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Joe Azcue (#176)
Here is Indians' #1 catcher Joe Azcue. I didn’t realize until looking at the back of the card today that Joe played for the Reds and Athletics before joining the Tribe. (Odd that Baseball-Reference.com uses a photo of Joe in an A’s cap. He played 594 games with Cleveland, while only 74 with Kansas City.)
Azcue was a catcher in the Reds' farm system from 1956 to 1960, also playing 14 games with Cincinnati in the final 2 months of 1960. He was purchased by the Braves in December 1960, but spent the entire '61 season in the minors.
One year after coming to the Braves, he moved on to the Athletics (with 3rd baseman Ed Charles and outfielder Manny Jimenez) for pitcher Bob Shaw and infielder Lou Klimchock.
Azcue shared the Athletics' starting catcher job with veteran Haywood Sullivan in 1962, then was traded to the Indians in May 1963 (with shortstop Dick Howser) for catcher Doc Edwards and $100,000.
Wait… Azcue AND Howser for DOC EDWARDS? Who was the Athletics' GM? No wonder they were so bad for so long!
Joe was the Indians' top catcher for the next 6 seasons (1963-68). For most of that time he platooned with Johnny Romano (and later Duke Sims), but managed to start more games than any other catcher each year. He made the All-Star team in 1968, his last full season with Cleveland.
With rookie Ray Fosse transitioning into a starting role in 1969, Azcue was traded to the Red Sox two weeks into the season. The Indians obtained pitchers Dick Ellsworth and Juan Pizarro, and 1B/OF Ken Harrelson in exchange for Azcue and pitchers Sonny Siebert and Vicente Romo.
After only 2 months (and 19 games) with Boston, Joe was flipped to the Angels for backup catcher Tom Satriano. Azcue replaced the tandem of Satriano and Tom Egan as the team's #1 catcher, starting 75 of the remaining 108 games in 1969.
In 1970 he started 2/3 of the games, to Egan’s 1/3. After sitting out the entire 1971 season with a contract dispute, he returned in 1972 but by then the Angels had moved on to John Stephenson.
(Oh please… I’m trying to keep a straight face as I typed that!) Azcue only played 3 games with the Angels in 1972, while spending most of that season’s first half in the minors.
In late July 1972 he and infielder Syd O'Brien were traded to the Brewers for catcher Paul Ratliff and infielder Ron Clark. Joe only appeared in 11 games for the Brewers in the season's final 2 months, then played for the Indians’ double-A team in 1973 before retiring.
Posted by Jim from Downingtown at 10:43 PM
Labels: ...debut: 1960, ...I learned something today, .Indians, Joe Azcue
Dissecting the 1969 Set
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P. A. Hayes Family Papers
1868-1985 [bulk 1940s-1950s]. 4 boxes (36 folders), ca. 215 items. MSS. COLL. #81
The P.A. Hayes Family Papers consist primarily of materials relating to Justice Drug Company and also include information about the Hayes family. P.A. Hayes worked for Justice Drug for fifty-five years, serving as president for thirty-seven years and then as chairman of the Board. The collection includes correspondence, photo albums, financial and legal documents, printed materials and several scrapbooks. Researchers interested in Greensboro history, the history of Justice Drug Company or the Hayes family will find this collection useful.
Arrangement: This collection is organized into seven series and arranged within series by document type and/or subject. The series are: 50th Anniversary with Justice Drug, 1953; Correspondence, 1935-1984; Financial & Legal, 1927-1961; Miscellaneous, ca 1930s-1950s; Photographs, 1958, n.d.; Printed Materials, 1868-1985; and Scrapbooks, 1906-1955.
Provenance: This collection was donated by Virginia Hayes Forrest in August 1986 and assigned accession number 1986.101. In January 1993, she added the materials relating to Vick Chemical Co. (6:7-9). Her final donation in March 1993 included two photo albums relating to Justice Drug (5:1-2); these items were assigned accession numbers 1993.16.1-2.
Processing: This collection was organized and the finding aid was prepared by intern Hannah Hemphill in July 2017.
Pearly Arthur “P.A.” Hayes (1882-1963) of 405 Meadowbrook Terrace was born to Mary Catherine (1855-1930) and Eli P. “E.P.” Hayes (1856-1931) in Randleman, NC. Upon his graduation from Guilford College in 1903, he went to work as an order clerk at L. Richardson Drug Company, which became Justice Drug Company when it was sold to R.L. Justice in 1905. The company was an important regional drug wholesaler. After purchasing a controlling interest in Justice Drug, Hayes became president in 1921 and held that position until 1958, when he was appointed chairman of the Board. He was president of the Greensboro Chamber of Commerce in 1929, the Greensboro Rotary Club in 1942, the Traveling Men’s Auxiliary of the NC Pharmaceutical Association in 1934, and the National Wholesale Druggists Association in 1940. He also served as a City Council member and mayor pro tem in 1931.
In 1913, Hayes married Virginia Townsend (1890-1973). Born to Emma Elizabeth (1852-1932) and Christopher Columbus “C.C.” Townsend (1849-1929), Virginia Townsend Hayes was originally from Burlington but lived most of her life in Greensboro. She was an alumna of the State Normal and Industrial College (later Woman’s College and then UNC Greensboro), a president of the Greensboro Drug Club Auxiliary, and a member of the Women’s Auxiliary of the NC Pharmaceutical Association.
Mr. and Mrs. Hayes had two daughters. The eldest, Virginia Hayes Forrest (1919-2015), attended Mary Baldwin College before obtaining a Master of Arts in Drama from UNC Chapel Hill in 1942. She married Lt. Stephen Taylor Forrest (1919-1978) in 1942, and they had three children: Stephen Taylor Forrest Jr., Hayes Forrest and Beverly Forrest Kehayes. Mrs. Forrest participated in the Junior League, Children’s Theatre, Greensboro Drug Auxiliary and the NC Pharmaceutical Auxiliary. She also served as president and vice president on the Board of the Greensboro Historical Museum. Her husband, Stephen Forrest, worked at Justice Drug Company after World War II, eventually serving as president for fifteen years.
Her younger sister, Anne Hayes Brewer Davis (1921-2015), also attended Mary Baldwin College. She married William “Bill” Paul Brewer Sr. (1921-1987) in 1943, and they had three children: Paul, Michael and David H. She taught school before having children and afterwards worked part-time as a psychometrist with UNCG. After the death of her first husband, she married John Lorraine Davis (1916-2013) in 1999. She was active in the Greensboro Junior League and the Greensboro Cotillion, was a charter member of the NC Historical Book Club, and served as a president of NC Pharmaceutical Wives.
Biographical Sources: The sources for this biographical note include the obituaries of P.A. Hayes (Greensboro Daily News, November 21, 1963) and Virginia Townsend Hayes (Greensboro Daily News, November 14, 1973), as well as those of Virginia Hayes Forrest (News & Record, January 30, 2015) and Anne Hayes Brewer Davis (News & Record, January 11, 2015). Additional information was obtained from Ancestry.com, the Greensboro city directories, the Guilford County Register of Deeds database and materials in the collection.
Types of materials in this collection include correspondence, financial and legal documents, photographs, printed materials, LP recordings and scrapbooks. Most materials highlight P.A. Hayes’ career with Justice Drug. Of note are two photo albums depicting Justice Drug construction and employees (5:1-2), as well as an invoice from WFMY-TV for commercial spots (3:1). Also included are a few pieces of Justice Drug letterhead (2:2, 4:2), drug formulas (4:1-3) and an insert from the Greensboro Beacon about local businesses (6:3). The scrapbooks give insight to the Hayes family’s social and professional accomplishments (7:1-4). Of particular interest is Mrs. Hayes’ scrapbook from her time at the State Normal and Industrial College (7:5).
1. 50th Anniversary with Justice Drug. 7 folders (ca. 40 items). 1953.
Materials in this series relate to P.A. Hayes’ Golden Anniversary with Justice Drug Company. Correspondence (1:1-2) and a scrapbook (1:7) contain letters from associates congratulating him on his fifty years with the company. The photographs (1:3), LP records (1:6) and printed materials (1:4-5) detail the 50th Anniversary banquet held in his honor.
2. Correspondence. 6 folders (ca. 90 items). 1935-1984.
The majority of the correspondence was sent from wholesale manufacturers to Justice Drug Company about products and contracts (2:4-6). Letters from P.A. Hayes, including two on company letterhead, show how he conducted business (2:2), while a letter from William Brewer discusses the sale of a desk with company history (2:1). Also included is a postcard to Carlos Virgil Cagle, a pharmacist for Justice Drug (2:3).
3. Financial & Legal. 2 folders (18 items). 1927-1961.
This series contains Justice Drug contracts with wholesale manufacturers (3:2) and an invoice from WFMY-TV (3:1) for commercial spots purchased by the company. The invoice includes the times and costs of the commercials.
4. Miscellaneous. 4 folders (ca. 25 items). ca. 1930s-1950s.
The miscellaneous items consist of formulas and personnel forms. The Justice Drug formulas are contained in two notebooks and on several loose pages, some of which are Justice Drug letterhead (4:2-3). Other formulas were recorded on the prescription pads of Dr. John Wesley Long, Dr. S.P. Sebastian and the O.Henry Drug Store, while a recipe for cigar flavoring is on Carolina Cigar Company letterhead (4:1). The blank personnel forms from Justice Drug Company include job applications, termination records, and annual performance reviews that provide insight into employee evaluation (1946-1947; 4:4).
5. Photographs. 2 folders (2 items). 1958, n.d.
One of these photo albums shows the 1958 construction of a new Justice Drug building at 1201 Valley Park Drive (later Coliseum Blvd.; 5:1). The second album contains portraits of the company’s employees at their work locations (5:2).
6. Printed Materials. 10 folders (ca. 35 items). 1868-1985.
Materials in this series are a mix of family and business items. Family items include a geography book that belonged to C.C. Townsend (1868; 6:2), and poems and prayers by P.A. Hayes’ mother, Mary Catherine Hayes (1917-1930; 6:5). The business aspect is represented by advertisements for office equipment and medicine (6:1), wholesale price schedules (6:10), and an article about P.A. Hayes and Justice Drug in the Greensboro Beacon (6:3). Also of interest are a piece of letterhead from Nanzetta Medicine Company (6:6) and items relating to Vick Chemical Company, including an early issue of Vicks Family News (1938; 6:9), two newspaper clippings (1960, 1965; 6:7) and a term paper by Martin Boney (1985; 6:8).
7. Scrapbooks. 5 folders (6 items). 1906-1955.
The majority of the scrapbooks relate to the Hayes family and show how family and business were closely intertwined. Compiled by Mrs. Hayes and covering 1929-1955, these scrapbooks consist mostly of newspaper clippings about family and friends, as well as holiday cards (7:1-4). All of the scrapbooks contain articles about Justice Drug and Mr. Hayes’ career with the company. Items of note in the first scrapbook include newspaper clippings about P.A. Hayes’ election to the Greensboro Rotary Club (1942) and Chamber of Commerce (1929), and a photograph of the Hayes maid, probably Virginia Crutchfield (7:1).
Two scrapbooks (7:2,4) include information about the Hayes daughters’ marriages. The two large brown scrapbooks (7:3) also have newspaper clippings about Virginia and Anne’s children. Of particular interest are news clippings about the Justice Drug Company fire in July 1953. A copy of C.C. Townsend’s will (1921) is also present.
The final scrapbook (7:5) depicts Mrs. Hayes’ years at the State Normal and Industrial College. This scrapbook, which mostly consists of photographs, shows President J.J. Foust, faculty and students. Other photographs include the Spencer building and Mrs. Hayes’ room, and the Greensboro Centennial celebrations in 1908. Some programs from plays and ceremonies and Mrs. Hayes’ own musings are also included.
1 1-2 50th Anniversary with Justice Drug -- Correspondence (1953)
3 -- Photographs (1953)
4 -- Printed Materials (Guest Books; 1953)
5 50th Anniversary with Justice Drug -- Printed Materials (Newspaper Clippings; 1953)
6 -- Recordings (1953)
7 -- Scrapbook (1953)
2 1 Correspondence -- Brewer, William (1984)
2 -- Hayes, P.A. (1945-1957)
3 -- Shre?, D.L. to Carlos Virgil Cagle (1941)
4 Correspondence -- Wholesale distributors to Justice Drug Co. (1935-1939)
5 -- Wholesale distributors to Justice Drug Co. (1940-1949)
6 -- Wholesale distributors to Justice Drug Co. (1950-1958, n.d.)
3 1 Financial & Legal -- Invoice -- WFMY (1952)
2 -- Wholesale Manufacturer Contracts (1927-1961)
4 1 Miscellaneous -- Formulas (n.d.)
2 -- Justice Drug Formulas (loose; ca. 1930s-1940s)
3 Miscellaneous -- Justice Drug Formulas (notebooks; ca. 1940s-1950s)
4 -- Justice Drug Personnel Forms (1946-1947)
5 1 Photographs -- Album -- Justice Drug Company Construction (1958)
2 -- Album -- Justice Drug Company Employees
6 1 Printed Materials -- Advertisements
2 -- Geography Book (1868)
3 -- Greensboro Beacon (ca. 1947)
4 Printed Materials -- Greensboro Historical Museum (1947)
5 -- Hayes, Mary Catherine (copies; 1917-1930)
6 -- Nanzetta Medicine Company
7 Printed Materials -- Newspaper Clippings -- Vick Chemical Co. (1960, 1965)
8 -- "The Rise of an American Company" (by Martin M. Boney; 1985)
9 -- Vicks Family News (September 1938)
10 -- Wholesale Price Schedules (1941-1957, n.d.)
7 1 Scrapbooks -- Hayes Family (1929-1954)
2 -- Hayes Family (1942-1947)
3 -- Hayes Family (1949-1954; 1953-1955)
4 Scrapbooks -- Hayes Family (1954-1955)
5 -- State Normal and Industrial College (1906-1911)
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nike-air-women
Sneakers didn’t own the runway during Fashion Month this season https://www.thetopsneaker.com/nike-air-women , but they still reign at retail and on the street. While some insiders said the explosive growth of the category is leveling off, the long-term impact of the streetwear revolution is notable.“Boots are definitely back in as the ‘it’ shoe of the season,” said Alberto Oliveros, GMM at Level Shoes in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. “However, I don’t think this will affect sneakers in any way. The trend is very much alive and well, and that sense of comfortable luxury will prolong the [momentum] further. They are still performing extremely well, and I anticipate that they will continue to do so.”“Streetwear is here to stay because people are not going back to suits,” added GCDS co-founder and creative director Giuliano Calza. “Even if [formal] is the next sartorial trend, there are too many consumers out there who want easy things to wear every day. It’s going to be more organic, in a way.”To that end, Giuseppe Zanotti said he was trying to put the “emotion” of a sneaker into more dressed-up looks. “I tried to put a lot of details from streetwear and the sneaker universe on a high heel — some neon color, new materials. I want to make stilettos more technological, to do some elegant shoes that are less boring,” Zanotti said Womens Nike Air Max , noting that the explosion of streetwear has completely changed the landscape in the past few years. “It’s not only ready-to-wear or shoes or fashion. It’s a social evolution. It’s global. It’s digital.”Now designers need to understand what’s next, Zanotti said. “This is a challenge for me and a lot of other people.”Elizabeth von der Goltz, global buying director at Net-a-Porter, said she’s noticing the chunky sneaker evolving into a hybrid hiking boot silhouette.“Gucci has done this very well. Overall, streetwear seems to be gravitating toward alternative definitions of cool comfort in the form of combat and hiking boots, and chunky Chelsea ankle styles from brands such as Prada, Miu Miu and Moncler. UFC star Conor McGregor is in legal trouble yet again, this time for an alleged sexual assault in Ireland.According to a report from The New York Times today, the Reebok-backed fighter is under investigation in Ireland after a woman accused him of sexual assault at a hotel in south Dublin in December. The report states McGregor was arrested and released after questioning the next month and he has not been charged with or convicted of a crime. The investigation, as stated in the report, does not represent proof of allegations.Although he has not been charged or convicted, the latest allegations against McGregor are serious, and he has had trouble with the law in the past — leading industry insiders believe it may be time for Reebok to part ways with him.“On one hand [athletes] are unbelievable influencers, but on the other hand your brand gets connected to them," CEO and co-founder of influencer marketing platform HYPR Gil Eyal said. "If they’re prone to doing bad things and its beyond the point where you think its PR or intentional Nike Lunarlon Womens , he’s getting in real trouble, you have to ask if you’re willing to pay the price as a brand."Eyal continued, “Reebok is a really strong and powerful brand, they can find alternatives to Conor McGregor. He’s replaceable.”The influencer expert believes the mixed martial arts organization already has athletes who would be great ambassadors in place of the Irish fighter such as Daniel Cormier and the last man to defeat McGregor, Khabib Nurmagomedov.“There are plenty of other superstars. MMA is an industry, a business that’s in the business of creating superstars. Conor McGregor is just the current star," Eyal said. "There are an abundance of people to take his place."However, The NPD Group senior sports industry analyst Matt Powell believes it would be in Reebok's best interest to watch the situation carefully.“As I understand it, the procedures in Europe are different than the U.S. and he has not actually been charged with the crime although he is being investigated for it," Powell said. "It may be a bit premature for them to sever ties with him, but they’ve got to watch the case very closely. I might urge a little bit of caution, but when and if it becomes clear that he’s involved they need to act very swiftly.”Although he believes the athletic brand should proceed with caution, he's not sure McGregor — in legal trouble or not — is an asset it really needs.“I don’t know that he’s really brought them that much as an endorsee. Maybe, in some ways, this is a simple way to sever ties with him Womens Nike React ," Powell said. "The brand’s success is being driven by retro product and he’s not involved in that. Their performance business continues to be challenged so I don’t think they’ve got a ton out of this relationship. It may be a good time to cut ties.”McGregor is part of Reebok's efforts to promote its Sole Fury sneaker, an aesthetically bold performance running silhouette highlighted by its visibly split cushioning.Aside from McGregor, Reebok is using other combat sports stars, including boxing sensation Mikey Garcia, to promote the shoe.With a healthy roster of accomplished athletes, Eyal doesn't think the risk of keeping McGregor is worth the potential reward.“If he’s denying responsibility then Reebok may not be in a hurry to do it. With that said, they’re a very respected, well-known brand in the world, you can’t blame them if they decide to part ways," Eyal said. "The upside is limited, the downside is very big if there is truth to this.”In an email to FN, Reebok said: "We will not be commenting on this matter until we have more information."Two weeks ago, McGregor was arrested in Florida for breaking the cellphone of someone who was attempting to take the fighter’s photo, according to a Miami Beach Police report. The report states McGregor, slapped the phone out of the man’s hand outside the Fontainebleau Miami Beach hotel and stomped on it several times before picking it up and walking away with it.And in July 2018 https://www.thetopsneaker.com/nike-zoom-women , McGregor pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct charges after throwing a hand-truck into a bus window at a media event at the Barclays Center, in Brooklyn, N.Y., in April ahead of UFC 223, which was captured on video and shared on social media.Early this morning, in an unexpected tweet, the 30-year-old star athlete announced his retirement (for the second time) from the sport.“Hey guys quick announcement, I’ve decided to retire from the sport formally known as 'Mixed Martial Art' today. I wish all my old colleagues well going forward in competition. I now join my former partners on this venture, already in retirement,” McGregor wrote on the social media platform.
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Sigrid Holmwood talking to Alli Sharma at her studio, Streatham Hill, London
'Figure Painting', 2010, caput mortuum, gofun, lead-tin yellow, ochre, azurite and slate in parchment clipping distemper on kozo paper with tengujo tissue on board. Courtesy the artist and Annely Juda Fine Art
AS: You spent your weekend at a Tudor Group re-enactment event?
SH: Yes, we were doing a banquet in Haddon Hall, Derbyshire. I was working in the art department of the kitchen. On Saturday we made a pie in the shape of a castle with turrets and different fillings, like pork, pink custard and a strange 16th century pesto. Then on Sunday other members prepared a pig’s head by slicing off the face from the skull, sewing it back up, stuffing it and then boiling it for 3 hours. I then painted the head black with lard-bound charcoal and finished with marzipan tusks, eyes and a bristle brush comb so it looked like a wild boar.
AS: It must be amazing to have access to fantastic Tudor buildings.
SH: Yes, and we stay the night after the public have gone. So for breakfast this morning I had a lovely sour bread baked in a 16th century oven, actually, I think it was a 15th century oven.
AS: Are there lots of artists in the group?
SH: There are crafts people and photographers but then there are also accountants and IT people. And loads of kids because there are lots of families which is really great. People become expert in baking, leather work or ironmongery, all these things and, much like my approach to painting, they’re experimenting with materials, looking at what’s written at the time, but also by the act of doing, finding out what actually works.
AS: You make your own paints from pigments?
SH: I don’t make my all own pigments. I don’t make vermillion because it’s mercury sulphide. It can be synthesised but is also naturally occurring. You need a kiln to heat it, so in this period it would only be made industrially, not by artists themselves. That would be something they would go and buy. But yes, I make all the paints and all the pigments that artists would have made in the studio. Here I’ve got some madder, which is a pigment. I can pour that out so you can see it better. It’s made from madder roots.
AS: What is madder?
SH: It is an uninspiring looking plant but you grind up the roots and soak them in water. Heating it up turns it brown so I do it by soaking it in water with lye over a period of days works and you can see the dye coming out. These are birch leaves, they have their own smell. It smells tobacco-y. This is weld. It smells a bit pissy. My dress is dyed with weld so I like that the dyes used in the clothes are the same colours as one would use in some of the pigments. That’s fascinating. The world joins up.
AS: How authentic are your socks, did Tudors wear knitted socks?
SH: Yes, they wore knitted socks. There are all sorts of inventories. They also wore sewn fabric socks but I prefer knitted. You do find examples of things although socks don’t massively survive because they’re a bit throwaway. I didn’t knit these but knitting is one step too far for me. I sewed all my clothes.
AS: You hand stitched them?
SH: Yes, no machine stitching allowed.
AS: Who makes your shoes?
SH: In the world of re-enacting, you get people who make shoes, or pottery and they supply re-enactors from all periods.
AS: Do you need help putting on the corset? You’ve been trapped in there all weekend, was it uncomfortable?
SH: You get used to it but if you eat too much you suddenly want to get out. The key to wearing a corset is that you shouldn’t lean onto it. You should avoid it pressing onto you. I wouldn’t be surprised if it wasn’t always worn by working women. Trying to ascertain Tudor working clothes is a lot harder in Britain, than in the low countries, because there wasn’t the interest in painting them.
AS: You mean peasants?
SH: Peasants or even just working class. I’m not interested at all in the gentry with all their silks. I find that the least interesting.
AS: And well documented?
SH: Yes, they’re the ones we have paintings of in Britain. In this period in the low countries, there is an explosion of genre painting and it’s all linked-in with the birth of capitalism. The merchant classes and the stock exchanges began there and they were the new patrons of art. Before that, it was just aristocrats and the church interested in mythology, the bible and history painting. With the new middle class merchants, the new patrons of art, you get landscapes, peasants, still life, domestic scenes and artists specializing in different niches. It’s the predecessor of the art market we have today where artists have to specialize and find an original niche, which is their selling point and where art is about ourselves. So that’s part of my reason for painting these images. It’s actually the root of contemporary art. There’s a great irony, artists painting peasants only because of urbanization.
AS: You’ve just given yourself an extra bum bit.
SH: Yes, the bum roll, because in Tudor times, the question of ‘does my bum look big in this’ the answer you want is ‘yes’. You might have to give me a hand with tucking in my partlett. This was made of fine linen and used to fake being clean. You would have lots of linens but only one set of woollen clothes, and a Sunday best. These knives are my eating knives. You don’t have forks, that was a poncy Italian thing. So you cut and spear things and eat off your knife. They’re hand made by a guy in the group. So the final bit is my coif and then we’re done.
AS: Did you dye the fabric?
SH: I didn’t, that was a member of the Tudor Group. The thing about dying is that you need large facilities so that the wool can turn around and not get streaky so it requires a lot of space and drainage and some heat underneath it. However, someone in the group is setting up one in their garden in London so I’m hoping to go and dye some stuff so I can do it myself.
AS: Are you busy at the moment?
SH: Yes, I’m going to a gallery in China in August, I’m working with Vitamin Creative Space. They’ve planted Chinese indigo for me so hopefully when I get there that will have grown and I can harvest it to make some pigment. It’s in an urban farm in Beijing.
So, this is some gorgeous looking Madder. The crimson draperies in old paintings would be made with this.
AS: It’s a beautiful pink. It doesn’t look that colour in the tube?
SH: You get different shades. This was an experiment where I put in alum first, and then added potash. That means you get a warmer colour. I’ve made madders where I’ve made a cooler colour by putting in potash first and then added alum. They’re the two ingredients that you can play with when you’re making Lake pigments like this. Potash is alkali so it would be made with wood ash but it makes things cooler. If you think about litmus paper, the acid colours are red and yellow, and the alkali colours are blues and greens, purple so it works like that with these natural dyes.
AS: So what will you do to this madder now?
SH: I’m going to let it dry out completely and then I’m going to grind it up and wash it to take out any excess alum.
AS: You’ve also made your own paper from sheets?
SH: Yes, I have some here, with printed woodcuts. So the paper is made from my bed sheets. I burnished it but it still smells of my sheets.
AS: How do you go about making paper?
SH: First I cut up the sheets into one inch squares. You need a beating machine. In the 16th century you would have had large water powered ones where a big wheel powered by water sets off a trip and a big log comes down and pounds rags to a pulp. 16th century paper was made from the rags and scraps from linen and hemp fabric. Much like the pigment made from scraps of wool, you make use of a left over material. Once you can’t repair the linens any more they might as well be made into paper. Rag pickers were making a living by collecting rags from people and selling them to the paper mills. They were worth quite a lot in the end. Since I don’t have a beating machine, I send my rags off to a workshop in Glasgow and where it is beaten for me and the pulp sent back. I’ve got vats and felts and a friend who is also making paper to collaborate and share materials. We’ve made a press out of an oak frame and a hydraulic car jack because you need to squish all the water out to get it as smooth as possible. Then dry it. Because I was doing woodcuts I needed a smooth surface so I burnished this particular paper with the back of a spoon. I do have a burnisher at home which is agate but just rubbing a smooth hard thing across the paper will give you a bit of a sheen.
AS: Are these drawings on paper of people in the Tudor Group?
SH: Actually this is my apprentice. I’ve been inundated with offers from interns, which I think is indicative of young students these days feeling pressured into doing internships. I didn’t think I needed an intern because I like doing everything myself but then I thought it might be quite a good idea to play with the idea of having an apprentice and that relationship could be a body of work.
AS: She looks pretty fed up in this one. I wonder how many students imagine interning would involve stirring a pot in 16th century costume.
SH: I did explain! But yes, I think what has come out of the experience is a series of drawings that show the difficulty of the relationship. This is another student from the Ruskin and we did a painting circle, she grew up in Japan so she wore her kimono and we all painted each other. The idea is a women’s painting circle. The kimono is a lovely thing to draw. It’s more interesting to draw a kimono or Tudor clothes than jeans.
AS: It’s interesting, how artists choose to present themselves, as artists.
SH: It is, and the mystique of the studio.
AS: Most artists are open about their practices, but I can imagine some wouldn’t want us to know their secrets, and why should they?
SH: For me that’s quite important, I like to share recipes. It very much relates to movements such as relational aesthetics, where it’s about making work that deals with social exchanges that go on around art. Painters can seem isolated, stuck in their studios on their own and I think of my practice as fighting against that a bit, making it a more social practice. I also know other pigment freaks and we swap pigments... I’m not the only one!
Sigrid Holmwood's drawings can be seen at Mock Tudor, 60 Ravenscourt Road, London W6 0UG (open Fri-Sun, 12-6, or by appointment 07885 222409) until 10 July. She also features in the forthcoming issue of Garageland magazine, which will be launched at Mock Tudor on 17 July 2011.
Sigrid will be working in The Pavilion at Vitamin Creative Space, Beijing from 29 July - 27 September. For more information, follow The Astonishing Adventures of Lady Indigo. Resulting work will be exhibited at Annely Juda Fine Art next year.
Posted by Articulated Artists at 04:04 No comments:
Labels: Alli Sharma, Mock Tudor, Sigrid Holmwood
Jeff McMillan talks to Alli Sharma at his studio in Shoreditch, E2
AS: Where do you find your drawings and paintings?
JM: I go to car boot sales or sometimes to antique fairs, there are a few good ones in the south of England. Recently I was in Belgium and went to a couple of great flea markets there. I found a trove of one woman’s whole school career, which included her primary school drawings all the way through to her high school algebra. I think they’re from the 1950s and her name, Monique, is on everything. The drawings are a bit awkward, but in a good way, though her geometric drawings are very precise.
AS: Is that what you look for, an awkwardness?
JM: I’m just looking for potential. It’s hard to explain exactly what that means, but I make that assessment and decide whether it’s any good for my purposes. With this show in mind, I was specifically looking for works on paper to go with a number of drawings I’d already collected over the years. Certain things strike you as having real potential, whether it’s something in a figure’s eyes or a certain juxtaposition within a work, and I particularly like coming across works that are not really finished in the first place. Two of the Belgian schoolgirl’s drawings are of a woman, in one she has no right hand and there’s an ‘x’ marked on her shoulder where the teacher has ticked off that it has been drawn incorrectly. Most of the drawings have comments and grades in red ink over the top of them. In another the woman is in a position of lifting her arms in a way so that after I have immersed the paper in a container of ink, she looks like she’s floating or trying to escape.
AS: Or drowning.
JM: That’s the sort of potential I suppose I am looking for, as though the drawing is asking for an intervention to become complete. At times it feels like a collaboration.
AS: Do you know what the geometric drawings are?
JM: They’re old-school geometry, along with the pages and pages of equations and calculations to plot them out. I think a French curve and a ruler were used to make them so precise. They’re very technical but still beautiful drawings.
AS: And beautifully presented.
JM: Yes always drawn in with this double line border. I’m sure they’re all done by hand, and she always puts her name, written very neatly. There are some funny ones where she’s got bored and worked out who was dating who on the back of the drawings, some with love hearts. I was glad to see that, you can imagine it must have been pretty rigorous.
AS: The dipping line works well with the geometric look.
JM: I became most interested in what colour adds to them, particularly when the inks bleed into each other, they remind me of 1960s film strips or at times they become almost Rothko-like. The effect changes them from something dry and analytical to something with more of an emotional content. Just coincidentally the basic half-dozen ink colours are very similar to the colour scheme of a series of cardboard box paintings I made a few years back.
AS: Is it important to use hand-made works, you haven’t used prints or photographs?
JM: It always has been in the past, but I’ve worked with a few engravings for this show. Some are anatomical studies that have been cut out from a medical textbook from the 1800s.
AS: I wanted to ask you about using old things. You might be seen as destroying something but at the same time you have rescued them in the first place.
JM: I’m ambivalent about it, and I hope the work remains ambivalent too. It’s a fine line, I’m obviously the one making the decision about whether they stay as they are or become something else, but I like to think there are other anatomical prints like these out there but these are the only ones dragged into the contemporary world in this way.
AS: The Chapman brothers make a deliberate point in defacing old Goya prints, but that’s not your concern?
JM: No, but then their work is more about being provocative. In fact I tend towards the other end of the scale, I love coming across a painting that’s not got much going for it, that only costs a fiver but I know will be great for what I want to do. And actually I’m not that interested in appropriation either. What I do is probably closer to a form of recycling - I sometimes think all the painting techniques and brushstrokes have all been made before, all that is left now is how we re-configure them. Which is the idea of the re-mix I suppose, there really isn’t much new under the sun.
AS: Is there something in particular about working with drawings that differs from the paintings?
JM: One main difference is that with the canvases, I only ever work with oil paint. I think in my very first painting class I was taught that you couldn’t put acrylic over oil or it might crack, but you could put oil on top of anything. So I have always thought of oil as the final paint, the ultimate material. But by working on paper I was able to re-look at that and none of these works are done with oil paint. Some are made with acrylic paint and some with ink. Ink is a great medium because it has different properties like the fact that it’s so much thinner than oil or acrylic and also its not totally opaque.
AS: The transparency doesn’t obliterate the image, like in the paintings. Dipping paper seems to emphasize its fragility. Some look so delicate, like a thin leaf of paint.
JM: The ink has dripped off the bottom edge and become more intense in colour and slightly brittle where it has accumulated. Some of the engravings have been dipped two or three times in ink so you end up with this strange thing where two inks overlapping almost create a black, though a ghost of the original image can remain as well.
AS: I bet it’s great to watch the ink soak in.
JM: The old engraving papers are 150 years old and bone dry. They are so absorbent that the colour ends up being deeply saturated so they become darker than works on a thinner paper. I’ve also been working with a vinyl paint called flashe, which is actually a sign-writers paint. It looks like a pure pigment or something, so a sign writer would paint with it and the brushstrokes would disappear.
AS: It’s very flat, but you’ve still got some bubbles in it, where it’s been dipped.
JM: I like when a work reveals its natural physical properties. In fact, all the work is what it is, and it is quite simple to see how it is made.
AS: So what decisions were you making about colour choices for Untitled (Man with necktie), with the black and the vermillion red.
JM: It’s a strange mix of intention and intuition, I was interested because it’s a portrait of a black man, which is rare, and I wanted it to have some gravity so I used the black colour along the top. I was intrigued by his necktie and how it is not flush with his body, and it was just one of those things that is not easily explained. I think the brighter vermillion makes feel more exotic.
AS: It looks like a flag but I wouldn’t know what country.
JM: I don’t know either.
AS: So it’s not political.
JM: No, it’s not. Not for me. I think it has sinister overtones if you want to read that into it.
AS: Tell me about this one which looks like a blind boy with pointed ears, Untitled (Boy).
JM: If you saw the original image you would see it was just a portrait of a young boy but there was something about it once I started to take a piece of paper and obscure the lower part of it. There was this strange thing in that it wasn’t quite finished in the way the pupils had been drawn and then, for me, that was everything, an amazing point that makes it become something else.
Interview continued in Garageland magazine, Fake issue 12.
Jeff McMillan's drawings are at Consequences, four all saints, London W11, by appointment only, 25 May - 2 July 2011.
He is also exhibiting paintings at Mock Tudor, Transition Gallery Offsite, London W6, 18 June - 10 July 2011.
Labels: Alli Sharma, Jeff McMillan
Claire Undy talking to Alli Sharma at her studio in Hackney Wick, London
AS: This new work looks very different to what I’ve seen before.
CU: Yes, I’ve recently made quite a big change in my work. It’s been two years now since I finished studying at Wimbledon College of Art, and I felt I had reached an impasse with my practice - I was refining it rather than developing it.
AS: Did you feel that you’d exhausted your enquiry with the paintings with the gestural marks?
CU: I felt like I was polishing it, I’d got to the point where I was experimenting with something so tiny. I was using different pigments to catch the light in a certain way, and the only thing I could achieve would be to work out how to do it and get it right every time. All I was doing was increasing the success rate of making these same paintings.
The gestural mark represents the act of painting. I was trying to put drawing in the process at different points, as I don’t like the idea that a painting is simply the final top layer and that everything else is hidden workings-out. I wanted to acknowledge the process of making. I don’t like the idea that as the artist you choose what to reveal and what to conceal, when it is the act of painting that I’m interested in and the process of putting it together.
I started by stretching a canvas and then I used tape and paper to mask off the shape of a gestural mark. I built up a gesso ground over the entire surface so that when I took off the tape there was an area of un-primed canvas left in the gesso. When I pulled the paint across the whole surface, the colour changed on the different grounds. I was using transparent iron oxides, so that the bits that would soak into the fabric would be dark and the bits that were on the white ground would be really bright.
AS: When you say pull across, what did you use?
CU: A wide brush because I like the marks with the brush. They emphasise the act of applying the paint, rather than giving a perfectly uniform surface. Then I used a smaller brush on the top layer of wet paint to indicate another gestural mark, which slightly mis-registered the first.
AS: So it looks like there are two marks.
CU: Yes, but neither of them were painted, they were made by breaking the surface at different points. The gestural mark is blatantly a gestural mark because I didn’t want it to be a shape or to have any deceptive space to it. I wanted all the visual components to be about painting: brush marks; or the visible application of paint.
AS: So you’re getting new ideas out quite quickly?
CU: Yes, I’m aiming to make a lot of these new works, hopefully around 100 this scale. They’re all quite rough and different. They’re numbered; eg S1 (S stands for studio). So if S1 leads to others they become S1.1, S1.2 etc so they break up and then I can experiment further into an idea. It’s like research. I like this one. I’ve been moving the weave of the fabric to make the image.
AS: Breaking the surface again?
CU: Yes, drawing with the components of the painting, with the fabric. I went to Amsterdam recently and there was a market selling fabrics with really wide weave on them. With this one, I’ve pushed the weave of it and then set it with size. I’m just playing really with different ways of trying to show their making.
AS: It sounds investigative.
CU: I’m interested in finding a way of communicating that’s not via language. I think that this could be possible through making a painting, which doesn’t discuss things outside itself, and so talks very directly. A hole is a hole and a mark is a mark and they only attempt to communicate their hole-ness or mark-ness and not any other kind of coded message from the artist. I think the only thing the artist can communicate is the act of painting, so if I made a mark like that [gestures], you can sense that’s how it’s been made.
AS: You’re communicating the action.
CU: Yes, that’s one thing I can communicate truly. Quite a few people have said that you’re only talking to a painter in that respect, perhaps this is true - I hope not. As a painter, you see a gestural mark and you can really sense how it’s been made, I hope that non-painters can relate to that gesture too.
AS: Getting something across without reference to an illusion, or trying to convey something without describing it.
CU: I want to talk in a way that anyone can understand. I don’t want to use art historical, or other cultural references, as then you’re speaking in a certain language to a specific group of people. I feel like this is quite elitist. If that’s all we can do now, where can we go from here? Some people believe you can’t make a gesture now without referencing something else, you can’t make any paintings now without referencing what’s gone before. I don’t believe we can do that indefinitely. Eventually it will become a dated idea itself. There’s a lot of interesting work that references other ideas, other art, but it’s also a barrier to discovering anything new. I think that we need to look within the medium itself, not through a series of changing subject matters to find out what painting can be or do in the future.
AS: That sounds like a pure way of thinking about painting, like it’s coming from a very particular history?
CU: Most people would say it comes from a very old fashioned idea, from Modernism; wanting to be self referential with the meaning inherent within the work and not referring to anything. But equally I think, for me, there’s a lot of idealism to that which I don’t have. On the one hand I share the aspiration to make objective art, but equally I think my work is quite realistically aware of its futility and it doesn’t have grand ideas of being a pure or absolute idea. It’s about its materiality and what it physically actually is, rather than a bigger notion about painting.
There seems to be two ways you can approach painting today, which is either to ignore postmodernism and cynicism towards painting by going ahead and making geometric patterns, or gestural expressionist paintings or whatever, or you can be ironic, referencing the idea of painting itself as an ideology. I think I sit somewhere between the two in that I still have quite a lot of faith in painting and its possibilities but I think it has to be a realistic, grounded approach where you can talk about universal ideas and communication through the language of painting, but without having an unrealistic expectation that they are possible. I’m more interested in discussing the ideas rather than believing that they are true. I think that just because something has been proved to be impossible, it doesn’t mean the entire subject is worthless. Simply being an atheist does not mean that you can’t learn a great deal from religion.
AS: Are you keen on art history.
CU: It’s not something I’m particularly keen on. Making abstract work at College means that you have to be aware of it because the criticism is that making purely abstract painting is a naïve thing to do and you either don’t care about it or you don’t understand it. I think a lot of people wonder how you can do it without being ignorant, or how you can do this with conviction. I really feel that you can do it with conviction and understanding of what you’re doing. It’s hard. There have been over 60 years of history in this area I could spend a lifetime studying and I wouldn’t ever feel knowledgeable enough to make a genuine contribution to the discussion. But I do feel I have something that I want to add to the discussion of painting and I think it has to be possible to make abstract work today without having to answer every question of the last 60 years in every work.
AS: It’s weird when you start thinking like that, how difficult it is to continue, despite the desire to engage with something, like you have to keep one eye on the past and one on what your doing.
CU: This is what Fade Away touched on. I think this is why lots of people make work within that bracket between abstraction and figuration because there is still an interest in abstract painting but if you make a purely abstract painting you instantly take on this huge burden of history. However, if you make an abstract painting and work something vaguely figurative into it it’s suddenly free from so much theoretical baggage because it’s no longer aspiring to this pure idea. There’s less to answer, you’re not adhering to an old fashioned school of thought. There are an awful lot of abstract painters my age but it’s hard to relate to an older school of thought about abstract painting. It’s a hard discussion to be part of. You’re an outsider, and although the work looks visually similar, in your heart I think it comes from a very different place.
List of works: S5, S7.4, Trouble, S7.1, S7.5, S7.6, S9.2, S13.1. All 50x40cm.
'Trouble' 2010, by Claire Undy, can be seen at Fade Away, Gallery North, Newcastle Upon Tyne from 5 - 26 May 2011, with free symposium/publication launch 3-6pm on 26 May 2011 and reception afterwards.
Labels: Alli Sharma, Claire Undy
Phoebe Unwin talking to Alli Sharma at her Hackney studio
AS: You’ve been busy this year with a solo show at Wilkinson and the British Art Show 7. Do deadlines affect how you work?
PU: I find that it’s important to put deadlines out of my mind. I mean they’re there, but I don’t make work specifically for a show because I make what I make. But, as it gets nearer, you can’t help looking at what you have and what would go where and those kinds of decisions.
AS: I imagine the way you work can be unpredictable. You don’t use images. It’s all coming from your own experiences, from what’s in your mind, looking at things and seeing opportunities for paintings.
PU: That’s true, and because I don’t know what any of the paintings will look like when they’re finished, that’s part of it. I like that working process of being surprised by how something might look but that also means that it’s important to be comfortable with failure in the work in terms of making something, looking at it and then thinking it’s not quite right. It might be an interesting idea but the size is wrong or something, I really respond to how it looks in the studio.
AS: What do you do if you see something failing, do you try to make it work or do you scrap it and try something else?
PU: Sometimes I try to make it work. Sometimes I try for months, and then it’s scrapped. Or I try for months and it works. I might think at the time that it was a bad idea in the first place, so it’s never going to work. But then I find I might be drawn to the idea again and have another go at it a year later. There’s enough tension to get an image to work so if you’re getting too self-conscious and wound up, then that’s not helpful.
AS: The painting ends up looking too fraught or contrived?
PU: I think there’s an element of tension in all of them. They’re not completely relaxed paintings but if there’s too much tension then I think a painting can look nervous. And then it’s not doing the job of communicating something. I mean it might be interesting to make a painting about being nervous but then it has to communicate that well, rather than be apologetic of itself. That’s when they get scrapped; if I feel they’re like that.
AS: I’m looking at the girl figure in your earlier work, is it you or is that too obvious?
PU: It’s not meant to be, none of the people I paint are portraits. I think of them as being portraits for feelings rather than portraits of a particular person. But all of my paintings and subjects end up being things that I’ve experienced in some way. They’re not personal stories, but in order for me to explain what something might have felt like or a relationship to an object, in terms of space or colour or scale, then I need to have experienced it. There’s nothing fantastical about them.
AS: Are you losing the figure more, moving in an abstract direction?
PU: I can’t imagine ever being completely abstract because the aspect I’m most interested in is the relationship between a visual world that everyone experiences and how that is explored through materials and marks.
AS: You need something recognisable?
PU: In order to communicate this subject, yes. So the subject is actually really important. For me, it’s not a pure interest in paint and colour and painting. It’s also about these relationships. For me it’s a springboard into different atmospheres or moods or tensions.
AS: And they are invisible things.
PU: Yes, Self Consciousness is very much about painting a feeling. Or the subject of Brick Wall was the everyday but also the formal qualities of painting because it’s a flat painting about something flat. So I’m interested in these subjects that explore a visual everyday world but also the world of the painting and the object itself.
AS: How do you keep your ideas for paintings? Do you have a sketchbook?
PU: This is one book. It’s falling apart. When I work here I put in lots of different coloured papers and respond to marks and colours and so on in an intuitive way. I’m not working in the book from beginning to end. It’s developed as a whole. I have to feel excited or engaged with the page and if I don’t then I just move on. I’ve worked on these for a while and the only rule I have is that anything can go in them. It can be an insignificant thing like a note of a couple of colours that I like or it can be something about an actual place or an image that has been layered and built up. I describe this as somewhere to be really gentle with ideas so they don’t have to stand up for themselves yet. They might never be used for a painting. I like working with this size. I’ve tried working in smaller or larger books but this size is just right. I also like that they’re quite thick because they start to build up a rich body of images. This is where I begin with all the different types of materials. I use acrylic, graphite, pastel, ink, and printed papers. And using coloured papers gets away from that feeling of a white, empty, blank page.
AS: When it comes to a painting, is there a white blank canvas or do you have to mess it up first?
PU: I think I need to mess it up but I’m not intentionally messing it up. I’ll think I’m just starting a painting but at every stage I’m looking at that and responding to the scale and the way the colours are because they’re not planned. Whatever I feel the subject demands will change my approach. Brick Wall started in a relatively controlled way by making a background of bricks, almost like creating a space to work within and respond to. So I knew I was making a painting of a brick wall and I knew how I was going to begin, but I didn’t know what it would end up looking like or how it would feel working within that pattern or that scale or combination of colours. Something like Self-Consciousness was started by putting colours and textures together, especially the oil paint which was quite impasto, and seeing and feeling where the painting would go. So building up to the image, rather than beginning with an image and working within that. They each have different approaches.
AS: You’ve used patterned papers in your sketchbooks, like the chequerboard. What does pattern do for you in a painting?
PU: I used a lot of pattern in the last show. The printed chequerboard and brickwork papers in the sketchbook, is where I first thought of it for painting. The pattern I have been using recently is about exploring a certain sort of rhythm in the paintings. I describe it as a constant hum or drumbeat. It’s a space to work within, which then gets interrupted or, like in Three Bananas, it’s reversed because the background is stronger than the subject on it. The banana shapes are like stains, almost like something has been taken away. So the movement and the focus of the painting is the chequerboard which is also a hand made mark, it’s not really a neat chequerboard so that was important. And then with Brick Wall there are elements where I’ve masked off the pattern which is much more graphic and controlled but then that pattern is echoed and mimicked in handmade brick marks using the different reds. So sometimes its about interrupting something and also an echo or reverberation of a mark or colour.
AS: Do the same motifs crop up?
PU: They do but in the sketchbook they’re not judged too much, they just live there. Elements of them are used when I’m ready to use them but very rarely are they scaled up from here. There might be an element of a composition that I take from the book but usually it’s a material element.
AS: There doesn’t seem to be any hierarchy with the different materials.
PU: That’s really important. One of my main reasons for using different materials is colour, because I feel that a colour is different in say an oil paint, spray paint, acrylic or pastel because they have really different surfaces, qualities and connotations. An oil paint mark might seem more controlled than a spray paint mark. It’s got a different speed to it. A spray paint mark, especially with the fuzzy edge, records what it was like to make it, which is quite magical. You press the top of the can and you can just keep going. It’s fast and it covers everything in an opaque way. Whereas there is a very different relationship with making, in that sense, to then being with a brush and a more gentle type of mark making. So I like using both of those languages, and all different types of languages with marks. With this page, there are so many elements in it. I’ve got this table from above and the carpet. There might be just one element of this that becomes a painting. And different viewpoints are important in the work.
AS: I’m surprised you said that was a table, it’s looking down from above.
PU: That’s like Sponge Palette in a way, it’s a palette with the thumbhole, and so you’re looking at it from above. Again, there’s pattern, and the sort of echoing of that background pattern and also a combination of colours about painting itself. I called it Sponge Palette because one aspect is that colour and form, for me, are indistinguishable from the subject when they are worked up. That’s my aim in a painting, to achieve, if I feel that I can, the colours and forms to be just those ones necessary for the painting, not to have any that don’t need to be there. So in a sense, the subject of the painting is as inspired by the colour and form. I almost see a subject in a colour combination in a painting in the way that it almost feels like a sponge or something, that the painting becomes saturated with these feelings or atmospheres.
AS: It’s an interesting way to describe a painting, like a sponge, like it sucks in all this stuff, ideas and materials, and becomes visible.
PU: I’m making it sound quite mystical. There are definitely a lot of felt qualities that are really important to me. And it is that thing about a sponge of sucking things up, the subject becoming really imbedded and saturated in the painting itself and in the colours and shapes, but there’s another element. The rigorous editing and appraisal of the work is really important to me. There are real formal aspects that come into play, especially as the painting gets further on, where I’ll be really thinking is it working in terms of subject, is it working in terms of scale and in terms of the painting itself.
AS: It sounds like you’re very controlled about what goes in.
PU: I am but when you speak about paintings in retrospect, because you’re talking about all the ideas, you can’t help but make it sound like ‘when I got to this point I was thinking this …’. But, when I’m actually working on a painting, I wouldn’t necessarily be able to put into words why I chose to get rid of a whole section or decided a painting failed, because I’m working really close to it, and working very quickly, but also so close to instinct and response.
AS: Can you describe the process for making Sponge Palette?
PU: The ground of Sponge Palette is made with an acrylic medium called crackle paste so it’s breaking up the surface. It’s meant to and it makes the surface very spongy. It feels absorbent. Because of the little cracks, the paints run into each other. Different surfaces in paintings are as important as marks because it completely changes the marks on top. I find that quite fascinating. Again, the pattern was made first so I’m working on something that is already visually dense. This palette shape, almost like a picture frame, is translucent so that the pattern is visible almost all the way through it. There would have been, in this painting especially, a real interest in layering and communicating the kind of time and visual conversation that happened in the painting. Some of my other paintings are more sparse and economical in line so they don’t have that sense of layered time. They would be about some other atmospheres or moods or tensions that I’m interested in exploring.
Sponge Palette, 2010 can be seen at Fade Away, Gallery North, Newcastle, 5-24 May 2011
Images courtesy the artist and Wilkinson Gallery
Sponge Palette, 2010
Girl, 2009
studio photograph, 2011
Self Consciousness, 2010
Three Bananas, 2010
Brick Wall, 2011
Labels: Alli Sharma, Phoebe Unwin
David Wightman talking to Alli Sharma at his Hackney Wick studio
DW: People hesitate to call them targets but that’s what they are. When I first started doing them a few years ago, it was an attempt to mock formalist geometric abstraction. So I took on different abstract motifs, like the target, square, and stripe.
AS: I don’t know much about geometric abstraction, who are you referencing?
DW: The most obvious would be Kenneth Noland. He was part of the formalist Greenberg school in America, which has now been utterly rubbished and no-one talks about those artists any more. The Last Stand of Modernism is how I like to think of it. I looked at different painters within the geometric abstract movement, going back to Albers and Mondrian where its all about colour and form and shape. You know, someone will spend their life painting targets or squares or all-black monochromes. A mix of purity and weirdness.
AS: Are there any contemporary painters you look at.
DW: There are people like Peter Halley. He makes abstract paintings but they’re symbolic as well. I like the idea of abstraction having all these kinds of concerns attached to them, like hard-line abstraction, geometric abstraction, post-painterly abstraction, colour-field painting, and the difference between them is whether someone is using masking tape or not, little things like that.
AS: So you started with an ironic intent.
DW: I suppose I used typical art school irony where you look at the past and make fun of it, but it slowly turned into more of a lament.
AS: Was there something in particular that changed your perception?
DW: I had an idea of what I wanted to do and what I was making fun of (or ‘critiquing’ is what I would have said at the time), but the more I looked into it, the more I began to feel sorry that that endeavour had ended and the pursuit of abstraction had come to an end.
AS: Do you mean the seriousness about what painting could be?
DW: Yeah, at first I found it overblown and pretentious and then I immersed myself in it and I wished I could carry it on. I wished it was still up and running and I could be part of that lineage of abstract painters. It wasn’t until I really looked at that kind of work that I realised something was missing. Something had been lost, maybe a sincerity or a seriousness or some kind of aspirational quality to that kind of work had been put aside or had been trumped in favour of irony or something like that.
AS: Did you come to that realisation at art school or later?
DW: Once I’d left art school and stopped explaining things to other people. Once I was in my own studio and I could have fun and things didn’t necessarily have to make as much sense, I started to think differently about my work. Justifying things endlessly at art school can close down what you want to pursue. Can I really explain this kind of weird pink? I mean there’s more to the work than that, but for me it’s rediscovering something that’s lost so that’s how it started and so I began to see it more as a lament; a lost idea of art. Maybe that's pompous or just a bit silly, or maybe I’ve got my own idea of what it is and it never really existed. It does seem that formalist abstract painting was the last time painting took itself seriously. After that everything was different – and a lot of it is fantastic - I’m not wanting to return to the past.
AS: I like this one, it makes me think of the Tudors.
DW: Yes, it has references to non-art historical points but you can see it as a weird take on Ad Reinhardt which was the intention but it became something else, especially with the texture, it changes everything.
AS: Tell me about the wallpaper.
DW: The wallpaper was chosen for being cheap, tacky, un-aesthetic, something disregarded. That’s how I felt about abstraction at the time and this was me thinking I was witty. So the paintings weren’t dissimilar to what they are now but the intent was profoundly different. I was painting with household emulsion, in magnolia and cream and those clichéd household décor colours so everything made sense and I could talk about them very well. The wallpaper was critiquing pattern and design and abstraction and the decorative nature of what it may become or what it may mean. But they were ugly paintings and there was no real sincerity to them. They made sense and my tutors thought they were interesting. But I didn’t enjoy painting them. I could say it was a critique of colour painting and formalism but it wasn’t really, it was just an empty shell of a bigger idea. And, like I say, they gradually became something else; I started to miss the intentions that I’d mocked. Then I started to explore colour, slowly and tentatively, but only after I left college. I felt I couldn’t justify it there.
AS: Really, because colour is vulgar, or tasteless?
DW: There was always the notion at art college that colour was seductive and therefore should be ignored or used sparingly.
AS: You mean an easy hook?
DW: Yeah, but I don’t really agree. I think that’s a narrow view of what colour can be. It seems to be such a shame that a massive aspect of painting, probably the most important, immediate aspect, would be so thoroughly disregarded. When I was at college everyone would make purposefully ugly paintings, and I did the same. So when I left, I felt amazingly free to start exploring colour and using acrylic and to look at art in a different way, without being as prejudiced. So the wallpaper stayed and colour came in and the wallpaper, like the abstract motif, was used mockingly. I hated it, in a sense, because it was so cheap and tacky but I gradually grew to love that and I became a connoisseur of wallpaper and started to think about what it meant to me. I started to think about the house I grew up in that was full of this wallpaper and what it was supposed to mean back in the late 1970s. I felt that I had been working with two things that were very similar; abstraction and some sense of aspiration. But ultimately they had both failed or gone awry or been prematurely ignored. I like the idea of failure being inherent in abstraction, at least in modernity and the same sense of failure embodied by wallpaper.
AS: You mean wallpaper in your home was aspirational?
DW: DIY became really big in the mid to late 1970s when my parents decorated their home. It was about trying to aspire to something else, either some strange mock stately home or a weird contemporaneous vision of design. A weird blend of different elements thrown together and ultimately it’s just paper on a wall, and you don’t live in a stately home, it’s a small house in Stockport. But that sense of aspiration is still there, even if it’s failed. When I was at the Royal College, Lord Snowdon, who was the Patron of the College, came to visit and he loved the wallpaper and he was saying how he had it in his home. I had to explain to him that the wallpaper he was commenting on was actually the imitation of what he has. This is the cheap alternative, this is what people, who can’t afford what he has, buy to try to signify something else.
AS: There is that familiarity about the wallpaper, so I wonder if they speak of a particular decade.
DW: To me, it does, of growing up in the 1980s. My house was out of date by a decade. People say the patterns and textures are 1970s, but we were just ten years out of date. So I have these two elements, the wallpaper and colour and a different way of how I was looking at abstraction, I had a technique as well, which was quite laborious: collaging pieces of wallpaper together.
AS: How are they made up?
DW: Every piece is separate and they’re all cut to fit like a jigsaw, almost like marquetry.
AS: How do you cut them?
DW: Just with a scalpel – a surgical knife.
AS: Although they look slick, they actually involve a very hand-made process.
DW: Yeah, you could say they’re too perfect, but they're as perfect as I can possibly make them. Every single piece is an individual piece of wallpaper. Nothing overlaps. The abstract pieces are simpler, but the landscapes become quite complicated and there could be hundreds of pieces so they are very hand-crafted which is something else I wanted to elaborate on, rather than being against something that is hand-made and beautiful and textured and all those things that you’re not really allowed to do now. I stretch a canvas, put the wallpaper on, so they look quite scrappy at first. It takes a lot of scrappy preparation to make them that perfect. Then they’re sanded and primed and then I start painting.
AS: So they’re painted afterwards.
DW: Yes, and I paint from light to dark. But with the abstract pieces I usually try to work out the colours with these small modelli on paper. It’s just a way of working out colour and form, some of them I don’t even use. It’s far more labour intensive than I think the end product suggests. It’s a shame in a way because everything looks so perfect; it's easy to think the process must be quite simple.
AS: So how do the landscapes fit with the targets?
DW: I wanted to do what I was doing with abstraction and wallpaper but with something figurative or using a landscape. So I started to look at landscape imagery, especially clichéd mountain images you might find on a chocolate box. Images that seem familiar and beautiful but ultimately banal, which I think relates to the wallpaper. Something that is quite attractive but so commonplace it’s easy to overlook. I wanted to take another look at landscape painting and see if I could do something with that, reinvigorate it or see if I could use a similar technique to the abstract paintings to create an entire surface out of wallpaper.
AS: You limit the colour in the landscapes.
DW: I think the pink is brighter because the rest is greyscale. I like the idea of the greyscale standing in for a photograph. It’s quite documentary-like. The landscapes are a new thing. The first ones I painted using the original colours of the photographs, bright blue skies, green grass, white mountains. It quickly became tiresome and I missed the freedom of abstraction where you can use any colour combination you want. So it was an attempt to try to utilise that, especially with colourful skies and heavily floral wallpaper.
AS: They’re graphic, less about material.
DW: They’re graphic in the way Mondrian, Ad Reinhardt or Frank Stella are graphic. I’m making work about the geometric side of abstraction, it’s not expressionism or gestural mark-making. The squares are based on Josef Albers’ ‘Homage’ series but his are very placid, light yellows and cream or slightly greyish colours - subdued. I tried to do the opposite of that, bright and camp.
AS: You embrace the camp or kitschness of the work?
DW: I think it’s inevitable with the wallpaper; it’s impossible to avoid. Camp in the sense that it tries to be serious but it can’t take itself seriously, not just something that’s tacky or bright and brash, but something that has an intent and fails. It’s not that they fail because they’re bad paintings, they fail because abstraction, or this kind of painting, or even mountainscapes, don't seem to exist as a serious pursuit any more. It’s just me doing it on my own and the wallpaper is something you’re not supposed to use in serious art-making. So I’m making what I think are very serious paintings using two monumental things, mountainscapes and abstraction, out of wallpaper and bright colours. The subjects themselves are almost too big so they have to fail, or they have to have failure built in otherwise they’re pretentious and overblown.
AS: I try to get my head around kitsch but it’s a word that is bandied about but can’t be pinned down.
DW: People ask me about that. It’s not something I think about that much or purposefully try to take on, but I think it's implicit in the work. It’s not kitsch in a Jeff Koons sense. It’s not really celebratory kitsch, it’s more sad or melancholy kitsch. It’s the kitschness of a beautiful Alpine landscape on a cheap box of chocolates. Koons deals with a bigger, brasher, louder, funnier form of kitsch. I think if you try to incorporate kitsch in your work, it instantly stops being kitsch. Self-aware kitsch isn’t kitsch.
AS: I was thinking of a sad, sentimentality related to the wallpaper.
DW: There’s always that sense of nostalgia, which is different from sentimentality. I think for sentimentality, it has to be based around an object or thing. I think nostalgia is just a feeling, which is evoked by wallpaper or landscapes but you can’t clinch it, it’s not this object or this thing, it’s more these objects or these things. Perhaps that’s the difference between sentimentality and nostalgia. All those words are hard to talk about because we know what they mean but there’s something about these words (nostalgia, sentimentality, kitsch, aspiration) that when you try to define them; you lose the quality of what they represent.
David Wightman is currently a fellowship holder at the Berwick Gymnasium Arts Fellowship, Berwick-upon-Tweed, Northumberland until April 2011.
Labels: David Wightman
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String phenomenology of the somewhat different kind
[Cat’s cradle. Image Source.]
Ten years ago, I didn’t take the “string wars” seriously. To begin with, referring to such an esoteric conflict as “war” seems disrespectful to millions caught in actual wars. In comparison to their suffering it’s hard to take anything seriously.
Leaving aside my discomfort with the nomenclature, the focus on string theory struck me as odd. String theory as a research area stands out in hep-th and gr-qc merely because of the large number of followers, not by the supposedly controversial research practices. For anybody working in the field it is apparent that string theorists don’t differ in their single-minded focus from physicists in other disciplines. Overspecialization is a common disease of academia, but one that necessarily goes along with division of labor, and often it is an efficient route to fast progress.
No, I thought back then, string theory wasn’t the disease, it was merely a symptom. The underlying disease was one that would surely soon be recognized and addressed: Theoreticians – as scientists whose most-used equipment is their own brain – must be careful to avoid systematic bias introduced by their apparatuses. In other words, scientific communities, and especially those which lack timely feedback by data, need guidelines to avoid social and cognitive biases.
This is so obvious it came as a surprise to me that, in 2006, everybody was hitting on Lee Smolin for pointing out what everybody knew anyway, that string theorists, lacking experimental feedback for decades, had drifted off in a math bubble with questionable relevance for the description of nature. It’s somewhat ironic that, from my personal experience, the situation is actually worse in Loop Quantum Gravity, an approach pioneered, among others, by Lee Smolin. At least the math used by string theorists seems to be good for something. The same cannot be said about LQG.
Ten years later, it is clear that I was wrong in thinking that just drawing attention to the problem would seed a solution. Not only has the situation not improved, it has worsened. We now have some theoretical physicists who argue that we should alter the scientific method so that the success of a theory can be assessed by means other than empirical evidence. This idea, which has sprung up in the philosophy community, isn’t all that bad in principle. In practice, however, it will merely serve to exacerbate social streamlining: If theorists can draw on criteria other than the ability of a theory to explain observations, the first criterion they’ll take into account is aesthetic value, and the second is popularity with their colleagues. Nothing good can come out of this.
And nothing good has come out of it, nothing has changed. The string wars clearly were more interesting for sociologists than they were for physicists. In the last couple of months several articles have appeared which comment on various aspects of this episode, which I’ve read and want to briefly summarize for you.
First, there is
Collective Belief, Kuhn, and the String Theory Community
Weatherall, James Owen and Gilbert, Margaret
philsci-archive:11413
This paper is a very Smolin-centric discussion of whether string theorists are exceptional in their group beliefs. The authors argue that, no, actually string theorists just behave like normal humans and “these features seem unusual to Smolin not because they are actually unusual, but because he occupies an unusual position from which to observe them.” He is unusual, the authors explain, for having worked on string theory, but then deciding to not continue in the field.
It makes sense, the authors write, that people whose well-being to some extent depends on the acceptance by the group will adapt to the group:
“Expressing a contrary view – bucking the consensus – is an offense against the other members of the community… So, irrespective of their personal beliefs, there are pressures on individual scientists to speak in certain ways. Moreover, insofar as individuals are psychologically disposed to avoid cognitive dissonance, the obligation to speak in certain ways can affect one’s personal beliefs so as to bring them into line with the consensus, further suppressing dissent from within the group.”
“As parties to a joint commitment, members of the string theory community are obligated to act as mouthpieces of their collective belief.”
I actually thought we knew this since 1895, when Le Bon’s published his “Study of the Popular Mind.”
The authors of the paper then point out that it’s normal for members of a scientific community to not jump ship at the slightest indication of conflicting evidence because often such evidence turns out to be misleading. It didn’t become clear to me what evidence they might be referring to; supposedly it’s non-empirical.
They further argue that a certain disregard for what is happening outside one’s own research area is also normal: “Science is successful in part because of a distinctive kind of focused, collaborative research,” and due to their commitment to the agenda “participants can be expected to resist change with respect to the framework of collective beliefs.”
This is all reasonable enough. Unfortunately, the authors entirely miss the main point, the very reason for the whole debate. The question isn’t whether string theorists’ behavior is that of normal humans – I don’t think that was ever in doubt – but whether that “normal human behavior” is beneficial for science. Scientific research requires, in a very specific sense, non-human behavior. It’s not normal for individuals to disregard subjective assessments and to not pay attention to social pressure. And yet, that is exactly what good science would require.
The second paper is
Contested Boundaries: The String Theory Debates and Ideologies of Science
Sophie Ritson, and Kristian Camilleri
Perspectives on Science, Vol. 23, No. 2, pp 192-227.
This paper is basically a summary of the string wars that focuses on the question whether or not string theory can be considered science. This “demarcation problem” is a topic that philosophers and sociologists love to discuss, but to me it really isn’t particularly interesting how you classify some research area, to me the question is whether it’s good for something. This is a question which should be decided by the community, but as long as decision making is influenced by social pressures and cognitive biases I can’t trust the community judgement.
The article has a lot of fun quotations from very convinced string theorists, for example by David Gross: “String theory is full of qualitative predictions, such as the production of black holes at the LHC.” I’m not sure what’s the difference between a qualitative prediction and no prediction, but either way it’s certainly not a prediction that was very successful. Also nice is John Schwarz claiming that “supersymmetry is the major prediction of string theory that could appear at accessible energies” and that “some of these superpartners should be observable at the LHC.” Lots of coulds and shoulds that didn’t quite pan out.
While the article gives a good overview on the opinions about string theory that were voiced during the 2006 controversy, the authors themselves clearly don’t know very well the topic they are writing about. A particularly odd statement that highlights their skewed perspective is: “String theory currently enjoys a privileged status by virtue of being the dominant paradigm within theoretical physics.”
I find it quite annoying how frequently I encounter this extrapolation from a particular research area – may that be string theory, supersymmetry, or multiverse cosmology – to all of physics. The vast majority of physicists work in fields like quantum optics, photonics, hadronic and nuclear physics, statistical mechanics, atomic physics, solid state physics, low-temperature physics, plasma physics, astrophysics, condensed matter physics, and so on. They have nothing whatsoever to do with string theory, and certainly would be very surprised to hear that it’s “the dominant paradigm.”
In any case, you might find this paper useful if you didn’t follow the discussion 10 years ago.
Finally, there is this paper
‘Crackpots’ and ‘active researchers’: The controversy over links between arXiv and the scientific blogosphere
Sophie Ritson
Social Studies of Science, 1-22, 2016
The title of the paper doesn’t explicitly refer to string theory, but most of it is also a discussion of the demarcation problem on the example of arXiv trackbacks. (I suspect this paper is a spin-off of the previous paper.)
ArXiv trackbacks, in case you didn’t know, are links to blogposts that show up on some papers’ arxiv sites, when the blogpost has referred to the paper. To exactly which blogs trackbacks show up and who makes the decision whether they do is one of the arXiv’s best-kept secrets. Peter Woit’s blog, infamously, doesn’t show up in the arXiv trackbacks on the, rather spurious, reason that he supposedly doesn’t count as “active researcher.” The paper tells the full 2006 story with lots of quotes from bloggers you are probably familiar with.
The arXiv recently conducted a user survey, among other things about the trackback feature, which makes me think they might have some updates planned.
On the question who counts as crackpot, the paper (unsurprisingly) doesn’t come to a conclusion other than noting that scientists deal with the issue by stating “we know one when we see one.” I don’t think there can be any other definition than that. To me the notion of “crackpot” is an excellent example of an emergent feature – it’s a demarcation that the community creates during its operation. Any attempt to come up with a definition from first principles is hence doomed to fail.
The rest of the paper is a general discussion of the role of blogs in science communication, but I didn’t find it particularly insightful. The author comes to the (correct) conclusion that blog content turned out not to have such a short life-time as many feared, but otherwise basically just notes that there are as many ways to use blogs as there are bloggers. But then if you are reading this, you already knew that.
One of the main benefits that I see in blogs isn’t mentioned in the paper at all, which is that blogs supports communication between scientific communities that are only loosely connected. In my own research area, I read the papers, hear the seminars, and go to conferences, and I therefore know pretty well what is going on – with or without blogs. But I use blogs to keep up to date in adjacent fields, like cosmology, astrophysics and, to a lesser extent, condensed matter physics and quantum optics. For this purpose I find blogs considerably more useful than popular science news, because the latter often doesn’t provide a useful amount of detail and commentary, not to mention that they all tend to latch onto the same three papers that made big unsubstantiated claims.
Don’t worry, I haven’t suddenly become obsessed with string theory. I’ve read through these sociology papers mainly because I cannot not write a few paragraphs about the topic in my book. But I promise that’s it from me about string theory for some while.
Update: Peter Woit has some comments on the trackback issue.
Posted by Sabine Hossenfelder at 6:32 AM Labels: Papers, Science and Society, Sociology of Science
Phillip Helbig 6:49 AM, June 13, 2016
"To me the notion of “crackpot” is an excellent example of an emergent feature – it’s a demarcation that the community creates during its operation. Any attempt to come up with a definition from first principles is hence doomed to fail."
John Baez's crackpot index is usually pretty accurate.
Michael Fisher 7:14 AM, June 13, 2016
You are one of my favourite bloggers Bee ~ not that I understand 90% of the physics, but I try
Good post & I'm looking forward to the book
Andrew Thomas 8:31 AM, June 13, 2016
It's funny John Baez's 50 point entry is a sneaky reference to string theory.
Unknown 9:05 AM, June 13, 2016
If theorists can draw on criteria other than the ability of a theory to explain observations, the first criterion they’ll take into account is aesthetic value, and the second is popularity with their colleagues. Nothing good can come out of this.
I think that is too dogmatic an assertion.
Scientific research requires, in a very specific sense, non-human behavior. It’s not normal for individuals to disregard subjective assessments and to not pay attention to social pressure. And yet, that is exactly what good science would require.
I would say you don't have to "disregard subjective assessments and to not pay attention to social pressure" you just need to be aware of the influence of these on your own thinking.
“String theory currently enjoys a privileged status by virtue of being the dominant paradigm within theoretical physics.”
I would imagine this statement is referring to theoretical physicists working in quantum gravity.
Also nice is John Schwarz claiming that “supersymmetry is the major prediction of string theory that could appear at accessible energies” and that “some of these superpartners should be observable at the LHC.” Lots of coulds and shoulds that didn’t quite pan out.
I suppose the second "should" should have been a could. We still could/should find supersymmetry in a future accelerator - so it's definitely work looking for more than once.
Uncle Al 10:30 AM, June 13, 2016
http://www.quantamagazine.org/20160112-string-theory-meets-loop-quantum-gravity/
Unite the unworkable into the grant fundable.
http://www.ics.uci.edu/~eppstein/junkyard/nested-klein-bottles.jpg
Klein gravitation.
Geometric tests of spacetime geometry (existing apparatus!) offer more inclusive gravitation consistent with observation. Physics' chiral and parity anomalies, "dark matter," and SUSY failure are sourced. Luboš, it's about empirical validation not love. Spacetime is a trace oddity (fermionic) not a strict eventy (bosonic).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-uIQgq0obk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Js0evCum83o
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OADGS587eOs
Close-packed concave homochiral spacetime. giggle
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Mf0JpTI_gg
Haelfix 3:58 PM, June 13, 2016
Its clear the notion of a scientific consensus isn't always right in science (Lysenkoism etc), and definitions of 'crackpot' which use this criteria are hence flawed.
But I think its fair to say that the subject has a much higher likelihood of being correct if a large number of independant specialists believe in it. Yes yes, societal biases, group think blah blah blah. Despite all of that, the statement remains true.
It's worth noting how things progress in the mathematics community. Almost always when a problem is close to being solved, there are several groups trying the same methods. Like for the Poincare conjecture, it was widely believed that Richard Hamiltons methods would be part of a solution, and indeed they were... This years before the eventual solution. Of course there was almost assuredly some other individual coming at the problem from a different way who would disagree, but nevertheless you could say there was a sort of consensus amongst the best people about what the most promising avenue was.
String theory is like that, since there is so little experimental guidance. It's certainly a less strong belief than a traditional scientific consensus (like the belief in say the veracity of GR, which has experimental support) but that's about as good as you are going to get in quantum gravity... Basically mathematical consistency arguments, plausibility arguments, no go theorems for everything else and theoretical aesthetics.
Also finally, its not like string theory has given zero contributions in return. It's returned many different ideas to a wide array of fields in physics. For instance, many of the highly cited hep-ph of the past 20 years are stringy inspired models (some of which are now known to not quite work, but in that field almost any new and original idea is a big breakthrough, and string theory furnished many of these). Then of course there is AdS/CFT which it's fair to say has objectively contributed to the understanding of physics in many different diverse areas of physics.
John Baez 4:08 PM, June 13, 2016
This is indeed a strange sentence: “String theory currently enjoys a privileged status by virtue of being the dominant paradigm within theoretical physics.”
Yes, there's the usual arrogant thing that particle physicists do - mixing up particle physics and theoretical physics as a whole. But even apart from that, it seems to be saying something like “String theory currently enjoys a privileged status by virtue of enjoying a privileged status.”
APDunbrack 4:48 PM, June 13, 2016
I think in popular media language, "theoretical physics" = high-energy/GR/cosmology/... and "applied physics" = condensed matter/biophysics/..., regardless of whether a particular individual would be classified as an applied or theoretical physicist in the language used within the physics community. Accordingly, calling string theory the dominant within "theoretical physics" (meaning, in practice, BSM physics and open areas of GR) would be not unreasonably inaccurate within the language of the community/intended audience.
notevenwrong 4:58 PM, June 13, 2016
Some commentary on the Ritson article is at my blog
http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=8578
If anyone ever finds the answer to "one of the arXiv’s best-kept secrets", please let me know...
Jonathan Tooker 9:05 AM, June 14, 2016
> the first criterion they’ll take into account is aesthetic value, and the second is popularity with their colleagues.
Why would you say Higgs' theory was found to be "successful" if not only because the math had quite a pleasing look to it when printed on the page and that the result was very popular with his colleagues?
akidbelle 9:15 AM, June 14, 2016
so if I read (perhaps not so) correctly, discussing Angel's sex is science because Angel's sex scientists enjoy discussing it. But they still don't know if it's good for something... let's hope I will never.
More seriously, there is conceptual bias, which is well-known of psychologists (and zen practitioners among others) under the name of projection. It's interesting that you never mention it because its effects is what this post describes to me (rather more than less, my own projection?).
Plato Hagel 9:43 AM, June 14, 2016
It seems to me that a shift too, as Quantum realism, has pervaded science as a Kuhnian shift now regarded as quantum cognition.
Geometrical underpinnings, has underscored our progressions, and such a basis serves to illustrate how our understanding as a base reality now functions derived as that quantum realism. So different models help you to see reality in different ways?
piein skee 11:41 AM, June 14, 2016
"It’s somewhat ironic that, from my personal experience, the situation is actually worse in Loop Quantum Gravity"
Smolin's thesis wasn't primarily historic in terms of String Theory (you said decades without experiment). To borrow your symptom/cause vocabulary Smolin saw the long running lack of experiment as symptomatic of the much more fundamental problem specific to String Theory that it was untestable in principle.
I think you've said somewhere that String is testable in principle because the necessary energy could be reached in the future, or some get-around might come with advance of technologies. String Theory can't be falsified even there, because at least one category of String Theory is decoupled from strings.
To be fair on him Smolin actually placed the absence of experiment plaguing alternate streams like Quantum Loop Gravity, front and centre of his argument, and went on to juxtaposition QLG and Strings as part of the construction of his argument, by demonstrating that QLG was testable in principle and had tests (which in the event came to nothing) in the pipeline.
Sabine Hossenfelder 12:22 PM, June 14, 2016
Jonathan,
Higgs' idea was found to be successful because... they found the Higgs-boson. I don't think that the idea at the time was thought of as particularly beautiful. But more to the point, you have it backwards. I am not saying that beautiful ideas cannot work. I am saying merely that there isn't any known reason for why they should be more likely to work, hence putting an emphasis on beauty is a distortion of objective judgement. Indeed, if you look at what's been going on in theoretical physics since the early 80s, ideas from beauty have been dramatically unsuccessful. (And also in the course of history supposedly beautiful ideas have often failed.) Best,
akidbelle,
Yes, I know what projection is. I ask myself about it constantly. If there is some mistake I am making that I am not aware of, please let me know.
piein,
The sentence you quote is about communal reinforcement not about testability.
Jonathan Tooker 12:29 PM, June 14, 2016
I guess another way to ask my question is why did Higgs win all these prizes if not only because his theory was nice to look at and his colleagues liked it?
• Hughes Medal, Royal Society (with T W B Kibble) 1981
• Rutherford Medal, Institute of Physics (with T W B Kibble) 1984
• Scottish Science Award, Saltire Society and Royal Bank of Scotland 1990
• James Scott Prize Lectureship, Royal Society of Edinburgh (delivered April 1995) 1993
• Paul Dirac Medal and Prize, Institute of Physics 1997
• High Energy and Particle Physics Prize, European Physical Society (with R Brout, F Englert) 1997
• Royal Medal, Royal Society of Edinburgh 2000
• Wolf Prize in Physics (with R Brout and F Englert) 2004
• Oskar Klein Memorial Lecture and Medal, Stockholm Academy of Sciences 2009
• J J Sakurai Prize, American Physical Society (with R Brout, F Englert, G S Guralnik, C R Hagen and T W B Kibble) 2010
Koenraad Van Spaendonck 12:36 PM, June 14, 2016
As far as any privileged status is concerned :
String theory :
+: It has the ambition to explain space AND matter
-: It starts from spacetime as currently described, therefore de facto, it cannot look underneeth hyperbolic spacetime.
LQG :
+: It tries to describe what spacetime itself is constructed from.
-: It does not attempt to incorporate the nature of matter in the concept.So de facto not a unifying theory.
Disadvantage of both : Infinitesimal calculus fails to describe the finite character of a necessary quantumlike description.
So both (actually more than these 2 of course) can keep claiming to have the best approach, but without new oxigen they will not live up to the requirements right from their conception forward.
Joining forces instead of more war would be a good start towards better insights, as opposed to more (tax payer unfriendly) stagnation and not enough positive energy to start over.
In his latest paper from december 2015 Lee Smolin argues that 'first and foremost, we need new physical causal principles, only than can we proceed to develope a mathematical description for it'.
That's hard to disagree with in my opinion.
Best, Koen
Because it solved a problem.
Anyway, you're not making sense focusing on a theory that was popular, was tested, and turned out to be correct. You should be asking how many theories are there which were (are) popular and turned out to be not correct (think: geocentrism, mechanism, steady state, vortex theory, etc), and how many theories are there which are not popular and their lack of popularity might have the consequence we'll never find out whether they are correct.
Koenraad,
You have some misunderstanding both about quantization (you seem to confuse it with discretization) and about infinitesimal calculus (which is, as the name says, a method of calculation. That calculation is either correct or it isn't, but the method itself not to blame for the failure of a theory.) Best,
Louis Tagliaferro 12:58 PM, June 14, 2016
Another article I really enjoyed. When John Baez replied to your sentence, “String theory currently enjoys a privileged status by virtue of being the dominant paradigm within theoretical physics.”… He says, it seems to be saying something like “String theory currently enjoys a privileged status by virtue of enjoying a privileged status.”
I believe that is your point when you said, “Scientific research requires, in a very specific sense, non-human behavior. It’s not normal for individuals to disregard subjective assessments and to not pay attention to social pressure. And yet, that is exactly what good science would require.”
I believe there are too many scientist who do not fully appreciate how difficult it is to truly separate the influence that, social pressures and personal motivations have in steering one’s own “objective reasoning”.
Koenraad Van Spaendonck 1:14 PM, June 14, 2016
Ok on the bad nomenclature.
I will certainly not argue on the proven usefulness of infinitesimal calculus, but the question is wether it is the adequate instrument specifically for a theory of quantum gravity. T. Padmanabhan for instance tries to avoid it in his extensive work on emergent gravity.
akidbelle 1:44 PM, June 14, 2016
I don'k know about your own mistakes; only you can. But I know there are training methods against projections. First one I heard of is by Korzybski (Science and sanity, 1933), which inspired PNL. Next, but not from Korzybski, there is a trick too long to explain here, about automatic judgement, personal history/training, refusal/denial and their relation to automatic and reactive emotions (not true sentiments).
If I were a top gun physicists (like I suppose you are), and considering the amount of theoretical work already on the table, I would change my point of observation, and hypothesize that the next productive step is theoretically impossible. In other words, and following Korzybski, I would guess that I would see it contradictory to the language I learnt - and then that I would instantaneously discard it.
I would be happy to discuss the point further.
Jonathan Tooker 9:37 PM, June 14, 2016
What is the difference between the case where one solves a physics problem only using math tools and the case where on develops a theory that can be considered successful even before it is tested? I don't get it. It seems like if your theory was good enough that someone might want to test it, that means it was a successful theory.
Sabine Hossenfelder 12:49 AM, June 15, 2016
I read a book about NLP many years ago, but to my knowledge that idea itself turned out to be pretty shaky science. In any case, I'm always happy to learn something new, so if you have some reference, let me know. Best,
Sabine Hossenfelder 1:00 AM, June 15, 2016
"It seems like if your theory was good enough that someone might want to test it, that means it was a successful theory."
I sincerely hope you are not a scientist. Because this sentence of yours sums up pretty much all that's going wrong in science right now. The purpose of science is to describe nature. A theory is successful if it correctly describes nature. A theory's success should not be assessed based on whether other scientists believe it has chances to do that. That's a popular vote, not science.
See, this is exactly the problem I have with Richard Dawid's idea of "non-empirical theory assessment" - it comes down to sociology. Science is a community enterprise, yes. But in the end the judgement call is made by nature. The big problem is that if we maneuver ourselves into a situation where we continuously test hypotheses that are wrong, we might just entirely miss to build experiments that could confirm correct hypotheses.
Do you realize that literally dozens of experiments have been build to search for dark matter, beginning in the mid 80s? Every time they come back with a null-result, the "expected" scale for the mass and interaction rate shifts. It's pretty much the same with collider searches for susy. They've been looking for this already at LEP. That was 20 years ago. Now that it doesn't look like it's showing up at the LHC, it's supposed to show up at the next bigger collider.
Read this for example:
"Physicists thought they might find these superpartners when the LHC's predecessor, CERN's Large Electron-Positron collider, came online a quarter of a century ago. They did not. When superpartners also failed to appear in the much bigger and more powerful LHC, some physicists panicked.
But there is hope. Recent theoretical research suggests that Higgsinos might actually be showing up at the LHC—scientists just cannot find them in the mess of particles generated by the LHC's proton-antiproton collisions.
This is where the International Linear Collider would shine."
Korzybski's work is not NPL.
Let us try with an example; for instance, you state in a response: "A theory is successful if it correctly describes nature." OK, but the words "correct" and "describes" are not clear to me. Let us try a definition.
"correct" = sufficiently similar quantities pop-out of equations when compared to experimental results.
"describes" = no other quantities and equations are needed and can I understand.
Second: "this sentence of yours sums up pretty much all that's going wrong in science right now". Disagree, it's going right, because success is firstly mimetic in the human world - group's meme selection. No one stands a chance against that; the only thing you can do is start your own church. But you are right, it is not scientific! So this sentence shows an incomplete analysis (I mean the sentence, not you.) And I'll add that for many "deciders", success = money.
Then : "The big problem is that if we maneuver ourselves into a situation where we continuously test hypotheses that are wrong, we might just entirely miss to build experiments that could confirm correct hypotheses." In the sense of the meme/group, it is not a problem at all, it is a guarantee of success for the next 30 years; this is an experimental fact.
Now please, tell me in 3 lines what is the technical need for super-partners?
(the meme/group answer is play super-ball, I know this one, more work for collision machines - 30 more years to grow; we do not change a winning team).
Well, then I don't know what the acronym means.
I don't understand what you are trying to say with your example. I agree that in the first sentence I haven't explained "correct" and "describe," I hope we can agree that in conversation it's quite uncommon to define every word (not to mention that it's in most cases impossible). If I write a longer text, I am usually doing something similar to what you ask for.
I don't understand however what your issue is with the second sentence, since the first explains exactly that "success" for a "scientific theory" is not group selection, but adequacy to describe nature. (Now we can debate whether we agree that's what science should do, if that's what you mean.)
Your further elaboration just continues to deny what I stated in the first sentence, that scientific success means to describe nature.
There is no technical "need" for superpartners. I can tell you the main motivations for supersymmetry, if that's what you mean: aids unification, provides dark matter candidates, supposedly avoids the need the finetune the Higgs mass, though that has turned out not to work. What do we learn from that?
I am trying to explain you what success is in practice. You are trying to tell me what it should be in science. All that for a word: "success". We could debate like this and not understand each other indefinitely.
What I am trying to tell you is that if you fight facts, you loose. Not because you loose the debate/fight but because you loose your energy. (Believe me, realizing this in my own work changed a lot of things; it's even become funny.)
In my opinion, a successful theory leads to a technological gap. In this way, the sorcerer who could make fire was the scientist of the time - whatever the fairy tales he used to explain his doing. This is not a problem until a class of sorcerers emerges working not for the fire, but for the fairy-tales explanation that support their class.
What I learn from your list is that super-symmetry is not mentioned to lead to a technological gap (- in your list). What about string theory?
I'm not fighting facts. (Which facts anyway?) I am merely telling you how I used the word success. In the example you picked I even explicitly explained how I use it, so I don't understand why you insist on redefining it.
You are telling me that for other people in other circumstances it might mean something else. I don't disagree. But fighting about the use of words I find rather pointless.
Let me hence just rephrase the point without the word "success": if scientists would ask the public to please give them money so they can write papers about topics they like which they hope will also be liked by their colleagues with no intention to describe some aspect of our observations, I doubt that they would get much funding. (Look, I haven't used the word "success" at all. I am merely drawing upon what people think scientists should do with the money they get.)
Nobody expects either supersymmetry or string theory to lead to a technological gap any time in the next 100 years (at least I've never met someone who thinks this). But I'm not sure why I should care what in your opinion counts as a "successful theory" - it's clearly not the way the word is currently used in science...
akidbelle 10:08 AM, June 15, 2016
thanks; I'm not trying to fight, be sure of that.
I agree with your description of the current definition of "success" without using the word. I agree from the beginning with all you said, I'm merely trying to discuss with you a different perspective (and I think you probably have it for long, or I would not even try).
Now if scientists ask the public to please give them money so they can write papers, make congresses, careers, receive prizes, and make experiments about topics they like and in which they have no hope to lead to a technological gap any time in the next 100 years, would that be true?... and what would happen? That is the sorcerer class stuff, and the true, real output is to maintain societal stability, to begin with the position of the sorcerer class (and hopefully improve it).
That's my point. No offense meant, of course.
The Shroud of Turin projects a bicurved face onto a planar cloth without distortion. Peer-voted faith and theory suffer Galileo, Popper; science.
Principia's first page assumes the pendulum equation has no bob. Newton bobbled c, h, and k_B. All are falsifiable, but not within the axiomatic system. Two fat black holes merged in external real time, with no firewall (anomalous binding energy), with no angular momentum blip as singularities danced (if they existed) re unaltered general relativity. The universe did not, Higgs versus top quark masses, nucleate into vacuum decay.
Theory must look outside postulates to fundamentally allow baryogenesis, then repair itself.
Jonathan Tooker 10:55 AM, June 15, 2016
I am going to have to disagree with you when you write "The purpose of science is to describe nature." I think the purpose of science is to attempt to do that. The accumulation of many such attempts is success in itself because the history of science demonstrates that many attempts to describe invariably lead to increasingly accurate descriptions. I am compelled to point out that approximately 0% of practicing scientists have found anything that does affirmatively describe nature, and most efforts show what does not describe nature, perhaps by testing as-yet untested theories. By your own words, it could inferred that the still-absent theory of everything represents a failure of the entire scientific effort of mankind because all of our descriptions are still in some way wrong. I take the other position, the one I think is most popular among scientists, that science is a collection of baby steps, and any steps that aren't obviously in the wrong direction must have then been in the right direction, i.e.: the direction of scientific progress.
I actually agree with you, that sentence of mine was somewhat sloppy, sorry about that. I expressed a very similar opinion to yours here.
You write: "The accumulation of many such attempts is success in itself because the history of science demonstrates that many attempts to describe invariably lead to increasingly accurate descriptions."
Just because something has worked before doesn't mean it will always continue to work. Science has changed dramatically in the last 100 years. There's no reason to expect that the methods from the past will continue to work in such a different environment. Either way, I am not so much worried that there won't be no progress at all, but that progress is much slower than it could be and that a lot of money is wasted. Best,
When do you think we will get a final answer on the spin of the Higgslike particle that got discovered n 2012?
I don't know, I'm not the right person to ask this, maybe ask Tommaso instead.
Koenraad Van Spaendonck 6:48 AM, June 17, 2016
@akidbelle
I don't think technological spin off should be the only motivation for physics research, although a very important one.
To understand more of our position as human beings in the great unknown universe is an equally valid reason.
But if we observe stagnation in both areas, then the tax payer might indeed become increasingly impatient.
Before the internet, it was very difficult for a layman to inform himself on the actual status of research. But nowadays every bit of information is available to everyone.
Physicists and universities are therefore facing an adaptation period to cope with this rapid evolution.
Knowledge bastions are losing that monopoly of single guardian, maker and distributor of information.
On top of that, systems like Google are not only data bases but are evolving into auxiliary instruments of research, somewhat in competition with 'the professor'. These professors are facing the upcoming challenge of how to stay relevant and how to produce added value in the face of this powerful almost-artificial-intelligence.
This is also the reason why academics with a degree and laymen are increasingly clashing.
Physics education faces the challenge to procure physicists who know how to handle this artificial intelligence,how to incorporate it in their problem solving methods. To make sure they stay far ahead of the intelligent laymen, thus providing him with the added value the laymen offers them his tax money for.
piein skee 9:29 AM, June 18, 2016
Dr Bee "piein, The sentence you quote is about communal reinforcement not about testability"
Hi - I thought I replied to this already. You are referring to the comment you still have not published? In fact my response in that comment is also about communal reinforcement. The testing is for construction purposes, and is legitimate because his own context is very much that of String Theory contributions to adjacent or other fields as counter-argument to the lack of tests.
The point in that comment is that the contributions to adjacent fields are no less subject to the prediction than String Theory major.
I hope everything is in order now and I will see my comment.
(piein: There's no unpublished comment from you in the queue. It must have been a submission error.)
piein skee 1:28 PM, June 19, 2016
Sabine - ok thanks for letting me know. So your comment referred to the QLG quote I took from you regarding Smolin?
Haelfix says " Then of course there is AdS/CFT which it's fair to say has objectively contributed to the understanding of physics in many different diverse areas of physics." (plus a more general statement of String Theory indirect contributions made)
Haelfix - these contributions, if they lead to non-trivial predictions in the recipient field, are perfectly adequate as major confirmation of String Theory.
But there have not been any non-trivial predictions in the recipient fields. And that means String Theory may be contributing things that are wrong that leave those other fields undermined in the longer term.
Which will be case even if String Theory contains large amounts of truth. Because the amount of truth that would be needed would have to be at or above the standard already in play in those fields.
For that reason, just because String Theory brings something that seems very plausible and has eloquence and opens up new avenues of enquiry, this cannot be seen as evidence of usefulness. Because the levels of truth needed for effects like that is a fraction of what is necessary to add rather than diminish.
Sheever 8:51 AM, June 20, 2016
" But if we observe stagnation in both areas, then the tax payer might indeed become increasingly impatient."
I haven't read such nonsense comment long time. Tax payers in general have no idea what is going on, they are flooded with physics news continously. Lets clear some misconception here, which is because one theory can't yet be tested successfully doesn't mean other theories need to sit, and theorists of other models do nothing.
Again, there is no theory up to date which is successful and frankly theoretical physics is in deep shit in its own regarding to ANY model as the lack of confirmation and experimental evidence.
Sheever,
We may have a simple misunderstanding here, easy to clear up. By stagnation I mean precisely what you say, not that physicists would not be working very hard to obtain results.
As for the tax payer, in recent years and years to come, he has access to much more than the popsi section, if he takes an interest.
Sheever 4:04 PM, June 21, 2016
I havent ever heard a complaint from tax payers,to pointing to slow or no scientific progress.To be fair,to actually monitor this by a layman, need quite a bit of study.. not just reading a paper or two,or blog posts because the lack of understanding of the contents in general.You may agree on this.
I agree, and I would like to see more accounts of accurate reports in the popsi section to keep the public informed on the actual status of things. Instead of the sensationalism that keeps the layman stupid. That is why I like blogs such as this one.
An example. I saw a video online of the World Science Festival. A known physicist spoke the following words in the context of approaching the speed of light : "If I can walk fast enough, I can walk into your future." That - in my oppinion - does not belong in the 21st century concerning informing the layman on physics.It should always be accompanied by many ifs and a serious amount of nuance, because people take that for granted coming from important physicists.I completely dislike this oversimplification when communicating to the layman. Same thing for the rubber sheet with the earth 'weighing' on it to explain spacetime. Why not inform the layman that it is a totally unsatisfactory representation because gravity comes in over the horizontal plane semi-downward (hyperbolic line), and simultaneously from above with the earth's weight on the sheet, in that picture. Why keep people stupid about that ?
I don't think people originally that stupid. Some percentage due lack of interest may accept such description and care no more about it. However some who have the intention to understand mathematical description will take its time to background check surely, on the level fit to their understanding. You know the good thing these days that, you just need to look up on the Stanford or Oxford University youtube page and can study Sr or quantum mechanics freely. Layman whom interested in reliable source will find it eventually.i understand your concern and its can be reflected back to the speaker (who influenced by another ones, used your same example) but have you ever heard a complain of the taxpayer against the rubbersheet analogy? :)
As a different note I would like to express this in different comment. These days I noticed that, people much more interested in science and this is i think because the effective access to sources are easier and more convenient. The can do from home and enjoy spending time on look up things in general. They are more informed on the current status on the developments of different physics branches and that is a communication I think is necessary to bridge Laymans to professional physicists at the first place.
Where can new physics hide?
Wissenschaft auf Abwegen
New study finds no sign of entanglement with other...
String phenomenology of the somewhat different kin...
Dear Dr B: Why not string theory?
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Benefit Reception for Doctors Without Borders
The VII Photo Agency and Doctors Without Borders
Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) Present
DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF THE CONGO: FORGOTTEN WAR
A PHOTOGRAPHIC EXHIBITION
Stephen Cohen Gallery, March 16 – May 6, 2006
Benefit Reception to be held Thursday, April 6, 6 – 9 pm
(Los Angeles, CA) February 6, 2006 – Five world-renowned photographers from the VII Photo Agency – Ron Haviv, Gary Knight, Antonin Kratochvil, Joachim Ladefoged, and James Nachtwey – traveled to the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) from May through August of 2005 with the international humanitarian organization Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) in order to shed light on the suffering of the Congolese people as they struggle to survive a war that remains virtually invisible to the outside world. Their work is presented in Democratic Republic of the Congo: Forgotten War which arrives at the Stephen Cohen Gallery, located at 7358 Beverly Boulevard in Los Angeles on March 16, 2006. A benefit reception for Doctors Without Borders will be held on Thursday, April 6 from 6 to 9 pm. All VII photographers will be present. A brief talk on the Congo will be given by Ron Haviv and Kris Torgeson from Doctors Without Borders at 7pm. The exhibition will tour throughout the United States, Africa, Asia, Australia, and Europe.
More than a decade of war and the collapse of the public health system have resulted in widespread and acute misery for people throughout the DRC. Many Congolese face extreme deprivation and violence, with brutal militia attacks and sexual violence common. Severe malnutrition and epidemics of diseases like malaria, HIV/AIDS, and cholera take an even greater toll as few people have access to health facilities let alone treatment. The complex and diverse nature of the violence and neglect challenges any notion of simple, blanket solutions to address even the immediate causes of so much death and suffering.
"Today the world only seems to be able to focus on one or two events at a time. Over the past years, the DRC has never been one of them," said VII photographer Ron Haviv. "By becoming aware of the staggering human toll in the DRC, it was obvious for us at VII to try to help change that. We hope that through this work we can raise the awareness of what is happening and that all who see the work will want to help change an ever worsening situation."
During the past year, the northeastern region of Ituri has been an epicenter of violence, with multiple factions fighting for the control of the area's resources. Photographers Ron Haviv, Gary Knight, and James Nachtwey all documented the Bon Marché Hospital in Bunia city in Ituri, where MSF teams offer medical care for victims of violence in the region. Sexual violence is especially prevalent in Ituri – MSF treated more than 3,500 rape survivors since June 2003. A flare-up in fighting this past spring throughout Ituri prompted emergency medical interventions in four displacement camps in Tchomia, Kakwa, Tche, and Gina. VII photographer Haviv also traveled with MSF teams to two of these camps to photograph the intolerable situation for the more than 80,000 civilians who have sought safety in them.
Insecurity is also widespread in North Kivu, where photographer James Nachtwey accompanied MSF teams providing basic medical care, specialized care for malnourished children, and treatment for victims of sexual violence.
HIV/AIDS is also a key health emergency in DRC. VII's Antonin Kratochvil photographed in the town of Bukavu, South Kivu, where MSF is providing nearly 500 people living with HIV/AIDS with free antiretroviral (ARV) medicines. In a second HIV/AIDS project, in the capital Kinshasa, where VII photographer Joachim Ladefoged traveled, more than 1300 people living with HIV/AIDS receive free ARV treatment from MSF and MSF carries out community health work with commercial sex workers in the city.
"The grim reality of life in many areas of the DRC has become commonplace, a kind of normalization of the unacceptable," said Nicolas de Torrente, Executive Director of MSF in the United States. "There is so much need that it is a struggle to do anything other than respond to the most serious emergencies. What strikes me most about the plight of the Congolese people is how their unbearable situation is virtually invisible to the world beyond their village. These photographs go behind the headlines and offer glimpses of the strength and suffering of ordinary people – reminding us, and the world at large, that we must refuse to let the unacceptable become normal."
Copies of Democratic Republic of the Congo: Forgotten War, published by de.MO, will be available at the gallery and donations to Doctors Without Borders can be made throughout the duration of the exhibition.
To coincide with the photographic exhibition, the photojournalists of the VII Photo Agency will host a seminar this year from Friday, April 7 through Sunday, April 9 at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. This three-day seminar will feature practical breakout sessions covering topics like creative innovation, personal projects, assignments, book publishing and fine art. Alexandra Boulat, Lauren Greenfield, Ron Haviv, Antonin Kratochvil, Joachim Ladefoged, Christopher Morris, James Nachtwey, John Stanmeyer, and Gary Knight will present their latest work and participate in panel discussions, breakout sessions and portfolio reviews. Sponsors of the seminar include Canon, Lexar, Lowepro, Digital Railroads and Art Center.
Registration is required at a cost of $75 for students and $175 for professionals. There are also a limited number of portfolio reviews available for $375. To register online or for additional information, please see www.viiphoto.com/LAseminar.
About VII Photo Agency
VII Photo Agency derives its name from the number of founding photo-journalists who, in September 2001, formed this collectively owned agency. Designed from the outset to be an efficient, technologically enabled distribution hub for some of the world's finest photojournalism, VII has been responsible for creating and relaying to the world many of the images that define the turbulent opening years of the 21st century. Alexandra Boulat, Ron Haviv, Gary Knight, Antonin Kratochvil, Christopher Morris, James Nachtwey and John Stanmeyer were joined in 2002 by Lauren Greenfield and in 2004 by Joachim Ladefoged. Together they document conflict – environmental, social and political, both violent and non-violent – to produce an unflinching record of the injustices created and experienced by people caught up in the events they describe. For more information, go to www.viiphoto.com
About Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF)
Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) is an international independent medical humanitarian organization that delivers emergency aid to people affected by armed conflict, epidemics, natural and man-made disasters, and exclusion from health care in more than 70 countries. Today, MSF has more than 160 international volunteers and over 1800 national staff working in 30 projects in 6 provinces of the DRC in one of the organization's largest assistance program in the world today.
For more information please visit their website at www.viiphoto.com
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Home » Car cultures around the world: Monaco
Car cultures around the world: Monaco
December 22, 2015 by Bart Demandt Leave a Comment
In our series of car cultures around the world/international street scenes we move from the car culture in Morocco to that of Monaco, the wealthy principality on the other side of the Mediterranean, the contrast couldn’t be bigger. Whereas the streets of Morocco are filled with cheap and practical transportation, sometimes decades old, living a tough but grateful life as daily workhorses, the cars in Monaco serve a much different purpose. The densely populated city-state which is enclosed by France and the Mediterranean Sea covers only 2 square kilometers (0.78 sq. Mi) and is built on a hillside. That means it doesn’t really make sense for its inhabitants to drive supercars, hypercars and top-of-the-line sports versions of regular cars, but that’s exactly what they’re doing.
McLaren 650S Spider and Lamborghini Huracan taking a hairpin in Monaco
After a day or so in Monaco, you don’t even notice a “regular” Ferrari or Bentley anymore, as they’re so commonplace. In fact, Ferrari and Bentley each sell more cars than brands like Renault or Opel in the small principality. And Rolls Royce sells as many cars as Volvo does, and McLaren sells twice as many cars as Alfa Romeo. The top-3 of brands? Mercedes-Benz, Audi and Porsche. And don’t think those are the basic Mercedes’ or Audis: the Audi RS6 Avant is like the Volkswagen Golf Wagon of Monaco, you’ll spot at least one but often a handful every time you cross the city state from one end to the other. Small cars? Sure, there are plenty, but again mostly the top-of-the-line. I’ve spotted more Abarth 500 than Fiat 500, more Audi S1 than A1 and more Mercedes-AMG A45 than the regular Mercedes-Benz A-Class.
One of the many Abarth 500 parked behind a Porsche 911
If you want to spot the most exclusive and most expensive cars in Monaco, you’ll only need to go to Casino Square (Place du Casino), where the uber-wealthy are so kind to tip the valet guys enough to make sure their Bugatti Veyron, Ferrari LaFerrari or Rolls Royce Phantom gets a prime spot right in front of the entrance.
Ferraris, Rolls-Royces and Bentleys at the Monte Carlo Beach Resort
International Street Scenes Abarth, bentley, bugatti, car culture, ferrari, lamborghini, mclaren, Monaco, porsche, rolls royce, street scenes
About Bart Demandt
Bart is a 36-year old Dutchman who's always had a thing for cars, the automotive industry and statistics. He’s combined these passions by writing about them on CarSalesBase.com. His daily driver is an Alfa Romeo GT 3.2 V6 which he just can't seem to say goodbye to thanks to the mesmerizing exhaust note, despite approaching 300.000km which probably makes this the most experienced GT 3.2 in the world.
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Great Breakthroughs in Adult Stem Cell Research
Chloe: “You saved my life”
At a National Press Club lunch in Washington D.C. yesterday -- sponsored by the Bethesda Life Foundation which was founded by the president emeritus of the 16 million member Southern Baptist Convention Executive Committee, Dr. Morris Chapman -- Dr. Jeong-Chan Ra, a prominent scientist and president of RNL Bio, introduced his new book, The Grace of Stem Cells: A Story of Science and Faith.
This writer had the privilege of sitting next to a couple of Dr. Ra’s patients, two outstanding young people, a brother and sister, who Dr. Ra has helped with the use of adult stem cells. Their parents, both physicians in Long Beach, CA, found Dr. Ra through a doctor friend of theirs. The bright and articulate young woman is mentioned in Dr. Ra’s new book in Case Study #8, title “Chloe Can Hear Again.” At age 17, she had total deafness in left ear and hearing loss in right ear. After receiving conventional treatment (steroids), she received three intravenous injections of stem cells over 15 days and had hearing restored to 50% in her left ear and 90% in her right ear. At yesterday’s lunch, she seemed to have her full hearing restored.
Oprah and Michael Fox shocked by Dr. Oz's truth
Capitol Notebook
Michael Fox sat as a guest on Oprah's show in stunned silence! Oprah was pretty shocked also. What caused their astonishment was some truth-telling by Oprah's other guest, a popular physician named Dr. Mehemet Oz. Indeed, Dr. Oz, a regular guest on Oprah's show, is so popular with Oprah that she has called him "America's Doctor." Dr. Oz is a cardiovascular surgeon at Columbia University.
Earlier this month, Dr. Oz, appeared on the Oprah Show and explained to Oprah and her other guest, Michael Fox -- the premier promoter of human embryonic stem cell research because of his Parkinson's disease -- that human embryonic stem cells are not the solution to the cure for Fox's Parkinson's disease or other diseases. Indeed, he warned them -- and a lot of Americans who are so enamored with this immoral research -- that these human embryonic stem cells multiply at such a rapid pace, they cannot be controlled.
Injecting such cells into mice have caused life-ending cancerous tumors. Dr. Oz warned Michael Fox that that would also happen if such human embryonic stem cells were injected into him.
Billions of dollars, much of it provided by taxpayers, have been wasted on this highly controversial research already. Indeed, the state legislature of California, with the signature of the governor, appropriated a whopping $3 billion of tax dollars for useless human embryonic stem cell research.
Capitol Notebook's blog
Bipartisan bill puts patients first
Democrat Congressman Daniel Lipinski and Republican Congressman J. Randy Forbes have joined together in an increasingly partisan Washington D.C. to sponsor "The Patients First Act," H.R. 877. Their bill will prioritize stem cell research toward treating and curing patients. The Forbes/Lipinski bill promotes research and human clinical trials using stem cells that show the most potential of providing clinical benefit and are ethically obtained.
Congressman Forbes referred to a chart showing the difference in benefits from adult stem cells in human patients versus the so-called benefits in embryonic stem cells from peer-reviewed studies. There have been ZERO benefits from the politically-correct human embryonic stem cell destruction research. On the other hand, there have been cures and successful treatments of an astounding 73 diseases using adult stem cells.
Adult stem cells have benefited human patients with brain cancer, ovarian cancer, skin cancer, Non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma, Hodgkin's Lymphoma, Juvenile Myelomonocytic Leukemia, cancer of the lymph nodes, breast cancer, diabetes Type I (Juvenile), Crohn's Disease, rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis, chronic coronary artery disease, acute heart damage, Parkinson's Disease, spinal cord injury, stroke damage, sickle cell anemia, limb gangrene, jawbone replacement, skull bone repair, and many many more diseases.
Daniel Lipinski
Randy Forbes
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Home > Hints of charisma in CEO letter to shareholders have undue impact on stock analysts
Hints of charisma in CEO letter to shareholders have undue impact on stock analysts
Considerable evidence in recent years suggests that corporate America has come to attach great importance to charisma in CEOs. Now research presented on August 9 at the Academy of Management 2004 annual meeting in New Orleans suggests that stock analysts are equally sold on charismatic company chiefs -- so much so that they are all too receptive to hints of charisma in annual-report messages of new CEOs.
Such is the conclusion of Angelo Fanelli of HEC School of Management, Vilmos F. Misangyi of the University of Delaware, and Henry Tosi of the University of Florida.
In earlier studies, these same researchers had gathered evidence of CEO charisma through anonymous surveys of managers who worked for the chiefs in question. In this study, they seek evidence in something more remote from the source -- namely, the CEO letter to shareholders that is a staple of corporate annual reports.
Even at that remove, they find, evidence of CEO charisma proves enticing enough to have a significant effect on ratings issued by stock analysts.
"The letter to the shareholders is the most widely read section of the annual report," the authors write, "and presents several characteristics that make it suitable to study symbolic management: it is relatively free from legal restrictions about its form or content, communicates both facts and beliefs in a form that is directly approved by the CEO, reflects managerial attributions, locus of attention and framing strategies."
The study draws on the text of CEO letters to shareholders in the annual reports of 367 companies selected from among the largest corporations in 30 industries. So that CEO charisma would not be mixed up with company performance, the sample was restricted to new CEOs, whose message to the shareholders would represent the chief's first direct communication with that constituency.
To measure the amount of charisma in the letters, the professors assigned individual sentences in each letter to one of three themes -- 1) assessment of the past, 2) vision for the future, and 3) shareholders, employees, and organizational capabilities. Then for each sentence related to one or another of the themes, they made a count of particular words that conveyed the theme in strong, decisive, or emphatic ways and thereby conveyed an impression of charisma. In doing so, they were able to draw on thematic lists of words compiled in earlier linguistic research by other management scholars.
-- In sentences relating to the past, the words that project a charismatic image would be clearly negative or suggestive of crisis.
-- In sentences relating to vision for the future, the words would be moral, ideological, or emotional.
-- In sentences referring to employees, shareholders, and organizational potential, the words would convey outreach, approbation, optimism.
By this process, the professors obtained a measure of the frequency of charisma-projecting words for each of the 367 CEO messages to shareholders. They were then able to assay the relationship between this measure and the ratings that stock analysts assigned to the individual companies on a scale ranging from 1=strong buy to 5=sell. To get a true picture of that relationship, the professors controlled for an array of factors that affect such ratings, including prior firm performance, CEO reputation, and analysts' previous records of stock recommendations.
Other things being equal, the study concludes, the more charisma the CEO's letter projects, the more favorable a company's ratings from stock analysts are likely to be -- and the more uniformity there is likely to be in those ratings.
The professors find no evidence, though, that picking up on charisma makes for better stock-picking. Analysts turn out to be no more accurate in their assessment of companies with dynamic-sounding CEO letters than of companies with dull ones.
But what is that the analysts are responding to -- real charisma or simply the skills of company wordsmiths adept at making an impression on investors? Prof. Misangyi considers the latter alternative unlikely, since the letter is the CEO's first communication with shareholders and is likely to reflect the new chief's true vision. But he adds: "Whether the analysts are responding to real charisma or just a skillful simulation, the point is that the impression of charisma influences the way they rate the companies. The CEO charismatic image, as we call it, accounts for six percent of the variance in analyst ratings, and that's a sizable amount."
He continues: "Two years ago, my colleagues and I reported to the Academy of Management annual meeting findings to the effect that charismatic CEOs do little or nothing to enhance company performance that low-key CEOs don't do and yet make far more money. Our conclusion was that their high pay reflects the excessive valuation people in the corporate world assign to CEO charisma.
"The findings in this study suggest that stock analysts are buying the same bill of goods."
The Academy of Management, founded in 1936, is the largest organization in the world devoted to management research and teaching. It has about 15,000 members in 90 countries, including some 10,000 in the United States. The academy's 2004 annual meeting drew some 7,000 scholars and practitioners to New Orleans for more than 1,000 sessions on a host of issues relating to corporate organization, the workplace, technology development, and other management-related subjects.
Wilmington News-Journal. Charisma of top CEOs just hype. (Tuesday, September 07, 2004).
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What's It All About
Check out this amazing cover version of Paul Simon's "The Sound of Silence" arranged and played by Pat Metheny, the track is featured in the new album by the artist "What's It All About".
The guitar player has been active since the 70's and is acknowledge to be one of the most creative, experimental, productive (with more than forty albums) and bold musicians of our time.
If you are going to give it a listen, here's a piece of advice: Click on play, sit back and just relax, I promisse you won't regret.
Also don't forget to check out the full album for more amazing music.
Official Website: patmetheny.com
Being shot
That's it, being shot at. How does it feel like? What are the consequences?
Sometimes surfing the web you randomly run into something really interesting, something that you have never thought about in a significative way. This time a website came up, a spot to share experiences, and somebody found an interview of a guy reporting, by personal experience, how does it feel like being shot in the chest.
A not so confortable, really sad, yet very interesting (from a biological, sociological e psychological point of view) story that's worth a read.
Article: Being shot
Melancholia is another Lars von Trier's controversial piece. Some love it, others hate it, yet some things are undeniably good like the acting of Charlotte Gainsbourg and Kirsten Dunst in a complex sisterhood relationship, the symbolic criticism developed in the plot, some amazing takes with a beautiful photography, and the Wagnerian soundtrack. All of this items create a masterpiece mood, that feeling you have when you know you are watching to something really special, even though you are not quite sure why.
Everything written about this movie, does not live up to the intense experience of watching it, if it's going to be bad or good, there's no way to know, but one thing is certain, the "melancholia shower" is something really deep and strong.
Official website: melancholiathemovie.com
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Home > E-maristes > Marcellin Champagnat > Writings about Marcellin > Br Sean Sammon
Writings of Marcelin
Writings to Marcellin
Founding the Brothers
Beatification - 1955
Canonization - 1999
Writings about Marcellin
In art
Marist places
The Scandal of the Incarnation and our Marist Challenge
Br Sean Sammon - 02/01/2017
This text is from Br Sean Sammon, former Superior General of the Marist Brothers, and was delivered at Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, NY. 2nd January 2017.
With the exception of the crucifixion, no scene in Christian tradition is more familiar to most of us than the image of the infant Jesus lying in a manger in Bethlehem. From the great artists of the Renaissance to the commercial Christmas card makers of today, this picture has been rendered again and again complete with a familiar casts of characters: visiting shepherds, wise men from afar, barnyard animals, and, of course, at the centre of it all, a young and newly married Jewish couple and their infant son. And, among the many characters who make up any traditional Christmas crèche, Mary the mother of Jesus has always been easy to spot. With the wonder and trauma of childbirth diligently scrubbed away, she appears as a picture of springtime freshness— hands folded, head bowed, eyes downcast demurely. How very unlike the Mediterranean peasant woman who brought forth a son in a stable whose destiny was to be the Saviour of his people. So, we must ask ourselves this question:
What would possess us to transform the scandal of the Incarnation into symbols and scenes at once banal and prosaic? To mute its message and make it nothing more than a comforting tale of babes and barns, cribs and crèches, shepherds and angels that sing? We can find the answer to our question in Mary, for we have similarly domesticated her, rendering her safe and risk free, unable to upset us and our understanding about the demands of faith. Now, bear with me for a moment as I fast forward almost eighteen hundred years to a rather obscure village in central France by the name of LaValla. The revolution that swept that country near the end of the last century is now but 27 years and a few months old. It is January 2nd, 1817 and a young priest—the same age as the revolution—is about to set in motion a movement aimed at changing his world and ours. This twenty something young man was possessed by the same Holy Spirit that had captured the heart and seized the imagination of the mother of Jesus.
At the moment, he probably didn’t realize that fact and wasn’t completely sure where he was headed but, then again, neither were the two young men who had joined him in this apparent foolhardy adventure. A few weeks before he had bought an old house and did what he could to make it a home: building a table, beds, gathering other furnishings, simply cleaning up the place. But aren’t so many beginnings of greatness similar in form and style: youth, a willingness to be disturbed and to risk all, an apparent and absolute human need staring you in the face, as well as a faith that believes in the unconditional love of God. And what did Marcellin Champagnat have in mind on that January day in 1817? What went through his head that first evening as he made his way back to the presbytery from the small cottage in LaValla? What was his aim? Something quite simple: to help all young people—but particularly those at the margins, those who had very little in terms of material goods—to help them fall in love with God. It takes your breath away.
Similar to our Church’s approach to Mary, we Marists have spent almost two centuries scrubbing up Marcellin Champagnat, trying to domesticate him. But never forget that this founder of ours set in place the first stones of this Marist movement but seven months after being ordained a priest. He was more in touch with passion than burdened by prudence; he did not form a committee to study the idea nor worry whether he had funds sufficient to bring this dream of his to life. No, he simply did it. So, where does all of this leave you and me today? We who have resources that he could not have dreamed of; we, who were we to open our eyes, might see the needs he would see today; we who keep talking about aging when a new generation of young people are longing for community, searching for mentors, hungry for the love of God. We must ask ourselves: are we, like him, willing to disrupt our lives, to be disturbed, to change, regardless of age, and to set out on an adventure today that he would make his own. Let’s not romanticize the past. Make no mistake about it: there has never been a golden age in the history of our Institute.
From day one, every period has had its crises. Marcellin and our early brothers contended with Cardinal Fesch, Vicar General Bochard, Father Corveille, as well as hateful gossip. In 1903, the laws of secularization in France led to our suppression as an Institute in that country; well over 100 brothers as well as lay Marists were murdered in Spain during that country’s Civil War; six of our French Marist brothers serving in Hungary during World War II were brutally tortured by the Gestapo because they gave refuge to one hundred Jewish children and fifty of their parents; following the revolution in China in 1950 many of our brothers spent ten and twenty years in prison at hard labour because of their faith; ten years later more than 275 of our brothers in Cuba had their institutions and belongings confiscated and were told to leave their country within 72 hours; our brothers in South Africa integrated their schools in Joburg, Durban, Port Elizabeth and elsewhere in defiance of government apartheid policies, 204 of our brothers who have lost their lives to violence in Oceania, Asia, Africa, Europe, and Latin America are considered martyrs for the faith. In our own day, we witness the courage of the blue Marists in Aleppo, Syria.
These may not be our crises but they are crises nonetheless. So, rather than wringing our hands in today’s US Province and fretting about increasing age and diminishing numbers, let’s instead give thanks for the great work that has been carried out by so many brothers and lay Marists over the history of our Institute in this country. Each of them realized that time is the only real currency that we have and they squandered it on young people. At the same time, however, let’s imagine for a moment that twenty-seven-year-old Marcellin Champagnat arrived tonight at New York’s JFK airport, or Chicago’s O’Hare, or Miami International, or Boston’s Logan. {we can each make the appropriate geographical/cultural adjustments.
Where would he go; what contemporary absolute human needs would he find; would he be able to identify the congregation that he founded two centuries ago? Of this much we can be sure: Marcellin Champagnat was a man in love with God; his heart had been schooled by the gospel and he wanted to share this gift with every young man and woman he met. Yes, he wanted us to be the Church’s experts on helping young people to fall in love with God.
And so we must ask ourselves: is every institution that bears our name or is administered by lay Marists or brothers here in the United States, first and foremost, a centre of evangelization, a place where faith is witnessed to and promoted? We must ask also: in our efforts are we giving priority to children and young people living today in this country at the margins of our society? Our early brothers in the US joined with their lay colleagues and established a series of elementary schools throughout New England to preserve the faith among an immigrant population. Once these places were up and running, they often moved on to meet new needs in new places. More often than not, they faced human and financial challenges in their efforts and quite honestly there were times when concern grew that there would be enough money to meet payroll. But they persisted. So, let’s ask: who are today’s throwaway kids and pledge to make a commitment to mark this milestone of 200 years by making sure we have a home among them: kids from broken families, those who are victims of racial injustice, young people who are members of the LGBT community, those whose lives are ravaged by drugs as well as those who cannot find a place in our Church or most existing schools.
Anniversaries are not a time for looking back but rather a moment for planning ahead. They provide us with an opportunity also to rediscover the dream that was there at the outset. And we are called to carry out that task today as brothers together with lay Marists. And so, let this Lady Chapel in Saint Patrick’s Cathedral this January 2nd, 2017 be our Notre Dame de Fourviere. Let it be like that small and simple space that existed in Lyons long before today’s stunning basilica was constructed. And let us make a pledge here similar to the one that those seminarians and newly ordained young priests—who full of dreams and of hope and who had been touched profoundly by this simple woman of faith named Miriam of Nazareth—were willing to pledge, dedicating their lives and becoming her presence in our world, giving witness to the Marist virtues of mercy and compassion. Let us be her heart and her hands among the young in this our 21st century and let us set out to build the Marian Church—that Church with the face of a mother—that they dreamed of for their time and place.
Early on Marcellin Champagnat discovered fire; he realized, too, that fire has always attracted the young. Let us pray that the Spirit of God lights in each of us the fire of renewal, giving us the courage to be as bold, as daring and as in love with God as was this simple country priest and son of Mary. May we, like him, be fire upon this earth making Jesus known and loved among poor children and young people. And so may a third century of Marist life and mission take root and flourish in these United States…and Australia.
Br Sean Sammon FMS - 2 January 2017
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Type of record Group of monuments
Monument Code CHURCH0005
Monument Name Holy Monastery of St. Kyriaki in Alistrati
Related Institution Holy Diocese of Zichni and Nevrokopi
Location Name Alistrati in Serres
Short Description The monastery of St. Kyriaki is located two kilometers outside of Alistrati. The existence of the monastery at that location is associated with the manifestation of the Saint in the dream of a gardener named Kyriazis in 1855. The gardener was not convinced of the truth of his vision and the Saint appeared twice and pointed to dig into the area of the monastery to reveal her icon. The gardener was convinced and after informing the bishop – whose seat was in the adjacent Alistrati – went together with him to dig and uncover the icon of the Saint and other relics.
The church of the Monastery is a building of the second half of the twentieth century, built next to the earlier katholikon – as it is asserted – which was destroyed by raids or other disasters in the period from 1912 to 1940. The monastery existed since at least 1860. The above chronological element, only related to the date of monastery’s foundation, is supported by the inscription built at the main entrance of the Abbey. This date is in agreement with the narrative of the revelation of the St. Kyriaki.
From the initial phase (?) of the 19th century only the icons of the oldest iconostasis survived, stylistically similar to those of the Church of St. Athanasius in Alistrati.
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Industrial Logging, Forest Depletion, and Climate Change—The Ghost in the Machine
“Hole in Headwaters” on Humboldt Redwood Company Property, August 2014, as part of a Sanctuary Forest Forestry Practices Hike. Forest thinning in previously-managed second-growth redwood stand.
There are nearly 33 million acres of forested land in the State of California. Since the early days of European-American settlement, the wholesale destruction of our native, “old-growth” forests, and the overall depletion of the productive capacity of our forests, both public and private, have been the subject of debate and concern. Many may not realize it, but the California State Legislature actually created the very first Board of Forestry all the way back in 1885, recognizing even then that the threat that large-scale timber harvest and resource extraction from, and conversion of, California’s forestlands were a matter of statewide urgency and concern. This first Board of Forestry was quickly dissolved in 1887 as a consequence of push-back on the Legislature applied by the burgeoning and politically-powerful timber industry.
In 1945, the California State Legislature again acted to create a State Board of Forestry and a position for a “State Forester,” once again recognizing the threat posed by rapid depletion of the state’s forestland resources, and their conversion. Unfortunately, the 1945 Forest Practice Act was weak, and the Board of Forestry was entirely comprised of the industry itself, which was left to self-regulate until the creation of the present-day Z’berg-Negedly Forest Practice Act of 1973.
Old-growth redwood forest at Tall Trees Grove, Redwood National Park.
By the time the modern Forest Practice Act was created, California’s forestland resources had already been substantially depleted, and some of the most productive land for forests had already been converted to agricultural and residential uses. At the time Redwood National Park was created in 1968, several years prior to the advent of the modern Forest Practice Act, it was estimated that only ten percent of the original 2 million acres of native “old-growth” redwood forest remained. By 1999 and the creation of the BLM-administered Headwaters Forest Reserve, the estimate ranged between three and five percent.
It was not only lack of regulation, however that has led to our forestland depletion crisis in California; land use laws, most notably taxation structures, also served to incentivize over-harvesting. Particularly, the so-called “Ad valorum” tax, which required assessment and taxation of the value of standing timber volume on private ownerships annually based upon percent of standing inventory value, was a major driver. The tax on standing timber volume was assessed in addition to property taxes, thus serving to encourage heavy-handed forest management and the depletion of forestland productive capacity in the long-term for the sake of avoiding annual standing volume taxes in the short-term.
Clearcut logging units in redwood forest land on Green Diamond Resource Company Property.
Expressing the loss and depletion of California’s forestlands and their productive capacity in terms of acres of remaining native or “old-growth” forest in comparison to previously-managed and perpetually-managed forest stands can be grossly misleading because it vastly understates the magnitude of what we have lost to timber harvest and conversion. Timber harvest in California focuses almost exclusively on the production and value of wood products derived from the trees in our forests. However, the value, and potential growth capacity of our trees, as well as all other living, green, material in our forests that isn’t comprised of trees, has been grossly underestimated. There’s no better evidence for this short-sighted and narrow view of the productivity of our forests than we have today as we look at the overall productive ability of our forests to be carbon sinks in an age of climate change.
Green, living, breathing plants, including our trees, utilize air, soil nutrients, water, and sunlight to perpetuate photosynthesis, and the conversion of base elements into simple sugars to create more living, breathing, green woody material commonly referred to as biomass. Forestland productivity is a function of the basic elemental building blocks of life on earth: carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen. These basic elements utilize trees and other living, breathing things in our forests to operate and perpetuate essential planetary ecological cycles, such as our air, water, and soil nutrient cycles. Our forestlands produce all of these, and the production and perpetuation of these are essential components to healthy, growing, productive forests.
The 1973 Forest Practice Act establishes a duel mandate for timber production on private forestlands in the state. This mandate calls for ensuring, “maximum sustained production of high-quality timber products, while giving consideration,” to a suite of overall environmental and social public trust forest-related values, including fish, air, water, wildlife, range, forage, carbon dioxide sequestration, and regional employment and economic viability. In our now 40 years of history advocating for science-based protection and restoration of forests in the State of California, EPIC has long-argued that maintaining a sustainable productive capacity of private forestlands is a matter of state-wide public trust concern.
Currently, as California strives to take the lead on combating the causes and effects of global and regional climate change, it is more clear than ever that the productive capacity of our forestlands has been severely depleted, and that changes in law and incentives affecting forestry practices, particularly on industrial lands, may be our last hope for continued human civilization and survival.
Let’s remember, forests are the lungs of our planet, cycling in and storing or “sequestering” large amounts of carbon dioxide, one of the primary elements in a gaseous form contributing to our atmospheric greenhouse effect. Carbon dioxide is unnaturally emitted into our atmosphere in two primary ways: fossil fuel combustion, and deforestation. Research suggests that deforestation and forestland depletion contribute as much as 20 percent of the total excess carbon dioxide emitted into earth’s atmosphere as a result of anthropogenic extractive activities. A 1994 study conducted on industrial redwood timberlands in Mendocino County concluded that the total amount of living woody material, or biomass, in the forest at that time represented only ten to fifteen percent of the total biomass that existed pre-European-American settlement. In 2015, a study of the overall above and below ground carbon dioxide storage budget in California’s forests showed a continuing decline, while 2016 state-wide forest inventory assessment shows continued overall declines in total forest biomass and productivity. Declining forestland productivity and a commensurate decline in the amount of carbon dioxide stored in our forests raises many questions, about our forest management, and about our prognosis for long-term survival.
In late 2016, the California State Legislature enacted Senate Bill 32, a follow-up law that extends the state’s greenhouse gas (GHG) reduction and carbon storage goals, and calls for attainment of a 20 percent reduction in GHG emissions below 1990 levels by the year 2030. The state’s climate change plan is predicated upon the presumption of utilizing California’s forestlands as our primary means of sequestering carbon dioxide captured from our atmosphere in living biomass, such as trees and other woody forest plants, while at the same time reducing GHG emissions associated with various state industry sectors, including transportation, energy production, and manufacturing of non-renewable fossil fuels like oil and gas.
However, the depleted condition of California’s forestlands raises numerous questions about the wisdom and likelihood of success of such a strategy. The present day tree mortality crisis occurring in the southern Sierra Nevada serves as one example of how past forest management and forestland depletion have led to catastrophic consequences that may serve to foil and undo California’s bold and aggressive GHG reduction and carbon dioxide storage objectives.
Historically, the forests of the Sierra Nevada were of a mixed conifer composition, dictated by soil, slope, aspect, and elevation, as well as water availability, and were largely fire-adapted. However, 150 years of fire exclusion, aggressive logging of native forests and conversion of these to homogenous over-stocked pine plantations, combined with extensive drought, and expansion of the range and influence of the pine-bark beetle, have served to generate an unprecedented tree-mortality event that some claim has affected over 100 million trees. The debate about how to respond to this tree-mortality crisis exemplifies the “Pandora’s Box” effect of past, aggressive logging of the native “old growth” forests and replacement of these with young, overstocked, under-performing, homogenous pine tree plantations, which represents a much greater hazard for large-scale, high intensity wildfire than did the native, fire-adapted forests. Instead of having a mix of large, well-spaced, fire-adapted tree species with higher branches and crowns, the homogenous, even-aged and over-crowded pine plantations of the Sierra Nevada are a tinder box, and a potentially significant source of carbon dioxide emissions, either as a result of large-scale high-intensity fire, or from mass die-offs, and decomposition.
The one-two punch of logging native “old growth” forests, resulting in the loss of both the living, breathing woody biomass and the associated carbon dioxide that was once stored, and the replacement of these with industrial tree plantations largely harvested on short even aged rotations, deprives California of critical forestland productivity, and has turned our forests into a net source of carbon dioxide emissions instead of a carbon sink.
The solution seems simple; extend forest harvest rotations, increase forest diversity and move industrial logging away from even-aged to multi-aged management to increase total biomass and carbon storage in trees and other herbaceous woody forest plants. Unfortunately, contemporary Forest Practice Rules fail to constrain harvest on industrial ownerships in any meaningful way, and as we know, the Department of Forestry is asleep at the wheel. If California can’t change the “business as usual” mentality of our forest products industry, there’s little hope that the state’s ambitious plans to combat the causes and effects of climate change will ever succeed. EPIC is dedicated to ensuring that the forests of North West California are protected, enhanced, and restored, and are managed for maximizing benefits to combating the causes and effects of global and regional climate change.
Author adminPosted on March 28, 2017 Categories Environmental Impacts, Logging Impacting watershed, Main Article Archive
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Our Customers.
C.S. Rail is committed to achieving the highest standards in running a Heritage Railway as a Charity Incorporated Organisation, where customers safety, satisfaction and experience are the focus of our operations.
Our Standards.
C.S. Rail will be run as an organisation where we aim to set the benchmark for the training standards that we provide for our support staff, volunteers, and assistants, and that the training meets or exceeds the requirements of legislation and advice given by the O.R.R. and the H.R.A. in the operation and construction of a railway, and that the railway will be operated safely and professionally for the benefit of our customers, and the enjoyment of our staff.
Our Attitude.
C.S. Rail will ensure that our volunteers, support staff, and assistants are professional, helpful, and polite when representing the company.
Our Future.
C.S. Rail is committed to ensuring that growth is maintained by the company through reinvestment of profits, and the continued exploration of funding from grant awarding organisations into planned development, and that a proportion of the benefits generated may be used in supporting other appropriate organisations.
Our Finances.
C.S. Rail will operate and develop the Middy Branch line, using authorised funds from specific accounts and capital, ensuring that appropriate reserves are held for unforeseen expenditure.
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Celso Borges
BORN PLACE Costa Rica
Celso Borges Bio
EDIT/Suggest of Celso Borges
Who is Celso Borges
Borges is the professional football player from Costa Rica currently playing for Deportivo La Coruña (on loan from AIK) as a central midfielder. His paternal name is Borges and the maternal family name is Mora.
Borges was born in the capital city of Costa Rica named San José. He joined Sistema Educativo Saint Clare Highschool, where he took part in the school's team and he was taught about soccer by Costa Rican football legend Don Juan Varela .
Borges made a debut in football at an early age of 18 and he won five national championships with Saprissa at the same age. On 1 April 2012, he made his first match for AIK.
His personal life is as successful as his professional life. But nothing has been heard about his marital relationship with anyone till now. So, there is no information regarding his children and divorce.
He is honored with the various awards. they are listed as : Primera División de Costa Rica (5): 2005–06, 2006–07, 2007 Apertura, 2008 Clausura.
No rumors and controversy has been heard about the Costa Rican soccer player Celso Borges till now.
Height of Celso Borges
1.85 Meter
6 Feet 1 Inch height inCosta Rica
6 Feet 1 Inch height ofPlayer
6 Feet 1 Inch height ofMale
People Born On 1988 People Born On January 27 More on Player
Loukas Vyntra
Loukas Vyntra is a Greek professional football player who mainly plays as a central defender and also as right back for for Spanish club Levante UD and the Greek national team.
Loukas Vyntra Biography
Emmanuel Agyemang-Badu
Emmanuel Agyemang-Badu known better to the world as footballer Badu plays as a midfielder for both the Ghanaian National team as well as the Serie A club Udinese.
Emmanuel Agyemang-Badu Biography
Popular,enthusiastic and expert basketball player from America.He is associated with the team New York Knicks of the National Basketball Association.
Brandon Jennings Biography
30 year old professional basket player from America. She plays as a forwarder in the Los Angeles Sparks of the WNBA and also UMMC Ekaterinburg of Russia.
Candace Parker Biography
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The story of Japanese Americans in the military during World War II is complex and in many ways ironic. It is a story of mistrust by the very country for which these soldiers placed themselves in harms' way. Many were drafted directly out of the camps and fought for democracy abroad while their parents and families were incarcerated by their own government.
Military service (530)
Related articles from the Densho Encyclopedia :
298th/299th Infantry, Charles H. Bonesteel, Buddhahead, Fighting for Tomorrow: Japanese Americans in America's Wars (exhibition), Frank "Foo" Fujita, GI Bill, Hawaii Territorial Guard, Hood River incident, Japanese American World War II military service memorials, Japanese Americans in military during World War II, Samuel Wilder King, Kotonk, Ben Kuroki, Spark Matsunaga, None, Rescue of the Lost Battalion, Revolution of 1954, Shigeo Yoshida
Nisei soldiers (ddr-densho-5-32)
Soldiers (ddr-densho-5-3)
Young Nisei man (ddr-densho-5-24)
Two men in a rowboat (ddr-densho-5-2)
Memorial service, reunion of Nisei veterans (ddr-densho-8-3)
Nisei veterans reunion (ddr-densho-8-5)
Soldier (ddr-densho-258-91)
U.S. Army general at memorial service for Nisei veterans (ddr-densho-14-1)
Disabled German plane on the Autobahn (ddr-densho-22-38)
Nisei serviceman (ddr-densho-34-83)
Honor Roll billboard (ddr-densho-37-736)
Citation for the commendation ribbon with metal [sic] pendant (ddr-densho-271-2)
Bring on Japs, Says Nipponese In U.S. Army (June 13, 1943) (ddr-densho-56-932)
VOXPAPA Vol. I No. 8 (ddr-densho-280-120)
The Kinkatis News Vol. I No. 6 (ddr-densho-280-117)
Rifleman's qualification certificate (ddr-densho-72-43)
Members of medical supply branch (ddr-densho-91-14)
Soldiers on a tank (ddr-densho-92-22)
The Newell Star, Vol. I, No. 40 (November 30, 1944) (ddr-densho-284-42)
The Newell Star, Vol. II, No. 13 (March 30, 1945) (ddr-densho-284-62)
The Newell Star, Vol. II, No. 31 (August 3, 1945) (ddr-densho-284-79)
The Northwest Times Vol. 1 No. 72 (October 3, 1947) (ddr-densho-229-59)
The Northwest Times Vol. 1 No. 38 (June 3, 1947) (ddr-densho-229-26)
The Northwest Times Vol. 3 No. 22 (March 16, 1949) (ddr-densho-229-189)
img Nisei soldiers (ddr-densho-5-32)
http://ddr.densho.org/ddr-densho-5-32/
img Soldiers (ddr-densho-5-3)
http://ddr.densho.org/ddr-densho-5-3/
img Young Nisei man (ddr-densho-5-24)
img Two men in a rowboat (ddr-densho-5-2)
img Memorial service, reunion of Nisei veterans (ddr-densho-8-3)
Grandchildren of Nisei veterans of World War II stand at this memorial service, which took place at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific.
img Nisei veterans reunion (ddr-densho-8-5)
This Nisei veteran reunion took place over Independence Day weekend. Shown here is keynote speaker, Four Star General Eric Shinseki.
img Soldier (ddr-densho-258-91)
Hideo Kato, in uniform, standing in front of a barracks. Caption above: "Hidio [sic]."
img U.S. Army general at memorial service for Nisei veterans (ddr-densho-14-1)
General David Bramlett, Commanding General, U.S. Army Forces Command, at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific. The service was part of a reunion of Nisei veterans. (Nisei veterans national convention program.)
http://ddr.densho.org/ddr-densho-14-1/
img Disabled German plane on the Autobahn (ddr-densho-22-38)
Caption in album: "Between Munich - Augsburg the highway used as runways many German planes could be seen on the side most disabled."
http://ddr.densho.org/ddr-densho-22-38/
img Nisei serviceman (ddr-densho-34-83)
Noboru Oyama.
img Honor Roll billboard (ddr-densho-37-736)
doc Citation for the commendation ribbon with metal [sic] pendant (ddr-densho-271-2)
Notification of a U.S. army commendation for Kiwamu Tshuchida's distinguished service in Japan from May, 1952 to October, 1953.
http://ddr.densho.org/ddr-densho-271-2/
doc Bring on Japs, Says Nipponese In U.S. Army (June 13, 1943) (ddr-densho-56-932)
The Seattle Daily Times, June 13, 1943, p. 14
doc VOXPAPA Vol. I No. 8 (ddr-densho-280-120)
Selected article titles: "World News" (p. 1), "Daily Log" (p. 1), "Sports" (p. 2), "Today's Movie" (p. 2), "The Crow's Nest" (p. 2).
doc The Kinkatis News Vol. I No. 6 (ddr-densho-280-117)
Selected article titles: "Armistice Day" (p. 1), "Unity of Command" (p. 1), "Views of the News" (p. 2), "Sports Round Up" (p. 3).
doc Rifleman's qualification certificate (ddr-densho-72-43)
This certificate is from page of scrapbook "Scrapbook: 1946"
img Members of medical supply branch (ddr-densho-91-14)
Art Shibayama is fourth from left.
img Soldiers on a tank (ddr-densho-92-22)
doc The Newell Star, Vol. I, No. 40 (November 30, 1944) (ddr-densho-284-42)
Selected article titles: "Comply with Smoking Ban at All Indoor Gatherings" (p. 1), "263 Casualties Listed from 9 Centers-WRA" (p. 2), and "Issei Volunteers to Be Accepted by U.S. Army" (p. 2).
doc The Newell Star, Vol. II, No. 13 (March 30, 1945) (ddr-densho-284-62)
Selected article titles: "Spain Quits as Protecting Power: Vice Consul of Spain Leaves Center After Receiving Order" (p. 1), "Nisei Inducted into U.S. Army Now Total 17,600" (p. 1), "9 Sentenced on Charges of Violating Regulations" (pp. 1-2), and "Procedure Given for Those Planning Return to Hawaii" (p. 3).
doc The Newell Star, Vol. II, No. 31 (August 3, 1945) (ddr-densho-284-79)
Selected article titles: "Japan Now Represented in U.S. by Swiss Govt." (pp. 1, 3), "Army Alone Determines Who Can Return--Pratt" (pp. 1-2), "Demonstration Given by Center Fire Dept." (p. 2), and "Safety Council Gives Warning" (p. 4).
doc The Northwest Times Vol. 1 No. 72 (October 3, 1947) (ddr-densho-229-59)
"Local 7 Rejects Ousted Officials" (p. 1), Postscript to World War II: Nation's War Dead to Return Oct. 10" (p. 1), "Court Returns Greenhouses to Japanese" (p. 1).
doc The Northwest Times Vol. 1 No. 38 (June 3, 1947) (ddr-densho-229-26)
"Lest We Forget : The GI's Who Didn't Come Back " (p. 1), "Hears Pleas for Claims Board Bill" (p. 1),"MISLS to Send Teams East" (p. 4).
doc The Northwest Times Vol. 3 No. 22 (March 16, 1949) (ddr-densho-229-189)
"ADC Releases More Queries, Replies in Regard to Your Evacuation Claims Measure" (p. 1), "Amendment Seeks to Rid Vote Bias" (p. 1), "Chicago, Washington Hold Final Rites for Two More Nisei Combat War Heroes" (p. 1).
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About Cameroon
Main Committees
Treaties and Conventions
Special Files
Special Files TV
Activities of the Permanent Mission
Activities of the Permanent Representative
Permanent Rep statements
Sea Bed Authority
Sea Bed Authority Presentation
The International Seabed Authority is an autonomous international organization established under the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea and the 1994 Agreement relating to the Implementation of Part XI of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. The Authority is the organization through which States Parties to the Convention shall, in accordance with the regime for the seabed and ocean floor and subsoil thereof beyond the limits of national jurisdiction (the Area) established in Part XI and the Agreement, organize and control activities in the Area, particularly with a view to administering the resources of the Area.
The Authority, which has its headquarters in Kingston, Jamaica, came into existence on 16 November 1994, upon the entry into force of the 1982 Convention. The Authority became fully operational as an autonomous international organization in June 1996, when it took over the premises and facilities in Kingston, Jamaica previously used by the United Nations Kingston Office for the Law of the Sea. Meetings of the Authority are held at the Jamaica Conference Centre in downtown Kingston.
The International Seabed Authority web site contains detailed information on the organs of the Authority, including the Assembly, Council, Legal and Technical Commission, Finance Committee and the Secretariat. The site also includes a full list of documents issued by the Authority at each of its sessions, and the full text of selected documents. Press releases are available for the latest session and links are provided to some of the most important law of the sea documents. The web site is updated on a regular basis and it is the intention of the Authority eventually to provide access to non-confidential information relating to deep seabed exploration through these web pages.
Public Holidays observed by the Secretariat in 2014 are:
1 January New Years Day
5 March Ash Wednesday
18 April Good Friday
21 April Easter Monday
23 May Labour Day
1 August Emancipation Day
6 August Independence Day
20 October National Heroes Day
25 December Christmas Day
26 December Boxing Day
JAMAICA HEADQUARTERS
International Seabed Authority
14-20 Port Royal Street
Jamaica, W.I.
Office of the Permanent Observer for the International Seabed Authority to the United Nations
One United Nations Plaza
Presidency of the Republic
Ministry of External Relations
IZF
Invest in Cameroon
Cameroun tribune
C R T V
UNDP Cameroon
UN sub regional center for human rights and democracy
Permanent Rep Speeches
(c) 2014 Permanent Mission of Cameroon to the United Nations
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