Riverside

Earthquake Rattles Southern California
The New York Times - July 29, 2008

LOS ANGELES — A moderately strong earthquake shook Southern California on Tuesday, swaying buildings and tossing food off grocery store shelves for about 20 seconds. There were no immediate reports of major injuries or structural damage.

The quake, estimated at 5.4 magnitude (reduced from an initial estimate of 5.8), was centered 35 east of downtown Los Angeles in Chino Hills, just south of Pomona in San Bernardino county. It was felt as far east as Las Vegas and as far south as San Diego.

Cellphone lines were jammed throughout the region as people began to frantically make calls in the immediate moments after the powerful jolt. Some schools, office buildings, tourist attractions and other facilities were evacuated temporarily as people braced for aftershocks, which were numerous and in some cases were as strong as 3.8 magnitude, while the Los Angeles City Council stopped to regroup.

Residents adjusted to that eerie, off-putting sensation of having rolled from side to side on the rollers that are common in seismically engineered buildings, which can leave buildings swaying for several seconds after the quake.

The shake was strong enough to knock pictures off walls and rattle windows, but there appeared to be little damage near the earthquake’s epicenter.

In Riverside, two women suffered minor head injuries from climbing under tables.

Legend

In Memoriam: Bruce Conner (1933-2008)

By Steve Seid

Bruce Conner, the great, irascible and ever-evolving San Francisco–based artist known for his assemblages, films, drawings, and interdisciplinary works, passed away on July 7, 2008. The prototype for much of today’s repurposed art, Conner’s gauzy assemblages of salvaged materials, such as doll parts and nylon stockings, attracted much art-world attention in the late fifties. His landmark film, A Movie (1958), made from scraps of newsreels, soft-core porn, and B movies, augured the future of another form, the music video. Conner moved to the Bay Area in 1957 and quickly became a significant member of the lively Beat community, forming his own makeshift group of funk artists, the Rat Bastard Protective Association. In the ’60s, Conner could be found at the Avalon Ballroom designing light shows; when the ’70s punk scene emerged, Conner was there as well, capturing the dark vitality of the music in the photographs exhibited here. Throughout these countercultural trends, Conner continued to work in many media—drawings, photography, films, sculptural objects—creating powerful works summarized in an ambitious 1999 touring survey, 2000 BC: The Bruce Conner Story. To further highlight his crucial influence, A Movie was placed on the National Film Registry at the Library of Congress.

Bruce Conner’s association with BAM/PFA goes back many years. The museum’s collection contains numerous drawings, including the exquisite felt-pen renderings of the mid-‘60s and the much later inkblot drawings. His earliest work is represented by Untitled Collage with Hair Growing Out of It from 1960. Conner was also a MATRIX artist (number 102), displaying his otherworldly photograms, full-scale contact bodyprints on large rolls of photographic paper. Made with Edmund Shea, these towering works seem to capture the trace of one’s spirit. One of these, Angel, is in the BAM collection. Almost all of Conner’s seminal film works reside in the Pacific Film Archive collection, including America Is Waiting (1982), Looking for Mushrooms (1961–67), Marilyn Times Five (1968–73), Mongoloid (1978), Take the 5:10 to Dreamland (1977), and Report (1963–67). The monumental Crossroads (1976), one of Conner’s most ambitious films, was the object of a PFA preservation project assisted closely by the artist. A pristine 35mm print of this uncanny ode to nuclear terror is now housed in PFA’s vault.

As you view the photographs in Mabuhay Gardens, please keep in mind Bruce Conner, a lively and truculent artistic force, bent on culling order from the loose ends of the everyday. We will miss him.

November

Anxious in America, New York Times, June 29, 2008
by Thomas L. Friedman

Just a few months ago, the consensus view was that Barack Obama would need to choose a hard-core national-security type as his vice presidential running mate to compensate for his lack of foreign policy experience and that John McCain would need a running mate who was young and sprightly to compensate for his age. Come August, though, I predict both men will be looking for a financial wizard as their running mates to help them steer America out of what could become a serious economic tailspin.

I do not believe nation-building in Iraq is going to be the issue come November — whether things get better there or worse. If they get better, we’ll ignore Iraq more; if they get worse, the next president will be under pressure to get out quicker. I think nation-building in America is going to be the issue.

It’s the state of America now that is the most gripping source of anxiety for Americans, not Al Qaeda or Iraq. Anyone who thinks they are going to win this election playing the Iraq or the terrorism card — one way or another — is, in my view, seriously deluded. Things have changed.

Up to now, the economic crisis we’ve been in has been largely a credit crisis in the capital markets, while consumer spending has kept reasonably steady, as have manufacturing and exports. But with banks still reluctant to lend even to healthy businesses, fuel and food prices soaring and home prices declining, this is starting to affect consumers, shrinking their wallets and crimping spending. Unemployment is already creeping up and manufacturing creeping down.

The straws in the wind are hard to ignore: If you visit any car dealership in America today you will see row after row of unsold S.U.V.’s. And if you own a gas guzzler already, good luck. On Thursday, The Palm Beach Post ran an article on your S.U.V. options: “Continue to spend upward of $100 for a fill-up. Sell or trade in the vehicle for a fraction of the original cost. Or hold out and park the truck in the driveway for occasional use in hopes the market will turn around.” Just be glad you don’t own a bus. Montgomery County, Md., where I live, just announced that more children were going to have to walk to school next year to save money on bus fuel.

On top of it all, our bank crisis is not over. Two weeks ago, Goldman Sachs analysts said that U.S. banks may need another $65 billion to cover more write-downs of bad mortgage-related instruments and potential new losses if consumer loans start to buckle. Since President Bush came to office, our national savings have gone from 6 percent of gross domestic product to 1 percent, and consumer debt has climbed from $8 trillion to $14 trillion.

My fellow Americans: We are a country in debt and in decline — not terminal, not irreversible, but in decline. Our political system seems incapable of producing long-range answers to big problems or big opportunities. We are the ones who need a better-functioning democracy — more than the Iraqis and Afghans. We are the ones in need of nation-building. It is our political system that is not working.

I continue to be appalled at the gap between what is clearly going to be the next great global industry — renewable energy and clean power — and the inability of Congress and the administration to put in place the bold policies we need to ensure that America leads that industry.

“America and its political leaders, after two decades of failing to come together to solve big problems, seem to have lost faith in their ability to do so,” Wall Street Journal columnist Gerald Seib noted last week. “A political system that expects failure doesn’t try very hard to produce anything else.”

We used to try harder and do better. After Sputnik, we came together as a nation and responded with a technology, infrastructure and education surge, notes Robert Hormats, vice chairman of Goldman Sachs International. After the 1973 oil crisis, we came together and made dramatic improvements in energy efficiency. After Social Security became imperiled in the early 1980s, we came together and fixed it for that moment. “But today,” added Hormats, “the political system seems incapable of producing a critical mass to support any kind of serious long-term reform.”

If the old saying — that “as General Motors goes, so goes America” — is true, then folks, we’re in a lot of trouble. General Motors’s stock-market value now stands at just $6.47 billion, compared with Toyota’s $162.6 billion. On top of it, G.M. shares sank to a 34-year low last week.

That’s us. We’re at a 34-year low. And digging out of this hole is what the next election has to be about and is going to be about — even if it is interrupted by a terrorist attack or an outbreak of war or peace in Iraq. We need nation-building at home, and we cannot wait another year to get started. Vote for the candidate who you think will do that best. Nothing else matters.