text:
'For Household Use' by Kristaps Ancāns at careva contemporary
Kristaps Ancāns, For Household Use, exhibition view. Photo: Ansis Starks
"For Household Use" is a first solo show in Riga by Kristaps Ancāns (b.Livani, Latvia, 1990, based in London, UK). Ancans nourishes his artistic practice with concept of artificial nostalgia (having an image in ones head of how things were before, even if one was not physically present at the time, or even born yet). Dissecting his own memories of growing up in rural Latvia in 90's and learning to create art with found materials, he often channels the familiar and relatable, while avoiding the banal.
Exhibition consists of three types of artworks (2d, sculptures and kinetic sculpture), all of which play conceptual games with each other, so for example the sculptural work "We have two bunnies at home- a spotty one, a light-furry and a darker-furry one" is shown next to two dimensional, textual artwork "1839.6 cm2", on which that sentence is written. Conceptually, Ancans artworks often have open-ended messages, yet what is persistent is his honesty towards subject matter and materials used. The frequent use of stabilised plasticine on theorethical level brings in clear connection with childhood naivete, creating connection with the viewer in the "small disasters" that happen whilst playing and making, yet the adult knowledge of chemistry allows this game to be transformed into a permanent artwork.
Similarly, the kinetic artwork "Device which can transport your big, as well as your small dog to the other side" seems to have a playful element to the repetitive movement of the platform which could, indeed, transport one's big as well as small dog. At the same time it touches upon the notion of "other side" without fear of otherness. The animal references, that Ancans uses in his practice are there to establish a connection with the viewer, to wink at the viewer while playing with the stereotypes that we have about these animals and about each other.
Artist Kristaps Ancāns
Exhibition For Household Use
Place / venue careva contemporary, Riga
Dates 27 April 2018 - 5 May 2018
Photos Ansis Starks
Website www.carevacontemporary.com
Index Careva Contemporary Kristaps Ancāns


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Telehealth can reduce costs and help improve access to care — is your business ready?. current menu item
Telehealth can reduce costs and help improve access to care — is your business ready?
Third-party apps, new mobile technology, and government policies are poised to drastically expand telehealth access in the coming years. That's good news: Research shows that telehealth has the potential to save U.S. companies approximately $6 billion a year.1 And 93% of consumers who've used telehealth say that it lowered their health care costs.2 However, only 15 percent of doctors use telehealth with their patients.3 So while embracing telehealth presents great cost-saving opportunities, it's important for employers to fully understand the telehealth landscape to get the most out of their health care benefits.
Telehealth helps employees keep up with much-needed care
In many ways, health care still operates on a 9-to-5, Monday through Friday, schedule. This can present a real dilemma for working people, who have to take time off work for health appointments. This can also lead to delayed or missed care because employees can't or don't want to take the time off:
More than 2 in 3 people say they've delayed seeking care for a health problem, often because they're too busy4
3 out of 5 people say they feel uncomfortable leaving work for a preventive appointment5
9 out of 10 would cancel or reschedule a preventive appointment because of job pressure6
Telehealth expected to become more widely available
Changing financial incentives are set to significantly expand telehealth access, offering employees a convenient alternative to in-person office visits. Here's why: The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) — the largest health care payer in the U.S. — has historically limited reimbursement for many telehealth services. Some services aren't covered at all, while others are only covered in specific situations — for patients in rural areas who are staying in a hospital, for example. So it's easy to see why some doctors wouldn't want to offer telehealth: In many situations, they wouldn't get paid for it.7
Starting in 2020, certain types of Medicare plans will be allowed to offer telehealth services as an alternative to in-person visits, provided that in-person visits are still an option. The rule also expands the type of telehealth services covered by Medicare.8 "These are exciting changes which will increase access to care, give patients new choices, and foster the type of innovations we need to strengthen Medicare and ensure its sustainability into the future," CMS Administrator Seema Verma said. "And we know that, given Medicare's size, whatever we do affects the entire health care market."9
Third-party apps aim for convenience, but is the care effective?
One way the market is looking to capitalize on the consumer interest in telehealth is through third-party mobile apps. Experts estimate that ultra-high-speed 5G internet will be available in cities by 2020 and in less populated areas by 2023, making for a better mobile experience.10
But there are big drawbacks to third-party apps. In most cases, providers can't access patient medical records, so they're not aware of existing health conditions and medications. This can lead to serious problems — one study found that doctors on a third-party telehealth app were more likely to prescribe antibiotics for respiratory infections, even though most respiratory infections do not respond to antibiotics.
The truth is that some third-party telehealth care apps won't do much to help support overall health. "Telehealth has to be integrated fully into a total care system," Mario Gutierrez, executive director of the Center for Connected Health Policy, told Wired magazine. "It can't just be a one-off. That's not health care."11
It pays to carefully consider your telehealth options
When done right, telehealth can be an effective way for doctors, payers, and employers to manage costs. It can help providers deliver care sooner, potentially resulting in fewer procedures, shorter hospital stays, and healthier outcomes. But current employee-sponsored coverage levels vary widely. Most private insurance payers currently limit telehealth reimbursement to certain types of interactions. And third-party apps carry their own set of issues. For employers, understanding their telehealth coverage must be part of their overall health care strategy.
1"Current Telemedicine Technology Could Mean Big Savings," MarketWatch, Aug. 11, 2014, marketwatch.com/press-release/current-telemedicine-technology-could-mean-big-savings-2014-08-11.
2"The 2016 HealthMine Digital Health Report: State and Impact of Digital Health Tools," HealthMine, 2016.
3Carol K. Kane and Kurt Gillis, "The Use of Telemedicine by Physicians: Still the Exception, Rather Than the Rule," Health Affairs, December 2018, healthaffairs.org/doi/10.1377/hlthaff.2018.05077.
4"Telehealth Index: 2017 Consumer Survey," American Well, americanwell.com/resources/telehealth-index-2017-consumer-survey-2.
5"By the Numbers: The Conflict Between Work and Health," Zocdoc, October 11, 2016, zocdoc.com/about/news/unsick-day-by-the-numbers.
6See note 5.
7"Fact Sheet: Telehealth," American Hospital Association, February 2019, aha.org/system/files/2019-02/fact-sheet-telehealth-2-4-19.pdf.
8"Value-Based Insurance Design Model (VBID) Fact Sheet CY 2020," Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, January 18, 2019, cms.gov/newsroom/fact-sheets/value-based-insurance-design-model-vbid-fact-sheet-cy-2020.
9"Remarks by Administrator Seema Verma at the Alliance for Connected Care Telehealth Policy Forum for Health Systems," Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, November 15, 2018, cms.gov/newsroom/press-releases/remarks-administrator-seema-verma-alliance-connected-care-telehealth-policy-forum-health-systems.
10Shara Tibken, "Why 5G Is Out of Reach for More People Than You Think," CNet, October 25, 2018, cnet.com/news/why-5gs-out-of-reach-for-more-people-than-you-think.
11Megan Molteni, "Telemedicine Could Be Great, if People Stopped Using It Like Uber," Wired, March 6, 2017, wired.com/2017/03/telemedicine-great-people-stopped-using-like-uber.
12"83% of patient issues are resolved in 1 telehealth visit," Assessment of the Feasibility and Cost of Replacing In-Person Care with Acute Care Telehealth Services, Dale H. Yamamoto, Red Quill Consulting, December 2014, connectwithcare.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/Medicare-Acute-Care-Telehealth-Feasibility.pdf.
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redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


text:
'use strict';

// @flow

import path from 'path';
import mkdirp from 'mkdirp';

import {writeFile} from './promisified';

import type {FlowCoverageSummaryData} from './flow';
import type {FlowCoverageReportOptions} from '.';

async function saveFlowCoverageReportJSON(
  coverageSummaryData: FlowCoverageSummaryData,
  options: FlowCoverageReportOptions
): Promise<[FlowCoverageSummaryData, FlowCoverageReportOptions]> {
  const {projectDir} = options;
  const outputDir = options.outputDir || path.join(projectDir, 'flow-coverage');

  coverageSummaryData.globIncludePatterns = options.globIncludePatterns;

  await mkdirp(outputDir);
  await writeFile(
    path.join(outputDir, 'flow-coverage.json'),
    Buffer.from(JSON.stringify(coverageSummaryData))
  );
  return [coverageSummaryData, options];
}

const ReportJson = {
  generate: saveFlowCoverageReportJSON
};

export default ReportJson;

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


New Delhi: The India-Bangladesh border adjoining Sipahijala and Unakoti districts of Tripura has been sealed in view of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's visit to the state today, police said today.
The prime minister will address two public rallies near border areas, programme manager and Deputy Speaker of Assam Assembly Biswarup Bhattacharya said.
Giving details of PM Modi's itinerary, he said that the prime minister will arrive at Agartala airport in a chartered plane, and from there, he would fly to Sonamura of Sipahijala districts in a helicopter.
A public rally has been organised at Rangamati Madrassa school ground in Sipahijala, Mr Bhattacharya said.
According to Sipahijala SP Sudipta Das, the Border Security Force has been asked to seal the frontier as the place is not very far from the international border. "A security blanket has been thrown around the district with central and state paramilitary forces deployed at strategic points," Mr Das said.
After the rally at Siphijala, Prime Minister Modi would go to Kailashahar in Unakoti district, Mr Bhattacharya said, adding that the prime minister would address a public meet at Ramkrishna Mahavidyalaya stadium in the second half of the day.
COMMENTSSecurity forces have intensified patrolling in the district and adequate measures have been taken to thwart any untoward incidents, Unakoti SP Ajit Pratap Singh said.
Tripura is set to go to polls on February 18 and the results will be announced on March 3.


text:
Math Bass at Tanya Leighton
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Allan McCollum at Petzel
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Armory Center for the Arts
145 North Raymond Avenue
Barbara T. Smith at Brand Library and Art Center
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Jonas Wood at David Kordansky
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David Austen: The Last Trapeze Artist
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Simphiwe Ndzube: Vusamazulu | Awakening the Heavens
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Math Bass at Henry Art Gallery
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LACMA x Cirrus Interview Online
Jean Robert Milant speaks with Leslie Jones
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Image: Photo courtesy Cirrus Gallery, by Pablo Prietto; Cirrus founder Jean Milant, artist John Baldessari, and printers Richard Hammond and Francesco Siqueiros working at Cirrus Editions
Derek Boshier: Icarus and K Pop
Gazelli Art House
Gazelli Art House represented artist Derek Boshier brings a solo exhibition to the London gallery, unveiling two series, Icarus and K Pop. The exhibition coincides with Frieze London and will incorporate a programme of corresponding events to be revealed closer to the time.
Craig Kauffman: Prints 1980-1981
at Frank Lloyd Gallery
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Roger Herman
at Sorry We're Closed Gallery
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Peter Alexander: Deep Dive
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Judy Chicago: A Retrospective
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Raul Guerrero Print
Raul Guerrero
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Mark Bradford Education Lab
at Hauser & Wirth Menorca
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Ron Cooper: Charlotte Jackson Fine Art
Opening July 30
RON COOPER | CARS & BARS
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Full Time Gallery Associate
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Math Bass in Altered Future
at Tanya Leighton
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Simphiwe Ndzube and Zakes Mda
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Alexis Smith at Garth Greenan Gallery
June 10 - July 30, 2021
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Technical Associate
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Four Tennis Courts
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a new magazine
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William T. Wiley
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Mary Weatherford | SITE Santa Fe
Canyon - Daisy - Eden
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Artforum: Ed Ruscha x Rachel Kushner
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Ron Cooper: In a New Light
at Louis Stern Fine Arts
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at Franklin Parrash Gallery
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The Cross Cultural Female Gaze
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11:30 am (EST)
Manal Ataya, Director General of the Sharjah Museums Authority
Alia Ali, artist
Lita Albuquerque, artist
Rania Matar, photographer
Holly Harrell
Curate LA
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Farah Atassi
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Simphiwe Ndzube
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Upside Down, Invisible Sculpture
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Carson's geometric paintings, inspired by the land of big sky, mimic rolling hills and valleys.
On Math Bass: Got a Light?
by William J. Simmons for Artillery Mag
A strained, stretched, widening, loosened metaphor, one that gives lights and receives them, might be the best way to describe Math Bass' work. Yet metaphor is an easy interpretational mode that relies too heavily on iconography. Morever, description logo-centrically implies that all that is felt can be written or painted, that you actually can describe what bottoming is like to someone who has yet to do it. A simile might be better. In this moment, it seems more capacious. Bass' work is like a ride on the Long Island Rail Road, winding through a certain kind of world, in which crushed skulls and young love happen simultaneously and often unnoticed, where aspiration and reality meet, where the Piano Man's jar is filled up with cock-like bread, where hearts are broken and lose their three-dimensionality, only to unflatten at the sight of beautiful arms at work on a floor.
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Hannah Feniak for Hyperallergic
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Judy Chicago: Rainbow AR
commissioned by LAS
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David Lloyd at Quotidian and Klowden Mann
IN COLOR Group Exhibition
In the time of covid, Quotidian and Klowden Mann present IN COLOR, an exhibition that invites viewers to embrace the art of slow looking through an immersive experience in color rich paintings, collage and sculptures. The exhibition will be on view at transformative arts HQ, located in the former Quotidian space at 410 S. Spring Street in downtown Los Angeles, from December 21st, 2020 through February 28th, 2021.
Michael Kohn in Conversation with Lita Albuquerque
Art Basel Miami 2020
Join Michael Kohn for a conversation with Lita Albuquerque. Albuquerque has created an expansive body of work, ranging from sculpture, painting, and multi-media performance to ambitious site-specific ephemeral projects in remote locations around the globe.
Video courtesy Kohn Gallery and the artist.
We're excited to announce a new print with Albuquerque coming out early 2021, stay tuned.
Lita Albuquerque and Kori Newkirk as part of Show Me The Signs benefit auction
bidding through November 30
Bidding for Show Me The Signs is now live on artfizz.com through November 30th. The entirety of sale proceeds will be donated to the African American Policy Forum's #SayHerName campaign, which works with the families of Black women, girls, and femmes killed by police to elevate their stories and fight for justice.
Pick of the Week: Peter Alexander
Exhibition review by Cole Sweetwood for Artillery Magazine
It's not that difficult to be contemporary. Be it through art, or writing, or simply conversation, we're almost always discussing what's right in front of us. It's another thing all together to create something which takes on an entirely new meaning decades after fabrication. This is the power of Peter Alexander's exhibition "Light in Place," on view now at the Cirrus Gallery.
A new site-specific artwork by Lita Albuquerque, "Red Earth," greets visitors at The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens as garden areas reopen after a closure of more than three months as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Originally scheduled to go on view in March, the temporary installation centers around a boulder capped with bright red pigment placed among towering bamboo in a grove of the Japanese Garden. It is exclusive to this particular time and place and is "a stand-in for what I am hoping the visitor to feel, a sense of calm in the midst of chaos," Albuquerque said. "Red Earth," which closes Nov. 2, was commissioned as a part of The Huntington's Centennial Celebration.
Mary Weatherford: The Japan Drawings
November 7 - December 12, 2020 at David Kordansky Gallery
The Japan Drawings brings together four groups of works—all shellac ink paintings on Gampi Torinoko paper—that Weatherford produced during a 2019 residency at Troedsson Villa in Nikko, Japan. While a selection of these drawings was presented in the gallery's Online Viewing Room in May 2020, this physical exhibition allows viewers to appreciate the full scope of the project, as well as both the intimacy and materiality of the individual works and their many moods and impressions.
Glenn Kaino on Hope, Art, and Invisibility
an interview by Lauri Firstenberg for Compound LB
Glenn Kaino transforms conventional materials and forms through a process of working that mobilizes the languages, logics and economies of other creative disciplines as raw elements in artistic production. Conceiving his practice as "conceptual kit bashing"—Kaino synthesizes objects, performances and site specific encounters by reconfiguring conditions of cultural spheres, where disparate ideas and materials are forced to make contact.
"12 Sunsets: Exploring Ed Ruscha's Archive"
by Deborah Vankin in the LA Times October 8, 2020
Ed Ruscha invites you on the ultimate road trip: Time travel with him, over 42 years, along the full length of Sunset Boulevard from downtown L.A. to the beach.
Bruce Nauman at the Tate Modern
For more than 50 years Bruce Nauman (born 1941, Fort Wayne, Indiana, United States) has continually tested and reinvented what an artwork can be. His work is difficult to confine to any one movement, genre or medium. However his highly experimental approach makes him a key figure within art today. His interest in ambiguity and shades of meaning relates to daily human experience, where certainty is not always guaranteed.
Mary Weatherford: Train Yards
an interview by Laura Hoptman in Gagosian Quarterly
Mary Weatherford speaks to Laura Hoptman about her new paintings, the Train Yard series. Begun in 2016, this body of work evokes the sights and sounds of railroads and night skies. The series will be shown for the first time in September 2020, in an exhibition at Gagosian, London.
Bruce Nauman Videoworks at Sperone Westwater Gallery
by Katie White on Artnews, September 23, 2020
This month, Nauman, who at 78 is still very much at it, debuted three new works at Sperone Westwater in an exhibition that marks his 13th solo show at the gallery since his first one, 45 years ago in 1976. Two new interactive 3-D video works and one hanging sculpture (Two Leaping Foxes, a return to the animal sculptures Nauman first made in the late 1980s) comprise the show and are given ample space in the gallery (which should be something of a comfort to those still hesitant to visit galleries in person).
Celebrating Cirrus
The Renowned L.A. Print Shop Turns 50 Leslie Jones, Curator, Prints and Drawings at LACMA
September 15, 2020 by Leslie Jones, Curator, Prints and Drawings at LACMA
Cirrus Editions celebrates its 50th anniversary this year! Founded by Jean Milant in 1970, Cirrus has been a stalwart presence in the Los Angeles print world, making a name for itself through its commitment to local artists and its embrace of unconventional printmaking techniques. Ed Ruscha was among the first artists invited to Cirrus and immediately offered up an unusual challenge: a two-color screenprint made with Pepto Bismol and caviar (in lieu of conventional inks). The result was Pepto-Caviar Hollywood, now an icon in the annals of experimental printmaking (and artmaking for that matter). In 1977–78 Joe Goode made lithographs at Cirrus that he subsequently slashed with a razorblade and, a few years later, produced his "Gunshot Series" of two-side lithographs punctured and tattered with shot. Jill Giegerich printed on rubberized cork, William T. Wiley on leather hide, and Greg Card on plexiglass. More recently, Cirrus published a print by legendary feminist and peformance artist Barbara T. Smith who improvised with her hands and face over the scanner bed in the process of capturing the final image.
Oregon foundation acquires Judy Chicago print archive
Over 300 works chart the career of a feminist pioneer in revelatory detail
The Oregon philanthropist Jordan D. Schnitzer has acquired a significant archive of prints and other works on paper by the artist Judy Chicago with the goal of highlighting her six-decade feminist career through exhibitions and museum loans.
The purchase by the Jordan Schnitzer Family Foundation, encompassing over 300 limited-edition prints, preparatory drawings and sketches and copper plates, is entering a collection already known for championing women artists and artists of colour including Kara Walker, Lorna Simpson, Alison Saar and Hung Liu, according to Tonya Turner Carroll, the Santa Fe dealer and art advisor who brokered the acquisition. No price was disclosed.
Charles Garabedian: Outside the Gates
At LA Louver
In a bi-coastal collaboration, L.A. Louver and Betty Cuningham Gallery are pleased to present Charles Garabedian: Outside the Gates. Drawing from both galleries' long histories with the artist, this exhibition brings together two dozen paintings from the last three decades of Garabedian's life. The artist's ability to tap into the collective unconscious renders the work timeless; while many of the figures may be familiar from myth, their staging speaks to our common lot as humans. With distinctive humor and pathos, Garabedian takes us on a trip as he moves toward finding himself in history, mythology, and by accident.
Art Basel at 50
Launched the same year as Art Basel, Cirrus participated in the fair in its third year, in 1973.
A Conversation between Massimo Minini and Clément Dirié
The Italian gallerist reflects on his first Art Basel in 1977, his inaugural exhibition featuring Sol LeWitt and Daniel Buren, and how the artworld has changed since.
Active in Brescia since 1973, Massimo Minini and his namesake gallery are key members of a pioneering generation of the European artworld. Having first participated in Art Basel in 1977 and returned every year since, he has witnessed the development of the contemporary art scene over the last five decades. In the 1990s, Minini was a member of Art Basel's Exhibitors' Advisory Board. In this retrospective interview, he talks about his first years in the artworld and his Art Basel routine.
Everything Is Going to Be OK
ALLAN MCCOLLUM
From his image archive, An Ongoing Collection of Screengrabs with Reassuring Subtitles, with currently 1.200 screenshots from American TV series and movies, Allan McCollum has chosen 400 motifs with subtitles such as "It will be ok" or "Don't worry, Babe" to be printed on canvas, each framed in a black wooden frame and measuring 10.4 x 17.2 x 1.6 in (26.3 x 43.8 x 4 cm). This group of works is especially designed for Galerie Thomas Schulte to be offered to friends, supporters and interested clients as a sign of consolation and to financially help two highly acclaimed art institutions, the ICA Miami and C/O Berlin, to cope in these difficult times. A selection of the works is on view at Galerie Thomas Schulte in an individual exhibition from May 23 through July 11, 2020.
ED RUSCHA: Drum Skins
At Gagosian, May 28–June 3, 2020
There's a peculiar kind of patois, like Okie jargon. People have a funny way of speaking, almost like using bad English, double negatives like, "I can't find my keys nowhere." . . . Yes, they were incorrect, but they had a punch to them.
Gagosian is pleased to present recent paintings by Ed Ruscha online for galleryplatform.la. The works are currently featured in the solo exhibition Drum Skins at the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, Texas. Due to the ongoing health crisis, the museum is currently closed.
Peter Alexander dies at 81
Artist created ethereal worlds out of resin
Los Angeles Times, May 28, 2020, 11:05 AM.
By Carolina A. Miranda, staff writer
For Peter Alexander, the moment that helped change the direction of his art arrived after a mundane session of ding repair on his surfboard in the 1960s.
He had poured some resin into a paper cup to seal his board, and over the course of several hours the resin hardened into a translucent puck.
"I remember at the bottom of the Dixie Cup, this clear material," he told a documentary team from the Getty Conservation Institute in 2014. "And I was doing a project and I thought, 'I bet this could be done in polyester, in this resin.' So I started casting it in little things — like little boxes."
Those experiments with industrial materials, begun when he was a student at UCLA, led to the creation of ethereal sculptures that evoked the quietly shifting nature of light, color and environment. And they put Alexander among the vanguard of Southern California's Light and Space artists, a movement that brought buoyancy and perceptual play to Minimalism, which until then been dominated by the more austere forms emerging from the East Coast.
PETER ALEXANDER (1939–2020)
Artforum, May 27, 2020 at 2:17pm
Peter Alexander, an American painter and sculptor closely associated with the Light and Space movement of 1960s Southern California, has died at the age of eighty-one. In contrast to his West Coast Minimalism counterparts like Robert Irwin or Douglas Wheeler, Alexander eschewed immersive, ephemeral environments in favor of contained microcosms of translucent polyester resin and Plexiglas to create works that radiated their own inner light. Though best known for his early experimentations in synthetic materials and their pigment, scale, and shape, by the '70s the toxicity of his initial medium led Alexander to shift to painting and drawing.


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Documentary Watch
German president says his country is responsible for the security of Israel
Voltaire Network | 28 November 2010
Germany's President Christian Wulff said Sunday that his country has a "responsibility" toward Israel's security, during talks with Israeli counterpart Shimon Peres.
"Germany considers that it has a responsibility concerning Israel's right to exist and to security," said Wulff, Germany's first head of state to be born after World War II.
He stressed, however, that Israel's long-term security can only be guaranteed through peace based on an independent Palestinian nation living side by side with Israel.
The German president, who began an 3-day official visit to Israel and the Palestinian territories on Saturday, made his remarks at a news conference after talks with Peres.
Wulff will also meet Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman and President Mahmoud Abbas.
On Sunday he also visited Jerusalem's Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial, erected for the six million Jews killed in the Nazi Holocaust.
The two countries established full diplomatic relations in 1965 and Germany is now one of Israel's closest partners in Europe. Wulff, 51, is the fifth German president to pay an official visit to Israel.
Focus News in Brief Controversies Diplomatic Wire Documentary Watch
Israel/State of Palestine
UN requests own court to declare Israeli occupation of Palestine illegal
Israeli practices affecting the human rights of the Palestinian people in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem
Netanyahu government reconnects with "revisionist Zionism"
Israeli-Lebanese agreement for the exploitation of Mediterranean gas
Coup attempt in Germany
Paradoxes of Russophobia
Poland resurrects issue of WWII damage
Foreign Affairs adviser to Chancellor Olaf Scholz open to Russia
CentCom: Control of the "Greater Middle East"
Saudi-Iranian negotiations moving forward
Only 3 out of 21 states in Greater Middle East loyal to the US
Fanaticisms at the service of the United States
In the 1980s, the Pentagon was preparing a nuclear war in Iran
Article licensed under Creative Commons
The articles on Voltaire Network may be freely reproduced provided the source is cited, their integrity is respected and they are not used for commercial purposes (license CC BY-NC-ND).
Source: "German president says his country is responsible for the security of Israel", Voltaire Network, 28 November 2010, www.voltairenet.org/article167614.html
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/ Comics
Falcon & The Winter Soldier
Review: 'Sword Daughter' #1 Takes Its First Steps Towards Something Greater
By Jamie Lovett - August 3, 2018 04:04 pm EDT
Writer Brian Wood returns to a familiar setting for his latest Dark Horse Comics series, Sword Daughter, with artist Mack Chater. The series' start isn't exactly the most graceful, but there's an underlying depth that seems likely to bear fruit in the future.
Sword Daughter takes place during the Viking era in Europe and follows Elsbeth and her father, Dag. Elsbeth's mother and brother were killed by a thuggish clan of warriors called the 40 Swords when they razed the town the family lived in. Dag fell into a decade-long stupor. Elsbeth grew up, survived, and made sure her father didn't die. The day when the 12-year-old Elsbeth reaches for the sword on her father's belt is the day Dag finally wakes up and begins his quest for revenge.
The influence of classic samurai stories like Lone Wolf and Cub is immediately apparent as the, but Sword Daughter also fits into a recent trend in fiction we'll call "murder girls," stories that involve young girls who suffered trauma and channel that trauma into acts of violence. See also: Hit-Girl, Hanna, Eleven, Laura.
(Photo: Mark Chater, Jose Villarrubia)
Elsbeth certainly fits into this mold. In fact, the child is presented as nearly feral and even more inclined towards violence than her father. What separates Sword Daughter from most others in this subgenre is that its presentation is more grounded. Most murder girl stories lean into the dissonance of seeing a 12-year-old girl commit acts of bodily harm with a stylized presentation. The violence here should evoke a visceral response but is not presented in a way that distracts from the brutality. Chater and Wood want you to linger and consider.
Sword Daughter seems less interested in the violence itself than in the way it shapes the relationship between Elsbeth and Dag, who is hardly the model father. Dag is obsessed with wiping out the 40 Swords to the point that his first instinct is to leave Elsbeth behind, essentially abandoning her for the second time. Revenge is a familiar motivator, but the comic has its own texture and tone that can largely be credited to Chater's art, as well as Jose Villarrubia's colors. Villarrubia brings an earth-tone palette to most of the issue that speaks to the hard, rigorous, but rewarding life of the people on the island and serves as a great contrast to the black and crimson used whenever the 40 Swords are on the page, communicating the violence inherent in their being.
While the issue itself builds a strong foundation for the series, it suffers from some clumsy storytelling. Chater's characters and expressions are mostly solid, but some of the frightened victims of the 40 Swords have expressions so over-the-top that they verge on comical, undercutting the horror of the scene.
There are also some missed opportunities in how certain moments are framed. At one point, a friend implies to Dag that he only survived his 10 sleeping years because Elsbeth looked after him, saying "Who do you think looked after you?" Setting aside this assertions' plausibility and how casually Dag's friend accepts his sudden reanimation, the moment feels like it calls for a shot of Elsbeth or a close-up of Dag's reaction, but instead, we get a half-page mid-range shot of the conversation from a distance that illuminates and emphasizes nothing.
In other instances, Chater gets the scene perfectly, such as how he frames the moment that Dag tries to assert his paternal authority over Elsbeth, coming in close and looking up at Dag with his face covered in shadow.
Similarly, Sword Daughter takes an interesting approach to Elsbeth's speech, but it's unclear what the issue is trying to accomplish. Her word balloons have pictograms in them rather than words, which is a creative way to show how she has not learned to speak the way others do and is executed well by letterer Nate Piekos. However, despite the visual difference in language, her father seems to understand everything she's saying just fine, even when there's little to no context to aid him, making it unclear if this method is meant to represent a difference in vocabulary or tone, and its made even less clear since Elsbeth narrates the issue in perfect English.
Sword Daughter feels very much like a pilot issue. The issue is seemingly unsure of what it's trying to accomplish in certain aspects, and takes a few clumsy steps for the sake reaching the story's true launching pad by the end of the issue, but there's a strength in the concept here seems likely to find surer footing now that the introductions are out of the way. If you're a fan of Wood's past Viking-era dramas like Northlanders and Black Road, or even his Revolutionary War series Rebels, Sword Daughter is the spiritual successor you've been waiting for.
Written by Brian Wood
Art by Mack Chater
Colors by Jose Villarrubia
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Home Redemptorists General Government General Archives
General Historical Archives
Congregation of the Most Holy Redeemer
The General Historical Archives of the Congregation of the Most Holy Redeemer preserve, classify and catalogue all the documents of the Congregation that have historical value, beginning with the writings of our Founder, Alphonsus Maria de Liguori, and including all official documents of the General Government and the Provinces, Vice-provinces, Regions and members of the Congregation. It also preserves any other documentation that refers or pertains to the Congregation or any of its members.
The organization of the General Archives began already in the time of the Founder who was careful to insure that important documents were preserved in the local communities' archives.
The General Archives were first established and organized in Pagani during the 19th century and the first archivist was Fr. Giovanni Giuseppe Sabelli who gathered and organized all the documentation produced from 1747 to 1848.
The General Archives were first established in Rome in 1856 under the direction of Fr. Edward Schwindenhammer and, after the reunification of the Congregation in 1869, the greater part of the Pagani archives were transferred to Rome.
Fr. Schwindenhammer was succeeded by Fr. Michael Ulrich in 1862, Fr. Fredrick Kuntz in 1879, Fr. Edward Bührel in 1903, Fr. Jean Baptiste Raus in 1924, Fr. Louis Arnold in 1943, Fr. Philip Hoffmann in 1946, Fr. Maurice Meulemeester in 1949, Fr. Andrea Sampers in 1951, Fr. Hernán Arboleda Valencia in 1986 and Fr. Raúl Campos in 2004.
In 1986 there were 590 dossiers dating from 1725 to 1954, organized in seven sections. The Alphonsian documents are marked with the acronym SAM (Sancti Alfonsi Manuscripta).
In 1989, using the computer program LIDOS, the electronic or digital organization of the documentation was begun. The archivists are presently working with ARBOR, a database designed especially for the General Archives by Fr. John Vargas. Fr. Stephen Rehrauer collaborated in transferring the data to this new program. Currently 100,000 documents, 11,292 books, 2,428 magazines, 6,283 documents of General Chapters, 2,543 articles, 16,200 photos, slides and other pictures and 1,273 architectural designs have been catalogued in digital form. More than 24,012 items from the file of Fr. Andrea Sampers have also been digitized.
Nevertheless, the work yet to be done is enormous. The amount already organized and catalogued is quite small compared to all that remains to be processed. Each document is given an identification number, then marked with the seal of the General Archives and covered with paper before being placed in a protective folder. All directions for its location and use are stored in the computer database.
Traditionally, all units of the Congregation send Fr. General three copies of their publications, such as books, magazines, brochures, albums, newsletters, etc. In these is preserved the historical memory of our life and ministry.
The Historical General Archives are open to researchers except during July and August and the Christmas holidays, and on feast days and Saturdays.
The Archivists
Fr. Edward Nocuń(archivio.gen@cssr.com)
Fr. Nocun was born on October 11, 1950 in Radlice, Poland. He made his profession of religious vows on August 15, 1969 and was ordained a priest on June 17, 1976.
Fr. Nocun worked as a formator in the novitiate from February, 1977 to June, 1979 and for the students from 1985-1987. He was the prefect of the postulants, candidates for priesthood from 1987 to 1990. In 1991 he earned his doctoral degree in Church history from the Catholic University of Lublino, Poland. He served as novice master from August, 1992 till February, 1996 and as provincial superior of the Province of Warsaw from February 1996 till February 2002. From January 1, 2004 until the end of May, 2007 he was in charge of pastoral care at the Marian Shrine Mariahilfberg, in Neumarkt OPf, Germany. Since July 1, 2007 Fr. Nocun has served as the General Archivist in Rome.
Fr. Jean Beco (jbeco@cssr.com)
Fr. Beco, the Vice-Archivist, is a Belgian Redemptorist. He was born October 10, 1938 in Charleroi, diocese of Tournai. He professed vows on September 15, 1958 and was ordained a priest on March 19, 1964.
He has served as a professor and in various other capacities in several communities. From 1983 to 1993 he was procurator for the foreign missions in the Democratic Republic of Congo (Zaire), Haiti and Brazil.
Since 1988 he has been the chronicler and provincial archivist of the Belgian Province. In 1993 he came to the General Archives where he has digitized the documents of the Belgian province and has prepared a publication of the correspondence of Fr. Friedrick von Held, official Visitor to Belgium.
Fr. Ivo Fernandes (ifernandes@cssr.com)
Fr. Ivo Fernandes, a Redemptorist Missionary from the Province of Bangalore (India), was born November 30, 1930 at Bukoba, Tanzania (British East Africa), where his father worked for 24 years. In 1937 his family returned to India and lived in Poona. He made his first profession in 1949, his final profession in 1952 and was ordained a priest in 1955.
In 1956-1957 he did his licentiate in theology at the Angelicum in Rome. He studied moral theology at the Alphonsian Academy from 1957-1959. In 1960 he completed his doctorate in theology at the Angelicum. He returned to India and first taught Latin and later dogmatic theology in the Redemptorist major seminary in Bangalore. At the same time he taught moral theology at an Institute for the post-novitiate training of religious women and was a chaplain at St. John's Medical College in Bangalore, where he taught religion and ethics.
He has served as superior in several communities. In 1971 he became a full-time mission preacher. For 23 years his main apostolate, particularly in northern India, was conducting Life Guidance Seminars in schools and colleges, mainly for non-Christian students and their parents. He was actively involved in 'Marriage Encounter' as a team priest for 27 years.
In September 2008, he was called to work part-time in the General Archives, cataloguing and entering documents into the database program. On February 5, 2009 he was appointed to work in the General Archives for three years.
Fr. Emilio Szopinski (eszopinski@cssr.com)
A naturalized Argentine, Fr. Szopinski was born on April 24, 1937 in Woliczka-Rzesów, Poland. He was professed August 31, 1953 and was ordained a priest August 27, 1961.
He preached parish missions in Poland, Argentina, Paraguay and Bolivia. He served in different offices in the Vice-province of Resistencia, Argentina.
Since 2000 he has worked on the documentation of various Units founded by the Galo-Helvetica Province.


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NASA Rover Finds Mysterious Methane Emissions on Mars
New results suggest evidence for extraterrestrial life could be near at hand
By Lee Billings on December 16, 2014
Is there life on Mars? The answer may be blowing in the wind.
NASA's Curiosity rover has detected fluctuating traces of methane – a possible sign of life – in the thin, cold air of the Martian atmosphere, researchers announced today at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union.
Across Mars and within Gale Crater, where Curiosity is slowly climbing a spire of sedimentary rock called Mount Sharp, the methane exists at a background concentration of slightly less than one part per billion by volume in the atmosphere (ppb). However, for reasons unknown, four times across a period of two months the rover measured much higher methane abundances, at about ten times the background level. Further in-situ studies of the methane emissions could help pin down whether Mars has life, now or in its deep past, though it is unclear when or if those studies will ever take place. The findings are published in the journal Science.
"Most of the methane on Earth is produced by biology, and the hope has been that 'methane on Mars' could be reduced to 'life on Mars,'" says lead author Chris Webster, a senior research scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "But we cannot yet distinguish whether the high methane levels we're seeing are being produced geochemically or biologically." Webster and his team believe the unexpected bursts of methane are produced relatively nearby, somewhere north of the rover, before being carried to Curiosity on prevailing winds.
The findings are a dramatic reversal from Curiosity's earlier results released one year ago, in which it used data gathered over a third of a Martian year to all but rule out significant quantities of methane in the Martian air. That null result, it is now clear, was due to the actual background level of Martian methane lying just below the threshold of detectability for the standard operations of Curiosity's instruments.
To sniff out the methane, the Curiosity team had to look longer and harder. For these new results, they collected data over the course of a full Martian year, and gathered "enriched" samples of Martian air that were stripped of carbon dioxide to amplify fainter traces of methane. The one-part-per-billion methane background they eventually found, Webster says, translates to about 200 metric tons of the gas flowing through the Martian atmosphere each year. The Earth, by comparison, annually has about half a billion metric tons of methane cycling through its air.
Most of Earth's methane comes from anaerobic bacteria living in low-oxygen environments, such as stagnant water and the guts of animals, though abiotic processes such as hot water flowing through mineral-rich rock can also produce the gas. Mars's minuscule methane background is broadly consistent with what should be produced by ultraviolet light striking the carbon-rich debris of meteorites, comets, and interplanetary dust that periodically fall to the Red Planet. But this mechanism cannot easily explain the methane spikes that Curiosity observed, as it calls for large, very recent meteoritic impacts or airbursts in the vicinity of Gale Crater that would leave clear signs which vigilant orbiting spacecraft should have spotted by now. Alternatively, the Curiosity team suggests the methane spikes may come from unseen, buried deposits of clathrates, lattices of ice that can trap gases such as methane in their crystalline structure.
Another possibility is that the methane spikes aren't small, transient events produced near Curiosity, but that they are instead whiffs of larger methane releases occurring much farther away on the planet. For more than a decade, various teams using noise-riddled observations from Earthbound telescopes or interplanetary orbiters have claimed to see signs of massive methane releases in the Martian atmosphere, at varying concentrations of between ten to nearly sixty ppb. In 2009, the leader of one of those teams, Michael Mumma, a senior scientist at NASA's Goddard Space flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., announced the detection of giant, globe-girdling plumes of methane periodically venting from localized regions on the Martian surface.
Other researchers, notably Kevin Zahnle of NASA's Ames Research Center in Calif., cast doubt on the reality of the plumes. Zahnle says that the effects of Earth's atmosphere could have contaminated Mumma's telescopic data, and that the plumes' purported transience required the unlikely existence of some potent planet-wide chemical catalyst to scrub the methane from the air. Curiosity's early sniffs of seemingly methane-free Martian air were widely seen as a more definitive repudiation, since even with some unknown methane-scrubbing catalyst such huge plumes would still have left clearly detectable enhanced concentrations of the gas distributed throughout the planet's atmosphere.
Though the huge plumes he claimed in 2009 have now fallen out of favor, Mumma still suspects something like them, venting in large amounts far away from the rover, could be the source for Curiosity's methane spikes. Arguments for a weaker, more local release, he notes, rely on assumptions about wind patterns in and around Gale Crater that are not yet fully backed by available data.
"What the Curiosity results really confirm is that we still do not understand the release and persistence of methane on Mars," Mumma says. "In a nutshell, this is very exciting because it very clearly shows methane has a source on the planet."
That source, however, could also be the rover itself, which has components known to have outgassed small amounts of methane in the past. "The rover has a lot of methane in it, that is not disputed," says Zahnle, who is authoring a forthcoming commentary in Science on the findings. "The real issue is what is the source of the methane in the samples: rover or Mars?"
The Curiosity team, Webster says, has gone to heroic lengths to test against possible confounding effects from the rover, repeatedly monitoring all its relevant components for signs of methane contamination. The team even carefully analyzed rock samples from the section of Curiosity's traverse where it detected enhanced methane, just in case the rover's heavy wheels happened to crush any deposits of gas-rich material under its treads. Time after time, their results suggested the most plausible conclusion was that the methane spikes Curiosity measured were genuine signs of mysterious processes occurring elsewhere, outside of the rover's immediate vicinity.
If those processes are biological, and Martian microbes are even now belching methane from subsurface refuges, Webster believes it is within our grasp to now find out. "On Earth, bacteria are lazy, or rather, inefficient," he says. "They like to use a lighter isotope of carbon, carbon-12. So the methane they produce is depleted in a heavier isotope, carbon-13, by up to fifteen percent." If Curiosity is lucky enough to observe another methane spike, Webster argues that relatively minor tweaks to the process of gathering "enriched" air samples could allow the rover to measure the ratio of carbon-12 to carbon-13 well enough to distinguish between a biotic and abiotic source. All that's needed, essentially, is a larger number of measurements and a longer "enrichment" time for Curiosity's air samples.
Such measurements, however, face competition as steep as the climb up Mount Sharp that the rover is now attempting. The last time Curiosity sniffed the air for methane, Webster says, was five months ago.
Curiosity was meant to be a mission to study signs of habitability on ancient Mars, not signs of life on Mars in the present day, says Paul Mahaffy, a senior Curiosity team member at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. An intensive search for more Martian methane could easily prevent Curiosity accomplishing those primary goals. Other, future missions, such as Europe's ExoMars orbiter and rover launching later this decade, or NASA's next rover, a Curiosity clone slated for launch in 2020, could potentially take the next necessary steps in unraveling the mystery of Martian methane. Webster notes that instruments now exist which are a thousand times more sensitive than Curiosity's methane-sniffing kit, instruments that could in theory discern the gas's potentially biotic origins with ease. But those instruments are presently not planned for flight on any upcoming mission from NASA or any other space agency.
"We'll continue to monitor for the methane, but unfortunately these experiments are power-hungry," Mahaffy says. "They consume a lot of [Curiosity's] resources, and there is always, always a lot of geology to do."
At the same meeting at which the tantalizing methane results were announced, the Curiosity team also presented yet more evidence that, early in its life, Mars was warm and wet, far more Earthlike and probably capable of sustaining life. Alas, barring a major shift in the pace and emphasis of our present explorations, the question of whether the planet sustains life now may remain unanswered for many years to come.
Lee Billings
Lee Billings is a senior editor for space and physics at Scientific American.
The Curious Case of Proxima C
Record-Breaking Gamma Rays Reveal Secrets of the Universe's Most Powerful Explosions
Inside the World's First Underground Gravitational-Wave Detector
12 minutes ago — Caleb A. Scharf
Go from Quantum to Cosmic
Scientific American Space & Physics is a roundup of the most important stories about the universe and beyond


Different types of jewellery also have some specific care tips. For example, always undo the clasp to remove a bracelet rather than pulling it straight off (unless it is elasticated and designed in this way). For charm jewellery we recommend the use of clips to distribute the charm weight into 3 equal sections. All sterling silver will tarnish over time, but it will happen much faster when it comes into contact with agents such as perfume, salty air, sulphur, skin creams, hairspray, chlorine and acidic skin ph. The amount of tarnishing (oxidation) that occurs is dependent on the skin and care habits of the wearer. Tarnishing is therefore not a manufacturing fault.
Jewellery should be stored away from natural sunlight and heat, in a protective (lined) jewellery box or a tarnish-resistant pouch. The box in which your item came can also be useful for storage. However it is often convenient to use a jewellery box where many items can be stored together. Jewellery can also be stored in a plastic zip lock bag made of Mylar or polyethylene. Never use polyvinyl plastic bags, such as bin liners as they contain sulphur compounds, which will make sterling silver tarnish faster. Do not store your jewellery in the bathroom due to the moisture content of the air.
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text:
December 2nd, 2019 | Issue one hundred twenty-eight
An Interview with Hari Kunzru
"CULTURE IS NOT A STOREHOUSE OF STUFF; AT BIRTH, YOU DON'T GET ISSUED A BAG WITH SOME RECIPES AND SOME GREAT BOOKS AND SOME SHIT THAT IS YOURS. CULTURE IS SOMETHING YOU DO."
by Stephen Piccarella
Illustration by Tony Millionaire
5 Snaps
Stephen Piccarella
In 2003, when he published his first novel, The Impressionist, Hari Kunzru was already a recognizable enough print and TV journalist to receive a record-breaking advance. The protagonist of The Impressionist hides and reinvents his identity, assuming different names and claiming different ethnicities repeatedly in order to survive in different spaces and cultures. Although Kunzru has maintained a stable public identity for decades, in his work little is as it first appears. In Gods without Men, the story of a middle-class New York family's stay at a bed-and-breakfast in the Southwest becomes an inquiry into paranormal events and the limits of faith and reason. In White Tears, a story about two liberal arts grads opening a music studio in Brooklyn becomes a blood epic unearthing centuries of violence that have been struck from written history.
When I read one of Kunzru's novels, I find one of my own obsessions pursued to a satisfying end. White Tears connected my nerdy fascination with analog recording technology to the exploitation implicit in our cultural economies. Gods without Men, a pastiche spanning centuries, synthesized my excitement about psychedelia into a series of neat epistemological premises. In a world in which new and frightening questions emerge every day, it's startling to discover how many of them Kunzru has already anticipated, engaged with, and answered.
Kunzru has published eight books at a steady clip since 2003, and yet he still finds the time to take down any public figure who dares to present him with a weak or dubious ideological stance on Twitter, from Newt Gingrich to The New York Times. He was named one of Granta's "Best of Young British Novelists" after publishing The Impressionist, has received honors including a Somerset Maugham Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship, and served as the deputy president of English PEN. These are just the highlights.
After consuming his work for many months, with increasing enthusiasm, I finally had the opportunity to talk with Kunzru. He's busy these days with all of the above and also with raising his young children in Brooklyn, so a long meeting was out of the question. We spoke for an hour via Skype, which is a perfect platform for an author dedicated to calling the real into question: I saw his face, but never for long before it broke down into pixels. As it turns out, an hour is more than enough time for Kunzru to offer essayistic takes on ufology, blues revivalism, philosophy of mind, the decline of postmodernism, and the maddening landscape of contemporary political discourse.
I. A RECOVERING PYNCHONITE
THE BELIEVER: There's a story I've been eager to share with you. A couple of years ago, before I read White Tears or knew that a book like White Tears was going to come out, I went with a couple of musician friends to visit a man named Joe Bussard.1
HARI KUNZRU: Oh yeah, I know him, or I know of him. I've not met him.
BLVR: He played us wonderful 78 rpm records, lots of blues, and also country, gospel, and early jazz, like King Oliver. Then, a couple of hours in, he started reminiscing about a friend of his who had worked as an engineer with NASA, and he said that his friend, in the '50s, went to Area 51, where the aliens had supposedly visited us—
HK: [Laughs]
BLVR: —and that when his friend was at the facility, there were five aliens in the room, and three of them were dead, one of them was alive but not moving, and one was up and walking around the room. Joe was definitely telling us this story with no hint of irony, and I think he believed it. I don't think it's a coincidence that there's more than one person on the planet with these twin attractions to 78s and alien visitation. Do you see any connection between your sustained interests in early recorded music and UFOs?
HK: My interest in UFOs has to do with religion, really, and how people handle the unknown. I'm fascinated by the different orientations that people have toward the things that are beyond human understanding, whether those things are threatening or exciting, whether they even need to fill the space of the unknown with some sort of determinate idea, whether they're happy with not knowing as a condition. Now we're at a historical and political moment where conspiracy is part of the warp and weft of our daily lives. The UFO conspiracy is very interesting to me as a way of tracing a cultural history, so I suppose that might be where it would connect with wanting to dig up forgotten music and trying to understand minor pathways through the past through music. My excitement about UFOs isn't really a straightforward "Is anybody out there?" sort of excitement. It's much more to do with the ways the stories we tell about them have changed since the Second World War, very early on after the Second World War, when the first UFO fascination starts to be part of public consciousness and the people involved in propagating it are by and large people who have a background in spiritualism. The aliens are effectively angels—they're human looking; they're kind of higher; they're often very racialized as Aryan, beautiful white people, and they're here on a mission to save us, usually from nuclear war or our own destructive tendencies.
Then suddenly it shifts at the point when people's feelings about the state start to become more ambiguous, and you get Area 51 emerging as a site in people's imaginations. The standard ET-like Grey aliens only come along fairly late; I think they turn up in the early '60s, and they are oriented toward us as much more indeterminate. Some of them are actively hostile, they're doing experiments, they're potentially treating us like cattle, they're certainly not our protectors from a higher plane of knowledge, and you see how the UFO story propagates. The Area 51 story's really interesting as a story about the Cold War as well. There's a guy called Mark Pilkington, a British UFO researcher who spent a lot of time in the hard-core UFO subculture and who adopted an interestingly skeptical frame of mind. The UFO faction has these contacts with people from the Air Force. High-level Air Force people turn up to tip the wink to some UFO researcher to say, "I can't say publicly that you've got it right, but hey, man, you're on to something there," and this of course is the most exciting thing imaginable, a confirmation that everything they believe is possible is true. The UFO people are made to believe they're correct and that UFOs are extraterrestrial in origin, and this provides a sort of smoke screen for the various test flights and other secret military projects being done on these bases. It's deliberate disinfo, weaponizing the UFO subculture.
BLVR: Postwar paranoia was a literary theme particularly in the American novel in the '60s and '70s. I understand the first wave of paranoid literature, at least in the West, as being connected to a vaguely leftist political world view. Writers who were concerned with paranoia—Pynchon, DeLillo, et cetera—were skeptical of the government, skeptical of power. In recent years, in America and elsewhere, paranoia and conspiracy theory have really become co-opted by the right. There's this new faction of the right wing in America. All of their ideology is based on harebrained conspiracy theories like white genocide—
HK: Yeah, and QAnon2 and all that.
BLVR: Has seeing this emergence of right-wing paranoia affected the way you think about those ideas?
HK: There's two parallel strands to how I'd want to answer that. One is to do with history and one is to do with literary form. If you take the Red Scare of the '50s—which initially emanated from a right-wing political position—and the Body Snatchers genre of alien movie as a sense of ideological takeover by people from another side, there has been a historical shift in our thinking about conspiracy theory. From the moment of the new left and afterward, the '60s right through to the '80s, the conspiracies become about the government and the actions of the secret state. If you're my age, you lived through everything from Iran-Contra onward. Kennedy onward, it was already very well established that there were wheels within wheels. I would guess that the things that really shook people on the left were the COINTELPRO revelations and the idea that the state was prepared to work against domestic opponents and was prepared to murder people. That was, I imagine, very shocking for people.
In terms of literary form, DeLillo's such an interesting figure. Libra, his book about the Kennedy assassination, is one of the most sophisticated books addressing this question of plot as conspiracy versus plot as literary form. I'm a recovering Pynchonite, really. I was an eighteen-year-old fan of Pynchon and various other '60s and '70s writers with quite an antic, zany tone. I came out of quite a conservative background in terms of what literature was supposed to be and what you were supposed to write, and it felt very liberating to me to understand that you could tell bad jokes and not worry about maintaining a certain realist texture. In the '60s and '70s that zaniness connected in a political way. There's the Man and there's the kids who are kind of crazy and wild and free. That's really flipped. I think that now we don't have a sense that informational excess, and our inability to process everything and the kind of absence of stability in tone and reality, is a liberating force. I think that feels, in this political moment, like a very threatening force. In literary terms, it became domesticated as a set of forms. With high postmodernism, eventually the wheels fell off, sometime in the late '80s or early '90s. Around the time I was an undergraduate in humanities departments, Derrida was the point around which you had to argue, and this indeterminacy—that language did not relate to the world in any fixed or stable way—again was being mined for liberatory possibilities.
More recently, that lack of anchor has started to feel like a problem rather than the solution to anything. We're in an interesting moment in English-language fiction right now where we've had several years of a kind of nervousness about plot and character from a lot of writers. The autofictional trend that's been around has led a lot of people who I never would have thought had much of a problem with plot and character to suddenly declare that they, too, are sick of the fakery of fiction and want to have some sort of biographically rooted authenticity. I see that as a nervous reaction to the thinness and scary zaniness of our current moment. But I'm quite committed to the forms of fiction, actually. I'm very comfortable with making stuff up, and I think the structures of fiction are quite useful for understanding a very complex, multipolar, multifaceted world. Historically, a certain kind of fiction writer has been a bit embarrassed about fiction, because compared to contemporary art and the kind of coolness of modernism—I use coolness both in the sense of hipness and also in the sense of affectlessness and precision or tightness—fiction is in this cheesy commercial world. You have bad covers put on your stuff, and the whole thing is just desperately uncool. Novels are just never going to be reducible to a kind of modernist rigor. You can look at things like the nouveau roman as various interesting experiments that test out the novel as a formal apparatus, but essentially the novel is baggy and messy, and bits get stuck to it, and it gets mixed up with the writer's life and the writer's world in a very unsatisfactory way. As I say, I'm not self-conscious about the fact that I make things up, and I like echoing literary genre stuff. I have a past as a teenage science fiction writer. Again, Pynchon is a sort of hinterland to my writing that is not a cool hinterland. It's a kind of speculation attached to writing stories that I think is useful and can do work in our present moment.
II. "A FAKE STORY ABOUT AUTHENTICITY IS INSTANTLY FASCINATING TO ME."
BLVR: A lot of your writing is about authenticity, but specifically, in White Tears, Seth and Carter, the two young men who run a recording studio in Brooklyn, are obsessed with finding the most authentic recordings, which is a contradiction. A recording is a copy of something, but we recognize a gradation of authenticity from a Robert Johnson song on a 78 rpm vinyl record to one on an MP3. A lot of the things you were talking about, like using fiction to investigate what's happening in the real world, are playing to the same concept, using what is by definition inauthentic to touch something real. Do you think about it that way?
HK: I'm very suspicious of the ways that authenticity gets deployed culturally and politically. I've always been on the wrong end of any conversation about authenticity because of stuff to do with my ethnic background. I'm insufficiently white and insufficiently brown. When I was an undergraduate and a young writer, I was really hoping that these postmodernist ideas were going to allow us to put together a new way of understanding identity that wasn't on this spectrum between those perceived as having a "fully present" authenticity and the rest of us, who were a bit lacking or broken in some way. The limits of that theory and those politics have emerged now. The blues is sold as a signifier of authenticity first and foremost. If blues turns up in popular culture now, in a beer advert, or whatever it is, it's signing the real America, it's signing a kind of rootsiness, it's signing a kind of connection with the past. Historians of the blues are at pains to point out that this is quite a racialized history as well, because you end up with this picture of the primitive bluesman somehow channeling the sound, in a nonintellectual, nonartistic way, in a sort of savant way, rather than as a conscious artist making art. Robert Johnson spent half his time playing polkas to white audiences. He was a professional musician. He was going to change his set depending on where he was playing. If you were playing at a church picnic, you were playing holy songs. If you were playing at a barrelhouse, you were going to play blues. If you were playing for the boss's white relatives, you'd play Tin Pan Alley popular songs. These guys were very self-conscious professional artists, so that whole story about the blues is fake.
A fake story about authenticity is instantly fascinating to me. I was very, very interested when I discovered the coterie of New York record collectors in the late '40s and early '50s who essentially invented the contemporary taste for the blues,3 and the terms in which we think about it, which is to do with leftist ideas about social exclusion. Certainly it's about authenticity. I'm not speaking in favor of some old-school There is no real; let's all go skipping through the fields of signification, tra-la-la-la-la, but I'm interested in the complexity of these stories. In White Tears, I grant you, I've written a story where bad white appropriators end up in welters of blood, but it is way more complicated than just bad white people stealing from the authentic creative Black people, because those collectors and people like Joe Bussard have done extraordinary cultural work. Funnily enough, Joe Bussard's personal opinions about race are apparently not those that one might wish him to hold.
BLVR: I don't think so.
HK: There's a guy who's steeped in all this stuff, and I think he's a Trump guy, actually. That seems insane to me, but that's where we are.
BLVR: After White Tears came out, I think a lot of people did receive it as a novel by a person of color about racist white people. However, in an interview you said, "I have no business writing this book." I didn't read any reviews where anyone said that to you, but I'm wondering if there was a part of you that meant to ask or provoke this question of "Who does have the right to this story?" And "Is it me?"
HK: Yeah, absolutely. Clearly I've stumbled into the middle of something that I have no ownership over, and that whole language of ownership, which is the language with which we have been taught to frame this conversation, is causing us a lot of trouble. It seems on the surface that it's a useful language because you think intuitively that some people made some stuff and they should have rights to it and other people, who don't own that stuff, are stealing it. That sometimes leads to actual legal challenges. But then you get into quasi-legal language and it allows for quasi-legal conversations about rights and ownership and property. I think it runs into the weeds in very well-documented ways. Who judges? Who are the gatekeepers? Who is the council of the owners that gets to say who's appropriating and has the right to use what? Instantly you get into absurdities. Fiction is not possible without acts of appropriation. You cannot create a character without acts of appropriation. Anomalisa, that movie where everybody has the same face, is the kind of work you'd have if you were attempting to speak only from the position that you own. So essentially the battle is already lost; purity is not possible. When writing fiction, you are venturing forth into a situation. Whether you're understanding that in the usual kind of identity categories or not, you are appropriating. A priori, you can't deny anybody the right to attempt to imagine what they want to imagine. It doesn't seem either desirable or practical to make that prohibition. Black music has been such an important part of my life, and my absence of ownership of that music has been something I've had to work with. When I put the needle down on a dub record, a reggae record, and sing idly along to some lyric about Haile Selassie, what is it I am doing there? One of the characteristics of great art, one of the things that we want to say about great art of any kind, is that it's universal. That's almost in the concept—that it speaks outside the context in which it was made, so that means if you want to assert that, say, John Coltrane is a great artist, he has to be allowed to reach people who have no cultural connection to him or no necessary ownership of him or the tradition he comes from. If you're taking a nationalist cultural position, you're into some sticky stuff, and you're limiting the horizon. If you're saying that only certain people get to listen to and love something, then you're also in trouble, so given that the ground is so treacherous for everybody already, I think you have to find some other ways of unpacking the question to make it legible.
In terms of cultural politics, the easiest way of slicing it up is to say there's a material basis. You can follow the money. Who's getting paid? Who's able to sustain themselves by making work? Who's reviewed? Who's listened to? Who's acknowledged and recognized as great artists? That is fairly easy for us to trace. It's just about who gets to sustain themselves. Culture is not a storehouse of stuff; at birth, you don't get issued a bag with some recipes and some great books and some shit that is yours. Culture is something you do. Culture is something in which you participate. Participation as in sharing, as in a dialogic thing, is where we start to understand what's actually happening here. If you are participating, regardless of your ethnic origin or your position, if you are in that relationship of dialogue with the work, whatever it is, and if you are putting in as well as taking out, then I think that is useful and positive. "Should you write?" is a question that involves being quite honest about your personal position and the meaning of your particular artistic gesture at this historical moment. Right now, there are many areas that it seems not especially useful to hear from some people on. I would rather hear a trans writer about gender than I would a cis writer. I think a lot of the hand-wringing right-wing talk about censorship and the mob and the illiberal left is just hooey. They don't actually care about anybody getting free; what they care about is protecting their own rights, and it's very unfamiliar for some white writers to have their objectivity questioned. They are socialized to believe that their voice is in some way neutral, and that they are almost disembodied, they are capable of transcending whatever their individual position might be in order to speak universally. In a way, that's the central claim of artistic whiteness, whereas the rest of us have to inevitably think about our identities, these bloody millstones around our necks that we've always got to go, Oh, I've got to write about my identity. I've got to think about my identity. What we all want is for us all to be able to freely imagine, but without that culpable forgetting that you are an individual with a particular window on the world. I don't think that's a terrible burden for white writers to have to shoulder. It doesn't necessarily stop you from doing anything; it just means you're actually tuning into some aspects about being in the world that will probably make you a better writer. I've spent my entire life talking about identity, and nobody's ever asked Ian McEwan about his identity. I do want to say that I think this is a positive conversation. It's good. It's being presented as the sans culottes mob tearing at the ankles of the beautiful, free white artists and shackling the imagination, but it's really very good that as a culture we're having this difficult conversation. I think things are moving on, and when the smoke clears and all the silliness and hysteria get put in the past, we're going to work out that we haven't really lost anything at all, that we've gained a level of nuance and a sort of ability to be embodied and be in dialogue with one another that's really aesthetically useful.
III. THE SELF AS SCRATCHPAD
BLVR: I noticed that in White Tears and Gods without Men, questions of identity are important at the outset, and as you move through the novel, they don't go away, but they do become more and more complicated, and there comes a point in both novels where it seems that the question of being is problematized. Seth's story becomes intertwined with Charlie Shaw's, and they become indistinguishable. Jaz becomes sure that his son is not his son, and he may be correct.4 The question of political identity is important here, but are you interested at all in a psychological or philosophical question of being that is perhaps not political, or that precedes the political?
HK: Funnily enough, that is really what I'm working on at the moment. In a literary way, I got interested in what a character is a long, long time ago, and the kind of psychology that turns up in fiction, and the kinds of bogus psychology that feel comforting in a piece of fiction—explanations for character, explanations for motivation, and so on. But more recently I've been reading a lot of neurophilosophy, philosophy of mind, and becoming very interested in the ways that the whole idea of a self is kind of epiphenomenal to the way that the mind actually functions. The normal folk picture is: I decide to go pick up my flask, and my intention to pick it up activates my mind and body, and the flask gets picked up. That is not the correct picture. The self is something like a model that we project or that we use as a scratchpad for various processes that we need on our desktops at that particular moment. I'm reading quite a lot of the German philosopher Thomas Metzinger. He's a fascinating guy who's at the intersection of a lot of scientific work about the brain and a lot of philosophy-of-mind stuff, and he wants to make the case that the self doesn't exist in any real way, that the self is essentially a model, and this is fascinating and also deeply troubling for lots of very basic things that we think and feel about the world.
For my first novel, The Impressionist, I wrote a story about somebody who changes himself so thoroughly at several points during his life that it's not clear that he is substantially the same person as he was before. That's edging toward a postmodernist idea, but I was trying to keep it in the frame of somebody who's actually, in a slightly Talented Mr. Ripley–ish way, reinventing himself. I still find that really interesting to chew over. If you do commit a murder and then you're on trial, if you're not substantially the same person, or if you're not in some meaningful way the same, what is that? What is going on there? And if ideas about intention and causality in the mind are not as clear as we think, then all sorts of things start to fall apart. In the '90s, I was a graduate student and also running around in the tech counterculture scene in London, where artists and writers and tech people were thinking about the posthuman, and at that point the posthuman was a joyous liberation from the normie shackles of the everyday. Now we are heading toward something that is posthuman, and it's terrifying.
A question that's really preoccupying me at the moment is: If you no longer believe in the category of the human, what happens to human rights? If there's no dignity that is afforded the individual by virtue of being human, that opens the floodgates, doesn't it? That means if you want to make Soylent Green out of your neighbors, then you can make them into food, you can torch them, you can do whatever, and I think that's a fascinating question for fiction writers in particular, because we do have this nineteenth-century psychology that we habitually function with, and there's certain explanations for things that are felt to be correct in novels. So I'm writing a novel about a scholar of lyric poetry who starts to suspect that he has no inner life. It's funnier than White Tears, and it heads into a lot of alt-right-y stuff as well.
BLVR: We've talked a lot about authenticity, and your work is rife with indeterminacy and uncertainty, and obviously these questions preoccupy you. Your work is also concerned with the idea of faith, and different spiritual faiths, and also faith in a political sense, in aligning yourself with an ideology. Spiritual or political or otherwise, is there a belief system you feel you can adopt and commit yourself to?
HK: Off the shelf, no. I grew up outside any spiritual tradition. On one side of my family there are believing Hindus, and on the other side of my family there are reasonably serious believing Christians, so I was rather left to get on with it so as not to offend one side or the other. I tend to call myself a materialist and an atheist. I don't believe there is a realm of spirit outside the potentially knowable world. My relationship with the unknown is that it's potentially knowable, but it also fascinates me that our senses are limited things. We can detect certain spectra of light. The picture I have of the world around me is a model rather than a true, complete picture. It is an approximation that my brain is putting together and updating. From that point of view, I suppose I'm a skeptic, but I don't find that a necessarily traumatic position.
1. Joe Bussard maintains one of the largest collections of original 78 rpm records. His collection includes country, blues, and jazz singles that date back to the 1920s, many of which he acquired by "canvassing" small towns, a practice detailed in White Tears.
2. QAnon is the popular name for a conspiracy theory originally advanced on the online message board 4chan. QAnon links various powerful persons, many of them mainstream liberal politicians, to malignant activities including systematic child abuse and political conspiracy against Donald Trump, who, according to the theory, is aware of these efforts and actively working to combat them.
3. The so-called blues mafia centered around the eccentric James McKune, who lived in a single room at a YMCA on Marcy Avenue in Brooklyn. It included figures like Don Kent, Pete Whelan, and the guitarist John Fahey.
4. White Tears alternates between different narrative voices in its latter sections, recounting similar experiences in the voice of Seth, a young white music producer, and Charlie Shaw, an early-blues musician whose story is lost to history. In Gods without Men, a boy named Raj Matharu goes missing while traveling in the Southwest with his parents, Jaz and Lisa Matharu. When Raj is later returned to his parents, Jaz observes Raj's behavior and becomes suspicious that he is not the same child.
Stephen Piccarella is a writer, musician, and community organizer based in Philadelphia. His writing appears in n+1 and The New Inquiry.
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