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Photographing a Mother’s Descent into Mental Illness

by dfonis5 Posted on March 23, 2013

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Most photographers use their books as a means to an end, a delivery vehicle for their images. Photographer Joshua Lutz, by contrast, uses his latest, “Hesitating Beauty,” to tell a story. Lutz identifies as an artist who works with photographs—a fitting description given the gorgeous large-format landscapes he’s shot in the past and the way he turned this one into an artistic medium. In “Hesitating Beauty,” he employs vintage family photos, contemporary images of his mother, and text that reads like fragments of a stranger’s letters—not to mention the book’s physical format—to plunge the reader into a world in which reality appears entirely subjective. It’s not some philosophical jerkoff, but a rather painful exploration of his mother’s descent into mental illness. Here she is in one of the few vintage photos found in the book, younger than today.

Joshua Lutz/Schilt Publishing

Lutz’s first monograph, “Meadowlands,” was a sprawling object befitting the subject matter. The book itself was giant and unwieldy; its pages allowed his large-format images to stretch out. You got a little lost in his landscapes, finding beauty in the most unlikely places.

Joshua Lutz/Schilt Publishing

But “Hesitating Beauty” is appropriately stark. It’s a smallish book, about the size of a diary. Where “Meadowlands” stood wide open, arms outstretched, Lutz’s new book is tight and withdrawn—arms wrapped around itself. The format fits this very personal photo narrative of Lutz caring for his mother as she slipped from paranoia and depression into psychosis and delusion. It’s a sad book. Strong and memorable, but sad.

Joshua Lutz/Schilt Publishing

“I tried to imagine a time when the past, present and future collided,” Lutz writes, “a place where the weight of memory is heavier than reality.” Unlike other über-personal photo projects about the demise of a loved one (and there are a lot of ’em), “Hesitating Beauty” imparts the sense of setting out on a torrid sea in a small boat—or drifting in and out of consciousness and reality. There are moments of lucidity: The images and texts from Lutz’s father, the detail shots from within the hospital, and even the shots of Lutz’s mother. You know where you are and what you’re looking at.

Joshua Lutz/Schilt Publishing

But then Lutz will sweep you into a dreamscape, with images that might not be quite what they seem and text that only sometimes makes sense. Even the old family photos tinker with the concept of reality. Everyone looks happy. Dig deeper, read the text, and you quickly learn otherwise.

Even the cover image, a woman wearing pearls caught mid-blink during a portrait session, tips you off that everything within hovers on the fringe of normality. How do you use photography to describe mental illness? How can images tell the story of seeing someone you love slip gradually into a world divorced from reality?

Joshua Lutz/Schilt Publishing

“Hesitating Beauty” is not the usual coffee-table book that you pick up and leaf through casually. Yes, there are 50 or so wonderful images to be perused. But to get the full impact, you have to pick it up, spend some time with it, put it down, and then repeat—each time uncertain whether you’ll land at a moment of clarity or be lost underwater; unsure which way is up, or what is real.

Joshua Lutz/Schilt Publishing

“Hesitating Beauty” is far more than a means to an end. It’s subtle yet powerful. And it’s one of many signs that Lutz is not simply a great photographer, but a very smart one as well.

Joshua Lutz/Schilt Publishing

Schilt Publishing, 2013

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Photographing a Mother’s Descent into Mental Illness

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Louisiana Attorney General Says Angola 3 "Have Never Been Held in Solitary Confinement"

by AlvinaiTyler Posted on March 23, 2013

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This story first appeared online at Solitary Watch.

Albert Woodfox and Herman Wallace in the early 1970s, when they were placed in solitary confinement. Photo from “In the Land of the Free.”

James “Buddy” Caldwell, attorney general of the state of Louisiana, has released a statement saying unequivocally that Herman Wallace and Albert Woodfox, the two still-imprisoned members of the Angola 3, “have never been held in solitary confinement while in the Louisiana penal system.”

In fact, Wallace, now 71, and Woodfox, 66, have been in solitary for nearly 41 years, quite possibly longer than any other human beings on the planet. They were placed in solitary following the 1972 killing of a young corrections officer at Angola, and except for a few brief periods, they have remained in isolation ever since.

The statement from Caldwell follows on the heels of a ruling by a federal district court judge in New Orleans, overturning Albert Woodfox’s conviction for the third time—in this instance, on the grounds that there had been racial bias in the selection of grand jury forepersons in Louisiana at the time of his indictment. Subsequently, Amnesty International, along with other activists, mounted a campaign urging the state of Louisiana not to appeal the federal court’s ruling. In the absence of an appeal, Woodfox would have to be given a new trial or released.

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Louisiana Attorney General Says Angola 3 "Have Never Been Held in Solitary Confinement"

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Donglegate: How One Brogrammer’s Sexist Joke Led to Death Threats and Firings

by Shelby Morris Posted on March 22, 2013

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Another day, another boneheaded sexist misstep igniting a blamestorm in the tech world. The latest incident played out at the annual Python developer conference, which ended yesterday with multiple people getting fired, a woman of color enduring hundreds of violent and racist threats, apparent DDoS attacks knee-capping at least one website, and tech community outrage that’s attracted national attention.

It all started on Sunday at the PyCon event in Santa Clara, California, when Adria Richards, a female conference-goer and a technology consultant, overheard a conversation with a guy seated behind her at a panel. Richards claims their otherwise unremarkable techie chat turned sour when a neighboring guy joined in with a couple of jokes. They had to do with “forking” (copying someone else’s code) and “dongles” (little pieces of hardware), but in a way Richards found suggestive and inappropriate. Richards snapped a picture of the guys making the jokes, and posted it to Twitter. PlayHaven, a mobile-gaming site, confirmed to Mother Jones that both of the men photographed by Richards were PlayHaven employees at the time.

Richards also tweeted her seat location, a plea for someone to come by and talk to the guys in question, and a link to the PyCon Code of Conduct page, which defines unacceptable behavior at the conference (more on this later). Minutes later, a PyCon staffer came by and Richards spoke with him and a few other staffers in private. There are conflicting accounts of what happened next. In a blog post Richards posted the next day, she writes that staffers “wanted to pull the people in question from the main ballroom” and that they were escorted out. She doesn’t mention seeing them again. It was later widely reported across Twitter and tech forums that the two guys Richards pointed out to staffers were kicked out of the conference. Not so, lead conference organizer Jesse Noller told us in an email: “They were pulled aside, spoken with, and then returned to their seats to the knowledge of the staff and myself.” Noller says no one was removed from the conference due to this incident; someone was kicked for using drugs in public, indoors, but that was two weeks ago, and no one’s been removed since.â&#128;&#139;

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Donglegate: How One Brogrammer’s Sexist Joke Led to Death Threats and Firings

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We’re Measuring Energy Efficiency Wrong

by bloksaggfdflajn Posted on March 22, 2013

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This story first appeared in Slate and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

It is widely assumed that over the coming decades, increased energy efficiency will help the world meet its energy needs and reduce carbon emissions. That may be true, but recent research suggests that energy intensity—a widely used way of measuring efficiency—isn’t the right metric.

Energy intensity is a simple ratio: energy use per dollar of GDP. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the energy intensity of the U.S. economy declined by 1.6 percent per year from 1985 to 2004, suggesting that we’re doing more with less energy.

Energy companies have embraced this idea: “Energy per unit of income as measured by GDP continues to fall, and at an accelerating rate,” asserts BP. “This is true in our outlook to 2030 not only for the global average, but for almost all of the key countries and regions. The combination of energy efficiency gains and a long-term structural shift towards less energy intensive activities as economies develop underpins this trend.” Similarly, ExxonMobil’s Outlook for Energy: A View to 2040 projects that economic output will increase by 80 percent while OECD energy demand remains flat, because “global energy demand does not rise as dramatically as economic growth as a result of declining energy intensity.”

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We’re Measuring Energy Efficiency Wrong

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Meet The Agent Who Protected Presidents, the Popemobile, And the Factual Accuracy of "Olympus Has Fallen"

by Jacobi Posted on March 22, 2013

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In Olympus Has Fallen (FilmDistrict, 118 min.), highly trained and well-armed North Korean terrorists storm the White House, murder nearly every Secret Service agent in Washington, DC, and take the president hostage in the underground command center. The terrorists explode large chunks of the White House, tear down its American flag in particularly heinous fashion, kill a lot of innocent civilians, and knock over the Washington Monument in the process. And a lone agent (played by Gerard Butler) is the only one who can save the day, mostly by using sharp objects, assault weapons, and Die Hard–emulating trash-talk.

Given that the real-life White House is fairly well protected—maybe with lasers—and hasn’t been burned down since the British invaded in 1814, this film isn’t going to win awards for realism. (The assumption of North Korean military competence is also really, really funny.)

But even the most intentionally unrealistic action movies aim to get some details right. The Core, a 2003 sci-fi disaster movie about scientists who travel to the center of the Earth to set off nukes, had its very own scientific consultant. And Olympus Has Fallen director Antoine Fuqua (Training Day, Tears of the Sun) sought out a good deal of Washington and Secret Service advice on how to craft his thriller. One of the technical consultants was Dr. Joe Bannon, a former special agent with the Office of the Attorney General and Department of Justice in Los Angeles, where he also worked as an allied agent with the Secret Service.

Bannon now teaches presidential and heads of state protection—as well as a form of martial arts that combines “ancient Shaolin Wisdom with Modern Medical Science“—at the Bannon Institute of Martial Arts and Executive Security International in Colorado. And as brawny as that may sound, when he talks about protective services, Bannon blends religious convictions and psychological maxims. “I understand the terrorist mindset of willing to lay down their life for what they believe in,” Bannon told me. “Not that I agree with any attack on the United States or the White House, but I have to respect that value.”

In his long career as a special agent assisting the Secret Service, Bannon served on protection details for George W. Bush, the Clintons, the Gores, Ted Kennedy, Dianne Feinstein, the Saudi royal family, the first family of Kurdistan, Mikhail Gorbachev, and Pope John Paul II. “I provided close-quarter protection for the Popemobile when he gave a service at Mission Dolores in San Francisco in 1987,” Bannon said. “I helped him down the stairs of the Popemobile and he smiled at me and touched me on the shoulder. Everyone wanted to rub my shoulder after that to get, like, a blessing out of me.”

In his decades-long career in law enforcement and dignitary protection, he racked up a nice roster of honors and medals; on November 14, 2006, the mayor of San Francisco officially declared it “Joe Bannon Day.”

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Meet The Agent Who Protected Presidents, the Popemobile, And the Factual Accuracy of "Olympus Has Fallen"

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Do Conservatives or Liberals Have Better Gaydar?

by AmberPkk Posted on March 22, 2013

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Last week the conservative world was roiled by prominent Ohio Sen. Rob Portman’s dramatic reversal on the issue of gay marriage. Having learned two years earlier that his son, a college junior, is gay, Portman says he struggled deeply with the issue—and finally pulled a Dick Cheney, coming out politically in favor of the same-sex marriages that many grassroots conservatives find viscerally abhorrent. In an op-ed explaining his reasoning, Portman noted that he and his wife were “surprised to learn” that their son is gay—but added that they now have “a more complete picture of the son we love.”

Here’s an interesting question: How do conservatives arrive at their assumptions about who is or isn’t gay—in the absence of those people coming out to them directly?

A new paper just out in the March issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology casts surprising light on this subject.

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Do Conservatives or Liberals Have Better Gaydar?

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Will the Old Fulton Fish Market Become the Next Pike Place?

by 9ji7g4x Posted on March 22, 2013

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For nearly 200 years in Lower Manhattan, Fulton Fish Market served as a bustling, aromatic, and, late in its tenure, reportedly Mob-connected wholesaler linking the city’s restaurants and food retailers to the eastern sea board’s fisheries. Long before its emergence as a covered market in the early 19th century, the site had been a place where people gathered to trade fish and other foodstuffs. The market’s vendors moved to the Bronx in 2005, leaving behind two historic remnants, known as the Tin Building and the New Market Building.

Now there’s a battle afoot over what should become of those two abandoned city-owned edifices, which sit on the East River just south of Brooklyn Bridge at the edge of South Street Seaport, a once-vibrant commercial port that was transformed in the 1980s into a dismal mall. On the one side, there’s the folks at New Amsterdam Market, who want to transform the two-building site into a grand food market, in the style of Seattle’s Pike Place or Philadelphia’s Reading Terminal. (New Amsterdam Market hosts weekly markets outside of the old Fulton buildings, with the hope of one day running a permanent, publicly owned indoor market at the site. ) On the other, there’s Howard Hughes Corp (a real estate holding firm spun off from a company originally started by the famous magnate Howard Hughes) which is in negotiations with the city to redevelop it and is already in the process of redeveloping South Street Seaport. The company’s plans for the old fish-market sites remain murky, but aren’t likely to include a vast, city-owned food emporium.

Yes, even L.A. has a proper central market. GoTo10/Flickr

Like all land-use issues in New York City, this one is complicated. But I agree with New Amsterdam: The two historic waterfront market buildings are a glittering municipal asset, and the city should move quickly to re-establish them as a place where people assemble to buy and sell food. Municipal food markets might seem like relics from a lost pre-supermarket past, but they’re actually quite durable—and they’re surging in popularity as Americans are thinking more critically about how and what they eat. Detroit is a city perennially down on its luck, but its Eastern Market, which dates to 1891, still thrives. Same with Cleveland’s 100-year-old West Side Market, Seattle’s Pike (1907), and Philly’s Reading (1893). Even ultra-modern Los Angeles, land of highways and sprawl, has supported its downtown Grand Central Market since 1917 (and it’s now getting a makeover).

Then there’s Barcelona’s La Boqueria, London’s Borough Market , and Mexico City’s La Merced, all occupying land on which food has been traded for hundreds of years, all now occupying structures built in the 19th century, and all bustling today, drawing locals and tourists alike. Meanwhile, what Zola called the “belly of Paris,” Les Halles Market, lives on only in remnants. The 1970s-era decision to obliterate it, making way for a mall, will haunt the city forever.

London’s Borough Market, circa 1860—and still going strong today. Wikimedia Commons

In their odd status as both old-fashioned and anything-but-obsolete, city markets resemble trains and the venerable buildings where people alight to catch them. As the late historian Tony Judt put it in a gorgeous 2011 essay, trains “are perennially modern—even if they slip from sight for a while.” They already represented “modern life incarnate by the 1840s — hence their appeal to ‘modernist’ painters,” he writes. And yet, “the Japanese Shinkansen and the French TGV are the very icons of technological wizardry and high comfort at 190 mph today.”

Judt also noted the magnificent durability of old train stations—when they haven’t been sacrificed to the wrecking ball like Manhattan’s original Penn Station. Mentioning Paris’ Gare de l’Est (1852), London’s Paddington Station (1854), Bombay’s Victoria Station (1887), and Zurich’s Hauptbahnhof (1893), Judt notes that “they work in ways fundamentally identical to the way they worked when they were first built. This is a testament to the quality of their design and construction, of course; but it also speaks to their perennial contemporaneity. They do not become ‘out of date.’ “

Judt’s description captures both the romance and enduring utility of city markets. As the explosive growth of farmers markets—up more than fourfold since 1994—shows, more and more Americans want to eat food that’s an expression of their surrounding landscape, processed, prepared, and vended when possible by people around them. The popularity of farmers markets also suggests that consumers want to buy food in interesting spaces that put them face-to-face with independent vendors. A covered, year-round market, teeming with purveyors and producers of regionally sourced veggies, cheese, meat, and pickled foods, would fill that role even better than Manhattan’s uncovered, four-days-per-week Union Square Greenmarket can.

Barcelona’s La Boqueria, thronged as usual. Ulf Liljankoski/Flickr

And such a food market would leverage and showcase the city’s food-manufacturing revival, which the New York City Economic Development Corp calls a “key component of the City’s economy and one of the City’s industrial success stories.” As of 2011, New York housed 1,000 food manufacturing businesses, employing 14,000 people and generating $2.9 billion in sales, NYECD claims. (In a 2010 post, I wrote about the economic possibilities and limits of the city’s budding food-artisan movement.)

On Wednesday, a small breakthrough in the fight over Fulton emerged. Under pressure from supporters of the Fulton market idea, who had swarmed a hearing on the South Street Seaport redevelopment a week before, the NY City Council announced it had reached deal with the Howard Hughes Corp on the redevelopment on one of the old Fulton market’s historic buildings, the Tin Building. According to a Council press release, reprinted here, Howard Hughes agreed that “any proposal for a Mixed Use Project at the Tin Building must include a food market occupying at least 10,000 square feet of floor space that includes locally and regionally sourced food items that are sold by multiple vendors and is open to the public seven days a week.”

That’s a start, but it’s not adequate. Robert Lavalva, president of New Amsterdam Market, told me that the two remaining market buildings occupy a combined 50,000 square feet—vs. 180,000 square feet for London’s Borough Market, he added. Cutting down the remaining Fulton footprint to a fifth of its potential total is a cramped vision for what should be a grand market. Lalvalva vowed to me that the fight to restore the full market will continue. I hope it does.

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Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods Won’t Sell GM Salmon

by John Basset Posted on March 21, 2013

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This story first appeared on the Guardian website.

A number of US supermarket chains pledged on Wednesday not to sell genetically modified salmon, in a sign of growing public concern about engineered foods on the dinner table.

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is in the final stages of deciding whether to allow GM salmon on to the market. If approved, AquaBounty Technology’s salmon would be the first genetically engineered animal to enter the food supply.

The company combined genes from two species of salmon with a pouter eel to produce a fish it says it can bring to market twice as fast as conventional salmon.

The GM salmon is the first in some 30 other species of genetically engineered fish under development, including tilapia. Researchers are also working to bring GM cows, chickens, and pigs to market.

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Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods Won’t Sell GM Salmon

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Former Obama Official Compares Glenn Beck’s Attacks to Orwell’s "Two Minutes Hates"

by OfeliawWeeks Posted on March 21, 2013

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In a new book, former senior Obama administration official Cass Sunstein compares former Fox News host Glenn Beck’s harsh attacks on his record to George Orwell’s 1984, and blasts what he calls the “the true terribleness of the contemporary confirmation process.”

Sunstein, a former law professor at Harvard and the University of Chicago, was nominated in 2009 to be director of the little-known Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs—a job that quickly took on the sobriquet of “regulatory czar.” His long record of books and speeches quickly became fodder for Beck, who dubbed Sunstein “the most dangerous man in America.” In his soon-to-be-released book, Simpler: The Future of Government, Sunstein notes that Beck “developed what appeared to be a kind of obsession with me” and says that the unrelenting criticism from this tea party leader and other conservative pundits triggered more threatening messages:

In Orwell’s 1984, there is a brilliant, powerful, and frightening scene of the “Two Minutes Hate,” in which party members must watch a film depicting national enemies. (As it happens, the leading enemy is named Goldstein.) At times, Beck’s attacks on me, featuring my smiling face, were not entirely unlike those scenes. A new website was created, stopsunstein.com, filled with inflammatory quotations, some taken out of context to suggest that I endorsed views that I rejected and was merely describing.

I began to receive a lot of hate mail, including death threats, at my unlisted home address. One of them stated, “If I were you I would resign immediately. A well-paid individual, who is armed, knows where you live.”

Beck wasn’t the only right-wing leader who had Sunstein in his sights. In 2009, Wayne LaPierre, the National Rifle Association’s executive vice president, bashed Sunstein as “a radical animal rights extremist who makes PETA look like cheerleaders with pooper-scoopers,” and he alleged that Sunstein “wants to give legal standing to animals so they can sue you for eating meat.”

In his book, Sunstein’s response to the attacks from hunting and agriculture groups is succinct: “OMG.”

Despite all the conservative opposition to Sunstein, he survived the confirmation process and was approved by the Senate on a 57-40 vote—after having to ensure fence-sitting senators he would not in his new post ban hunting or steal guns. Following the vote, he met with Obama in the Oval Office, and Rahm Emanuel greeted him with a sarcastic exclamation: “Fifty-seven to 40! That’s a landslide!”

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Former Obama Official Compares Glenn Beck’s Attacks to Orwell’s "Two Minutes Hates"

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And the Most Outrageous Neocon Iraq War Anniversary Remark Is…

by HartkePoundstone568 Posted on March 20, 2013

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The past week has brought about a ten-years-after review of the Iraq war—particularly an examination of how the Bush-Cheney administration sold the war prior to the invasion launched on March 19, 2003. Pundits and politicians have relived those days—and somberly reconsidered the run-up to the war, the role of the media in enabling the swindle, and the consequences of that military action. MSNBC has aired a documentary based on the book I co-wrote with Michael Isikoff, Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War. Showtime featured a documentary on Dick Cheney that centered on the war. The Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University released a study noting that the war cost US taxpayers $2.2 trillion and consumed the lives of 4,488 members of the US armed services and at least 123,000 to 134,000 Iraqi civilians.

One of the most shocking reactions to the anniversary came—perhaps no surprise—from one of the leading neoconservative drum majors for the war, Richard Perle. As a member of the Defense Policy Board advisory committee, Perle, who had been a hawk’s-hawk assistant secretary of defense during the Reagan years, began calling for war in Iraq nanoseconds after September 11. He told CNN, “Even if we cannot prove to the standard that we enjoy in our own civil society they are involved, we do know, for example, that Saddam Hussein has ties to Osama bin Laden. That can be documented.” In 2002, he suggested a war against Iraq would be a cakewalk: “It isn’t going to be over in 24 hours, but it isn’t going to be months either.” He asserted Saddam was “working feverishly to acquire nuclear weapons.” He claimed the post-invasion reconstruction in Iraq would be self-financing. He got everything wrong.

On Wednesday morning, NPR’s Renee Montagne interviewed Perle. It wasn’t a grilling. Perle was allowed to explain his Iraq war fever, noting that “we had intelligence assessments” indicating Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. He pleaded his case by remarking that after 9/11, “You ask yourself what could happen next, you do the obvious thing….The Bush administration made a list of potential threats and on that list the single most important potential threat was another attack with a weapon of mass destruction. So then you make a list of who has weapons of mass destruction and who might be motivated either to attack or enable someone else to attack the US. And Iraq was clearly on that list.” Perle then off-handedly observed, “It’s easy a decade later to say, well, it turned out this fact or that presumption was wrong.” He insisted that the biggest “blunder” with Iraq was the post-invasion occupation.

This is all standard fare for a neocon who won’t let go. But the final exchange of the interview was a chilling driveway moment:

Montagne: Ten years later, nearly 5000 American troops dead, thousands more with wounds, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis dead or wounded. When you think about this, was it worth it?

Perle: I’ve got to say I think that is not a reasonable question. What we did at the time was done with the belief that it was necessary to protect this nation. You can’t a decade later go back and say we shouldn’t have done that.

That was cold. In the Showtime documentary, Cheney predictably expresses no regrets, saying, “I did what I did. It’s all on the public record, and I feel very good about it. If I had it to do over again, I’d do it in a minute.” Yet here is Perle going beyond no-regrets to deny it is even worthwhile to consider the human costs of the war when assessing the decision to invade Iraq. His comment is modern-day Strangelove and yet another reason he deserves the nickname he earned in the 1980s: the Prince of Darkness. What transpires within Perle’s soul, ultimately, is not all that important. The true tragedy is that anyone would seek—let alone heed—the advice of a man so averse to considering a basic (and moral) calculation.

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And the Most Outrageous Neocon Iraq War Anniversary Remark Is…

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