Suzaku

Gotta give a big shoutout to the folks at NASA and JAXA, the Japan Space Agency, for the successful launch Sunday of Astro-E2, the next generation of X-ray telescope satellites.
Astro-E2 was the working name of the satellite on the ground; it was a rebuild of Astro-E, which blew up when its rocket went off course soon after launch in 2000. Since that mishap, there has been a gap in the X-ray spectrum that scientists could study. Two other X-ray telescopes (or spectrometers, actually) are in orbit right now: one is called Chandra, and there’s one called XMM-Newton, which is run by the European Space Agency. All three were designed to be complementary in their coverage of the X-ray spectrum and their resolution.
It’s traditional to wait and name a satellite only after it completes its second orbit, and after Astro-E2 made its second 90-minute pass over its Japanese launch site, it was announced that the name would be “Suzaku,” which translates variously as “red sparrow,” or “phoenix.” It derives from a creature guarding one of the four points of the compass on ancient Chinese astronomical charts, and it apparently has some regenerative characteristics like the phoenix in western mythology, something that obviously appealed to those scientists responsible for building and using this important satellite.
Those people include my wife, Jean, who is calibrating and characterizing the XRS, or X-Ray Spectrometer, and who will use it to continue her research on the composition and behavior of binary neutron stars. Congratulations and good luck. If I live to be 100, I’ll never figure out why someone so smart decided to marry me, but hey, I ain’t complaining.

Suzaku/Astro-E2 Homepage [nasa.gov]
How ’bout that, Suzaku is also the name of an anime demon character in Yu Yu Hakusho [absoluteanime.com]

You Decide, Indeed

“I mean, my first thought when I heard — just on a personal basis, when I heard there had been this attack and I saw the futures this morning, which were really in the tank, I thought, ‘Hmmm, time to buy.'”
– from an on-air transcript of Brit Hume, Washington Managing Editor, FoxNews, 7/7/2005.

Zsa Zsa Gabor Still Alive, Suffers Stroke

Credit where it’s due: one summer in the Hamptons, a housemate picked up Zsa Zsa’s autobiography at the Southampton library booksale–the one written in response to her Beverly Hills copslapping incident, not the other one–and it was hi-larious. Lots of stuff like, “I wear nothing in bed. Except for diamonds.”

Zsa Zsa Gabor In Critical Condition After Stroke [nbc4, via trent]
Buy Zsa Zsa Gabor’s One Lifetime Is Not Enough, from $0.49 at Amazon [amazon]

And That’s The Way It Is

Nothing like a terrorist attack to whipsaw our sense of context, priorities and emotions. From Kottke‘s links this morning [note: the older, carefree links are at the bottom]:

# A series of explosions in London this morning during rush hour; at least 2 dead and 160 wounded   # 
The explosions were coordinated and officials have shut down the tube and central bus service.
# Mariopedia is “an illustrated listing of virtually every character, item, and enemy from the ‘Super Mario Universe'”   # 
# A list of mini golf holes based on movies   # 
“Raiders of the Lost Ark: You must putt the ball precisely into the idol’s head, or a 15-foot-high, 1-ton golf ball comes rolling after you.”

So September 10th

Hmm. I don’t really know what to make of this. In the months after September 11, when no one knew what shape the WTC site would take in the future, but when people were at least entertaining the possibility that architecture and contemporary art might be able to make some sense of what’d happened, John Powers’ ideas from a show about memorials earlier that year kept coming to my mind.
He proposed aggressively political minimalist gestures for sites in Manhattan (Penn Station, the now-defunct East River Guggenheim) and DC (the WWII Memorial) that upset prevailing notions of public space, spectacle, sentimentality, order and control, and history, among other things. [Although more successful and uncompromised by virtue of its sheer impossibility, Powers’ proposal for a WWII memorial eerily prefigures Michael Arad’s original fountain pit design, transposed to the end of the Reflecting Pool on the Mall.]
Powers never pursued any direct responses or proposals to the WTC site, either for Max Protech’s early display of (as it turned out) architectural impotence and hubris, or for the WTC Memorial ‘competition.’ Still, I thought of Powers when I saw Ellsworth Kelly’s collaged proposal for the WTC site–a NYT aerial photo with a trademark Kelly trapezoid superimposed on it.
Meanwhile, I followed along (or obsessed over, take your pick) the WTC rebuilding issues and saw the craven folly and political machinations unfold before my eyes–and anyone elses? I often wondered. Then I found Philip Nobel’s book Sixteen Acres, the first unsentimental look at what was actually transpiring behind the scenes and in front of our still-teared up eyes. It’s harsh in places, mostly as it should be, and I only wish it could’ve brought some things to light sooner. It’s the same kind of weary wishfulness that allows you to entertain fleeting thoughts of disaster averted, “what if we’d–” and “if only we’d–” before snapping back to the grim reality of our political failures.
Anyway, I only bring this up now because a friend showed me Powers’ early 2001 invite with details of his projects and then pulled out their own copy of Sixteen Acres. [They’re scanned side by side above.]
I am a solid fan of both peoples’ work, but there was clearly something going on in the design process for Nobel’s 2005 cover which needs some explaining. The frontispiece says “Design by Fritz Metsch, Map by David Cain,” with cover design by Raquel Jaramillo. But to me, it’s clearly John Powers’ work.
Buy Nobel’s excellent Sixteen Acres : Architecture and the Outrageous Struggle for the Future of Ground Zero at Amazon
Previously: Ellsworth Kelly on Ground Zero
UPDATE: I emailed Philip Nobel about this. Here is his reply:

Thanks for the heads up. I’ve been on both sides of this sort of
accusation before (this time, I guess, I’m a bystander). But I can
assure you there was no foul play. Re “explaining to do”: Before the
book was written, the Holt art department had cooked up something that
looked like a Bob Woodward book (still posted around online in spots).
My editor and I didn’t think it made sense with the feel of the
finished thing, so we cooked up the idea of a map (sitting in her
office on 18th Street; no graphic cues on hand). I said “black” and
that it had to go as far north as possible (in the spirit of that
Borges quote and the first lines of the prologue), and she said we
should just box out the shape of the site like a symbol. Raquel worked
from those directions. She’s good people, and i don’t think so mobbed
up in the art or architecture worlds that she would have seen your
friend’s work, which, of course, looks really interesting. I imagine
“map” led her to an aerial view, “black” led her to the one in
question, and “box out/symbol” led her to treat the site as she did.
You know from reading the book that I’m all about seeing the worst in
our fellow men. But this sort of convergence reminds me of the recent
forced frenzy (Lock was tracking it) over Freedom Tower cognates. Might
it not just be a case of two people with good taste seeing the graphic
possibilities of applying a color field (red, an obvious choice) to
what appears to be the same publicly available (via the Library of
Congress) image?

Also, timely but not quite directly related: With Covers, Publishers Take More Than Page From Rivals [nyt]

VV Talks With Hustle & Flow Director Craig Brewer

Memphis’s own Brett Ratner mouths off, which, after scoring $9mm for your film that’d been passed over by every studio dawg in town, is just fine.

“What is interesting is the ‘indie blockbuster’ idea; that Hollywood’s going to buy cheaper movies and put the kind of money behind them that they would a blockbuster. What’s wrong with that?” He cracks, “Look, we didn’t make The Killing of a Chinese Bookie. [Hustle] has a commercial, mythological, hero’s-journey structure to it. I have always wanted it to be reflective of The Commitments, Footloose, Flashdance, and Rocky.”

Yes, interesting. Slate’s Christopher Kelly thinks it’s train wreck interesting, at least: “Funny, though, that this ‘vision of what’s hip and what Hollywood isn’t doing,’ as Singleton has described it, should look exactly like what Hollywood’s been doing for years.”
Rhyme Scheme [vv]
The Pimp Who Saved Hollywood [slate]

What Coudal’s Doing On Their Summer Vacation

Making a “short feature film,” just for the heck of it, it turns out, and documenting the production online:

The very first thing that happened is that we dropped an expensive rented audio remote unit down three flights of stairs. Oops. I wonder if Kubrick had to take a conference call about an advertising project after finishing just three set-ups on the first day of shooting Barry Lyndon?

Check it out: Copy Goes Here [coudal.com]

Out Of The Mouths Of Babes

A scene this past weekend at a wedding in the Hudson River Valley:
At dusk, a 6-year-old boy would charge up to the younger kids and, with his fists full of sparklers, he would roar and shake his hands until they would run away crying.
When the sparklers went out, he marched around proudly, shouting, “I am the dominant democracy! I am the dominant democracy! Did you see them? They bow down to me!”
Happy Fourth of July!

Who Has Final Cut At The Lincoln Memorial?

About that 8-minute short subject documentary showing at the Lincoln Memorial, the one about all the people who use “America’s Soapbox” to protest in support of their causes? Well, the Religious Right screened the first cut, and they loved it, they just had a few notes… Aww, who’re we kidding? They hated it, and they had a ton of notes, which they sent to the producers at the National Park Service. So consider that you’ve been watching the rough cut of history for the last ten years.
Of course, to even see the production notes required a FOIA request, and even then, major portions of the conservative suits’ demands and the NPS’s editing decisions that flowed out of them have been redacted. So until the Extra-Special Impeachment Edition DVD comes out sometime after Jan. 20, 2009, this is about all we know of their re-edits:

  • Lose that Clinton character.
  • Add more pro-gun marches.
  • Nixon protesters? They’re hippies. Take’em out.
  • What’s with The Gays? Cut’em. You want people to think Lincoln approved of man-on-man action? [Wait, don’t answer that.]
  • Add some Pro-Iraq War marches [note: maybe we can bluescreen some town hall rally footage onto the Memorial steps? tk]

    Lincoln Memorial Video May Be Revised     [guardian, via robotwisdom]
    View Lincoln Memorial’s 8-min short [ap.org]

    • Robert Melee? He Has A Huge Talent Show

    A couple of snaps from Robert Melee’s Talent Show at The Kitchen. With touches of Wigstock, Laugh-in, Blow-up, Moulin Rouge, Merce, Cher, Olivia Newton John fitness video, Puppetry of the–um–and Fischerspooner-meets-Spinal Tap, it’s a NSFW riot.
    And don’t forget Robert’s mother. As if you ever could. There’s one more performance, Thursday night at 8. If tickets are available, you should get them.
    Robert Melee’s Talent Show 6/30, 8p [thekitchen.org]