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David Maisel

http://www.davidmaisel.com/works/works.asp

Library of Dust

these canisters hold the cremated remains of patients from an American psychiatric hospital. Oddly reminiscent of bullet casings, the canisters are literal gravesites. Reacting with their ash inhabitants, the canisters are now blooming with secondary minerals, articulating new metallic landscapes.”

- La fotografía de James Balog, publicada por las más prestigiosas publicaciones, nos acerca y reconcilia con la Naturaleza.

http://jamesbalog.com/

By Clarence Williams
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, January 11, 2008; B05

A man impersonating an armored car guard walked out of a downtown Washington bank with more than $100,000 yesterday, and it took bank officials hours to realize that they'd been robbed, D.C. police said.

Police believe that the robber was armed only with a uniform that resembled a Brinks guard's as he entered the Wachovia branch at 801 Pennsylvania Ave. NW about 9:30 a.m. Bank officials let him sign for a locked satchel of cash, said Lt. William Farr, the head of the D.C. police bank robbery unit.

The man then walked out of the bank. Last night, police had next to no idea of whom they were looking for.

About an hour after the robbery, the genuine Brinks guard arrived at the bank branch and was told that another guard had completed the day's cash pickup.

Only after returning to his office did the Brinks driver tell his supervisors that he did not make a pickup at the Wachovia branch, police said. Brinks officials contacted the bank, and a branch manager called D.C. police about 8 p.m., almost 11 hours after the theft.

Authorities did not have a detailed description of the robber and did not know whether he left the bank in a vehicle or on foot.

"We're now behind. We're trying to catch up with everybody, all the employees," Farr said last night in a telephone interview. "[But] if we can get good pictures from the surveillance cameras . . . I think we'll get him."

D.C. police and FBI agents will canvass the area around the bank, hoping that passersby saw the robber leave the bank, officials said.

Italian Carnival Mask”
The show emphasizes transcultural twists and turns. A 19th-century Italian carnival mask made of painted papier-mâché has much in common with a demonic mask of a Tibetan king used in ceremonial dances in 18th- or 19th-century Bhutan. (It’s made of the same material.) A pale, moonlike mask with a woebegone expression and a pale, angular, grinning visage next to it — both in carved, painted wood — might almost belong to the same comedic drama. Yet the moon mask is Korean, for satiric dances; the angular one is Swiss, a witch’s mask for winter festivals.

Kovave Spirit mask from Papua New Guinea
Many of the masks are feats of construction and conjuring. Consider a spirit mask from Papua New Guinea used in male initiation rites; it is made mostly of tapa cloth, reeds, grasses and seed pods, with its conical hat, wide ears and long, wolflike snout toothed with sharp nails. Or an Eskimo shaman’s mask made of wood, wire and feathers. Its stern face, with the black goatee and curled mustache of a dime-novel villain, is encircled by two rings of twig from which tiny hands and feet sprout. It seems to orbit toward us, getting bigger every second

Duchess” (1994) by Rammellzee.
When it comes to contemporary art, masks aren’t what they used to be as objects, but that doesn’t necessarily make them any less potent in effect. A remarkable object by the artist-rapper Rammellzee channels Japanese face armor and its more recent descendant Darth Vader while maintaining a streetwise, found-object funkiness all its own

Palmer, an ecologist at the University of Florida, was walking past a fenced-off research site in Kenya when he noticed something curious: instead of thriving, acacia trees that were protected from leaf-eating elephants and giraffes were withering and dying.

“That struck me as paradoxical,” he said in a telephone interview this week from the site. “If you remove large herbivores, you should see more vigorous trees.”

Dr. Palmer and his colleagues investigated. Their findings, reported in Friday’s issue of the journal Science, add to the mounting evidence that relationships between plant and animal species can be far more complex than had been thought and that even seemingly benign interference can have devastating effects.

The acacias and a species of ant that colonize them live together in an arrangement called mutualism. The ants nest in the trees’ thorns and sip on their nectar; in return, they swarm out ferociously, ready to bite, when a tree is disturbed by an elephant, a giraffe or other grazing animal.

But somehow, Dr. Palmer said, the trees seem to sense when no one is munching on their leaves and, after a year or so, seemingly decide, “We are going to reduce our investment in ants” by not producing so many roomy thorns or so much tasty nectar. The ants’ responses — lassitude is one — eventually encourage wood-boring beetles to invade the trees. Soon their tunnels leave the trees sickly, dying or dead.

The finding shows that what looks like two-species mutualism may involve other species. And they offer new proof of the fragility of the web of life, a phenomenon observed, for example, when wolves vanish from mountain landscapes or sharks and other top marine predators are fished out of the marine food chain.

Without wolf predation, elk are freer to roam and eat more plants. Result: aspen begin to vanish. Similarly, the overfishing of sharks and similar large fish leave smaller, algae-eating fish free to graze unhindered on algae growing on (and feeding) coral. Result: dead coral.

Dr. Palmer said it was shocking to see how quickly the ant-acacia mutualism, evolved over thousands of years, “dissolved” once the herbivores were removed. Now, he said, he and his colleagues want to see if they can restore the old pattern by again allowing giraffes and elephants to feed on the trees.

gave the place such a dark and gloomy atmosphere. This stuff screams haunted mansion; if you're looking for that kind of ambiance, look no further." Link

Moises González

 

Moises González Web Gallery
via zaeega
#Nothing was considered but it copied.
#sorry, my lady Ms Parumo,just no omission.
#beautiful!

http://www.canevgin.net/ 

William Pfaff

Paris, January 10, 2008 – The main division on Iraq policy among the surviving U.S. presidential candidates is not Republicans versus Democrats but between those who favor an indefinitely long-term U.S. occupation of Iraq, with U.S. political domination of that country, and those accepting a limited presence.