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by Phil Perkins
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Our weekender tote bags are chic and perfect for a day out on the town, a staycation, or a weekend getaway. The tote is crafted with soft, spun poly-poplin fabric and features double-stitched seams for added durability. The 1" thick cotton handles are perfect for carrying the bag by hand or over your shoulder. This is a must-have for the summer.
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Located on the Cumberland Plateau adjacent to Grandview, Tennessee, Upper Piney Falls is a scenic waterfall standing 80-feet tall. It's a... more
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Julie Adair
You really captured the serenity and beauty of this place. Very pretty. L/F
Thanks Julie Adair
Kim Tran
Wonderful capture Phil, so beautiful! L/f
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Angeles M Pomata
Love this gorgeous capture, Phil!! The wide framing is magnificent. L/F
Thanks Angeles M Pomata
Carol Japp
Such a great image Phil, beautifully photographed! l/f
Thanks Carol Japp
Rosalie Scanlon
Stunning image Phil. L/tweet
Thanks Rosalie Scanlon
Located on the Cumberland Plateau adjacent to Grandview, Tennessee, Upper Piney Falls is a scenic waterfall standing 80-feet tall. It's a relatively short hike on well-maintained trails, and dogs (leashed) are welcomed.
Forest trails leading to beautiful, oftentimes remote waterfalls. Mountain peaks with expansive sunrise views. Enjoy your connection with the great outdoors and come along to discover some wonderful museum quality prints to adorn your living spaces - home, business, lobby or cafeteria. You will also encounter other abstract artworks along the way, so take your time and enjoy the creative world of Phil Perkins. Note: Fine Art America watermark will not appear on purchased artwork. You can visit Phil's web site, here: http://perkinsdesigns.com Thanks for stopping by! All Images Copyright (c) Perkins Designs LLC. All Rights Reserved.


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There have been a few recent PowerPC announcements that have caused the Mac Faithful to wonder anew about The Switch and the "real" reasons behind it. First, there was the 970FX announcement, which clearly showed that IBM is capable of putting out a 970 processor that compares quite well with the Pentium M in performance/watt. And then there's the 970MP, which Apple has used to make a monster of a quad-processor 64-bit RISC workstation. For even the most diehard Jobs fans, both of these product releases, especially when set against Intel's current performance/watt woes, raise serious questions about the public case that Teh Steve made for The Switch.
To make matters even more interestingor more vexing, if you were one of the true believers in PowerPC's alleged power failureP.A. Semi has just announced a dual-core 64-bit PowerPC processor SoC that, if the specs and numbers are to be believed, could take PowerPC to a whole new performance/watt level. Check out these stats, distilled from the press release:
- Two 64-bit, superscalar, out-of-order PowerPC processor cores with Altivec/VMX
- Two DDR2 memory controllers (one per core!)
- 2MB shared L2 cache
- I/O unit that has support for: eight PCIe controllers, two 10 Gigabit Ethernet controllers, four Gigabit Ethernet controllers
- 65nm process
- 5-13 watts typical @ 2GHz, depending on the application
Yup, they appear to have crammed all that stuff onto one laptop-capable chip, and it's due out sometime in very late 2006 or early 2007.
The new architecture is called PWRficient, and if you just can't get enough coverage of it (and I know I can't) then RWT has an in-depth look. (More also at the EET.) The RWT article covers the architectural details and discusses possible high-performance computing (HPC) and server implementations. With the kind of SPEC scores that P.A. Semi is touting (1100 SPECInt, 2255 SPECFP), you could gang these SoCs together easily and have a nice cluster.
Needless to say, jaws are on the floor, especially among those who were sold on Jobs' description of The Switch as a purely performance/watt proposition. Yeah, Merom is still going to rock the PowerBook line in 1H06, but even Intel isn't (yet) promising anything that can touch the PWRficient PA6T-1682M (again, if the numbers are real, if it's on-time, etc.) in the 2007 timeframe. Furthermore, if you don't think that Jobs was aware of the P.A. Semi project at the time of The Switch, then I've got a bridge to sell you. There is absolutely no way that P.A. Semi has been developing a PowerPC design like this for the past two years and not courting Apple with it at the same time. So what gives?
Let's take a moment to step back and look at how the terrain has changed since The Switch was announced:
- The 970FX was announced as a perfectly capable laptop chip.
- The 970MP was announced as a solid, 64-bit RISC dual-core server/workstation chip.
- Intel is taking a performance/watt beating everywhere except for the Pentium M.
- Intel has just shaken up their server lineup for 2007.
- PA Semi is set for a major performance/watt breakthrough in 2007 with a dual-core, 64-bit, Altivec-enabled processor that looks perfect for the Mac line.
It's now quite clear to anyone who's not blinded by the RDF that things aren't nearly so bad on the PowerPC side as the famous "the PowerPC roadmap will fail to deliver by an astounding margin when compared to Intel's offerings" Jobsnote bar graph slide made them out to be. In fact, things look significantly more sunny on the PowerPC side of the street as of this week. Furthermore AMD looks set to continue handling Intel its you-know-what in the server market for at least another year.
So the search commences afresh for Jobs's super-secret, evil genius motives for hitching the entire Mac wagon to the unreleased and unproven Conroe/Merom architecture. Candidates for "super-secret motives" must of course support the thesis that Apple really does intend to ride the Macintosh all the way back into media workstation leadership, or education market dominance, or double-digit market share, or whatever other Golden Age of Mac fantasy suits one's fancy.
And while this search is carried out in forums like the Machintoshian Achaia, I will sit back and give a big, fat, Nelson Ha-ha! to the participants. Ever since The Switch I've been preaching that Jobs's stated reasons for moving to Intel are bogus, and that Apple really cares more about gadgets going forward than it does about the Mac line (Part I and Part II). The Switch proves, I've argued, that the Mac line is no longer the foundation for Apple's future growth, and it could very well go bye-bye.
I've been flamed furiously for my blasphemy, but whether my flamers will acknowledge it or not I'm now having the last laugh. P.A. Semi., IBM's 970FX/MP, POWER5, and the next-generation of game console chips all show that the book is by no means closed on PowerPC. In fact, we're in the opening moments of a full-blown PowerPC Renaissance. Who knows how long the PPC revival will last, but Apple would've been hard pressed to pick a worse time to jump ship for performance or performance/watt reasons.
But they didn't jump ship for performance or performance/watt reasons. They jumped ship because they no longer care about making leading-edge computer hardware. They also don't care about PC market share, or any of that other G3-era Mac Faithful malarkey. From now on, merely "good enough" is good enough for the Mac line, and the real innovation will come in the form of post-PC gadgets and entertainment-oriented, techno-cool doohickeys. But I repeat myself...
Ah, I can smell the indignant flames already. But that's ok, because I'm right, and when you're right you don't need asbestos underwear.
PS. While I'm shamelessly gloating like an eight-year-old spelling bee champion, I'm still waiting for apologies from all the folks who indignantly flamed me for posting video iPod "rumors and speculation" on the Ars front page.

subset: commoncrawl


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GOP Intransigence: Wise or Foolish?
It's too early for a definitive answer, but few conservatives appreciate the opportunity costs of total combat.
After I reviewed Philip Klein's e-book about how conservatives should behave if Mitt Romney is elected, he and I had a conversation about Election 2012 and related subjects over at Bloggingheads.tv. In the clip above, Klein notes that after Obama's victory, there was an argument among Republicans about how to respond to a newly elected, relatively popular president:
We all remember how popular he was when he came in. There was one side that said we need to moderate and change our image, and we can't be as combative with Obama. And there was another school of philosophy that said we have to block his agenda and stand up against him, and we're not going to compromise on these principles. Clearly over time the latter category won out.
But it wasn't clear where things were going to fall in 2009.
In conversation, I argued that the Tea Party too often mistakes a combative posture with standing on principle. A polite fiscal conservative like Mitch Daniels is considered a squish for suggesting a temporary, tactical truce on social issues. Jon Huntsman is totally dismissed by the conservative movement for a tweeted zing aimed at the base, despite a very conservative governing record. Meanwhile, Newt Gingrich adeptly throws out red meat and is accordingly presumed a staunch defender of conservative principles, despite years of glaring unprincipled behavior.
Perhaps the GOP's unmitigated combativeness and obstruction these last two years will end in a victory in the upcoming election. Especially if it doesn't, Republicans will have to confront the opportunity cost of the path they've chosen. I am not talking about the good of the country. Set that aside for the time being. What I'm saying is that Obama would've traded major concessions for GOP support on his health-care bill, he would've cut a deal that reduced the deficit with significantly more spending cuts than tax increases, and he might've even cut a deal on entitlements.
But the GOP didn't want to compromise.
Thus the status quo today is marginally worse by their lights than it might've been. And it isn't clear that their intransigence has improved Mitt Romney's electoral chances. He wasn't in Congress casting votes. And Obama's reelection chances hinge on the economy more than anything. Republican members of Congress aren't stupid. They've chosen this tactic because the base loves their intransigence and refusal to compromise. The c-word is thought by the rank-and-file to mean "selling out one's principles," rather than "reaching a mutually beneficial trade that needn't violate anyone's core principles." But if Republicans are ever going to govern successfully, advancing their agenda in any circumstance save the right-wing fantasy of a unified, permanent conservative majority in the White House and Congress, they'll have to compromise.
That means distinguishing between the bad and good kinds of compromise. It means that the Tea Party must keep encouraging its representatives to stick to principle, but that it must also pressure them to successfully execute the sort of trades that good negotiators leverage, when there's an incentive. It means measuring "conservative victories" by policy advances rather than news cycles or even elections. It means maturing enough to do what works instead of what feels good.


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This climate is characterized by relatively high temperatures and evenly distributed precipitation throughout the year. This climate type is found on the eastern sides of the continents between 20° and 35° N and S latitude. In summer, these regions are largely under the influence of moist, maritime airflow from the western side of the subtropical anticyclonic cells over low-latitude ocean waters. Temperatures are high and can lead to warm, oppressive nights. Summers are usually somewhat wetter than winters, with much of the rainfall coming from convectional thunderstorm activity; tropical cyclones also enhance warm-season rainfall in some regions. The coldest month is usually quite mild, although frosts are not uncommon, and winter precipitation is derived primarily from frontal cyclones along the polar front.
The Köppen Climate Classification subtype for this climate is "Cfa". (Humid Subtropical Climate).
The average temperature for the year in Rocha is 60.8°F (16°C). The warmest month, on average, is January with an average temperature of 71.1°F (21.7°C). The coolest month on average is July, with an average temperature of 51.6°F (10.9°C).
The highest recorded temperature in Rocha is 103.1°F (39.5°C), which was recorded in December. The lowest recorded temperature in Rocha is 21.6°F (-5.8°C), which was recorded in June.
The average amount of precipitation for the year in Rocha is 42.9" (1089.7 mm). The month with the most precipitation on average is September with 4.3" (109.2 mm) of precipitation. The month with the least precipitation on average is December with an average of 2.5" (63.5 mm). There are an average of 79.0 days of precipitation, with the most precipitation occurring in February with 7.0 days and the least precipitation occurring in December with 5.0 days.


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Officials at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services ignored multiple auditor reports warning them of potential problems at insurance-shopping website HealthCare.gov before the site's launch Oct. 1, one Republican senator said Wednesday.
HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius chose to move forward with what became a botched website launch despite potential problems identified in a June U.S. Government Accountability Office report, an August HHS inspector general's report and warnings from website contractors, said Senator Pat Roberts, a Kansas Republican.
As the reports came in, Sebelius and other members of President Barack Obama's administration gave lawmakers "assurances that everything would go smoothly," Roberts said at a Senate Finance Committee hearing. The June GAO report "should have served as a warning to you," he told Sebelius.
CGI Federal, one of the main contractors for HealthCare.gov, warned in early September, that it was falling behind in several high-priority tasks, Roberts said. "In short, madam secretary, I believe you were given advice, counsel and warning from experts inside your agency and out that the health-care exchanges were not going to be ready," he said. "Furthermore, I believe to protect the administration, you chose to ignore these warnings."
Roberts repeated his calls for Sebelius, a former governor of his state, to resign as HHS secretary. Several other committee Republicans, all long-time critics of the insurance-reform law that created HealthCare.gov, ripped into Sebelius for the website's problems. The site, a key feature of the Affordable Care Act or Obamacare, is one way for uninsured U.S. residents to shop for new coverage soon to be available through the law.
A team of "dozens" of IT workers from inside and outside government is working to fix HealthCare, Sebelius told senators. She offered few new details on the efforts to fix the site, but said earlier protections to have the site working for the majority of users by the end of the month remain on track.
Sebelius rejected calls for HHS to take down the website and fix it, saying IT experts have concluded it's possible to fix the site while allowing people to use it to apply for insurance coverage. The tech team added more upgrades to the site, focusing on enrollment and consumer experience, and "those upgrades will continue on an aggressive schedule" until the end of November, she said.
"Delaying the Affordable Care Act wouldn't delay people's cancer or diabetes or Parkinson's [Disease]," she said. "It didn't delay the need for mental health services or cholesterol screenings or prenatal care. Delaying the Affordable Care Act doesn't delay the foreclosure notices for families forced into bankruptcy by unpayable medical bills."
While the hearing focused on the website, many Republicans also repeated questions about potentially millions of U.S. residents having their insurance coverage canceled, despite promises from Obama and Sebelius that people who like their current plans could keep them. Under the Affordable Care Act, many insurance plans in place before 2010 were grandfathered in, but plans that didn't meet the consumer protections standards in the law and were changed significantly by the insurance companies will no longer comply with U.S. law.
Republicans said they've heard from many constituents who have had their plans canceled and are being offered more expensive plans by their insurers. HHS officials have recommended that people with canceled plans shop around. Many people will find cheaper plans or plans with more coverage at a similar price to their old plans through HealthCare.gov, they have said.
Obama administration officials have "repeated time and time again" that U.S. residents can keep their plans, said Senator John Cornyn, a Texas Republican. "It's impossible to do something in this administration that gets you fired," he said.
Some Republicans also asked about security at the site, with Senator Orrin Hatch, a Utah Republican, suggesting insufficient security testing could open up users to identity theft. There was one report this month of the website sharing a user's insurance application information with a second user.
Sebelius defended HealthCare.gov's security, saying the site complies with federal cybersecurity standards and is undergoing constant security monitoring. HHS officials said they have fixed the issue that allowed the user's information to be shared.
Many committee Democrats defended the Affordable Care Act and questioned why Republicans who have opposed the law are now complaining that the site isn't working well. Republicans are "concerned not about its failure, they're concerned about its success," said Senator Robert Menendez, a New Jersey Democrat.
But many Democrats also said they were disappointed with the website's launch. "It has been a rocky rollout," said Senator Max Baucus, the committee's chairman and a Montana Democrat. "This is unacceptable. We heard multiple times that everything was on track. We now know that was not the case."
Grant Gross covers technology and telecom policy in the U.S. government for The IDG News Service. Follow Grant on Twitter at GrantGross. Grant's email address is firstname.lastname@example.com.


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Federal Agencies Are Failing to Uphold Obama's Stated Commitment to Transparency
A new report for the National Security Archive shows the majority of agencies lagging far behind in complying with a 2009 presidential order.
On President Obama's very first full day as president in 2009, he issued a memorandum to the heads of federal agencies that said, in so many words, time to get serious about the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). "The Freedom of Information Act should be administered with a clear presumption: In the face of doubt, openness prevails," Obama declared. He continued, "All agencies should adopt a presumption in favor of disclosure, in order to renew their commitment to the principles embodied in FOIA, and to usher in a new era of open Government." Two months later, Attorney General Eric Holder issued new guidelines to agency heads, urging them to streamline their FOIA process and make more information available.
But despite this urging, many agencies haven't exactly prioritized FOIA compliance. A new audit from the National Security Archive found that 62 of the 99 government agencies have not updated their FOIA regulations since then and the vast majority of those -- 56 -- have not even updated them since the passage of the OPEN Government Act of 2007, which "mandated that agencies reform their fee structures, institute request tracking numbers, publish specific data on their FOIA output, and cooperate with the new FOIA mediators at the Office of Government Information Services." Additionally, only six agencies (NARA, the EPA, Commerce, Treasury, the Federal Labor Relations Authority, and the Merit Systems Protection Board) have joined FOIAonline, a one-stop shop for making and tracking FOIA requests.
Government agencies are not known for being nimble but this kind of foot-dragging is the result of more than some sort of inherent difficulty in the task: Administrators who are capable and care about FOIA can (and have) made progress. The problem lies in getting the slower agencies to follow the president's directive. Right now, that responsibility falls to the Office of Information Policy at the Department of Justice, but Nate Jones of the National Security Archive would like to see more enforcement coming from the White House directly. "If Obama is serious about ensuring his pledges on transparency are met," he told me, "the White House needs to install a 'FOIA bulldog' to monitor and ensure that the agencies he leads are not ignoring the law." Until that kind of force is behind the White House's push, greater transparency will remain a promise with little effect.


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Legendary cartoonist Lynda Barry has her first solo show in New York. "Everything: Part 1,"on view at Adam Baumgold Gallery through July 11, surveys Barry's 35-year career as a leading figure in the post-punk, alternative-comics scene. Known for her distinctive DIY style—crude but evocative line drawings surrounded by swaths of hand-written narration—Barry has pushed boundaries in the male-dominated field of comics by highlighting the viewpoints of women and children and using humor to confront controversial subjects ranging from race to sexuality to abuse.
While tackling taboos through content, Barry has also challenged the conventions of genre in her work. She forged new ground, first by focusing on storytelling in her comics and then by prioritizing visual art in her two acclaimed novels: The Good Times Are Killing Me,which was adapted into an off-Broadway play, and Cruddy, which the New York Times called, "a work of terrible beauty."
Two of her award-winning books, What It Is and Picture This: The Near-Sighted Monkey Book, both on view at Adam Baumgold, have created an entirely new genre alltogether: "graphic memoir/how-to" books.
"Everything: Part 1" begins with new pages from Blabber, Blabber, Blabber: Volume 1 of Everything, an introduction to Barry's career with collaged pages of her artwork and personal photos. The pages selected also include the artist's best-known comic, Ernie Pook's Comeek, a syndicated series that appeared in over 70 newspapers throughout the United States for 30 years.
Also on view are selections from One Hundred Demons, a collection of comic strips from her later column in the "Mothers Who Think" section on Salon.com; The Freddie Stories, culled from the Ernie Pook's Comeek series; and selections of Barry's comic strips that poke fun at menopause, work-related stress, one-night stands, and other topics that Barry assumes you're probably uncomfortable talking about.
Comics, long relegated to the back pages of art history, have been elevated in recent years, beginning with the 2005 "Masters of American Comics" exhibition in Los Angeles. But women comic artists like Barry were infamously excluded from the show. "Everything: Part 1" presents a rare opportunity to fill this hole in the cultural archive and view the breadth of work by someone from the other half of the population.
Now an assistant professor of interdisciplinary creativity in the art department of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Barry encourages a new generation of would-be cartoonists to believe in their own inherent artistic abilities. Her unorthodox drawing courses and her innovative Image Lab, which is part of the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery, provide the opportunity for Barry to examine the physiological effects of art-making with students from different disciplines and community members of all ages.
Why are comics your art form of choice?
If it's all just drawing, it's too quiet; if it's all just writing, it's too lonely. So, it's about the two coming together.
Your work also blends humor with very serious issues, ranging from abusive relationships to racial divisions and self-consciousness.
I was in a lucky position when alternative papers existed all across the country and wanted cartoonists who were different. So, I could use comics to write about serious stuff. But it took people a couple of years to realize that I wasn't making a joke.
Comics are like songs. You can sing about anything–about love or about minors being treated badly. Art Spiegelman broke that open for the whole world with Maus. Imagine that pitch! If there was any question about what comics could do, he answered it.
It turns out to be one of the most moving and powerful things about it all. Crying and laughing come from the same place. I was able to carve out a space, another side of comics.
Many of your comics read like a kind of call to arms for non-artists to express themselves creatively. Why is this important to you?
I don't think there's any other reason we have art than to save us, the way our liver is there to keep us alive. I have come to regard the arts as external organs. They have always been as critical to me as my kidneys are. It's like a dialysis machine you draw yourself.
I trace that right back to elementary school, bonding with the first place I felt really safe and cared for with pencil and paper. If you were drowning in the ocean and came to an island, you'd love every bug on that island for the rest of your life.
Is that why you decided to become a teacher yourself?
Teachers played the biggest role in my life and to be a teacher is to continue a certain kind of family line for people who don't have families.
It's my way of being a mom. No, not a mom–the crazy auntie that everybody needs. One of my students calls me "Auntie Monkey Glasses."
What are you tackling in your upcoming book Syllabus: Notes from an Accidental Professor?
How does one teach this? That's one thing. The university gave me the opportunity to bring people together from different backgrounds. I have PhD students studying math or genetics or engineering alongside art students.
I try to attract people who are confident drawing and those who gave up when they were 9. What's fascinating about the people who gave up at 9 is that their drawing style is intact from then. And these people don't realize how valuable that is. It's like watching a baby walking around with a vase, hoping it doesn't break.
That's what this book is really about. It's not, "everybody can draw like Michelangelo!" with rainbows around it. It's about this other astonishing ability that lays dormant in people's untrained hands.
Some of your comics feature dance, which is also presented as a liberating creative activity. Do you see a connection between visual art and dance?
Dance is very much tied to this idea of image-making. I sometimes surprise the class by demanding they do the Hokey Pokey. I say we're doing something very tied to the act of creativity. Or they'll sing with me. We memorize a lot of poetry and recite together. There's something about doing things in unison that's very powerful.
In one of your comics, you say that babies and grandmas are "keepers of the groove" because they help us remember to dance, even if we can't dance well. Do you think people become more free about these things as they age? Especially grandmas?
I think it depends on the grandma. A grandma among grandmas is one thing, but a grandma around kids is a whole other personality. But there's no two ways about it—something about getting older loosens you up, the self-consciousness finally drops away.
That's my big news for women. When they talk about menopause, they hold it in front of you like Medusa's head. They tell you about all the stuff that will start to change in your body but no one tells you that you won't care. It's a really good thing.
How would you guide non-artists to draw who aren't lucky enough to be able to visit your lab?
I always say this. You can do it immediately: draw a hand, then a beak then, then a cigarette. I propose drawing that and it makes people laugh–what the hell is that?
Even in writing classes it's the first thing I have people do and they get giddy and that connection has been broken through. That's what I'm curious about: Why can imagining that make us feel better the way a good beer can?
You ask many philosophical questions about art in your comics.
"'What is an image?'" Marilyn Frasca asked me that when I was 19 and I've been trying to answer it ever since. You can answer questions in essay form but the problem with trying to write an essay is we immediately try to impose a structure. There's this weird internal logic that's important to find first before giving it form.
I also like presenting a question in a way that makes people feel like they have a chance to answer it themselves. "Where is a story before it becomes words or after it becomes words?"
It's not in the real world and it's not fully in the imagination. I love that kind of weird open feeling it gives you, not knowing in a delighted way. It's rare in life and very sweet to chase after it.
Image on home page: Lynda Barry,My Summer of Drive Through Movies (page 1), 1995, for Premiere Magazine, ink, watercolor on paper. Courtesy Adam Baumgold Gallery.


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100 Brilliant Minds and What They Said!
February 4, 2016 \ Infographics, Inspiration
\ 1 Comment
In the increasingly competitive world of today, the ability to innovate can often be the difference between business success and failure. But let's face that it's not always easy for most entrepreneurs to find the time to think outside the box.
Meetings with clients, conference calls, reports, staff administration and administrative tasks – not to mention the constant stream of emails demanding attention – are just a small part of the busy daily routine of businessmen.
So if you're looking for a dose of inspiration that fits in your schedule, the dynamic infographic "100 Brilliant Minds and What They Said" can be the right source for you to develop your creativity, leadership and innovation skills.
The team at Funding Circle has curated hundreds of quotes from the most influential business leaders to grasp their business approaches, attitudes and philosophical views. A sure-fire recipe for you to let your creative instincts out.
To access the dynamic version of the infographic click here.


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Photographer Wing Young Huie goes beyond appearances
Art Heroes is an MPR News series about people who have chosen to use their artistic talents to make the world a better place. These are people who commit themselves day in and day out to transforming their communities through their art. We benefit from a wealth of artists in this area who are also great community leaders.
ST. PAUL, Minn. -- Born and raised in Duluth, photographer Wing Young Huie is best known for his public art installations, most recently the University Avenue project, in which he turned a six-mile stretch of the thoroughfare into an outdoor photo gallery. The pictures were of people and life from the surrounding neighborhoods, some of which he enlarged to the size of billboards.
The project was all about confronting the prejudices with which we categorize others, based solely on how they look. It's an existence Huie knows well.
"We were the only Asian family in our neighborhood and I was always the only Asian kid in school, until my senior year, when another kid showed up, another Asian boy. And I avoided him. I don't think I realized at the time that I was avoiding someone who looked like me," he said recently.
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But that's what was happening. Huie describes himself as a "Banana" — slang for someone who's yellow on the outside, but white on the inside. And he saw that Asian boy as foreign.
"What I realized is that you are what you see. And as I looked around at my fellow students I became formed by popular culture, TV, Hollywood, media, marketing — I forgot what I looked like. It's not like you go around with a mirror in front of you. Popular culture becomes your mirror and it's a distorted mirror," Huie said.
• Click for more Art Heroes stories
The average American is bombarded by thousands of advertising images each day. Huie said those images are usually digitally altered to make them look as appealing as possible, and they often stereotype people on the basis of sex or race.
And he believes most documentary photography is about victims: The photographs elicit sympathy and pity, but the viewer often comes away thinking, "Thank god I'm not like them." Huie hopes his photography accomplishes something altogether different.
Hence the University Avenue project.
"The perception of University Avenue has been that it is unsafe, that 'those people' live and work there. It's a place of crime. It's a place of dysfunction at all sorts of levels, and I have to watch myself," said Christine Podas-Larson, the executive director of Public Art St. Paul, who has worked with Huie extensively over the years, particularly on his University Avenue photo project. "It says everything about us as a society that when we look at someone we judge them instantly."
Huie's University Avenue project included nightly parties, during which he'd project his photographs on stacks of shipping crates and host live music. Each month he presented cabarets featuring local spoken word artists. The event, Podas-Larson said, drew people to the neighborhood that otherwise would never have come.
"And lo and behold they get to University Avenue and they aren't mugged," she said. "I cannot tell you how many people came to the projection site from other parts of the Twin Cities area, and that was a pretty common comment: 'Well, here we all are in a parking lot sitting with people we've never met before in our lives and this feels good and I feel safe. I never thought I would.'"
Podas-Larson said Huie finds the beauty in the everyday moments of people's lives and displays them as a sort of antidote to marketing images that continue to stereotype or offer unrealistic standards for good looks or wealth.
According to St. Paul Mayor Chris Coleman, Huie's images don't just change the perceptions of outsiders, they also transform the community they portray.
"Sometimes you can live in a community, but when you see it up on the big screen it becomes more real to you, and you realize maybe other people know about us and maybe other people see us in a different way than we see ourselves," Coleman said. "I think that was one of the things that Wing's work was able to do — was to say, 'You know what? Here's a fresh perspective on a place that you've lived in and known all your life.'"
At a time when the neighborhood was preparing for the long construction process surrounding the Central Corridor light rail project, Huie's work on University Avenue brought its people and places together in a sort of summer-long celebration, enlivening a community that is often portrayed as disparate and downtrodden.
"I think in a way I'm a tour guide: You walk the street, you won't see all of this. I go into people's homes," Huie said of his work. "We live in cultural bubbles, cultural islands, we go from point A to point B and don't see what's in between. I'm showing you what's in between. And it's fascinating work."
Just as powerful as his photography is what Huie does with it once a project is over.
On a recent Thursday morning, Huie presented a slideshow of images to students at the University of Wisconsin campus in Superior. One of the photographs showed some Latino men hanging out around a nice-looking car, with the window rolled down.
One student thought the scene depicted a drug deal. But eventually others correctly guessed the image was of day laborers negotiating a job — the photo started a conversation about how two different people can see the same exact image, and have a very different reaction.
Later, Huie conducted what he calls a "chalk talk," in which students are paired up to discuss, and come up with answers to some basic questions, including, 'What are you?' And, 'How do you think other people see you?'
As students gradually come up with their answers, they are asked to pick one of them and write it on a small chalkboard. They have their photo taken, holding the chalkboard in front of them. The result is a portrait in which the viewer is not just invited into someone's world, but into their mind.
"You know, we all have a public face and a private face, and I think especially in high school or middle school, no one wants to be ridiculed, no one wants to be embarrassed, no one wants to be bullied and so they keep their real selves to themselves or only to those very, very close," Huie said. "But when I ask them if they would like to be real all the time? Everybody does."
The chalk talk is a device Huie came up with to take his photography somewhere new. It's now being used by schools and companies to raise awareness of diversity among their students and staff. It's another example of Wing Young Huie working to create a world in which everyone can be their authentic selves, and see each other with more open eyes.
• The people's photographer
• Photographer's homepage
• Huie's Science Museum race project (pdf)
• NY Times: Anywhere the Eye Can See, It's Likely to See an Ad


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Star Commentary: Roasted, With a Side of Funny
For the first time in seven seasons, Sunday night's episode of Star featured a panel of comedic guest judges brought on to roast the remaining five contestants and their food — aptly, variations on the classic roast. This unique challenge elicited mixed reactions from the passionate and opinionated commenters on Food Network's Facebook page and our Star blog.
While some of you found the roast to be "clever and different" and "a brilliant idea," one viewer argued that typically "you roast people who are at the top of their game, not people struggling to get a start" in the industry. Another commenter worried that the roast would simply involve mindless "heckling," although upon watching the episode, many found that the comedians offered "insightful" remarks and "were able to give the best feedback in terms of audience likeability."
And while the challenge proved too much for Whitney, one commenter noted, "If you can't take the heat, now's the time to jump out of the frying pan! It's simply a test."
What did you think of the roast challenge? Was it fair for the finalists to be judged by non-food people? Join the conversation on Facebook and Star Talk, and tune in Sunday at 9pm/8c to see who can withstand the pressure of Kitchen Stadium.
Who's your favorite finalist so far? Cast your Fan Vote up to 10 times per day.


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Saving the Shrinking Flame: How to Reignite Your Passion for Homeschooling
- Naomi Musch Author
- 2012 30 Nov
Burnout is a scary word. It can quench our homeschooling fire before it flames or even quench it after months or years of burning bright. It can make a family feel like a troop of reluctant campers in a rainstorm just trying to keep the last match lit amidst the driving wind and downpour of doubt. When the flame of passion sputters, chances are it just might . . . disappear.
Having homeschooled my five children over the course of eighteen years, I've known the weariness that causes frustration, despair, and the overwhelming desire to give up. But we can keep our passion burning bright by first identifying, and then avoiding (if possible), the reasons that we burn out.
Burnout usually stems from a lack of confidence, and confidence is driven down by a variety of factors such as these:
- Too many to-do's, from household tasks to outside obligations, that have us functioning on overload.
- Children who are antagonistic toward "doing school" or are otherwise strong-willed, defiant, and wearing us down until we feel like we don't want to be in the battle any more.
- Lack of a solid support system within family or community. We feel like Elijah, who, after he'd stood against the prophets of Baal groaned, "I, even I only, am left, and they seek my life, to take it away" (1 Kings 19:14, ESV).
- No time of personal refreshing. There's no breather, and we're at our wits' end physically and emotionally.
- Unexpected lifestyle adjustments, such as a new baby or job change, which disrupt our homeschooling for a lengthy period of time.
- Feelings of inadequacy to instruct. Lack of confidence at its most basic level whispers that we just don't have what it takes—no degree, no understanding of certain subjects, no patience—to teach our kids.
- A combination of the above. When total burnout is at hand, we are likely to feel a combination of all the above situations. At this level, we're drowning in circumstances, emotion, exhaustion, lack of support—you name it.
Climbing out of discouragement feels like trying to escape a cyclone of doubt that keeps pulling us deeper and further from our original goals. So let's look at some goals that can help us regain our confidence.
#1 - Focus on the necessary. It's been said that "busyness is the enemy of fruitfulness." It's the old I'm-spinning-my-wheels syndrome of working harder and faster but accomplishing little. Being busy doesn't necessarily mean achieving results. To be effective without burning out usually starts by figuring out what to take off our schedules rather than what to take on.
We can't avoid doing the laundry and going to the grocery store occasionally, and our children need our individual attention. But in order to homeschool smarter, we have to set and guard a sustainable pace. This might mean offering simple meals like grilled cheese sandwiches and a can of tomato soup on most school nights. It will almost certainly require saying "no" to other people's expectations, even if those other people are our relatives or people who want us to be involved in ministry.
Focusing on the necessary requires daily prayer. God has specific tasks set for each of our days, and He never assigns us more than we can handle. We might find that it's better to skip the worksheets and the book report in lieu of the action that is going to produce a more important, even character-building, result. For example, we may need to accept the fact that while an ailing grandparent is living with us, this care-giving is an education.
Psalms 139:16 reminds us, "Your eyes saw my unformed body; all the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be" (NIV). God not only knows our days, but He also has ordained specific things for each one of them. Burnout happens when we try to scribble extra notes in the margins and between the lines on the pages He's already written.
#2 - Focus on areas of strength. Sometimes we forget that we are gifted differently. God doesn't expect us to be good at everything, but He does expect us to use the gifts He gave us, for His glory. When doubts assail us, it serves our needs better—and glorifies God—to concentrate our efforts in areas where He has gifted us. That might mean completely setting aside schoolwork today in order to serve a neighbor. Jesus Himself was called to certain tasks by the Father and sometimes said "no" to assignments He wasn't called to do.
As a homeschooling parent, one of the most freeing things I've done was to loosen my grip on my lesson plans and schedules, especially when my kids got to be juniors and seniors in high school. That is almost directly opposed to common thinking, because those junior/senior years are typically when we pile on more, study harder, test, and prepare!
Nonetheless, I turned a big dose of control over to my kids, allowing them to pursue (with guidance) their unique gifts. This meant they focused primarily on their personal areas of interest: writing music and recording a CD, starting a photography business, concentrating on an Electronics course, studying ornithology, and holding part-time jobs that gave them valuable, real-world experience. As for "school" work, they kept up with just enough math and writing to remain well rounded as they applied life principles to projects that were dear to them. It's worked out very nicely.
#3 - Focus on a new direction. At any time during the school year, we should prayerfully discern the direction that will bring our family the most satisfaction. What is it that really makes your family tick? Camping? History? Participating in a club like 4-H? Whatever you find to be most rewarding, simply pray first and head that way. Gear your schooling around those pursuits instead of limiting it to a box of curricula.
Some ministries burn out because the person ministering is using his or her own strengths and not going in a direction that brings personal satisfaction. He may try to follow somebody else's plan (or curriculum) for success. What is homeschooling to us if it is not ministry to our families? Pray your own plan, and be listening when God says, " . . . Stand by the roads, and look, and ask for the ancient paths, where the good way is; and walk in it, and find rest for your souls" (Jeremiah 6:16, ESV).
#4 - Focus on friendship. If you don't have a support system, either through your family or church, you are on a special playing field. You must seek it out. Get on a social network, find online forums, and read magazines like The Old Schoolhouse® Magazine, but foremost, remember that God is your companion. Dwell in Him. Put yourself in a (prayerful) position that will find you smothered in His strength and guidance. He will support you, and He will bring others who are like-minded into your path at the right time.
Letting Go
You might have noticed that overcoming burnout involves letting go. Like it or not, plans fall apart. Exhaustion sweeps in. Life happens. "Rising above" means we sometimes have to relinquish control, but don't equate that with failure. As we take time to rest and free ourselves and our children to live as God leads, we let go of anxiety and are then free to grasp the opportunities that are lying before us today—opportunities waiting to grow us in faith, character, and knowledge.
So let go, walk in God's strength each day, and remember that "little is much when God is in it."
Copyright 2012, used with permission. All rights reserved by author. Originally appeared in the January 2012 issue of The Old Schoolhouse® Magazine, the trade magazine for homeschool families. Read the magazine free at www.TOSMagazine.com or read it on the go and download the free TOS apps to read the magazine on your Kindle Fire or Apple or Android devices.
Naomi and husband Jeff enjoy epic adventures in northern Wisconsin with their five adult children, at home or nearby. Naomi is the author of several inspirational novels, including the Empire in Pine series from Desert Breeze Publishing, and she mentors young writers through tutorials at A NOVEL Writing Site. Visit her at www.naomimusch.com.
Publication date: December 3, 2012


text: Once you opt to individual a boutique there are actually three options prior to deciding to. You could buy an already present shop. In this sort of straight up buy you could have an already current customer base. The next option is opening up a business of the reputed specialist chain. Using this method you… Continue reading Learn How to Own a Boutique


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How long is too long to wait for a seat at the hottest new restaurant in Houston?
For friends who showed up at the no-reservations Coltivare on Saturday night for dinner, a quoted three-and-a-half hour wait time wasn't just excessive, it was outrageous. They went elsewhere for dinner.
Coltivare co-owner Morgan Weber said that three-and-a-half hours might be "hyperbole" (after all, hunger does play tricks on the mind), but he acknowledged that the waiting game at Coltivare is a very real thing. And that the restaurant is grappling with the realities of customers angered and confused about the waiting times that can stretch to from two to two-and-a-half hours on busy Friday and Saturday nights.
"I'm not telling people not to come eat on Saturday night. But you're going to wait," Weber said. "I hate it too. I don't like the fact that you're not sitting down eating."
A brief glance at Yelp finds reviews that praise the food but damn the wait. Weber is well aware of the complaints – they are a thorn in the side of the Heights restaurant.
But the factors of the wait time are understandable:
1. Coltivare – the first from Revival Market's Weber and co-owner chef Ryan Pera – is new, having opened Jan. 22 to a hungry neighborhood and a feverish foodie contingent.
2. The restaurant has only 60 seats inside. The patio, which can accommodate an additional 30 customers, isn't open yet because of the weather.
3. It's only open for dinner, with a five-hour service window for weekdays and six-hour service on Friday and Saturday.
4. While Coltivare is awaiting its liquor license, the restaurant is operating as BYOB.
The latter is probably the greatest contributing favor in the long waits for tables at Coltivare. Since patrons are bringing their own wine, they might have an impulse to linger longer at the tables.
"In this situation, there's no real motivation to eat up," Weber said. "We've had people who come in and have their meal, have their dessert, and then open up another bottle of wine and stay another hour."
The restaurant quickly abandoned its practice of allowing patrons to call ahead and put themselves on a waiting list. The wait estimates proved unreliable, Weber said, adding that even now, the quoted wait times are approximates. "We truly don't know," he said.
So how do you get a table at Coltivare without an exorbitant wait? Weber has simple recommendations:
• Try eating early on Sunday, Monday and Wednesday, when the wait isn't so long. The restaurant opens daily except Tuesday at 5.
• Come in later. The restaurant is open until 10 p.m. on Monday, Wednesday and Thursday; until 11 on Friday and Saturday and until 9 on Sunday. If you come an hour before closing time your wait time won't be long.
• Don't come on Thursday, Friday and Saturday at 7 p.m. and expect to eat at 8. The longer waits – yes, they can be as long as two-and-a-half hours – are at peak hours on the most popular dining days.
Weber said he expects the waiting to become less of a problem when the liquor license is granted (no firm time on that) and when the restaurant opens for brunch and lunch (could be sometime later this month). He adds that the restaurant is doing the best it can concerning waiting game.
"The word I want to get out is we want everyone to have a good experience," he said. "There's no hard and fast science for figuring out how long the wait will be. It's our best guess."
Coltivare is at 3320 White Oak, 713-637-4095; coltivarehouston.com


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Can style rule in a utilitarian realm?
That's the $43,995 question riding the broad shoulders of the smallest-ever Range Rover, the Evoque. To be accurate, it's the $43,995 to $53,895 question, if we include all the trim levels. That lofty base-price range makes the thesis issue—the preeminence of style as a purchase motivator for SUVs—critical to this Range Rover newbie. A matter of life and death, even.
The product planners and the marketing troops would probably want to protest at this point that their new vehicle delivers something its competitors—primarily the Audi Q5, the BMW X3, and the Mercedes-Benz GLK—do not: serious off-road capability.
After our first Evoque experience, which included substantial episodes of bouncing around in wild Welsh terrain that ranged from rocky trails to deeply rutted mud tracks—all in persistent rain—we readily concede that this small-scale Range Rover would leave its German rivals mired down or high-centered on some lonely moor. However, the Range Rover people recognize that most Evoque owners probably won't venture farther from pavement than a dirt road or pea-gravel parking lot.
Competitive Checklist
So if superior off-road credentials don't count for much with urbanites who have no off-road aspirations, where's the competitive edge? It's not price. The Evoque's least-expensive get-in—for the base Pure Plus five-door model—is higher than upscale versions of the Q5, X3, and GLK.
Is the edge in performance? With curb weights around 4000 pounds, according to Range Rover, the Evoque is on a par with its rivals, and with 240 hp and 251 lb-ft of torque, its 2.0-liter direct-injection turbo four-cylinder (adapted from Ford's EcoBoost four) is not an output champ, either.
This four-cylinder engine is offered by a brand known for V-8 power, and most of the competing powerplants are sixes. Moreover, the Evoque four is mated to a six-speed automatic, whereas the others offer seven- or eight-speed units. A manual transmission is offered elsewhere but won't be available in U.S. models.
Although we found throttle response to be a little reluctant at times, and the system's electronic brain balks at any hint of indecision with the right foot, the Evoque seems to scoot along readily enough, particularly in passing situations. We predict 0-to-60-mph times of 6.9 and 7.0 seconds for the three- and five-doors, respectively, numbers near the back of the class but not embarrassingly slow.
The Evoque comes to market with respectable fuel-economy forecasts—19 mpg city and 28 highway, per the EPA, at the good end of the pack. There's a turbo-diesel version available in Europe that would stack even better numbers, but that won't be offered here, either.
Zigs and Zags
The jury's out on dynamics. In rugged outback stretches, the Range Rover's combination of full-time four-wheel drive and respectable ground clearance (minimum 8.4 inches) made easy work of the crusty Welsh high country. But on narrow, rain-slicked highways, bordered by jagged stone fences, there wasn't much opportunity to explore the Evoque's limits of adhesion or measure its athleticism other than trying to avoid oncoming lorries straddling the road's center line.
We can say that the Evoque's new electric rack-and-pinion power-steering system, although quick, could provide more tactile info, especially on-center. On the other hand, braking performance is powerful, with good pedal feel, and ride quality is unlikely to provoke unhappiness, on-road or off.
But can the Evoque match the athleticism of an X3? The Rover's optional Adaptive Dynamics package, with magnetorheological dampers at its core, would have much to say about the outcome of an Evoque/X3 showdown. But it's a stand-alone option that's only available with the top-of-the-line Prestige Premium model, pushing that trim's heady $52,395 price upward by $1250.
The Eyes Have It
However, you don't need a comparison test to understand the key element of the Evoque's appeal. Just check the photos. Makes the Teutonic trio look pretty tame, doesn't it? The Evoque began as the Land Rover LRX, a concept car unveiled at the 2008 Detroit auto show and Gerry McGovern's first styling statement as the company's then-new design director.
With its rising beltline and rear-sloping roof, the LRX was reminiscent of the Mini Cooper, albeit on a somewhat larger scale, and the Evoque stays essentially true to the show car. Taking another page from the Mini's book, the Evoque offers contrasting roof colors among its wide array of personalization options, yielding a snazzy look that makes the competition seem even more ho-hum.
Like the concept, the production Evoque is based on LR2 architecture and rides on the same wheelbase (104.7 inches). The Evoque is shorter, lower, and distinctly wider, though, lending a little brawn to its appearance.
The sloping roofline doesn't compromise rear-seat headroom, and there's plenty of space for four inside. Cargo volume trails that of the German machines—20 cubic feet for the five-door with rear seats up, 51 cubic feet with the rear seats folded flat. (For reference, the Audi Q5's numbers are 29 and 57.) Interior appointments are Range Rover–posh, standard-equipment comprehensive, and the array of electronic goodies extensive. The latter includes the five-camera system from other Rangies that provides a 360-degree view of the Evoque's immediate surroundings—most helpful in tight quarters.
Prices and Packages
Unlike the competition, the Evoque is offered in three- and five-door body styles. They are identical in most dimensions save for a 1.2-inch disparity in height, the three-door being the lower of the two. Consistent with its dashing looks, the Evoque's trim levels march to their own beat. As noted, the lineup begins with the $43,995 Pure Plus five-door—add a grand for the Pure Plus coupe (as Land Rover calls the three-door).
The Pure Plus is well equipped, but if you want navigation, you need to step up to the Pure Premium level—$47,995 ($49,395 for the three-door). That's probably as much Evoque as anyone will need equipment-wise, but it will be possible to spend more if you like. The Dynamic Premium model adds various fancy trim touches and a choice of four interior color schemes; it commands $51,495 in five-door guise, while $52,895 is required for a three-door. Topping the lineup is the five-door Prestige Premium model at $52,395. Like the Dynamic Premium, it basically adds nicer trim.
When the Evoque goes on sale in October, Range Rover anticipates that about 80 percent of U.S. sales will be five-doors. Of course, how heavily sales will run in total—with those heavy price tags—remains to be seen.
So how important is styling? How many buyers will pay a premium to be the coolest on their block? We're going to find out soon enough. But in the meantime, keep in mind that Christian Dior didn't get to the top of the design game selling plain T-shirts.


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I'd guess 100 percent. Not that watching porn completely accounts for the behavior. But pornography undermines sexual restraint. It offers a distorted image of what "everybody" is doing, and it grants permission for indulging every conceivable urge. Porn is mainstream now, offered in nearly every hotel room and ubiquitous on the Internet. The stigma that once attached to porn is gone. You can take college courses in it. Is it surprising that its corrupting influence is felt everywhere?
As Pamela Paul documented in Pornified, "Men look at pornography online more than they look at any other subject. And 66 percent of 18- to 34-year-old men visit a pornographic site every month."
Mary Eberstadt, who has a flair for juxtaposition, offers a brilliant comparison of American attitudes toward tobacco and pornography in her new book "Adam and Eve After the Pill: Paradoxes of the Sexual Revolution."
She asks us to imagine two women, one a 30-year-old 1958 housewife named Betty and the other her 30-year-old granddaughter Jennifer today. "Betty would never dream of putting even a few minutes of Internet pornography as we now know it before her eyes. She would feel degraded, polluted, even sick. ... She thinks that pornography is morally wrong and that the people who create it are borderline evil."
Jennifer, by contrast, "may not greet pornography with quite the gusto that her boyfriend does. But she has no such passionate feelings about it as Betty would, let alone any . . . impulse to make a sweeping moral claim about it. On the other hand, Jennifer would never dream of putting a cigarette into her mouth. She would feel degraded, polluted, even sick. She thinks that tobacco is morally wrong and that the people who create it are borderline evil."
With hindsight, we know that smoking causes a variety of ills. But with regard to porn, Eberstadt proposes, we are in the 1950s or early 1960s moment -- the industry denies that its product causes harm or is addictive and for a variety of reasons, we accept that evasion.
One fascinating parallel in the two cases is the pursuit of women customers. Until the 1950s, cigarette consumption was much higher among men than among women. The industry attempted to lasso women by creating brands such as Virginia Slims and marketing cigarettes as emblems of "glamour, beauty, autonomy and equality." Similarly, pornographers recognize that their clientele is heavily male and are keen to draw in the other 50 percent of consumers. Playgirl magazine, when it debuted in 1973, pitched itself to "today's liberated, independent, self-aware, sensual woman." College women report that they feel pressured to watch porn to prove their "enlightenment" on sexual matters. With the exception of some feminists and some religious groups, they get very little support for resisting its march to mainstream status.
It is possible, Eberstadt argues, that pornography can reacquire the stigma it has lost. Attitudes toward smoking underwent that kind of reversal. At first, smoking was disapproved, then went mainstream and when the evidence could no longer be denied, finally slipped back into social opprobrium.
Like smoking, porn is not an innocent pleasure. At a 2003 meeting of the Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers, 62 percent of attendees said that Internet porn had contributed to divorces in the previous year. Mary Anne Layden, of the Sexual Trauma and Psychopathology program at the University of Pennsylvania, reports that young people who view porn are more likely to have multiple sexual partners, more likely to engage in risky forms of sex, and more likely to be sexual offenders. Other studies have shown that teenagers who view pornography are more likely to engage in early and more frequent sexual activity. Pamela Paul wrote of "countless men" who described "how while using pornography, they lost the ability to relate to or be close to women."
That last insight, hard to prove with statistics, is the heart of the matter. Porn degrades relations between the sexes by encouraging a gross and impersonal approach to a subject that should be most elevated by tenderness, fidelity and respect. Eberstadt quotes philosopher Roger Scruton, who said it very well: "Those who become addicted to this 'risk-free' form of sex run a risk of another and greater kind. They risk the loss of love, in a world where only love brings happiness."


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Scores of independent record store owners are calling out Jay-Z and Kanye West over release plans for their much-anticipated "Watch the Throne" collaboration.
Owners signed a letter that calls the exclusive deals with iTunes and Best Buy "bad news" and asks two of music's top stars to reconsider and allow more than 1,700 indie retailers equal access.
"We know that you are busy, and that you put most of your energies into creating great music, but we are writing to you in the hope that you will hear us and take the time to rectify this matter," the letter states. "As representatives of the independent record store music community, we are asking you to allow record stores and music fans equal access to your new album."
Exclusive deals are now common for top acts and it's unclear why the letter's original writers, the organizers of Record Store Day, chose this project to object. Doyle Davis, co-owner of Grimey's New and Preloved Music in Nashville, said some of the letter's signees will pull current and previous releases by the two artists from their shelves, though he will not go that far.
Jay-Z and West have agreed to give iTunes customers access to "Watch the Throne" on Aug. 8, four days ahead of everyone else. And Best Buy will exclusively sell a deluxe album till Aug. 23 when other retailers will have access.
Jay-Z's spokesman had no comment and West's did not immediately reply to an email from The Associated Press.
Record Store Day has become something of a holiday for independent retailers each April. This year, dozens of artists provided exclusive vinyl, performances and other perks.
Fans lined up, sometimes hours early and around the block, to score new music from acts like Radiohead and The White Stripes. Independent stores have suffered a marked decline over the last decade, casualties of the ascendance of box stores, digital music sales and a poor economy.
Now they say they just want a fighting chance.
"We believe this is a short-sighted strategy, and that your decisions will be doing great damage to over 1,700 independent record stores — stores that have supported you and your music for years," the letter states.
AP Music Editor Nekesa Mumbi Moody contributed to this report.
Contact Chris Talbott at www.twitter.com/Chris_Talbott.


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mikroBUS is a standard specification by MikroElektronika that can be freely used by anyone following the guidelines. It includes SPI, I2C, UART, PWM, ADC, reset, interrupt, and power (3.3V and 5V) connections to common embedded peripherals.
This page is meant to foster discussion within the embedded Linux community on usage of mikroBUS compatible add-on boards, adding mikroBUS sockets to embedded Linux systems, and ways to improve both Linux support for mikroBUS and the mikroBUS standard.
- 1 Usage of mikroBUS compatible add-on boards today
- 2 Implementation of a mikroBUS socket on an embedded Linux system
- 3 Improving Linux support for mikroBUS
- 4 Improving the mikroBUS standard for better Linux support
- 5 Comparisons to other popular embedded add-on form-factors
- 6 Definitions
- 7 References
Usage of mikroBUS compatible add-on boards today
Device tree overlays loaded at boot time
Today, there is no mainline solution for enabling mikroBUS add-on boards at run-time, so they must all be configured at boot-time with device trees[definitions 1].
Instructions for PocketBeagle: https://github.com/beagleboard/pocketbeagle/wiki/Click-boards%E2%84%A2
Example overlay: https://github.com/beagleboard/bb.org-overlays/blob/master/src/arm/PB-I2C2-MPU-9DOF-CLICK.dts
This is the primary mechanism for enumerating device drivers[definitions 2] for mikroBUS add-on boards today. It suffers from the need to maintain a large out-of-tree database for which you'd need an overlay for every mikroBUS add-on board for every Linux system for every mikroBUS socket on that system. Multiplying 1,000 Click boards by the number of BeagleBoard.org boards by the number of sockets supported on each of those boards ends up being a LOT of device tree overlay fragments.
Further, the application of those fragments is rather error prone and can even result in preventing a system from booting.
Run-time device tree overlays
There are some out-of-tree mechanisms[1] for loading device-tree overlay fragments via ConfigFS.
This patch doesn't apply after 4.14 and is not likely to be accepted in mainline. Mainline doesn't want arbitrary device-tree fragments[2], but there is a chance that this could be considered a "development-only" patch if this is rebased. The solution would allow run-time loading, but would not be automatic and requires authoring of overlay fragments specific to every add-on board, every Linux platform and every mikroBUS socket.
Using Greybus simulator to enable software hotplug support
It is possible to enumerate some device drivers for mikroBUS add-on boards by running the Greybus simulator, gbsim. Instructions for setting up gbsim and more information can be found in a wiki write-up on a GSoC project. This method uses Greybus simulator to load a manifest blob to the kernel greybus driver where the virtual interfaces(SPI/I2C/other) are created.
gbsim manages the transfers between the physical bus/gpio/interrupt and the virtual Greybus interface. Having a userspace application, gbsim, in the middle of the transactions has a performance and security impact.
This approach requires additional platform data[definitions 3] for instantiating device drivers for mikroBUS add-on boards with platform data requirements like reset, interrupt-gpio, and other named-gpio, thus the approach needs more refinements to tackle the issues of instantiating devices with additional platform data requirements. A few approaches to solve this problem are discussed here.
Using Greybus to enumerate drivers for mikroBUS add-on boards has an added advantage of using different transports[definitions 4] which makes it ideal for IoT applications[3]. A transport could be a wired or wireless network, in addition to more flexible embedded busses like Unipro.
Implementation of a mikroBUS socket on an embedded Linux system
Improving Linux support for mikroBUS
Motivation for supporting software hotplug
Creation of a mikroBUS bus driver in the Linux kernel
This approach does not involve the use of greybus directly but uses the greybus manifests for providing the platform data, it is actually a combination of the Greybus manifest parsing logic combined with the working of Bone Cape Manager used in the previous BB kernels, the Cape Manager used to load the data for a cape from the Device Tree whereas this bus driver[definitions 5] takes the data from the manifest blob passed via the SysFS interface.The Mikrobus port information for the device is parsed from the Device Tree(this information only account for the port information and does not have any click specific information).
Improving the mikroBUS standard for better Linux support
Adding an identifier[definitions 6] would provide a way to load the device drivers for a mikroBUS add-on board without the need for manual configuration. By fetching the identifier in the mikroBUS bus driver probe[definitions 7] function, would enable that function to call the probe function in the various device drivers.
Proposal #1: Use Greybus Manifest binaries
- Module vendor specified separately from driver usage
- Possibility of using existing driver names for invocation
Proposal #2: Use simple string identifiers
- Requires table to be kept in kernel
- Fix-ups would be very direct and not "fix-ups" at all, since no driver specific information would be encoded
Specifics on power function
The direction and accommodations related to the power pins aren't as specific in the mikroBus standard as with Feather.
Comparisons to other popular embedded add-on form-factors
The purpose of this page is to advance the development of mikroBUS support in Linux. Some distractions may be introduced to either illustrate the effort cannot be sufficiently limited in scope to tackle or that focus should be elsewhere. I'm not assuming these would be introduced with any ill-will, they are just natural concerns that need to be addressed up-front.
|1.0" x 1.125"/1.6"/2.25"
|0.9" x 2.0"
|De-facto standard based on implementation pin-out. Could benefit from some of the efforts for mikroBUS support, but not as cleanly defined with a limited and focused scope. Not as easy to make an impact on the majority of existing designs.
|Too irregular to make useful as an embedded system bus.
|Far too flexible for a standard outside of the Beagle ecosystem.
Why should mikroBUS be a bus in the kernel even if these other interfaces aren't?
- mikroBUS is simple, not requiring the need to overlay arbitrary device trees like Capes or other excessively flexible interfaces defined arbitrary collections of microcontroller pins.
- mikroBUS a free standard and not an ad-hoc one.
- Over 750+ Click add-on boards ranging from wireless connectivity clicks to Human Machine Interface clicks, of which more than 100+ clicks already have support in the Linux kernel.
- Over 140+ Development boards supported[4].


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This won't exactly be a full-fledged Photoshop tutorial; I just wanted to show a photo I edited in Photoshop and compare it to the original photo I had taken, and describe the general processes and tools that I used in Photoshop to get the various effects. However, to understand this tutorial you need at least basic background in Photoshop. If you have just installed Photoshop and want to try out what it can do, this probably is not the tutorial for you, because it will use some terms that I will casually throw around and not explain in detail. I have also not taken screenshots while I made this edit, so this won't be a full walkthrough, and I shall only describe the procedures in words.
Anyway, even though I am an amateur at both photography and editing, I hope this example will still serve to show the powers of digital editing and software in particular like Photoshop in bringing out detail, vibrance and richness in photos.
So here are the two images:
On the right is the original photo, of a building in Brussels, Belgium. On the left is the result after some hours of Photoshop by an amateur shopper such as me. You can click the images to see larger versions.
The major differences in the two photos are:
- The edited image is much more detailed, especially the sky and its reflection. The texture of the clouds is now much more prominent and rich. Little of this texture is visible in the original photo, and it might even be hard for the uninitiated to believe that this texture information was at all contained in the original photo. But it was, and such information always is, and with some practice it can very easily and quickly be recovered and enhanced in Photoshop for a much richer look. The human eye gorges on detail. Give it as much as you can.
- The image is much more colourful. The sky is much more vibrant, the clouds have a warm tinge, and the building itself has exploded into green and blue, very little of which is visible in the original photo.
- The sun shining off the glass panels of the building is much more prominent.
- Overall, a semi-realistic, computer-game style vibrance and brightness has been added to the photo, and the relative drabness of the original photo is completely gone.
The question now is, how were these results achieved?
I said at the outset that this is not a full-fledged tutorial, because a step-by-step instruction will be too arduous for me to write and probably pretty fruitless to blindly follow. A lot of editing comes from hunches, intuition and experimentation (which grows the intuition), so I would not encourage anyone to do exactly what I did. However, I could outline the general procedures I used.
- To add richness and detail
Make layer copies of your image and change its Image > Adjustment > Levels. You will notice that tweaking the levels makes detail and texture emerge at different exposure levels. Meaning that a certain tweak of the sliders will make detail emerge from the overexposed parts such as the clouds, at the cost of completely ruining and blackening the underexposed parts, while others will brighten and add visibility to the underexposed parts at the cost of whitewashing the overexposed parts. The trick is not to go with any one of these settings, but to employ them on different regions in separate layer copies, then merge them using layer masks. Keep checking continuously your result with the original photo to see which areas could be given more detail. Once you spot such a region, make a layer, adjust levels until that part has detail, then use layer masks to remove all but that part (use as soft a brush as possible, because the final output must appear a seamless, single image). Yes, Photoshop is a long, arduous, and highly manual process. One or two button press effects will give you pretty cheap shot results like Picasa and Instagram, but doing that kind of thing in Photoshop will not usually work.
Anyway, other adjustments you could try alongside levels is exposure, shadows/highlights etc. Basically, I would encourage you to fiddle around with all the options under Image > Adjustments for a few days to get an idea of what tool is capable of what effect.
- To add colour, warmth and vibrance
For these the primary tools are Image > Adjustments > Photo Filter, Color Balance, Hue/Saturation and Vibrance. Photoshop earlier didn't have the Vibrance tool, and using the Hue/Saturation tool to change saturation used to leave ugly bright grains in the image that was very unprofessional. Vibrance now does the job more subtly and in a slightly different way, so you can use Hue/Sat only to change the hue if required, not the saturation, but keep in mind that this is a crude tool which used beyond a measured degree will introduce patches of coloured grains in your photo. What I think vibrance concentrates on is increasing the colour diversity of the image rather than linearly increasing the saturation of every colour in the image. So if you have a bit of blue in a lot of green, vibrance will enhance that blue a lot more. When you are using the vibrance tool, use it in conjunction with the saturation slider (usually in opposite directions) to get your desired effect.
Use these colour enhancement tools with great caution, though. There's a thin line between rich and colourful and a saturated comic disaster.
Again, use the same trick here that I mentioned for adding detail, that of separating into different regions via layer masks and applying vibrance to each region as it suits the region the most.
For warmth, when I need it, I usually use the third warm filter in the Photo Filter dropdown list. I use it on clouds, but also generally on the whole image on most occasions because most of the times a bit of warmth makes the image more attractive. Again, this depends on your image. If you have a photo of a beach with white sand and cool blue water, you probably want to preserve the blues. Tweaking the colour temperature has its effect on all colours of your image, and it effectively decreases your colour diversity. (Think of it as putting a filter of a certain colour on top of your image. Every colour then acquires a tint or shade of that colour and the diversity between them is reduced.) Many photos acquire their 'wow' factor from contrast and diversity in colour, so make sure you are not ruining that rare component in your image for the sake of a warm and fuzzy feeling.
I usually use photo filters on separate regions of my image and not on the whole thing (for example, mostly on the clouds here) so as not to lose this diversity. I make layer copies as I said, apply photo filters, then merge with layer masks. However, if different regions of your photo have very different colour temperatures, it might look decidedly unrealistic and just plain wrong. Human beings are very good at figuring out what effect a certain type of lighting in the sky should have on objects in the image, and even a slight deviation will make the photo fall apart. It is important, therefore, to do this differential colour temperature tweak cautiously and with due measure, and know always where to draw the line. The merging of regions with different colour temperatures should be smooth and seamless, like the clouds and the sky in this photo. The photo filter adjustment that gives the clouds that warm glow completely botches the appearance of the sky (expected, since it's all cool blue), so I had to keep those separate and merge with layer masks using a soft brush.
Remember: a slight departure from reality usually looks good, but only up to the point where you cannot put your finger on what exactly is unreal. When your effects are so loud that the editing you have done becomes obvious, you have failed.
- To add that glowing look
If you notice closely, you may realize that parts of the image have acquired a glowing look that contributes significantly to the final semi-realistic, sci-fi sort of perception I was heading for. For this you copy your image into a new layer on top, set its blend mode to overlay or soft light or something like that (fiddle around with this), then apply a Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur to it (you can also use other blurs; I just find it fast and good enough for my purpose).
You can find a detailed walkthrough (with screenshots) of using overlay layers and layer masks in this other tutorial that I wrote.
This process blurs out some detail though, so as before, you may employ this differently for different sections, and using layer masks you can get a final output. Note though, that layers in most of these overlay-type blend modes when stacked on top of each other with overlapping regions, will increase the effect greatly, and not usually to positive outcomes. So if you require separate blur overlays for different regions, you need to merge pairs of normal+overlay layers instead of many overlay layers atop a single normal one.
- To add that sun glimmer
This was a cheap one: Filter > Render > Lens Flare. It is not as cheap and easy as it might appear though; there are many things to consider even here. There are only some logical regions in your image where there could be a bright spot creating a lens flare. Put it anywhere else, and again the human eye can catch the artifice immediately. I chose here the spot which even without the flare was the brightest part of the building facade.
The brightness of the flare is also important. The secondary rings are good to look at, but they come with the bright bloom at the center which washes out nearby areas and you lose detail. By default there is no way to control the appearance of the flare or its different parts, as it is rendered smack on top of your image and then there's nothing you can do. But with some innovation, actually there is.
Make a new layer on top of your image and fill it with black, and set its blend mode to screen (experiment with the blend mode). Put your lens flare on this layer, and it will show up faithfully on your image. Now you can tweak the appearance of your lens flare (visibility, warmth, etc.) on the top layer and the changes will show in your bottom layer, the original image. This way you can keep your flare and image separate and editable. Make sure, again, to keep the colour temperature and colour balance of the lens flare concordant with the lighting of the image, or else it will look immediately weird to even a slightly trained eye.
Careful also about choosing the lens type for the flare. I chose a decidedly unrealistic one here (movie prime), because one of my goals as I set out editing this photo was to make it look as semi-realistic as possible. The reason for this is a little involved, and will hopefully be covered in a future post, where I discuss the popular resentment against Photoshopping and editing and general.


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Validea's ETF Factor Report offers a fundamental analysis of any ETF using the major investing factors, including value, quality, momentum, and low volatility.
User Guide Video Tutorial
Ticker not available or not a US Equity ETF
IVW's exposure to the major factors (100 is highest).
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ETFs with the closest factor profiles to IVW.
(click ticker to access ETF report and name to compare to current ETF)


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In December 2007, the New Museum inaugurated its Bowery location with "Unmonumental," a four-month presentation of a determinedly unheroic strain of recent assemblage that embraces humble materials and low production values, the piecemeal, the contingent, the nonhierarchical. Midway through the exhibition's run, and just a stroll away at Deitch Projects in SoHo, filmmaker Michel Gondry opened his show "Be Kind Rewind." He re-created the derelict video store from his unspeakably bad film Be Kind Rewind, in which two buddies set out to reshoot the movies one of them inadvertently erased in the shop, using materials at hand to fashion the props and scenery. Visitors to the gallery were invited to make their own films using makeshift sets. DIY culture was ascendant on all fronts. When Gondry's film was distributed in the UK by Pathé, it was preceded by the company's loopily elegant logo—a metal speech bubble serving as the frame of a fishlike mobile outfitted with the letters of the company name—crudely remade for the occasion as if by the film's daft protagonists. (Yes, it's on YouTube.) This morsel of Pathé trivia has been willfully invoked to introduce one thread—more accurately, one wire—that connects DIY practice to a figure routinely assumed to have little contemporary traction: Alexander Calder.
Not that Calder ever sank into obscurity. Pace Gallery has shown his work faithfully since the mid-1980s; his Circus was on seemingly eternal view in the Whitney Museum lobby. If anything, Calder was rendered invisible by his very ubiquity in public collections and urban plazas. But interest has been simmering over the last few years, expressed in an array of exhibitions: "Calder, Miró" (Fondation Beyeler, Phillips Collection, 2004-05), "Alexander Calder: the Paris Years, 1926-1933" (Whitney Museum, Centre Pompidou, 2008-09), "Calder Jewelry" (Norton Museum of Art, Phildelphia Museum of Art, Metropolitan, Irish Museum of Modern Art, 2008-09), "Tanguy/Calder: Between Surrealism and Abstraction" (L&M Arts, New York, 2010). In the thick of those grand efforts arrived a small, dandy show in 2007 at New York's Jonathan O'Hara Gallery, "Simplicity of Means: Calder and the Devised Object." With lowly domestic objects—a door pull, a dinner bell, kitchen gadgets—the exhibition associated Calder most intimately with the DIY ethos of thrift, uniqueness and ingenuity.
Calder's renewed pertinence is celebrated in the engaging exhibition "Alexander Calder and Contemporary Art: Form, Balance, Joy," organized by Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art, which combines—or rather separates into—a comprehensive Calder retrospective of more than 50 works and a seven-person group show featuring "Unmonumental" veterans Martin Boyce, Abraham Cruzvillegas and Aaron Curry, plus Nathan Carter, Kristi Lippire, Jason Meadows and Jason Middlebrook. Catalogue contributor Brooke Kamin Rapaport raises and answers the show's motivating question in the very title of her essay: "Why Calder is Back: A Modern Master's Creative Reuse of Materials." Exhibition curator Lynne Warren stipulates that Calder's legacy is discernible in discrete sculptural objects, not sprawling installations, and that those objects are constructed, not "conglomerative." A third feature shared by the younger group is a prevailing disregard for finish—not unlike that evinced by the jury-rigged Pathé logo.
Of course the degree of affinity with Calder varies from artist to artist, and even from work to work. Lippire, the only woman (and also the youngest of the seven, with the shortest résumé), is arguably the most tenuously affiliated. I wouldn't dismiss her as a token, because her assemblages, while rather literal in their imagery and too axially structured to feel Calderesque, are persuasive on their own terms. Still, her inclusion does serve to keep the roster from suggesting that relating to Calder is strictly a guy thing. Middlebrook and Meadows mine the rougher bricolage side of Calder's enterprise, using lowdown materials to make forms that range from lanky to chunky. Carter channels Calder's love of miniaturization with an impish, shelf-size installation of Tyrolean radio transmission stations, though certain images and elements of his other works summon Miró (ladders, arrows) and David Smith (space frames, alphabet forms) more keenly than they do Calder.
Boyce's Fear Meets the Soul (2008), a low-slung mobile that refuses to soar, incorporates an altered leg splint designed by Charles and Ray Eames and a dangling black-painted steel element, whose silhouette seems to encompass much of Arp's abstract lexicon while evoking a shadowy silhouette from Picasso's mid-'20s Surrealism-influenced paintings. The pendant form's profile rhymes with the biomorphic contours of Curry's Danny Skullface Sky Boat (Reclining), 2009, a fuchsia aluminum construction. Arpian "navels" abound, from the hole in the midsection of Boyce's black component to the circle painted in black on Curry's metamorphic figure and the round aperture cut in Meadows's Artemis (2004), which further conjures Picasso's guitar-hole-navels. The goddess's profile in particleboard is another nice bit of Picassoism.
Perhaps because the selection and positioning of the sculpture at the MCA is so insightful, I was unprepared for the tone of the catalogue, which is laced with an almost patronizing insistence on presenting the works as being utterly transparent in aims and ideas. Warren contends that the sculpture of the younger generation has "no need for long-winded extra-object explanations," and offers into evidence the innocent delight of children to establish that "one needn't study the Kabbalah, plumb artist statements or manifestos, have read philosophy, delve into the psycho-sexual depths of an artist's autobiography, or be conversant with the socio-political context of the artwork to appreciate a Calder." In Rapaport's words, "Today, Calder is emulated by a new generation of sculptors who find that buoyancy in sculpture is an asset, that formalism does not equal affliction, and that guileless found materials deflate the need for highfalutin theory." It's as if no one had read that "other" essay in the catalogue, a study by George Baker which adds Duchamp, Arp and Giacometti to the conversation, and examines Calder's fruitful exploration of the principles of disparity and connection, of the Dada diagram and the Surrealist prop. Most of this is not child's play.
It's hard to argue with the contention that excessive theory can be a buzzkill in the studio and gallery (and art magazine). But the real problem, I would argue, is not an excess of art theory but the erasure of art history, collateral damage in the war against modernist authoritarianism. The problem of art history was also apparent in the presentation of "Unmonumental," a show bent on tracing a specifically 21st-century trend that was both a statement of opposition to the craven values of the Bush years and an expression of anxiety about environmental depredation and the specter of endless war. In a jeremiad of a catalogue introduction, cocurator (with Massimiliano Gioni and Laura Hoptman) Richard Flood proclaims "formalism and traditionalism have become elite and moribund. . . . Sculpture is the medium that knows best how to live in the present and find the future." The past? Forget about it.
As with the MCA's Calder show, reading further in the "Unmonumental" catalogue revealed art historical connections that the exhibition in the galleries seemed to ignore if not suppress. Gioni rightly characterizes Boyce, Curry, Tom Burr, Manfred Pernice, Carol Bove and Gedi Sibony as "revisionists" who explore the legacy of modernism (though he overstates the certainty and wholeness of modernist sculpture). Hoptman begins her analysis of the works by discussing the precedents of Duchamp, Picasso, Miró, Ettore Colla, Rauschenberg and even William Seitz's 1961 exhibition "The Art of Assemblage" at MoMA. Grappling with Rachel Harrison's wholly considered yet improvised-looking sculpture, Hoptman calls it a "composition as sophisticated and tightly-wound as an El Lissitzky Proun." If you're looking in the rearview mirror for a simile, they don't come more art historical than that.
Kiesler, Calder, Hepworth, Moore—all are cited as modernist magi for the Unmonumental generation. So in the spirit of giving, I'd like to suggest that, along with once-neglected modernist artists, we rehabilitate some of the art historians who championed them in the first place. I'm placing into consideration one of Calder's most sympathetic interpreters (and my long-ago professor), Albert E. Elsen (1927-1995), an old-school practitioner of narrative art history who fell out of favor, charged with buying into the myth of artistic progress and the phallocentric cult of the masterpiece, though more than anything else he stood for creative individualism and the sheer necessity of independent art in a healthy society. He published a thematically organized textbook, Purposes of Art, as an alternative to Janson's chronological classroom bible as early as 1962; in the '70s became a pioneering advocate of artists' legal rights; and was ahead of the crowd in his appreciation of the role played by the new medium of photography in the development of modern sculpture. Elsen was art history's Teddy Roosevelt, with male swagger to spare and the heart of a reformer. He also was the author of the booklet that accompanied the MCA Chicago's Calder show of 1974.
Not unlike Calder's sculpture, Elsen's writing—clear, fluid and unblemished by "highfalutin theory"—is easily underestimated. After noting the importance of Mondrian, Miró, Arp, Kandinsky and others to Calder's artistic development in Paris, this is how Elsen characterized (in Modern European Sculpture, 1918-1945: Unknown Beings and Other Realities, 1979) the reason for the sculptor's imperviousness to the anxiety of influence:
So freely did Calder acknowledge important debts to fellow artists that their number seems to exclude any room for originality. Calder's gift was to begin where other artists left off and to draw new conclusions.
That's not a bad standard to keep in mind as we come to terms with what a new generation is learning from the legacy of Calder and his modernist kin.
Currently on View: "Alexander Calder and Contemporary Art: Form, Balance, Joy" is at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, through Oct. 17. It travels to the Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas; Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach; Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham.
Cover: Detail of Aaron Curry's Deft Composition (Deft Composition), 2009, painted wood and steel, 1081⁄2 by 52 by 45 inches; in "Alexander Calder and Contemporary Art" at the Chicago MCA. Photo Fredrik Nilsen. Private collection, courtesy Michael Werner Gallery, New York.