IN DUBAI, a city playground in the Middle East desert, nothing succeeds like excess.
The glitzy enclave has lavish shopping malls; uber-luxurious hotels and restaurants; neighborhoods built on artificial islands; even an indoor ski slope. And, oh yes, the tallest building in the world, the more-than-160-story Burj Khalifa.
One Dubai hotel, the 1,539-room Atlantis, goes all out with a watery motif. The hotel’s dramatic aquarium is fronted with an almost three-story-tall sheet of glass. For human water play there are massive swimming pools, water slides (including one nine stories tall) and inner-tubing streams. You can snorkel with sharks or feed rays in artificial pools.
In the searing desert of the Arabian Peninsula, where conserving water was a way of life for centuries, thank desalination plants for such an incongruously abundant water world.
And, thanks to the long reach of Emirates Airlines, which has helped turn Dubai into a bustling crossroads of international travel, you can hop on a nonstop Seattle-to-Dubai flight and be in the desert, and the Atlantis water world, in just a little more than 14 hours.
Kristin R. Jackson is The Seattle Times’ NWTraveler editor. Contact her at kjackson@seattletimes.com.
Seattle’s Henry Art Gallery poses a photographic puzzle with “Out [o] Fashion Photography: Embracing Beauty,’ a wide-ranging show exploring cultural attitudes about beauty, running through Sept. 1, 2013.
By Michael Upchurch, The Seattle Times
Frank A. Rinehart “Hattie Tom, Apache” (1899), platinum print
What is beauty? How do concepts of beauty change? And who possesses beauty — those who observe it or those who are observed?
These are among the questions raised in “Out [o] Fashion Photography: Embracing Beauty,” a new exhibit at the Henry Art Gallery, curated by Deborah Willis, the first scholar to take part in the Henry’s new Visiting Fellow Program.
Willis is a historian of African-American photography who teaches at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, where she serves as professor and chair of photography and imaging. A few years ago, the Henry invited her to pore through its holdings and those of the University of Washington Libraries, Special Collections, with the idea of exploring “different attitudes about and cultural interpretations of beauty.”
“Out [o] Fashion Photography” is the result. It’s a big show that weighs how men photograph women, how women photograph men, how photographers turn their lenses on members of the own sex or people of other races, and, finally, how some artists — Cindy Sherman, Robert Mapplethorpe, the amazing Janieta Eyre — translate themselves into the most unlikely photographic icons.
As the exhibit’s punning title suggests, it deals with how ideals of beauty can go out of style, while also acknowledging the role fashion has played in shaping our concept of beauty. Wildly diverse in content, it asks viewers to draw their own connections more than it spells anything out for them.
Willis has divided it into three “thematic groupings,” although she cautions in her catalog essay that “there is overlap throughout, and many images can be discussed in multiple categories.”
If that sounds vague to the point of being unhelpful, it is.
The exhibit is better approached as a free-associative romp through the Henry/UW collections by someone with a curious eye. One question that gets raised again and again, in all three sections, is: Who is exploiting whom in the photographic process?
Willis starts off with works by Edward S. Curtis, whose passion about documenting vanishing Native American cultures may have overridden a more personal connection between the photographer and his subject.
Still, Curtis’ “Two Moons — Cheyenne” (1910) is a fine thing to behold, catching the essence of the war chief’s proud, weathered character. Frank A. Rinehart’s “Hattie Tom, Apache” (1899) tells a different story: The look of skepticism the young woman levels at the camera is withering.
Honest portraiture is one thing. Voyeurism is another.
The voyeuristic norm — of a male eye trained on a female form for purposes of arousal — seems most vividly and straightforwardly represented by E.J. Bellocq’s “Storyville Portrait” (c. 1912). But in other works, things get more complicated.
Don Wallen’s “Untitled” (1976), with its live female nude draped around a plastic-white mannequin, seems to comment on how synthetic some ideals of female beauty can be. Harry Callahan’s gorgeous silhouette shot of his wife, “Eleanor” (1948), uses photographic artifice to create something intimate, loving and mysterious.
Willis includes some actual fashion photography, including items by Hans L. Jorgensen and Irving Penn, where women are idealized by the camera, surely with their own full cooperation. And in shots of famous actresses — Cecil Beaton’s “Marlene Dietrich” (1930) and Benjamin J. Falk’s “Portrait of Miss Rush, the Actress” (c. 1892/1897) — there’s little doubt that the models are shaping their own images as much as the photographer is. “Miss Rush,” in her bow-tie, jacket, vest and trousers, is a dapper gender-bender. Dietrich, here, is in pure glamour-queen mode.
The male figure, if a bit underrepresented, isn’t neglected in “Out [o] Fashion.”
Jack Pierson’s gauzy “Belvedere Clayton” (1992) portrays a dreamy young man, swaddled in a nightshirt, sprawled back in bed and gazing at the camera. There’s something so swooning and heady about his pose that he seems made of gossamer. George Dureau’s black male nude, “Glen Thompson, Rear” (1983), on the other hand, couldn’t be more directly carnal.
In some cases, subjects’ actions, more than their looks, lend a true hypnotic allure to their images. That’s the case with Lewis Wickes Hine’s “Powerhouse Mechanic” (1921) and Barbara Morgan’s “Martha Graham — Letter to the World” (1940), which are slyly juxtaposed in the show.
There’s fine work here that seemingly has nothing to do with Willis’ chosen theme. Weegee’s masterpiece “The Critic” (1943), in which a Bowery character snarls at two preening operagoers, is surely less about beauty than hostilities between two social worlds, while Lisette Model’s “Famous Gambler, Nice” (1934) comes off as a pure character study, with little thought about the attractiveness of its subject (although the photograph itself is certainly handsomely composed).
Diane Arbus’ “A Woman in a Bird Mask, N.Y.C.” (1967) delights in how artifice can triumph over age and take a turn for the beautiful-fantastical. But in Arbus’ “A Family on Their Lawn One Sunday in Westchester, New York” (1968), it’s the total disconnect between husband, wife and child that rivets you far more than the incidental detail of the sunbathing mom’s classic, brittle 1960s looks.
Some of these puzzling inclusions might benefit from more commentary by Willis on individual photographs. Without that, the exhibition is mostly what you choose to make of it.
One thing for sure: There are plenty of photographic riches here — including work by Imogen Cunningham, Dorothea Lange, Edward J. Steichen and many others — to make something from.
A movie review of “Room 237,” subtitled “An Inquiry Into ‘The Shining’ in 9 Parts.” Rodney Ascher’s fascinating documentary examines Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 horror film from the divergent perspectives of five obsessive interpreters.
By Jeff Shannon, The Seattle Times
The subtitle of “Room 237” is “Being an Inquiry Into ‘The Shining’ in 9 Parts,” and Rodney Ascher’s fascinating documentary subjects Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 horror classic (based on Stephen King’s 1977 novel) to intense scrutiny that ranges from critically astute to far-fetched absurdity.
The title of Ascher’s inquiry is taken from the Overlook Hotel, the haunted setting of King’s novel and Kubrick’s film. A forbidden place where unspeakable horrors occurred, Room 237 is just one of many mysteries that leave Kubrick’s film so enticingly open to interpretation.
Ascher invited five obsessive viewers to share their divergent observations about Kubrick’s film. Heard but never seen, their thoughts are accompanied by extensive clips from “The Shining” and dozens of other films, from the sci-fi cheesiness of “The Brain from Planet Arous” to the challenging formalism of “Last Year in Marienbad.”
If the result is best appreciated by serious cinephiles, so be it: “Room 237” is an act of uncommon devotion to cinema, embracing the notion that movies are best defined by what happens to us as we watch them — how our own beliefs and experiences dictate our interpretation of what we’ve seen and heard. At a time when analytical film essays are abundant on YouTube, “Room 237” acknowledges (to paraphrase one participant) that movies can yield interpretations far beyond the filmmaker’s artistic intentions.
Kubrick encouraged such interpretive latitude (especially with regard to “2001”), so when “Room 237” views “The Shining” through prisms of Native American genocide, the Holocaust, architectural oddities, numerology and even the ludicrous suggestion that Kubrick faked the Apollo moon landing on film, it’s a safe bet that Kubrick (who died in 1999) would be delighted with Ascher’s film. It confirms a work of importance and lasting value, which is all any serious artist can hope for.
A federal judge told the state of Washington to get working on repairing, replacing or abandoning culverts that create barriers to salmon passage.
Source: The Seattle Times Editorial
FIX it, pay for it, get it done. A federal judge is virtually that blunt in telling the state of Washington to repair culverts that block passage to salmon habitat.
U.S. District Judge Ricardo Martinez reminded the state it has a narrow and specific treaty-based duty to ensure Northwest tribes access to healthy fish runs.
Martinez’s order last Friday in Seattle ended an extended phase during which the state and tribal parties were to sit down and work out what would come next. Nothing much happened.
The legal obligation to honor commitments made in the 1850s was not a question for the judge. Accountability for delivering on the promise is the issue.
“The Tribes and their individual members have been harmed economically, socially, educationally and culturally by the greatly reduced salmon harvests that have resulted from state-created or state-maintained fish-passage barriers,” Martinez wrote in his ruling.
The judge put the state departments of fish and wildlife and parks, which have done some work, on a path to fix culverts by 2016.
The state Department of Transportation has a 17-year timeline for an extensive to-do list.
Martinez said the state has the capacity to accelerate work because of expected growth in transportation revenues in years ahead. Separate budgeting for transportation and the general fund, the ruling notes, prevents harm to education and social programs.
The point was also made that culvert repairs will work:
“Correction of fish-passage barrier culverts is a cost-effective and scientifically sound method of salmon-habitat restoration.”
It provides immediate benefit in terms of salmon production, as salmon rapidly recolonize the upstream area and returning adults spawn there,” the opinion states.
In another case that echoes in the news, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in March that water runoff from logging roads was more like runoff from farms, and not the same as industrial pollution from a factory.
The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which was overturned, had found no exemption for logging.
Fish in streams have no options. They are vulnerable to the sediment collected, channeled and discharged into waterways from all activities, including logging.
The latest debris from the 2011 Japanese tsunami to come ashore on the state’s southern coast is likely the most surprising so far.
A small, 18-foot blue fiberglass skiff bearing the name Saisho-Maru was found March 22 just north of Sid Snyder Beach near Long Beach.
While finding tsunami debris on our beaches isn’t new, what was found inside the stern’s built-in compartment caught the attention of state Fish and Wildlife biologists.
“There was five fish total we found in the boat’s compartment, and this is the first time we’ve seen vertebrates come ashore in tsunami debris,” said Bruce Kauffman, a state Fish and Wildlife biologist in Montesano.
The fish are commonly referred to as a “knifejaw or striped beak fish” that are native to waters off Japan, Korea and China.
“Finding these fish alive was totally unexpected and it is pretty unusual to find live fish,” Kauffman said.
Fisheries biologists say the compartment where the fish were found looked like an aquarium with enough sealife growth that the fish were able to feed off that and survive for so long.
“The fish were found in a compartment in the very back of the boat that appeared to have been enclosed at one point, but didn’t have a lid anymore,” said Leanna Reuss, the tsunami debris coordinator for AmeriCorp in Long Beach.
“It looked like most of the boat was floating underwater, and the fish used it (the compartment) as a shelter to stay alive,” Reuss said. “Otherwise I don’t think they could have survived the long drift across the ocean.”
Reuss says the boat was taken off the beach, and is now in the shop at Cape Disappointment State Park.
Only one of the fish is still alive. That fish is being kept in a holding tank at the Seaside Aquarium in Oregon. Once it’s healthy, the aquarium plans to put it on display.
Other tsunami debris found recently on coastal beaches include a large dock, boats and even a motorcycle.
(Photos courtesy of Washington State Fish and Wildlife)
“Our tribal leadership’s main responsibility is simply to protect our people,” said Marc Gauthier, a representative of the Upper Columbia United Tribes, before leaving the meeting. “It comes down to that basic human desire to protect your family.”
The Washington State Department of Ecology has known since the 1990s that its water-pollution limits have meant some Washingtonians regularly consume dangerous amounts of toxic chemicals in fish from local waterways.
At least twice, Ecology has been told by its overseers at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to fix the problem and better protect people’s health. Ecology was close to finally doing that last year — until Boeing and other business interests launched an intense lobbying campaign aimed not just at Ecology but also at the Washington Legislature and then-Gov. Christine Gregoire. That is the picture that emerges from recent interviews as well as government documents obtained by InvestigateWest under the Washington Public Records Law.
The problem lies in Ecology’s estimate of how much fish people eat. The lower the amount, the more water pollution Ecology can legally allow. So by assuming that people eat the equivalent of just one fish meal per month, Ecology is able to set less stringent pollution limits.
Meanwhile, citing the health benefits of fish, the state Department of Health advises people to eat fish twice a week, eight times as often as the official estimate of actual consumption. The state knows that some members of Indian tribes, immigrants and other fishermen consume locally caught seafood even more often than that and are therefore at greater risk of cancer, neurological damage and other maladies.
The Boeing Co. looms large in this story. In June 2012, Boeing said if Ecology went ahead with plans to make fish safer to eat, it would “cost the company hundreds of millions of dollars and severely hamper its ability to increase production in Renton and make future expansion elsewhere in the state cost prohibitive,” according to a Gregoire aide’s reconstruction of a conversation with a Boeing executive that month.
In July 2012, Ecology announced it would not go forward with a new rule to adjust the fish-eating estimate as planned. Instead the agency launched a “stakeholder process” that would delay any new rules for at least two years. Last week that process plodded on in Spokane, where state and local government officials and others spent more than three hours discussing the many contaminants that for years have prompted official state warnings against eating Washington fish too regularly.
“All we’ve seen is delay,” said Bart Mihailovich of the Spokane Riverkeeper environmental group, one of several that have refused to participate in the new series of meetings. “Why are we going back and doing what was already done?”
At the meeting in Spokane Thursday, a representative of Indian tribes called Ecology’s conduct “a betrayal” and explained that the tribes are boycotting the current process because it is unnecessary.
“Our tribal leadership’s main responsibility is simply to protect our people,” said Marc Gauthier, a representative of the Upper Columbia United Tribes, before leaving the meeting. “It comes down to that basic human desire to protect your family.”
Ecology had at least one other false start in fixing the rules, back in the mid-1990s, an effort that petered out even before a rule change was proposed, said Melissa Gildersleeve, the Ecology manager overseeing the current stakeholder process. That followed a 1994 study by the Columbia River Intertribal Fish Commission that documented how the national estimate of one fish meal per month was greatly and regularly exceeded by some members of Indian tribes.
While who eats how much contaminated fish is a slippery and much-debated corner of science, few of the parties involved in the current dispute in Washington contend that the current fish-consumption rate accurately reflects the true amount eaten, especially by some groups such as members of Indian tribes, subsistence fishermen and immigrants. The figure came from a 1973-74 federal study that asked consumers to fill our “food diaries” for three days, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
GWYNETH ROBERTS/Lincoln Journal Star 1491s member Bobby Wilson (center) dances for the camera as Native Youth Leadership Symposium Participants (rear) watch during production of a public service announcement video Tuesday, April 2, 2013, at Morrill Hall.
The guerrilla Native filmmakers and comedy troupe came to Lincoln on Tuesday to help participants of the Sovereign Native Youth Leadership program shoot a video. The Nebraska Commission on Indian Affairs hosted the 1491s’ visit and sponsors the youth program — high school students from Nebraska’s four tribes learning to be leaders.
Last week, to prepare for the 1491s’ visit, the students brainstormed ideas. But on Tuesday, the five members of the 1491s struggle to get students to share them.
Goldtooth, one of the group’s founders, tells students the filmmakers are there to help them find their voice.
“You dictate the direction,” he says.
Ryan Red Corn, an Osage member of the 1491s, shares the story of a young woman they met at a Native boarding school who told them about briefly escaping the school to retrieve berries from a nearby tree. The 1491s made a video about it.
The 1491s have lampooned everything from the movie “The Last of the Mohicans” to powwow emcees, and they’ve gotten hundreds of thousands of hits on YouTube.
Despite their popularity, at least two Native students haven’t seen their work.
As the morning wears on, the students begin opening up, a little at a time.
Two brothers from Winnebago speak about their dad, who once struggled with alcoholism but quit after his children were born. They talk about losing their uncle to cirrhosis, a liver disease prevalent in alcoholics.
“Top that,” student Skyler Walker says, daring the others to beat his story and eliciting laughter.
So how does a mixed bag of comedians and filmmakers get shy Native students to open up? Red Corn says it’s important to make them laugh and see themselves as important.
The 1491s spend much of Tuesday making each other laugh, poking fun at Red Corn for being half white and Goldtooth for enjoying food too much.
Eventually, they begin teasing the students, including Skyler and his brother Max, who are half Ho-Chunk and half white. The boys call themselves “half chunks.”
“Half chunk 1 and half chunk 2,” the 1491s call them.
Then they turn on each other: “Osage sounds like a drunk person speaking Dakota,” Goldtooth says to Red Corn.
But then, just a little, the tone of their conversation shifts.
As he talks about his love of gourd dancing in the Omaha tribal tradition, student Marco Ramos cuts short a conversation between Red Corn and comedian Bobby Wilson.
“Quit holding hands and pay attention,” he says, as the room erupts in applause and laughter.
Later at lunch, Scott Shafer of the Nebraska Commission on Indian Affairs describes how difficult it has been getting the students to open up to the presenters they have heard since the program began its second year this past fall. So often, students have struggled to connect to policymakers and professionals, he says.
That wasn’t the case Tuesday as the students and the 1491s developed ideas for their video on alcoholism.
One student describes adults who tell her not to drink but who then drink themselves.
Somewhere in the room, an idea flickers.
Filmmaker Sterlin Harjo, who has directed several movies and documentaries, offers an idea that involves the students making the video’s viewers believe they were talking about using drugs and alcohol.
“It helps me forget my worries,” Cheyenne Gottula, an Oglala who attends Lincoln High School, says before the camera. “My mom’s the one who got me into it.”
Then, the reveal.
“I like playing volleyball.”
Reach Kevin Abourezk at 402-473-7225 or kabourezk@journalstar.com.
70 sacred Hopi masks that are set to be auctioned in France are estimated to be worth $1 million. The New York Times reports, the auction is set for April 12th at Néret-Minet auction house. Néret-Minet states that the items were legally obtained over 30 years ago and that this auction should be considered a homage to the Hopi Indians and they should be happy so many people want to understand and analyze their civilization.
“The Hopi Tribe is just disgusted with the continued offensive marketing of Hopi culture.” The Hopi Tribe has attempted to contact the auction house with no luck and has sought legal council on possible ways to bring the masks back to their rightful owners, The Hopi Tribe.
Source: FDA Consumer Health Information www.fda.gov
Is your medicine cabinet filled with expired drugs or medications you no longer use? How should you dispose of them?
Most drugs can be thrown in the household trash, but consumers should take certain precautions before tossing them out, according to the Food and Drug Administra- tion (FDA). A few drugs should be flushed down the toi- let. And a growing number of community-based “take- back” programs offer another safe disposal alternative.
Guidelines for Drug Disposal
FDA worked with the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) to develop the first consumer guidance for proper disposal of prescription drugs. Issued by ONDCP in February 2007 and updated in October 2009, the federal guidelines are summarized here:
Follow any specific disposal instructions on the drug label or patient information that accompanies the medication. Do not flush prescription drugs down the toilet unless this information specifically instructs you to do so.
Take advantage of community drug take-back programs that allow the public to bring unused drugs to a central location for proper disposal. Call your city or county government’s household trash and recycling service (see blue pages in phone book) to see if a take-back program is available in your community. The Drug Enforcement Administration, working with state and local law enforcement agencies, is sponsoring National Prescription Drug Take Back Days (www.deadiversion.usdoj.gov) throughout the United States.
If no instructions are given on the drug label and no take-back program is available in your area, throw the drugs in the household trash, but first:
° Take them out of their original containers and mix them with an undesirable substance, such as used coffee grounds or kitty litter. The medication will be less appealing to children and pets, and unrecognizable to peo- ple who may intentionally go through your trash.
° Put them in a sealable bag, empty can, or other container to prevent the medication from leaking or breaking out of a garbage bag.
FDA’s Deputy Director of the Office of Compliance Ilisa Bernstein, Pharm.D., J.D., offers some additional tips:
Before throwing out a medicine container, scratch out all identifying information on the prescription label to make it unreadable. This will help protect your identity and the privacy of your personal health information.
Do not give medications to friends. Doctors prescribe drugs based on a person’s specific symptoms and medical history. A drug that works for you could be dangerous for someone else.
When in doubt about proper disposal, talk to your pharmacist.
Bernstein says the same disposal methods for prescription drugs could apply to over-the-counter drugs as well.
Why the Precautions?
Disposal instructions on the label are part of FDA’s “risk mitigation” strategy, says Capt. Jim Hunter, R.Ph., M.P.H., senior program manager on FDA’s Controlled Substance Staff. When a drug contains instructions to flush it down the toilet, he says, it’s because FDA, working with the manufacturer, has determined this method to be the most appropriate route of disposal that presents the least risk to safety.
Drugs such as powerful narcotic pain relievers and other controlled sub- stances carry instructions for flushing to reduce the danger of unintentional use or overdose and illegal abuse.
For example, the fentanyl patch, an adhesive patch that delivers a potent pain medicine through the skin, comes with instructions to flush used or left- over patches. Too much fentanyl can cause severe breathing problems and lead to death in babies, children, pets, and even adults, especially those who have not been prescribed the drug. “Even after a patch is used, a lot of the drug remains in the patch,” says Hunter, “so you wouldn’t want to throw something in the trash that contains a powerful and potentially dangerous narcotic that could harm others.”
Environmental Concerns
Despite the safety reasons for flushing drugs, some people are questioning the practice because of concerns about trace levels of drug residues found in surface water, such as rivers and lakes, and in some community drinking water supplies. However, the main way drug residues enter water systems is by people taking medications and then naturally passing them through their bodies, says Raanan Bloom, Ph.D., an environmental assessment expert in FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research. “Most drugs are not completely absorbed or metabolized by the body, and enter the environment after passing through waste water treatment plants.”
A company that wants FDA to approve its drug must submit an application package to the agency. FDA requires, as part of the application package, an assessment of how the drug’s use would affect the environment. Some drug applications are excluded from the assessment requirement, says Bloom, based on previous agency actions.
“For those drugs for which environmental assessments have been required, there has been no indication of environmental effects due to
flushing,” says Bloom. In addition, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, scientists to date have found no evidence of adverse human health effects from pharmaceutical residues in the environment.
Nonetheless, FDA does not want to add drug residues into water systems unnecessarily, says Hunter. The agency reviewed its drug labels to identify products with disposal directions recommending flushing or disposal down the sink. This continuously revised listing can be found at FDA’s Web page on Disposal of Unused Medicines (www.fda.gov/Drugs/ResourcesForYou/ Consumers/BuyingUsingMedicineSafely/ EnsuringSafeUseofMedicine/Safe DisposalofMedicines/ucm186187.htm).
Another environmental concern lies with inhalers used by people who have asthma or other breathing problems, such as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Traditionally, many inhalers have contained chlorofluorocarbons (CFC’s), a propellant that damages the protective ozone layer. The CFC inhalers are being phased out and replaced with more environ- mentally friendly inhalers.
Depending on the type of product and where you live, inhalers and aerosol products may be thrown into household trash or recyclables, or may be considered hazardous waste and require special handling. Read the handling instructions on the label, as some inhalers should not be punctured or thrown into a fire or incinerator. To ensure safe disposal, contact your local trash and recycling facility.
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