Bert Jansch

Art without Market, Art without Education: Political Economy of Art

Since the early days of modernism, artists have faced a peculiar dilemma with regard to the economy surrounding their work. By breaking from older artistic formations such as medieval artisan guilds, bohemian artists of the nineteenth century distanced themselves from the vulgar sphere of day-to-day commerce in favor of an idealized conception of art and authorship. While on the one hand this allowed for a certain rejection of normative bourgeois life, it also required that artists entrust their livelihoods to middlemen—to private agents or state organizations. One result was that some of the most influential modernist artists, from Paul Gauguin to Mondrian and Rodchenko, died in abject poverty, not because their work was unpopular but because the economy produced by the circulation and distribution of their work was entirely controlled by others, whether under capitalist or communist regimes.1 While a concern with labor and fair compensation in the arts, exemplified by such recent initiatives as W.A.G.E. or earlier efforts such as the Art Workers Coalition, has been an important part of artistic discourse, so far it has focused primarily on public critique as a means to shame and reform institutions into developing a more fair system of compensation for “content providers.”2 It seems to me that we need to move beyond the critique of art institutions if we want to improve the relationship between artists and the economy surrounding their work.

Here I am not particularly interested in the power relations between artists and the art market, a cyclical conversation that seems to dominate much of art writing today. Historically, art and artists have existed both with and without a market. Important art was produced in socialist countries for most of the twentieth century, in the absence of an art market. Much of art production today occurs in places without a market for art, or in countries where a capitalist market system is not the dominant form of social and cultural organization. Art can clearly exist without a market, but artists fundamentally rely upon a certain economy in order to live and make art in the first place. Furthermore, it’s important to note that “economy” and “market” are not synonymous terms: a market is just one facet of the economic sphere, coexisting with many other forms of exchange, from barter, debt, and favors to a gift economy.  (...)

In 1878, the painter James Abbott McNeill Whistler took Ruskin to court for libel. Ruskin had written a rather positive review of an exhibition at the Grosvenor Gallery—a privately owned space exhibiting works that had been rejected by the Royal Academy. Ruskin singled out Whistler’s Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket, accusing the artist of charging too high a price for what Ruskin thought was a hastily made painting:

For Mr. Whistler’s own sake, no less than for the protection of the purchaser, Sir Coutts Lindsay ought not to have admitted works into the gallery in which the ill-educated conceit of the artist so nearly approached the aspect of willful imposture. I have seen, and heard, much of Cockney impudence before now; but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face.4

Whistler was outraged and sued Ruskin for a thousand pounds and the costs of the trial. The trial became a public spectacle, the first of its kind. It also became a public seminar on art. Whistler’s case was based on his argument that a painting is about nothing but itself; Ruskin’s case was based on his belief that art should have moral value. The court heard arguments about the duties of art critics and the role of labor in art. Ruskin was too ill to attend the trial and was represented by lawyers who asked Whistler how long it had taken him to make the painting. Whistler replied that it was completed in a day or two.

Lawyer: The labor of two days, is that for which you asked two hundred guineas?
Whistler: No, I ask it for the knowledge I have gained in the work of a lifetime.5

Whistler won the case but received only a symbolic settlement: a quarter of a penny. Ruskin’s friends covered his legal expenses; Whistler went bankrupt covering his own.

Ruskin did not single-handedly invent positions and notions popularized through his book and lectures on the economy of art; rather, he articulated existing Victorian attitudes regarding the role of artists and culture, which themselves reflected the British and Dutch art systems of the time, emphasizing a certain element of commerce in art. A somewhat different system of cultural organization existed in France, where in 1648 a royal decree established a government-funded Art Academy. The Academy removed painting and sculpture from the control of artistic guilds, which emphasized craft, and instead created a centralized institution that treated visual art more like the liberal arts, such as literature. While poets and writers like Baudelaire were often compensated per line of text for publishing their work (Baudelaire’s rate apparently was 0.15 francs per line), as far as I know, no one in France proposed subjecting them to wage labor.

by Anton Vidokle, e-flux |  Read more:

Image: James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Nocturne in Black and Gold (The Falling Rocket), circa 1875. Oil on panel. Detroit Institute of Art.

Knocked Out Loaded

I’m going to share a truly amazing story with you, but I must confess something first: None of the parties involved want to deal with the events I am about to describe any longer, and we need to respect their wishes. What I request is that you consider the facts of the story without wasting the time of those involved.

For what I am going to share with you are some occurrences that led to and then emerged from a period of thirteen mysterious minutes during which no one really knows what happened. Dozens of people have spent dozens of months trying to figure it out. Thousands of dollars have been shelled out, too, and untold amounts of stress. Lives have been derailed, careers have suffered, relationships been strained or lost. Violations took place, and crimes. Blood was shed. Yet what happened during those thirteen minutes remains a mystery — one that nearly destroyed the lives of some very nice people.

At the heart of this story sits time: Who controls it, who records it, who mourns it, who allocates its usage. And how and why this happens, and, of course, when. One particular substance upends all our presumptions about the control of time, but we think we know where they land again. Yet who is in control of what and for how long is not so easy to discern.

I will tell you this story, but you must promise not to take up any more of the time of those involved.

But first, a question: How much do you know about Rohypnol?

Early one new year — doesn’t matter which, exactly, since we’re going for the “Once upon a time” sense — a quiet and charming and alarmingly tall man, let’s call him Frank, went to an informal dinner party hosted by an ex-girlfriend, a sweet and kindly teacher, a bit of an artistic soul. We’ll refer to her as Zelda. The two had dated for close to a decade about a decade ago — it doesn’t matter exactly how long or when. The point is that they used to date, and then they stopped, and now they’re friends, but it was all such a long time ago that all you need to know is that they still like each other.

After a couple glasses of wine, the group of several at the party agreed to go out to karaoke at a tacky disreputable bar. If I were to tell you details about this bar, you would accuse me of inventing them, so let’s pretend it was called Gone Fishin’!. The interior of Gone Fishin’! (the exclamation point is part of the name) was decked out in bait and tackle-related geegaws, including a talking wall-mounted trout and various doctored photographs of white men in obtrusive vests with giant walleyes, and all the specialty drinks had names like Wonderbread Standard and Worm on a Hook, and they were supposed to be cute references to picking people up, but they weren’t. I’m setting a scene here (albeit a fake one), and what I want to convey is that the bar was maybe going for hipster in a slightly-more-authentic-than-TGIFriday’s way but nothing about it worked. So people just went there to sing pop songs to each other.

And order cheap drinks. Zelda and her friends and Frank had a few. Frank had never done karaoke before, so he may have had more cocktails than he usually does. Songs were sung, more drinks were consumed. New friends! Rounds were purchased. More songs. One of Zelda’s friends had driven them all there and wasn’t drinking. When someone at the bar sent her and Zelda a couple drinks, the teetotaler passed her gift along to Frank.

Karaoke became aggressive and weird. It was that kind of place, Gone Fishin’!. Stages were stormed, maybe a wall-mounted trout was given a solo, the house got a round, that sort of thing. Some of the new friends began drifting away, other new ones replaced them. Two suspicious dudes, on their way out of the bar, jerked a thumb toward Zelda and Frank and made a snide comment about “Roofie and Friend.”

Their pals agreed later that the two were pretty trashed.

by Anne Elizabeth Moore, TNI |  Read more:

Image: Pablo Picasso, Weeping Woman, 1937

Living Rooms by Usona
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The Cyprus File – Why it Matters, Even to Americans

[ed. As one journalist noted, this isn't a tax, it's theft. Ostensibly directed at Russian depositers, the common Cypriot resident will likely get hosed in the process. It remains to be seen how other EU countries will view this development. As Paul Krugman notes, if you want to start a run on the banks this is a good way to do it.] 

It would be ironic if Cyprus, one the smallest countries in Europe with little over 1 million people and about 0.5% of the European Union (“EU”) economically, were to prove a key inflexion point in the crisis.

Since June 2012, it has been known that Cyprus needs around Euro 17-18 billion to recapitalise its banks (around Euro 10 billion) and for general government operations including debt servicing (around Euro 7-8 billion). While small in nominal terms and well within EU’s resources, the amount is large relative to Cyprus’ Gross Domestic Product (“GDP”) of Euro 18 billion. It is unlikely that Cyprus can realistically repay it, in the absence of a dramatic change in its circumstances such as the mooted oil and gas reserves in the Eastern Mediterranean.

The various options considered to generate the required funding included: privatisation of state assets, increases in corporate taxes (from 10% to 12.5%) and withholding taxes on capital income (to 28%) and restructuring of existing bank or sovereign debt. Debt restructuring options included a “bail-in” of creditors (the new fashionable term for a write off of principal). It would also entail easing terms and lengthening maturities of (up to) Euro 30 billion in loans from Russian banks to Cypriot companies of Russian origin.

The package proposed by the EU incorporates almost all of the above measures. Most controversially, ordinary depositors will face a “tax” on Cypriot bank deposits, amounting to a permanent write down in the nominal value of their deposits. The deposit levy will be 6.75% on deposits of less than Euro 100,000 (the ceiling for European Union account insurance) and 9.9% for deposits above that amount. In return, the depositors will receive shares in the relevant banks.

The unprecedented write down of bank deposits expected to raise around Euro 5.8 billion is motivated by a number of factors. (...)

Whatever the case for the Cyprus package, it risks significant side effects.

Firstly, it may trigger capital flight from banks in Greece, Portugal, Ireland, Italy and Spain, based on depositor concerns about loss of capital in any future debt restructuring.

Europe has total bank deposits of around Euro 8 trillion, including around Euro 6 trillion in retail deposits. Around Euro 1.5-2 trillion of these deposits are in banks in peripheral countries.

In the period leading up to July 2012 banks, these peripheral countries lost between 10% and 20% of their deposits. This only abated when the ECB made its extraordinary announcement in July 2013 that it would do whatever it takes to safeguard the Euro.

If depositors withdraw funds in significant size and capital flight accelerates, then the ECB, national central banks and governments will have intervene, funding affected banks and potentially restricting withdrawals, electronic funds transfers and imposing cross-border capital controls.

by Satyajit Das, The Big Picture | Read more:
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Kay Mc Donagh, Cat Nap
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The Least Sustainable City

If cities were stocks, you’d want to short Phoenix.

Of course, it’s an easy city to pick on. The nation’s 13th largest metropolitan area (nudging out Detroit) crams 4.3 million people into a low bowl in a hot desert, where horrific heat waves and windstorms visit it regularly. It snuggles next to the nation’s largest nuclear plant and, having exhausted local sources, it depends on an improbable infrastructure to suck water from the distant (and dwindling) Colorado River.

In Phoenix, you don’t ask: What could go wrong? You ask: What couldn’t?

And that’s the point, really. Phoenix’s multiple vulnerabilities, which are plenty daunting taken one by one, have the capacity to magnify one another, like compounding illnesses. In this regard, it’s a quintessentially modern city, a pyramid of complexities requiring large energy inputs to keep the whole apparatus humming. The urban disasters of our time — New Orleans hit by Katrina, New York City swamped by Sandy — may arise from single storms, but the damage they do is the result of a chain reaction of failures — grids going down, levees failing, backup systems not backing up. As you might expect, academics have come up with a name for such breakdowns:infrastructure failure interdependencies. You wouldn’t want to use it in a poem, but it does catch an emerging theme of our time.

Phoenix’s pyramid of complexities looks shakier than most because it stands squarely in the crosshairs of climate change. The area, like much of the rest of the American Southwest, is already hot and dry; it’s getting ever hotter and drier, and is increasingly battered by powerful storms. Sandy and Katrina previewed how coastal cities can expect to fare as seas rise and storms strengthen. Phoenix pulls back the curtain on the future of inland empires. If you want a taste of the brutal new climate to come, the place to look is where that climate is already harsh, and growing more so — the aptly named Valley of the Sun.

In Phoenix, it’s the convergence of heat, drought, and violent winds, interacting and amplifying each other, that you worry about. Generally speaking, in contemporary society, nothing that matters happens for just one reason, and in Phoenix there are all too many “reasons” primed to collaborate and produce big problems, with climate change foremost among them, juicing up the heat, the drought, and the wind to ever greater extremes, like so many sluggers on steroids. Notably, each of these nemeses, in its own way, has the potential to undermine the sine qua non of modern urban life, the electrical grid, which in Phoenix merits special attention.

If, in summer, the grid there fails on a large scale and for a significant period of time, the fallout will make the consequences of Superstorm Sandy look mild. Sure, people will hunt madly for power outlets to charge their cellphones and struggle to keep their milk fresh, but communications and food refrigeration will not top their list of priorities. Phoenix is an air-conditioned city. If the power goes out, people fry.

In the summer of 2003, a heat wave swept Europe and killed 70,000 people. The temperature in London touched 100 degrees F for the first time since records had been kept, and in portions of France the mercury climbed as high as 104 degrees F. Those temperatures, however, are child’s play in Phoenix, where readings commonly exceed 100 degrees F for more than 100 days a year. In 2011, the cityset a new record for days over 110 degrees F: There were 33 of them, more than a month of spectacularly superheated days ushering in a new era.

by William deBuys, Grist |  Read more:

Photo: Shutterstock

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[ed. I remember doing this...rolling down the window and giving a black bear a sandwich. Yellowstone, circa: another lifetime ago.]
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To Build a (Better) Fire

Two men walked into a bar called the Axe and Fiddle. It was a Thursday night in early August in the town of Cottage Grove, Oregon, and the house was full. The men ordered drinks and a vegetarian Reuben and made their way to the only seats left, near a small stage at the back. The taller of the two, Dale Andreatta, had clear blue eyes and a long, columnar head crowned with gray hair. He was wearing a pleated kilt, festooned with pockets and loops for power tools, and spoke in a loud, unmodulated voice—like a clever robot. His friend, Peter Scott, was thinner and more disheveled, with a vaguely Biblical look. He had long brown hair and sandaled feet, sun-baked skin and piercing eyes.

The featured act at the bar that night was a burlesque troupe from New York called Nice Jewish Girls Gone Bad. Just how they’d landed in the Oregon woods wasn’t clear, but they stuck stubbornly to their set list and met with only polite applause. Finally, near the end of the show, one of the performers—a spindly comedian with thick, black glasses and a T-shirt that said “Freak”—peered out from under the spotlight and fixed her eyes, a little desperately, on Peter Scott. “Do you have a job?” she said, almost to herself.

Scott said no, then yes.

“That sounds fishy. What is it you do?”

Scott fidgeted for a second, then mumbled, “I make stoves for Africa.”

“You what?”

“I make stoves for Africa.”

Scott was being modest. In the small-but-fanatical world of stovemakers, he is something of a celebrity. (“Peter is our rock star,” another stovemaker told me.) For the past seven years, under the auspices of the German technical-aid agency GTZ (now GIZ), Scott has designed or built some 400,000 stoves in 13 African countries. He has made them out of mud, brick, sheet metal, clay, ceramic, and discarded oil drums. He has made them in villages without electricity or liquid fuel, where meals are still cooked over open fires, and where burns are among the most common injuries and smoke is the sixth-leading cause of death. In the places where Scott works, a good stove can save your life.

He and Andreatta were in Cottage Grove for Stove Camp. A mile or two from the Axe and Fiddle, a few dozen engineers, anthropologists, inventors, foreign-aid workers, and rogue academics had set up tents in a meadow along a willowy bend in a fork of the Willamette River. They spent their days designing and testing wood-burning stoves, their nights cooking under the stars and debating thermodynamics. Stove Camp was a week-long event hosted by the Aprovecho Research Center—the engineering offshoot of a local institute, education center, and environmental collective. Now in its tenth year, the camp had become a kind of hippie Manhattan Project. It brought together the best minds in the field to solve a single, intractable problem: how do you build cheap, durable, clean-burning stoves for 3 billion people?

by Burkhard Bilger, Conservation |  Read more:

Illustration by Dan Page

Gotan Project

[ed. Wow, just watch the whole thing.]

Disclaimer

SNAP Day

WOONSOCKET, R.I. – The economy of Woonsocket was about to stir to life. Delivery trucks were moving down river roads, and stores were extending their hours. The bus company was warning riders to anticipate “heavy traffic.” A community bank, soon to experience a surge in deposits, was rolling a message across its electronic marquee on the night of Feb. 28: “Happy shopping! Enjoy the 1st.”

In the heart of downtown, Miguel Pichardo, 53, watched three trucks jockey for position at the loading dock of his family-run International Meat Market. For most of the month, his business operated as a humble milk-and-eggs corner store, but now 3,000 pounds of product were scheduled for delivery in the next few hours. He wiped the front counter and smoothed the edges of a sign posted near his register. “Yes! We take Food Stamps, SNAP, EBT!”

“Today, we fill the store up with everything,” he said. “Tomorrow, we sell it all.”

At precisely one second after midnight, on March 1, Woonsocket would experience its monthly financial windfall — nearly $2 million from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly known as food stamps. Federal money would be electronically transferred to the broke residents of a nearly bankrupt town, where it would flow first into grocery stores and then on to food companies, employees and banks, beginning the monthly cycle that has helped Woonsocket survive.

Three years into an economic recovery, this is the lasting scar of collapse: a federal program that began as a last resort for a few million hungry people has grown into an economic lifeline for entire towns. Spending on SNAP has doubled in the past four years and tripled in the past decade, surpassing $78 billion last year. A record 47 million Americans receive the benefit — including 13,752 in Woonsocket, one-third of the town’s population, where the first of each month now reveals twin shortcomings of the U.S. economy:

So many people are forced to rely on government support.

The government is forced to support so many people.

The 1st is always circled on the office calendar at International Meat Market, where customers refer to the day in the familiar slang of a holiday. It is Check Day. Milk Day. Pay Day. Mother’s Day.

“Uncle Sam Day,” Pichardo said now, late on Feb. 28, as he watched new merchandise roll off the trucks. Out came 40 cases of Ramen Noodles. Out came 230 pounds of ground beef and 180 gallons of orange juice.

SNAP enrollment in Rhode Island had been rising for six years, up from 73,000 people to nearly 180,000, and now three-quarters of purchases at International Meat Market are paid for with Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) cards. Government money had in effect funded the truckloads of food at Pichardo’s dock . . . and the three part-time employees he had hired to unload it . . . and the walk-in freezer he had installed to store surplus product . . . and the electric bills he paid to run that freezer, at nearly $2,000 each month.

Pichardo’s profits from SNAP had also helped pay for International Meat Market itself, a 10-aisle store in a yellow building that he had bought and refurbished in 2010, when the rise in government spending persuaded him to expand out of a smaller market down the block.

by Eli Saslow, Washington Post |  Read more:

Photo: uncredited

Moni Haworth, this amerian life.
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The Talk of the Irish

Having recently written a book about conversation, and having survived, at least for the time being, a serious illness that involved a huge number of grave discussions, discussions largely bereft of ornament and humor, and having lived seventy years’ worth of a life of words—surely too many of them, when weighed against actions—I found myself at the end of last summer yearning to go back to Ireland, especially to the West, to hear the Irish talk.

I had been there nearly forty years earlier, and the trip had confirmed the generally held high opinion of Irish verbal agility, wit, and garrulousness. “Are you American, then?” a butcher had asked me when I was buying a steak from him, in Schull, in the spectacular Southwest. “Yes,” I said. “Then of course I’ll be charging you twice as much,” he said. When I confessed to a little girl on a dirt road that the cows she was herding home made me, a city boy, a little nervous, she waited a bit until they were up the road and then pointed behind me and said, “Look out! The cows are comin’ for yeh.” And when I asked a train conductor on a platform if the train that had just left was the last one that day to somewhere or other, he said, “You’ll get no more.” (The Irish can be a little sharp, sometimes. Read William Trevor’s stories, if you haven’t.) I wanted to hear it again. I wanted to remind myself out of what lexical soil my heroes Yeats, Joyce, Beckett, and Heaney had sprung.

So off I went, with my daughter, Lizi—her spelling, I assure you—twenty-five, who served as my left-hand-driving navigator and conversational memory bank. We landed at Shannon at nine in the morning and picked up our rental car. At the Avis counter, while Lizi was away getting coffee, the reservations person asked me, “Will your…er, daughter is she…be driving?” Lizi is five feet two, blonde, and pretty, unlike me in every way. “I know she doesn’t look like me but yes, she is my daughter,” I said, “but no, she won’t be driving.” Then, jet-lagged, I sort of blurted, “She’s adopted.” The face of the theretofore crabby-looking agent next to my agent lit up, and she said, “We have an adopted child, too—from Russia. He’s ten now, and as sweet as a bun. Aren’t we the lucky ones, then, you and I? They are like Christmas every day, don’t you think?”

We drove off through a correspondingly driving rain to Galway, about forty minutes away, with me drifting left and Lizi quietly correcting me. We checked in at the Nile Lodge Bed and Breakfast, in Salthill, a strip of seaside houses abutting Galway’s City Center. Centre. The Nile Lodge had been open for only a month or so. Lizi had found it online—we did most of our booking online—and it was absolutely wonderful, run by its owner, Maura, whose family house this capacious and elegant white building sitting atop a small hill had once been. It has only four rooms but doesn’t feel the least incarcerational, the way many B. & B.’s do.

At breakfast—and this full Irish breakfast is very full—Maura played, quietly, CDs of the traditional Irish music I like so much. She told us about the cheeses she was serving, including one with “just a touch of smoke,” and another “as creamy as, well, cream,” and then when we told her that we would be driving around Connemara that day, she pressed some of her CDs on us, and was gratifyingly surprised at what I knew about some of the musicians. She kept on revising her listening-recommendation priorities: “You must hear this one—do you know De Danaan? No, for Connemara, maybe this one would be best—it would go smoothly with the landscape. And then there’s this one—this man’s voice is like a burr; you must hear it. But wait—your coffee must be quite chilly by now, anyway—let me get you a new pot. Coffee that isn’t hot is cold.”

by Daniel Menaker, New Yorker |  Read more:

Photo: Martin Parr/Magnum

Wingsuit Flying Into Rio

h/t Americablog

Washed Away

In the last moments of the Second World War, a few days after Hiroshima and just hours before Nagasaki, a Canadian airman named Robert Hampton Gray was shot down over Onagawa, a small town at the northeast limit of Japan’s main island, Honshu.

Decades later, a monument to Gray was erected there—the only such honor for a foreign combatant on Japanese soil and perhaps Onagawa’s only claim to fame outside the country. Even domestically, the town was mostly unknown until the ocean rolled over it on March 11, 2011.

Located where thickly forested mountains drop into the Pacific and submerged river valleys form a landscape of deep bays and narrow inlets, Onagawa is a relatively new port, founded in 1926, incorporating older fishing hamlets. For centuries, human settlers have been feeding off two fertile ocean currents that converge just offshore, carrying saury and silver salmon practically into their mouths. Less than 50 miles out, there is also a volatile section of seismic fault plane in the trench between the Pacific and Okhotsk plates.

In 1896 a major earthquake displaced seawater through the contours of the surrounding terrain, pushing waves inland and upward to the surrounding slopes. It happened again in 1933, seven years after Onagawa was established.

In both cases, devastated towns and villages were reconstructed at slightly higher elevations, and memorial stones were carved to warn future generations not to build so close to the waterline. But in minato machi, Japanese harbor towns, residents consider themselves people of the sea, and have always been inclined to return. And mountainous volcanic islands don’t leave developers much land to work with, except for low-lying coastal plains.

On May 22, 1960, an earthquake near Valdivia, Chile—still the most powerful ever recorded—sent destructive waves across the Pacific. When they reached northeast Japan the next day, they rose to heights of almost twenty feet, swamping Onagawa.

Town officials who lived through the “Chile tsunami” based disaster planning on that event, and assumed that twenty feet was about as high as tsunami waves would ever get. Breakwaters, seawalls, and evacuation shelters were configured accordingly.

But the earthquake that occurred in the offshore fault plane at 2:46 pm on March 11, 2011, was the most powerful in Japanese history. And the waves that followed 40 minutes later were the largest to strike this coast in more than a thousand years.

There were four or five waves, according to some witnesses, but just one, according to others—a possible effect of separate waves piling up and over each other. They rose to heights of 50, 60, 65 feet, depending on which post-tsunami survey you read. They drowned and dragged away almost 10 percent of Onagawa’s population—close to a thousand people—and destroyed more than 80 percent of its buildings. Tsutomu Yamanaka of the on-site relief agency Japan Platform described Onagawa as “the most damaged town on the coast.”

I went for the first time to Onagawa five weeks later. By then, the disaster was already dropping off the international news agenda. Reactor fires and failures at the crippled, flooded Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant had not sent radiation clouds across the Pacific, though it turned out that initial fears of meltdown were valid. Across the world, the Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami of 2011 is now remembered by the name “Fukushima.”

Some 70 miles northeast of Fukushima and 30 miles closer to the epicenter, Onagawa had its own nuclear power plant. Its three reactors were “remarkably undamaged,” according to a study by the International Atomic Energy Agency. But the main port was effectively wiped off the map that afternoon, along with any number of smaller fishing villages. I wanted to see this for myself—a place in the modern world that had suddenly passed from existence. Like Pompeii, or, more fancifully, Atlantis.

by Stephen Phelan, Boston Review | Read more:

Photo: Stephen Phelan

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Fiona Apple

Bar Examined

Steven J. Harper has been blessed with notably good timing.

Born smack in the middle of the Baby Boom, the Minneapolis native excelled in school, collected bachelor’s and master’s degrees in economics from Northwestern University, then headed straight to Harvard Law School, where he was a classmate of future U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts.

Neither of Harper’s parents—a truck driver dad and a stay-at-home mom—got past high school. A working-class kid, Harper financed his future with student loans. By the time he graduated Harvard Law, magna cum laude, in 1979, the total debt he had incurred for his three degrees from Northwestern and Harvard came to about $16,000.

It paid off. Harper went straight from Harvard Law to Kirkland & Ellis in Chicago, where he had been a summer associate. His starting salary was $25,000. He flourished, and was mentored and trained as a litigator by sage elder partners who invested their time and energy in the new blood brought into the old-even-then firm. This was the start of the Reagan era, and the U.S. economy began to boom after a long malaise. The future for the bright young corporate litigator was sweet.

“I led what anyone would call a charmed life in the law,” Harper writes in his new book, The Lawyer Bubble: A Profession in Crisis. “Then, as now, most people assumed that the legal profession offered financial security and a way to climb out of the lower or middle class. Career satisfaction, upward mobility, social status, financial security—who could ask for more?”

Harper spent his entire career at Kirkland & Ellis, made equity partner by the time he was thirty-four, and did so well financially that he was able to retire from the practice of law in 2010, when he was fifty-three years old. He now writes books. His latest seeks to warn bright young sons and daughters of midwestern truck drivers that they best not try to climb that ladder that served him so well.

Some of the rungs are broken, others greased and impossible slippery, and that ladder doesn’t stretch to any place you would want to be, really. The era of law being the safe and well-compensated “traditional default option for students with no idea what to do with their lives,” Harper notes, is over, even if the tens of thousands who still flood into law school each year stubbornly believe that these macro forces will somehow not apply to them.

by Elizabeth Lesly Stevens, Washington Monthly | Read more:
Image: uncredited