Robert Rauschenberg, Titan of American Art, Is Dead at 82

One of the greatest and most protean and influential artists of the modern era has died, at age 82, on May 12. Robert Rauschenberg gave new meaning to what constitutes art, and even what an artist is. Here's a tribute from the NY Times. - MS

(the artist at his studio and home on Captiva Island, Florida, 2005. Photo, by Tony Cenicola, NYT)

By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN, New York Times
Robert Rauschenberg, the irrepressibly prolific American artist who time and again reshaped art in the 20th century, died Monday night. He was 82.
His death was confirmed by his gallery, PaceWildenstein in Manhattan.
Mr. Rauschenberg’s work gave new meaning to sculpture. “Canyon,” (below) for instance, consisted of a stuffed bald eagle attached to a canvas. “Monogram” was a stuffed Angora goat girdled by a tire atop a painted panel. “Bed” entailed a quilt, sheet and pillow, slathered with paint, as if soaked in blood, framed on the wall. They all became icons of postwar modernism.
A painter, photographer, printmaker, choreographer, onstage performer, set designer and, in later years, even a composer, Mr. Rauschenberg defied the traditional idea that an artist stick to one medium or style. He pushed, prodded and sometimes reconceived all the mediums in which he worked.
Building on the legacies of Marcel Duchamp, Kurt Schwitters, Joseph Cornell and others, he thereby helped to obscure the lines between painting and sculpture, painting and photography, photography and printmaking, sculpture and photography, sculpture and dance, sculpture and technology, technology and performance art — not to mention between art and life.
Mr. Rauschenberg was also instrumental in pushing American art onward from Abstract Expressionism, the dominant movement when he emerged during the early 1950s. He became a transformative link between artists like Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning and those who came next, artists identified with Pop, Conceptualism, Happenings, Process Art and other new kinds of art in which he played a signal role.
No American artist, Jasper Johns once said, invented more than Mr. Rauschenberg. Mr. Johns, John Cage, Merce Cunningham and Mr. Rauschenberg, without sharing exactly the same point of view, collectively defined this new era of experimentation in American culture. Apropos of Mr. Rauschenberg, Cage once said, “Beauty is now underfoot wherever we take the trouble to look.”
Cage meant that people had come to see, through Mr. Rauschenberg’s efforts, not just that anything, including junk on the street, could be the stuff of art (this wasn’t itself new), but that it could be the stuff of an art aspiring to be beautiful — that there was a potential poetics even in consumer glut, which Mr. Rauschenberg celebrated. “I really feel sorry for people who think things like soap dishes or mirrors or Coke bottles are ugly,” he once said, “because they’re surrounded by things like that all day long, and it must make them miserable.”
The remark reflected the optimism and generosity of spirit that Mr. Rauschenberg became known for. His work was likened to a Saint Bernard: uninhibited and mostly good-natured. He could be the same way in person. When he became rich, he gave millions of dollars to charities for women, children, medical research, other artists and Democratic politicians.
A brash, garrulous, hard-drinking, open-faced Southerner, he had a charm and peculiar Delphic felicity with language that nevertheless masked a complex personality and an equally multilayered emotional approach to art, which evolved as his stature did. Having begun by making quirky small-scale assemblages out of junk he found on the street in downtown Manhattan, he spent increasing time in his later years, after he had become successful and famous, on vast international, ambassadorial-like projects and collaborations.
Conceived in his immense studio on the island of Captiva, Fla., these projects were of enormous size and ambition; for many years he worked on a project that grew literally to exceed the length of its title, “The 1/4 Mile or 2 Furlong Piece.” They generally did not live up to his earlier achievements. Even so, he maintained an equanimity toward the results. Protean productivity went along with risk, he believed, and risk sometimes meant failure.
The process — an improvisatory, counterintuitive way of doing things — was always what mattered most to him. “Screwing things up is a virtue,” he said when he was 74. “Being correct is never the point. I have an almost fanatically correct assistant, and by the time she re-spells my words and corrects my punctuation, I can’t read what I wrote. Being right can stop all the momentum of a very interesting idea.”
This attitude also inclined him, as the painter Jack Tworkov once said, “to see beyond what others have decided should be the limits of art.”
He “keeps asking the question — and it’s a terrific question philosophically, whether or not the results are great art,” Tworkov said, “and his asking it has influenced a whole generation of artists.”
That generation was the one that broke from Pollock and company. Mr. Rauschenberg maintained a deep but mischievous respect for these Abstract Expressionist heroes like de Kooning and Barnett Newman. Famously, he once painstakingly erased a drawing by de Kooning, an act both of destruction and devotion. Critics regarded the all-black paintings and all-red paintings he made in the early 1950s as spoofs of de Kooning and Pollock. The paintings had roiling, bubbled surfaces made from the torn scraps of newspapers embedded in paint.
But these were just as much homages as they were parodies. De Kooning, himself a parodist, had incorporated bits of newspapers as flotsam in pictures, and Pollock stuck cigarette butts to canvases.
Mr. Rauschenberg’s “Automobile Tire Print,” from the early 50’s — resulting from Cage’s driving an inked tire of a Model A Ford over 20 sheets of white paper — poked fun at Newman’s famous “zip” paintings.
At the same time, Mr. Rauschenberg was expanding on Newman’s art. The tire print transformed Newman’s zip — an abstract line against a monochrome backdrop with spiritual pretensions — into an artifact of everyday culture, which for Mr. Rauschenberg had its own transcendent dimension.
Mr. Rauschenberg frequently alluded to cars and spaceships, even incorporating real tires and bicycles, into his art. This partly reflected his own restless, peripatetic imagination. The idea of movement was logically extended when he took up dance and performance.

Photo: Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times

"Rebus". 1955

There was, beneath this, a darkness to many of his works, notwithstanding their irreverence. “Bed” was gothic. The all-black paintings were solemn and shuttered. The red paintings looked charred, with strips of fabric, akin to bandages, from which paint dripped, like blood. “Interview,” which resembled a cabinet or closet with a door, enclosing photographs of toreros, a pinup, a Michelangelo nude, a fork and a softball, suggested some black-humored encoded erotic message.
There were many other images of downtrodden and lonely people, rapt in thought; pictures of ancient frescoes, out of focus as if half remembered; photographs of forlorn, neglected places; bits and pieces of faraway places conveying a kind of nostalgia or remoteness. In bringing these things together, the art implied consolation.
Mr. Rauschenberg, who knew that not everybody found it easy to grasp the open-endedness of his work, once described to the writer Calvin Tomkins an encounter with a woman who had reacted skeptically to “Monogram” and “Bed” in his 1963 retrospective at the Jewish Museum, one of the events that secured Mr. Rauschenberg’s reputation: “To her, all my decisions seemed absolutely arbitrary — as though I could just as well have selected anything at all — and therefore there was no meaning, and that made it ugly.
“So I told her that if I were to describe the way she was dressed, it might sound very much like what she’d been saying. For instance, she had feathers on her head. And she had this enamel brooch with a picture of ‘The Blue Boy’ on it pinned to her breast. And around her neck she had on what she would call mink but what could also be described as the skin of a dead animal. Well, at first she was a little offended by this, I think, but then later she came back and said she was beginning to understand.”
Milton Ernest Rauschenberg was born on Oct. 22, 1925, in Port Arthur, Tex., a small refinery town where “it was very easy to grow up without ever seeing a painting,” he said. (In adulthood he renamed himself Robert.) His grandfather, a doctor who immigrated from Germany, had settled in Texas and married a full-blooded Cherokee. His father, Ernest, worked for a local utility company. The family lived so frugally that his mother, Dora, made him shirts out of scraps of fabric. Once she made herself a skirt out of the back of the suit that her younger brother was buried in. She didn’t want the material to go to waste.
For his high school graduation present, Mr. Rauschenberg wanted a ready-made shirt, his first. All this shaped his art eventually. A decade or so later he made history with his own assemblages of scraps and ready-mades: sculptures and music boxes made of packing crates, rocks and rope; and paintings like “Yoicks” (photo, Whitney Museium, r.) sewn from fabric strips. He loved making something out of nothing.
He studied pharmacology briefly at the University of Texas in Austin before he was drafted during World War II. He saw his first paintings at the Huntington Gallery in California while stationed in San Diego as a medical technician in the Navy Hospital Corps, and it occurred to him that it was possible to become a painter.
He attended the Kansas City Art Institute on the GI Bill, traveled to Paris and enrolled at the Académie Julian, where he met Susan Weil, a young painter from New York who was to enter Black Mountain College in North Carolina. Having read about and come to admire Josef Albers, then the head of fine arts at Black Mountain, Mr. Rauschenberg saved enough money to join her.
Albers, a disciplinarian and strict modernist who, shocked by his student, later disavowed ever even knowing Mr. Rauschenberg, was on the other hand recalled by Mr. Rauschenberg as “a beautiful teacher and an impossible person.”
“He wasn’t easy to talk to, and I found his criticism so excruciating and so devastating that I never asked for it,” Mr. Rauschenberg added. “Years later, though, I’m still learning what he taught me.”
Among other things, he learned to maintain an open mind toward materials and new media, which Albers endorsed. Mr. Rauschenberg also gained a respect for the grid as an essential compositional organizing tool.
For a while, he moved between New York, where he studied at the Art Students League with Vaclav Vytlacil and Morris Kantor, and Black Mountain. During the spring of 1950, he and Ms. Weil married. The marriage lasted two years, during which they had a son, Christopher, who survives him along with Mr. Rauschenberg’s companion, Darryl Pottorf.
Mr. Rauschenberg experimented at the time with blueprint paper to produce silhouette negatives. The pictures were published in Life magazine in 1951; after that Mr. Rauschenberg was given his first solo show, at the influential Betty Parsons Gallery. “Everyone was trying to give up European aesthetics,” he recalled, meaning Picasso, the Surrealists and Matisse. “That was the struggle, and it was reflected in the fear of collectors and critics. John Cage said that fear in life is the fear of change. If I may add to that: nothing can avoid changing. It’s the only thing you can count on. Because life doesn’t have any other possibility, everyone can be measured by his adaptability to change.”
Cage acquired a painting from the Betty Parsons show. Aside from that, Mr. Rauschenberg sold absolutely nothing. Grateful, he agreed to host Cage at his loft. As Mr. Rauschenberg liked to tell the story, the only place to sit was on a mattress. Cage started to itch. He called Mr. Rauschenberg afterward to tell him that his mattress must have bedbugs and that, as Cage was going away for a while, Mr. Rauschenberg could stay at his place. Mr. Rauschenberg accepted the offer. In return, he decided he would touch up the painting Cage had acquired, as a kind of thank you, painting it all-black, being in the midst of his new, all-black period. When Cage returned, he was not amused.
“We both thought, ‘Here was somebody crazier than I am,’ ” Mr. Rauschenberg recalled. In 1952 Mr. Rauschenberg switched to all-white paintings, which were, in retrospect, spiritually akin to Cage’s famous silent piece of music, during which a pianist sits for 4 minutes and 33 seconds at the keyboard without making a sound. Mr. Rauschenberg’s paintings, like the music, in a sense became both Rorschachs and backdrops for ambient, random events like passing shadows. “I always thought of the white paintings as being not passive but very — well, hypersensitive,” he told an interviewer in 1963. “So that people could look at them and almost see how many people were in the room by the shadows cast, or what time of day it was.”
Kicking around Europe and North Africa with the artist Cy Twombly for a few months after that, he began to collect and assemble objects — bits of rope, stones, sticks, bones — which he showed to a dealer in Rome who exhibited them under the title “scatole contemplative,” or thought boxes. They were shown in Florence, where an outraged critic suggested that Mr. Rauschenberg toss them in the river. The artist thought that sounded like a good idea. So, saving a few scatole for himself and friends, he found a secluded spot on the Arno. “‘I took your advice,’’ he wrote to the critic.
Yet the scatole were crucial to his development, setting the stage for bigger, more elaborate assemblages like ‘“Monogram.’’ Back in New York, Mr. Rauschenberg showed his all-black and all-white paintings, then his erased de Kooning, which de Kooning had given to him to erase, a gesture that Mr. Rauschenberg found astonishingly generous, all of which enhanced his reputation as the new enfant terrible of the art world.
Around that time he also met Mr. Johns, then unknown, who had a studio in the same building on Pearl Street where Mr. Rauschenberg had a loft. The intimacy of their relationship over the next years, a consuming subject for later biographers and historians, coincided with the production by the two of them of some of the most groundbreaking works of postwar art.
In Mr. Rauschenberg’s famous words, they gave each other “permission to do what we wanted.’’ Living together in a succession of lofts in Lower Manhattan until the 1960’s, they exchanged ideas and supported themselves designing window displays for Tiffany & Company and Bonwit Teller under the collaborative pseudonym Matson Jones.
Along with the combines, Mr. Rauschenberg in that period developed a transfer drawing technique, dissolving printed images from newspapers and magazines with a solvent and then rubbing them onto paper with a pencil. The process, used for works like “34 Drawings for Dante’s ‘Inferno’,” created the impression of something fugitive, exquisite and secretive. Perhaps there was an autobiographical and sensual aspect to this. It let him combine images on a surface to a kind of surreal effect, which became the basis for works he made throughout his later career, when he adapted the transfer method to canvas.
Ashley Chen, with other Merce Cunningham dancers, performing against a backdrop by Robert Rauschenberg.

Instrumental in this technical evolution back then was Tatyana Grossman, who encouraged and guided him as he made prints at her workshop, Universal Limited Art Editions, on Long Island; he also began a long relationship with the Gemini G.E.L. workshop in Los Angeles, producing lithographs like the 1970 “Stoned Moon” series, with its references to the moon landing. His association with theater and dance had already begun by the 1950s, when he began designing sets and costumes for Cunningham, Paul Taylor and Trisha Brown and for his own productions. In 1963, he choreographed “Pelican,’’ in which he performed on roller skates wearing a parachute and helmet of his design to the accompaniment of a taped collage of sound. This fascination both with collaboration and with mixing art with technologies dovetailed with yet another endeavor. With Billy Klüver, an engineer at Bell Telephone Laboratories, he started Experiments in Art and Technology, a nonprofit foundation to foster collaborations between artists and scientists.
In 1964, he toured Europe and Asia with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, the same year he exhibited at the Whitechapel Gallery in London and the Venice Biennale as the United States representative. That sealed his international renown. The Sunday Telegraph in London hailed him as “the most important American artist since Jackson Pollock.’’ He walked off with the international grand prize in Venice, the first modern American to win it. Mr. Rauschenberg had, almost despite himself, become an institution.
Major exhibitions followed every decade after that, including one at the Pompidou Center in Paris in 1981, another at the Guggenheim in 1997 and yet another that landed at the Metropolitan Museum in 2005.
. When he wasn’t traveling in later years, he was in Captiva, a slender island off Florida’s Gulf coast, living at first in a modest beach house and working out of a small studio. In time he became Captiva’s biggest residential landowner while also maintaining a town house in Greenwich Village back in New York. He acquired the land in Captiva by buying adjacent properties from elderly neighbors whom he let live rent-free in their houses, which he maintained for them. He accumulated 35 acres, 1,000 feet of beach front and nine houses and studios, including a 17,000-square-foot two-story studio overlooking a swimming pool. He owned almost all that remained of tropical jungle on the island.
“I usually work in a direction until I know how to do it, then I stop,” he said in an interview in the giant studio on Captiva in 2000. “At the time that I am bored or understand — I use those words interchangeably — another appetite has formed. A lot of people try to think up ideas. I’m not one. I’d rather accept the irresistible possibilities of what I can’t ignore.”
He added: “Anything you do will be an abuse of somebody else’s aesthetics. I think you’re born an artist or not. I couldn’t have learned it. And I hope I never do because knowing more only encourages your limitations.”

1968 Looms on the Large Screen at Lincoln Center Retrospective

The Spirit of ’68
There can be no avoiding the cataclysmic social, political and cultural events of 1968, and the shadows linger still, today, 40 years later. While the student protests of Paris are most profound, almost leading to the overthrow of the deGaulle government, students throughout the world were at the ramparts, in America, Mexico, Prague, and elsewhere. The cinema in France played a prominent role, and film critic A.O. Scott reviews what Lincoln Center and the Film Forum in New York are screening to commemorate the year. - MS
By A. O. SCOTT
NY Times
At least according to legend, the “events of May” — the strikes and disturbances that convulsed France in the spring of 1968 — began at the movies. On Feb. 9 Henri Langlois (photo, r.), president of the National Cinémathèque Française in Paris and a shambling, revered godfather of the French New Wave, was removed from his post by André Malraux (photo, l.), the minister of culture in Charles de Gaulle’s government. Young cinephiles reacted with outrage, and their angry protests flowed into a tide of political and social discontent that quickly reached the flood stage.
Three months later the country was engulfed in riots, work stoppages and mass demonstrations. Some of France’s most venerable traditions and institutions seemed to be under assault, and the Cannes Film Festival, the nation’s glamorous and exalted cinematic rite of spring, was hardly immune. The festival came to a halt on May 19, after a group of filmmakers, including Jean-Luc Godard (photo, r.) and François Truffaut (photo, l.), professing solidarity with insurgent students and workers, rushed the stage at the Palais des Festivals and held down the curtain, preventing the scheduled screening from taking place.
Next month some of the entries from that aborted 21st Cannes festival will be shown, belatedly, at the 61st. This is just one of many film-world commemorations of the 40th anniversary of a singularly tumultuous year.
New Yorkers can mark the occasion with two rich and wide-ranging programs that aim to capture, on screen, the spirit of that bygone age. One, at Film Forum (Friday through June 5), is devoted to Mr. Godard in the 1960s, when he was at the height of his influence, productivity and creative power. The other, at Lincoln Center (Tuesday through May 14), stretches across geography, time and genre: from Paris and Chicago to Hungary, Japan and Brazil; from journalistic documentaries to agitprop and experimental theater; from defiant in-the-moment statements of revolutionary zeal to somber post-mortem contemplations of ideological exhaustion and political defeat.
Such commemorations offer an opportunity to brush up on history and revive perennial debates: about Western imperialism and third world resistance; about the counterculture and consumer capitalism; about sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll. But there is more going on than a global “Big Chill” moment. To rediscover 40 years later some of the cinematic experiments of 1968 is to be amazed at how raw, how urgent, how disarmingly alive these films are.
More than any other art form, cinema captured the energy, the truth, of the times. To an extent rarely matched before or since, filmmakers did not simply record the upheavals and crises of the time; they were participants and catalysts. None more so than Mr. Godard. It seems apt that the Film Forum and Lincoln Center programs share “La Chinoise,” (see trailer here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wI4WxJb-uRU ) one of a flurry of films he began, completed or released in 1968, and one in which he indulges his fondness for epigrams and proverbs. One of his slogans proclaims that with vague ideas, we need clear images.
Contemplating 1968 after 40 years, it seems we have plenty of both: an increasingly blurry and sentimental (if also sometimes cautionary) notion of “the ’60s” accompanied by sharp and dramatic images of exemplary events. Start with the Tet offensive at the end of January; segue into the assassinations of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in April and Senator Robert F. Kennedy in June. Between them, the French événements and the student uprising at Columbia University (seen in photo at r., April 23, 1968).
In the summer, a glimpse of the massacre of student demonstrators by Mexican soldiers at the Tlatelolco Plaza, a bloody prelude to the Mexico City Olympics where Tommie Smith and John Carlos offered black power salutes from the medal stand. August brings the Democratic convention in Chicago, overwhelmed by anti-war demonstrations and a police riot.
That same month, Soviet tanks arrive in Prague to smash the human face of Czech socialism. And in November, the “silent majority,” recoiling from the spectacle of anarchy and disorder in the streets, elects Richard M. Nixon president of the United States. Swirl it all together with a soundtrack of slogans and classic rock songs. The whole world is watching! Be realistic: Demand the impossible! There’s something happening here; what it is ain’t exactly clear.
And neither is “La Chinoise.” By turns heady, charming, infuriating and impenetrable — a Godard film, in other words — it represents its moment with an authenticity that is both undeniable and hard to specify. The political passions of the young characters contribute to this feeling, of course, but Mr. Godard is not simply dramatizing a chapter in the lives of good-looking people in the throes of militancy.
To the extent that a narrative can be discerned, it is fractured and oblique. The cast members — including the exquisitely pouty Juliet Berto, a fixture of Godard’s universe at the time, and Jean-Pierre Léaud, the perpetual male ingénue of the nouvelle vague — quote from literary texts and declaim didactic speeches, their exchanges interrupted by archival and contemporary documentary footage of war and disturbance. Moments of unvarnished, appropriated reality alternate with sequences of arch and self-conscious theater. (The same methods inform “Le Gai Savoir,” which also stars Mr. Léaud and Ms. Berto (photo, l.) , and “Un Film Commes les Autres.”) “We must start again from zero.” “No, we must first go back to zero.” The beginning of Godard’s farewell to narrative, with Jean-Pierre Léaud and Juliet Berto meeting after hours in a TV studio to embark on seven dialogues on the relationship between politics and film, with street scenes occasionally intercut.

The series at Film Forum is called “Godard’s 60s,” and the possessive seems entirely appropriate. Mr. Godard, now 77, was surely the most widely imitated and ferociously debated filmmaker of the decade, and a strong case can be made that he was the era’s single most influential artist in any medium. From “Breathless” (photo r.) in 1960 to “Le Gai Savoir” in 1969, Mr. Godard was a cinematic perpetual-motion machine, completing 23 features and contributing to a number of omnibus and anthology films. This rate of production was not just a result of a uniquely accelerated artistic metabolism but also, and more decisively, the enactment of an aesthetic principle. Cinema, for Godard in the ’60s, was an art of the present tense, which meant that an individual film was not a framed and finished work but rather something more like an essay: provisional, disjunctive and almost by definition incomplete.
Mr. Godard was hardly the only filmmaker of the era who embraced an open-ended, experimental conception of the medium. A speech at the end of “Le Gai Savoir” suggests that he saw himself as part of a loose international fraternity of iconoclastic filmmakers, including Bernardo Bertolucci in Italy and Glauber Rocha (photo, r.), the father of Latin American cinema novo, in Brazil. A strong cumulative impression left by the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s “1968: An International Perspective” is that the political and cultural paroxysms of the time were accompanied by and refracted through a revolution in cinematic form and technique, one that leapt over boundaries of language and nation and fed on similar impulses in the other arts.
In the avant-garde theater, for instance, the distinctions between spectacle and audience, between ritual and performance, were coming under sustained and lively assault.

In the world of letters, books like Norman Mailer’s “Armies of the Night” trampled conventional distinctions between fiction and reportage, as well as those between subjective exploration and the objective analysis of events.

American movies, partly because of the conservatism of the Hollywood

studios, lagged behind their counterparts in other countries. Perhaps the most famous collision between life and art in an American film is Haskell Wexler’s “Medium Cool,” in which the unscripted violence of Chicago during the convention erupts into the fictional tale of a journalist chasing down breaking news. As the billy clubs and tear-gas canisters start to fly, the microphone picks up a warning from off camera: “Watch out, Haskell. It’s real.”
But in Chicago and elsewhere, real events frequently contained elements of spectacle and performance. Some organizers of the antiwar protests, Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin in particular, explicitly conceived of their actions as a kind of self-conscious improvisational theater. This traffic between politics and theatrical performance is explored from the other direction in “Dionysus in 69,” Brian De Palma’s split-screen filmed record of the Performance Group’s production of “The Bacchae” by Euripides. Some of the audience is pulled into a mock orgy with members of the cast, who periodically shed their roles along with their clothes. At the end everyone bursts out of the theater into the street in a travesty of political ardor, proclaiming Dionysus, god of wine and mischief (played by William Finley, Mr. De Palma’s future Phantom of the Paradise), to be their standard-bearer in the 1968 presidential election. (In Chicago, the Yippies would try to nominate a pig.)
What is most striking in retrospect — what seems oddest and in a way most touching about these evocations of revelry and riot — is the spirit of asceticism, of earnest and passionate seriousness, driving the wanton experimentation. To return to Mr. Godard for a moment: His ’68-vintage films are playful, to be sure (“Weekend” in particular is full of barbed jokes and apocalyptic satire), but they are also a lot of work to watch. And the same can be said of many other films in the Lincoln Center program, from “WR: Mysteries of the Organism,” Dusan Makavejev’s anarchic sexual-political tour de force (inspired by the maverick psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich), to “Antonio das Mortes,” Glauber Rocha’s ferocious populist folk epic, to “It Is Not the Homosexual Who Is Perverse, but the Society in Which He Lives,” Rosa von Praunheim’s deliriously campy, painfully serious critique of gay life in bourgeois society.
To watch these films requires a kind of focused, self-denying, active attention that might best be described as revolutionary discipline. The experience is a rigorous and sometimes punishing one that seems meant to put the viewer in the position of sharing, rather than merely witnessing, what is happening on the screen. Watching “La Chinoise,’’ “Un Film Commes les Autres” and “Le Gai Savoir” in sequence is like sitting through an endless series of cell meetings whose agendas are as inscrutable as they are pressing.
A lot of the action in these movies turns out to be talk. Mr. von Praunheim’s movie, an educational documentary in the guise of a sexploitation picture (or vice versa), ends with a scene that seems at once to celebrate and to parody the radical politics of the time. A bunch of men sit around naked, chain-smoking and patiently criticizing both traditional morality and homosexual behavior, proposing alliances between gay activists and factory workers as a substitute for the pursuit of pleasure and declaring an ideal of being “erotically free and socially engaged.”
A laudable goal, and one that, it might be argued, its proponents achieved since the ’60s to some degree in spite of themselves. Many of the idealistic impulses of the time, that is, bore fruit even though the larger utopian schemes to which they attached themselves failed. And some of the most moving films in the Lincoln Center series (as well as some of Mr. Godard’s recent work, which falls outside the purview of the current Film Forum retrospective) reckon with that failure, with the letdown that followed the stillborn revolutions of 1968.
One of these is Alain Tanner’s “Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000” (1976), which captures a pastoral moment in the lives of former radicals. In Geneva and the surrounding countryside, they teach school, work the land, make love, drink wine and argue, all the while clinging to the conviction that another way of life is possible. And the characters in “Milestones” (photo, l.) (1975), made by Robert Kramer and John Douglas at around the same time, find themselves in similar situations, trying to navigate between political commitments and personal desires and to figure out which is which.
Being European, the characters in “Jonah” express their subjective longings in a Marxist (or at least Hegelian) language of impersonal historical forces and dialectical movements. The Americans in “Milestones,” by contrast, use the Emersonian idiom of the self to give voice to their understanding of history. And both films demand, from present-day audiences, a degree of indulgence. They are long, slow and full of heavy conversation. “Milestones” in particular, with nonprofessional actors alternating between scripted scenes and real-life moments (including a long scene of natural childbirth), can feel endless and sometimes pointless.
But that is what history can feel like too, and I have the sense that any attempt to grasp the essence of the ’60s will have to pass through “Milestones,” as sad and compassionate a movie as I have ever seen. And also as difficult, because it doesn’t seem to want to be a movie at all, but rather an attempt to keep alive one of the noble, impossible promises of its time, which was to abolish the distinction between art and life.

Breillat's astounding new film "The Last Mistress" premieres at the 51st SFIFF

“I detest anything feminine, except in men, of course,” remarks La Villini (Asia Argento), the ravenous center of Catherine Breillat’s glorious new film, "The Last Mistress" based on the controversial novel by 19th century author and dandy Jules-Amédée Barbey d’Aurevilly. The alluringly vulpine Villini is the Spanish mistress of Parisian roué Ryno de Marigny (striking newcomer Fu’ad Ait Aattouto) and the rude, sensual, commanding counterpart to his foppish, bee-stung beauty. Their ten-year affair is about to come to an end with the now-penniless Ryno’s marriage to the pure and well-placed Hermangarde (Roxane Mesquida)—that is, if he can resist Villini’s savage love. . . Known for her fearlessly candid explorations of female sexuality in such films as Fat Girl and Brief Crossing (SFIFF 2002), Breillat’s triumphant foray into period drama proves a rigorously unsentimental, frankly erotic and very funny work. Ironically, it is the figures of old age, those for whom sex is the still-felt lost limb, who propel the story with their vaguely prurient curiosity, irrepressible gossip and patronage—the indulgent Marquise de Flers (Claude Sarraute), her friend the Comtesse d’Artelles (Yolande Moreau) and witty Vicomte de Prony (Michael Lonsdale). In them we see the truth in La Villini’s prediction that “there will be no end to what exists between M. de Marigny and me.” Arguably Breillat’s most accessible film, this sophisticated chamber piece is as ravishingly entertaining as it is supremely intelligent.

Water, Water Everywhere and What Is It That We Drink?

Premiering at the 51st San Francisco International Film Festival, comes this bracing examination and clarion call for the world. The operative word, quite suitably is FLOW and it's not only about water, but also capital, and the cost is far greater than oil.

Rocket fuel in the water from our taps. Sex-shifting frogs and fish on Prozac. Rivers of sewage and slaughterhouse blood flowing into sacred lakes. Children around the world dying because their families cannot afford to buy clean water from the global corporations that control it. These are among the alarming, all too real scenarios arrayed in Flow, which makes clear the resource whose scarcity most threatens our future isn’t oil—it’s water. And as Maude Barlow, Canadian water activist and author of Blue Covenant, says in the film, the crisis isn’t 50 or 100 years down the road, it’s happening now. This important documentary joins reports from scientists, researchers and human rights advocates (several of them from the Bay Area) with wide-ranging on-the-ground footage to demonstrate how access to water is inextricably and disastrously linked to the flow of capital. Snapshot case studies from Indian villages, African townships and communities in the United States portray the devastating effects of treating a life-giving natural resource as a commodity to be harvested and sold at a profit. Meanwhile, governments and the World Bank seek to address the problem of scarcity with increased privatization and colossal dam projects that will likely do more environmental, cultural and economic harm than good. At the same time, Flow finds currents of hope in successful small-scale local solutions, which often draw on indigenous traditions, and in the activists fighting an overwhelming tide of political mismanagement and corporate greed.—Juliet Clark

The State of the Cinema 2008

State of Cinema Address at 51stSFIFF

Sunday, May 4

1:00 pm
Landmark’s Clay Theatre
2261 Fillmore Street (at Clay)

Last year, at the 50th SFIFF, I heard Peter Sellars deliver one of the most astounding perspectives on the cinema I had ever heard. Weaving history, and culture, from Greece and Shakespeare to the stage and the screen, a vivid and truly electric performance by one of our era's giants in the Arts. This year, yet another luminary brings his own brilliance to an audience that gathers to gain insight from the lens of a Bay area prominent figure who has a long connection, quite literally, to the emerging technologies of our time. Kevin Kelly, the eclectic co-founder and editor of Wired magazine, and also of The Whole Earth Catalog, and the Whole Earth Review, will present the 2008 State of the Cinema address.
The SFIFF states that each year, the San Francisco Film Society invites a culturally prominent public figure to address one or more of the issues facing the intersecting worlds of contemporary cinema, visual arts, technology, viewership, images and ideas. From his learned perspective as a digital-age authority, Kelly will speak to the thrills and hazards of our post-cinematic era in an address titled, “Beyond Moving Pictures: Possibilities for the Future of Film.” -MS

Kevin Kelly, Ahead of Time

By Scott Kirsner
It almost seems as if Kevin Kelly has time-traveled back from the future to bring us up to speed. Beginning with his part in founding The WELL, one of the first true online communities, and Wired magazine, Kelly has assessed the merits of new technologies and plotted their impact before most of us are even vaguely aware of them.
His writings, most of them available for free online http://www.kk.org/, read like a hybrid of E.B. White’s elegance and connectedness to things past, and H.G. Wells’s ability to imagine where the next thousand steps of scientific and technical progress will leave us.
Kelly is the kind of eclectic thinker San Francisco seems especially gifted at producing: equally happy reviewing Internet conference calling software, contributing do-it-yourself projects to a blog called Geekdad, photographing the continent of Asia for a Taschen art book and attempting to catalogue every living species on the planet.
As a younger man, he sold his belongings and rode a bicycle across America, each evening knocking on a different door to ask strangers whether he might camp in their yards. (No one, he says, ever said no.)
Kelly’s great role since the publication of his 1994 book Out of Control has been as an exponent and interpreter of the Internet. Before most of us had ventured online, Kelly was already exploring the implications of a “network culture.” “Nets have their own logic,” he wrote, “one that is out-of-kilter to our expectations. And this logic will quickly mold the culture of humans living in a networked world.”
Lately, Kelly has been explaining to artists the implications of a world where practically any work of art can be digitized and spread instantly via the Internet’s “super-distribution system.” His essay, “1,000 True Fans,” suggests the Internet is capable of mass-producing mini-Medicis and that independent animators, photographers, musicians and writers would be smart to cultivate a community of these willing patrons.
The future is often unnerving. Yet Kelly, no matter what historical moment he hails from, is gentle in bringing his readers and listeners face-to-face with the uncertainty wrought by change. His insights are helpful signposts as we hurtle ahead.
Scott Kirsner edits the blog CinemaTech and is the author, most recently, of Inventing the Movies, a technological history of Hollywood.

Previous State of Cinema Addresses
2007 Peter Sellars

2006 Tilda Swinton

2005 Brad Bird

2004 B. Ruby Rich
2003 Michel Ciment

Lou Reed at SXSW Fest screens "Berlin"

One of the best experiences being at the SXSW Film Fest was seeing "Berlin" premiere. Plus, I was only sitting two rows behind Lou Reed at the Paramount theatre on Congress Avenue. Like many "stars", their presence looms so large, that when one has the chance to be up close, and you see they are, well, quite human sized, it can be disorienting at first. Lou is maybe 5'5", and he actually looked, frail, actually. Then I am reminded, he is 67 years old for chris' sake, and that he is even alive given his phenomenal life it's a wonder he's made it this far, and then he gets on stage and his diminutive size is erased with his fierce and strong chords, and I'm reminded why I have always been so moved by his songs, his writing, and his music. Listen to what he says in this interview for a measure of this giant of our age.

Hal Wilner interviewed Lou Reed for SXSW’s keynote address and Reed, maybe because of the early hour, was typically irascible.
He talked about his music being misunderstood, problems with music critics and the industry in general, the horrible sound quality of MP3s and the manner in which the world’s problems that informed “Berlin” in 1973 are occurring in the 21st century.
“Berlin” was staged for five concerts in Brooklyn -- “not in L.A., the music business town,” Reed pointed out -- and filmed by Julian Schnabel. It was shown Tuesday and will head to Europe for more screenings before returning to the U.S. in the summer.
“It’s emotional music,” Reed said after a performance clip of “Men of Good Fortune” was screened for the packed house.
“In 1973, a lot of the songs dealt with things, some of which is going on now. I don’t know if people relate to it.
“It’s based on Othello and Desdemona. It’s about intense jealousy and in that sense it’s romantic. Everyone has experience jealousy. I though people could relate to it easily and not be offended. To dislike this because of the subject matter is narrow-minded.”
Reed offered thoughts about a variety of subjects.
ON SONGWRITING: “I don’t know if I know how to do it. If I did I would have written ‘Son of Wild Side’ and would now have a Caribbean island.”
ON PUNK: We made city music. We said no R&B licks, no blues licks because we can’t do that. Aggressive steel street action -- that’s punk. Now it exists and it will last forever.
ON CREATING MUSIC: “What I have going for me is instinct. Thinking won’t get me to where I want to go. Instinct makes the music. “
ON TECHNOLOGY : "MP3s have very bad sound. If you find out you like good sound you have to go out and get a good unit to play over. If the guy making the record likes good sound, the price goes up. People have to have higher standards. Some might say ‘that’s elitist.’ You can get any song you want in the world. If you don’t care about good sound, none of this matters for a second.
“If no one cares, it will stay the same. Technology is talking us backwards, making it easier to make things worse.”
YOUNG BANDS HE ENJOYS: Dr. Dog, Melt-Banana, Holy Fuck, Joan as Police Woman.
“I look to a young group for energy. They all have energy.”
‘BERLIN’ PART II: “(Filming) ‘Berlin’ was not an audition. But I think about doing ‘Magic and Loss’ or ‘Street Hassle’, putting together songs (that share a similar) milieu. I dream on.”

Virus Kills Chile’s Salmon

A virus has sent shivers through Chile’s salmon industry and opened companies up to fresh charges that their breeding methods are producing potentially unhealthy fish.

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"Bush's War" on PBS/Frontline Reveals The Tragic Ineptitude and Arrogance Behind the Scenes.

Conclusion of PBS two-parter opus is expectedly excellent, despite the War is ongoing and no end in sight. Frontline gets direct and stays focused on the architects and reveals the arrogance and ineptitude in the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld troika. Riveting, while skirting much of the human carnage and cost that piles up, in the now familiar Frontline style of reporting, the Jack Webb "just the facts" format, but with real heft and inspection

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Will Coffee Be a Casualty of Climate Change

It was nearly one year ago that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), government officials, and scientists from more than 100 countries, wrangled for weeks in Brussels as to whether global warming was a man-made or a natural phenomenon.
They argued over droughts, air circulation patterns, snowfall, ice caps, and a thousand other indicators of whether global warming was "likely" or "directly" our fault. In spite of the strong belief in the scientific community that all of our cars, factories, and other activities were speeding up global warming at an alarming rate, the politicians managed to get the official word to be "likely."

High in the Sierra Nevada (Snow-Capped Mountains) of Colombia, indigenous Arhuaco coffee farmer Javier Mestres had no such doubts.
He did not see things in parts per million. He had never heard of the global circulation model that tried to measure increments of change in the temperature of the ocean or dynamics of the atmosphere. He was unaware that the IPCC report stated that Colombia would heat up dramatically in the next twenty years and lose 90 percent of its glacial snowcaps by 2050.
Javier saw the results of a warming planet clearly in the premature flowering of his coffee plants on his four-acre family farm in the slopes above Nabusimake, the capital of the Arhuaco nation. He showed me the smaller, weaker berries that dotted the stems and wondered why the outside world wanted to harm these beautiful plants. Why were we changing the world?
Like many of his coffee-growing brothers and sisters around the world, with global warming has come a change in temperature that is affecting crop yields. And, if the Nobel Peace Prize-winning IPCC's predictions come true and we see global temperatures rise anywhere 2.6 F to 10 F, coffee could be harder to come by in many parts of the world, not just Columbia: Uganda, Kenya, and Tanzania in Africa could become unsuitable for coffee growing, and many Southeast Asian islands could be wiped off the map by rising ocean levels.
Our world is out of balance, and it seems we may be the only ones who aren't noticing.
For centuries, the Arhuaco spiritual elders, the Mamos, known in their language as the "Elder Brothers," have carried out monthly rituals in sacred sites throughout the Sierra Nevada, which they call "the Heart of the World," to ensure that the planet is kept in a geo-spiritual balance.
But for the past two decades, the Mamos have been observing rapid changes in the Heart of the World. They have watched the snowcaps on their sacred peaks shrink over time and have seen the plant life change. They have felt the lower moisture levels in the air and soil and noted the changing migration patterns of the birds and butterflies. They have shared these observations with the tribe, and increasingly with the outside world, with us-the "Younger Brothers."
I asked the Mamo I met what changes he had noticed over his lifetime.
"The Younger Brothers have come here, to the Heart of the World, and are cutting out the Mother's heart. They dig out the gold that we need for our rituals. They cut down the trees that hold the earth in place and destroy these homes for the birds. The Younger Brothers pollute the water with chemicals from mining and are making drugs from the plants, from the sacred coca!" While he spoke, he rubbed the stick onto the poporo in a hypnotic rhythm, the pain and confusion caused by the foolish actions of the Younger Brothers etched in layers. "They have invaded our land. They destroy sacred sites to make mines and farms. They are making it difficult for us to do the work we must do to keep the world in balance. What would happen if we stopped keeping the world in balance? If we didn't make the payments, would the trees still grow?"
I was taken aback by this last comment. I agreed with the need to stop the destruction, but did he really believe that the world would stop if the Mamos weren't able to perform their rituals? Did they really believe that they held the world together? To my rational mind, it seemed a quaint and romantic notion.
But maybe it was true. Maybe there is a tipping point where the whole thing comes down. It certainly happens on the micro level, where localized ecosystems and plant and animal communities crash when the balance is disturbed beyond repair. Ecologists tell us about "trophic cascade," when the crash of one system leads to the crash of another, and then of many related systems. Is the critical point on Earth located here in the Sierra Nevada? Are the spiritual rituals the prime focus of energy, the "seams" that hold the world intact? The Mamos believe so.
"So what must be done to control this destruction?" I asked respectfully. The Mamo looked piercingly into my eyes.
"All the white men must leave the Sierra Nevada."
"Uh, I know that would be ideal, but what can be done practically?"
"I told you. All the white men must leave."
Maybe that was the most effective way to protect the sacred lands, and maybe that will ultimately be the solution-create a Heart of the World International Sacred Landscape. This is the underlying dynamic for the concept of totem or taboo, the recognition that there are places or actions that must be safeguarded for the benefit of the whole. Maybe we need to recognize and protect sacred spaces, beyond the multiple-use designations of national parks and forests, so that they can be accessed only by the ritual keepers. Whether or not the keepers actually hold the world together, their ritual activities keep the need for balance between the sacred and the profane within our collective psyche.
"But there is more," the Mamo continued. "Beyond the Heart of the World, the Younger Brothers are changing the whole earth. I don't know everything they are doing, but they are changing the whole earth."
"Are you talking about global warming?" I asked.
"I don't know what you call it, but yes, the Mother is getting warmer. The rain falls differently than before. It is later, but it falls harder. It is destructive sometimes when it should be nurturing. Many of the rivers are dry before they reach the sea. And the snows on the peaks that replenish the rivers are less each year. Even the bees are disappearing, and that affects the flowering of the coffee and all other plants."
I asked the Mamo how he knew there were fewer bees.
"I can hear them. Their sound has lessened," he replied. "It is all happening very quickly. First you took our gold. Then you took our land. Now you are taking the water and the air itself. The Younger Brothers are waging a war on the earth and it must stop!"
***
Valledupar sits like a supplicant at the foot of the Sierra Nevada. It is a friendly, clean town where the Arhuaco and the colonists mix freely.
There were a few Arhuaco men and women in the large courtyard as we entered. The men were scribing their thoughts on their poporos and the women were doing a similar action by drawing out long strands of cotton by hand into thread for weaving. It was a peaceful scene and nobody seemed to take notice of my entrance. Nelson, the Colombian indigenous rights lawyer traveling with me, introduced me to several people, but all I got were indifferent glances or limp hands to shake.
"Don't take it personally, Dean," Nelson offered kindly. "Remember that the Arhuaco think of all outsiders as the Younger Brothers. It's not that they think you are inferior or anything, but they think you don't know much."
And, they are right. At least as far as most Americans go in terms of coffee literacy and the impact of each cup they drink. In the hyper-caffeinated world of coffee marketing, it is very difficult to tell the truth from a load of beans. And, that's what most of us are being told in terms of climate change, and in terms of what coffee farmers are paid, the latter of which often has an impact on the former.
Fair Trade allows farmers to be paid meaningful prices for their labors, a way to realize cherished dreams of education for their kids and sufficient food on the table, and to be willing to then take better care of the crops and the land around them. That's what Fair Trade is all about, and it is the most tangible result to the work us Fair Traders do.
But let me be real. Only twenty percent of the coffee from Fair Trade-certified cooperatives gets sold as Fair Trade. The rest gets sold under conventional pricing, which even at the current higher level does not give a farmer much to feed his family, and certainly doesn't give the community enough to build a school, a well or a health clinic. This is not the farmer's fault. It is the same coffee grown in the same manner.
The problem is that most people in the coffee industry are not willing to recognize farmers as true partners in our businesses-they are often simply cheap wage slaves to whom we can give pennies while selling their coffee for inflated prices. It is not an economic issue-even at our higher-than-Fair-Trade-prices paid to farmers we make a very good living. It is not a quality issue-non-Fair Trade roasters are buying the same beans as we are from Oromia (Ethiopia), PPKGO (Sumatra), and Pangoa (Peru) to name a few, just not paying the sme Fair Trade price. Quality actually improves under Fair Trade because there is simply more money for technical training, new processing equipment (such as eco-friendly washing stations) and the farmers have an incentive to care for their crop better if it will bring higher returns.
It is not an availability issue-as an example, eighty percent of the Oromia crop is out there waiting. It is first and foremost an ethical issue, plain and simple.
So take a look deep into your coffee cup. Behind the aroma, the acidity, and the body lay the real lives of farmers and their families. The choices we make at the supermarket and the café have immediate and profound impacts on almost thirty million people around the globe, on their ability to drink clean water, to educate their kids, and to dream of better lives, as well as to keep the heat off the planet. Fair Trade works. Help make it happen.

It’s the Oil...How Could Anyone Deny it? Botched? Or Purposeful?

Iraq is ‘unwinnable’, a ‘quagmire’, a ‘fiasco’: so goes the received opinion. But there is good reason to think that, from the Bush-Cheney perspective, it is none of these things. Indeed, the US may be ‘stuck’ precisely where Bush et al want it to be, which is why there is no ‘exit strategy’.

Jim Holt of the London Review of Books writes a brilliant critique of the US occupation of Iraq, and questions the reasons and rationale. While the US has incredibly and steadfastly denied the reason the nation went to war was explicitly to get the oil, indeed, has offered many justifications, notably the presence and threat of Weapons of Mass Destruction (cynics and realists alike have noted it is more like the US campaign was engaged in weapons of mass deception), the deep oil reserves in Iraq remain the primary reason, and not the desire to create a "democratic" state in the region, which is more and more transparently a sop for domestic consumption, to assuage any guilt (or war crime indictments) and particularly for patriotic posturing. - MS

Iraq has 115 billion barrels of known oil reserves. That is more than five times the total in the United States. And, because of its long isolation, it is the least explored of the world’s oil-rich nations. A mere two thousand wells have been drilled across the entire country; in Texas alone there are a million. It has been estimated, by the Council on Foreign Relations, that Iraq may have a further 220 billion barrels of undiscovered oil; another study puts the figure at 300 billion. If these estimates are anywhere close to the mark, US forces are now sitting on one quarter of the world’s oil resources. The value of Iraqi oil, largely light crude with low production costs, would be of the order of $30 trillion at today’s prices. For purposes of comparison, the projected total cost of the US invasion/occupation is around $1 trillion.
Who will get Iraq’s oil? One of the Bush administration’s ‘benchmarks’ for the Iraqi government is the passage of a law to distribute oil revenues. The draft law that the US has written for the Iraqi congress would cede nearly all the oil to Western companies. The Iraq National Oil Company would retain control of 17 of Iraq’s 80 existing oilfields, leaving the rest – including all yet to be discovered oil – under foreign corporate control for 30 years. ‘The foreign companies would not have to invest their earnings in the Iraqi economy,’ the analyst Antonia Juhasz wrote in the New York Times in March, after the draft law was leaked. ‘They could even ride out Iraq’s current “instability” by signing contracts now, while the Iraqi government is at its weakest, and then wait at least two years before even setting foot in the country.’ As negotiations over the oil law stalled in September, the provincial government in Kurdistan simply signed a separate deal with the Dallas-based Hunt Oil Company, headed by a close political ally of President Bush.
How will the US maintain hegemony over Iraqi oil? By establishing permanent military bases in Iraq. Five self-sufficient ‘super-bases’ are in various stages of completion. All are well away from the urban areas where most casualties have occurred. There has been precious little reporting on these bases in the American press, whose dwindling corps of correspondents in Iraq cannot move around freely because of the dangerous conditions. (It takes a brave reporter to leave the Green Zone without a military escort.) In February last year, the Washington Post reporter Thomas Ricks described one such facility, the Balad Air Base, forty miles north of Baghdad. A piece of (well-fortified) American suburbia in the middle of the Iraqi desert, Balad has fast-food joints, a miniature golf course, a football field, a cinema and distinct neighbourhoods – among them, ‘KBR-land’, named after the Halliburton subsidiary that has done most of the construction work at the base. Although few of the 20,000 American troops stationed there have ever had any contact with an Iraqi, the runway at the base is one of the world’s busiest. ‘We are behind only Heathrow right now,’ an air force commander told Ricks.
The Defense Department was initially coy about these bases. In 2003, Donald Rumsfeld said: ‘I have never, that I can recall, heard the subject of a permanent base in Iraq discussed in any meeting.’ But this summer the Bush administration began to talk openly about stationing American troops in Iraq for years, even decades, to come. Several visitors to the White House have told the New York Times that the president himself has become fond of referring to the ‘Korea model’. When the House of Representatives voted to bar funding for ‘permanent bases’ in Iraq, the new term of choice became ‘enduring bases’, as if three or four decades wasn’t effectively an eternity.
But will the US be able to maintain an indefinite military presence in Iraq? It will plausibly claim a rationale to stay there for as long as civil conflict simmers, or until every groupuscule that conveniently brands itself as ‘al-Qaida’ is exterminated. The civil war may gradually lose intensity as Shias, Sunnis and Kurds withdraw into separate enclaves, reducing the surface area for sectarian friction, and as warlords consolidate local authority. De facto partition will be the result. But this partition can never become de jure. (An independent Kurdistan in the north might upset Turkey, an independent Shia region in the east might become a satellite of Iran, and an independent Sunni region in the west might harbour al-Qaida.) Presiding over this Balkanised Iraq will be a weak federal government in Baghdad, propped up and overseen by the Pentagon-scale US embassy that has just been constructed – a green zone within the Green Zone. As for the number of US troops permanently stationed in Iraq, the defence secretary, Robert Gates, told Congress at the end of September that ‘in his head’ he saw the long-term force as consisting of five combat brigades, a quarter of the current number, which, with support personnel, would mean 35,000 troops at the very minimum, probably accompanied by an equal number of mercenary contractors. (He may have been erring on the side of modesty, since the five super-bases can accommodate between ten and twenty thousand troops each.) These forces will occasionally leave their bases to tamp down civil skirmishes, at a declining cost in casualties. As a senior Bush administration official told the New York Times in June, the long-term bases ‘are all places we could fly in and out of without putting Americans on every street corner’. But their main day-to-day function will be to protect the oil infrastructure.
This is the ‘mess’ that Bush-Cheney is going to hand on to the next administration. What if that administration is a Democratic one? Will it dismantle the bases and withdraw US forces entirely? That seems unlikely, considering the many beneficiaries of the continued occupation of Iraq and the exploitation of its oil resources. The three principal Democratic candidates – Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards – have already hedged their bets, refusing to promise that, if elected, they would remove American forces from Iraq before 2013, the end of their first term.
Among the winners: oil-services companies like Halliburton; the oil companies themselves (the profits will be unimaginable, and even Democrats can be bought); US voters, who will be guaranteed price stability at the gas pump (which sometimes seems to be all they care about); Europe and Japan, which will both benefit from Western control of such a large part of the world’s oil reserves, and whose leaders will therefore wink at the permanent occupation; and, oddly enough, Osama bin Laden, who will never again have to worry about US troops profaning the holy places of Mecca and Medina, since the stability of the House of Saud will no longer be paramount among American concerns. Among the losers is Russia, which will no longer be able to lord its own energy resources over Europe. Another big loser is Opec, and especially Saudi Arabia, whose power to keep oil prices high by enforcing production quotas will be seriously compromised.
Then there is the case of Iran, which is more complicated. In the short term, Iran has done quite well out of the Iraq war. Iraq’s ruling Shia coalition is now dominated by a faction friendly to Tehran, and the US has willy-nilly armed and trained the most pro-Iranian elements in the Iraqi military. As for Iran’s nuclear programme, neither air strikes nor negotiations seem likely to derail it at the moment. But the Iranian regime is precarious. Unpopular mullahs hold onto power by financing internal security services and buying off elites with oil money, which accounts for 70 per cent of government revenues. If the price of oil were suddenly to drop to, say, $40 a barrel (from a current price just north of $80), the repressive regime in Tehran would lose its steady income. And that is an outcome the US could easily achieve by opening the Iraqi oil spigot for as long as necessary (perhaps taking down Venezuela’s oil-cocky Hugo Chávez into the bargain).
And think of the United States vis-à-vis China. As a consequence of our trade deficit, around a trillion dollars’ worth of US denominated debt (including $400 billion in US Treasury bonds) is held by China. This gives Beijing enormous leverage over Washington: by offloading big chunks of US debt, China could bring the American economy to its knees. China’s own economy is, according to official figures, expanding at something like 10 per cent a year. Even if the actual figure is closer to 4 or 5 per cent, as some believe, China’s increasing heft poses a threat to US interests. (One fact: China is acquiring new submarines five times faster than the US.) And the main constraint on China’s growth is its access to energy – which, with the US in control of the biggest share of world oil, would largely be at Washington’s sufferance. Thus is the Chinese threat neutralised.
Many people are still perplexed by exactly what moved Bush-Cheney to invade and occupy Iraq. In the 27 September issue of the New York Review of Books, Thomas Powers, one of the most astute watchers of the intelligence world, admitted to a degree of bafflement. ‘What’s particularly odd,’ he wrote, ‘is that there seems to be no sophisticated, professional, insiders’ version of the thinking that drove events.’ Alan Greenspan, in his just published memoir, is clearer on the matter. ‘I am saddened,’ he writes, ‘that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.’
Was the strategy of invading Iraq to take control of its oil resources actually hammered out by Cheney’s 2001 energy task force? One can’t know for sure, since the deliberations of that task force, made up largely of oil and energy company executives, have been kept secret by the administration on the grounds of ‘executive privilege’. One can’t say for certain that oil supplied the prime motive. But the hypothesis is quite powerful when it comes to explaining what has actually happened in Iraq. The occupation may seem horribly botched on the face of it, but the Bush administration’s cavalier attitude towards ‘nation-building’ has all but ensured that Iraq will end up as an American protectorate for the next few decades – a necessary condition for the extraction of its oil wealth. If the US had managed to create a strong, democratic government in an Iraq effectively secured by its own army and police force, and had then departed, what would have stopped that government from taking control of its own oil, like every other regime in the Middle East? On the assumption that the Bush-Cheney strategy is oil-centred, the tactics – dissolving the army, de-Baathification, a final ‘surge’ that has hastened internal migration – could scarcely have been more effective. The costs – a few billion dollars a month plus a few dozen American fatalities (a figure which will probably diminish, and which is in any case comparable to the number of US motorcyclists killed because of repealed helmet laws) – are negligible compared to $30 trillion in oil wealth, assured American geopolitical supremacy and cheap gas for voters. In terms of realpolitik, the invasion of Iraq is not a fiasco; it is a resounding success.
Still, there is reason to be skeptical of the picture I have drawn: it implies that a secret and highly ambitious plan turned out just the way its devisers foresaw, and that almost never happens.

Robert Reich warns a recession, or worse, could be coming

The Big D?
Think the last few days have been bad for Wall Street and the rest of the world's markets? Hang on, things are probably going to get worse, says Robert Reich, President Clinton's former secretary of Labor and author of the recent book "Supercapitalism: The Transformation of Business, Democracy and Everyday Life." According to Reich, who currently teaches public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, the United States might even be headed toward a depression.

NEWSWEEK's Arlyn Tobias Gajilan talked to Reich about the Fed's surprise rate cut Wednesday, the "D word," the growing criticism of Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke and whether a stimulus package will include $500 check for each American. Excerpts:
NEWSWEEK: Many investors had hoped for an interest-rate cut, but this cut's size and timing took people by surprise. Were you taken aback by the Fed's three-quarter basis-point cut, the largest single-day reduction in the Fed's history? And do you think it's necessary?
Robert Reich: Yes and yes. The Fed is clearly becoming aware of the serious potential of an economic meltdown. The size of the cut is larger than anyone expected because the Fed usually moves in [increments of] .25 or .50 percentage points. But the danger of a cut this size is that it may panic the investors. They may conclude that the Fed has determined that the economy is even worse than assumed and that there is still a way to go before we hit bottom. Yet the Fed has to [cut]. Credit markets are still uncomfortably frozen, and the housing slump continues to worsen.
Unlike Ben Bernanke, Alan Greenspan had a habit of hinting at what his next move would be. While he kept investors on their toes, Greenspan rarely acted as unexpectedly as Bernanke did this week. Is it dangerous for a Fed chairman to surprise the market?
Yes, but I don't believe Bernanke wants to surprise the market as a general rule. This strikes me as a major exception to the relative transparency he's trying to achieve with regard to letting the market know where the Fed is going. It's a move that underscores the seriousness of the current economic problems.
Tuesday's rate cut initially caused a huge market swing, with the Dow, NASDAQ and the S&P 500 all hitting 14-, 15- and 16-month lows respectively. But by the end of the day, all three had bounced back considerably. Does that mean the cut is working?
The fact is that no one knows anything. Investors are flying blind. Even experienced Wall Street hands have no idea whether we're near the bottom. We can expect even more violent swings in the stock market. The reason for all the uncertainty is that the big banks and lenders simply have no idea how many bad loans they're holding. [During the housing bubble] credit markets evolved such complex ways of reselling and repackaging debt that even many top Wall Street professionals simply have no idea of the risks and costs they're involved with. The bottom line is there is a great deal of uncertainty out there, and the markets hate uncertainty.

Can we expect another rate cut at the Fed meeting next week?
Yes. I wouldn't be surprised if the Fed cut another quarter point. If it doesn't announce something at its meeting, it may cut .25 or even .50 within the next month or so. They are clearly worried. [And while lowering rates may cause] inflation, it is far less threatening now than a recession or perhaps-and I cringe at using the word-a depression.

You cringe, but you still used the D word. How far along are we on that particularly slippery slope?
Hopefully, not far. But several managing directors on the Street, whose opinions I trust, have said to me that the chances for a depression are 20 percent. That matches my sense. In other words, it's still low, but 20 percent is nonetheless far higher a probability than anyone should be comfortable with. Even absent a depression, it seems likely that the coming recession will be deeper than the last several.
There's a U.S. News & World Report blog item that was making the rounds on the NYSE floor Wednesday reporting that Bernanke has privately been much more negative about the economy than he publicly admits. From the indicators you've been watching, how bad do you think things are really going to get in the next six months to a year? Is a recession avoidable at this point?
It's going to be difficult to avoid a recession, defined as two consecutive quarters of economic contraction. Difficult because the scale of the problems is so much larger than any stimulus package or Fed rate cut can readily deal with. The stimulus package now being considered on the Hill is in the range of $140 [billion] to $150 billion. But at the rate housing prices are dropping, consumer purchases are likely to be hit by $360 [billion] to $400 billion. Similarly the Fed rate cuts, under normal circumstances, would free up money, but lenders are afraid of lending because they don't know how much risk of default they face, even at lower interest rates. It's a little like offering a lobster dinner to someone who is so constipated that they can't take in another mouthful.
Bernanke hasn't won many fans lately. Under his leadership, many on the Street think the Fed has moved too slowly to avoid recession and too ineffectively to prevent inflation. Is that fair criticism?
Probably not. Up until last week, Wall Street's assessment of Bernanke was quite positive. He was getting good press all around. He faces a very difficult balancing act under circumstances in which energy and food prices are rising, the dollar is falling and inflation is becoming more threatening. What should the Fed do? It is terribly unqualified to cope with speculative bubbles and their aftereffects. The housing bubble and the Wild West credit markets of the last few years came about not because the Fed kept interest rates too low, but because the treasury, the comptroller of the currency, and the Fed, in its regulatory capacity, failed miserably to use their authority to oversee credit markets and assure that they were not unduly exploiting those low interest rates with irresponsible lending practices. Now we have a mess on our hands. Bernanke has the only pooper-scooper in town, but it is too small for the job.
There's a theory that the global markets have matured past the point where they won't necessarily get slammed whenever the U.S. economy gets hammered. Do you buy into that thinking? Will our country's worsening economic situation infect the rest of the world economy?
The U.S. is not completely uncoupled from the rest of the global economy, but the good news is that consumers in Japan, China, India and Europe are now far better able to fill-in the gap when American consumers fail to do the job they have been doing for decades, which is to buy enough of the world's goods and services to keep the world out of recession. Remember American consumers have been the Energizer Bunnies of the global economy for some time. Now others around the world are wealthy enough to become Energizer Bunnies themselves.
The administration has called for a $140 billion economic stimulus package. There have been few details about the plan, but Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Congress have all hinted that taxpayers might soon receive checks of several hundred dollars or more. Can Americans expect those checks any time soon and will such a plan actually stimulate the economy?
Only relatively low-income people are likely to spend any extra money they get, since they need the extra money in order to maintain their living standards. So the first questions is will the stimulus be targeted to them or will it be frittered away in tax breaks for the upper-middle class and for investors. Secondly, the money has to be in people's pockets right away, not eight or nine months from now in the form of a tax rebate from the IRS. The only surefire way to do that is to reduce withholding in payroll taxes, since 80 percent of Americans pay more in payroll tax than they do in income tax. Thirdly, the money has to be enough to change people's behavior. Five hundred dollars isn't likely to do the trick. I see far more politics in this than economics. Washington has to look like it's doing something, and so it will.

MPAA once again searches for scapegoat

The MPAA has admitted to a "data entry error". Oops! They claimed 45% of the film piracy they were facing was due to college students, later backtracking to only 15%, which is still suspect, at best. Just rate the flicks, ok? Better yet, just fold your tent, there's really no reason for it to exist, except to censor films and be hacks.

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As the Price of Coffee Turns

As if Tuesday’s market plunges weren’t enough to demoralize us all, The New York Times’s Dining section followed up today with an article on a new insane price-point for your daily pick-me-up: “At Last, a $20,000 Cup of Coffee.”
Uncaffeinated jaws dropped before realizing that it wasn’t meant literally (please see: recent $18,000 belt): it is a coffee machine that costs those big bucks, not the individual servings it produces with its “brass-trimmed halogen heating elements, glass globes and bamboo paddles.”
At the same time, The Wall Street Journal was reporting coffee news at the opposite end of the price spectrum. Improbably, a purveyor with a reputation for emptying wallets was coming to the rescue:
Starbucks Tests $1 Cup, Free Refills in Seattle
Deep pockets, rest assured: it is still possible to spend a lot of cash at Starbucks. One blogger recently discovering a $13.76 concoction — try saying this one in the face of an impatient order-taker: “13 shot venti soy hazelnut vanilla cinnamon white mocha with extra white mocha and caramel.”
Of course, the $1 Starbucks is aimed at a whole other audience.
As McDonalds and Dunkin Donuts have lured coffee drinkers with low, low prices, Starbucks stock has plummeted. Earlier this month, the longtime chairman of the company seized the executive reins of the company and promised a “laser-like focus” on reinvigorating the “Starbucks experience,” according to Andrew Martin’s report in The New York Times.
Meanwhile, McDonalds is working on replicating that experience, too, by hiring baristas at locations across the country.
And in an interview published today in Advertising Age, the chief executive of Dunkin Donuts, Will Kussell, played the schoolyard tough guy, dismissing the competition and spoiling for a fight — in terms of selling coffee and carbs, of course.
“We really are the leading beverage authority,” Mr. Kussell said of his company. “Marrying that with our bakery authority, we have a two-fisted punch, and of course it’s built on speed of service.”