/m573
The real prize belongs to curbed.com

http://gutter.curbed.com/archives/2005/05/...arce_thats_rich.php

Click on each of the farce/kitsch links. What we say here simply pales by what it says.

Curbed (which incidentally has pulled its tagline "in association with the New York Times") is a great site.

Curbed is in Moveable Type format If you want to get its rss feed:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/TheGutter

The RSS feed for the home page is:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/curbed/BHBe

If anybody is interested in the power and coolness of rss feeds post something here and I will give you more details on how to subscribe (although
http://bloglines.com

Is probably the best place to fully understand the power. QT and 911memorials both have rss feeds.

'Violated ... again'
 
Kin slap art center's 9/11 pieces
 
By DOUGLAS FEIDEN
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER
 
 
Several pieces of artwork that have been displayed at Drawing Center have drawn protests from relatives of 9/11 victims, including 'A Glimpse of What Life in a Free Country Can Be Like #6' (top) and 'Homeland Security' (below).
 
 
 
 
A museum that is set to rise above the hallowed soil of Ground Zero has showcased art that the families of 9/11 victims are denouncing as offensive, anti-American - and a slap in the face of nearly 3,000 dead innocents.
The Drawing Center, a little-known cultural group in SoHo, has mounted works linking President Bush to Osama Bin Laden and showing a hooded victim of U.S. abuse at Abu Ghraib prison.

The storefront museum currently features a "pseudo-didactic PowerPoint presentation on the Axis of Evil" that appears to mock Bush's famous description of Iraq, Iran and North Korea.

Previous exhibits include a drawing of four airplanes swooping menacingly out of the sky - one of which is flying directly at a naked woman lying on her back, legs spread-eagled. The acrylic image is titled "Homeland Security."

"It's truly the most vulgar thing I have ever seen in my entire life," said Jennie Farrell, whose brother James, 26, an electrician, died on the 105th floor of the south tower.

"To call it art is reprehensible, and to place it at Ground Zero is committing a second criminal act against our dead," she added.

"It's offensive, it's America-bashing, it's a despicable insult to the families of people defending us in Iraq, and I'm sick and tired of it," said Jack Lynch, who helped carry the body of his firefighter son Michael, 30, out of the rubble.

"On 9/11, the families were violated by terrorists. Now we're being violated all over again, and it brings 9/11 right back home to each of us."

The center, founded in 1977, has displayed more than 10,000 works in 28 years, and supporters say only a tiny number have been overtly political.

Asked if the museum would display different kinds of works when it moves from SoHo to Ground Zero, spokeswoman Rebecca Herman said only, "Our mission is not changing."

But Lynn Rasic, a spokeswoman for Gov. Pataki, said: "The governor's first priority at the World Trade Center site is to build a lasting memorial that honors those we lost. That priority cannot be compromised."

And Joanna Rose, a Lower Manhattan Development Corp. spokeswoman, said: "We expect that the cultural institutions in the memorial area will be respectful of this hallowed ground."

Pataki controls the LMDC, which has ultimate authority over the cultural complex at Ground Zero.

The Drawing Center was largely unknown until it was tapped in 2004 as one of four cultural institutions for the World Trade Center site, out of 113 that had originally expressed interest.

It will vacate its cramped, 10,000-square-foot space at 35 Wooster St. to share a showcase Greenwich St. building with the WTC Memorial Visitor's Center and the controversial International Freedom Center. Groundbreaking is set for 2007, completion in 2009.

The IFC has sparked a firestorm of protests from victims' families who fear it will focus on U.S. wrongdoing throughout history, like the treatment of American Indians.

By contrast, the low-profile Drawing Center, which will occupy 36,000 square feet, has attracted scant attention.

But a News review of dozens of its catalogues since Sept. 11, 2001, revealed numerous politically charged works.

Among those recently featured:


"A Glimpse of What Life in a Free Country Can Be Like," by Amy Wilson, was displayed in fall 2004.
A hood on his head and electrodes bearing the word "Liberty" connected to his arms, the iconic image of Abu Ghraib stands above a field peopled with dancing skeletons.


"Global Networks: George W. Bush, Harken Energy and Jackson Stephens," by the late Mark Lombardi, was displayed in fall 2003.
A favorite of conspiracy theorists, this line drawing uses arrows and circles to link politicians, oil tycoons and international terrorists. Then-Texas Gov. George Bush and ex-President George H.W. Bush are linked to Bin Laden, indirectly, via another Saudi sheik and a business baron.

"There's more than 100 people in a 10-foot-long drawing, and it's a simplification to pick out two people and connect them like that," said Herman, the center's spokeswoman.
 
http://www.nydailynews.com/front/story/321914p-275263c.html

Questioning their patriotism

...

It continues to defy explanation why liberals, who theoretically love liberty, equality, tolerance and moderation, should find so much to despise in their own country, which represents the fullest expression of those virtues anywhere on the globe. Perhaps it is because, as Robert Frost said, "A liberal is a man too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel." Some have speculated that the jingoism of World War I permanently soured the intellectual classes toward nationalism and inclined liberals toward reflexive criticism of their own societies. But this is unsatisfying because 1) it hasn't seemed to have this effect on the French or the Russians, and 2) liberals have shown great tenderness toward politically correct nationalisms, like Vietnam's and the Palestinians'.

 This brings us to the latest clash between those who despise this country and those who don't. Debra Burlingame is the sister of Charles Burlingame, the pilot who died on Flight 77 when it crashed into the Pentagon. A member of the World Trade Center Memorial Foundation, Burlingame published an account in The Wall Street Journal of the foundation's plans for memorializing 9/11. The liberal leadership of the International Freedom Center (as part of the memorial will be called) includes one-time Marxist Columbia University Professor Eric Foner and Michael Posner of Human Rights First, and receives advice from George Soros and Anthony Romero of the ACLU. The IFC plans, writes Burlingame, not a moving evocation of that catastrophic day, but instead "a high-tech, multimedia tutorial about man's inhumanity to man, from Native American genocide to the lynchings and cross-burnings of the Jim Crow South, from the Third Reich's Final Solution to the Soviet gulags and beyond. This is a history all should know and learn, but dispensing it over the ashes of Ground Zero is like creating a Museum of Tolerance over the sunken graves of the USS Arizona."

 Actually, if liberals had been in charge of the Arizona memorial, it would probably have featured an exhaustive exhibit about the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II and little about the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

 Consider a thought experiment: Suppose we were planning a memorial to honor murdered civil rights workers James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, whose killer was finally convicted last week (and, by the way, a memorial is good idea). But what if the proposal included a section on black-on-black violence? Wouldn't liberals be quick to object that such a display is beside the point, not to say antithetical to the spirit of a memorial? They would, and they'd be right.

 Richard Tofel, president of the International Freedom Center, denies that the exhibit will malign the United States. As proof of his bona fides, he quotes Judge Learned Hand: "The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which seeks to understand the mind of other men and women." Feel reassured? Neither do I.

http://www.townhall.com/columnists/monacharen/mc20050624.shtml

'Rescue Me' draws more smoke than ire

By Mike Mastroianni
TRIBUNE-REVIEW
Friday, June 24, 2005

People across the country are still wearing shirts, hanging ribbons and buying statues to honor the 343 firefighters who lost their lives at the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001.
Denis Leary responded with "Rescue Me," a dark and gritty look at interactions between firefighters and the challenges they face in their daily lives. Set in a Manhattan firehouse, the show stars Leary as Tommy Gavin, a firefighter driven to drink by "ghosts" of fire victims, including Jimmy, his best friend and cousin who was killed in the Sept. 11 attacks.

The first season of FX's "Rescue Me" received approval from critics and loyalty from viewers. After offering a fast and tough look at firefighting in its initial year, the show's season premiere Tuesday showed no signs that the series is slowing down. For those who missed it, the episode repeats at 11 p.m.

It's all personal for Leary, whose real-life cousin, a firefighter in Worcester, Mass., died in 1999 along with five other men during a warehouse fire. The following year, he created the Leary Firefighters Foundation, which to date has generated more than $5 million to provide training and equipment for firefighters.

In the first episode of Season 2, Gavin is shown on the verge of collapse, after a relapse into alcoholism when his wife disappears with their kids. While drunk, he attacks a vendor selling memorial Sept. 11 cookies. Next Tuesday's episode continues Gavin's fight to regain his sobriety, family and peace of mind.

Although Leary created a second benevolent fund for the families of the firefighters killed that raised nearly $2 million, his core concept in "Rescue Me" -- a traumatized post-Sept. 11 city -- is controversial among some firefighters, both in and outside of New York.

"I don't like that the show keeps coming back to (the attacks)," said Tim Scully of Pittsburgh's Engine 4, Uptown. "It's the basis of the show, but it's overdone."

A sticker with an American flag and the inscription "In Memory of our Fallen Brothers -- FDNY" is on the door of Scully's station house.

Both Leary and FX have a history of controversial subject matter. Leary's choice of title for his 1991 one-man show, "No Cure for Cancer," sparked problems before it aired on Showtime a year later. In 2002, FX's raw portrayal of Los Angeles police in "The Shield" led to high ratings and critical acclaim but harsh reaction from some LAPD officers.

Although many firefighters agree that "Rescue Me" portrays life in a firehouse reasonably accurately, they find several parts of the show exaggerated, including Gavin's personal attributes.

"(Gavin) has a lot of problems," Scully says. "He uses alcohol as a crutch, and he doesn't talk to the other guys in his crew enough."

Several television shows and films, such as "Backdraft" and the recent "Ladder 49," have answered the romantic view of firefighting with vivid scenes of flames and explosions.

"Seeing heavy smoke is more the norm than seeing flames," says Capt. Pat Devine of Engine 14 in Central Oakland. "At least when you see flames, you know where the fire is."

Many firefighters who have seen the first season of "Rescue Me" call it good entertainment, but not a guide to a firefighter's life.

"Girls watch it a lot," Devine says. "They ask if it's realistic or not, but lots of shows like that are overdramatic."

Scully agrees.

"Firemen are human beings, just like everyone else," he says. "I hope that's what people get out of the show."

http://pittsburghlive.com/x/tribune-review...nt/tv/s_347036.html

Democrats Furious Over Rove Remarks On 9/11 Aftermath

BY JULIA LEVY - Staff Reporter of the Sun
June 24, 2005

President Bush's chief policy adviser, Karl Rove, set off a national firestorm Wednesday night when he told a New York Conservative Party group that liberals wanted to "offer therapy and understanding for our attackers" in the wake of the September 11 attacks, while conservatives "saw the savagery of 9/11 and the attacks and prepared for war."

By yesterday morning, Mr. Rove's words, delivered in Manhattan just miles north of the World Trade Center site, had spread around the five boroughs and beyond.

"Karl Rove should immediately and fully apologize for his remarks or he should resign," the Senate Democratic leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, said. "I hope the president will join me in repudiating these remarks."

Senator Kerry said: "For Karl Rove to equate Democratic policy on terror to 'indictments' and 'therapy' is an outrageous attempt to divide the nation at just the moment we must be unified." He pointed out that soon after the attack, the Senate, on a 98-0 vote, and the House, on a 420-1 vote, authorized the president to use "all necessary and appropriate force" against terror.

Senators Schumer, Clinton, Corzine, Lautenberg, Dodd, and Lieberman wrote a letter to Mr. Rove asking him to retract his comment.

"Your comments were inaccurate and inflammatory," the coalition of tristate senators, all of them Democrats, wrote. "To come into the heart of New York City, which has suffered so deeply and is still recovering from those savage attacks, to try to score partisan, political points at the expense of the 3,000 victims and their families was unacceptable and opportunistic. It was a slap in the face to the unity that America achieved after September 11, 2001."

...

http://www.nysun.com/article/16003

Feds want new skyscraper rules
 
By PAUL H.B. SHIN
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER
 
Federal investigators probing the World Trade Center collapse urged a sweeping overhaul of skyscraper building codes yesterday to make high-rises stronger and easier to evacuate.
But don't expect to see the changes in the Freedom Tower or other new buildings going up at Ground Zero, experts said.
 
http://www.nydailynews.com/front/story/322076p-275281c.html

"We believe that the recommendations are realistic and achievable," said lead investigator Shyam Sunder, who noted that the agency is not suggesting that skyscrapers be built to withstand the impact of fuel-laden jetliners.

But critics said the recommendations are not specific enough and doubted whether they would be adopted into local building codes in time to influence the design of the 1,776-foot Freedom Tower.

"The [building] code groups move at a snail's pace," said Glenn Corbett, a professor of fire sciences at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in Manhattan and a member of the advisory committee to the probe.

"The fact that NIST didn't hand them very specific code requirements is going to slow the process down," he said.

But Sunder said the recommendations were deliberately kept broad so as not to stymie innovation in construction.

Industry officials have estimated that adopting the recommendations would add 2% to 5% to the cost of a building.

Critics were also skeptical that the Port Authority, which owns the 16-acre Trade Center site, would adopt the recommendations because the agency is exempt from local building codes.

"This [report] is not going to make one iota of difference in the Freedom Tower or the new 7 World Trade Center," said Sally Regenhard of the Skyscraper Safety Campaign, who lost her firefighter son Christian on 9/11.

Developer Larry Silverstein, who holds the lease on the Trade Center site, said he and his designers believe "that we have correctly anticipated the findings and recommendations contained in the NIST report, as well as recent developments in the New York City Building Code, in the design of 7 World Trade Center and Freedom Tower."

http://www.nydailynews.com/front/story/322076p-275281c.html

Menin romps in C.B. 1 race: Promises changes to committees
By Ronda Kaysen

Julie Menin won a resounding victory at Tuesday night’s Community Board 1 election, securing more than 70 percent of the vote from the 50-member board.

Emerging as the strong frontrunner from a crowded field of candidates, Menin’s substantial margin of victory surprised some board members who expected a closer race between her and interim chairperson Richard Kennedy.

“Julie got the overwhelming majority,” said Nominating Committee chairperson Ray O’Keefe, who voted for Menin, after the results were announced.

http://www.downtownexpress.com/de_111/meninromps.html

Fight over ground zero museum reveals deeper divide
 
By MICHAEL WEISSENSTEIN
Associated Press Writer

NEW YORK -- Will the ground zero freedom museum be anti-American?

Its creators say the International Freedom Center will offer inspiring stories of mankind's progress toward liberty. Critics say the institution is being hijacked by left-wing advisers who blame the U.S. for the world's wrongs.

The debate is playing out on talk shows, opinion pages and the Web. Relatives of people slain on Sept. 11, 2001, protested the museum this week at ground zero. More than 13,000 people have signed an Internet petition condemning it.

...

http://www.newsday.com/news/local/wire/new...ny-region-apnewyork

Sept. 11 memorial vandalized - by lunatics
The World Trade Center's footprints are hollowed ground. but not so by the politically motivated
By James Mack, Jr.

Mrs. Burlingame is the sister of Capt. Charles Burlingame III, pilot of American Airlines flight 77, which crashed into the Pentagon on the September 11 terrorist attacks. She's also pretty angry. Why? It seems the World Trade Center site, the most hollowed ground in contemporary America, is suffering a second attack; a second betrayal. The memorial which will occupy this site, she opines, is about to be dedicated to something other than our nation's collective tragedy.

Mrs. Burlingame wrote a commentary for the Wall Street Journal, in which she stated: "The World Trade Center Memorial Foundation will have erected a building whose only connection to September 11 is a strained, intellectual one. While the IFC is getting 300,000 square feet of space to teach us how to think about liberty, the actual Memorial Center on the opposite corner of the site will get a meager 50,000 square feet to exhibit its 9/11 artifacts, all out of sight and underground."

"Wait a second," I thought. She has to be kidding me. There's no way that any governing body would let hollowed ground become a shooting gallery for radical ideologues. Well, I was wrong. The International Freedom Center (IFC) is in charge of the content of the memorial site. One of the educational centers proposed is the 300,000 square foot building Mrs. Burlingame described. What lurks inside this structure that is on the same ground where the World Trade Center once stood? The advisory board of the IFC is as telling to the content as it is disturbing.

Anthony Romero, executive director of the ACLU, has campaigned the board for exhibits on the ... degradation ... of civil rights since the 9/11 attacks. Eric Foner, a far-left professor from Columbia University, who stated, "the only true heroes are those who find ways to defeat the U.S. military." Then there's George Soros. Google his name, if you must, but he's the mastermind behind MoveOn.org.

Yes, the ACLU sounds like such an appropriate organization to be backing this memorial, but their culture of baseless partisan attacks, and support of illegal immigration, mare any chance of a wholesome participation in the memorial's planning. Radical left professors from Universities who call for more "Mogadishus" (referring to the military operation in 1993 where the U.S. won the battle, but lost the war), scare the living daylights out of me. George Soros is so partisan and offensive, that he is part of the reason John Kerry lost the election. These "advisors" are doing nothing more than advancing their own horrid agenda: Make America submissive, "understand" the terrorists.

...

http://www.thetriangle.org/media/paper689/...natics-959104.shtml

The long shadow of September 11
25 June 2005
By CLAIRE ALLFREE

Criticised for taking on the raw wound of the World Trade Center attacks, novelist Jonathan Safran Foer says he couldn't have written about anything else.

"Do you know what the most searched-for term is in the history of the internet?" Jonathan Safran Foer asks the question as someone who knows the answer. "Janet Jackson's breast. It was a huge deal. Reputable newspapers put it on the front page. But the question is: why did anyone give a shit? Why did it matter at all?"

Safran Foer has brought this up midway through an elliptical conversation on the power of the image and the degenerate state of American culture. He has previously been discussing how the World Trade Center attacks on September 11, 2001, were the most visually documented event ever. A minute before that he was raging against gossip: "The singular concern of the American people."

Talking to him is a little like reading one of his books. Paragraphs jangle with loose connections. Sentences fizz with ideas.

Safran Foer was 25 when his debut novel, Everything is Illuminated, won the Guardian First Book Award in 2002. A self-consciously clever novel full of linguistic ticks and self-reflexive narratives, it told of a Jewish-American author, called Jonathan Safran Foer, and his quest to find the Ukrainian woman who saved his grandfather from the Nazis.

Safran Foer mixed the horror of the Holocaust with tracts of dazzling comedy - the main narrator was a Ukrainian, Alex, with a hilariously bad grasp of English - and earned himself the reputation for being one of his generation's most precociously talented writers.

His second novel, which is published in New Zealand next month, hasn't gone down quite so well.

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is mostly narrated by a nine-year-old child prodigy, Oskar Schell, who lost his father in the World Trade Center attacks. Oskar has found a key in a vase, next to a piece of paper inscribed with the word Black. Convinced the key holds some crucial information about his dad, he sets off across New York in search of the right lock.

AdvertisementAdvertisementOnce again bursting with knotty typographical games, it's a novel about grief and absences, and about people separated from each other across time, place and yawning emotional distances.

American critics have suggested that it's too soon for a novelist to take on the raw wound of September 11. Safran Foer is adamant that he couldn't have written about anything else.

http://www.stuff.co.nz/stuff/0,2106,3324617a4501,00.html

ART REVIEW
Concrete, yet not

A gray grid forms an intangible Holocaust memorial in Berlin.
 
By Christopher Knight, Times Staff Writer

BERLIN — Evolving plans for a 9/11 memorial at ground zero in Manhattan have generated much hand-wringing lately, and with good reason. Even in the best of circumstances an effective memorial to the victims of a cataclysmic event is extremely difficult to design; once built, a failed memorial isn't likely to be altered or removed. A cautionary example recently opened here in the German capital, and it offers a textbook case of what not to do.

Titled "The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe," it took more than 15 years to plan, design and erect. The sculpture occupies a prominent site in the center of the city, a block south of the Brandenburg Gate and Pariser Platz, an area of shiny new hotels, private banks, apartment buildings, embassies (including one across the street just being built for the United States) and other urban renewal developments. Roughly the size of two football fields, the memorial is composed from a massive grid of 2,711 concrete blocks, which tilt almost imperceptibly this way and that, some just a few inches high and others 15 feet tall. The ground undulates, sloping down toward the center, to create a surging gray maze through which visitors are invited to roam.


The project has been a source of controversy since the idea for a memorial gained momentum, shortly after the Berlin Wall came down. For one thing, the murdered homosexuals, Gypsies and disabled people who were also slaughtered systematically by the Nazis apparently do not warrant remembrance and recognition at this prominent location in the heart of the once-divided city. The establishment of a permanent hierarchy of suffering is a cruel legacy of an otherwise important project.

 http://www.calendarlive.com/galleriesandmu...-home-more-channels

Pataki Warns Cultural Groups for Museum at Ground Zero

By PATRICK D. HEALY
Published: June 25, 2005
Gov. George E. Pataki delivered an ultimatum to two important cultural players at ground zero yesterday, demanding "an absolute guarantee" that they would not mount exhibitions that could offend 9/11 families and pilgrims to a proposed memorial nearby.

The museum model for the International Freedom Center and the Drawing Center. Some art at the Drawing Center has been criticized.
Treading warily into the nexus of art and politics, the First Amendment and the symbolism of the twin towers site, Mr. Pataki made the demand after learning that one of the groups, the Drawing Center, has featured some politically themed and controversial artwork in its shows. A current display at its SoHo gallery, for instance, appears to make light of President Bush's description of Iraq, Iran and North Korea as the Axis of Evil.

While saying that he respected artistic expression, Mr. Pataki invoked the solemnity of past battlegrounds in promising to preserve the hallowed ground in Lower Manhattan and ensure that no one will come away feeling offended by the reborn site.

"I view that memorial site as sacred grounds, akin to the beaches of Normandy or Pearl Harbor, and we will not tolerate anything on that site that denigrates America, denigrates New York or freedom, or denigrates the sacrifice or courage that the heroes showed on Sept. 11," Mr. Pataki told reporters in Albany.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/25/nyregion...ild.html?oref=login