Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to The Hershey Company's Fourth Quarter 2012 Conference Call. J.P. Bilbrey, President and CEO; Bert Alfonso, Senior Vice President and CFO; and I will represent Hershey on this morning's call. We also welcome those of you listening in on the webcast.
Let me remind everyone listening that today's conference call may contain statements, which are forward-looking. These statements are based on current expectations, which are subject to risk and uncertainty. Actual results may vary materially from those contained in the forward-looking statements because of factors such as those listed in this morning's press release and in our 10-K for 2011 filed with the SEC. If you have not seen the press release, a copy is posted on our corporate website in the Investor Relations section. Included in the press release is a consolidated balance sheet and a summary of consolidated statements of income prepared in accordance with GAAP.
Within the Notes section of the press release, we have provided adjusted pro forma reconciliations of select income statement line items quantitatively reconciled to GAAP. The company uses these non-GAAP measures as key metrics for evaluating performance internally. These non-GAAP measures are not intended to replace the presentation of financial results in accordance with GAAP, rather the company believes the presentation of earnings, excluding certain items, provides additional information to investors to facilitate the comparison of past and present operations.
Thanks, Mark, and good morning to everyone on the phone and webcast. I'm pleased with Hershey's fourth quarter and full year financial and marketplace results, which represent a solid end to another good year. We accomplished our 2012 objectives while growing adjusted EPS 14.5%, our fourth consecutive year of double-digit percentage increases. We continue to build and execute our consumer-centric business model and are creating a virtuous cycle that is delivering predictable, profitable and sustainable results. We've accelerated profitable organic sales growth, increased our leadership position in the U.S. marketplace, boosted margins and returns and delivered record profitability. Outside of the U.S. and Canada our businesses continue to grow and, barring any dramatic changes related to foreign currency, we're on a path to achieve net sales of $1 billion in these markets by the end of 2014. We're operating from a position of strength. We believe there are far more opportunities ahead than successes behind us because at The Hershey Company, the future is not where we're headed but what we're creating.
Now for an overview of the U.S. candy, mint and gum category. Growth was solid in 2012 and within the 3% to 4% historical growth rate. As has been the case for the last few years, the gum category has been challenged. Excluding a decline of minus 5.5% for the gum category this year, chocolate, sweets and refreshment grew a combined 5.2% in 2012. This increase outpaced other snack alternatives such as salty snacks, cookies and crackers.
Promoters of the $38 billion Severn Barrage tidal energy project in the UK are ramping up their lobbying for the scheme, saying it would require smaller subsidies than those afforded to wind energy, and probably around the same level as nuclear, Bloomberg reports. Gregory Shenkman, chairman of Hafren Power, told a hearing in the House of Commons in London that the project – which involves a dam-like structure spanning the 18km width of the Severn River and 1,026 turbines – would be economically viable. “We plan to finance this project entirely from private sources, and it’s taken five to six years to get here so far, said Shenkman.
However, he said the project would need 30 years of support through subsidies. Across its 120 year life span, the project could produce power at about $70/MWh, nearly half the cost of nuclear. Bloomberg said the project has yet to have an environmental impact assessment. An earlier tender for a Severn power plant was ditched in 2010 because the governments said it would rely too heavily on public funds. It is estimated that it could provide 5 per cent of the UK’s energy requirements.
Meanwhile, French energy supply giant Alstom has completed the acquisition of ocean turbine maker Tidal Generation for around $78 million. The deal gives Alstom access to a 1MW turbine installed this month at the European Marine Energy Center in the Orkney Islands. Alstom says the machine has a rotor diameter of 18m, a 22m metres long nacelle and weighs 150 tonnes. It has three pitchable blades, and operates at a water depth of 40 meters, by rotating to face the incoming tide at an optimal angle, to extract the maximum energy potential.
Last week, French engineering group DCNS paid $176 million for majority stake in OpenHydro. Alstom also bought 40 percent of AWS Ocean Energy in 2011 and is working with UK utility SSE to use wave-power systems at a 200MW project off northern Scotland. Alstom also makes turbines for offshore wind farms, Bloomberg reports.
Thursday, January 31, 2013
Man killed partner then himself
A man killed his partner in a planned attack then spent a week on board a river cruiser on the Norfolk Broads with her daughter before drowning himself, an inquest has heard.
The body of Annette Creegan, 49, who worked as a community nurse at the Trinity Hospice charity in Clapham Common, south-west London, was found naked, strangled and weighted down in the River Bure last September following a major police search.
The body of her partner, John Didier, 41, was found nearby and evidence suggests he drowned himself by tying dumbbells to his limbs and jumping overboard, the inquest at Norwich Coroner's Court heard.
A search was launched after a river worker alerted police on September 1 to the discovery of Ms Creegan's 13-year-old daughter alone on a boat moored near isolated Salhouse Broad. When she was interviewed, the girl said they had arrived for a holiday on the Broads on August 25 and the following day she woke to find her mother was not there.
Detective Constable Christina Stone told the inquest: "They had moored the boat at about 5.30pm on the Friday. The following day she woke up and Mr Didier told her that Annette had left.
"She had no access to a mobile telephone and no means of getting off the boat so stayed there over the following days. Six days later she woke up and there was no sign of Mr Didier and she was rescued by a passing Broads ranger."
The inquest heard Mr Didier's body was found later on September 1. He had drowned and was found immersed in water, weighted down with two 17.5kg dumbbells tied to his feet and two 15kg weights tied to his wrists, pathologist Ben Swift said.
Ms Creegan's body was found in the water nearby the following afternoon. Mr Swift said she was naked and her hands had been tied behind her knees with cable ties. She was weighted down with a 30kg dumbbell and had been strangled. The decomposed state of the body suggested she had been in the water for about a week. Bruises to her fists suggested she had tried to fight off Mr Didier but there was no evidence of sexual abuse.
Detective Inspector Gary Bloomfield said a thorough investigation was carried out. Outside the inquest, he added that officers had found no evidence of any tension in the relationship and Mr Didier's motive remained unclear.
Never mind that there isn’t a road. His father, the previous khan, spent his life lobbying for a road. The new khan does the same. A road, he argues, would permit doctors, and their medicines, to easily reach them. Then maybe all the dying would stop. Teachers too could get to them. Also traders. There could be vegetables. And then his people—the Kyrgyz nomads of remote Afghanistan—might have a legitimate chance to thrive. A road is the khan’s work. A car is his dream.
But for now, with no car and no road, the reality is a yak. The khan is holding one by a rope strung through its nose. Other yaks are standing by. It’s moving day; everything the khan owns needs to be tied to the back of a yak. This includes a dozen teapots, a cast-iron stove, a car battery, two solar panels, a yurt, and 43 blankets. His younger brother and a few others are helping. The yaks buck and kick and snort; loading them is as much wrestling as packing.
Moving is what nomads do. For the Kyrgyz of Afghanistan, it’s from two to four times a year, depending on the weather and the availability of grass for the animals. They call their homeland Bam-e Dunya, which means “roof of the world.” This might sound poetic and beautiful—it is undeniably beautiful—but it’s also an environment at the very cusp of human survivability. Their land consists of two long, glacier-carved valleys, called pamirs, stashed deep within the great mountains of Central Asia. Much of it is above 14,000 feet. The wind is furious; crops are impossible to grow. The temperature can drop below freezing 340 days a year. Many Kyrgyz have never seen a tree.
The valleys are located in a strange, pincer-shaped appendage of land jutting from the northeast corner of Afghanistan. This strip, often referred to as the Wakhan corridor, was a result of the 19th century’s so-called Great Game, when the British and Russian Empires fought for influence in Central Asia. The two powers created it, through a series of treaties between 1873 and 1895, as a buffer zone—a sort of geographical shock absorber—preventing tsarist Russia from touching British India. In previous centuries the area was part of the Silk Road connecting China and points west, the route of armies and explorers and missionaries. Marco Polo passed through in the late 1200s.
But communist revolutions—Russia in 1917, China in 1949—eventually sealed the borders. What was once a conduit became a cul-de-sac. Now, in the postcolonial age, the corridor is bordered by Tajikistan to the north, Pakistan to the south, and China to the east. Mainland Afghanistan, to the west, can seem so far away—the corridor is about 200 miles long—that some Kyrgyz refer to it as a foreign country. They feel locked in a distant outpost, encaged by a spiked fence of snowy peaks, lost in the swirl of history and politics and conflict.
The body of Annette Creegan, 49, who worked as a community nurse at the Trinity Hospice charity in Clapham Common, south-west London, was found naked, strangled and weighted down in the River Bure last September following a major police search.
The body of her partner, John Didier, 41, was found nearby and evidence suggests he drowned himself by tying dumbbells to his limbs and jumping overboard, the inquest at Norwich Coroner's Court heard.
A search was launched after a river worker alerted police on September 1 to the discovery of Ms Creegan's 13-year-old daughter alone on a boat moored near isolated Salhouse Broad. When she was interviewed, the girl said they had arrived for a holiday on the Broads on August 25 and the following day she woke to find her mother was not there.
Detective Constable Christina Stone told the inquest: "They had moored the boat at about 5.30pm on the Friday. The following day she woke up and Mr Didier told her that Annette had left.
"She had no access to a mobile telephone and no means of getting off the boat so stayed there over the following days. Six days later she woke up and there was no sign of Mr Didier and she was rescued by a passing Broads ranger."
The inquest heard Mr Didier's body was found later on September 1. He had drowned and was found immersed in water, weighted down with two 17.5kg dumbbells tied to his feet and two 15kg weights tied to his wrists, pathologist Ben Swift said.
Ms Creegan's body was found in the water nearby the following afternoon. Mr Swift said she was naked and her hands had been tied behind her knees with cable ties. She was weighted down with a 30kg dumbbell and had been strangled. The decomposed state of the body suggested she had been in the water for about a week. Bruises to her fists suggested she had tried to fight off Mr Didier but there was no evidence of sexual abuse.
Detective Inspector Gary Bloomfield said a thorough investigation was carried out. Outside the inquest, he added that officers had found no evidence of any tension in the relationship and Mr Didier's motive remained unclear.
Never mind that there isn’t a road. His father, the previous khan, spent his life lobbying for a road. The new khan does the same. A road, he argues, would permit doctors, and their medicines, to easily reach them. Then maybe all the dying would stop. Teachers too could get to them. Also traders. There could be vegetables. And then his people—the Kyrgyz nomads of remote Afghanistan—might have a legitimate chance to thrive. A road is the khan’s work. A car is his dream.
But for now, with no car and no road, the reality is a yak. The khan is holding one by a rope strung through its nose. Other yaks are standing by. It’s moving day; everything the khan owns needs to be tied to the back of a yak. This includes a dozen teapots, a cast-iron stove, a car battery, two solar panels, a yurt, and 43 blankets. His younger brother and a few others are helping. The yaks buck and kick and snort; loading them is as much wrestling as packing.
Moving is what nomads do. For the Kyrgyz of Afghanistan, it’s from two to four times a year, depending on the weather and the availability of grass for the animals. They call their homeland Bam-e Dunya, which means “roof of the world.” This might sound poetic and beautiful—it is undeniably beautiful—but it’s also an environment at the very cusp of human survivability. Their land consists of two long, glacier-carved valleys, called pamirs, stashed deep within the great mountains of Central Asia. Much of it is above 14,000 feet. The wind is furious; crops are impossible to grow. The temperature can drop below freezing 340 days a year. Many Kyrgyz have never seen a tree.
The valleys are located in a strange, pincer-shaped appendage of land jutting from the northeast corner of Afghanistan. This strip, often referred to as the Wakhan corridor, was a result of the 19th century’s so-called Great Game, when the British and Russian Empires fought for influence in Central Asia. The two powers created it, through a series of treaties between 1873 and 1895, as a buffer zone—a sort of geographical shock absorber—preventing tsarist Russia from touching British India. In previous centuries the area was part of the Silk Road connecting China and points west, the route of armies and explorers and missionaries. Marco Polo passed through in the late 1200s.
But communist revolutions—Russia in 1917, China in 1949—eventually sealed the borders. What was once a conduit became a cul-de-sac. Now, in the postcolonial age, the corridor is bordered by Tajikistan to the north, Pakistan to the south, and China to the east. Mainland Afghanistan, to the west, can seem so far away—the corridor is about 200 miles long—that some Kyrgyz refer to it as a foreign country. They feel locked in a distant outpost, encaged by a spiked fence of snowy peaks, lost in the swirl of history and politics and conflict.
Tuesday, January 29, 2013
Qatar 2022 World Cup will exploit migrant workers
The World Cup due to be played in Qatar in 2022 will be "a crucible of exploitation and misery" for poorly paid migrant workers who will toil on the country's construction sites, the campaigning organisation Human Rights Watch will warn in a report due to be published on Thursday.
In its World Report 2013, HRW is expected to say workers from India, Pakistan, Nepal and other south Asian countries suffer forced labour, low pay, insanitary and overcrowded living conditions and other violations of their human rights when they arrive to work in Qatar, one of the world's richest countries.
HRW says the Qatar government has not fulfilled pledges made when Fifa awarded the World Cup to the country, to improve the conditions for workers who will build nine new stadiums and massive infrastructure projects for the tournament. Although there are concerns within the football establishment about players and supporters enduring the heat of Qatar if the tournament is played in the summer of 2022, HRW argues no similar care is being taken for the workers labouring in that summer heat every year.
HRW, which published an extensive report into workers' human rights in Qatar in June, found that some workers have to live in "overcrowded and unsanitary labour camps", which lacked clean water, ventilation or air-conditioning, "crucial elements for adequately minimising the risk of heat stroke".
Many of the 1.2 million migrant workers, who form 88% of the country's population, suffer the kafala sponsorship system, which ties them to a single employer. That means they cannot change jobs without the consent of that employer, other than in exceptional cases, and to leave Qatar they need the sponsoring employer to grant an exit visa, which can be refused. Employers "routinely" confiscate workers' passports, HRW says.
"Qatar has some of the most restrictive sponsorship laws in the Gulf region and forced labour and human trafficking are serious problems," the HRW World Report will state. "The government has failed to address shortcomings in the legal and regulatory framework despite the initiation of many large-scale projects for Qatar's 2022 World Cup."
Qatar's bid included commitments that the situation of workers in the country would be improved but HRW argues little progress has been made. There remains no legal right to form or join a trade union and no minimum wage. Sharan Burrow, the general secretary of the International Trade Union Confederation, said that, combined with the kafala system, workers are suffering "forced labour" in Qatar.
"The World Cup in 2022 was awarded by Fifa to a country which treats workers as modern-day slaves," Burrow said. Calling on Qatar to improve its labour laws and practices, including outlawing recruitment fees charged to workers, she cited figures from the Nepal government that 200 Nepali migrant workers died last year working in Qatar. "More workers will die building World Cup infrastructure than players will take to the field," Burrows predicted.
The Qatar 2022 supreme committee told the Guardian it has nearly finalised a "migrant worker charter" for all World Cup-related projects, that it will include labour requirements in its tender documents and work with HRW and other stakeholders to seek "the highest health and safety and worker welfare standards to the benefit of all major projects in Qatar".
It’s going to cost an estimated $750,000-$850,000 to take advantage of geothermal energy to heat and cool the older portion of the county jail, at 400 Walnut St.
Engineer Vic Amoroso of A&J Associates of North Liberty, whose company designed the new geothermal system for the older part of the jail, told the Muscatine County Board of Supervisors Monday evening during its regular meeting that bids will be opened on Wednesday.
The board unanimously reappointed three people to county boards: Architect and engineer Mark Hawthorne to the Muscatine County Building Board of Appeals, Dr. Rebecca Mueller of Muscatine to the Muscatine County Board of Health, and Ana Gretsinger of Muscatine to the Community Action of Eastern Iowa board of directors.
Supervisors heard from County Auditor Leslie Soule that Larry Beik of Nichols (District 2), Robert Feldmann of Fruitland (District 5) and Richard Lovetinsky of West Liberty (District 9) all won three-year terms on drainage districts within the county. Each man received all three votes cast.
The board also approved $10,400 for FSCC baseball and softball umpires for this spring season. Some $7,232 will go to pay men's baseball umpires, while $3,168 will pay for women's softball officials. The baseball team has more home games and the officials are generally paid more, thus the difference.
Trustees also approved spending $19,200 for a ventilation system for welding courses at the Construction Trades Building in Pittsburg. Tatro said about $27,500 was raised, entirely in Crawford County, for the project. USD 250, Pittsburg, the city of Pittsburg and numerous Crawford County businesses raised the money for the project. FSCC currently conducts two morning classes and one night class at the site.
Tatro also announced during his President's Report that FSCC honor students will be recognized during half-time of the FSCC-Brown Mackie basketball game Wednesday night at Arnold Arena.
Trustees tabled a vote on a couple of items until the February meeting, including one to form a Board Facilities Committee. Within the next two years, Tatro said he believes the cosmetology program in Pittsburg will need find another home. He said Vinyl Plex, where the school is currently located, has allowed FSCC to use its building for $1 per year, but is paying more than $36,000 per year in taxes on the structure. Tatro said a facilities board will help when situations like this arise.
During its February meeting, trustees also will consider a request for an exemption to the alcohol beverages policy at FSCC for it annual scholarship auction. FSCC currently does not allow alcoholic beverages on campus, but would like the option of serving them on-campus during its auction.
In its World Report 2013, HRW is expected to say workers from India, Pakistan, Nepal and other south Asian countries suffer forced labour, low pay, insanitary and overcrowded living conditions and other violations of their human rights when they arrive to work in Qatar, one of the world's richest countries.
HRW says the Qatar government has not fulfilled pledges made when Fifa awarded the World Cup to the country, to improve the conditions for workers who will build nine new stadiums and massive infrastructure projects for the tournament. Although there are concerns within the football establishment about players and supporters enduring the heat of Qatar if the tournament is played in the summer of 2022, HRW argues no similar care is being taken for the workers labouring in that summer heat every year.
HRW, which published an extensive report into workers' human rights in Qatar in June, found that some workers have to live in "overcrowded and unsanitary labour camps", which lacked clean water, ventilation or air-conditioning, "crucial elements for adequately minimising the risk of heat stroke".
Many of the 1.2 million migrant workers, who form 88% of the country's population, suffer the kafala sponsorship system, which ties them to a single employer. That means they cannot change jobs without the consent of that employer, other than in exceptional cases, and to leave Qatar they need the sponsoring employer to grant an exit visa, which can be refused. Employers "routinely" confiscate workers' passports, HRW says.
"Qatar has some of the most restrictive sponsorship laws in the Gulf region and forced labour and human trafficking are serious problems," the HRW World Report will state. "The government has failed to address shortcomings in the legal and regulatory framework despite the initiation of many large-scale projects for Qatar's 2022 World Cup."
Qatar's bid included commitments that the situation of workers in the country would be improved but HRW argues little progress has been made. There remains no legal right to form or join a trade union and no minimum wage. Sharan Burrow, the general secretary of the International Trade Union Confederation, said that, combined with the kafala system, workers are suffering "forced labour" in Qatar.
"The World Cup in 2022 was awarded by Fifa to a country which treats workers as modern-day slaves," Burrow said. Calling on Qatar to improve its labour laws and practices, including outlawing recruitment fees charged to workers, she cited figures from the Nepal government that 200 Nepali migrant workers died last year working in Qatar. "More workers will die building World Cup infrastructure than players will take to the field," Burrows predicted.
The Qatar 2022 supreme committee told the Guardian it has nearly finalised a "migrant worker charter" for all World Cup-related projects, that it will include labour requirements in its tender documents and work with HRW and other stakeholders to seek "the highest health and safety and worker welfare standards to the benefit of all major projects in Qatar".
It’s going to cost an estimated $750,000-$850,000 to take advantage of geothermal energy to heat and cool the older portion of the county jail, at 400 Walnut St.
Engineer Vic Amoroso of A&J Associates of North Liberty, whose company designed the new geothermal system for the older part of the jail, told the Muscatine County Board of Supervisors Monday evening during its regular meeting that bids will be opened on Wednesday.
The board unanimously reappointed three people to county boards: Architect and engineer Mark Hawthorne to the Muscatine County Building Board of Appeals, Dr. Rebecca Mueller of Muscatine to the Muscatine County Board of Health, and Ana Gretsinger of Muscatine to the Community Action of Eastern Iowa board of directors.
Supervisors heard from County Auditor Leslie Soule that Larry Beik of Nichols (District 2), Robert Feldmann of Fruitland (District 5) and Richard Lovetinsky of West Liberty (District 9) all won three-year terms on drainage districts within the county. Each man received all three votes cast.
The board also approved $10,400 for FSCC baseball and softball umpires for this spring season. Some $7,232 will go to pay men's baseball umpires, while $3,168 will pay for women's softball officials. The baseball team has more home games and the officials are generally paid more, thus the difference.
Trustees also approved spending $19,200 for a ventilation system for welding courses at the Construction Trades Building in Pittsburg. Tatro said about $27,500 was raised, entirely in Crawford County, for the project. USD 250, Pittsburg, the city of Pittsburg and numerous Crawford County businesses raised the money for the project. FSCC currently conducts two morning classes and one night class at the site.
Tatro also announced during his President's Report that FSCC honor students will be recognized during half-time of the FSCC-Brown Mackie basketball game Wednesday night at Arnold Arena.
Trustees tabled a vote on a couple of items until the February meeting, including one to form a Board Facilities Committee. Within the next two years, Tatro said he believes the cosmetology program in Pittsburg will need find another home. He said Vinyl Plex, where the school is currently located, has allowed FSCC to use its building for $1 per year, but is paying more than $36,000 per year in taxes on the structure. Tatro said a facilities board will help when situations like this arise.
During its February meeting, trustees also will consider a request for an exemption to the alcohol beverages policy at FSCC for it annual scholarship auction. FSCC currently does not allow alcoholic beverages on campus, but would like the option of serving them on-campus during its auction.
White Rock City Hall turns the big 50
As the White Rock Museum and Archives Society prepares to celebrate 100 years of White Rock's well-known railway station, another building is also celebrating a milestone anniversary.
Up the hill from the railway station, White Rock City Hall will be celebrating its golden jubilee, having spent 50 years as the headquarters for all of the city's operations since opening July 6, 1963.
Having started as a multi-purpose civic building, the current City Hall initially also played host to the city's police detachment, library and court clerks. In fact, the current council chamber was originally built as the White Rock Courthouse, which is why White Rock Mayor Wayne Baldwin's chair is so high up.
"It used to be a judge's chair and the room beside the chambers was the judge's chambers," explained Baldwin.
However, in the five decades since opening, many of those other operations have since moved out as White rock continued to grow, leaving the entirety of the facility for city hall's increasing demand for space.
"Now the purpose of the building has changed considerably since it was first built, and so any money we've spent on the building since has been spent on accommodating the change in purpose," said Baldwin.
But like all old things, some upgrades are in order.
"The biggest thing would be the heating ventilation system, which is really bad," said Baldwin. "We need to do a lot of work on things like getting better windows in, we've got single pane, so the energy efficiency of our windows and doors is also bad."
Another key upgrade, said Baldwin, is to improve the appearance of the building.
"It hasn't really been touched much since it was first built, so the appearance both on the inside and outside has to be improved," he said.
Despite the upgrades needed, Baldwin said the building is still serving its purpose well and will likely continue to do so into the future.
"The building itself is well-built. It's a strong structure, the roof is still good and so on, but obviously changes need to be made to keep up with the times and the expectations of the public," he said.
Binghamton University will save an estimated $355,000 in energy costs every year and avoid sending more than 2,190 tons of greenhouse gas emissions annually into the atmosphere thanks to a number of energy efficiency projects, the New York State Emergy Research and Development Authority announced.
BU has received $740,000 from the agency. Projects include energy efficiency measures at seven new East Campus dorms; a new Collegiate Center with kitchen and dining facilities, multipurpose rooms, computer labs, lounges and offices; and renovations at the Recreation Center.
The NYSERDA-funded projects for new construction are projected to be 17 to 30 percent more energy efficient than the state’s energy code requires, depending on the building. Measures include high-efficiency lighting; occupancy-based lighting controls; insulation; high-efficiency heating, ventilation and air-conditioning systems; variable-speed pumps and motors; and daylight harvesting controls, which is a system that dims artificial light in response to available natural light.
“The implementation of our projects will greatly enhance our energy conservation efforts, reduce cost and reduce greenhouse gas emissions,” BU President Harvey Stenger said in a statement.
Overall, the measures BU is taking are projected to reduce electricity use by 1.8 million kilowatt hours and fossil fuel use by 18,437 million Btu annually, the equivalent of powering and heating about 260 homes for a year, according to NYSERDA. They will also reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 2,190 tons annually, the equivalent of taking 438 cars off the road.
Funding is through the agency’s New Construction Program, which provides technical support to design teams and financial incentives to building owners. The projects also support Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s Build Smart NY initiative, which aims to increase energy efficiency in state buildings by 20 percent over seven years.
“There were three things for fire stations that were rated high [for need],” Fire Chief Alan Mannel said. “One was a generator which we already have, one was the exhaust ventilation system which we got and the other was a fire sprinkler system.”
The fire department/municipal building was approved for a new sprinkler system late last year.
The majority of the funding is being handled by “Assistance to Firefighters Grant” – a nationwide grant though FEMA and Homeland Security. The grant will pay for 90 percent of the cost to install the system.
“It’s certainly not an easy grant to get but it’s well worth the effort,” Mannel said.
Mannel said he hopes to have the sprinkler system installed throughout the Municipal Building and the fire station in about a year’s time. According to the U.S. Fire Administration Tropical Fire Research Series, back in 2001 most fires in fire stations often originate in the fire department vehicles – 44 percent – while the rest of the damages are caused by structural fires.
Framingham State University will eliminate some infrastructure improvements planned for the Hemenway Hall academic building renovation in light of the project's increased cost from rising construction prices around the state, university officials said.
The university will forgo modernizing the interiors of existing classrooms and laboratories in the building, deferring the work until funding is available, said Dan Magazu, a university spokesman.
Earlier this month, officials said they might have to scale back parts of the $64 million project after rising construction costs led the state to drive up the project estimate by $10 million.
"As we anticipated, some of the planned infrastructure improvements to the original building have been eliminated from the scope of the work to balance the project budget," Magazu said in an email.
The main parts of the Hemenway Hall project, which received approval for $54 million in state funding in 2010, will still move forward, including a new science wing with 16 laboratories equipped with cutting-edge technology by 2014, as well as an update the building's existing windows and heating and ventilation system, Magazu said.
Up the hill from the railway station, White Rock City Hall will be celebrating its golden jubilee, having spent 50 years as the headquarters for all of the city's operations since opening July 6, 1963.
Having started as a multi-purpose civic building, the current City Hall initially also played host to the city's police detachment, library and court clerks. In fact, the current council chamber was originally built as the White Rock Courthouse, which is why White Rock Mayor Wayne Baldwin's chair is so high up.
"It used to be a judge's chair and the room beside the chambers was the judge's chambers," explained Baldwin.
However, in the five decades since opening, many of those other operations have since moved out as White rock continued to grow, leaving the entirety of the facility for city hall's increasing demand for space.
"Now the purpose of the building has changed considerably since it was first built, and so any money we've spent on the building since has been spent on accommodating the change in purpose," said Baldwin.
But like all old things, some upgrades are in order.
"The biggest thing would be the heating ventilation system, which is really bad," said Baldwin. "We need to do a lot of work on things like getting better windows in, we've got single pane, so the energy efficiency of our windows and doors is also bad."
Another key upgrade, said Baldwin, is to improve the appearance of the building.
"It hasn't really been touched much since it was first built, so the appearance both on the inside and outside has to be improved," he said.
Despite the upgrades needed, Baldwin said the building is still serving its purpose well and will likely continue to do so into the future.
"The building itself is well-built. It's a strong structure, the roof is still good and so on, but obviously changes need to be made to keep up with the times and the expectations of the public," he said.
Binghamton University will save an estimated $355,000 in energy costs every year and avoid sending more than 2,190 tons of greenhouse gas emissions annually into the atmosphere thanks to a number of energy efficiency projects, the New York State Emergy Research and Development Authority announced.
BU has received $740,000 from the agency. Projects include energy efficiency measures at seven new East Campus dorms; a new Collegiate Center with kitchen and dining facilities, multipurpose rooms, computer labs, lounges and offices; and renovations at the Recreation Center.
The NYSERDA-funded projects for new construction are projected to be 17 to 30 percent more energy efficient than the state’s energy code requires, depending on the building. Measures include high-efficiency lighting; occupancy-based lighting controls; insulation; high-efficiency heating, ventilation and air-conditioning systems; variable-speed pumps and motors; and daylight harvesting controls, which is a system that dims artificial light in response to available natural light.
“The implementation of our projects will greatly enhance our energy conservation efforts, reduce cost and reduce greenhouse gas emissions,” BU President Harvey Stenger said in a statement.
Overall, the measures BU is taking are projected to reduce electricity use by 1.8 million kilowatt hours and fossil fuel use by 18,437 million Btu annually, the equivalent of powering and heating about 260 homes for a year, according to NYSERDA. They will also reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 2,190 tons annually, the equivalent of taking 438 cars off the road.
Funding is through the agency’s New Construction Program, which provides technical support to design teams and financial incentives to building owners. The projects also support Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s Build Smart NY initiative, which aims to increase energy efficiency in state buildings by 20 percent over seven years.
“There were three things for fire stations that were rated high [for need],” Fire Chief Alan Mannel said. “One was a generator which we already have, one was the exhaust ventilation system which we got and the other was a fire sprinkler system.”
The fire department/municipal building was approved for a new sprinkler system late last year.
The majority of the funding is being handled by “Assistance to Firefighters Grant” – a nationwide grant though FEMA and Homeland Security. The grant will pay for 90 percent of the cost to install the system.
“It’s certainly not an easy grant to get but it’s well worth the effort,” Mannel said.
Mannel said he hopes to have the sprinkler system installed throughout the Municipal Building and the fire station in about a year’s time. According to the U.S. Fire Administration Tropical Fire Research Series, back in 2001 most fires in fire stations often originate in the fire department vehicles – 44 percent – while the rest of the damages are caused by structural fires.
Framingham State University will eliminate some infrastructure improvements planned for the Hemenway Hall academic building renovation in light of the project's increased cost from rising construction prices around the state, university officials said.
The university will forgo modernizing the interiors of existing classrooms and laboratories in the building, deferring the work until funding is available, said Dan Magazu, a university spokesman.
Earlier this month, officials said they might have to scale back parts of the $64 million project after rising construction costs led the state to drive up the project estimate by $10 million.
"As we anticipated, some of the planned infrastructure improvements to the original building have been eliminated from the scope of the work to balance the project budget," Magazu said in an email.
The main parts of the Hemenway Hall project, which received approval for $54 million in state funding in 2010, will still move forward, including a new science wing with 16 laboratories equipped with cutting-edge technology by 2014, as well as an update the building's existing windows and heating and ventilation system, Magazu said.
Sunday, January 27, 2013
Variety critics review Sundance
On the opening night of Sundance, festival director John Cooper reminded crowds that this was the place where "Beast of the Southern Wild" was born, suggesting that if we only looked hard enough, we might find such a treasure again this year. But breakouts like "Beasts" are few and far between, and none of the 16 films in dramatic competition -- half of which were directed by women and all of which I saw -- embodied that sort of rousing new vision.
Instead, the lineup included an overall high quality of work shaped more to the proven commercial and artistic standards of the indie film scene. For example, unvarnished coming-of-ager "The Spectacular Now" and highly varnished chick-lit comedy "Austenland" could pass as studio pics, while Lake Bell's "In a World ..." (set in the world of Hollywood voice coaching) and Cherien Dabis' "May in the Summer" are limited only by the hyper-specific contexts in which they are set. If it were only funnier, "May" could have become a breakout "My Tall, Skinny Jordanian Wedding."
I'd say the quality of the dramatic lineup announced itself most impressively in the level of formal sophistication displayed by certain filmmakers. Coming-of-age stories and navel-gazing sex comedies are par for the course at Sundance; what you don't always get is a movie as ravishing as Andrew Dosunmu's "Mother of George," which heightens classic meller material to a point of stunning visual abstraction -- the latest testament to the genius of d.p. Bradford Young. Or perhaps that would be the other Young-lensed film in competition, "Ain't Them Bodies Saints" (the dramatic jury saw fit to award the films a shared cinematography prize).
But I don't mean to knock the more conventionally shot films you cited: "In a World ... " and "Austenland" afforded many welcome laughs. As for "The Spectacular Now," it's simply the freshest, most touching high-school movie I've seen in years, and the latest proof that director James Ponsoldt excels at breathing new life into exhausted genres.
"The Spectacular Now" owes much of its appeal to its outstanding central couple, Miles Teller and Shailene Woodley, who seem refreshingly real compared with the countless teen lovers we've seen at Sundance. I love how personal so many of these stories are, though the majority seem to reveal the limits of the filmmakers' life experience. I'm surprised "The Way, Way Back" directors Nat Faxon and Jim Rash are still dwelling on their teen years, for example, and found Jordan Vogt-Roberts' "Toy's House" to be the funnier teen summer tale.
But the material gets more interesting as the storytellers (or their subjects, at least) get older. I'm thinking specifically of Stacie Passon's complex look at modern commitment, "Concussion," in which a lesbian housewife faces her mid-life crisis by what she euphemistically calls "breathing" (renting herself out as a female prostitute), and Drake Doremus' admirably grown-up "Breathe In," which stars Guy Pearce as a failed rock musician who falls for the foreign-exchange student he's hosting. And, of course, 18 years after "Before Sunrise" played Sundance, Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy re-examine their love story from a more mature place in "Before Midnight," though that one disappointingly skims more than plumbs where the pair's minds are now.
We'll have to agree to disagree on "Before Midnight" -- if Hawke, Delpy and Richard Linklater had plunged any deeper into those characters' psyches, we might have had a slasher movie on our hands. I typically come to Park City expecting discoveries, not masterpieces, and so it was a shock of the happiest kind to encounter a truly world-class piece of filmmaking, Cannes competition-caliber stuff, from a director who seems to have absorbed the various influences of Rossellini, Rohmer, Bergman and even Kiarostami into his very being.
Will the filmmakers from this year's promising pack have aged so well 20 years hence? When Linklater first showed up at Sundance with "Slacker" and "Before Sunrise" in the early '90s, he was helping to pioneer a filmmaking movement that clearly informs the mumblecore movies and low-budget two-handers that make up part of today's American indie landscape. Yet the way Linklater's work has deepened -- gaining in craft and assurance without sacrificing that searching, spontaneous quality -- strikes me as both remarkable and rare.
One talent who gives me hope: Andrew Bujalski, whose hilarious black-and-white oddity "Computer Chess" was the deserving winner of this year's Alfred P. Sloan prize. Here's hoping Bujalski puts that $20,000 to good use. Among its many virtues, this uncategorizable whatsit offers a considerably more interesting look back at the days of old-school computer technology than this year's slick closing-night entry, "Jobs."
Festivals indeed have a way of putting different films in intimate dialogue with one another. Which brings us to this year's big jury/audience winner, Ryan Coogler's "Fruitvale," about the victim of a tragic 2009 police shooting, and Alexandre Moors' much less heralded Next entry "Blue Caprice," which unfolds from the perspective of the infamous Beltway snipers. Both of these debut features tell tense, ripped-from-the-headlines stories that try to make sense of senseless acts of brutality. And both play in subtle, provocative ways with our perceptions of their black male protagonists and their possibly violent inclinations.
So why did one ring so true, while the other felt somewhat forced by comparison? Perhaps because "Fruitvale," though it boasts stellar performances and builds to a climax of undeniable emotional force, spends an hour rigging a series of implausibly neat contrivances intended to maximize the poignancy of what's to come. "Blue Caprice," by contrast, is a serious, psychologically grounded attempt to contend with the nature of human evil, and it begs our understanding rather than our sympathy. "Fruitvale" insists on its protagonist's humanity, but it's "Blue Caprice" that leaves you pondering what it means to be human.
Instead, the lineup included an overall high quality of work shaped more to the proven commercial and artistic standards of the indie film scene. For example, unvarnished coming-of-ager "The Spectacular Now" and highly varnished chick-lit comedy "Austenland" could pass as studio pics, while Lake Bell's "In a World ..." (set in the world of Hollywood voice coaching) and Cherien Dabis' "May in the Summer" are limited only by the hyper-specific contexts in which they are set. If it were only funnier, "May" could have become a breakout "My Tall, Skinny Jordanian Wedding."
I'd say the quality of the dramatic lineup announced itself most impressively in the level of formal sophistication displayed by certain filmmakers. Coming-of-age stories and navel-gazing sex comedies are par for the course at Sundance; what you don't always get is a movie as ravishing as Andrew Dosunmu's "Mother of George," which heightens classic meller material to a point of stunning visual abstraction -- the latest testament to the genius of d.p. Bradford Young. Or perhaps that would be the other Young-lensed film in competition, "Ain't Them Bodies Saints" (the dramatic jury saw fit to award the films a shared cinematography prize).
But I don't mean to knock the more conventionally shot films you cited: "In a World ... " and "Austenland" afforded many welcome laughs. As for "The Spectacular Now," it's simply the freshest, most touching high-school movie I've seen in years, and the latest proof that director James Ponsoldt excels at breathing new life into exhausted genres.
"The Spectacular Now" owes much of its appeal to its outstanding central couple, Miles Teller and Shailene Woodley, who seem refreshingly real compared with the countless teen lovers we've seen at Sundance. I love how personal so many of these stories are, though the majority seem to reveal the limits of the filmmakers' life experience. I'm surprised "The Way, Way Back" directors Nat Faxon and Jim Rash are still dwelling on their teen years, for example, and found Jordan Vogt-Roberts' "Toy's House" to be the funnier teen summer tale.
But the material gets more interesting as the storytellers (or their subjects, at least) get older. I'm thinking specifically of Stacie Passon's complex look at modern commitment, "Concussion," in which a lesbian housewife faces her mid-life crisis by what she euphemistically calls "breathing" (renting herself out as a female prostitute), and Drake Doremus' admirably grown-up "Breathe In," which stars Guy Pearce as a failed rock musician who falls for the foreign-exchange student he's hosting. And, of course, 18 years after "Before Sunrise" played Sundance, Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy re-examine their love story from a more mature place in "Before Midnight," though that one disappointingly skims more than plumbs where the pair's minds are now.
We'll have to agree to disagree on "Before Midnight" -- if Hawke, Delpy and Richard Linklater had plunged any deeper into those characters' psyches, we might have had a slasher movie on our hands. I typically come to Park City expecting discoveries, not masterpieces, and so it was a shock of the happiest kind to encounter a truly world-class piece of filmmaking, Cannes competition-caliber stuff, from a director who seems to have absorbed the various influences of Rossellini, Rohmer, Bergman and even Kiarostami into his very being.
Will the filmmakers from this year's promising pack have aged so well 20 years hence? When Linklater first showed up at Sundance with "Slacker" and "Before Sunrise" in the early '90s, he was helping to pioneer a filmmaking movement that clearly informs the mumblecore movies and low-budget two-handers that make up part of today's American indie landscape. Yet the way Linklater's work has deepened -- gaining in craft and assurance without sacrificing that searching, spontaneous quality -- strikes me as both remarkable and rare.
One talent who gives me hope: Andrew Bujalski, whose hilarious black-and-white oddity "Computer Chess" was the deserving winner of this year's Alfred P. Sloan prize. Here's hoping Bujalski puts that $20,000 to good use. Among its many virtues, this uncategorizable whatsit offers a considerably more interesting look back at the days of old-school computer technology than this year's slick closing-night entry, "Jobs."
Festivals indeed have a way of putting different films in intimate dialogue with one another. Which brings us to this year's big jury/audience winner, Ryan Coogler's "Fruitvale," about the victim of a tragic 2009 police shooting, and Alexandre Moors' much less heralded Next entry "Blue Caprice," which unfolds from the perspective of the infamous Beltway snipers. Both of these debut features tell tense, ripped-from-the-headlines stories that try to make sense of senseless acts of brutality. And both play in subtle, provocative ways with our perceptions of their black male protagonists and their possibly violent inclinations.
So why did one ring so true, while the other felt somewhat forced by comparison? Perhaps because "Fruitvale," though it boasts stellar performances and builds to a climax of undeniable emotional force, spends an hour rigging a series of implausibly neat contrivances intended to maximize the poignancy of what's to come. "Blue Caprice," by contrast, is a serious, psychologically grounded attempt to contend with the nature of human evil, and it begs our understanding rather than our sympathy. "Fruitvale" insists on its protagonist's humanity, but it's "Blue Caprice" that leaves you pondering what it means to be human.
Pop Art pioneer is back in the picture
Kurt Schwitters, the pioneering German Dadaist now acknowledged as the founder of performance art, was hopelessly misunderstood in his lifetime, at least when it came to the general public.
Even before he came to Britain – fleeing Nazi Germany in 1940 – his epic sound poem, Ursonate or Ur Sonata, comprised solely of abstract sounds was being pilloried in the national press. The BBC's response in 1947 didn't help. When two reporters turned up to his solo exhibition at London Gallery to record a live performance of Ur Sonata (sometimes translated as "a sonata in primal sounds"), they left halfway through without recording it at all. Only 28 people attended the recital and a fellow artist remembers Schwitters' enduring positivity in the face of an evident lack of interest in the room.
The sound poem, and other works created by Schwitters, have all since been fully reappraised and vindicated. In the past few years, a Schwitters revival has gained ground: Jarvis Cocker played Ur Sonata on BBC Radio 6 Music in June last year; Michael Nyman wrote an opera about the artist in 2003 entitled Man and Boy: Dada; Bryan Ferry is a fan; Damien Hirst owns his sculptures and has spoken of the artist's influence on his own early work.
Yet the public is still, by and large, relatively uninformed of the immense imprint left by Schwitters on contemporary British art. Tate Britain hopes to change that by staging a major exhibition, Schwitters in Britain, opening on Wednesday, which will showcase 150 collages, sculptures, paintings and sound poems – some seen in the country for the first time. The exhibition will focus on the years between his arrival in Britain as an "enemy alien" from Germany in 1940 until his death in Cumbria in 1948.
Schwitters developed the concept of "merz" while he was still in Hanover in the 1920s. This was the idea that any object – foraged or found – could be transformed into artistic material if used in the right way by an artist. So a pebble or a piece of corrugated cardboard became as legitimate as oil paint in the construction of an artwork. Emma Chambers, curator of the Tate Britain show, says he referred to string as an analogous line and cotton wool as softness in the formal composition of his work.
While "merz" is hardly a new concept to us today, it was radical then. He carried on his work abroad, first in Norway where he lived briefly after fleeing Germany and then in Britain where he was interned on arrival. During this period on a camp on Isle of Man, he began making work from whatever material he could get his hands on. He dismantled tea chests and tore up linoleum from floors as well as using debris such as stamps and sweet wrappers for his art.
Fellow artists reported the stink emanating from a work that he had made from porridge in the absence of more conventional artist's material. In the exhibition catalogue, Jenny Powell, a co-curator, quotes a friend and fellow artist, Fred Uhlman, also at the camp, who saw the sculpture. "The room stank. A musty, sour indescribable stink which came from three Dada sculptures which he had created from porridge, no plaster of Paris being available. The porridge had developed mildew and the statues were covered with greenish hair and bluish excrements of an unknown type of bacteria."
In the camp, he took part in group exhibitions and also gave poetry performances, producing up to 250 works and giving impromptu poetry recitals that raised the spirits of the other inmates. Chambers says that many on the camp came to greet each other with sections of the Ur Sonata.
On release in 1941, he met Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth, exhibiting in shows alongside them, while the critic Herbert Read described him in glowing terms: "Schwitters has shown that it is possible to make art out of anything – so long as one is an artist. Used tram tickets, pieces of cardboards, or corrugated paper… Schwitters has pursued this line of development far beyond that reached by Juan Gris and Picasso. Schwitters is a supreme master of the collage."
Schwitters relocated to the Lake District in the mid-1940s and inspired by the rural landscape, he began to incorporate natural objects into his work. This culminated in the creation of the monumental installation, The Merz Barn, comprised of six room-size sculptures that were made from organic material such as twigs and stones. This was a continuation of the Hanover Merzbau – an architectural construction which was also made from "found materials" before the Second World War but destroyed during the Allied bombing.
His concept of merz developed further and prefigured the British Pop Art movement, especially in his groundbreaking collages. He began incorporating commercial images, some cut out from Life magazine, a publication his American friends sent to him. His legacy, according to Tate Britain director, Penelope Curtis, "begins with Richard Hamilton and continues through to Damien Hirst". Indeed, Hamilton was among those instrumental in the Schwitters revival some years after his death. Schwitters had been working on a wall, built within the Merz Barn, which Hamilton helped to move from the Lake District to the more accessible city of Newcastle.
Years before Andy Warhol's Campbell soup tins, Schwitters incorporated fragments from packaging and newspapers into his collages, which reflected ordinary British life such as London bus tickets, or Bassetts Liquorice Allsorts wrappers used in Untitled (This is to Certify That), in 1942.
Ms Chambers says the public – rather than critical – response to such collages was uncomprehending. "All the newspaper articles talked about his work being made from rubbish. The implication was that his work was also rubbish."
Just before his death, he was in talks with various galleries including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, about staging exhibitions. Yet when he died, his work seemed to die with him. He was rediscovered in the late 1950s when artists began to understand the extent of his groundbreaking concepts. His ideas "had a currency that they didn't have when he was alive," says Chambers. His retrospective now, more than 60 years after his death, has been a long time coming.
Even before he came to Britain – fleeing Nazi Germany in 1940 – his epic sound poem, Ursonate or Ur Sonata, comprised solely of abstract sounds was being pilloried in the national press. The BBC's response in 1947 didn't help. When two reporters turned up to his solo exhibition at London Gallery to record a live performance of Ur Sonata (sometimes translated as "a sonata in primal sounds"), they left halfway through without recording it at all. Only 28 people attended the recital and a fellow artist remembers Schwitters' enduring positivity in the face of an evident lack of interest in the room.
The sound poem, and other works created by Schwitters, have all since been fully reappraised and vindicated. In the past few years, a Schwitters revival has gained ground: Jarvis Cocker played Ur Sonata on BBC Radio 6 Music in June last year; Michael Nyman wrote an opera about the artist in 2003 entitled Man and Boy: Dada; Bryan Ferry is a fan; Damien Hirst owns his sculptures and has spoken of the artist's influence on his own early work.
Yet the public is still, by and large, relatively uninformed of the immense imprint left by Schwitters on contemporary British art. Tate Britain hopes to change that by staging a major exhibition, Schwitters in Britain, opening on Wednesday, which will showcase 150 collages, sculptures, paintings and sound poems – some seen in the country for the first time. The exhibition will focus on the years between his arrival in Britain as an "enemy alien" from Germany in 1940 until his death in Cumbria in 1948.
Schwitters developed the concept of "merz" while he was still in Hanover in the 1920s. This was the idea that any object – foraged or found – could be transformed into artistic material if used in the right way by an artist. So a pebble or a piece of corrugated cardboard became as legitimate as oil paint in the construction of an artwork. Emma Chambers, curator of the Tate Britain show, says he referred to string as an analogous line and cotton wool as softness in the formal composition of his work.
While "merz" is hardly a new concept to us today, it was radical then. He carried on his work abroad, first in Norway where he lived briefly after fleeing Germany and then in Britain where he was interned on arrival. During this period on a camp on Isle of Man, he began making work from whatever material he could get his hands on. He dismantled tea chests and tore up linoleum from floors as well as using debris such as stamps and sweet wrappers for his art.
Fellow artists reported the stink emanating from a work that he had made from porridge in the absence of more conventional artist's material. In the exhibition catalogue, Jenny Powell, a co-curator, quotes a friend and fellow artist, Fred Uhlman, also at the camp, who saw the sculpture. "The room stank. A musty, sour indescribable stink which came from three Dada sculptures which he had created from porridge, no plaster of Paris being available. The porridge had developed mildew and the statues were covered with greenish hair and bluish excrements of an unknown type of bacteria."
In the camp, he took part in group exhibitions and also gave poetry performances, producing up to 250 works and giving impromptu poetry recitals that raised the spirits of the other inmates. Chambers says that many on the camp came to greet each other with sections of the Ur Sonata.
On release in 1941, he met Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth, exhibiting in shows alongside them, while the critic Herbert Read described him in glowing terms: "Schwitters has shown that it is possible to make art out of anything – so long as one is an artist. Used tram tickets, pieces of cardboards, or corrugated paper… Schwitters has pursued this line of development far beyond that reached by Juan Gris and Picasso. Schwitters is a supreme master of the collage."
Schwitters relocated to the Lake District in the mid-1940s and inspired by the rural landscape, he began to incorporate natural objects into his work. This culminated in the creation of the monumental installation, The Merz Barn, comprised of six room-size sculptures that were made from organic material such as twigs and stones. This was a continuation of the Hanover Merzbau – an architectural construction which was also made from "found materials" before the Second World War but destroyed during the Allied bombing.
His concept of merz developed further and prefigured the British Pop Art movement, especially in his groundbreaking collages. He began incorporating commercial images, some cut out from Life magazine, a publication his American friends sent to him. His legacy, according to Tate Britain director, Penelope Curtis, "begins with Richard Hamilton and continues through to Damien Hirst". Indeed, Hamilton was among those instrumental in the Schwitters revival some years after his death. Schwitters had been working on a wall, built within the Merz Barn, which Hamilton helped to move from the Lake District to the more accessible city of Newcastle.
Years before Andy Warhol's Campbell soup tins, Schwitters incorporated fragments from packaging and newspapers into his collages, which reflected ordinary British life such as London bus tickets, or Bassetts Liquorice Allsorts wrappers used in Untitled (This is to Certify That), in 1942.
Ms Chambers says the public – rather than critical – response to such collages was uncomprehending. "All the newspaper articles talked about his work being made from rubbish. The implication was that his work was also rubbish."
Just before his death, he was in talks with various galleries including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, about staging exhibitions. Yet when he died, his work seemed to die with him. He was rediscovered in the late 1950s when artists began to understand the extent of his groundbreaking concepts. His ideas "had a currency that they didn't have when he was alive," says Chambers. His retrospective now, more than 60 years after his death, has been a long time coming.
Wednesday, January 23, 2013
Texas A&M Announces "25 by 25" Initiative
The 25 by 25 initiative was developed in response to the critical need to increase the engineering workforce of the state and the nation.
“Last year, more than 10,000 students applied for only 1,600 undergraduate slots available in the Dwight Look College of Engineering at Texas A&M, one of the top ranking public institutions for undergraduate and graduate degrees in engineering,” Sharp said. “And universities from other states have set up offices to recruit our top students out of Texas. As a land grant institution, we are taking measures to provide access to a high quality engineering education for more students to keep our nation competitive in the global landscape.”
“The demand for engineering education at Texas A&M has never been higher,” Loftin said. “The Texas Workforce Commission has projected the need for engineers entering the workforce will increase significantly over the next 12 years. Texas A&M is stepping forward to meet this critical need for our state and nation.
M. Katherine Banks, vice chancellor and dean of engineering, said the 25 by 25 initiative is not just about increasing enrollment, but also about providing better instruction and student opportunities.
“We cannot grow in the way that universities have traditionally grown, by simply spending more,” Banks said. “We are looking at a model that ultimately leverages our existing resources to deliver a high-quality education in a cost effective manner. In addition to increasing our enrollment, we will be transforming engineering education to mold the engineer of the future.”
Curricula will be enhanced through technology-enabled learning, and an extensive Professor of Practice program will be established for industry leaders to return to the classroom.
“Through our innovative educational and recruiting efforts, Texas A&M will lead the way as we become the single largest engineering program in the United States,” Banks said. “At current growth rates, projections show that Texas A&M’s increase in engineering degree production will elevate Texas as second only to California in the number of engineering degrees granted per year.”
“In the global competition for the best and brightest minds in math and science, the United States should take a backseat to no one,” Cornyn said. “That is why I support efforts to provide visas to high-skill immigrants with graduate STEM degrees, and I am pleased that Texas A&M University has announced its commitment to increasing the enrollment and graduation rate of students in these fields.”
The 25 by 25 initiative has received strong support from former students, including Mark W. Albers, a 1979 graduate and senior vice president of Exxon Mobil Corporation.
“At ExxonMobil, we recognize from our own involvement in education, that to increase achievement in science, technology, engineering and math, our nation’s schools must challenge students with a strong curricula and we must support teacher training in the subjects they teach,” Albers said. “The 25 by 25 initiative does just that. Aggie engineers will be solving problems all around the world. Not just at companies, in the lab, or in the field, but they will be meeting the world’s most pressing needs.”
S. Shariq Yosufzai, a 1974 graduate and vice president of Chevron said, “As an alumnus of Texas A&M, I am excited by the transformational potential of the 25 by 25 initiative in engineering. Having recently served as chairman of the board of the California Chamber of Commerce, I had the opportunity to observe the impact of investment in the 1950s in California’s higher education system, which resulted in the state becoming the center of technology and innovation of the world. This 25 by 25 initiative could do the same thing for the state of Texas."
“Texas A&M’s 25 by 25 Initiative is great news for the University and for the State of Texas. This dedication to increased engineering education access will aid in innovation, investigation and investment for our country; all of which will ultimately facilitate economic growth and prosperity for American families. I applaud Texas A&M University for launching this initiative and look forward to supporting its success in meeting the needs of the engineering marketplace.”
“We are a Texas-based company with sales and manufacturing locations in over 50 countries. As a result, we experience daily the increasing need and advantages of having a dynamic supply of engineers to fulfill the future growth potential for Texas in our global environment. Texas A&M’s 25 by 25 program reflects a vision for the continued success and leadership of Texas in the future. The demand for engineers is much greater than the current supply, and will continue to grow.”
Kidman is now happily married to singer Keith Urban and the mother of two small children. She declines to reveal much about her adopted children with Tom, who are devout Scientologists. Of her own status and Hollywood in general, she tells HR writer Merle Ginsberg: "I actually don't even know what a movie star is now -- what is a movie star? When the best female part of the year is Claire Danes in Homeland, you know the game's changed. Maybe in the 1950s there was a far more particular idea. But now that's all blurry -- everything's more fluid."
“Last year, more than 10,000 students applied for only 1,600 undergraduate slots available in the Dwight Look College of Engineering at Texas A&M, one of the top ranking public institutions for undergraduate and graduate degrees in engineering,” Sharp said. “And universities from other states have set up offices to recruit our top students out of Texas. As a land grant institution, we are taking measures to provide access to a high quality engineering education for more students to keep our nation competitive in the global landscape.”
“The demand for engineering education at Texas A&M has never been higher,” Loftin said. “The Texas Workforce Commission has projected the need for engineers entering the workforce will increase significantly over the next 12 years. Texas A&M is stepping forward to meet this critical need for our state and nation.
M. Katherine Banks, vice chancellor and dean of engineering, said the 25 by 25 initiative is not just about increasing enrollment, but also about providing better instruction and student opportunities.
“We cannot grow in the way that universities have traditionally grown, by simply spending more,” Banks said. “We are looking at a model that ultimately leverages our existing resources to deliver a high-quality education in a cost effective manner. In addition to increasing our enrollment, we will be transforming engineering education to mold the engineer of the future.”
Curricula will be enhanced through technology-enabled learning, and an extensive Professor of Practice program will be established for industry leaders to return to the classroom.
“Through our innovative educational and recruiting efforts, Texas A&M will lead the way as we become the single largest engineering program in the United States,” Banks said. “At current growth rates, projections show that Texas A&M’s increase in engineering degree production will elevate Texas as second only to California in the number of engineering degrees granted per year.”
“In the global competition for the best and brightest minds in math and science, the United States should take a backseat to no one,” Cornyn said. “That is why I support efforts to provide visas to high-skill immigrants with graduate STEM degrees, and I am pleased that Texas A&M University has announced its commitment to increasing the enrollment and graduation rate of students in these fields.”
The 25 by 25 initiative has received strong support from former students, including Mark W. Albers, a 1979 graduate and senior vice president of Exxon Mobil Corporation.
“At ExxonMobil, we recognize from our own involvement in education, that to increase achievement in science, technology, engineering and math, our nation’s schools must challenge students with a strong curricula and we must support teacher training in the subjects they teach,” Albers said. “The 25 by 25 initiative does just that. Aggie engineers will be solving problems all around the world. Not just at companies, in the lab, or in the field, but they will be meeting the world’s most pressing needs.”
S. Shariq Yosufzai, a 1974 graduate and vice president of Chevron said, “As an alumnus of Texas A&M, I am excited by the transformational potential of the 25 by 25 initiative in engineering. Having recently served as chairman of the board of the California Chamber of Commerce, I had the opportunity to observe the impact of investment in the 1950s in California’s higher education system, which resulted in the state becoming the center of technology and innovation of the world. This 25 by 25 initiative could do the same thing for the state of Texas."
“Texas A&M’s 25 by 25 Initiative is great news for the University and for the State of Texas. This dedication to increased engineering education access will aid in innovation, investigation and investment for our country; all of which will ultimately facilitate economic growth and prosperity for American families. I applaud Texas A&M University for launching this initiative and look forward to supporting its success in meeting the needs of the engineering marketplace.”
“We are a Texas-based company with sales and manufacturing locations in over 50 countries. As a result, we experience daily the increasing need and advantages of having a dynamic supply of engineers to fulfill the future growth potential for Texas in our global environment. Texas A&M’s 25 by 25 program reflects a vision for the continued success and leadership of Texas in the future. The demand for engineers is much greater than the current supply, and will continue to grow.”
Kidman is now happily married to singer Keith Urban and the mother of two small children. She declines to reveal much about her adopted children with Tom, who are devout Scientologists. Of her own status and Hollywood in general, she tells HR writer Merle Ginsberg: "I actually don't even know what a movie star is now -- what is a movie star? When the best female part of the year is Claire Danes in Homeland, you know the game's changed. Maybe in the 1950s there was a far more particular idea. But now that's all blurry -- everything's more fluid."
What’s on the President’s Plate?
Cooking for guests and cooking for people at home are two totally different things. When expecting guests, the preparation is much more tedious and dishes tend to be a cut above what you usually serve on a daily basis.
Imagine the pressure that comes with preparing for not just any ordinary guest. Imagine serving a company of powerful men in the world.
By no means is it an easy task and there’s only few capable enough to thrive in such an environment. Chef Louis Esguaras is one of those gifted few who have taken their talents and flourished in one of the most high profile kitchens in the world – the White House.
Chef Esguaras has had the pleasure of serving former United States president George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton and their families, along with diplomats and dignitaries from all over the world, taking with him the pride of his mother country. “It’s all about attitude in this industry,” Chef Esguaras shared. “The reason I got chosen out of 250 people from my culinary school was because I was always smiling. I was always happy and I always made sure that anything I could do, I would do it,” he added.
During a cooking demonstration held at the Center for Culinary Arts (CCA) on Katipunan Avenue, Quezon City, Chef Esguaras shared cooking tips he acquired in over 25 years of culinary experience. In front of students, faculty, and some of the most renowned culinary practitioners in the country, Chef Esguaras lit up CCA’s Culinary Theatre with masterful dishes that he was able to whip up during his tenure in the White House.
“When I started planning my international tour, I wanted to do it in Manila first. This is where I’m from and this is where I was born,” Chef Esguaras explained. Born and raised in the Philippines, Chef Esguaras grew up in the streets of Mandaluyong until his family migrated to the United States when he was 13 years old. “Although you can’t see it by the way I look, pero marunong ako mag-Tagalog,” the world-renowned chef quipped.
Chef Esguaras made four wonderful dishes that came from the “Presidential Menu,” all of which he took part in preparing and serving at significant events during his stint as a presidential chef. One of the dishes he prepared was Crab Cakes with Cajun Remoulade, which was a personal favorite of former president George Bush, Sr. “He enjoys a lot of seafood, but what he really likes are crab cakes so I wanted to show that,” Chef Esguaras revealed.
The browned Crab Cakes have that perfect consistency of crispiness that locked in the rich and juicy crab meat inside. The dish is rounded out by a Cajun Remoulade dip that adds that distinct Southern Spice to each bite.
Chef Esguaras also prepared a Vodka-Marinated Salmon with Cucumber Salad and Kasha Pilaf, a dish he prepared at a state dinner for former Russian president Boris Yeltsin during the Clinton administration. The dish consists of rich textures and levels of flavor from the light Cucumber Salad, the Vodka-infused Salmon, and the nutty Kasha Pilaf grains, all of which are brought together to offer a familiar taste and experience for the special guest.
Also included on the list was a dish served during a state dinner for the Emperor of Japan. The Grilled Arctic Char with Wild Mushroom Risotto was a dish made by the White House Kitchen to present a light yet complex entrée. The unique character of the Arctic Char when grilled takes precedence because of its distinct texture complemented well by a bed of mushroom risotto that provides such a flavorful canvas.
Chef Esguaras saved the best for last when he prepared the Layered Late-Summer Vegetables with Lemongrass and Red Curry. This intricate and eye-catching dish was served during a state dinner for former South African president Nelson Mandela. “This one was very memorable for me. Nelson Mandela just got out of prison and he came to the White House and he was able to share with the world his knowledge,” Chef Esguaras recalled.
The labor intensive dish consists of preparing each ingredient separately and making use of a ring mold to stack them into a tower. The dish, however, is well worth the trouble because of how various textures and different flavors came together in a light yet multi-layered plate.
Chef Esguaras has come a long way from when he learned his first dish, Spaghetti and Meatballs cooked Pinoy style as taught to him by his mom. Despite his success and having served high profile personalities, this kitchen artisan has remained humble and has learned to keep things fresh and simple.
“Presidential cuisine, in a sense, shouldn’t be anything that is super hard or anything that you can’t do at home,” Chef Esguaras shared. “People think that these people like all these glorified food but really they’re normal just like us,” he added.
Imagine the pressure that comes with preparing for not just any ordinary guest. Imagine serving a company of powerful men in the world.
By no means is it an easy task and there’s only few capable enough to thrive in such an environment. Chef Louis Esguaras is one of those gifted few who have taken their talents and flourished in one of the most high profile kitchens in the world – the White House.
Chef Esguaras has had the pleasure of serving former United States president George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton and their families, along with diplomats and dignitaries from all over the world, taking with him the pride of his mother country. “It’s all about attitude in this industry,” Chef Esguaras shared. “The reason I got chosen out of 250 people from my culinary school was because I was always smiling. I was always happy and I always made sure that anything I could do, I would do it,” he added.
During a cooking demonstration held at the Center for Culinary Arts (CCA) on Katipunan Avenue, Quezon City, Chef Esguaras shared cooking tips he acquired in over 25 years of culinary experience. In front of students, faculty, and some of the most renowned culinary practitioners in the country, Chef Esguaras lit up CCA’s Culinary Theatre with masterful dishes that he was able to whip up during his tenure in the White House.
“When I started planning my international tour, I wanted to do it in Manila first. This is where I’m from and this is where I was born,” Chef Esguaras explained. Born and raised in the Philippines, Chef Esguaras grew up in the streets of Mandaluyong until his family migrated to the United States when he was 13 years old. “Although you can’t see it by the way I look, pero marunong ako mag-Tagalog,” the world-renowned chef quipped.
Chef Esguaras made four wonderful dishes that came from the “Presidential Menu,” all of which he took part in preparing and serving at significant events during his stint as a presidential chef. One of the dishes he prepared was Crab Cakes with Cajun Remoulade, which was a personal favorite of former president George Bush, Sr. “He enjoys a lot of seafood, but what he really likes are crab cakes so I wanted to show that,” Chef Esguaras revealed.
The browned Crab Cakes have that perfect consistency of crispiness that locked in the rich and juicy crab meat inside. The dish is rounded out by a Cajun Remoulade dip that adds that distinct Southern Spice to each bite.
Chef Esguaras also prepared a Vodka-Marinated Salmon with Cucumber Salad and Kasha Pilaf, a dish he prepared at a state dinner for former Russian president Boris Yeltsin during the Clinton administration. The dish consists of rich textures and levels of flavor from the light Cucumber Salad, the Vodka-infused Salmon, and the nutty Kasha Pilaf grains, all of which are brought together to offer a familiar taste and experience for the special guest.
Also included on the list was a dish served during a state dinner for the Emperor of Japan. The Grilled Arctic Char with Wild Mushroom Risotto was a dish made by the White House Kitchen to present a light yet complex entrée. The unique character of the Arctic Char when grilled takes precedence because of its distinct texture complemented well by a bed of mushroom risotto that provides such a flavorful canvas.
Chef Esguaras saved the best for last when he prepared the Layered Late-Summer Vegetables with Lemongrass and Red Curry. This intricate and eye-catching dish was served during a state dinner for former South African president Nelson Mandela. “This one was very memorable for me. Nelson Mandela just got out of prison and he came to the White House and he was able to share with the world his knowledge,” Chef Esguaras recalled.
The labor intensive dish consists of preparing each ingredient separately and making use of a ring mold to stack them into a tower. The dish, however, is well worth the trouble because of how various textures and different flavors came together in a light yet multi-layered plate.
Chef Esguaras has come a long way from when he learned his first dish, Spaghetti and Meatballs cooked Pinoy style as taught to him by his mom. Despite his success and having served high profile personalities, this kitchen artisan has remained humble and has learned to keep things fresh and simple.
“Presidential cuisine, in a sense, shouldn’t be anything that is super hard or anything that you can’t do at home,” Chef Esguaras shared. “People think that these people like all these glorified food but really they’re normal just like us,” he added.
Monday, January 21, 2013
Nicki Minaj Plus a Gay Bear Equals Chicago's The Big Dipper
There is a Big Dipper Sound, as ascribed by the artist himself in the pornographically droll and ebola infectious song "Drip Drop." In an Andersonville walk up on Chicago's North Side, one can see it being polished; following a cup of coffee from a Swedish bakery, the Dipper, né Dan, bounced around eagerly, ricocheting ideas off of producer Dan Foley, of self described queer-electro-fuck music act BAATHAUS. Scheduled for a show in a few days, the duo were busy setting the set list and adjusting the live tracks, providing an intimate look at the compositions, stripped down to various colored bars, and providing insight into the Big Dipper Sound even as they adjusted it.
The Big Dipper Sound is clubby, for lack of a better term, not full on dance music, per se, but irrevocably along the lines of dance rap. "Danceability is what we aim for," the Dipper said when asked about the floor friendly rhythms that permeate his tracks. "If we can't dance to it, we don't do it."
Bouncing along atop the drums, heavy synths and, in one case, a Backstreet Boys sample, is the single key component to the sound, the Dipper's voice, a voice honed over countless lunch table top-of-the-head freestyles in Evanston with the girth and elasticity of a produce rubber band and the texture of a bag full of marbles, framed, as it should be, in a beard and delivered with a palpable energy from beneath bright eyes, large glasses and a high and semi-tight/rattail combination. The voice is reflected in the Dipper's clothes, as strong, flexible and impractical as his silver chain, and in his motions, namely, the idea that something so large, be it the voice or the Dipper's own sizable frame, can move so nimbly.
The Dipper is just now coming in to finding his voice. After leaving Evanston for the theater program at Ithaca College, he had returned to Chicago and gone to work. "I graduated in 2007 and I came back here and I was pursuing a theater career," he recalled. "I was affiliated with a lot of different companies here. I was working as a choreographer, and a teacher, and a photo assistant. I had some service jobs. And during all of that, I started to really connect with a queer nightlife. Queer parties in Chicago, DJs, music, performance; that sort of thing was really formative and eye opening. I always knew how I identified and what was interesting to me as a spectator, but I was working in a theatrical medium, and you've got a script, and you've got to execute the script. There was no 'just make some shit up that's inside your head and turn it in to a performance,' and that's happening in this very sort of art party, underground, no one's making any money, no one's paying any money. People are just showing what's inside of them."
What was inside the Dipper was a deep, long standing love for hip-hop music that he had come to believe was damned to be unrequited, due first to race, "Kriss Kross were living my dream, but I was like 'I'm white, it's never going to happen.' But then Eminem came out, and I was like 'oh shit, this could legitimately be something I could do'," and then sexual orientation. "A close friend of mine, his older brother had a rap crew … in high school, we would like smoke blunts, and watch them freestyle. Then they would leave, and we would do our own freestyles. But they would throw "faggot" around left, right, and center, and it was always so hard, because it [rap] was something that I wanted. I saw it, and I was like 'I identify with this world. This music makes me happy. I want to be involved. But I won't be accepted.' And so it was really difficult." With his eyes now opened to the realm of creative possibilities and receptive audience he found in the queer nightlife scene, the Dipper began to drift into performance.
He started with an art project-cum-dance troupe called Double DJ. "It was me and two other people," Dipper said. "They were both former drag performers, one a man and one a woman, and we all had very different looks and body types, and we did what I still consider a fascinating bar, club dance performance that fucked with gender representation and movement." Double DJ collaborated with Foley and other DJs to create mixes and set lists, pulling primarily from the hip-hop and dance worlds (their most popular number was to the Peaches remix of Crime Mob's "Stiletto Pumps in the Club"). "It was opening this door of 'this can be whatever we want it to be.' And we would dance pretty much always in big, six inch stiletto platform heels, and for a while, when I started rapping, I was doing them at the same time. People would want us to dance, and then for me to rap. The first few times I did it, I was like 'yes! I'm being double paid for the same night.' But then I started to realize that I was being one performance character and identity, and then I was being another."
Despite leaving the theater behind, the Big Dipper had not allowed himself to grab the microphone. "Now, what I do when I rap is way more myself. When I was first doing it, it was more like a character. You're going to be a rapper? That's not serious. So I had to be a character. And now, that's really faded away as people have responded personally to what we're doing."
Now that the Big Dipper Sound had found its voice it needed something to say, which brings us to the sound's next key component: The Big Dipper Sound is terribly profane and filthily hilarious, which is not to say that it is a joke. The Dipper pulled a Details spread off of Foley's refrigerator and handed it to me.
"I think they think I'm like Weird Al," he laughed. The article places the Dipper in the "great tradition of hip-hop jokesters" with The Fat Boys and Ugly Duckling (respectable enough names, although leaving Heems and Kool AD out of a conversation about rap harlequins seems absurd, even if the jump from jokester to satirist is perhaps too large a one for most to make) and "Andy Samberg's Lonely Island Crew," the last of which seems a particularly lazy and egregious companion. True, the Dipper's bars are stuffed with punchlines and vulgarity, but the disturbing question one wonders when seeing him listed as a "hip-hop jokester" is, if he was rhyming about fucking women, would it still be funny?
The simple fact is that the Big Dipper is saying nothing that countless straight rappers have not said before, and the novelty of hearing it applied, with skill, mind you, to the male anatomy is something to bemoan, not laud; it is the skill with which he gets vulgar, rather than who he is getting vulgar with, that would be the focus in a perfect world. But while we can take the rubbernecking factor as a negative, or cultural tourism, there is also something inherently positive to be found in the Dipper's explicit bars. As part of a new guard of gay rappers, he has been afforded the ability to rap and be gay, rather than rap about being gay; to devote himself to songs of carnal pleasure, rather than fighting vehemently for his political rights. Basically, the Big Dipper and other like him represent a dramatic sea change in gay hip-hop: By having to say nothing, they are saying everything.
The Big Dipper Sound is clubby, for lack of a better term, not full on dance music, per se, but irrevocably along the lines of dance rap. "Danceability is what we aim for," the Dipper said when asked about the floor friendly rhythms that permeate his tracks. "If we can't dance to it, we don't do it."
Bouncing along atop the drums, heavy synths and, in one case, a Backstreet Boys sample, is the single key component to the sound, the Dipper's voice, a voice honed over countless lunch table top-of-the-head freestyles in Evanston with the girth and elasticity of a produce rubber band and the texture of a bag full of marbles, framed, as it should be, in a beard and delivered with a palpable energy from beneath bright eyes, large glasses and a high and semi-tight/rattail combination. The voice is reflected in the Dipper's clothes, as strong, flexible and impractical as his silver chain, and in his motions, namely, the idea that something so large, be it the voice or the Dipper's own sizable frame, can move so nimbly.
The Dipper is just now coming in to finding his voice. After leaving Evanston for the theater program at Ithaca College, he had returned to Chicago and gone to work. "I graduated in 2007 and I came back here and I was pursuing a theater career," he recalled. "I was affiliated with a lot of different companies here. I was working as a choreographer, and a teacher, and a photo assistant. I had some service jobs. And during all of that, I started to really connect with a queer nightlife. Queer parties in Chicago, DJs, music, performance; that sort of thing was really formative and eye opening. I always knew how I identified and what was interesting to me as a spectator, but I was working in a theatrical medium, and you've got a script, and you've got to execute the script. There was no 'just make some shit up that's inside your head and turn it in to a performance,' and that's happening in this very sort of art party, underground, no one's making any money, no one's paying any money. People are just showing what's inside of them."
What was inside the Dipper was a deep, long standing love for hip-hop music that he had come to believe was damned to be unrequited, due first to race, "Kriss Kross were living my dream, but I was like 'I'm white, it's never going to happen.' But then Eminem came out, and I was like 'oh shit, this could legitimately be something I could do'," and then sexual orientation. "A close friend of mine, his older brother had a rap crew … in high school, we would like smoke blunts, and watch them freestyle. Then they would leave, and we would do our own freestyles. But they would throw "faggot" around left, right, and center, and it was always so hard, because it [rap] was something that I wanted. I saw it, and I was like 'I identify with this world. This music makes me happy. I want to be involved. But I won't be accepted.' And so it was really difficult." With his eyes now opened to the realm of creative possibilities and receptive audience he found in the queer nightlife scene, the Dipper began to drift into performance.
He started with an art project-cum-dance troupe called Double DJ. "It was me and two other people," Dipper said. "They were both former drag performers, one a man and one a woman, and we all had very different looks and body types, and we did what I still consider a fascinating bar, club dance performance that fucked with gender representation and movement." Double DJ collaborated with Foley and other DJs to create mixes and set lists, pulling primarily from the hip-hop and dance worlds (their most popular number was to the Peaches remix of Crime Mob's "Stiletto Pumps in the Club"). "It was opening this door of 'this can be whatever we want it to be.' And we would dance pretty much always in big, six inch stiletto platform heels, and for a while, when I started rapping, I was doing them at the same time. People would want us to dance, and then for me to rap. The first few times I did it, I was like 'yes! I'm being double paid for the same night.' But then I started to realize that I was being one performance character and identity, and then I was being another."
Despite leaving the theater behind, the Big Dipper had not allowed himself to grab the microphone. "Now, what I do when I rap is way more myself. When I was first doing it, it was more like a character. You're going to be a rapper? That's not serious. So I had to be a character. And now, that's really faded away as people have responded personally to what we're doing."
Now that the Big Dipper Sound had found its voice it needed something to say, which brings us to the sound's next key component: The Big Dipper Sound is terribly profane and filthily hilarious, which is not to say that it is a joke. The Dipper pulled a Details spread off of Foley's refrigerator and handed it to me.
"I think they think I'm like Weird Al," he laughed. The article places the Dipper in the "great tradition of hip-hop jokesters" with The Fat Boys and Ugly Duckling (respectable enough names, although leaving Heems and Kool AD out of a conversation about rap harlequins seems absurd, even if the jump from jokester to satirist is perhaps too large a one for most to make) and "Andy Samberg's Lonely Island Crew," the last of which seems a particularly lazy and egregious companion. True, the Dipper's bars are stuffed with punchlines and vulgarity, but the disturbing question one wonders when seeing him listed as a "hip-hop jokester" is, if he was rhyming about fucking women, would it still be funny?
The simple fact is that the Big Dipper is saying nothing that countless straight rappers have not said before, and the novelty of hearing it applied, with skill, mind you, to the male anatomy is something to bemoan, not laud; it is the skill with which he gets vulgar, rather than who he is getting vulgar with, that would be the focus in a perfect world. But while we can take the rubbernecking factor as a negative, or cultural tourism, there is also something inherently positive to be found in the Dipper's explicit bars. As part of a new guard of gay rappers, he has been afforded the ability to rap and be gay, rather than rap about being gay; to devote himself to songs of carnal pleasure, rather than fighting vehemently for his political rights. Basically, the Big Dipper and other like him represent a dramatic sea change in gay hip-hop: By having to say nothing, they are saying everything.
The man
I forget what I said in the speech -- and the audience probably has long forgotten, too, -- but I will always remember having lunch with Stan Musial.
I asked him how it all began. He said when he was in high school during the Depression a baseball scout came to his hometown of Donora, Pa. The scout told Musial's father he wanted to sign him to a contract.
Musial said his father rejected the offer, telling the scout, "My son is going to college." Musial's father worked in a steel mill and never got a college education. Like most fathers, he wanted a better life for his son and believed college would be his ticket to success.
The scout left, but returned several weeks later to again ask that Stan be allowed to play professional baseball. He was rejected again. Musial says the scout then appealed to "a higher authority, my mother" and she agreed.
In 1938, Musial was signed as a pitcher to a professional baseball contract. I asked him how much they paid him. As I now recall it was about $2,000 to $3,000. With so many players of lesser skill making millions today, I didn't begrudge him selling his autograph on baseballs and memorabilia.
After injuring his arm as a minor league player, Musial was moved to the outfield and then to first base where he began to hit the ball like few left-handers ever had. He became one of the greatest hitters in Major League Baseball history.
If ever there was a sports role model, Stan was one. A World War II vet and family man, Musial played his entire career with the St. Louis Cardinals, a rarity today when players, like interchangeable parts, are traded often or jump to other clubs for more money.
President Obama touched on Musial's character when he presented him with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in February 2011. The president said then, "Stan remains to this day an icon untarnished, a beloved pillar of the community, a gentleman you'd want your kids to emulate."
In our celebrity culture where it doesn't matter why you're famous, only that you are famous, we don't focus enough on true achievement and the untarnished. Musial's contemporaries, Joe DiMaggio and Ted Williams, received more media attention than he did, but Stan never publicly expressed any bitterness. They were in larger media markets, -- New York and Boston respectively -- which may account for some of it, though it was in New York that Musial acquired his moniker "The Man." Sporting News reports that, "According to the National Baseball Hall of Fame, Musial earned 'The Man' nickname 'by (Brooklyn) Dodgers fans for the havoc he wrought at Ebbets Field.'"
Sporting News quoted Hall of Fame president Jeff Idelson: "Stan will be remembered in baseball annals as one of the pillars of our game. The mold broke with Stan. There will never be another like him."
On that one day in 2007, as I had lunch with my childhood hero, I was a kid again. For me, it was better than any politician I have met or dined with. He signed a baseball for me, for free. It sits encased on a shelf in my office.
“To anybody who knows us (who) feels any bad feelings about Foxygen’s ‘successes,’” says a recent post on the band’s Facebook page, “[...] it only seems like we’re ‘making it’ or ‘going places’ on the internet, so get off your computer and record some music.” It could be a stretch, but maybe that reveals something about the epicenter of Foxygen’s musical ideology. The Californian duo of Sam France and Jonathan Rado twist the hell out of a familiar British Invasion blueprint as it suits them, dressing it up with candid brain-flow lyrics and a lust for misleading your expectations. We Are The 21st Century Ambassadors Of Peace & Magic is turbulent creativity stuffed into a mold of vintage pop rock, barely holding it all together while lurching along a line between safety and madness—recommended listening for anyone mourning some perceived end of rock ‘n’ roll.
The first two songs of the album—straightforward, mellow—are two of the best, but belie an approaching torrent of free-wheeling indulgence in which tempos swap, structures melt, and France’s vocal performances rev into a stream-of-consciousness freak-out, like Kevin Barnes being tempered into shape with Jack White’s bluster. Tracks such as “On Blue Mountain” and leadoff single “Shuggie” swap tempos and moods in bipolar fashion, with downtrodden verses suddenly picking up speed and launching into exuberant refrains. Other loops taken are more subtle: The wonderful “San Francisco,” for instance, is veiled as a polite Kinks-like tune of schmaltzy reminiscence, trussed with glockenspiel, before a priceless chorus (“I left my love in San Francisco/That’s okay, I was bored anyway”) totally inverts the sentimental mood. Little things.
I couldn’t find a boring, robotic bassline or mailed-in lyric on this album. Painstaking attention to the minor details in all regards—production as well, dolled up with psyched-out keyboard flourishes, clever talk-backs, and my favorite drum sound in recent memory—will keep this one in my stereo for a long time. The titular song, oozing with genuine petulant son-of-a-bitch swagger, sums up the vitality behind Foxygen’s latest, fueled with abhorrence for misery and disillusionment. It’s welcome at a time when popular rock music seems to be taking a lethargic slide towards the gutless.
I asked him how it all began. He said when he was in high school during the Depression a baseball scout came to his hometown of Donora, Pa. The scout told Musial's father he wanted to sign him to a contract.
Musial said his father rejected the offer, telling the scout, "My son is going to college." Musial's father worked in a steel mill and never got a college education. Like most fathers, he wanted a better life for his son and believed college would be his ticket to success.
The scout left, but returned several weeks later to again ask that Stan be allowed to play professional baseball. He was rejected again. Musial says the scout then appealed to "a higher authority, my mother" and she agreed.
In 1938, Musial was signed as a pitcher to a professional baseball contract. I asked him how much they paid him. As I now recall it was about $2,000 to $3,000. With so many players of lesser skill making millions today, I didn't begrudge him selling his autograph on baseballs and memorabilia.
After injuring his arm as a minor league player, Musial was moved to the outfield and then to first base where he began to hit the ball like few left-handers ever had. He became one of the greatest hitters in Major League Baseball history.
If ever there was a sports role model, Stan was one. A World War II vet and family man, Musial played his entire career with the St. Louis Cardinals, a rarity today when players, like interchangeable parts, are traded often or jump to other clubs for more money.
President Obama touched on Musial's character when he presented him with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in February 2011. The president said then, "Stan remains to this day an icon untarnished, a beloved pillar of the community, a gentleman you'd want your kids to emulate."
In our celebrity culture where it doesn't matter why you're famous, only that you are famous, we don't focus enough on true achievement and the untarnished. Musial's contemporaries, Joe DiMaggio and Ted Williams, received more media attention than he did, but Stan never publicly expressed any bitterness. They were in larger media markets, -- New York and Boston respectively -- which may account for some of it, though it was in New York that Musial acquired his moniker "The Man." Sporting News reports that, "According to the National Baseball Hall of Fame, Musial earned 'The Man' nickname 'by (Brooklyn) Dodgers fans for the havoc he wrought at Ebbets Field.'"
Sporting News quoted Hall of Fame president Jeff Idelson: "Stan will be remembered in baseball annals as one of the pillars of our game. The mold broke with Stan. There will never be another like him."
On that one day in 2007, as I had lunch with my childhood hero, I was a kid again. For me, it was better than any politician I have met or dined with. He signed a baseball for me, for free. It sits encased on a shelf in my office.
“To anybody who knows us (who) feels any bad feelings about Foxygen’s ‘successes,’” says a recent post on the band’s Facebook page, “[...] it only seems like we’re ‘making it’ or ‘going places’ on the internet, so get off your computer and record some music.” It could be a stretch, but maybe that reveals something about the epicenter of Foxygen’s musical ideology. The Californian duo of Sam France and Jonathan Rado twist the hell out of a familiar British Invasion blueprint as it suits them, dressing it up with candid brain-flow lyrics and a lust for misleading your expectations. We Are The 21st Century Ambassadors Of Peace & Magic is turbulent creativity stuffed into a mold of vintage pop rock, barely holding it all together while lurching along a line between safety and madness—recommended listening for anyone mourning some perceived end of rock ‘n’ roll.
The first two songs of the album—straightforward, mellow—are two of the best, but belie an approaching torrent of free-wheeling indulgence in which tempos swap, structures melt, and France’s vocal performances rev into a stream-of-consciousness freak-out, like Kevin Barnes being tempered into shape with Jack White’s bluster. Tracks such as “On Blue Mountain” and leadoff single “Shuggie” swap tempos and moods in bipolar fashion, with downtrodden verses suddenly picking up speed and launching into exuberant refrains. Other loops taken are more subtle: The wonderful “San Francisco,” for instance, is veiled as a polite Kinks-like tune of schmaltzy reminiscence, trussed with glockenspiel, before a priceless chorus (“I left my love in San Francisco/That’s okay, I was bored anyway”) totally inverts the sentimental mood. Little things.
I couldn’t find a boring, robotic bassline or mailed-in lyric on this album. Painstaking attention to the minor details in all regards—production as well, dolled up with psyched-out keyboard flourishes, clever talk-backs, and my favorite drum sound in recent memory—will keep this one in my stereo for a long time. The titular song, oozing with genuine petulant son-of-a-bitch swagger, sums up the vitality behind Foxygen’s latest, fueled with abhorrence for misery and disillusionment. It’s welcome at a time when popular rock music seems to be taking a lethargic slide towards the gutless.
Thursday, January 17, 2013
LS, A8 and 7 series face-off
The measuring scale of large luxury saloons is very simple and looks like this: a thermometer-style narrow glass tube, filled with liquid burr walnut, with just one red line in the middle. If the burr walnut rises above the line, the car is better than the benchmark, the Mercedes- Benz S-Class. Normally the burr walnut always hovers just below the red line.
But gathered here today, we have no Mercedes-Benz S-Class. And that’s because we’re not interested in reconfirming our unanimous opinions that the S-Class is the best, but rather we want to decide which of the latest newcomers to the large luxury saloon segment are most worthy of attention too.
The Audi A8 with its 4.0-litre twin-turbo V8 was launched only a few months ago near the end of 2012, and BMW thoroughly revamped its 7 Series with a UAE release date around about the same time in October. Just a month later, Lexus countered with its ‘all-new’ LS. So while the S-Class condescendingly looks on from the safety of its top-spot for the segment in terms of 2012 sales, we decided to gather the three also-rans for a guns-blazing shoot-out, minus the guns and the shooting, and pls some sedate cruising…
The objective of this comparison is to, basically, find out what the second best luxury saloon out there is since the S-Class is untouchable.
Well, almost, because this A8 L is so darn good, Mercedes had better not get too comfortable on top of its perch; second spot isn’t good enough for Ingolstadt.
With a blistering 4.0-litre twin-turbo V8 sending 420bhp to all four wheels, it isn’t planning on standing around for anyone. It wants to be seen and heard. Bury the throttle and your ears are met with a thunderous roar. Has its time in the limelight come? Maybe.
What’s for certain is it’s as refined and luxurious as can be both inside and out. The exterior may not jump out and grab you by the neck; instead, it slowly seduces you until you can’t resist its charms, of which there are plenty, such as those sharp LED lights, 19in alloys and muscular body. I’d say it is the most handsome of the three we’ve assembled.
Audi has been producing some of the best interiors for years and the A8 L’s cabin is nothing short of majestic and loaded with every conceivable feature imaginable... Barring a coffee machine. We wouldn’t blame you if you double checked that the boffins didn’t fit one in there too because with a push-button ignition, sunroof, leather upholstery, dual-zone automatic climate control, 18-way power heated front seats, a power tilt-telescopic steering, Bluetooth, Bose audio system, mobile Wi-Fi capability, Audi’s Multi-Media Interface (MMI) with an eight-inch power-retracting TFT display screen, full iPod integration, twin SD-card slots and a navigation system with Google Earth street views, a coffee machine doesn’t sound absurd at all.
The fit and finish and lavishness of it all is so good that apart from Rolls-Royce, no other carmaker comes close. The materials used in here are first class and they feel it too. Though the front seats are very comfortable, it’s here that the Merc shows its class. It boasts active side bolsters that keep you locked into your chair when carving up a corner. Very cool. Audi, Lexus and BMW obviously didn’t get the memo. Ah well, at least the A8 L gets a better looking dashboard... More importantly, it drives as smooth as it looks.
It’s a large car, no doubt, but it manages to shrink around you when you put it through its paces — something the LS badly struggles to do. The Quattro system with its 40/60 front/rear power split keeps you planted on the road no matter how quick you take that corner, while the air suspension cushions you from all the blows on bumpy surfaces. The new V8 is a marvellous piece of engineering that delivers 600Nm of torque and flings the A8 L from 0-100kph in 4.7 seconds.
Mated to an eight-speed tiptronic, the power plant is both powerful yet frugal — 9.5 litres per-100km isn’t bad at all and neither is the Dh369,000 starting price. Is it better than the S Class? Not yet. Better than the Lexus and BMW? Let’s see what the guys have to say…
Perhaps at Dh375K the Lexus is one of the cheapest luxury cars around because the Japanese carmaker’s tooling costs are at kept to an absolute minimum. The Lexus is devoid of stylistic charm or unique design features as your eyes take ages to transcend 5,207mm of flat steel, searching for something interesting to lock on to before giving up and trailing down towards your feet in disappointment.
Then you just stand there feeling sorry for yourself, and for Lexus for missing
a huge opportunity to carry the momentum its other cars have set — various attractive concepts recently and the GS production model.
Agreed, Lexus has slapped the spindle grille on to the new LS as well, but unfortunately, that’s the car’s only defining feature. Don’t people with money want something special?
Perhaps they’ll find it inside the new LS. The interior feels the same as the GS’s, which is a good thing, but with a few extra touches of leather and twin rear seats in the long-wheelbase model and all the trimmings — the right-rear throne reclines with extending leg supports, and the centre arm-rest houses the computing power of a passenger plane, so you can command the whole car from the back. That’s neat, but it suggests this car is not meant to be driven, but be driven in.
So you probably don’t care that the LS 460 L comes with the same old 4.6-litre V8 producing 386bhp and 498Nm of torque. Peak power comes in high, as does the torque, but there’s now an even smoother eight-speed automatic transmission and driven in its element (below 3,000rpm), the Lexus LS is eerily silent and unrivalled in comfort.
The light steering is pinky-friendly and all the right controls are mounted to the wheel-spokes, while the rest of the gizmos are reached via the mouse-like command knob beside the gear level.
Up top there’s a screen that’s darn near the size of my television set, but it’s all
not as fluid to use as either BMW’s excellent new iDrive or the latest generation of Audi’s MMI. Other features include adaptive cruise control with over- eager braking (unlike in a Mercedes-Benz S-Class the system isn’t totally autonomous for easy traffic-jam crawls), all the usual safety systems (lane departure, blind-spot monitoring…), excellent surround-sound quality, air suspension, smart entry and start, and a relatively small boot for the car’s overall size.
Although Lexus claims otherwise, the handling is still the same as before, an abdominal workout at best as you tense to remain in the outrageously comfortable yet unsupportive seat. If you don’t care much about driving, this is the best car in the world.
But gathered here today, we have no Mercedes-Benz S-Class. And that’s because we’re not interested in reconfirming our unanimous opinions that the S-Class is the best, but rather we want to decide which of the latest newcomers to the large luxury saloon segment are most worthy of attention too.
The Audi A8 with its 4.0-litre twin-turbo V8 was launched only a few months ago near the end of 2012, and BMW thoroughly revamped its 7 Series with a UAE release date around about the same time in October. Just a month later, Lexus countered with its ‘all-new’ LS. So while the S-Class condescendingly looks on from the safety of its top-spot for the segment in terms of 2012 sales, we decided to gather the three also-rans for a guns-blazing shoot-out, minus the guns and the shooting, and pls some sedate cruising…
The objective of this comparison is to, basically, find out what the second best luxury saloon out there is since the S-Class is untouchable.
Well, almost, because this A8 L is so darn good, Mercedes had better not get too comfortable on top of its perch; second spot isn’t good enough for Ingolstadt.
With a blistering 4.0-litre twin-turbo V8 sending 420bhp to all four wheels, it isn’t planning on standing around for anyone. It wants to be seen and heard. Bury the throttle and your ears are met with a thunderous roar. Has its time in the limelight come? Maybe.
What’s for certain is it’s as refined and luxurious as can be both inside and out. The exterior may not jump out and grab you by the neck; instead, it slowly seduces you until you can’t resist its charms, of which there are plenty, such as those sharp LED lights, 19in alloys and muscular body. I’d say it is the most handsome of the three we’ve assembled.
Audi has been producing some of the best interiors for years and the A8 L’s cabin is nothing short of majestic and loaded with every conceivable feature imaginable... Barring a coffee machine. We wouldn’t blame you if you double checked that the boffins didn’t fit one in there too because with a push-button ignition, sunroof, leather upholstery, dual-zone automatic climate control, 18-way power heated front seats, a power tilt-telescopic steering, Bluetooth, Bose audio system, mobile Wi-Fi capability, Audi’s Multi-Media Interface (MMI) with an eight-inch power-retracting TFT display screen, full iPod integration, twin SD-card slots and a navigation system with Google Earth street views, a coffee machine doesn’t sound absurd at all.
The fit and finish and lavishness of it all is so good that apart from Rolls-Royce, no other carmaker comes close. The materials used in here are first class and they feel it too. Though the front seats are very comfortable, it’s here that the Merc shows its class. It boasts active side bolsters that keep you locked into your chair when carving up a corner. Very cool. Audi, Lexus and BMW obviously didn’t get the memo. Ah well, at least the A8 L gets a better looking dashboard... More importantly, it drives as smooth as it looks.
It’s a large car, no doubt, but it manages to shrink around you when you put it through its paces — something the LS badly struggles to do. The Quattro system with its 40/60 front/rear power split keeps you planted on the road no matter how quick you take that corner, while the air suspension cushions you from all the blows on bumpy surfaces. The new V8 is a marvellous piece of engineering that delivers 600Nm of torque and flings the A8 L from 0-100kph in 4.7 seconds.
Mated to an eight-speed tiptronic, the power plant is both powerful yet frugal — 9.5 litres per-100km isn’t bad at all and neither is the Dh369,000 starting price. Is it better than the S Class? Not yet. Better than the Lexus and BMW? Let’s see what the guys have to say…
Perhaps at Dh375K the Lexus is one of the cheapest luxury cars around because the Japanese carmaker’s tooling costs are at kept to an absolute minimum. The Lexus is devoid of stylistic charm or unique design features as your eyes take ages to transcend 5,207mm of flat steel, searching for something interesting to lock on to before giving up and trailing down towards your feet in disappointment.
Then you just stand there feeling sorry for yourself, and for Lexus for missing
a huge opportunity to carry the momentum its other cars have set — various attractive concepts recently and the GS production model.
Agreed, Lexus has slapped the spindle grille on to the new LS as well, but unfortunately, that’s the car’s only defining feature. Don’t people with money want something special?
Perhaps they’ll find it inside the new LS. The interior feels the same as the GS’s, which is a good thing, but with a few extra touches of leather and twin rear seats in the long-wheelbase model and all the trimmings — the right-rear throne reclines with extending leg supports, and the centre arm-rest houses the computing power of a passenger plane, so you can command the whole car from the back. That’s neat, but it suggests this car is not meant to be driven, but be driven in.
So you probably don’t care that the LS 460 L comes with the same old 4.6-litre V8 producing 386bhp and 498Nm of torque. Peak power comes in high, as does the torque, but there’s now an even smoother eight-speed automatic transmission and driven in its element (below 3,000rpm), the Lexus LS is eerily silent and unrivalled in comfort.
The light steering is pinky-friendly and all the right controls are mounted to the wheel-spokes, while the rest of the gizmos are reached via the mouse-like command knob beside the gear level.
Up top there’s a screen that’s darn near the size of my television set, but it’s all
not as fluid to use as either BMW’s excellent new iDrive or the latest generation of Audi’s MMI. Other features include adaptive cruise control with over- eager braking (unlike in a Mercedes-Benz S-Class the system isn’t totally autonomous for easy traffic-jam crawls), all the usual safety systems (lane departure, blind-spot monitoring…), excellent surround-sound quality, air suspension, smart entry and start, and a relatively small boot for the car’s overall size.
Although Lexus claims otherwise, the handling is still the same as before, an abdominal workout at best as you tense to remain in the outrageously comfortable yet unsupportive seat. If you don’t care much about driving, this is the best car in the world.
Tuesday, January 15, 2013
Boatline Will Undergo $2.5 Million in Hurricane Repairs
The Steamship Authority governors Tuesday authorized $2.5 million in repairs for the Oak Bluffs ferry terminal, which was damaged in Hurricane Sandy.
The main pier section of the Oak Bluffs terminal was damaged by rough seas and high waves during the storm. The storm damage repairs have qualified for reimbursement from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and the authority will be reimbursed up to 75 per cent of the cost, Steamship Authority general manager Wayne Lamson said.
The pier will be redesigned with steel piles and steel caps to minimize future damage, a report by director of engineering and maintenance Carl Walker said, whereas the failed parts of the pier were constructed of wood.
The largest portion of the repair project is $1.8 million and will go out to bid Feb. 5, with repairs to be done within 90 days of the contract being awarded. The project will involve removing damaged electrical equipment, lighting, pier decking, stringers, pile caps and wooden piles and replacing the wooden piles with steel piles and caps, installing new wooden stringers, re-decking the pier and making repairs to electrical and lighting systems.
The governors also authorized awarding a contract for dry-dock and overhaul services for the M/V Island Home, which is scheduled to be in the shipyard from March 8 through April 9 for a required US Coast Guard hull exam, underwater hull cleaning and painting, installation of sewage holding tanks and evacuation piping, and machinery inspection and repairs. Approximately $562,000 is budgeted for the repairs.
In other business, the board got a look at the Steamship Authority’s new website, which is set to be launched in the next four to six weeks. The website includes new features, including a GPS ferry tracker, filters for Nantucket or Martha’s Vineyard residents to customize their information, and updates on ferries and parking lot availability.
The website will be launched in time for the busy season, which got off to an early start Tuesday, opening day for making summer ferry reservations. Mr. Lamson said that as of 9 a.m., the authority had processed almost $1.4 million in transactions. The first reservation came at 1:19 a.m., he said, and almost 6,000 reservations have been made.
Despite some misgivings, the board also approved participation in a ferry compact created by the Massachusetts Department of Transportation’s Office of Transportation Planning, which will “examine opportunities to provide additional transportation mobility options for the commonwealth’s residents and visitors,” a staff summary of the proposal said.
Mr. Lamson said the Office of Transportation Planning recognizes that Island residents depend on the Steamship Authority, and that there is no intention to interfere with or change the authority’s autonomy. He said the authority, as the largest ferry system in the state, should have a seat at the table.
Some authority members said they had concerns about joining the group, and Mr. Lamson said he shared those concerns about the state taking over. But, he said, he didn’t see that happening. The board ended up voting unanimously in favor of joining the compact.
A report from treasurer Robert Davis said in 2012, passengers traffic was up by about 3.4 per cent, and up 2.5 per cent on the Vineyard, making it the second highest traffic year in the last decade for the Vineyard route.
And while it’s still too early to have a solid estimate of how the authority ended the year financially, Mr. Davis said, they will likely end up in the black.
The meeting started with remembrance of H. Flint Ranney, the Nantucket governor who died on Dec. 17. Mr. Ranney’s son, Robert, was appointed in his place and now serves as chairman of the board. Tuesday was his first meeting.
The governors also authorized awarding a contract for dry-dock and overhaul services for the M/V Island Home, which is scheduled to be in the shipyard from March 8 through April 9 for a required US Coast Guard hull exam, underwater hull cleaning and painting, installation of sewage holding tanks and evacuation piping, and machinery inspection and repairs. Approximately $562,000 is budgeted for the repairs.
In other business, the board got a look at the Steamship Authority’s new website, which is set to be launched in the next four to six weeks. The website includes new features, including a GPS ferry tracker, filters for Nantucket or Martha’s Vineyard residents to customize their information, and updates on ferries and parking lot availability.
The website will be launched in time for the busy season, which got off to an early start Tuesday, opening day for making summer ferry reservations. Mr. Lamson said that as of 9 a.m., the authority had processed almost $1.4 million in transactions. The first reservation came at 1:19 a.m., he said, and almost 6,000 reservations have been made.
Despite some misgivings, the board also approved participation in a ferry compact created by the Massachusetts Department of Transportation’s Office of Transportation Planning, which will “examine opportunities to provide additional transportation mobility options for the commonwealth’s residents and visitors,” a staff summary of the proposal said.
Mr. Lamson said the Office of Transportation Planning recognizes that Island residents depend on the Steamship Authority, and that there is no intention to interfere with or change the authority’s autonomy. He said the authority, as the largest ferry system in the state, should have a seat at the table.
Some authority members said they had concerns about joining the group, and Mr. Lamson said he shared those concerns about the state taking over. But, he said, he didn’t see that happening. The board ended up voting unanimously in favor of joining the compact.
A report from treasurer Robert Davis said in 2012, passengers traffic was up by about 3.4 per cent, and up 2.5 per cent on the Vineyard, making it the second highest traffic year in the last decade for the Vineyard route.
And while it’s still too early to have a solid estimate of how the authority ended the year financially, Mr. Davis said, they will likely end up in the black.
The meeting started with remembrance of H. Flint Ranney, the Nantucket governor who died on Dec. 17. Mr. Ranney’s son, Robert, was appointed in his place and now serves as chairman of the board. Tuesday was his first meeting.
The main pier section of the Oak Bluffs terminal was damaged by rough seas and high waves during the storm. The storm damage repairs have qualified for reimbursement from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and the authority will be reimbursed up to 75 per cent of the cost, Steamship Authority general manager Wayne Lamson said.
The pier will be redesigned with steel piles and steel caps to minimize future damage, a report by director of engineering and maintenance Carl Walker said, whereas the failed parts of the pier were constructed of wood.
The largest portion of the repair project is $1.8 million and will go out to bid Feb. 5, with repairs to be done within 90 days of the contract being awarded. The project will involve removing damaged electrical equipment, lighting, pier decking, stringers, pile caps and wooden piles and replacing the wooden piles with steel piles and caps, installing new wooden stringers, re-decking the pier and making repairs to electrical and lighting systems.
The governors also authorized awarding a contract for dry-dock and overhaul services for the M/V Island Home, which is scheduled to be in the shipyard from March 8 through April 9 for a required US Coast Guard hull exam, underwater hull cleaning and painting, installation of sewage holding tanks and evacuation piping, and machinery inspection and repairs. Approximately $562,000 is budgeted for the repairs.
In other business, the board got a look at the Steamship Authority’s new website, which is set to be launched in the next four to six weeks. The website includes new features, including a GPS ferry tracker, filters for Nantucket or Martha’s Vineyard residents to customize their information, and updates on ferries and parking lot availability.
The website will be launched in time for the busy season, which got off to an early start Tuesday, opening day for making summer ferry reservations. Mr. Lamson said that as of 9 a.m., the authority had processed almost $1.4 million in transactions. The first reservation came at 1:19 a.m., he said, and almost 6,000 reservations have been made.
Despite some misgivings, the board also approved participation in a ferry compact created by the Massachusetts Department of Transportation’s Office of Transportation Planning, which will “examine opportunities to provide additional transportation mobility options for the commonwealth’s residents and visitors,” a staff summary of the proposal said.
Mr. Lamson said the Office of Transportation Planning recognizes that Island residents depend on the Steamship Authority, and that there is no intention to interfere with or change the authority’s autonomy. He said the authority, as the largest ferry system in the state, should have a seat at the table.
Some authority members said they had concerns about joining the group, and Mr. Lamson said he shared those concerns about the state taking over. But, he said, he didn’t see that happening. The board ended up voting unanimously in favor of joining the compact.
A report from treasurer Robert Davis said in 2012, passengers traffic was up by about 3.4 per cent, and up 2.5 per cent on the Vineyard, making it the second highest traffic year in the last decade for the Vineyard route.
And while it’s still too early to have a solid estimate of how the authority ended the year financially, Mr. Davis said, they will likely end up in the black.
The meeting started with remembrance of H. Flint Ranney, the Nantucket governor who died on Dec. 17. Mr. Ranney’s son, Robert, was appointed in his place and now serves as chairman of the board. Tuesday was his first meeting.
The governors also authorized awarding a contract for dry-dock and overhaul services for the M/V Island Home, which is scheduled to be in the shipyard from March 8 through April 9 for a required US Coast Guard hull exam, underwater hull cleaning and painting, installation of sewage holding tanks and evacuation piping, and machinery inspection and repairs. Approximately $562,000 is budgeted for the repairs.
In other business, the board got a look at the Steamship Authority’s new website, which is set to be launched in the next four to six weeks. The website includes new features, including a GPS ferry tracker, filters for Nantucket or Martha’s Vineyard residents to customize their information, and updates on ferries and parking lot availability.
The website will be launched in time for the busy season, which got off to an early start Tuesday, opening day for making summer ferry reservations. Mr. Lamson said that as of 9 a.m., the authority had processed almost $1.4 million in transactions. The first reservation came at 1:19 a.m., he said, and almost 6,000 reservations have been made.
Despite some misgivings, the board also approved participation in a ferry compact created by the Massachusetts Department of Transportation’s Office of Transportation Planning, which will “examine opportunities to provide additional transportation mobility options for the commonwealth’s residents and visitors,” a staff summary of the proposal said.
Mr. Lamson said the Office of Transportation Planning recognizes that Island residents depend on the Steamship Authority, and that there is no intention to interfere with or change the authority’s autonomy. He said the authority, as the largest ferry system in the state, should have a seat at the table.
Some authority members said they had concerns about joining the group, and Mr. Lamson said he shared those concerns about the state taking over. But, he said, he didn’t see that happening. The board ended up voting unanimously in favor of joining the compact.
A report from treasurer Robert Davis said in 2012, passengers traffic was up by about 3.4 per cent, and up 2.5 per cent on the Vineyard, making it the second highest traffic year in the last decade for the Vineyard route.
And while it’s still too early to have a solid estimate of how the authority ended the year financially, Mr. Davis said, they will likely end up in the black.
The meeting started with remembrance of H. Flint Ranney, the Nantucket governor who died on Dec. 17. Mr. Ranney’s son, Robert, was appointed in his place and now serves as chairman of the board. Tuesday was his first meeting.
Santa Monica City Hall Seeks $12 Million In Grants From MTA
As much as $12.2 million could be made available to Santa Monica to spend on Capital Improvement Projects if City Hall’s grant applications to the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) are successful.
Santa Monica’s City Council convened for the first time in 2013 last Tuesday and immediately approved as part of its consent calendar a resolution to authorize seven grant applications seeking $12,268,050 from the MTA as part of the Authority’s 2013 Call for Projects.
Any funds awarded would be allocated for capital projects during the 2018-2019 Fiscal Year.
“Historically, the Call for Projects grant funding has provided the City with one of the best opportunities to compete for Federal, State, and County transportation funding,” a City staff report stated.
City Hall will be applying for seven grants in six categories: Signal Synchronization and Bus Speed Improvements; Transportation Demand Management; Bicycle Improvements; Pedestrian Improvements; Transit Capital; Transportation Enhancement Activities.
The City staff report to council members detailed each of the seven projects it hopes will be funded.
The largest grant request is for $4.195 million and would be used to replace the nine of the City’s 40-foot LNG buses with five 60-foot alternative fuel buses.
Another $2.5 million is sought for enhancements linking the Fourth Street Expo Line Station to the Civic Center and downtown area.
“This project would fund the planning and construction of upgrades on 4th Street between Broadway and Olympic Drive to increase pedestrian/bicyclist safety, to provide access and mobility, and encourage walking and biking between the Downtown, Civic Center, and the Expo light rail station,” City staff stated.
Similarly, City Hall is requesting $2.5 million for an extension of the Expo Bike Path at Seventeenth Street and Michigan Avenue. City staff indicated the bike path would extend “south along 17th Street to Pico Boulevard and westward along Michigan Avenue to Lincoln Boulevard.”
A third Expo-related project included in the grant request is to install safety and security lighting for transit access as the Colorado and Seventeenth Street station.
“This project would increase pedestrian safety and security in accessing the Expo light rail station … with the installation of pedestrian lighting,” City staff stated.
City Hall is requesting $2 million to construct a Bike and Mobility Hub at the Expo Line’s Seventeenth Street Station, which will be complete with “secured bike parking spaces, multi-modal travel information, and self-service bicycle maintenance tools for the public.”
To help Expo riders visiting Santa Monica to get around town, City Hall seeks to add multi-modal way-finding signs. A request for $1.475 million, if funded the way-finding project would result in “two signs per relevant intersection within a minimum four block radius surrounding each of the three Expo stations” being installed. The funds would also pay for real-time parking signage informing drivers of which of the City’s parking structures have space available.
Finally, City Hall seeks a grant for $600,000 for a citywide signal detection system, allowing for signal synchronization and bus speed improvements.
“This project would install bicycle detection at 20 to 30 intersections on transit corridors to reduce signal delay for transit and autos,” City staff stated. “Santa Monica has installed bike detection at 30 percent of signalized intersections; this project would fund another 15 percent.”
Northeastern lawmakers hoping to push a $50.7 billion Superstorm Sandy aid package through the House face roadblocks by fiscal conservatives seeking offsetting spending cuts to pay for recovery efforts as well as funding cuts for projects they say are unrelated to the Oct. 29 storm.
The amendments by budget hawks set up a faceoff Tuesday, with Northeast lawmakers in both parties eager to provide recovery aid for one of the worst storms ever to strike the region as the House moves toward expected votes on the emergency spending package.
The base $17 billion bill by the House Appropriations Committee is aimed at immediate Sandy recovery needs, including $5.4 billion for New York and New Jersey transit systems and $5.4 billion for the Federal Emergency Management Agency's disaster relief aid fund.
Northeast lawmakers will have a chance to add to that bill with an amendment by Rep. Rodney Frelinghuysen, R-N.J., for an additional $33.7 billion, including $10.9 billion for public transportation projects.
The Club for Growth, a conservative group, is urging lawmakers to oppose both Sandy aid measures. Sandy aid supporters, nonetheless, voiced confidence Monday they would prevail. The Senate passed a $60.4 billion Sandy aid package in December with bipartisan support.
The House Rules Committee on Monday night approved 13 amendments for floor consideration, including one requiring spending offsets and four seeking to strike money for some projects either not directly related to Sandy or not seen as emergency spending.
"With that many amendments, one could sneak through," King said. "We should be able to defeat the important amendments though."
As with past natural disasters, the $50.7 billion Sandy aid package does not provide for offsetting spending cuts, meaning the aid comes at the cost of higher deficits. The lone exception is an offset provision in the Frelinghuysen amendment requiring that the $3.4 billion for Army Corps of Engineers projects to protect against future storms be paid for by spending cuts elsewhere in the 2013 budget.
Santa Monica’s City Council convened for the first time in 2013 last Tuesday and immediately approved as part of its consent calendar a resolution to authorize seven grant applications seeking $12,268,050 from the MTA as part of the Authority’s 2013 Call for Projects.
Any funds awarded would be allocated for capital projects during the 2018-2019 Fiscal Year.
“Historically, the Call for Projects grant funding has provided the City with one of the best opportunities to compete for Federal, State, and County transportation funding,” a City staff report stated.
City Hall will be applying for seven grants in six categories: Signal Synchronization and Bus Speed Improvements; Transportation Demand Management; Bicycle Improvements; Pedestrian Improvements; Transit Capital; Transportation Enhancement Activities.
The City staff report to council members detailed each of the seven projects it hopes will be funded.
The largest grant request is for $4.195 million and would be used to replace the nine of the City’s 40-foot LNG buses with five 60-foot alternative fuel buses.
Another $2.5 million is sought for enhancements linking the Fourth Street Expo Line Station to the Civic Center and downtown area.
“This project would fund the planning and construction of upgrades on 4th Street between Broadway and Olympic Drive to increase pedestrian/bicyclist safety, to provide access and mobility, and encourage walking and biking between the Downtown, Civic Center, and the Expo light rail station,” City staff stated.
Similarly, City Hall is requesting $2.5 million for an extension of the Expo Bike Path at Seventeenth Street and Michigan Avenue. City staff indicated the bike path would extend “south along 17th Street to Pico Boulevard and westward along Michigan Avenue to Lincoln Boulevard.”
A third Expo-related project included in the grant request is to install safety and security lighting for transit access as the Colorado and Seventeenth Street station.
“This project would increase pedestrian safety and security in accessing the Expo light rail station … with the installation of pedestrian lighting,” City staff stated.
City Hall is requesting $2 million to construct a Bike and Mobility Hub at the Expo Line’s Seventeenth Street Station, which will be complete with “secured bike parking spaces, multi-modal travel information, and self-service bicycle maintenance tools for the public.”
To help Expo riders visiting Santa Monica to get around town, City Hall seeks to add multi-modal way-finding signs. A request for $1.475 million, if funded the way-finding project would result in “two signs per relevant intersection within a minimum four block radius surrounding each of the three Expo stations” being installed. The funds would also pay for real-time parking signage informing drivers of which of the City’s parking structures have space available.
Finally, City Hall seeks a grant for $600,000 for a citywide signal detection system, allowing for signal synchronization and bus speed improvements.
“This project would install bicycle detection at 20 to 30 intersections on transit corridors to reduce signal delay for transit and autos,” City staff stated. “Santa Monica has installed bike detection at 30 percent of signalized intersections; this project would fund another 15 percent.”
Northeastern lawmakers hoping to push a $50.7 billion Superstorm Sandy aid package through the House face roadblocks by fiscal conservatives seeking offsetting spending cuts to pay for recovery efforts as well as funding cuts for projects they say are unrelated to the Oct. 29 storm.
The amendments by budget hawks set up a faceoff Tuesday, with Northeast lawmakers in both parties eager to provide recovery aid for one of the worst storms ever to strike the region as the House moves toward expected votes on the emergency spending package.
The base $17 billion bill by the House Appropriations Committee is aimed at immediate Sandy recovery needs, including $5.4 billion for New York and New Jersey transit systems and $5.4 billion for the Federal Emergency Management Agency's disaster relief aid fund.
Northeast lawmakers will have a chance to add to that bill with an amendment by Rep. Rodney Frelinghuysen, R-N.J., for an additional $33.7 billion, including $10.9 billion for public transportation projects.
The Club for Growth, a conservative group, is urging lawmakers to oppose both Sandy aid measures. Sandy aid supporters, nonetheless, voiced confidence Monday they would prevail. The Senate passed a $60.4 billion Sandy aid package in December with bipartisan support.
The House Rules Committee on Monday night approved 13 amendments for floor consideration, including one requiring spending offsets and four seeking to strike money for some projects either not directly related to Sandy or not seen as emergency spending.
"With that many amendments, one could sneak through," King said. "We should be able to defeat the important amendments though."
As with past natural disasters, the $50.7 billion Sandy aid package does not provide for offsetting spending cuts, meaning the aid comes at the cost of higher deficits. The lone exception is an offset provision in the Frelinghuysen amendment requiring that the $3.4 billion for Army Corps of Engineers projects to protect against future storms be paid for by spending cuts elsewhere in the 2013 budget.
Sunday, January 13, 2013
Westmoreland exhibit highlights works that need a little help
A museum may be the safest place of all to hold precious artworks, but time can be just as harmful to cherished objects of all kinds. And when time takes its toll, it‘s the job of the art conservator to make things better.
The exhibit “Your Art Needs You!,” at the Westmoreland Museum of American Art in Greensburg, features 179 works from the museum‘s permanent collection that each needs a little tender loving care.
Take, for example, the painting “Still Life With Fruit and Wine” painted in 1858 by John F. Francis (1808-86). Small blemishes can be seen throughout the painting‘s surface, most likely caused by abrasive substances used in past cleanings, says the Westmoreland Museum‘s chief curator, Barbara Jones.
Jones says the painting is “acceptable” as is, but it needs to be touched up for an upcoming exhibit. “We‘d like to have this done because it will be loaned to the Art Institute of Chicago for their exhibition ‘Art and Appetite: American Painting, Culture and Cuisine,‘ Nov. 3, 2013 through Jan. 19, 2014,” Jones says.
Not just paintings, but frames can suffer damage over time, especially as things are moved around. A frame can easily get scratched, dinged or end up missing pieces or chunks, especially if they have gesso or plaster underlayers.
Pointing to the painting “On the Monongahela” (1860) by William Coventry Wall (1811-66), Jones says, “The frame is in the most need as it has several missing pieces.”
On the upper left corner, the rosette section is missing, and on the lower left corner, the outside leaf sections are missing in addition to a section of the floral motif on the lower rail of the frame.
“As long as there is an exact replica of the missing ornaments elsewhere on the frame, I use a mold-making silicone material and make a cast of the ornament,” says frame restoration specialist Emilie Cohen of Emilie Cohen Studios in Lawrenceville. Trained at Gold Leaf Studios in Washington, D.C., Cohen been doing frame restoration and gold leaf since 1990.
Cohen says the mold-making material she uses is quick-setting, doesn‘t stick to the surface and makes wonderful detailed castings. “I fill the mold with a plaster, which can be tinted to an ochre color,” she says. “That has to harden overnight. Once removed from the mold, I have to carve them in order to fit perfectly back into the missing section. Once the carving is finished, I glue them into place.”
Because the plaster is porous, it has to be sealed with shellac. A color layer is put on, and it will be the color of the clay underneath the gold surface. That is also sealed with shellac. An oil-based primer is applied and allowed to dry for 10 to 12 hours. The surface is then ready for the gold.
“I use 22- or 23-karat, which ever is closer in color to the original surface,” Cohen says. “Of course, the new gold will be too bright and new looking. The gold has to be toned in order to blend into the surrounding and original surface.”
Cohen says that if there is no replica of the missing ornaments, then she has to carve them individually. “The process is indeed labor-intensive,” she says. “The goal is to make the piece look well cared for, but not new.”
“Even with hours of examination and preparation, a conservator will often find things that are not immediately visible,” says Christine Daulton, a paintings conservator who has had a private practice in Greensburg since 1986. Before that, Daulton worked at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. Since 2001, she has been the paintings conservator at the Andy Warhol Museum in addition to her private practice.
Daulton will work on many of the paintings in the exhibit, after the funds are raised for their conservation. Each of the works in the exhibit are marked with price tags indicating how much the restoration would cost for the paintings, frames or both.
Daulton‘s work will involve cleaning their surfaces by removing old varnish and repairing any holes, cracks or missing paint with a process called “inpainting.”
The overall restoration process may sound somewhat simple, but it actually is quite extensive. To begin with, Daulton says each painting will be photographed, assigned a tracking number and thoroughly examined in normal light, UV light and under magnification.
“I will make up a work schedule for the piece, noting each step that will have to be taken,” Daulton says.
Many times, the conservator has to repair previous restoration attempts. For example, with the “Portrait of Thomas McKean” (1776) by Charles Willson Peale, Daultin says, “This painting, like many older works, has been restored at least once in the past. Given its age and the fame of its maker, it is likely that it was restored multiple times.”
Daulton says the original varnish and probably subsequent varnishes would have been made of a natural resin such as damar or mastic. These varnishes darken over time, giving the painting a brownish tint that can dull the colors and mask details. “These varnishes also become increasingly insoluble with age so that they require stronger solvents to remove them,” Daulton says.
“At some time, the ‘Portrait of Thomas McKean‘ was cleaned rather vigorously, and in the attempt to remove the darkened varnish, some of the original paint was removed, as well,” she says.
Daulton says this is called “solvent abrasion,” and it usually reveals itself as multiple tiny losses of paint in the areas that were cleaned. “The paint will look thin and worn,” she says. “When a conservator encounters this type of damage now, he or she will put a tiny drop of paint on each loss, making sure not to cover up the surrounding original paint.”
However, Daulton says, the restorer who cleaned this painting simply painted over large areas of solvent abrasion, covering not only the damage but the original paint as well. “The eyes and jaw of the sitter are badly damaged, and the overpaint gives a poor, distorted version of Thomas McKean‘s face,” she says. “My job will be to safely remove the overpaint and the varnishes that cover the painting.”
To do this without damaging the work further, Daulton will be testing various solvent mixtures and solvent gels based on the chemistry of the paint and the varnishes. “Once I have found suitable materials, I will slowly remove these layers using small cotton swabs,” she says.
After the painting has been cleaned, she will apply a new, non-yellowing synthetic-resin varnish that will remain soluble in solvents that are not damaging to the painting. “Then, I will begin the long process of inpainting, using a tiny brush to fill in the dots on all the losses until the fully restored image emerges,” Daulton say.
Conservators always use a different type of paint than that used in the original work so that it can be removed without affecting the original paint. For this, Daulton uses a combination of Da Vinci gouache for underpainting larger losses and Gamblin Conservation Colors, an acrylic paint, for finishing.
Inpainting is a process that is not only limited to oil paintings. A cigar store Indian, believed to be from the 1860s, will be lightly cleaned and then select paint losses on the figure will be filled overall with a tinted spackling compound.
“The purpose of the tinting is to create a base color on which to apply washes of inpainting,” says Michael Belman, an objects conservator with Fine Art Conservation Services in Squirrel Hill. Belman and his partner, Chantal Bernicky, have more than 30 years of combined experience restoring metals, wood, ceramics, stone, glass, leather, plastics and paintings on canvas, panel and paper in addition to murals and ceilings.
For the indian, Belman says, inpainting will be applied to integrate the cracks and loss of paint into the surrounding surface. “This multilayered approach is a trick to better camouflage paint losses,” he says. “The losses likely formed from moving the sculpture over time. As the sculpture is relatively heavy, the minor bumps and scrapes have accumulated to create the current abraded appearance in select areas.”
Bernickey and Belman also will be working on a carousel pig (no date), which, like the indian, has scattered splits and chipped paint. “The major problems with the carousel pig are the splits traveling through the face,” Belman says. “These splits were likely created by expansion and contraction of the wood grain as the temperature and humidity fluctuated over time.”
To make the repairs, Belman and Bernickey will inject adhesive into the splits to stabilize them, then fill them with tinted spackle, and follow with inpainting. To do this, the pig will be mounted to a pole, similar to when it was in use, and some preparatory work is needed to allow that to happen.
“The hole that accepted a pole which ran from the top of the front of the saddle down through the belly has been filled in, so this will need to be carefully excavated,” Belman says. “Then, there will be a campaign of filling and inpainting select paint losses, overall.”
“The goal for both treatments is not to make the objects look brand new,” Belman says, “but it is important that both objects have a patina of age.”
The cost of conserving these paintings, sculptures and frames can sometimes be pretty high. So visitors to this exhibition will be invited to “adopt” a work of art to help cover the costs. Everyone who adopts a work will be credited on a special wall label for one year following the re-opening and re-installation of the museum‘s $15 million expansion/renovation, which will almost double the size of the 35,000-square-foot museum. Additionally, patrons will receive a certificate of adoption for their chosen object, a one-year membership to the museum, and recognition in the annual report.
The exhibit “Your Art Needs You!,” at the Westmoreland Museum of American Art in Greensburg, features 179 works from the museum‘s permanent collection that each needs a little tender loving care.
Take, for example, the painting “Still Life With Fruit and Wine” painted in 1858 by John F. Francis (1808-86). Small blemishes can be seen throughout the painting‘s surface, most likely caused by abrasive substances used in past cleanings, says the Westmoreland Museum‘s chief curator, Barbara Jones.
Jones says the painting is “acceptable” as is, but it needs to be touched up for an upcoming exhibit. “We‘d like to have this done because it will be loaned to the Art Institute of Chicago for their exhibition ‘Art and Appetite: American Painting, Culture and Cuisine,‘ Nov. 3, 2013 through Jan. 19, 2014,” Jones says.
Not just paintings, but frames can suffer damage over time, especially as things are moved around. A frame can easily get scratched, dinged or end up missing pieces or chunks, especially if they have gesso or plaster underlayers.
Pointing to the painting “On the Monongahela” (1860) by William Coventry Wall (1811-66), Jones says, “The frame is in the most need as it has several missing pieces.”
On the upper left corner, the rosette section is missing, and on the lower left corner, the outside leaf sections are missing in addition to a section of the floral motif on the lower rail of the frame.
“As long as there is an exact replica of the missing ornaments elsewhere on the frame, I use a mold-making silicone material and make a cast of the ornament,” says frame restoration specialist Emilie Cohen of Emilie Cohen Studios in Lawrenceville. Trained at Gold Leaf Studios in Washington, D.C., Cohen been doing frame restoration and gold leaf since 1990.
Cohen says the mold-making material she uses is quick-setting, doesn‘t stick to the surface and makes wonderful detailed castings. “I fill the mold with a plaster, which can be tinted to an ochre color,” she says. “That has to harden overnight. Once removed from the mold, I have to carve them in order to fit perfectly back into the missing section. Once the carving is finished, I glue them into place.”
Because the plaster is porous, it has to be sealed with shellac. A color layer is put on, and it will be the color of the clay underneath the gold surface. That is also sealed with shellac. An oil-based primer is applied and allowed to dry for 10 to 12 hours. The surface is then ready for the gold.
“I use 22- or 23-karat, which ever is closer in color to the original surface,” Cohen says. “Of course, the new gold will be too bright and new looking. The gold has to be toned in order to blend into the surrounding and original surface.”
Cohen says that if there is no replica of the missing ornaments, then she has to carve them individually. “The process is indeed labor-intensive,” she says. “The goal is to make the piece look well cared for, but not new.”
“Even with hours of examination and preparation, a conservator will often find things that are not immediately visible,” says Christine Daulton, a paintings conservator who has had a private practice in Greensburg since 1986. Before that, Daulton worked at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. Since 2001, she has been the paintings conservator at the Andy Warhol Museum in addition to her private practice.
Daulton will work on many of the paintings in the exhibit, after the funds are raised for their conservation. Each of the works in the exhibit are marked with price tags indicating how much the restoration would cost for the paintings, frames or both.
Daulton‘s work will involve cleaning their surfaces by removing old varnish and repairing any holes, cracks or missing paint with a process called “inpainting.”
The overall restoration process may sound somewhat simple, but it actually is quite extensive. To begin with, Daulton says each painting will be photographed, assigned a tracking number and thoroughly examined in normal light, UV light and under magnification.
“I will make up a work schedule for the piece, noting each step that will have to be taken,” Daulton says.
Many times, the conservator has to repair previous restoration attempts. For example, with the “Portrait of Thomas McKean” (1776) by Charles Willson Peale, Daultin says, “This painting, like many older works, has been restored at least once in the past. Given its age and the fame of its maker, it is likely that it was restored multiple times.”
Daulton says the original varnish and probably subsequent varnishes would have been made of a natural resin such as damar or mastic. These varnishes darken over time, giving the painting a brownish tint that can dull the colors and mask details. “These varnishes also become increasingly insoluble with age so that they require stronger solvents to remove them,” Daulton says.
“At some time, the ‘Portrait of Thomas McKean‘ was cleaned rather vigorously, and in the attempt to remove the darkened varnish, some of the original paint was removed, as well,” she says.
Daulton says this is called “solvent abrasion,” and it usually reveals itself as multiple tiny losses of paint in the areas that were cleaned. “The paint will look thin and worn,” she says. “When a conservator encounters this type of damage now, he or she will put a tiny drop of paint on each loss, making sure not to cover up the surrounding original paint.”
However, Daulton says, the restorer who cleaned this painting simply painted over large areas of solvent abrasion, covering not only the damage but the original paint as well. “The eyes and jaw of the sitter are badly damaged, and the overpaint gives a poor, distorted version of Thomas McKean‘s face,” she says. “My job will be to safely remove the overpaint and the varnishes that cover the painting.”
To do this without damaging the work further, Daulton will be testing various solvent mixtures and solvent gels based on the chemistry of the paint and the varnishes. “Once I have found suitable materials, I will slowly remove these layers using small cotton swabs,” she says.
After the painting has been cleaned, she will apply a new, non-yellowing synthetic-resin varnish that will remain soluble in solvents that are not damaging to the painting. “Then, I will begin the long process of inpainting, using a tiny brush to fill in the dots on all the losses until the fully restored image emerges,” Daulton say.
Conservators always use a different type of paint than that used in the original work so that it can be removed without affecting the original paint. For this, Daulton uses a combination of Da Vinci gouache for underpainting larger losses and Gamblin Conservation Colors, an acrylic paint, for finishing.
Inpainting is a process that is not only limited to oil paintings. A cigar store Indian, believed to be from the 1860s, will be lightly cleaned and then select paint losses on the figure will be filled overall with a tinted spackling compound.
“The purpose of the tinting is to create a base color on which to apply washes of inpainting,” says Michael Belman, an objects conservator with Fine Art Conservation Services in Squirrel Hill. Belman and his partner, Chantal Bernicky, have more than 30 years of combined experience restoring metals, wood, ceramics, stone, glass, leather, plastics and paintings on canvas, panel and paper in addition to murals and ceilings.
For the indian, Belman says, inpainting will be applied to integrate the cracks and loss of paint into the surrounding surface. “This multilayered approach is a trick to better camouflage paint losses,” he says. “The losses likely formed from moving the sculpture over time. As the sculpture is relatively heavy, the minor bumps and scrapes have accumulated to create the current abraded appearance in select areas.”
Bernickey and Belman also will be working on a carousel pig (no date), which, like the indian, has scattered splits and chipped paint. “The major problems with the carousel pig are the splits traveling through the face,” Belman says. “These splits were likely created by expansion and contraction of the wood grain as the temperature and humidity fluctuated over time.”
To make the repairs, Belman and Bernickey will inject adhesive into the splits to stabilize them, then fill them with tinted spackle, and follow with inpainting. To do this, the pig will be mounted to a pole, similar to when it was in use, and some preparatory work is needed to allow that to happen.
“The hole that accepted a pole which ran from the top of the front of the saddle down through the belly has been filled in, so this will need to be carefully excavated,” Belman says. “Then, there will be a campaign of filling and inpainting select paint losses, overall.”
“The goal for both treatments is not to make the objects look brand new,” Belman says, “but it is important that both objects have a patina of age.”
The cost of conserving these paintings, sculptures and frames can sometimes be pretty high. So visitors to this exhibition will be invited to “adopt” a work of art to help cover the costs. Everyone who adopts a work will be credited on a special wall label for one year following the re-opening and re-installation of the museum‘s $15 million expansion/renovation, which will almost double the size of the 35,000-square-foot museum. Additionally, patrons will receive a certificate of adoption for their chosen object, a one-year membership to the museum, and recognition in the annual report.
Miami Beach builder Robert Turchin looks back
If former Miami Beach vice mayor Robert Turchin had been a Miami decision maker during the recent vote that decided the fate of The Miami Herald building, he would probably have voted with the ‘nays’ allowing its demolition.
“There’s nothing special about it,” says the 90-year-old Turchin as he cruises Collins Avenue between 63rd and 48th streets, a strip dense with buildings from the same period as the Herald’s — specimens of post-war Miami Modern (MiMo) architecture that he constructed.
It is no exaggeration to say that Turchin built much of post-war Miami Beach, collaborating with Melvin Grossman, Morris Lapidus and other MiMo period architects. From 1945 to 1985, his firm was the busiest in the building trade. Royal York, Montmartre, Moulin Rouge, King Cole, Charter Club, Four Ambassadors — the list goes on, numbering upward of 100 buildings.
“I grew up when Miami Beach was a small town. It was 1945, and the hotels would close during the summer for renovations because they had no air conditioning. I couldn’t wait for summers, when I would return from school and work on the construction sites,” Turchin says.
In an era when hotel signs sometimes read “No Jews or dogs,” Turchin’s father was a successful builder who hoped his son would be a diplomat. It was not to be. After serving in World War II, for which he recently received a French Legion of Honor medal, he started his first project. Like subsequent ones, it broke the mold.
“The GI Bill made housing affordable for veterans, but it was single-family housing. I wanted to build a four-family unit under the bill,” Turchin says. It was an unprecedented proposal that went from city to state to federal agencies before it was approved. The multi-unit buildings launched the concept of condominiums.
As did other builders, he began to experiment with air conditioning. “Once we were able to air condition them, the hotels stayed open year-round. The beach boomed then,” he says.
Buildings came down to make way for new ones. Turchin’s Morton Towers went up where Carl Fisher’s circa 1920 Flamingo Hotel stood on 15 acres. “The land had become more valuable than the building,” he explains.
Turchin became known as “the builder’s builder” for riding to the top floor of construction sites on the hook of a crane, and walking the beams to inspect the work. His view of the built landscape was daring, pragmatic, and often at odds with those of preservationists like Nancy Liebman, a Miami Beach city commissioner from 1993 to 2001 who served with Turchin on the city’s first historic preservation board.
“A lot of the beautiful mansions on the bay and beach were lost to that kind of development,” laments Liebman. “It was the typical mentality of throw it away and build something new.”
But Turchin was building for the next generation. To him, the Art Deco buildings of his father’s generation — Edgewater Beach, the Sands and the Sea Isle where he honeymooned with his wife — were old school.
“They made no sense. They were all building with a few trees in front. They weren’t called Deco back then. Curlicues on concrete is how we thought of them,” he says.
As the Miami Design Preservation League’s executive director in the early ’80s, Liebman fought to resurrect the Deco constructions. “They were the first generation built to capture the sea breezes, with light and porches. You have to anchor the city with its history and its past through the built environment,” she says.
But zoning had as much to do with how the Deco buildings looked as the architecture did, Turchin says. “When I was starting out, the zoning on the beach was 14 stories maximum, so builders would fill up bigger parcels to the edge of the property line. Land was cheap then, so they could. I kept saying ‘Go up. Go higher.’ You had more options then to put in nice landscaping, underground parking and other amenities,” he says.
While Liebman and others viewed the skyline of the 1960s and 1970s as a “concrete canyon,” the rising structures offered new opportunities for dining and nightlife that held an irresistible attraction for the post-war affluent. Miami Beach garnered a reputation for celebrity hot spots like the Montmartre, with its Les Girls Supper Club and Bardot Bar, one of many Turchin collaborations with Melvin Grossman.
If he demolished some buildings, Turchin has also seen his creations become tear-downs. In 1981 the Montmartre was leveled. On the strip south of 163rd Street, two condominiums replaced the circa 1957 Castaways that housed the famed Wreck Bar under its fanciful roof. A 46-story tower stands where he built the three-story Mozart. Many more of his buildings are in their second or third generation of redevelopment.
Liebman, now president of the MiMo Biscayne Association, works to preserve Biscayne Boulevard as the historic entryway to Miami, so that MiMo buildings like the Turchin-built 1961 King Cole Condominium at 900 Bay Dr. continue to stand. “As a matter of fact, I live in one of Mr. Turchin’s buildings on Belle Isle,” she says. “It’s well-built, has aesthetic appeal, and the amenities are lovely.”
The analysts see opportunity associated with AIG shares linked to the company’s capacity to improve its property-casualty results. These efforts include re-underwriting, re-pricing, re-tooling claims administration and reallocating capital to consumer lines. Over time, they expect AIG to be successful in these endavors, but they are not projecting a substantial P&C improvement over the next year.
Additionally, AIG has made clear that its near-term focus for capital management involves improving the company’s interest coverage ratio. They expect this focus to come at the expense of share repurchase, a considerable source of shareholder value creation in 2012. While AIG sold its remaining stake in AIA in December, the analysts expect that much of these proceeds will be used to repurchase or retire outstanding debt in an effort to lower the interest coverage ratio.
The mosaic was designed by the POP team which is comprised of 10 students from Edsel Ford High School, Dearborn High School and Fordson High School. They have been working with Sample and co-instructor Mohamad Bazzi since September to design the mural and tiles in various patterns, sizes, and colors for the rail station wall.
Workshop participants will attend a brief presentation about the creative process used to design the mosaic tile wall. POP team members will demonstrate the mold process and assist participants in making a tile or two. Approximately 1,000 tiles will be needed to complete the mural.
“When determining the theme and tile designs for the mosaic, the POP team carefully considered that the station is going to be a transportation gateway, welcoming visitors from near and far when they come to visit Dearborn and The Henry Ford,” Bazzi said.
Motion, energy, the historic significance of The Henry Ford just on the other side of the tracks from the new rail station, and the impact that the station will have on the future of Dearborn were all elements the students discussed as they collaborated to design the mosaic mural.
To make the tile molds, the POP students applied wood, plastic and clay to make a relief of each tile design on medium density fiberboard. Then the team went to TechShop in Allen Park where they learned how to use a VacuForm machine to heat and stretch a sheet plastic onto each relief to create the molds that will be used in making the tiles on Jan. 19 and Feb. 2. The clay tiles will be glazed and fired in HFCC Art Department kilns before being installed at the rail station in late 2013.
The POP project, an acronym for Pockets of Perception - We Are One Community, focuses on young people, encouraging multicultural understanding while cultivating their creativity and investment in the community through the creation of public art. The POP project is an initiative of the Dearborn Community Fund as it supports arts, cultural and recreational programs that enrich the Dearborn community.
“There’s nothing special about it,” says the 90-year-old Turchin as he cruises Collins Avenue between 63rd and 48th streets, a strip dense with buildings from the same period as the Herald’s — specimens of post-war Miami Modern (MiMo) architecture that he constructed.
It is no exaggeration to say that Turchin built much of post-war Miami Beach, collaborating with Melvin Grossman, Morris Lapidus and other MiMo period architects. From 1945 to 1985, his firm was the busiest in the building trade. Royal York, Montmartre, Moulin Rouge, King Cole, Charter Club, Four Ambassadors — the list goes on, numbering upward of 100 buildings.
“I grew up when Miami Beach was a small town. It was 1945, and the hotels would close during the summer for renovations because they had no air conditioning. I couldn’t wait for summers, when I would return from school and work on the construction sites,” Turchin says.
In an era when hotel signs sometimes read “No Jews or dogs,” Turchin’s father was a successful builder who hoped his son would be a diplomat. It was not to be. After serving in World War II, for which he recently received a French Legion of Honor medal, he started his first project. Like subsequent ones, it broke the mold.
“The GI Bill made housing affordable for veterans, but it was single-family housing. I wanted to build a four-family unit under the bill,” Turchin says. It was an unprecedented proposal that went from city to state to federal agencies before it was approved. The multi-unit buildings launched the concept of condominiums.
As did other builders, he began to experiment with air conditioning. “Once we were able to air condition them, the hotels stayed open year-round. The beach boomed then,” he says.
Buildings came down to make way for new ones. Turchin’s Morton Towers went up where Carl Fisher’s circa 1920 Flamingo Hotel stood on 15 acres. “The land had become more valuable than the building,” he explains.
Turchin became known as “the builder’s builder” for riding to the top floor of construction sites on the hook of a crane, and walking the beams to inspect the work. His view of the built landscape was daring, pragmatic, and often at odds with those of preservationists like Nancy Liebman, a Miami Beach city commissioner from 1993 to 2001 who served with Turchin on the city’s first historic preservation board.
“A lot of the beautiful mansions on the bay and beach were lost to that kind of development,” laments Liebman. “It was the typical mentality of throw it away and build something new.”
But Turchin was building for the next generation. To him, the Art Deco buildings of his father’s generation — Edgewater Beach, the Sands and the Sea Isle where he honeymooned with his wife — were old school.
“They made no sense. They were all building with a few trees in front. They weren’t called Deco back then. Curlicues on concrete is how we thought of them,” he says.
As the Miami Design Preservation League’s executive director in the early ’80s, Liebman fought to resurrect the Deco constructions. “They were the first generation built to capture the sea breezes, with light and porches. You have to anchor the city with its history and its past through the built environment,” she says.
But zoning had as much to do with how the Deco buildings looked as the architecture did, Turchin says. “When I was starting out, the zoning on the beach was 14 stories maximum, so builders would fill up bigger parcels to the edge of the property line. Land was cheap then, so they could. I kept saying ‘Go up. Go higher.’ You had more options then to put in nice landscaping, underground parking and other amenities,” he says.
While Liebman and others viewed the skyline of the 1960s and 1970s as a “concrete canyon,” the rising structures offered new opportunities for dining and nightlife that held an irresistible attraction for the post-war affluent. Miami Beach garnered a reputation for celebrity hot spots like the Montmartre, with its Les Girls Supper Club and Bardot Bar, one of many Turchin collaborations with Melvin Grossman.
If he demolished some buildings, Turchin has also seen his creations become tear-downs. In 1981 the Montmartre was leveled. On the strip south of 163rd Street, two condominiums replaced the circa 1957 Castaways that housed the famed Wreck Bar under its fanciful roof. A 46-story tower stands where he built the three-story Mozart. Many more of his buildings are in their second or third generation of redevelopment.
Liebman, now president of the MiMo Biscayne Association, works to preserve Biscayne Boulevard as the historic entryway to Miami, so that MiMo buildings like the Turchin-built 1961 King Cole Condominium at 900 Bay Dr. continue to stand. “As a matter of fact, I live in one of Mr. Turchin’s buildings on Belle Isle,” she says. “It’s well-built, has aesthetic appeal, and the amenities are lovely.”
The analysts see opportunity associated with AIG shares linked to the company’s capacity to improve its property-casualty results. These efforts include re-underwriting, re-pricing, re-tooling claims administration and reallocating capital to consumer lines. Over time, they expect AIG to be successful in these endavors, but they are not projecting a substantial P&C improvement over the next year.
Additionally, AIG has made clear that its near-term focus for capital management involves improving the company’s interest coverage ratio. They expect this focus to come at the expense of share repurchase, a considerable source of shareholder value creation in 2012. While AIG sold its remaining stake in AIA in December, the analysts expect that much of these proceeds will be used to repurchase or retire outstanding debt in an effort to lower the interest coverage ratio.
The mosaic was designed by the POP team which is comprised of 10 students from Edsel Ford High School, Dearborn High School and Fordson High School. They have been working with Sample and co-instructor Mohamad Bazzi since September to design the mural and tiles in various patterns, sizes, and colors for the rail station wall.
Workshop participants will attend a brief presentation about the creative process used to design the mosaic tile wall. POP team members will demonstrate the mold process and assist participants in making a tile or two. Approximately 1,000 tiles will be needed to complete the mural.
“When determining the theme and tile designs for the mosaic, the POP team carefully considered that the station is going to be a transportation gateway, welcoming visitors from near and far when they come to visit Dearborn and The Henry Ford,” Bazzi said.
Motion, energy, the historic significance of The Henry Ford just on the other side of the tracks from the new rail station, and the impact that the station will have on the future of Dearborn were all elements the students discussed as they collaborated to design the mosaic mural.
To make the tile molds, the POP students applied wood, plastic and clay to make a relief of each tile design on medium density fiberboard. Then the team went to TechShop in Allen Park where they learned how to use a VacuForm machine to heat and stretch a sheet plastic onto each relief to create the molds that will be used in making the tiles on Jan. 19 and Feb. 2. The clay tiles will be glazed and fired in HFCC Art Department kilns before being installed at the rail station in late 2013.
The POP project, an acronym for Pockets of Perception - We Are One Community, focuses on young people, encouraging multicultural understanding while cultivating their creativity and investment in the community through the creation of public art. The POP project is an initiative of the Dearborn Community Fund as it supports arts, cultural and recreational programs that enrich the Dearborn community.
Thursday, January 10, 2013
Beach Haven School Students May Be at Eagleswood Until June
Beach Haven School students can expect to be at their temporary home at the Eagleswood Elementary School for the balance of the school year.
“I’d like to say we’d be out of there sooner, but I don’t want to make a promise I can’t keep,” said Patricia Daggy, superintendent/principal of the Beach Haven School.
The school’s 63 students and 20 teachers and staff members were displaced following Superstorm Sandy. Daggy said the storm severely damaged the ground floor of the school, which celebrated its 100th anniversary last spring.
“The building took in 2 feet of water, and because we couldn’t get back to Beach Haven for two weeks after storm, the water just sat there, and that made the situation worse,” she said. “A lot of families couldn’t return to their homes, and some lost their homes and had to move off the Island. But we still kept most of our students. There were two families who were fairly new to Beach Haven, and they moved out of the area after the storm.”
She said loosened floor tiles resulted in asbestos being exposed, since it was part of the adhesive glue that held the flooring together.
“That’s the way it was done in older school buildings such as ours,” said Daggy. “When that gets done, then there has to be a lot of environmental testing. School buildings and hospitals are subject to the strictest building safety codes in the state.”
“Everything has to go out to bid, and that contributes to this being a very time-consuming process,” she said. “That’s why I’m really not counting on being back in the school until the school year ends and we can be back together again in September.”
“Helping to ease the transition was the wonderful outpouring of donations of school supplies, books, coats mittens and other items,” she said. “I had one parent tell me that while she felt so poor, at the same time she felt so rich because of all the kind-hearted people.”
Retailers had hoped that Christmas 2012 would mark a turning point when they could start to relax safe in the knowledge that consumers are in the mood to spend freely again. Sadly, this scenario did not materialise, and the latest festive period will be remembered for its fierce discounting, particularly in the fashion sector. While some chains, such as John Lewis, shot the lights out, for many, healthy, like-for-like sales – which strip out the boost from new space – only served to mask the fact they had to sacrifice margins to entice shoppers through their door. Here is what we learnt.
Morrisons blamed its weak performance on the fact that it still does not sell food on the web and only has a handful of smaller convenience stores. These weaknesses contributed to the Bradford-based grocer posting a 2.5 per cent fall in sales over Christmas, in contrast to its rivals. Both Tesco and Sainsbury's delivered booming online grocery sales over Christmas, up by 18 per cent and 15 per cent respectively, as well as enjoying robust growth in their convenience stores. Dalton Philips, the chief executive of Morrisons, will update on March on its online plans with a trial expected later this year.
Marks & Spencer's latest clothing and homewares sales not only missed City expectations by a country mile, but also marked its sixth-consecutive quarter in negative territory. Its chief executive Marc Bolland described the performance as "not yet satisfactory", but blamed the fall on the company's decision not to match the fierce discounting of rivals as it sought to protect profit margins. M&S said this enabled it to sell more products at full price and running 7 per cent fewer promotions helped it avoid a profit warning, but analysts downgraded it.
Tesco delivered its strongest UK underlying sales before Christmas, following a period of under-performance. The 1.8 per cent rise in sales over the festive period put listed grocery rivals Sainsbury's and Morrisons in the shade. Its Christmas performance vindicates the ￡1bn investment by Philip Clarke, chief executive, unveiled in April, to turn around the UK operation with more staff, revamped products and refurbished stores.
JD Sports continues to struggle with Blacks and Millets, which it bought out of administration in January 2012. JD described the trading of the two outdoor chains as "disappointing" over Christmas and said that it now expects the group's full-year profits to come in at about ￡60m, which is at the low end of City expectations. However, the sportswear group vowed to deliver a "substantial improvement in trading" at Blacks and Millets this year.
While Sainsbury's and Tesco battle it out to lay claim for the crown of the grocery sector's Christmas winner, low-profile Aldi continues to power ahead. The German discounter has charged ahead of its rivals by launching a huge expansion in its fresh fruit and vegetable offer, as well as ramping up the brands its sells, including Marmite and Carlsberg. Aldi grew its sales by 30.1 per cent over the 12 weeks to 23 December, according to Kantar Worldpanel, giving the company a small – but fast-growing – market share of 3.2 per cent.
“I’d like to say we’d be out of there sooner, but I don’t want to make a promise I can’t keep,” said Patricia Daggy, superintendent/principal of the Beach Haven School.
The school’s 63 students and 20 teachers and staff members were displaced following Superstorm Sandy. Daggy said the storm severely damaged the ground floor of the school, which celebrated its 100th anniversary last spring.
“The building took in 2 feet of water, and because we couldn’t get back to Beach Haven for two weeks after storm, the water just sat there, and that made the situation worse,” she said. “A lot of families couldn’t return to their homes, and some lost their homes and had to move off the Island. But we still kept most of our students. There were two families who were fairly new to Beach Haven, and they moved out of the area after the storm.”
She said loosened floor tiles resulted in asbestos being exposed, since it was part of the adhesive glue that held the flooring together.
“That’s the way it was done in older school buildings such as ours,” said Daggy. “When that gets done, then there has to be a lot of environmental testing. School buildings and hospitals are subject to the strictest building safety codes in the state.”
“Everything has to go out to bid, and that contributes to this being a very time-consuming process,” she said. “That’s why I’m really not counting on being back in the school until the school year ends and we can be back together again in September.”
“Helping to ease the transition was the wonderful outpouring of donations of school supplies, books, coats mittens and other items,” she said. “I had one parent tell me that while she felt so poor, at the same time she felt so rich because of all the kind-hearted people.”
Retailers had hoped that Christmas 2012 would mark a turning point when they could start to relax safe in the knowledge that consumers are in the mood to spend freely again. Sadly, this scenario did not materialise, and the latest festive period will be remembered for its fierce discounting, particularly in the fashion sector. While some chains, such as John Lewis, shot the lights out, for many, healthy, like-for-like sales – which strip out the boost from new space – only served to mask the fact they had to sacrifice margins to entice shoppers through their door. Here is what we learnt.
Morrisons blamed its weak performance on the fact that it still does not sell food on the web and only has a handful of smaller convenience stores. These weaknesses contributed to the Bradford-based grocer posting a 2.5 per cent fall in sales over Christmas, in contrast to its rivals. Both Tesco and Sainsbury's delivered booming online grocery sales over Christmas, up by 18 per cent and 15 per cent respectively, as well as enjoying robust growth in their convenience stores. Dalton Philips, the chief executive of Morrisons, will update on March on its online plans with a trial expected later this year.
Marks & Spencer's latest clothing and homewares sales not only missed City expectations by a country mile, but also marked its sixth-consecutive quarter in negative territory. Its chief executive Marc Bolland described the performance as "not yet satisfactory", but blamed the fall on the company's decision not to match the fierce discounting of rivals as it sought to protect profit margins. M&S said this enabled it to sell more products at full price and running 7 per cent fewer promotions helped it avoid a profit warning, but analysts downgraded it.
Tesco delivered its strongest UK underlying sales before Christmas, following a period of under-performance. The 1.8 per cent rise in sales over the festive period put listed grocery rivals Sainsbury's and Morrisons in the shade. Its Christmas performance vindicates the ￡1bn investment by Philip Clarke, chief executive, unveiled in April, to turn around the UK operation with more staff, revamped products and refurbished stores.
JD Sports continues to struggle with Blacks and Millets, which it bought out of administration in January 2012. JD described the trading of the two outdoor chains as "disappointing" over Christmas and said that it now expects the group's full-year profits to come in at about ￡60m, which is at the low end of City expectations. However, the sportswear group vowed to deliver a "substantial improvement in trading" at Blacks and Millets this year.
While Sainsbury's and Tesco battle it out to lay claim for the crown of the grocery sector's Christmas winner, low-profile Aldi continues to power ahead. The German discounter has charged ahead of its rivals by launching a huge expansion in its fresh fruit and vegetable offer, as well as ramping up the brands its sells, including Marmite and Carlsberg. Aldi grew its sales by 30.1 per cent over the 12 weeks to 23 December, according to Kantar Worldpanel, giving the company a small – but fast-growing – market share of 3.2 per cent.
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