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In his twenty-four years as the director of the Tate Gallery, in London, Nicholas Serota has been widely acclaimed—and often vilified—for changing the culture of Great Britain. The establishment, the press, and the numberless upright citizens who used to regard modern art as a joke, a foreign-born absurdity practiced by incompetents or charlatans, now embrace it with almost unseemly fervor. Tate Modern, the Tate's building for twentieth- and twenty-first-century art, which opened in 2000 in a derelict power station on the south side of the Thames, draws about five million visitors a year, making it the world's most heavily attended modern-art museum. Although Serota, the driving force behind Tate Modern, wouldn't think of claiming credit for this turnaround, his primary role is acknowledged by virtually all his professional colleagues. "Over the last thirty years, Nick has been by far the most important player in making the British comfortable with contemporary art, really engaged with it and eager to see it," Neil MacGregor, the director of the British Museum, said recently. Larry Gagosian, the New York superdealer, whose global empire now has two London branches, considers Serota a master strategist. "Nick really caught the wave," Gagosian told me. "He saw the possibilities, the wealth coming in, and he kind of harnessed that. A lot of other people were involved, but to me it really looks like the house that Nick built."
On a weekday morning in March of this year, the permanent-collection galleries at Tate Modern had a festive, holiday ambience. More than half the people who come here are under thirty-five, and the average that day appeared to be even younger. They drifted around in pairs or small groups—hardly anyone was alone—chatting convivially, taking pictures of one another with their smartphones, pausing now and then to look at a work of art. Eight schoolchildren with sketch pads sat in a semicircle around Umberto Boccioni's Futurist sculpture of a striding figure. On the opposite wall hung Roy Lichtenstein's terrific "Whaam!," with its comic-book fighter plane engulfed in a red-and-yellow explosion. There is no admission fee (the museum charges only for special exhibitions), and the young people rightly feel that the place and the art on view belong to them—even though, these days, less than forty per cent of the Tate's funding comes from the government. I mentioned this impression to Serota an hour later, when we met for lunch in the museum's top-floor restaurant. "We did a survey of about forty artists before we began this," he said, in his calmly engaging way. "We thought that if we could make spaces in which artists liked to show their work, then the public would also respond to them—we wanted spaces that the public would feel comfortable in. For example, it was a very deliberate decision to make this a good restaurant, but not a high-end one."
Serota speaks precisely, looking straight at you through rimless eyeglasses. Sixty-six years old, he is two inches over six feet tall, trim and very fit in an impeccable white shirt and dark suit. Some people find his manner headmasterish, but they're not paying attention. Everybody, even total strangers, calls him Nick. He keeps his watch set ten minutes fast, to avoid being late for appointments, and when he hears or says something funny, as he does quite often, his mouth opens wide in a soundless laugh.
From our table by a window, we could look straight across the Thames to St. Paul's Cathedral. In 1993, when the Tate's trustees were looking at sites in London for a separate museum of international modern and contemporary art, Serota knew better than to bring them to Southwark by the direct route, crossing the Thames a few miles upstream and then navigating the choked and winding back streets. "We put everyone in a minibus after a trustee meeting, and I made the driver go along the river, on the north side, until we got to St. Paul's, which of course they all knew. We stopped there, and I had them look through a gap between buildings, where you could see this power station across the river. That gave them a better sense of it."
What they saw was a huge, glowering brick monolith with massive walls and a three-hundred-and-twenty-five-foot chimney. Designed by Giles Gilbert Scott and completed in the early nineteen-sixties, the Bankside power station had been decommissioned in 1981, when rising oil prices made it uneconomical. The surrounding area, where brothels, bearbaiting, and Shakespeare's Globe once flourished (a replica of the Globe, which opened in 1997, is visible from Tate Modern), was a manufacturing center in the nineteenth century, but the factories eventually moved elsewhere, poverty settled in, and Southwark became one of London's blighted boroughs. Scott's building had its admirers, who were trying to keep it from being torn down by developers, and in 1993 Francis Carnwath, the Tate's deputy director and also a member of the London Advisory Committee for English Heritage, was invited to visit the site—which he had been attempting to do for some time. "He came back that afternoon," Serota recalled, "and said someone there, an architectural historian, had suggested that the Tate should take it over. Francis told him it was far too big, but I asked him to describe it to me, and it sounded more and more interesting, so that night I went home via the Bankside power station. At the time, it was cut off from the river by high walls, but there was a walkway by the river, as there still is, and I stood by the chimney and paced out to the end of the building, and realized that the footprint was about the same as the Tate's."
A week or so later, Serota got a key and went inside. The interior, abandoned for many years, was a vast, virtually empty space for very large machinery—turbines, boilers, generators, and the like—a space, he realized, in which you could build anything you wanted, on a scale that no other site in central London could accommodate. The trustees had several possible sites on their list at the time, but when Serota brought them to Bankside he was pretty sure this was it. ("You don't witness Nick persuading people," Neil MacGregor said. "You simply see the result.") A contract to buy the power station was signed early in 1994, the year John Major's Conservative government set up the National Lottery to fund projects for the millennium. Serota's politically astute arguments—that the project could help generate the redevelopment of Southwark, just as Royal Festival Hall had done in the nineteen-fifties for the South Bank area to the west of it; and that London was the only major capital city that didn't have a museum of modern art—produced a fifty-million-pound matching grant from the lottery. "That left us with eighty-five million to raise for the building," he told me. In England, where the big museums are government-owned and funded, eighty-five million pounds was stupendously more private money than had ever been raised for such a purpose. "It was rather foolhardy to try," Serota recalled. "There were periods when I had to keep saying we were making real progress, and we weren't." The money eventually came in, though, and the Tate, a beloved but somewhat parochial institution through much of its history, became a global phenomenon.
When the Tate Gallery opened, in 1897, on the site of the old Millbank penitentiary, on the north bank of the Thames, it was to be a museum of British art. In 1917, however, the trustees of the much older National Gallery, which shows Western European painting from the thirteenth through the nineteenth centuries, decided that some late-nineteenth-century works were too modern for its purpose—the list included Degas, Monet, Manet, and several others—and that these, along with later examples of international modern art, would go to the Tate. Coping with this dual responsibility has never been a simple matter, considering the long-standing British belief that art stopped with J. M. W. Turner.
Many people in the London art community thought that the Tate should show modern British art but not the foreign kind; others castigated it for doing too little about international modern art, and for virtually ignoring important British modernists such as Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud. The Tate either passed on or failed to acquire many important works it could have had, and when it finally started buying American Pop and minimal art, in the sixties and seventies, Britain's figurative artists complained bitterly about being marginalized. It has never really been explained why the British could accept modernism in literature, theatre, dance, and (to a lesser degree) music but not in art. The Tate's quandary over something that most Britons and many British art critics found ridiculous or offensive was not fully addressed, at any rate, until Serota came aboard, in 1988.
From his office on the ground floor of the Lodge, an annex to the original building on Millbank, Serota now oversees the operations of four museums, each of which has its own director—Tate Britain, as the first one is now called; Tate Modern; Tate Liverpool, which opened just before he took over; and Tate St. Ives, in Cornwall. Anyone walking by can look through the window and see him at his desk, in a small, austerely furnished room whose only decoration, when I met him there the morning after our lunch in March, was a pair of framed prints by the late Richard Hamilton. Serota and his cheerfully overworked staff were in the final stages of planning the Tate's program for the Cultural Olympiad, an ambitious series of arts events to complement this summer's Olympic Games, in London. Among the events still to come were Damien Hirst's first major retrospective exhibition, opening on April 4th, at Tate Modern, and, on July 18th, the public début of two huge, circular spaces that once housed the power plant's oil tanks. The new areas will be used for live performances, large installations, and films, and their opening completes the first stage of Tate Modern's two-hundred-and-fifteen-million-pound expansion program, to be completed by 2016.
I asked Serota the obvious question: Why does Tate Modern need to get bigger? "For several reasons," he replied. The sleeves of his white shirt were neatly rolled up, his jacket slung over a chair. "First, we have five million visitors in a building that was designed for two, and we need more space and also different kinds of spaces—for example, the raw, industrial spaces which so many artists prefer to use now." Like other decisions here, this reflects Serota's artist-centered approach. Few museums anticipated the proliferation of large-scale installations or the rapid growth of live and filmed performance work by artists during the past decade, and Tate Modern has now positioned itself as a primary showcase for these trends. One of the reasons the Swiss architectural firm Herzog and de Meuron won the competition to convert Bankside, Serota told me, was that they seemed to have the closest sympathy with artists. (They are also doing the expansion.) Other architects had wanted to fill the immense space now known as Turbine Hall with floors and partitions, but Herzog and de Meuron proposed leaving it empty—as an entrance to the building, and as a huge, new kind of exhibition space that artists would figure out how to use.
There is much talk these days about the changing role of museums in world culture. The opening of the Centre Pompidou, in Paris, in 1977, had shown that fresh approaches to the museum experience could attract a much bigger, younger, and more varied museum audience. In the years since then, an all-encompassing, media-based popular culture has eroded the reverential attitude that people used to have toward museums, and the new electronic media are changing the ways we process information. "The museum is becoming something else, and we don't know what it is yet," Chris Dercon, the current director of Tate Modern, said to me. "The main problem is what to expect from these audiences, which are larger and larger, and have different demands. We want to make sure they can talk back to us." Instead of passively accepting the interpretations of curators and other expert authorities, as Serota puts it, "people have got used to pulling stuff off the Web and assembling their own picture of the world. I think they're looking for a more interactive experience at museums. We have many more people than we'd anticipated who want to hear lectures and ask questions, or just spend time here, looking at art, buying a book, having coffee with a friend. Of course, there has to be an underlying feeling that you will experience great art. If we don't put on great exhibitions, people don't come."
At this point, we might ask how Nick Serota, with his innate shyness and reserve, became such a master of public persuasion. He was born in 1946, and he and his younger sister, Judith, grew up in Hampstead, in North London. Their father, Stanley Serota, was a civil engineer, the son of a Jewish cabinetmaker who had immigrated from Russia in 1912. Beatrice Serota, Stanley's wife, was a committed and vigorous politician, whose service on various local government councils led, in 1967, to her being named to the House of Lords, with the title of Baroness Serota. (Life peerages were introduced in Britain in 1958; until then, the honor had been hereditary.) A year later, she became Minister of Health in Harold Wilson's government. The historian Simon Schama, whose mother knew Beatrice well, remembers her as "a real figure in the Labour end of Anglo-Jewish eminences, a world that was very important in Britain and London." Serota concedes that it caused his mother "some heartache that I apparently gave up interest in the things that were dearest to her heart."
He had thought about a political career, when he was head boy and captain of the rugby team at Haberdashers' Aske's day school, just north of London, but at Christ's College in Cambridge, where he went in 1965 to study economics, his growing interest in the visual arts led him to a remarkable teacher in the art-history department named Michael Jaffe, a Rubens specialist who eventually became the director of the Fitzwilliam Museum there. "Jaffe was a connoisseur rather than a theoretician," Serota recalled. "He cared passionately about looking, and attending to what you see." In Serota's second year at Cambridge, he switched from economics to art history. "I had no idea where it would take me, but I thought if I spent two years with art history it would probably stay with me in one way or another for the rest of my life, and I'd end up with a degree that I could apply to a whole range of disciplines. Fortunately, it didn't just stay with me; it got hold of me."
Although Italian Renaissance painting was the main focus of his Cambridge years, Serota found himself becoming more and more interested in modern and contemporary art. Both were pretty much off the map in Cambridge, and barely detectable in London. Serota spent many hours in the Cambridge home of Jim and Helen Ede, a retired couple whose modest collection of works by Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth, and other British modernists gave him his first sense of how works of art could charge and dominate the space around them. He began making frequent visits to the Whitechapel Gallery, in London's East End, where a venturesome director named Bryan Robertson showed emerging British artists and imported exhibitions of Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns. The Whitechapel and the Institute of Contemporary Arts, in a space off Piccadilly, along with two or three commercial galleries, were the only places in London to see recent art, which most of the London reviewers could be counted on to mock and revile.
After graduating from Cambridge, in 1968, Serota took some time off before his postgraduate studies, at the Courtauld Institute. He joined a newly organized group called Young Friends of the Tate, and promptly became its chairman. "The Young Friends didn't last very long," he recalled. "We began running workshops for disadvantaged people across the river, and got some young artists and art students to make shows. The Tate's trustees were anxious that they might be seen as endorsing these shows. They said we must cease, and we all resigned." At the Courtauld, his adviser suggested that he do his graduate thesis on William Blake's engraver. Serota said that he would rather write a minor piece on a major artist than vice versa, and that he really wanted to work on Turner—"specifically on his visits to the Alps at different times in his life." He spent six months researching the drawings from those periods, and the artist's various itineraries. It was not, one gathers, an entirely happy experience. "A Turner scholar later told me that some of the things I had discovered were not quite right," he said. "That was as close to academe as I ever got."
In 1970, he went to work for the Arts Council of Great Britain, a government-funded body that supports cultural groups throughout the country. The council had leased the Hayward Gallery, on the South Bank, as its London showroom, and in 1971 Serota was assigned to help David Sylvester, an acutely perceptive writer and critic, install a show of Miró sculptures there. "Working with David," Serota said, "was a pretty special experience. I learned not to use a tape measure when installing, for starters. Use your eye." Serota helped install several more shows at the Hayward, and this is where he met Angela Beveridge, a former dancer with the Royal Ballet. She was running the bookstore, and trying to re-start her life after a serious foot injury and the two gruelling operations it required had ended her ballet career. "Nick was tall and thin," she remembers, "with quite long golden hair, rather Caravaggio-looking. Incredibly shy and said so little—he didn't communicate easily."
They got married in 1973, and moved to Oxford, where Serota had been named director of the Oxford Museum of Modern Art. It had no connection to the university. The funding was inadequate, and the rented premises were in bad shape. The Serotas, with help from an undergraduate volunteer, Sandy Nairne, who stayed on after graduation to become a poorly paid assistant director, spent the first few weeks repainting the interior themselves, and sewing together sisal mats to cover the floor. "Art became my new way of life," Angela remembers. "I had such an intuitive belief in Nick's vision and his gift."
Minimal art appealed very strongly to Serota. "It was the art I first felt a real identification with," he said. "It was about taking art out of the studio and into the world." At Oxford, Serota and his small staff presented difficult, austere art by the American minimalists Carl Andre, Sol LeWitt, Donald Judd, and Dan Flavin. They also did the first retrospective exhibition of paintings by Britain's Howard Hodgkin, and a major show of drawings by Joseph Beuys, the German artist and teacher, whose shamanistic alchemy of painting, sculpture, performance, sociology, and politics was virtually unknown in England at the time. People came out from London to see the shows they were doing, and Serota, whose success in developing such a complex and ambitious program had more or less done away with his reticence, started to be talked about in the London art world. When the director's job at the publicly funded Whitechapel Gallery was offered to him, in 1976, he was ready for it.
In his twelve years at the Whitechapel, Serota challenged, electrified, and infuriated the London art world in about equal measure. Three directors had come and gone since Bryan Robertson left, in 1969, and the Whitechapel had been more or less supplanted by the Hayward and the I.C.A. as a place to see cutting-edge art. Serota's exhibitions, many of which he curated and installed himself, changed all that. He introduced his audience to the German neo-expressionists Anselm Kiefer and Georg Baselitz—at a time when all things German were still anathema to the English—and showed minimalist and postmodern American artists (Bruce Nauman, Eva Hesse) and a host of British nonconformists, including the duo Gilbert and George. The London critics condemned virtually all of it. "There were people who just hated Nick," Richard Dorment, a longtime critic for the Daily Telegraph, told me. "And the forces of reaction then were very, very powerful." Brian Sewell, the Evening Standard 's reigning reactionary, identified what he called "the Serota tendency," which was to support any form of what Sewell considered pseudo art (conceptual, video, performance, installation) at the expense of traditional painting and sculpture. In 1981, though, when Serota teamed with Norman Rosenthal and Christos M. Joachimedes to organize an exhibition called "A New Spirit in Painting," at the Royal Academy, with works by thirty-eight artists, including Willem de Kooning, Francis Bacon, and Gerhard Richter, the critical outcry was near-apoplectic. "Only the sheer scale of its triviality is breathtaking," the Sunday Times' Marina Vaizey complained, and Bernard Levin, the Times' critic, advised readers that "if you really want to know why most of the population would never dream of entering an art gallery you will find the answer roughly half-way along Piccadilly on the northern side." Sewell and others thought Serota was out to destroy British culture. They were right to worry, because his Whitechapel shows drew larger and larger crowds, and had an immediate impact on London's art schools. Seeing Philip Guston's late paintings at the Whitechapel in 1982 was a game-changer for Peter Doig, a student at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design at the time. "No one in my generation knew that work," he said, "and all of a sudden here was this older artist doing great, great painting. It was like catching a bad rash—we called it the Guston rash. Seemed funny at the time, but that was the power of those exhibitions."
Sheena Wagstaff, who had worked for Serota at Oxford, joined his staff at the Whitechapel in 1980. "Nick was very focussed and very ambitious," she said. "He was also very clever at getting the best out of his team, by being consciously counterintuitive. He'd throw out a provocative statement, and then reverse one hundred eighty degrees and throw out another one. He nurtured and encouraged critical thinking, and of course he was totally in control." In those years, the Serotas and their two young daughters lived in a tiny flat in Hampstead. "I was like a single mother with Anya and Beth," Angela said last spring, "because of what was happening with Nick. We had very little money, and he was working long, long hours, and travelling a great deal. He was a wonderful, loving father to both the girls, but a rather long-distance one."
The Whitechapel was physically falling apart—water pouring in from roof leaks with every rainstorm—and in 1984 Serota closed it down for a complete renovation. The work took more than a year. During that period, Serota addressed the gallery's nonexistent endowment by organizing an auction of works by contemporary artists. Every artist he approached came through with a significant work, and the auction, in 1987, raised £1.3 million. This triumph was certainly known to the trustees of the Tate when they began, three months later, to interview prospective candidates for the director's job there. (The short list included Serota; Norman Rosenthal, the exhibitions secretary at the Royal Academy; and John Elderfield, the director of the Department of Drawings at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.) "Do I think that was the reason I got the job?" Serota asked me. "I hope not. But it certainly made the trustees aware that I was prepared to get my hands dirty, so it probably helped. Of course it did."
What impressed the trustees even more was Serota's seven-year plan for the Tate, which he and the other candidates had been asked to submit. Serota laid out the steps to be taken with clarity, boldness, and concision, single-spaced on two sides of an A4 sheet of paper (the standard European size, slightly longer than the American), under the title "Grasping the Nettle." The paper's conclusion read, in part, "The Tate is loved, but not sufficiently respected."
Moving from the Whitechapel to a national institution, where he would be subject to changing moods and policies in Whitehall, was never a problem for Serota, whose mother had been so committed to public service. His critics in the press were predictably appalled. Peter Fuller, the editor of Modern Painters, warned that Serota had "neither the experience, nor . . . the inclination" to maintain a collection of British and modern art.
Nine months elapsed between his appointment, in 1987, and his taking office, in 1988, and during that time, Serota told me, Alan Bowness, the outgoing director, refused to let him have any contact with the staff. "Alan said, 'You'll come to see me once a month,' " Serota recalls, " 'and I'll tell you what's happening.' " According to Bowness, "It was just normal practice at the time for him to have contact with the director, not with the staff." Bowness, who was the son-in-law of the artist Barbara Hepworth, actually liked modern art and had done what he could to build the Tate's modern collection. Some of his trustees were frustrated, however, by his traditionalist attitude toward outside fund-raising. Bowness believed it was the government's job to support the Tate and other museums, as it always had. The Tate's purchase grant under the Thatcher government was the same as it had been in 1981, though, and with art prices rising inexorably, several board members wanted to go after funds from corporate and private sources. One of them, the property developer Peter Palumbo, had criticized the Tate's administration in a newspaper interview. Bowness had threatened to resign, and a lot of bad feeling had built up. The trustees could have asked him to stay on after he reached retirement age, at sixty, but they didn't.
When Serota took over, in September, 1988, he was forty-two, one of the youngest directors in the Tate's history. One month earlier, a second-year art student at Goldsmiths College named Damien Hirst had organized an exhibition of work by himself and his fellow-students in an abandoned warehouse on the London docks. Hirst, a born entrepreneur, talked Serota, Norman Rosenthal, and other key people into seeing the show, taking them there himself in a taxi. "Nick said, 'I don't need a taxi,' " Hirst told me in March. (Serota usually prefers to take the Underground.) "He came and looked round the show, and said, 'I'm sure I'll be seeing you again.' " The exhibition, called "Freeze," marked the début of the Young British Artists, or Y.B.A.s, as they were soon known, whose impact on the London art scene would be roughly comparable to that of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones on the music world twenty years earlier. For the first time ever, new British art—epitomized in the public mind in 1992 by Hirst's fourteen-foot tiger shark in a tank of formaldehyde—became internationally famous.
In his first week at the Tate, Serota gave a big party for artists—clear notice that the museum would be showing more contemporary work. He also called a meeting of all the "keepers," as English curators were called then, and did something that Frances Morris, who had joined the Tate a few months before his appointment, found extraordinary. "We sat at a table, and he asked if anyone had a project they would like to do. Before, most exhibitions here were proposed by outside curators and then worked on by a special exhibitions team. After Nick came, we all started making exhibitions. The Tate became a much more open place. We were more ready to question what we did, and to take risks." One of the early risks was deciding to rehang the permanent collection. There would be periodic rehangings, Serota said; museums should offer "a series of arguments, rather than simply a collection of pictures."
Curators found themselves working much more directly with living artists. For the time being, though, Serota was in no haste to engage with Damien Hirst, Sarah Lucas, Marc Quinn, and the other Y.B.A.s. Charles Saatchi, a major collector and advertising mogul whose public-relations services helped Margaret Thatcher win the 1979 election, had sold his collection of avant-garde, mostly American art after the stock-market crash in 1989, and started buying work by the Freeze generation. He put up the money for Hirst to make his first shark sculpture, and showed it in 1992 at his gallery, on Boundary Road in St. John's Wood—a former paint factory, imaginatively redesigned by the architect Max Gordon, which had become London's premier showcase for contemporary art. Saatchi had a great eye, and a reputation for manipulating the art market. A few years earlier, under Bowness, the Tate had been heavily criticized for doing shows on the American artists Julian Schnabel and Jennifer Bartlett in which many of the works were borrowed from Saatchi—works that would gain in value because of being shown at the Tate. For that reason, according to Serota, "the Tate was not as active in promoting the Y.B.A.s as we might have been." In 1995, however, a jury chaired by Serota gave Hirst the Turner Prize (he had been short-listed for it three years earlier), and in 1996 the Tate acquired his "Pharmacy," a room-size installation of colorfully stocked medical cabinets. Most of the Y.B.A.s are well represented there now, and Hirst's current retrospective, at Tate Modern, has been drawing four thousand visitors a day—along with the usual complement of scathing reviews. "I have no doubt at all that Hirst's early work is very important," Serota told me in May. "Time will tell whether it survives, but I believe it will."
The bias against contemporary art was breaking down, and the Tate had become an active force in the new cultural climate. Dennis Stevenson, the chairman of its board of trustees, was just a year older than Serota. A Scottish-born entrepreneur with a gift for imaginative thinking, he had joined the board in 1989 and was simultaneously named its chairman, but Margaret Thatcher, who didn't care for his leftist views, rejected the appointment. (Government approval is required for Tate board members.) That weekend, Serota spoke to one of his trustees, who had a word with Tim Bell, Thatcher's media adviser. Bell told the P.M., not quite truthfully, that Stevenson's views had "mellowed," and also suggested that having him chair the Tate might keep him off other, more powerful boards. On Monday, Serota was notified that Thatcher had withdrawn her veto. "That was one of the best things I've ever done for the Tate," Serota told me. Stevenson worked to strengthen Serota's authority vis-à-vis the board, especially regarding acquisitions, and their close working relationship with Alex Beard, the Tate's young financial director, turned the Tate into a modern institution. "The Tate became a much better run, better organized Tate," Stevenson told me. "Nick is very brave in doing what he thinks is right. He wasn't naturally good at asking for money, but he's grown much better at that."
Faced by rising costs, skyrocketing art prices, and stagnant or declining government support, the Tate and other museums were turning to the private sector. "Initially, we went after corporations, to sponsor exhibitions and other projects," Serota told me, "but when it came to the capital campaign for Tate Modern it had to be from individuals and foundations." Britain, unlike the United States, does not allow most individuals to take tax write-offs for gifts to museums. However, the institution can reclaim the tax paid on the donated amount, substantially increasing the value of the gift. Serota and Stevenson, working together "like a couple of pirates," as Angela described it, made very effective use of this provision. "A significant proportion of the eighty-five million pounds we raised for Tate Modern came from foundations and trusts established by very rich people—Sainsburys, Westons, Vivien Duffield," Serota told me.
Following his own recommendations in "Grasping the Nettle," Serota competed, much more aggressively than his predecessors had, for works of modern and contemporary art. He brought in key works by Joseph Beuys, Lucian Freud, Gerhard Richter, Richard Serra, Francis Bacon, David Hockney, and Damien Hirst, many of them by donation, and he led a fund drive in 2007 that raised £4.95 million for Turner's late watercolor "The Blue Rigi," an acknowledged masterpiece that would have left the country if the drive had failed. Shortly before Tate Modern opened, Serota asked Charles Saatchi to consider giving it ten important works from his own collection. Saatchi countered with an offer of eighty works, "only one or two of which," as Serota described them to me, "you, today, would recognize." Serota and some members of his board considered this a transparent effort to make the Tate validate his judgment. The board turned him down, and Saatchi, who declined to be interviewed by me, is reported to have gone around afterward saying that he'd offered his collection to the Tate and the Tate had refused it. His name and his signal achievement as an art patron, which Serota and many others had hoped to make a significant part of Tate Modern, are nowhere in evidence there today.
Serota has somehow found time—except during the frantic years leading up to Tate Modern's opening—to organize and co-curate shows at Tate Britain or at Tate Modern by Donald Judd, Cy Twombly, Howard Hodgkin, Gerhard Richter, and several other artists. "There are things I don't do," he told me, "so that I can go on being a curator." It's hard to imagine what those things are. He spends at least two-thirds of his time on administration and fund-raising, by his own estimate. Although the Tate now gets sixty per cent of its funds from private sources, ticket sales for exhibitions, and other means, it must still negotiate with government politicians for the rest. He has dealt with five different Prime Ministers. "You tend to use different arguments," Serota explained. "Mrs. Thatcher was very keen on an entrepreneurial attitude, and bringing in private money. Tony Blair's government was more interested in access and education. Our public funding increased a little from 1997 to about 2003, but since then all the national museums have been cut back, and we have to make it up in private funds, or cut our program a bit."
The only thing he's given up, so far as I can see, is being chairman of the Turner Prize jury. (Since 2007, it has been chaired by the director of Tate Britain or Tate Liverpool.) The Turner Prize was established by Bowness in 1984, as an annual award given by the Tate for achievement in the arts during the previous year, and at first it could go to writers, critics, and museum curators as well as to artists. Nobody paid much attention to it until 1991, when Serota persuaded his fellow-jurors to limit it to artists who were under fifty, either British or working in Britain—whereupon the press began treating it as a major and hugely controversial news event. The anti-Serota press brigade erupted in rage when Rachel Whiteread won it, in 1993, and even more so when it went to Damien Hirst. Serota was damned as the mastermind, the "Trotsky of the arts" under whom, in Brian Sewell's enriched prose, "the Prize descends to the intellectual level of a freak show in a circus, and drags with it all the arts of western civilisation." The annual Turner Prize commotion, needless to say, has done much to promote interest in contemporary art.
A month before Damien Hirst's retrospective opened at Tate Modern, in early April, hundreds of his spot paintings filled all eleven Gagosian galleries worldwide, including the two in London. Gagosian gave a party for Hirst at the Arts Club on Dover Street, and invited an eclectic mix of artists, dealers, and big-money types, along with the sort of upper-class socialites who now want to be associated with contemporary art—people like David Cholmondely, the current Great Chamberlain, who walks backward before the Queen when she opens Parliament. Serota was there, after a full day that included speaking at a memorial for Lucian Freud, who died last July. Serota excels at this sort of thing. He went off by himself, on the morning of the event, and wrote a brief, evocative, highly personal tribute that compared Freud to "a bantam prize fighter in training—nippy, sinewy, always somehow poised for action." At the Arts Club that evening, I sat down with Serota at a table in the back room where Gagosian was entertaining Simon and Joyce Reuben, wealthy British collectors. Gagosian jokingly told Simon Reuben that Serota needed fifty million pounds to complete the Tate Modern's expansion project, and that Reuben should sell his boat and give it to him. "You can have your name on an oil tank," he added. Serota said, "You'll be known long after Larry is forgotten."
Serota lives with his second wife, Teresa Gleadowe, in a small, cozy house in King's Cross, North London. They have known each other since 1969, when she was reading art history at Cambridge and he was doing research there for his graduate thesis on Turner. Their paths crossed occasionally in later years, during which Teresa married, had two children (both girls, like his), and held several arts-related jobs. In the early nineties, she was the Tate's head of information, before moving to the Royal College of Art to lead its new program to train curators. Their previous marriages were ending by that time, and in 1997 Nick and Teresa were married. There was no number on their front door when I came by for afternoon tea—Teresa had pencilled a "9" on a piece of paper and taped it to the doorframe. Inside, the pictures on the walls were mostly prints or drawings or photographs by contemporary artists, some British and some not, all carefully chosen, but not for their commercial value. "We don't really buy art," Serota said.
Serota's friends agree that he has never had any interest in making money. His salary at the Tate for each of the past five years has been about a hundred and sixty thousand pounds, or around two hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars—at the upper level of civil-service rates in the U.K. but far below what he could expect at any large museum in the U.S. (In 1994, he was asked whether he would be willing to talk with the trustees of the Museum of Modern Art about the director's job there; he said no.) At six-forty-five every morning, he gets up and runs two miles, on the sidewalks in their neighborhood. When I mentioned to Teresa what his old friend and colleague Sandy Nairne had told me, that "nobody's ever seen him run," she laughed and said, "It's true—pretty much including me." They have a small vacation house by the sea in Cornwall, where Teresa spent summers when she was growing up. Both of them like sailing, but they don't own a boat. "He's a very good sailor," Teresa had told me earlier in the week, "although in certain circumstances I think I do some things better. When the wind is light and fluky, I can feel it better than he can. He gets exasperated. He wants to get on with it!"
The inauguration of Tate Modern, on May 11, 2000, was an all-day event. The Queen came in the morning, and appeared, to many of her subjects, unusually grumpy. "She got up on the platform in a mint-green dress and a matching hat, said, 'I declare the Tate Modern open,' and that was it," according to one Tate staffer. Serota concedes that the monarch did not appear to enjoy herself. "When she opened the Great Court at the British Museum, a few months later," he said, "she spoke for about ten or fifteen minutes about the virtues of the British Museum. On the other hand, she came. She didn't bring the Duke of Edinburgh. I saw him about two weeks earlier, and he made it clear that he would not be coming."
Thousands of people came to the public opening, the next day, and their reaction was quite different. "From the very first day, people were crazy about it," I was told by Michael Craig-Martin, an artist who had been one of Serota's first appointments to the Tate board as an artist-trustee. "Ordinary people felt very welcome. And there was this great thing—museums had been free in Britain for ages, but when Tate Modern opened there was all this in the press about how you can go and see this new wonder and it was absolutely free." "Now that White Van Man has approved London's new Tate Gallery," the Sun proclaimed, "it has the official blessing of the people"—deliverymen who drive white vans being the paper's current metaphor for working-class guys.
The crowds came, and kept on coming—5.2 million the first year. Serota and his team had planned for about two million, with a sharp drop after that, but attendance dropped only to 4.2 million the second year and then came right back, and it's hovered around five million ever since. (By comparison, the Museum of Modern Art, which charges for admission, gets about three million.) "There was a difficult period after the opening," Serota said. "Everyone was exhausted, and not quite sure what they'd got hold of with this monster child that was eating us." Lars Nittve, a soft-spoken Swede whom Serota had recruited in 1998 as Tate Modern's first director, left in 2001 to direct the Moderna Museet, in Stockholm, and for nearly two years Serota was the acting director—while continuing to supervise the three other Tates. He continued to work very closely with two people he had known and trusted since his days at the Oxford Museum: Sheena Wagstaff, who moved from Tate Britain to Tate Modern in 2001, to become its director of exhibitions; and Sandy Nairne, who since 1994 had been deeply involved in planning and structuring the new museum. Nairne had wanted to be the director of Tate Modern, but he didn't get the job, and in 2002 he left to become the director of the National Portrait Gallery. Vicente Todolí, a brilliant and indefatigable Spaniard, was Tate Modern's director from 2003 to 2010; he is a curator at heart, he said, and he left because he had other things he wanted to do. The current incumbent, Chris Dercon, is a Belgian. Serota sought them all out, talked them into applying for the job, and made sure they got it; although bureaucratic regulations were followed, Serota usually manages to get the people he wants. He is not threatened by strong associates, because there is never any question about who is really in control. The trustees have renewed Serota's tenure twice, at seven-year intervals. When his third term came up for renewal, they decided to make it permanent. He could keep going for another ten years, or more.
Serota eludes the hero's aura that his admirers try to attach to him these days. He knows that what he's done at the Tate (and, earlier, at the Whitechapel) is part of a larger story, which is London's revival as a great international city. "It's hard to remember how depressing London was in the seventies and eighties," Richard Rogers, the architect, who was chairman of the Tate board that chose Serota, said to me recently. "When I was doing the Lloyd's insurance building, in 1980, people were saying businesses should move to Frankfurt, which was like the capital of Europe. It shows how far London has come back, and art was part of that." London now vies with New York as a marketplace for modern and contemporary art, and this has attracted swarms of new-rich Russian oligarchs and Middle Eastern sheikhs and sheikas, and brought in artists from all over the world. One of Serota's outreach programs has been to form acquisitions committees in Latin America, the Middle East, Africa, and Asia, and to hire curators with expert knowledge in those areas. The Museum of Modern Art has run a similar program in Latin America for many years, but the Tate's is global. The modern-art canon that Alfred Barr established at MOMA, and which was focussed on the art of Western and Central Europe, Russia, Great Britain, the United States, and not much else, has expanded immeasurably, and so have our ways of using and looking at art.
In the past century, three museums have managed not just to reflect but to shape the visual culture of an era—the Museum of Modern Art, in the nineteen-thirties; the Centre Pompidou, in the nineteen-seventies and eighties; and Tate Modern today. John Elderfield, the greatly respected, British-born scholar who recently joined the Gagosian Gallery after many years at MOMA, believes that what's happened at Tate Modern is "a really radical change in how people use museums now. It's not only about looking closely at works of art; it's moving around within a sort of cultural spectacle. I have friends who think this is the end of civilization, but a lot more people are going to be in the presence of art, and some of them will look at things and be transported by them."
For students and young Londoners in their twenties or thirties, the members' room at Tate Modern is one of the cooler places to hang out on Friday and Saturday evenings, when the museum stays open until 10 P.M. The museum as a social environment, where people interact with art and with one another on their own terms, and create their own experiences, might seem to work against the close study of individual works that Serota learned from Michael Jaffe, at Cambridge. "One criticism of this building is that you can't have an intimate experience with a work of art," Serota conceded. "That's something we are going to address in the new building, where we'll have some smaller galleries, for photographs and modestly scaled works. But, if you come here at ten or eleven on a weekday morning, you can still have that experience." As a populist, artist-centered institution, though, Tate Modern is also responding to viewers who want to engage with art on a more active level than contemplation, and it is learning how to do this as it goes along. Comparing Tate Modern to MOMA, Massimiliano Gioni, the young chief curator of the New Museum, in New York, told me, "It's not pedantic, and it doesn't feel like they hold the truth in their hands."
Much of the art being made today encourages or requires its viewers to become part of it, in one way or another. More than two million of them responded with near-ecstatic delight to "The Weather Project," an installation in Turbine Hall in 2003, basking for hours at a time in the Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson's changing simulacrum of golden sunrise (from two hundred yellow sodium lights and their reflection in mirrored ceiling panels) and a soft mist that was piped into the five-hundred-foot-long space. "In Turbine Hall," Sheena Wagstaff told me, "you have artists working in a kind of space they've never encountered before, where even they don't know what the effect on the audience will be." Listening closely to artists has always been the real Serota tendency, at any rate, and it seems to be spreading. Last month, Wagstaff left the Tate, to head the twentieth- and twenty-first-century departments at the Metropolitan Museum, in New York. This was a blow to Serota, who will miss her deeply, but a few days later he told her it was the right move. At this point in his career, he can only be magnanimous. When I asked him whether he ever missed the vituperative attacks he used to get from London's art critics, he thought for a moment, laughed soundlessly, and said, "I have forgiven them all." ♦


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Andrew Jones necesitaba un nuevo diseño de tema de wordpress y lanzó un concurso de diseño en 99designs.
Un ganador ha sido elegido entre 112 diseños de 21 diseñadores freelance.
Heritage Legal Technologies
Heritage Legal Technologies sells turnkey IT solutions to progressive law firms. Solutions range from managed secure storage to hosted desktops with a complement of best-in-class pre-integrated legal applications.
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The Heritage Legal Technologies My Juris Desktop (myJDesktop) moves your desktop from a traditional physical laptop roaming "fort knox", into the internet cloud. Doing this means it's accessible from practically any machine in the world at any time. Because it's pre-built and tested, the line of business legal applications are guaranteed to work together from day one. What's more, you don't have to maintain the desktop – patch applications, or the operating system. Getting help is easy, because you can share your desktop with a trained IT staff available to answer your questions 24/7 (note, our help desk product is sill pre-launch at present).
Lawyers and partners of small to medium sized law firms, and their IT advisers and staff. Seeking progressive IT solutions for a new kind of law practice.
A very clean website based on the attached logo, which includes basic navigation and wordpress page templates for: People, Products, Services, FAQ, Blog, Contact.
See the attachments for a word template and the logo, which has already been designed.
Must include rich and creative supporting graphics, fully documented and installed template code (code modifications must include comments describing modifications, where appropriate). Quality coding standards must be followed.
We will provide a blank WP installation for you to modify and install against, and look forward to an exciting high quality contest!


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Louis D. Rubin, Jr., a curmudgeonly patron of contemporary Southern writing who as an author, teacher, editor and publisher helped establish and advance the careers of John Barth, Annie Dillard and dozens of others, has died. He was 89.
Eva Redfield Rubin said by telephone that her husband, who lived at a North Carolina retirement home, died Saturday, just three days before his 90th birthday.
A Charleston, S.C., native who switched from journalism to academia in the 1950s, Rubin for decades mentored and published Southern writers. He was among the first to write a scholarly analysis on the posthumous reputation of Thomas Wolfe, taught such future stars as Barth, Dillard and Kaye Gibbons and, through Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, published fiction by Clyde Edgerton, Jill McCorkle, Lee Smith and many more.
Rubin himself was a prolific author who wrote novels, critical studies, histories, memoirs and even a guide for predicting the weather. He started or co-started such influential publications as The Hollins Critic and the Southern Literary Journal. Algonquin Books, co-founded in 1982 by Rubin and Shannon Ravenel, has been an invaluable resource for writers overlooked by New York editors.
In 2005, the National Book Critics Circle presented Rubin with a lifetime achievement award.
He was as much a presence in person as on the page, a case study for the word "rumpled," an impulsive yeller and selective smiler who wore hearing aids that friends swore broke down when conversation turned tiresome. Dillard, Ravenel and others would acknowledge being frightened by him at first, then coming around.
"He's tireless, loyal, gruff and a genius, really," Ravenel once said of Rubin, who left Algonquin in 1992. (The publisher was bought out in 1989 by the New York-based Workman Press).
Born in 1923, Louis Decimus Rubin was a descendant of Russian Jews who by age 10 had already written a play and owned a typewriter soon after. Early heroes included Ernest Hemingway and H.L. Mencken. He graduated with a degree in history from the University of Richmond, and worked for The Associated Press and such newspapers as the Richmond News-Leader before returning to school as a graduate student at Johns Hopkins University.
He quickly emerged as a keeper of the past and present. His study of Wolfe, "Thomas Wolfe: The Weather of His Youth," was an early treatise on the late novelist known for "You Can't Go Home Again" and "Look Homeward, Angel." A review of authors from Edgar Allan Poe to Eudora Welty that Rubin co-edited with Robert D. Jacobs, "Southern Renascence," is credited as a starting point in modern Southern literary criticism.
As a teacher at Hollins College, then at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Rubin had a gift for attracting such established authors as Howard Nemerov and William Golding as instructors and for spotting talent among his students. In recent years, he would be criticized for (benign) paternalism, especially at Hollins, where the undergraduates all were women. Rubin would define his approach to creative writing as "teaching people how to read."
"If this be elitism, make the most of it," he wrote in the essay "What Are All Those Writers Doing on Campus?"
Ravenel was one self-described "Rubin groupie," an undergraduate at Hollins at the time Rubin joined the faculty. He not only convinced Ravenel to edit the school's literary magazine, but remained in touch after she graduated, helping her find work as an editor with Houghton Mifflin and sending her manuscripts of promising writers.
In a 2002 essay published in Southern Review, Ravenel remembered receiving a letter from Rubin in the early '80s that declared the imminent death of literary fiction from New York City and called for a new publisher, based in the South and run by Rubin, with Ravenel's help.
"I don't mean regional or experimental avant-garde stuff, but simply the best fiction (and nonfiction) I can locate," wrote Rubin, who named the company Algonquin, not after the New York hotel, but after a passenger ship he remembered from childhood.
Algonquin was very much homegrown: The company started in his study, expanded to his living room, then a bedroom, a porch and to his woodshed in the backyard. The initial editors all were former Rubin students. They worked together and truly played together, forming the Algonquin Bluegrass Band, which featured Rubin on harmonica.
Rubin's passions also included baseball, boats, trains and his Jewish roots, all duly documented in his own books, including "Small Craft Advisory," ''Babe Ruth's Ghost" and "A Memory Trains." The memoir "An Honorable Estate," published in 2001, covered his years in journalism. "My Father's People," which came out in 2002, was a dry-eyed reflection on his immigrant ancestors.
"Nostalgia is an impoverishing emotion; it robs our memory of all its complexity. I hope I have avoided it," Rubin wrote in the prologue. "There were no Good Old Days; my father's generation knew that very well. Yet we are our memory, and we exist in Time. What we can know is the distance we have traveled, and where we have been."
The Rubins were married in 1951. They had two children.
The News & Observer said Rubin died at Galloway Ridge at Fearrington, a retirement community in North Carolina's Chatham County.
Associated Press writer Pam Sampson in Atlanta contributed to this report.


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Fans Flock to Carpenter
The largest crowd of fans I've seen for the first day of spring training since the 1980s enjoyed a two and one-half hour Phillies workout at Carpenter Field. The parking lot at Carpenter was filled at 11:15 a.m., forcing people to park nearly two blocks away.
It was a picture-perfect, Clearwater Chamber of Commerce day: 75 degrees, a pale blue cloudless sky and plenty of green grass.
Two and one-half hours doesn't seem like a long time but with four fields plus the facilities at Bright House Networks Field, 60 players were occupied every minute.
Two groups of infielders fielded ground balls in a manner I had not seen before. Instead of having one coach/instructor hitting grounders to each of four infielders, there were four fungo hitters at one time. It meant that Chase Utley, for example, fielded grounders non-stop for 30 minutes.
Ryan Howard took batting practice on the Mike Schmidt Field at 11:30 a.m. Fans have the opportunity to watch the action on all four fields. They can roam and see everything. When Ryan hit, most of them migrated to Schmidt.
Pat Gillick feels there is talent on this team, but more importantly, "we have players with character. That's not so important when things are going good and the team is winning. There are times when a team will struggle and that's when character really shows up."
Only Danny Sandoval, who is having visa problems in Venezuela, was missing. Of the 60 players in camp, 27 weren't here a year ago.
2 Comments
Great stuff! Keep the blogs coming. I feel like I'm there when reading these.
What is the Phillies practice schedule on Sunday 2/25/07?


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The Learning Bridge
With support from the National Science Foundation, Franklin Moon, an associate professor of civil engineering at Drexel University, along with a number of collaborators are using modern technology to help manage and preserve bridges while also providing a unique and much needed infrastructure resource for civil engineering laboratory development and learning. Appropriately called "The Learning Bridge," the Tacony-Palmyra Bridge located in Tacony, Pa. and Palmyra, N.J., is one of the main bridges involved in this collaborative research, which is a partnership among Drexel University, Texas A&M University, Purdue University and Northeastern University, as well as the Burlington County Bridge Commission and Pennoni Associates. By attaching sensors, monitoring devices and cameras to the bridge, the researchers stream live data and video into classrooms, allowing civil engineering students to observe key engineering concepts.
Provided by the National Science Foundation
Runtime: 3:53
More Innovators videos


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Spruce Thermic
Manufacturer: Albino Pozzi
Thermic-Bio wood: This treatment involves a combination of dry heat and steam without any chemical additives, giving the wood some amazing features. It improves the quality of poorer woods.
This intensive heat treatment actually modifies the wood, and improves its structural characteristics. Naturally inherent notch sensitivity to twisting, bending, separation, and swelling or shrinking in the wood is reduced up to 50%. It becomes far more stable in conditions of climatic and environmental variability. But not only does this process lead to more physical stability and strength, it also results in warmer and more intense hues that are essential for enhancing antique looking atmospheres.
The bio-thermo process also improves the wood's insulation properties and removes the resin from conifer woods, rendering them ideal for areas that are warm and humid, such as saunas and bathrooms.
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The colors of the wood's natural patterns are enhanced without the use of paints, and no harmful substances are used in the process, leaving it a completely sound material in which the purity of the wood species can still be seen.


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We came home from California bedraggled and happy. We carried our bags to our car in the rain, somehow strange after 12 days of blue skies and warm air, but also welcome after seeing the effects of the California drought. It has taken us days to unpack and gather memories to us coherently. We're still lingering in the beauty of this trip.
We came from California with a few mementos. A jar of elderberry jelly, made by our friend Elise last summer, so kindly handed to us after an extraordinary visit with her in Sacramento. A copy of The Harvey House Cookbook: Memories of Dining Along the Santa Fe Railroad, a book we found at the California State Railroad Museum. Danny and I marveled over the recipes for cheese straws, guacamole monterey, albondigas soup, and New England scallop salad, while Lu just wanted to run from the real-life sleeping car to the dining car, over and over. Five bags of Cup4Cup flour mixes — pizza! brownies! pancakes! — given to us by the good folks in Napa, the team who created these flours for gluten-free folks to feel good about their baked goods again. And after a stop at Rancho Gordo to hug our friend Steve Sando, we added banana vinegar, midnight black beans, and dark chocolate tablets to our bags. Only a few days into our trip, our rented minivan was starting to fill.
From a private potluck lunch with friends at Contigo in San Francisco, there were dried persimmons and a case of SFQ, our very favorite barbecue sauce in the world. (Michele and Danny made a bet when the Seahawks played the 49ers. Lucky for us, the Seahawks won.) Lucy skipped to the car draped in wildly colored pop beads after playing with Tilden all afternoon. She also clutched the tiny AAA tow truck flashlight Anita had given her earlier. By the end of the evening, there was a small jar of tomato confit, made by our friends Tracy and Kim, who asked us to stay in their new home in San Jose.
The next day in Madera, we had walked through the rows of olive trees with the man who ran the Rosenthal Olive Ranch, then stood in his kitchen, sipping orange-flavored olive oil and white balsamic vinegar. Both bottles made it home safely, thankfully. We ate a salad of endive and romaine, goat cheese, and walnuts this evening with that olive oil and balsamic.
After a stop at the Santa Barbara farmers' market, Lucy owned a copy of The Royal Treasure Measure (Math Is Fun!), a lovely book that the even lovelier Amanda brought her. We met Amanda and a handful of other people in front of the Harry's Berries stand, laughing in the Saturday sunlight. Lucy insisted we buy a jar of pickled dilly beans and another of strawberry preserves. She walked back to the car with them all in her hands, set them down on the floor of the car, and put on the Groucho glasses our friend Leela had given her the night before. (This photo of her wearing them might be my favorite one of the hundreds and hundreds left on my phone after driving down California.)
After the potluck we held in Los Angeles, in a park by a playground, I took home a pair of earrings made by a reader, earrings the color of the Pacific Ocean we had swum in the day before. And after the next to last day in California, Lu came home with a pair of Minnie Mouse ears. Danny and I both wore our Mickey Mouse t-shirts on the plane back home.
It was, without a doubt, the best trip we have ever taken together, the three of us.
Of course, there were far more memories than tangible mementos. Those memories — of the good people with whom we shared food, of driving past dusty fields still being planted by farmers, of friends feeding us and taking us in for the night, of Disneyland and Oakland and hotel pools in Los Angeles, of meals with friends in restaurants — will stay with us for a long time.
We'll be sharing the stories of our time in California with you, here, over the next couple of weeks. There will be recipes too, inspired by our time in San Luis Obisbo and Sacramento and Santa Barbara. There will also be recipes in our next cookbook, which will have a good number of comfort food dishes and another good number of meals inspired by the fresh produce and healthy celebration of California. We will share photos and stories of the places we have gone, which might inspire you to visit them too.
Mostly, though, I'm left with a wave of gratitude for the state that was my childhood home. California, I underestimated you as a kid. I choked through smog and wondered why we lived in a place with skies so perpetually brown. The vapidity of Hollywood and the desperate need to appear beautiful all the time drove me away. (I was a bespectacled bookworm brunette in southern California in the late 1970s and 1980s. I never stood a chance.) But now, as an adult, firmly rooted with Danny and Lu on this island we call home, I fell in love with California in a way I never could as a child. The entire trip, I hummed Joni Mitchell in my mind:
"California I'm coming home
I'm going to see the folks I dig
I'll even kiss a Sunset pig
California I'm coming home."
It was a good trip home.
We can't wait to share it with you here.
We'd like to send out a huge acknowledgment and thank you to Erewhon Organic for sponsoring this California tour. Without them, we wouldn't have been able to meet you and gather material for our next cookbook. Erewhon Organic makes some of our favorite foods in the world, including their new quinoa-chia cereal and their buckwheat-hemp cereal, which was our favorite breakfast on this tour. They do things right.


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|May 2nd, 2012, 01:44 AM
Join Date: Jul 2008
Posts: 23
Great pictures! Especially the one in Figure 2. Note the large repair of the dragon in the lower right. This is the ancient type of dragon style, with an organic, vegetal look.... And yes, I would say the first piece does look rather like a felt appliqué piece, but it too has a curvilinearity, a vegetal nature in the way the "T"s sprout out of the center "lotus". The influence of China is strong.
Which should not be too Surprising. The Chinese influence on Tibetan and Xinjiang rugs can also be seen. Some would say that this is the nature of things: that the centers of commerce, whether Beijing, Bokhara or Tehran, set the fashion and create innovations. The nomads and village weavers follow and imitate.
It would be more instructive to see the back of the pieces, of course. A Tibetan piece could be immediately ID'd...and a Mongolian piece would take only a little more effort.
Regarding "Palace" rugs. While Forbidden City, much like Versaille or Tokapi is an enormous place, one must wonder if making rugs for the Palace really absorbed all the "royal" weavers time...or if they made some other pieces on the sly.
Often in China, craftsman would produce pieces for the palace in place of taxes....which means the rest of the time they were doing...what?
Probably making something more practical for the commoner. This still goes on.
Well, when I was in Khotan a few years back, one workshop was making traditional "pomegranate" rugs on one loom...and floor mats for cars on another. Finally in a different room, on an enormous loom probably 30 meters in length they were weaving a rug...in one color....by hand...for a hotel lobby.
OK....we have drifted a long way from the original conversation, but nonetheless I find the discourse fascinating. Shall we continue until Steve kicks us off..or finds the conversation a new home?
Last edited by Jeff Sun; May 2nd, 2012 at 02:05 AM.
|August 3rd, 2012, 09:12 AM
Join Date: Nov 2009
Posts: 7
There seems to be another example from Gentile da Fabriano of the three legged alien posted earlier that shows what should have been in the damaged panel, image below:
|August 3rd, 2012, 03:55 PM
Join Date: Nov 2009
Posts: 7
I must add that the image is from HALI. In the article, John Mills, wrote that the Vatican painting, earlier in this thread, is apparently a copy of the one just posted. Source: HALI, January 1997, Issue 90, page 62, title: In Saintly Company by John Mills.
|August 4th, 2012, 07:08 AM
Join Date: Oct 2009
Posts: 87
Hi George,
Very interesting indeed.
Did John Mills suggest a possible origin for the rug?
|August 4th, 2012, 09:16 AM
Join Date: Nov 2009
Posts: 7
Mills wrote:
|August 5th, 2012, 10:53 AM
Join Date: Oct 2009
Posts: 87
Hi Jeff,
I do apologize for my indecently late answer to your last post. I believed that I already answered it, discovering my error only a few days ago. Old age, I guess!!
Yes, indeed, we drifted far from the original topic, but neither Steve nor Filiberto have raised the red card, so far. They are rather tolerant people. With hindsight we should perhaps have started a new thread.
I fully agree with your views. Imperial workshops must have worked for the elite and not only for the Emperors residences.
The following examples of Timurid- and Il-khanid dragons, show (again) the very strong Chinese influence on Persian art, at least from the Mongol conquest onwards.
In FIG 1 and 2 the dragon is not airborne, as in most later Chinese representations, but is very similar to examples from the Song dynasty.
However, I wonder whether the concept of a hero fighting and slaying the dragon is truly Chinese (1) or was not rather based on Turko-Mongol mythology. For Chinese tradition the dragon was supposed to be beneficial, not hostile. Do you agree?
(1) Contrary to the fight of the phoenix and dragon.
FIG 1. Il-khanid period. 1341. Shiraz school. Bahram gur slays the dragon. Freer Sackler
FIG 2. Timurid period 1420-1450 . Herat school. Warrior slaying a dragon.
FIG 3. Timurid period 1420-1450. Cover of Ulugh Beys wooden box.
Best regards
|January 18th, 2013, 06:14 PM
Join Date: Jul 2008
Posts: 23
There is no denying the East Asian influence in these photos, but it may have filtered through an 3rd party: Tibet or India.
In Figure 1 and 2 the dragon has an upturned elephant-like trunk. This is especially evident in Figure 2. This is a form of Tibetan dragon which is called a Shalu. It's face is similar to another mythological creature found in Indian and Tibetan art called a Makara. Although no-one can say for sure, my feeling is that the Shalu is a Tibetan synthesis of the classical Chinese dragon and the Indian Makara.
It's presence in Persian art could point to Mongol influence, as there was long an influence of Tibet on Mongolia via shared religion and constant pilgrimage between the two. However, I do not know whether large scale Mongol conversion to yellow-hat Buddhism predates their conquest of Persia or not.
Just another thing to think about, I guess.
The dragon in figure 3 is VERY Chinese, indeed.
And yes, I agree with you 100%. A hero fighting a dragon is not-Chinese as the dragon is a beneficent creature. Perhaps it is a Mongol influence. Perhaps the dragon is a later stand-in for some other earlier, but less popular, Persian mythological creature. I've read the Shahnameh from cover to cover and don't ever recall a dragon in all it's pages.
Last edited by Jeff Sun; January 19th, 2013 at 01:48 AM.
|January 23rd, 2013, 05:59 AM
Join Date: Oct 2009
Posts: 87
Hi Jeff,
Your information about the possible influence of Tibetan- and Indian- dragons is interesting indeed!
I believe I have seen similar hostile dragons in Seljuk miniatures, painted more than a century before the Il-khans. (Ill try to retrieve the miniatures). As you rightly mentioned in an earlier post, the silk road was active (on- and off), way before the Mongol onslaught on Persia. Though it was surely at its busiest during the Pax Mongolica and the Il-khanid rule.
If I remember well, both the pre-Gengis-Khan Turkik- and Mongolian people (which were anyway quite close and intermixed frequently) were animists, sharing Tengri, the Sky, as their main deity. Both shared as well a very tolerant attitude, even curiosity, towards other religions. Buddhism and Manichaeism, and to a lesser extend also Nestorianism, had some success in several tribes of these ethnic groups. Long before Islam made inroads in the region.
For example the Turkik population of the Tarim basin (Uyghur etc.. had long Buddhist- and Manichaeist periods, from which many traces have been found by archeology near the silk road. The Kalmiks Turko-Mongols were Buddhist of Tibetan obedience. So, there was no shortage of west-bound vehicles for Buddhist symbols even long before the Pax Mongolica.
By the way, going back to our focus (Rugs),of which we have a little bit drifted away in this thread, the Berlin Museum shows several fragments of Manichaean rolls from the Tarim Basin (roughly 10th century), featuring rugs. FIG A. This brings some more water to Hans Bidders mill, who always claimed that this area was one of the oldest «cradles» of rug weaving.
FIG A: Turfan, Manichean roll fragments, ca 900-1000. Berlin.
|January 24th, 2013, 03:55 AM
Join Date: Jul 2008
Posts: 23
And let us not forget that the Altai mountains (and the Pazryk rug), were not far off, in the grand scheme of things.
Perhaps, in a dusty ruin somewhere west of Lou-Lan there is the oldest rug yet, waiting to be found by some future Sven Hedin or Aurel Stein. If only that could be me!
|January 24th, 2013, 03:36 PM
Join Date: Oct 2009
Posts: 87
I am very much looking forward to the Salon with which you will delight us as soon as you will find that rug!!
|January 24th, 2013, 04:16 PM
Join Date: May 2008
Posts: 100
Hi Jeff
You can't catch fish unless you go fishing.
Best of luck!
Steve Price
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text:
And the Hoka goes to..../
The 2013 Spirit of the Hoka awards were presented to winners in the following categories: Animation: Grandmothers (Abuelas) by Afarin Eghbal
Documentary Feature: An Ordinary Hero by Loki Mulholland (pictured) * Special jury award for excellence in regional filmmaking: Antenna by C. Scott McCoy
Documentary Short: Reborning by Helen Hood Sheer and Yael Bridge
Experimental Short: Don't Break Down by Matt Meindl
Mississippi Documentary: April's Way by Candace Harrelson * Special Jury Mention for Human Rights: Growing Our Own by Philip Scarborough
Mississippi Music Video: Growing Pains by Junk Culture
Mississippi Narrative: Tube by Jordan Berger * Spirit of Roger Corman award: Grasshopper! by Ryan Roy and Michael Usry * Special Jury Mention for Acting: Rebecca Jernigan, Tube
Narrative Feature: The Discoverers by Justin Schwarz * Special Jury Award for Cinematography: Come Morning by Derrick Sims
Narrative Short: Deafblind by Ewan Bailey * Special Jury Award: The Dark Companion by Darrell C. Hazelrig
Lisa Blount Memorial Acting Award: Rebecca Jernigan, Tube
Ron Tibbett Memorial Audience Award: (will be announced after Sunday ballots have been counted)
Category winners received a statuette designed by local artist Bill Beckwith. Additional prizes provided by Kirkwood National Golf Club and Cottages were presented to the winners of the Mississippi Documentary and Mississippi Narrative, and a one-year subscription to Footage Firm was presented to the winner of the Narrative Feature.


text:
Selena Gomez: Justin Bieber And I Have The Perfect Relationship!
Selena Gomez speaks to Bliss magazine about her relationship with Justin Bieber. She says he's the thunder to her lightning!
Selena Gomez and Justin Bieber look absolutely, positively, glowingly in love in their new romantic Hawaiian vacation pictures. And in case there was any question (there isn't), Bliss magazine just released a new interview in which Selena giddily talks about Justin and their relationship!
The reporter points out that throughout the interview Selena punctures her answers with "big goofy grins." "She's practically singing as she speaks. Selena's in a loved up cocoon and rather than shutting us out like she used to, she's more than happy to let us in," reveals the writer.
The reporter asks Selena if she thinks she's found the thunder to her lightning (lyrics from her song "Naturally") in Justin. "Yeah, I think so," she replies. (!!!)
"What's your idea of the perfect relationship?" they ask. "Compassion, honesty and having fun — and I'd like to think that's what I've got."
Selena thinks she has the perfect relationship with Justin full of compassion, honesty, and fun!? How sweet is that?
It's no secret that Justin and Selena are super happy — anyone with eyes can see that — but it's always wonderful to hear it straight from the loved-up gal in the relationship. Are you happy to know that Selena and Justin's relationship is going well? Or are you totally envious? Or both!?
Lorena O'Neil
Get more on Justin Bieber!


text:
- Fonds
- 1998 - ?
This fonds does not currently have any records in it.
Mason, David V.
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Mason, David V.
The William Kempa fonds contains materials created and collected by him during his time in the Public Health Inspection department at Ryerson as the director, chairman, instructor and professor in the course between 1967-1981. Also in the fonds ar...
Kempa, William
Huu Doan is a professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering at Ryerson University.Fonds consists of articles authored or co-authored by Doan.
Doan, Huu
Wieslaw Michalak (d. July 21, 2012) was a Professor in the School of Image Arts at Ryerson University. Wieslaw was born in Poland, emigrating in the 1980s to England and France, before settling in Canada. He received undergraduate and master's deg...
Michalak, Wieslaw
Fonds consists of 3 VHS tapes and 4 ¾" tapes containing 2nd and 3rd year RTA student productions created as part of their course work
Frances Henry is the former Chair of Diversity in the School of Journalism at Ryerson University. Henry is one of Canada's leading experts in the study of racism and anti-racism. Since the mid seventies, when she published the first study of ...
Manfred H. Breede was born in Hamburg, Germany, where he worked as an apprentice pressman. Breede emigrated to Montreal in 1967 and taught printing for many years in the Quebec High School System. In 1987, Breede began teaching printing technology...
Breede, Manfred
John Patrick Cassidy graduated from Ryerson with a diploma in Electronic Technology in 1957. Cassidy was born in Shediak, New Brunswick. Before coming to Ryerson, he attended Monction High School in Moncton, New Brunswick. Fonds consists of one Ry...
Cassidy, John
Stephen Law is a former professor in the Department of Economics at Ryerson University. He completed his PhD at the University Toronto with a dissertation entitled "Economic Policy Interactions: Intellectual Property Rights and Competition Po...
Khaled M. Sennah is a professor in the Department of Civil Engineering at Ryerson University. Sennah has been a faculty member since 1998. He earned his BSC (1985) and MSC (1990) from Alexandria University, Egypt, and his PhD in Civil Engineering ...
Sennah, Khaled
This fonds contains the following files: F 77.1: - books: Children's books authored or co-authored by Krumins, 1985. Open. This record is available for consultation without restriction. F 77.2: - correspondence: Gerald Hannon case corresponde...
Krumins, Anita
Michael R. Twiss is a limnologist (fresh water scientist) with expertise in the microbial plankton ecology of the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence River system and interactions of plankton with elements in the water column. Twiss was a member of the Facul...
Twiss, Michael
Leslie Hall is a classically trained musician and singer and an associate professor in the Department of Philosophy and Music at Ryerson University. Hall received her MA in Musicology and her PhD in Ethnomusicology from the University of Toronto. ...
Hall, Leslie
Fonds consists of one paper authored by Tam.
Tam, Jim C.
Linda Hart graduated with a BA from Ryerson and has been a teacher/preceptor in the University's Early Learning Centre for more than twenty years. Hart's areas of professional interest include: writing early childhood curriculum, integra...
Hart, Linda
Robin Rowland is an independent author, journalist and visual journalist, based in Kitimat, British Columbia, Canada. From 1995 until 2001, Rowland taught Computer-Assisted Reporting and Investigative Techniques at the Ryerson School of Journalism...
Rowland, Robin
Noel A. George is an Associate Professor in the Department of Chemistry & Biology at Ryerson University. Fonds consists of lecture notes authored by George.
George, Noel
Lynn Cunningham is an associate professor in the School of Journalism at Ryerson University. Cunningham joined the faculty full time in 1997. She has held senior editorial positions at such magazines as Canadian Business, Quest and Toronto Life an...
Cunningham, Lynn
Barbara Joyce Hack (née Shepherd) graduated with a three-year diploma in Fashion from Ryerson in 1955. While at Ryerson, Hack did promotional work for Simpson's and created costumes for RIOT and ROW. She also sat as a representative on the SA...
Hack, Ken and Joyce
This fonds contains the following files: F 78.1 - R.S.A. Correspondence, 1976-78. F 78.2 - Baseball Game: Ryerson vs Seneca, 1982. F 78.3 - Cost reduction through comprehensive energy conservation, 1996.
Hume, George
John Carew was born in Lindsay, Ontario. He graduated with a diploma in Food Technology as part of the first graduating class of Ryerson in 1950. While at Ryerson, Carew was the goalie of the senior hockey team and was awarded a bursary for outsta...
Carew, John
This fonds contains the following file: F 782.1 - Procedure To Estimate Missing Year-To Year Traffic...*, 2000. Open. Records are available for consultation without restriction.
Ronald Leslie Poole was a student at Ryerson from 1959 to 1964 and graduated with a diploma in Radio and Television Arts. During this time, Poole worked part-time at both the CFRA Radio Station in Ottawa and at CBC Toronto. After graduation from R...
Poole, Ronald
Fonds consists of 2 lapel pins owned by Walter Anderson. One is "RIT/CJRT" for the school's radio station at the time, and the other pin is the school crest.
Anderson, Walter
Terry Maley is a former faculty member in the Department of Politics and the School of Public Administration at Ryerson University. Maley received his MA in Social and Political Thought from York University and his PhD in Political Science from th...
Maley, Terry
Said Easa is a professor of Civil Engineering at Ryerson University.Fonds consists of papers and articles authored by Easa.
Easa, Said
Robert George Ward graduated from Ryerson in 1954 with a diploma in Photographic Arts. Ward was born in Hamilton, Ontario, where he attended Central Secondary School. While at Ryerson, Ward was a member of the camera club and the rifle team. Fonds...
Ward, Robert G.
Fonds contains textual records and graphic material used by Gary Shennette for teaching in the Image Arts program.
Shennette, Gary
Fonds consists of a report co-authored by Tony Hernandez.
Hernandez, Tony
Fonds consists of articles and other textual material authored by Phelan.
Phelan, Daniel
Fonds consists of miscellaneous photographs taking during and after McKinley's tenure at Ryerson.
McKinley, Ethel Lorraine
This fonds contains the following files: F 80.1 - Manuscripts, 1975. Records are under review. Contact the Archives for information on access. F 80.2 - Books - Published, 1974-1996. Records are under review. Contact the Archives for information on...
Tudor, Dean
Fonds contains papers and book chapter authored and co-authored by Kathryn Woodcock.
Woodcock, Kathryn
Fonds consists of articles authored or co-authored by Poh.
Poh, Paul
This fonds consists of materials related to Filiz Klassen including various published works and notices for events.
Klassen, Filiz
Fonds consists of architectural drawings of Howard Kerr Hall.
Peat, Owen
Fonds consists of memorabilia collected during Irwin's student days at Ryerson.
Irwin, John
This fonds contains the following files: F 807.01- Blueprints: Howard Kerr Hall - Unit III, 1961. F 807.02 - General Trades: Contract Requirements for Fixed Sum Contract - Howard Kerr Hall - Unit III, 1961.
Meacock, Thomas
John Wallace Easton is a former Chemistry Professor and Director of Ryerson's Office of Co-operative Education.Fonds consists of 1 article authored by Easton.
Easton, John
Fonds contains 36 books.
Archer, Maurice
Fonds consists of published material and textual records authored by Tham.
Tham, Donald
Fonds consists of 1 paper authored by Yuce.
Yuce, Ayse
Fonds contains textual and audio visual records created or collected by Catherine Frazee during the course of her academic career.
Frazee, Catherine
Fonds consists of papers authored by Magness.
Magness, Vanessa
Brij Raj Kishore Kashyap fonds
Fonds consists of 1 book co-authored by Kashyap.
Kashyap, Brij Raj Kishore
Fonds consists of articles authored or co-authored by Li.
Li, Jonathan
Fonds consists of 3 books co-authored by Ernest J. Amirault during his time at Ryerson.
Amirault, Ernest J.
Fonds consists of 1 book authored by Shipley.
Shipley, Dale
Fonds consists of published materials authored or co-authored by Tremblay.
Tremblay, Pierre
This fonds contains textual records generated or collected by David Reville relating to various aspects of his academic and political careers.
Reville, David
Fonds consists of published articles authored by Que.
Que, William
Fonds contains papers written and co-written by Lisa Anderson.
Anderson, Lisa
This fonds contains the following files: F 83.01 - Journal articles, 1975-2005. Open. Records are available for consultation without restriction. F 83.02 - Papers, 1980-2000. Open. Records are available for consultation without restriction. F 83.0...
Finn, Michael
Fonds consists of textiles and textual records accumulated by Windeyer while a student at Ryerson.
Windeyer, David
Matthews, Cathy
Richard Malinski was the Chief Librarian at Ryerson University Library between 1990 and 1999.
Malinski, Richard
Fonds consists of textiles, objecs, photographs, graphic material and textual records Rudiak accumulated while a studen at Ryerson.
Rudiak, Ray
Fonds consists of one article authored by Grandison.
Grandison, Chris
This fonds contains the following file: F835.01 - Innovation Nation, 2002. Records are under review. Contact the Archives for information on access.
Grant, Kenneth A.
Fonds consists of one paper authored by Catherine Middleton.
Fonds consists of Karnas' professor emeritus certificate.
Karnas, Joseph
This fonds contains the following files: F 84.1 - Papers, 1973-76. Open. Records are available for consultation without restriction. F 84.2 - Speeches and Addresses Presented by George Korey, 1971-76. Records are under review. Contact the Archives...
Fonds contains a single paper co-authored by M. Juliana Carvalho.
Carvalho, M. Juliana
Fonds consists of textual records produced and accumulated while Kembley was a student at Ryerson, as well as Ryerson-related artifacts.
Kembley, Lorne
Fonds consists of 1 book co-edited by Wellington.
Wellington, Alex
Fonds consists of two conference papers authored by Gekas.
Gekas, George
Fonds consists of a magazine containing two short articles authored by Goodyear.
Goodyear, Rye
Fonds consists of artifacts, a photograph, and textual records relating to Jack Bea's time at Ryerson Institute of Technology. The materials also pertain to his alumni membership after his graduation in 1952.
Bea, Jack
Fonds consist of black-and-white and colour photographic prints, Ryerson badges, and textual records pertaining to Henson's tenure at Ryerson. Includes some photographs that may have been taken after Henson left Ryerson to pursue his own busi...
Henson, Edgar
Fonds consists of one paper co-written by Scott Anderson with Dr. Yisong Tian of York University in 2003.
Anderson, Scott
Fonds consists of 1 children's book illustrated by Jurgen Lutz.
Lutz, Jurgen
Fond consists of 1 optical disc of architectural photographs.
Shelton, Eric
Fonds includes 1 article authored by Panitch.
Panitch, Melanie
Fonds includes radio and television transmitter manuals, class notes and exams, and lecture transcripts.
Zabinsky, Michael
Fonds consists of an article authored by David Hayes.
Hayes, David
Fonds consists of two Christmas greeting cards.
McGregor, Ken Norman
Fonds consists of 1 optical disc containing footage of an interview between Robert J. Fleming and Marshall McLuhan.
Williams, Darryl
Fonds consists of 4 bibliographies Miller compiled while an employee at the Ontario Ministry of Labour.
Miller, Alan
Fonds consists of news clippings and a copy of Rebick's book Ten Thousand Roses.
Rebick, Judy
Fonds includes 2 pages of email correspondence authored by Fil Salustri.
Salustri, Filippo
Fonds consists of 1 article written by Mario Estable for Catalyst, the newsletter of the Canadian Foundation for AIDS Research (CANFAR).
Estable, Mario
Fonds consists notes, photocopies, correspondence and other textual records pertaining to articles Mollins wrote for The Ryersonian
Mollins, Julie
Fonds consists of the plaque received by Newton from the SAC, as well as a letter from Howard Hillen Kerr.
Newton, Ruth Ann
Fonds consists of manuscript and typescript papers, as well as pre-book manuscript notes, authored by Audrey Cohn.
Cohn-Sandler, Audrey
Fonds consists of a 2004 article authored by Gabor Forgacs.
Forgacs, Gabor
Fonds consists of 1 book authored by Lennie Scott-Webber.
Scott-Webber, Lennie
Fonds consists of photographs, programmes, a dance card, newsclippings, correspondence, and a report card from Jack Aitken. He accumulated these items during his time at Ryerson in the Food Administration program, his membership on the Ryerson Ram...
Aitken, Jack
Fonds includes colour and black-and-white phtographic prints and negatives documenting Ryerson campus, as well as faculty and students in the Photographic Arts program.
Sebert, John
Fonds consists of 2 articles authored by Brian Cameron.
Cameron, Brian
Fonds consists of 1 concert ticket and 1 flyer for music events at and near Ryerson in 1969.
Goodings, Ken
Fonds includes 1 book of essays edited by Monique Schofen.
Tschofen, Monique
This fonds contains the following files: F88.1 - The Role of Satellites in the Canadian Broadcasting System, 1986. F88.2 - The Role of the Provinces in Public Broadcasting, 1986. Open. Records are available for consultation without restriction.
Keast, Ron
Fonds includes books authored or edited by Irene Gammel, and posters, clippings, brochures and other ephemera pertaining Gammel's work.
Gammel, Irene
This fonds contains records related to Dave Whiteside's time at Ryerson .
Whiteside, Dave
Fonds consists of student memorbilia, including athletic trophies and letters, convocation and dance programmes, photographs, newspaper clippings, and other miscellaneous objects.
Martell, Lois
Fonds includes newspaper articles and speeches written by Levy, programs for events, 1 plaque, and one framed keepsake.
Levy, Sheldon
This fonds contains an Offprint of "Living beside traumatic experience," authored by Tanya Lewis, published in the Canadian Journal of Community Mental Health, vol. 23, no. 1 (spring 2004), p. 5-18
Lewis, Tanya
The fonds consists of an abstract for: Caught in the act: the documentary filmmaker/subject collaboration.
Tucker, David
The fonds consists of one book that Grayson co-authored with her spouse J. Paul Grayson.
Grayson, Linda
Fonds contains records related to the planning, construction, and operation of the Ryerson University Student Learning Centre (SLC)


text:
Reimagining the Guestbook
CTW Features
Friend & Family Recipe Book
For a sweet (or savory) reminder of loved ones, Rachel Bowes, owner of Seattle-based Finch & Thistle Events, suggests including a blank recipe card with your invitation, as well as a note requesting that guests scribble down a favorite recipe (and why it's meaningful) and bring the card to the wedding. At the reception, set up a table where guests can then affix their card to a classy notebook, and find blank cards if needed.
Guest Book Box
Mette Morgan, co-founder and editor of DIYWedding.org, suggests decorating a heart-shaped box (with a lid!) and either cutting out or buying a stack of heart-shaped pieces of thin cardboard – at least one per guest. You can then either set up a table or hand out the hearts during dinner. After all the guests write their messages, the hearts are placed in the box, which is then sealed and not to be reopened until your first anniversary.
Place Mat Questionnaire
Bowes loves this idea because it can both keep guests busy and add another décor element to your tables. All it requires is typing or handwriting questions about you and/or your guests on a standard-sized piece of paper or cardstock, or purchasing a template at Etsy.com/Shop/TedZeppelynn. Put a copy at each setting.
Wall Hanging
This artful alterative is one of Morgan's personal favorites. First select a large picture that you love – a photograph of you together or a place that you both love, or a painting that you would like to hang in your home. Display the picture at your event, along with instructions for quests to write their well wishes on the "canvas."
Copyright © CTW Features


text:
Cisco announced at the Enterprise Connect conference in Orlando, Fla., today that it is now possible to patch WebEx users into Cisco telepresence conferences as full participants.
The browser-based WebEx service can be used for business-to-business connections, Cisco's President of Development and Sales Robert Lloyd said during his keynote.
[ RELATED: The future of telepresence: It's virtual, mobile and social
RUGGEDIZED: Cisco touts TelePresence endpoint for 'harsh' environments ]
Endpoints can now connect through browser-based WebEx to join a conference set up by Cisco telepresence gear. This could be used as a B2B connection. The conferences would be scheduled in Outlook using a Cisco plug-in and participants would be sent email invitations that include a WebEx link. Content sharing is automatic to all participants.
In addition to the WebEx upgrade, Cisco announced today at Enterprise Connect:
* A software upgrade to its telepresence server and Cisco TelePresence Conductor so devices that don't require a full 1080p HD port to connect to the conference can share a port with other devices. This can mean up to 70% greater efficiency in utilization, Cisco says. The upgrade also adds to the list of possible endpoints that can join a conference to include tablets with video clients. Cisco recommends its own Jabber client but any standards-based client will do, the company says. The software upgrade supports Cisco IP phones with video capabilities as well.
* Cisco is extending its MediaNet software to videoconferencing endpoints to give network admins a more thorough view of the network and how well it is performing The software is being added to the Cisco Catalyst 6500 Supervisor 2T and the ASR 9000 series routers, with global availability targeted for this month. The ISR and ISR G2 platforms are MediaNet-enabled, and will support the new MediaNet features being introduced. They also apply to Jabber for Windows clients, TX 9000 immersive room system as well as EX series desktop systems and CTS room systems.
* A software upgrade for Cisco-hosted telepresence-as-a-service gear for service providers enables a new virtual-meeting-room service. This is a dedicated bridge that customers can call in to at will without scheduling a meeting ahead of time. It is suitable for business-to-business meetings, Cisco says. The company is working out oversubscription models so providers can scale their infrastructure to the number of customers they support.
Tim Greene covers Microsoft and unified communications for Network World and writes the Mostly Microsoft blog. Reach him at firstname.lastname@example.com and follow him on Twitter @Tim_Greene.
Read more about lans and routers in Network World's LANs & Routers section.