AUDIO SLIDESHOW: “Pomona College’s new architectural installation, designed by the artist James Turrell, plays with light and sound.”

PRESS RELEASE:

Pomona College is pleased to announce an exhibition and symposium for a Skyspace created by Pomona College alumnus (1965) James Turrell. This will be the first Skyspace in Southern California to be regularly accessible to the public.

Turrell–an internationally acclaimed light and space artist and the architect of Roden Crater–has completed private commissions for Skyspaces in Southern California in the past, but none of them are available for public viewing. The new Skyspace, located in the Draper Courtyard of the new Lincoln and Edmunds Buildings on the Pomona campus, has been realized in collaboration with consulting architects Marmol Radziner + Associates AIA.

The exhibition and symposium offer audiences an in-depth look at Turrell’s work—work that was profoundly influenced by his undergraduate studies at Pomona College in perceptual psychology and mathematics “I value greatly my time at Pomona College. That kind of education is tailored to people, and was very responsible to each student. I’m grateful for that,” said James Turrell. The academic buildings surrounding the Skyspace house the College’s departments and programs related to the science of mind—such as computer science, psychology, neuroscience and cognitive science—as well as the earth sciences of geology and environmental analysis.

“We are very honored that James Turrell has created a work for the courtyard of the Lincoln and Edmunds buildings,” says Pomona College President David Oxtoby. “He is a distinguished alumnus, and his intellectual concerns— art grounded in the psychology of perception—are central to many of the academic disciplines housed in the new building complex.”

The Skyspace—a precisely designed architectural installation that heightens the viewer’s awareness of light, sky and the activity of perception—is the form for which Turrell is renowned. Building on this formal vocabulary, the artist has created an open, transparent courtyard space in which a floating metal canopy shades the seating area and provides a frame for the sky. During the transition from twilight to full night, lighting elements, programmed to change in intensity and hue as they wash the underside of the canopy, create the changing perception of sky as space, form, object and void. A shallow pool centered beneath the opening to the sky mirrors the daytime sky and reflects a dark echo of the night sky.

In honor of the new Skyspace, the Pomona College Museum of Art will present James Turrell at Pomona College, an exhibition uniting the various threads of Turrell’s artistic practice. “My work is about space and the light that inhabits it. It is about how you confront that space and plumb it with vision. It is about your seeing, like the wordless thought that comes from looking into fire,” said Turrell. The exhibition includes End Around, one of the artist’s Ganzfeld works; two LED Tall Glass works from 2006, Gathered Light and Silent Leading; and a selection of models and drawings. The exhibition opens Tuesday, September 4, 2007 and continues through May 17, 2008. The exhibition opening reception will be held on Saturday, September 8 from 5- 7 p.m. The public is welcome.

The Tall Glass pieces consist of a core of LEDs individually programmed by Turrell to create a subtle shift in color over time, similar to the deliberate but beautiful fashion in which the sky changes from late afternoon to night. However, the careful construction of these works ensures that the viewer sees only a floating, changing field of light—a subtle revelatory experience of photons as tangible entities and physical presence.

In a Ganzfeld space, depth, surface and color are replaced by a thick, all-encompassing mist of light. Upon entering the chamber of End Around, the visitor instinctively approaches what appears to be a faint wall of light in the distance. But upon reaching the light source, the viewer’s entire visual field is consumed by an apparently limitless field of blue light. Turrell engineers the Ganzfeld works to eliminate all visual cues that the human brain processes to construct depth and surface. As a result, the viewer is unable to tell whether the ethereal blue field seen from the platform extends for inches, feet or into infinity. Here, light is perceived as light, not as illumination on an object or surface.

“The exhibition and Skyspace define the issues that have animated Mr. Turrell’s distinguished career—the complex interplay of light, sky, atmosphere and human perception,” says Kathleen Stewart Howe, Sarah Rempel and Herbert S. Rempel ’23 Director of the Pomona College Museum of Art. “We are delighted to have this important and inviting work of art as the centerpiece of a dynamic academic cluster where it can play a vital role in our intellectual community.”

In conjunction with the exhibition and dedication, Pomona College will host a program titled James Turrell: Knowing Light on Saturday, October 13, 2007, 1:30–4 p.m. The program includes Michael Govan—CEO and Wallis Annenberg Director, Los Angeles County Museum of Art—as the keynote speaker; William Banks, Professor of Psychology at Pomona College, on perceptual psychology; and a conversation with Turrell and Arden Reed, Arthur M. Dole and Fanny M. Dole Professor of English at Pomona College. The symposium is free and open to the public.

Turrell is a native of Los Angeles who grew up in Pasadena, California. He received his undergraduate degree in perceptual psychology from Pomona College in 1965, and an M.F.A. from Claremont Graduate School in 1973. His work has been recognized with a MacArthur Foundation “Genius Grant,” a Guggenheim Fellowship, and multiple grants through the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2001, Turrell received an honorary doctorate from Pomona College. His creations have graced the halls and collections of institutions throughout the world, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the DeYoung Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, the Hirshhorn Museum, P.S.1 and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Turrell currently resides in Flagstaff, Arizona where he has worked for more than 30 years on his largest and most ambitious project—the Roden Crater, an ancient volcano crater that he is molding into one of the world’s most unusual and compelling light observatories.

New Worlds #1 (July 1946). Originally a science fiction fanzine founded by Ted Carnell, Arthur C Clarke and John Wyndham in the 1930s. The magazine was edited by Ted Carnell from 1946 to 1963 when Michael Moorcock took over and transformed it into the most important literary magazine of the 1960s.

Michael Moorcock
Saturday March 22, 2008
The Guardian

Michael Moorcock fondly remembers his friend Arthur C Clarke, the Ego, visionary and gentleman

I was a very young journalist of 17 or so when Arthur C Clarke invited me to celebrate his birthday before he returned to Ceylon, where he had recently settled. The party was scheduled for November 5 in north London. Flattered to be asked, I gave up plans to get drunk and do exciting things with explosives and set off into the terra incognita of Tottenham where Arthur’s brother Fred lived a modest and respectable life. A bottle in my pocket, I knocked at the door to be greeted by Fred. “It’s round the corner,” he said. “I’m just off there myself.” He turned a thoughtful eye on the bottle. “I don’t think you’ll need that.”

Promising, I thought. Ego (Arthur’s nickname since youth) has laid every-thing on. I let Fred place the bottle on the hallstand and followed him for a few hundred yards through misty streets, determinedly reenacting the Blitz with Roman Candles and Catherine Wheels, until we arrived at a church and one of those featureless halls of the kind where the Scouts held their regular meetings. Sure enough, inside was a group of mostly stunned friends and acquaintances holding what appeared to be teacups, one of which was shoved into my hand as I was greeted by Arthur in that Somerset-American acent that was all his own. “Welcome,” he said. “Got everything you want?”

“Um,” I stammered. “Is there only tea ?”

“Of course not!” beamed the mighty intelligence, who had already published the whole concept of satellite communications on which our modern world is based. “There’s orange juice, too.” He indicated a serving hatch. “But you’d better hurry, Mike. The film show’s starting soon.” I saw that ladies of the kind who help out at church socials were organising chairs. I strolled up to Ted Carnell who, in the 1930s, had founded New Worlds with Arthur and John Wyndham when it was still a mimeographed fanzine.

Ted had the air of melancholy satisfaction I’d spotted on the faces of boys at school as they saw you turn up beside them on the headmaster’s carpet. It read “Caught you, too, did he?”

Once we were seated, Fred downed the lights and the real ordeal began. Arthur’s early home movies of the Great Barrier Reef. The projector breaking down was the high point. When it did, the relief was tangible.

In spite of it all, my liking for Arthur continued. Everyone knew he was gay. In the 1950s I’d go out drinking with his boyfriend. We met his proteges, western and eastern, and their families: people who had only the most generous praise for his kindness. Self-absorbed he might be, and a teetotaller, but an impeccable gent through and through.

He had absolutely unshakeable (and why not?) faith in his own visions. After all, SatCom was by no means his only accurate prediction. He retained a faith in the power of reason and science to cure our ills. At one point, when the Tamil Tigers emerged on the Sri Lankan political scene, I asked if he wasn’t worried. He assured me that it was all a misunderstanding and that the Tigers, who subsequently became expert terrorists, were basically sound chaps who’d soon give up their wild ideas.

His view of our world, rather like PG Wodehouse’s (whom he resembled physically) didn’t include much room for the Four Horsemen galloping through his rhododendrons. His preferred future was extremely Wellsian, full of brainy people sitting about in togas swapping theorems.

And he was unflappably The Ego. After we watched the preview of 2001, Brian Aldiss, JG Ballard and I all admitted it had left us a bit cold in the visionary department. He took our poor response with his usual amused forgiveness reserved for lesser mortals and told us how many millions the movie had already made in America.

Around that time, I was able to introduce Arthur to William Burroughs. Everyone invited to my party expected the master of optimistic hard SF and the master of satirical inner space to get on about as well as Attila the Hun and Pope Leo. In fact, they spent the entire evening deep in animated conversation, pausing only to sip their OJ and complain about the rock ‘n’ roll music on the hifi. At the end of the evening both were warm in their gratitude for the introduction.

I scarcely read a word of his, apart from a few classic short stories, though I came to publish him occasionally in New Worlds, and he knew I was broadly unfamiliar with his work.

He understood this to be my loss. And, as he became a massive bestseller, partly because of 2001 but perhaps even more because of his TV series investigating the paranormal, he didn’t change. He would still turn up in the pub to show us brochures for his latest ventures and mention casually all the famous people who admired him, including Rupert Murdoch and Richard Nixon, showing us 10×8 glossies of himself with the world’s movers and shakers.

He still understood that we would rather watch his home movies than enjoy a drunken evening playing with rockets whose only technical secrets lay in the length of their blue touch-paper. But, I have to admit, I became much warier of accepting his “party” invitations.

Angus Wilson once returned from Sri Lanka exasperatedly describing Arthur as the most egocentric person he had ever met. Yet somehow, in spite of everything, Arthur remained a beloved friend of whom I retain only the fondest memories. He was a sweet-natured optimist in a world of grief. I’m really going to miss him.

His thirst for scapegoats shows how poorly George Bush understands the meaning of Easter

Giles Fraser
The Guardian, Saturday March 22 2008

Somewhere in the Middle East, Jesus Christ is strapped to a bench, his head wrapped in clingfilm. He furiously sucks against the plastic. A hole is pierced, but only so that a filthy rag can be stuffed back into his mouth. He is turned upside down and water slowly poured into the rag. The torturer whispers religious abuse. If you are God, save yourself you fucking idiot. Fighting to pull in oxygen through the increasingly saturated rag, his lungs start to fill up with water. Someone punches him in the stomach.

Perhaps this is how we ought to be re-telling the story of Christ’s passion. For ever since the cross became a piece of jewellery, it has been drained of its power to sicken. Even before this the Romans had taken their hated instrument of torture and turned it into the logo of a new religion. Few makeovers can have been so historically significant. The very secular cross was transformed into a sort of club badge for Christians, something to be proud of.

Two weeks ago, the most powerful Christian in the world vetoed a bill that would have made it illegal for the CIA to use waterboarding on detainees. “We need to ensure our intelligence officials have all the tools they need to stop the terrorists,” said George Bush in a passable impersonation of Pontius Pilate. “This is no time for Congress to abandon practices that have a proven track record of keeping America safe.”

Throughout his time in office, the president has frequently been photographed in front of the cross. Yet as his support for torture demonstrates, he has understood little of its meaning. For the story of the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus is supremely a moral story about God’s identification with victims.

The French anthropologist René Girard is the modern voice that has done most to explain the nature of this moral change. Human societies, he argues, are often held together by scapegoating. From the playground to the boardroom, we pick on the weak, the weird or the different as a way of securing communal solidarity. At times of tension or division, there is nothing quite as uniting as the “discovery” of someone to blame – often someone perfectly innocent. For generations of Europeans, the Jews were cast in the role; in the same way women have been accused of being witches, homosexuals derided as unnatural, and Muslims dismissed as terrorists.

The crucifixion turns this world on its head. For it is the story of a God who deliberately takes the place of the despised and rejected so as to expose the moral degeneracy of a society that purchases its own togetherness at the cost of innocent suffering. The new society he called forth – something he dubbed the kingdom of God – was to be a society without scapegoating, without the blood of the victim. The task of all Christians is to further this kingdom, “on earth as it is in heaven”.

Yet, for all his years in office, it is hard to think that President Bush has done anything much to make this kingdom more of a reality. Instead he has given us rendition, so-called specialised interrogation procedures, and the blood of many thousand innocent Iraqis. Given all this, what can it possibly mean for George Bush to call himself a Christian?

Easter is not all about going to heaven. Still less some nasty evangelical death cult where a blood sacrifice must be paid to appease an angry God. The crucifixion reveals human death-dealing at its worst. In contrast, the resurrection offers a new start, the foundation of a very different sort of community that refuses the logic of scapegoating. The kingdom is a place of shocking, almost amoral, inclusion. All are welcome, especially the rejected. At least, that’s the theory. Unfortunately, very few of us Christians are any good at it.

Giles Fraser is the vicar of Putney, London.

March 21 7:30pm

Les Blank Program Three

~Les Blank in attendance for a Q & A!~

Yum, Yum, Yum!: A Taste of Cajun and Creole Cooking
Blank’s talent for making our mouths water hits another high point with this spicy whirlwind tour of Cajun and Creole culture. Once again, the marriage of sensory pleasures takes center stage-music and food are depicted with equal reverence as Blank delves deeper into the heart of French-speaking Louisiana. Directed by Les Blank, 1990, 31 min

Always for Pleasure
“One critic said about Always for Pleasure that it looked like it was shot by a guy wandering through New Orleans with a bottle of beer in one hand and a camera in the other,” says Blank. What the camera captures is glorious and trance-inducing. The filmmaker’s loose, intimate style comes through wonderfully in this document of New Orleans’ singular celebrations: Second-line parades, Mardi Gras, and Jazz Fest. Features live music from Professor Longhair, the Wild Tchoupitoulas, the Neville Brothers and more. Directed by Les Blank, 1978, 58 min

~New Orleans style red beans & rice will be served on the Spanish Patio between films.~

$10

TICKETS & INFO

Star Explodes Halfway Across Universe

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: March 21, 2008

Filed at 3:01 p.m. ET

WASHINGTON (AP) — The explosion of a star halfway across the universe was so huge it set a record for the most distant object that could be seen on Earth by the naked eye.

The aging star, in a previously unknown galaxy, exploded in a gamma ray burst 7.5 billion light years away, its light finally reaching Earth early Wednesday.

The gamma rays were detected by NASA’s Swift satellite at 2:12 a.m. ”We’d never seen one before so bright and at such a distance,” NASA’s Neil Gehrels said. It was bright enough to be seen with the naked eye.

However, NASA has no reports that any skywatchers spotted the burst, which lasted less than an hour. Telescopic measurements show that the burst — which occurred when the universe was about half its current age — was bright enough to be seen without a telescope.

”Someone would have had to run out and look at it with a naked eye, but didn’t,” said Gehrels, chief of NASA’s astroparticles physics lab at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

The starburst would have appeared as bright as some of the stars in the handle of the Little Dipper constellation, said Penn State University astronomer David Burrows. How it looked wasn’t remarkable, but the distance traveled was.

The 7.5 billion light years away far eclipses the previous naked eye record of 2.5 million light years. One light year is 5.9 trillion miles.

”This is roughly halfway to the edge of the universe,” Burrows said.

Before it exploded, the star was about 40 times bigger than our sun. The explosion vaporized any planet nearby, Gehrels said.

http://www.nasa.gov/mission–pages/swift/main/index.html

The great science fiction writer and futurist appeared in the very first issue of Arthur.

Tues March 18 @ 8pm and 10pm

Jim Henson’s Commercials & Experiments

An exclusive screening selected from muppets, music & magic: Jim Henson’s legacy

A mind-blowing collection of shorts, crazy commercials, and other rarities from the Henson vault. Highlights include: an industrial film for Wilson’s Meat that must be seen to be believed, commercials featuring the LaChoy Dragon, a full-body character that caused Frank Oz to swear off doing any others, animation utilizing techniques ranging from stop-motion to early computer animation, excerpts from The Cube and Youth 68, the two episodes Jim and company created for NBC’s Experiment in Television, and a 35mm print of Time Piece, an Academy Award nominated 8-minute masterpiece that showcases Henson’s talent for making music out of everyday sounds.”

Tickets – $12/ $8 for members
Cinefamily at Silent Movie Theatre
611 N Fairfax Avenue
Los Angeles, CA 90036
323-655-2510

The New York Times – March 17, 2008

Chinook Salmon Vanish Without a Trace

By FELICITY BARRINGER

SACRAMENTO — Where did they go?

The Chinook salmon that swim upstream to spawn in the fall, the most robust run in the Sacramento River, have disappeared. The almost complete collapse of the richest and most dependable source of Chinook salmon south of Alaska left gloomy fisheries experts struggling for reliable explanations — and coming up dry.

Whatever the cause, there was widespread agreement among those attending a five-day meeting of the Pacific Fisheries Management Council here last week that the regional $150 million fishery, which usually opens for the four-month season on May 1, is almost certain to remain closed this year from northern Oregon to the Mexican border. A final decision on salmon fishing in the area is expected next month.

As a result, Chinook, or king salmon, the most prized species of Pacific wild salmon, will be hard to come by until the Alaskan season opens in July. Even then, wild Chinook are likely to be very expensive in markets and restaurants nationwide.

“It’s unprecedented that this fishery is in this kind of shape,” said Donald McIsaac, executive director of the council, which is organized under the auspices of the Commerce Department.

Fishermen think the Sacramento River was mismanaged in 2005, when this year’s fish first migrated downriver. Perhaps, they say, federal and state water managers drained too much water or drained at the wrong time to serve the state’s powerful agricultural interests and cities in arid Southern California. The fishermen think the fish were left susceptible to disease, or to predators, or to being sucked into diversion pumps and left to die in irrigation canals.

But federal and state fishery managers and biologists point to the highly unusual ocean conditions in 2005, which may have left the fingerling salmon with little or none of the rich nourishment provided by the normal upwelling currents near the shore.

The life cycle of these fall run Chinook salmon takes them from their birth and early weeks in cold river waters through a downstream migration that deposits them in the San Francisco Bay when they are a few inches long, and then as their bodies adapt to saltwater through a migration out into the ocean, where they live until they return to spawn, usually three years later.

One species of Sacramento salmon, the winter run Chinook, is protected under the Endangered Species Act. But their meager numbers have held steady and appear to be unaffected by whatever ails the fall Chinook.

So what happened? As Dave Bitts, a fisherman based in Eureka in Northern California, sees it, the variables are simple. “To survive, there are two things a salmon needs,” he said. “To eat. And not to be eaten.”

Fragmentary evidence about salmon mortality in the Sacramento River in recent years, as well as more robust but still inconclusive data about ocean conditions in 2005, indicates that the fall Chinook smolts, or baby fish, of 2005 may have lost out on both counts. But biologists, fishermen and fishery managers all emphasize that no one yet knows anything for sure.

Bill Petersen, an oceanographer with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s research center in Newport, Ore., said other stocks of anadromous Pacific fish — those that migrate from freshwater to saltwater and back — had been anemic this year, leading him to suspect ocean changes.

After studying changes in the once-predictable pattern of the Northern Pacific climate, Mr. Petersen found that in 2005 the currents that rise from the deeper ocean, bringing with them nutrients like phytoplankton and krill, were out of sync. “Upwelling usually starts in April and goes until September,” he said. “In 2005, it didn’t start until July.”

Mr. Petersen’s hypothesis about the salmon is that “the fish that went to sea in 2005 died a few weeks after getting to the ocean” because there was nothing to eat. A couple of years earlier, when the oceans were in a cold-weather cycle, the opposite happened — the upwelling was very rich. The smolts of that year were later part of the largest run of fall Chinook ever recorded.

But, Mr. Petersen added, many factors may have contributed to the loss of this season’s fish.

Bruce MacFarlane, another NOAA researcher who is based in Santa Cruz, has started a three-year experiment tagging young salmon — though not from the fall Chinook run — to determine how many of those released from the large Coleman hatchery, 335 miles from the Sacramento River’s mouth, make it to the Golden Gate Bridge. According to the first year’s data, only 4 of 200 reached the bridge.

Mr. MacFarlane said it was possible that a diversion dam on the upper part of the river, around Redding and Red Bluff, created calm and deep waters that are “a haven for predators,” particularly the pike minnow.

Farther downstream, he said, young salmon may fall prey to striped bass. There are also tens of thousands of pipes, large and small, attached to pumping stations that divert water.

Jeff McCracken, a spokesman for the federal Bureau of Reclamation, which is among the major managers of water in the Sacramento River delta, said that in the last 18 years, significant precautions have been taken to keep fish from being taken out of the river through the pipes.

“We’ve got 90 percent of those diversions now screened,” Mr. McCracken said. He added that two upstream dams had been removed and that the removal of others was planned. At the diversion dam in Red Bluff, he said, “we’ve opened the gates eight months a year to allow unimpeded fish passage.”

Bureau of Reclamation records show that annual diversions of water in 2005 were about 8 percent above the 12-year average, while diversions in June, the month the young Chinook smolts would have headed downriver, were roughly on par with what they had been in the mid-1990s.

Peter Dygert, a NOAA representative on the fisheries council, said, “My opinion is that we won’t have a definitive answer that clearly indicates this or that is the cause of the decline.”

Carolyn Marshall contributed reporting.