Rump

“Trump is congenitally incapable of rising to these kinds of occasions. Empathy is a word he can’t define, compassion an emotion he can’t experience, humility a virtue he can’t comprehend and kindness an act he will never undertake.” 

CAN'T WE?

A Tribute to Christo’s Unforgettable Art Works

A Tribute to Christo’s Unforgettable Art Works

By Calvin Tomkins

June 2, 


2020In projects such as “The Pont Neuf Wrapped,” Christo and his wife, Jeanne-Claude, made staggering, ephemeral works of contemporary art.

Photograph by Chris Steele-Perkins / Getty

For many years, I’ve wondered whether it was Christo’s naïvité, the childlike and overwhelming enthusiasm that he brought to every one of his hugely ambitious projects, that kept the art world from acknowledging him as one of the greatest artists of this era. What he and Jeanne-Claude, his wife and collaborator, achieved was so different from the work of anyone else, and on such a huge scale—seventy-five hundred saffron-colored nylon “gates,” in Central Park; the Reichstag, in Berlin, and the Pont Neuf, in Paris, transformed by their cloth wrappings into monumental and sensuous sculptures—that it’s hard to believe it was also ephemeral. Each spectacle drew huge crowds for two weeks and then vanished forever, without a trace. Together, the couple brought us a long-running aesthetic experience that was unlike anything else in contemporary art. Their deaths—Jeanne-Claude’s in 2009, Christo’s this past Sunday—ought to shame historians into taking the full measure of it.

I met them in 1964, the year they moved to New York from Paris, and I fell instantly under the spell of their very different personalities. Christo, who spoke almost no English, was mercurial, passionate, and implacable. Jeanne-Claude was French and upper-class, self-confident, witty, and—the essential factor—a brilliant manager. Their arguments were public and fierce, and punctuated by endearments—“Non, non, non, cheri!” I wrote about them first in 1972, when they were working on the “Valley Curtain” in Rifle, Colorado. I went to the openings of “The Pont Neuf Wrapped” and “Surrounded Islands,” and several other projects that I didn’t write about. The one I loved best, and did write about, was their “Running Fence,” from 1976, an eighteen-foot-high white nylon “ribbon of light,” as Christo described it, which stretched across twenty-four and a half miles of rolling farmland in California’s Marin and Sonoma Counties, and ended in the Pacific Ocean. The project cost the artists three million dollars, every cent of which Jeanne-Claude raised herself: some of the funds were from art dealers, but the major portion came from sales of Christo’s drawings of the staggeringly beautiful fence itself.

“Running Fence,” by Christo and Jeanne-Claude, 1972-76.

Photograph by Wolfgang Volz / laif / Redux

Four years earlier, when they had begun gathering the necessary permissions, they were told that the conservative sheep and cattle farmers in that part of California would never agree to let them put such a thing on the land, even for two weeks—but this turned out not to be true. After repeated visits by Christo and Jeanne-Claude, all but three of the landowners not only gave them permission but became staunch and vocal allies of the project. The real opposition that Christo and Jeanne-Claude faced came from environmentalists and from outraged local artists, some of whom claimed that a nylon fence was not art and that this piece was a front for a series of McDonald’s stands. The Christos eventually needed nine lawyers to help them through the lawsuits and the seventeen public hearings at the state and county level. In the end, they defied the law by taking their fence to the ocean without a permit from the California Coastal Commission. It was a calculated risk. They made what the local paper called their “illegal leap” at the last minute, using the morning fog as cover, and by the time a legal hearing on a restraining order could be scheduled it was too late: the fence had already come and gone. “I completely work within American system by being illegal, like everyone else,” Christo said to me at the time. “It’s the subversive character of the system that makes it so exciting to live here—one reason, anyway.”

On the night the illegal leap was completed, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, and twenty or thirty of the three hundred and sixty young, paid volunteers they had hired, were working by moonlight to install the last few panels, which went into the ocean. The workers had been on the job since five that morning, and they were laughing and shouting to each other. Christo moved back and forth, checking hooks, and occasionally running his hand along the white fabric. “Look at Christo flirting with his fence,” Jeanne-Claude said. A long-haired kid in torn jeans said, joyously, “It’s just so flip and outrageous. I can’t wait to see the rest of it.” Nobody enjoyed the fence more than Christo. Riding beside it one day in the passenger seat of a pickup truck driven by Ted Dougherty, the contractor on the project, he called out excitedly, “Look there, Ted. See how it describes the wind.”

So Much Better to Say Nothing

Bret Stephens

We knew from the moment Donald Trump won that we were destined for a national crisis like this one. 

It’s what you get when you elect someone who specializes in division, denigration, diminishment and debasement. He’s incapable of summoning the better angels of our nature. 

He makes everything worse because he personifies our despair — whether it’s despair over what we’ve become as a nation, or despair over the loss of hope that we can do better.

WILL: Trump must be removed. So must his congressional enablers.

THIS SAD EMBARRASSING WRECK OF A MAN 

Trump must be removed. So must his congressional enablers.

By

George F. Will 

Columnist covering politics and domestic and foreign affairs

June 1, 2020 at 2:18 p.m. CDT

This unraveling presidency began with the Crybaby-in-Chief banging his spoon on his highchair tray to protest a photograph — a photograph — showing that his inauguration crowd the day before had been smaller than the one four years previous. Since then, this weak person’s idea of a strong person, this chest-pounding advertisement of his own gnawing insecurities, this low-rent Lear raging on his Twitter-heath has proven that the phrase malignant buffoon is not an oxymoron.

Presidents, exploiting modern communications technologies and abetted today by journalists preening as the “resistance” — like members of the French Resistance 1940-1944, minus the bravery — can set the tone of American society, which is regrettably soft wax on which presidents leave their marks. The president’s provocations — his coarsening of public discourse that lowers the threshold for acting out by people as mentally crippled as he — do not excuse the violent few. They must be punished. He must be removed.

Social causation is difficult to demonstrate, particularly between one person’s words and other persons’ deeds. However: The person voters hired in 2016 to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed” stood on July 28, 2017, in front of uniformed police and urged them “please don’t be too nice” when handling suspected offenders. His hope was fulfilled for 8 minutes and 46 seconds on Minneapolis pavement.

What Daniel Patrick Moynihan termed “defining deviancy down” now defines American politics. In 2016, voters were presented an unprecedentedly unpalatable choice: Never had both major parties offered nominees with higher disapproval than approval numbers. Voters chose what they wagered would be the lesser blight. Now, however, they have watched him govern for 40 months and more than 40 percent — slightly less than the percentage that voted for him — approve of his sordid conduct.

Presidents seeking reelection bask in chants of “Four more years!” This year, however, most Americans — perhaps because they are, as the president predicted, weary from all the winning — might flinch: Four more years of this? The taste of ashes, metaphorical and now literal, dampens enthusiasm.

The nation’s downward spiral into acrimony and sporadic anarchy has had many causes much larger than the small man who is the great exacerbator of them. Most of the causes predate his presidency, and most will survive its January terminus. The measures necessary for restoration of national equilibrium are many and will be protracted far beyond his removal. One such measure must be the removal of those in Congress who, unlike the sycophantic mediocrities who cosset him in the White House, will not disappear “magically,” as Eric Trump said the coronavirus would. Voters must dispatch his congressional enablers, especially the senators who still gambol around his ankles with a canine hunger for petting.

In life’s unforgiving arithmetic, we are the sum of our choices. Congressional Republicans have made theirs for more than 1,200 days. We cannot know all the measures necessary to restore the nation’s domestic health and international standing, but we know the first step: Senate Republicans must be routed, as condign punishment for their Vichyite collaboration, leaving the Republican remnant to wonder: Was it sensible to sacrifice dignity, such as it ever was, and to shed principles, if convictions so easily jettisoned could be dignified as principles, for . . . what? Praying people should pray, and all others should hope: May I never crave anything as much as these people crave membership in the world’s most risible deliberative body.

A political party’s primary function is to bestow its imprimatur on candidates, thereby proclaiming: This is who we are. In 2016, the Republican Party gave its principal nomination to a vulgarian and then toiled to elect him. And to stock Congress with invertebrates whose unswerving abjectness has enabled his institutional vandalism, who have voiced no serious objections to his Niagara of lies, and whom T.S. Eliot anticipated:

We are the hollow men . . .

Our dried voices, when

We whisper together

Are quiet and meaningless

As wind in dry grass

or rats’ feet over broken glass . . .

Those who think our unhinged president’s recent mania about a murder two decades ago that never happened represents his moral nadir have missed the lesson of his life: There is no such thing as rock bottom. So, assume that the worst is yet to come. Which implicates national security: Abroad, anti-Americanism sleeps lightly when it sleeps at all, and it is wide-awake as decent people judge our nation’s health by the character of those to whom power is entrusted. Watching, too, are indecent people in Beijing and Moscow.

Desmond Tutu

“If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.”

Desmond Tutu

New INC. Magazine Blog Post by Howard Tullman

How to Get More Money and Share More of the Pain

There's a lot of misery to go around these days. And if you are going to stay in the game, you need to distribute some to your investors, even as you ask them for help.

BY HOWARD TULLMAN, GENERAL MANAGING PARTNER, G2T3V AND CHICAGO HIGH TECH INVESTORS@TULLMAN

Now that the Paycheck Protection Plan (PPP) picnic is almost over, the really difficult conversations are about to start. For an entrepreneur, it's actually pretty easy to ask a bank to lend you some of somebody else's money (thank you SBA) especially when no one really expects you to pay it back. Apart from the confusing and constantly changing requirements and regulations, the lack of government and bank process preparation, and the ethical dilemmas, it's been a lot like the old TV show Supermarket Sweep. You run around like crazy, grab as much as you can, spend it as fast as you can and hope somehow - even if it's way too little and too late - that the "free" money helps you hang on to some of your people and keep your doors open.

But, in all honesty, we pretty much know that these belated and limited funds alone won't be enough to save tens of thousands of businesses and likely millions of jobs. Congress will have to do much more and even that won't get us there. There aren't going to be a lot of winners. The new normal looks pretty grim all around, and the key for every business now is to be a survivor. The pain is going to be felt across the board and, unless it's promptly and fully shared by all the players, there's not much chance of seeing things through to the other side.

So, what does that really mean for you and your team?

It means that you're gonna have to go back to the well for additional funding -- hat in hand, even though it's not really your fault -- if you hope to make ends meet and to keep your company afloat. And it's much, much harder to have to return to your existing investors when the business itself is in limbo for nobody knows how long, and show them good faith models (but really only best guesses) at what the future will bring and then ask them to pony up follow-on dollars.  Your goal is to make it to year-end or to breakeven -- whichever comes first. There is nothing less fun in tough times than being invited to a pro rata party that no one wants to attend. Nothing at these meetings is ever good news because nobody wants to be the turkey invited for Thanksgiving dinner.

But, if you're one of the millions of entrepreneurs who knows that (a) the cash in the bank, (b) the PPP funds, (c) the draconian headcount cuts, and (d) whatever slow-to-rematerialize revenues may appear in the near term combined still aren't gonna be sufficient to get you through the upcoming "L" trough and into next year, you need to start planning your pitch and your approach right now. Because there will be a long line of sad and sorry faces at these investors' doors starting very soon.

There's no guarantee that you'll be successful, but unless you're fully prepared with a strategy and a plan, you can count on being the one holding the short straw when the new dollars get doled out. Some of us have been to this movie many times and lived - albeit sometimes pretty beaten up - to tell the tale. Here are 5 of the most important things that I've learned over the years.

(1) Set a dollar goal that is higher than you are necessarily comfortable with, and which leans toward worst-case scenarios.

a.    You won't get a second chance to ask for money again from these folks, so you need to get all that's available;

b.   You won't get money from all the investors who could contribute, and you don't have a lot of time to wait around for people to make up their minds; and

c.    Painting a rosy or overly optimistic picture right now is a waste of time and will not be believed. You're selling survival right now, not short-term success or a quick turnaround.

(2) Set a per-share price for the new dollars that comes out of a simple, mathematical formula where every investor is expected to pay its pro rata share of the dollar amount to be raised.

a.    If you need to raise $1,000,000 and there are a million shares outstanding, the price per share is a buck a share. For everyone. No side deals. No special deals. And no negotiation. It's a formula and not a free-for-all.

b.   If everyone participates at their appropriate percentage, the company has more funding and the relative ownership positions of the cash investors inter se are unchanged. If you do not play, you will be penalized.

c.    It's a hard pill for management and employees to swallow, but their relative overall ownership (through options, etc.) will be reduced when the company takes in the new funds. This is probably essential to demonstrating the extent of their own commitments to the company and its ultimate success. Lots of ways to fix this issue down the line, but you've got to get down the line first.

(3) Set a short funding date in stone and stick to it.  No excuses and no extensions.

a.    You need the money now. Actually, you needed it a few months ago.

b.   You need to keep the pressure on the players, or they will drag their feet.

c.    You need to be prepared to penalize everyone who does not participate by the deadline. See below.

d.   You may have to step on a few toes.  Get used to it. You are working hard to save the whole business - hard feelings are par for the course. Everyone's "disappointed". Get in line.

(4) Set up a simple penalty system. 

a.    The shares which would have been allocated to any investor who declines to participate (unclaimed shares) are reallocated.

b.   Each participating investor receives its adjusted pro rata proportion of the unclaimed shares.

c.    The adjusted pro rata percentage number for each participating investor which will determine its proportion of the unclaimed shares is a simple fraction that compares the amount of each investor's new investment to the total amount of new funds invested.

d.   If Bob is adding $25,000 of a total new raise of $250,000, then Bob will get 10% (25/250) of the unclaimed and reallocated shares of stock.

(5) Stick to your guns and get it done.   

a.    Don't waste time in conversations with investors complaining about what they were promised, what might have been, and how disappointed they are. Don't apologize - no one said life was fair or that venture investing was easy or risk-free.

b.   It's a simple question. Are you in and with us or would you prefer to sit on the sidelines?

c.    And remember, above all, that as professionals, every one of these investors knew or should have known what the risks were, and no one forced them to invest.  They're grown-ups and they should act like it. Especially since in 99 cases out of 100, it's not their money anyway. But it is your livelihood.

Bottom line: The future isn't guaranteed or promised to anyone. It's what you make of it and make it into every day. Pick yourself up (it's not easy), dust yourself off, get the dollars and support you need, and get on with building the best business you can build.

Greg Dobbs: A bookend for American boomers: Back on our own soil

A bookend for American boomers: Back on our own soil

May 30, 2020Boomer Life3 Comments

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Good news has been hard to come by since the coronavirus crisis started. But it came for sure when two American astronauts launched for the first time in nine years on an American rocket, from American soil. BoomerCafé’s co-founder and executive editor Greg Dobbs covered the last few years of the space shuttle program, and was gratified to see U.S. astronauts back on their own terrain.

May 30, 2020 – Launch of SpaceX Falcon 9.

What perfect timing— the month of May— for two Americans finally to lift off again into space, not from a Russian launch pad in Asia, but from American soil. This pandemic has brought much of our movement to a halt… but not our quest for the cosmos.

As older baby boomers might remember, it was also in May, 59 years ago, that Alan Shepard, in his capsule dubbed Freedom 7, became the first American to soar into space. The space race was on.

Alan Shepard after the flight of Freedom 7, May 1961.

And as even younger boomers will remember, that put us on the path to create the Apollo program and win that race against our Soviet rivals, landing six times on the moon. Still, today, only twelve men have left their footprints there. One of them was Alan Shepard, ten years after his first flight on Freedom 7. Nice bookends to grow up with.

After the final mission to the moon, it was 8-½ years before Americans reached space again, this time in the Space Shuttle. It was a magnificent vehicle. All told, there were 135 missions, and I had the privilege of anchoring a 90-minute television broadcast from the Kennedy Space Center for each of the shuttle program’s final 22 flights.

A space shuttle launch.

It never got old. Every launch was unique: the weather, the time of day, the trajectory toward the target, a different crew, a different payload, a different mission. But more momentous, with every launch, watching from my anchor desk 3.1 miles from the launch pad (considered the “blast radius,” as close as anyone got, save for a handful of emergency rescue personnel in a bunker), I was infused, sometimes emotionally overwhelmed, with a sense of awe: awe for the power of the vehicle, awe for the brilliance of the engineering, awe for the precision of the flight plan, awe for the courage of the astronauts. The head of NASA’s manned space program once squeezed his thumb and forefinger together right in front of me and said, “We’re always this close to disaster.”

And now, here we are again, astronauts blasting off from the Kennedy Space Center, nine years after the last launch from Pad 39A but still, “this close to disaster.” That’s what it takes to explore the cosmos. So many moving parts, so many forbidding forces, so many unknowns.

Greg on camera, anchoring a space shuttle launch for HDNet TV.

But man was meant to explore. Not to ignore the implications for native peoples, but where would we be today without the inquisitive adventurers of centuries past, who crossed into the unknown in their sailing ships and found new worlds? There are practical goals in space travel, as there are practical benefits from the exploration we’ve already seen— from home insulation to fire retardants to polarized sunglasses to freeze-dried foods to solar panels to the Dustbuster. But more important are what separate us from other species: curiosity, knowledge, invention, exploration. Now, from conception to ignition, it is once again an all-American enterprise.

I produced an hour-long program once at Russia’s Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center— Gagarin was the one human being who beat Alan Shepard into space. As a reflection of the Cold War, it is hidden in a forest of birch trees about a hundred miles from Moscow. For many years now, to get to the International Space Station, U.S. astronauts had to spend months there learning the Soyuz system, because they launched in Soyuz capsules atop Soyuz rockets.

Greg with Russian engineers.

Not any more. As one of our astronauts temporarily based there told me (while living in an American-style two-story clapboard house surrounded by a white picket fence which Roscosmos, the Russian Space Agency, thought would be a nice touch for our people), the Russians’ procedures weren’t better, or worse, just different. But when he said it, he winked.

With SpaceX building the Crew Dragon capsule that just carried our astronauts back into space from Florida, and with other companies also in the game, NASA now is more the manager of space flight than the galvanizer, but that’s not as big a change as it sounds. Private enterprise has always cobbled the ships together, to carry our modern adventurers out to do what man was born to do. Not even a pandemic can stop us.

Toward the end of the shuttle program, I asked NASA’s then-Administrator Charlie Bolden, himself a four-time shuttle astronaut, whether we’ll ever go back to the moon. “Yes, but we’re in no hurry” he said, summarizing America’s place in space. “Maybe someone will even beat us there. But do you know what they’ll find when they land on the lunar surface? Six flags. And they’re all ours.”

Now, even more flags are in our future. Somewhere. And they’ll be hoisted into space once again by an American rocket, from American soil.