Julie Mehretu, The Mural, 2010, Goldman Sachs, New York.

“Great nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts—the book of their deeds, the book of their words, and the book of their art. Not one of these books can be understood unless we read the two others; but of the three, the only quite trustworthy one is the last.”

— John Ruskin, St. Mark’s rest; the history of Venice (1877).

James McElroy leafs through “the book of their art” of today’s community of fashion elite and shudders.

In 2010, Goldman Sachs paid $5 million for a custom-made Julie Meheretu mural for their New York headquarters. Expectations are low for corporate lobby art, yet Meheretu’s giant painting is remarkably ugly—so ugly that it helps us sift through a decade of Goldman criticisms and get to the heart of what is wrong with the elites of our country.

Julie Mehretu’s “The Mural” is an abstract series of layered collages the size of a tennis court. Some layers are colorful swirls, others are quick black dash marks. At first glance one is struck by the chaos of the various shapes and colors. No pattern or structure reveals itself. Yet a longer look reveals a sublayer depicting architectural drawings of famous financial facades, including the New York Stock Exchange, The New Orleans Cotton Exchange, and even a market gate from the ancient Greek city of Miletus.

What are we to make of this? Meheretu herself confirms our suspicion that there is no overarching structure to the piece. “From the way the whole painting was structured from the beginning there was no part that was completely determined ever. It was always like the beginning lines and the next shapes. So it was always this additive process,” she said in an Art 21 episode. …

Scottish philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre gave a lecture to Notre Dame’s Center of Ethics and Culture in 2000 about the compartmentalization of our ethical lives. He argued that in modern Western culture these different areas are governed by different ethical norms and standards. The example he gives is how a waiter at a restaurant acts differently in the kitchen than in front of the customer. In the kitchen it is normal to yell, curse, and touch the food with his bare hands; none of this would be appropriate in front of the customer. And when the waiter goes home, his personal life is dictated by a further third set of norms. Or consider how the ethics of lying are treated differently during a job interview versus at home or at a law office. Like the painting in the Goldman Sachs lobby, our ethical lives seem to be made of different layers that don’t connect. Our culture no longer shares a single ethical narrative, and so our choices are not weighed against a standard that’s consistent. Rather, people ask that their choices be accepted simply because they were made. When the bankers over-leveraged prior to 2008, they made a series of compartmentalized choices without considering the larger societal implications. They and the art in their lobby are the same.

I do not think the bankers at Goldman spend each morning scrutinizing their lobbies for larger ethical implications. Nihilistic art does not create nihilistic bankers. Yet both the elites of art and the elites of finance come out of the same culture. Both are indicative of where we are as a society. The Occupy Wall Street crowd may call Goldman a vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, but they never apply the same harsh rhetoric to our cultural institutions. A decade after the recession, our contemporary high art is more nihilistic than ever. This informs all areas of our culture. When powerful institutions are discussed we often critique in terms of isms: capitalism, liberalism, managerialism. We forget to mention that our institutions are made up of individuals who share the same culture that we all do. IRS auditors listen to Katy Perry. Federal judges watch comic book movies. The spies at the CIA read Zadie Smith novels. Our morality is informed in part by the art, both high and popular, that surrounds us.

RTWT

Grafton, New Hampshire libertarians had serious bear problems and may have dealt with them privately, Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling suspects.

Tracey Colburn lived in a little yellow house in the middle of the woods. She was used to seeing bears in her yard, up in her trees, and raiding her compost pile, where they chucked aside cabbage in what she could only interpret as disgust. Colburn was in her forties, with long brown hair and a youthful face. She’d had a tough go of it; a breast-cancer diagnosis cut her college career short, and a long string of clerical and municipal jobs were unfulfilling. In 2012, she was in and out of work, but she had enough savings to care for her dog, Kai, a Husky-Labrador mix she’d rescued from a shelter. Kai had developed allergies to wheat and corn, two of the main ingredients in cheap dog food, so she was trying not to give him the stuff.

One muggy weekend, the kind where you leave the windows open to welcome even the slightest breeze, Colburn sliced up a cold pot roast and fed it to Kai. Then she let him out to pee. She was startled to see that her small porch, eight by ten feet, was “just full of bear.” Two of the animals, young ones, were down on all fours sniffing the deck. A bigger, older bear stood right in front of Colburn. Kai rocketed at it, and Colburn screamed. The bear lunged at the sound. “They move like lightning,” she told me.

The bear raked Colburn’s face and torso with its left paw. Its claws dug into one forearm, thrown up in self-defense, and then the other. Colburn, who’d fallen onto her back, tried to push herself inside but realized she’d accidentally closed the door when her head thumped glass. “She was going to frickin’ kill me, I just knew it, because her face was right here,” Tracey said, holding her hand about eight inches in front of her nose. “I was looking right into her eyes.”

Kai must have bitten the bear’s rear legs then, because it jerked away from Colburn. The two animals started snarling and fighting in the yard. Colburn regained her feet and scrambled inside the house, shaking from adrenaline. She looked at her right hand. It didn’t hurt, but it made her stomach turn. The bear had unwrapped the skin from the back of her hand like it was a Christmas present. The gaping hole showed ligaments, muscles, and blood. Colburn looked around her kitchen and picked up a clean dishcloth to wrap the wound.

Kai, only slightly injured, came trotting back toward the house; the bear was nowhere in sight. “Huskies prance. He come prancing out of the shadows, big grin on his face,” Colburn recalled. “Like it was the most wonderful thing he’d ever done.” But she was worried that the bear and its cubs were still out there, waiting for her. It was a terrifying prospect, because she needed to go outside. She didn’t get cell reception in her house, and she couldn’t afford a landline, so there was no way to get in touch with anyone to help her stanch the blood pouring from her injuries.

Carrying a lead pipe to defend herself, Colburn made a desperate run for her white Subaru, only to realize, once she was safely inside, that her mangled right hand couldn’t move the stick shift. Reaching across her body with her left hand, she got the car into gear and puttered down the driveway. She rolled along until she got to the home of a neighbor named Bob. When she rang his doorbell, he stuck his head out an upstairs window.

“I’ve just been attacked by a bear,” Colburn said, breathing heavily.

“Hold on,” Bob replied, and he ducked back inside. A few seconds later, his head popped back out.

“Uh, you’re kidding, right?” he asked.

Colburn conveyed, in painful shouts, that she was most certainly not kidding, and Bob quickly gave her a ride to the fire station. John Babiarz happened to be on duty. “Those goddamn bears!” he kept repeating. He called emergency responders, who whisked Colburn in an ambulance to the nearest hospital, then he phoned the Fish and Game Department. The person on the line was incredulous, like Bob before him. “It’s been a century since we’ve had a bear attack on a person,” the man said, referring to the whole of New Hampshire.

“I’m here!” Babiarz yelled back. “I see the blood!”

Doctors told Colburn that her body would heal. When she was released from the hospital, a warden from Fish and Game showed up at her house to erect a box trap in her yard. After he left, Colburn peeked at the single pink doughnut resting inside. That night she heard a bear banging on the side of the trap, but the next day the doughnut was still there. A few days later, the warden decided that the trap was useless, packed it up, and took it away.

Colburn thought about the bear all the time. She wondered how often it had ventured into her yard, onto her porch, and up to her windows without her knowing. Not like a Peeping Tom. Peeping Toms were people, and bears, she now knew for sure, were nothing like people. “If you look at their eyes,” she told me, “you understand that they are completely alien to us.”

RTWT

(photo via Dennis Motz) “He’s estimated to be over 900 lbs. [408.23 kilos]. Game wardens say he’s too big to fit their live traps.”

The Hillary Step, before and after the Earthquake of 2015.

It’s estimated that roughly 4000 people have made it to the top of Mount Everest in recent years assisted by fixed ropes, professional guides, and bottled oxygen, but people still debate the question of whether or not, in 1924, George Leigh Mallory and Andrew Irvine summited the mountain without any of those aids, before their fatal fall.

The best positive argument goes that when Conrad Anker found Mallory’s body at 26,760 ft (8,157 m) on the north face of the mountain, the photograph of his wife that Mallory had promised to leave on the summit was missing from his effects.

The key negative argument in climbing circles contends that it would have been impossible with the limited equipment and lack of oxygen in the period for anyone to have conquered the Hillary Step, a nearly vertical rock face with a height of around 12 metres (39 ft) located high on Mount Everest at approximately 8,790 metres (28,839 ft), named later for Sir Edmund Hillary, the first known person to reach the summit in 1953.

Outside magazine is reporting that the rumors are true, despite the Government of Nepal’s effort to suppress talk on the subject, the changes produced by the Earthquake of 2015 are dramatic: the Hillary Step is now the Hillary Stair. The ascent will now be easier than ever, though the traditional death toll of of five or six a year will probably remain unchanged.

The Blaze reports on some particularly unpleasant insanity upcoming on the Left Coast:

California has become the first state in the nation to pass a controversial new law that places tough limits on home water usage, KOVR-TV reported.

That means the state will have “more focus on flushes and scrutiny over showers,” according to the report.

Starting in 2022, California will limit water to 55 gallons per-person, per-day. By 2030, the amount falls to 50 gallons.

To put this into perspective, just taking one eight-minute shower (17 gallons of water) and doing one load of laundry (up to 40 gallons) is enough to exceed the 55-gallon limit. Taking a bath can use 80 to 100 gallons of water.

Why is the state doing this?

“So that everyone in California is at least integrating efficiency into our preparations for climate change,” said Felicia Marcus, chair of the State Water Resources Control Board.

Some residents said the limits are unrealistic.

“With a child and every day having to wash clothes, that’s — just my opinion — not feasible. But I get it and I understand that we’re trying to preserve, but 55 gallons a day?” Sacramento mom Tanya Allen, who has a 4-year-old daughter, said to KOVR.

Rocka Mitchell and his wife, Ginger, agreed that the water limits would be difficult to meet.

“She likes to bathe three times a day and she does laundry all day,” Rocka Mitchell said of his wife.
How would people achieve this?

Water-efficient fixtures could be used to help homeowners cut back on how much water they use, advocates say.

“I think the average new home is 35 gallons per person per day, so we are not talking emergency conservation here,” Marcus told the TV station.

Greg Bundesen of the Sacramento Suburban Water District said the agency helps residents conserve water by offering toilet rebates, complementary showerheads, and complementary faucets.

RTWT

The idiots ruining life in the Golden State today can only live there themselves because, a few generations back, better, saner, more practical men built dams and channeled water enormous distances to make the desert bloom. Today’s Californians don’t build, they simply ration.

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Bukowskis, June 7, 2018, 1:00 PM CET, Stockholm, Sweden, Important Spring Sale 609 – Day 1,

And more complications than a Patek Philippe!

Zooming in from 1mm to 500nm, from an amphipod to a bacterium.