Author: Josh Philip Ross

Okay, so I’ve been hit with a blog-meme: Leave one memory of you and me together. It doesn’t matter if I know you a little or a lot, anything you remember. Next, post this in your blog (if you have one) and see how many people leave a memory about you.

I’m hoping someone posts something here. I know I have readers ’cause the counter tells me so. Come out, come out, wherever you are!

After a wet, blustery Saturday, it was a pleasure to step out into the crisp, clear air on Sunday for the second half of the Annual Gowanus Artists Studio Tour (AGAST) (see my account of day one below). This time I was joined by my wife Jenny, and our first stop was the group show at location #23, on 9th St. between the Gowanus Canal and 2nd Avenue. In this maze of a building, which one viewer described as first-person-shooter-like, were over a dozen studios, as well as work collected from artists showing at different locations, making #23 AGAST’s Magical Mystery Tour. It was also at #23 that we bumped into my friend Daniel — my companion on day one — and his fiance Sally, the two of whom joined us for the rest of our ramble through Gowanusy goodness.

I couldn’t possibly do justice to all of the artists at #23, but I’d like to mention as many as I can. Geoff Grogan (who was dressed, appropriately, in a Superman T-shirt) ingeniously constructs oversized comics tableax from shredded bits of the New York Times, pulling apart newsprint to recreate a newsprint form. The obvious comparison is to Roy Liechtenstein, but where Liechtenstein hides his brushstrokes to create a cold, distancing modernist sheen, Grogan’s collages feel immediate and warm, recalling the intimacy of a comic book read by flashlight under the covers. Grogan is also the author of Dr. Speck’s Comics.

The “assembled worlds” of Joshua Marks were another highlight. Constructed of photographs and figurines in tiny lighted boxes, they feel like windows onto a strange alternate world. In contrast to these jewelbox creations was what Marks called “My Albuquerque,” a vast plateau of cracked earth punctuated by small slices of suburbia — model houses, plastic grass — under plastic domes. He declared that he would sell it at cost to anyone who had a place to put it, but at approximately 20 feet square, this horizontal work is likely to stay put for a while.

Olivia Valentine takes photographs of Avon perfume bottles that she collects, as well as large prints of photographs of her grandmother’s old porcelain figurines, and others she collected herself, to surprisingly creepy effect. Julia Simon’s entertaining horror-show included a big, campy Count-like vampire mounted on the wall, with fangs that dispensed vodka-spiked cranberry juice. (In a subsequent email, I was informed that he has since been dubbed “Count Drunkula,” and that the artist’s boyfriend, Erik Burns, helped out in the creation of the drink-dispensing demon.)

The dark emotion was palpable in Jessica Brommer’s paintings of distorted faces and ghostly montages, and in her wall-mounted sculptures of dessicated pelicans. Kimi Weart’s drawings were also unsettling, with images of animals retaking the human world. In one large piece, dear have taken over a rural parking lot, fighting and standing about in far greater numbers than the station wagons scattered about. In another, a wolf seems to vomit some kind of white glitter. Jim McGrath’s fine paintings of giant worms against backgrounds of half-hidden words on Hiroshima and other subjects were similarly eerie. Conceptual artist and sculptor Saul Melman’s gallery was largely filled by two big mobiles of tangled cardboard strips, but what drew people’s attention was a cake encrusted with dust and grime. (Update: The artist has explained to me that the cake is in fact covered with dust from September 11, 2001, and was recently included in a group show of art relating to 9/11. The work now strikes me as an apt illustration for what that period felt like: the horror of 9/11 making us choke on the good times of the late 1990s.)

More cheerful were the assemblages of Tamara Thomsen, which included a sort of playground for abstract stuffed kittens and a wooden fence on which were impaled a score or so gourds. I enjoyed the lush bodies in motion of Elsie Kagan, the Klimt-like work of Scott Facheux, and especially the spare, poignant paintings of Astrid Cravens (pictured), constructed of tiny dots against wintry fields of shifting color.

Other artists included Cynthia Winings, Annie Leist, Monique Davidson (who made blankets and clothes for babies), Katie Padden, Linda Tharp and Francis Sills.

Up on 3rd Ave. between 6th and 7th streets, we came to #24 on the tour — home of Third Avenue Clay — where we entered a second-floor gallery rich with incense and reggae sounds. The space was shared by Areta Buk and Abbyssinian Carto. Abbyssinian was the fellow with the dreadlocks, and his intricate paintings of hands and symbols that made me think of the Mithali paintings of northern India. Buk’s paintings were complex and precise. The rest of the building was taken up with the pottery of Orla Dunstan and Adrienne Yurick and the whimsical ceramic sculpture of Geri Gventer.

Moving over to 4th Ave., we were struck by all the new construction: signs of the changes afoot now that 4th Ave. has been rezoned for high-density residential development. It’s still a wasteland for foot travel, with its gas stations and vast taxi dispatchery. There was also, deep inside one of the inscrutable enclosures along the Gowanus, what looked like a pigeon coop. I can only hope it was not someone’s food source.

On 2nd Street we came to #25, our first home of the day, where we saw the flower paintings (and extensive tie collection) of Bill Thibodeau in his densely packed studio. Buried in a corner was a sort of cartoony Madonna and Child.

From there we crossed to 5th Ave., and suddenly we were well beyond the Gowanus zone and into the gentrified realm of Park Slope. On the top floor of an elegant home on Carrol St. (#26), we saw the drawings and paintings of Elizabeth Reagh. My friend Sally was particularly impressed with her sketches of her baby (now an older boy, shown in a later drawing slumping miserably in his chair), while I enjoyed her Brooklyn landscapes, particularly one with a vivid orange sky. In the background we could hear her dryer going. I also enjoyed her homemade chocolate-chip cookies.

Next up was #11, the shared studio of Elinor Dei Tos Pironti, whose abstract paintings explore color overlays in plaid formations; sculptor and potter Myrna Gordon, whose strange hanging tosos and arms and masks look like skin that has been peeled away (pictured); and stone sculptor Rosalind Kochman, who creates abstract works in marble and alabaster.

The next studio, Gallery 718 (#10), was the only one housed in a proper storefront, on busy 5th Ave., and it clearly functions as a commercial art gallery, which gave it a very different feel from the other studios we’d visited. We saw the work of Elizabeth Eckman and Alissa Neglia, but the space was dominated by the witty canvases of David Vigon. I was particularly struck by his “Smirky Boy” (pictured) and by a painting of a cityscape in black and white, with two helicopters, one in pink and the other in lime.

By this time I could stand it no longer. We had notions of taking some other route, but I insisted that we go straight to #9, the studio of Elyse Taylor, who was and remains my favorite artist on the Gowanus Tour. Climbing up the stairs to her studio, I was delighted to see again her pink neon RETRO sign, and then to turn a corner and find myself face to face with her extraordinary multipanel work “Growing,” which had indeed grown since I last saw it. Taylor’s imagination seems bottomless as she produces panel after panel of witty, precisely executed additions to this fascinating work. She was also showing a wide variety of paintings and drawings that shifted style and genre yet all somehow had the Taylor touch.

There is something about Elyse Taylor’s work that makes people smile, but there is nothing toothless or polyanna about her work: another couple was in the studio with us was cooing delightedly at the painting of the one fellow choking the other fellow, and then the woman let out a cheerful giggle at the painting of the green-faced man sniffing glue. Somewhere in “Growing” is a Buddha, and Taylor’s approach to art and life strikes me as fitting well with a Buddhist outlook, in which the dark and scary parts of life are neither something to run from nor something to dwell upon overmuch, but rather just aspects of the complexly interesting fabric of reality. And Taylor is certainly a deeply curious person (in both senses, in the best way), constantly exploring new uses of found materials and coming up with clever new jokes to work into her art.

Another thing I love about Elyse Taylor is that she sells art for cheap. I don’t have the sort of income one needs to be a serious collector of art, but at this point I have six original Taylors, which cost me a grand total of $105. To add to the painting of a television that I bought last year (similar paintings were still available for $15), I bought a marvelous red square canvas with a red computer keyboard button labeled “PANIC” affixed to the center ($20); a square over which a button-down shirt had been stretched like a canvas after it was stamped over and over in red with what is supposedly the artist’s name in Chinese ($40); an oddly shaped painting of a broken-down school bus daubed with graffiti ($20); and two small line drawings ($5 each). Our collection of original Taylors now has pride of place above our bed.

In any case, I urge you to visit Ms. Taylor and not wait until next year’s AGAST to do it. She’s a very nice woman, and I would say that her personality is as good as her art, but it’s not: the world has lots of nice people but very few artists this interesting. Give her a call and go. She’ll be happy to see you, and you’ll be happy to see her.

The sun was low in the sky by the time we left Taylor’s studio, and it was clear that I was going to fall short of my goal of hitting every studio on the tour like I did last year. It was also at around this point that Sally coined the term “Artditarod” for what we were doing. Meanwhile, Daniel had a particular favorite artist over at #16, one Jennifer Bevill, so we swung back toward the Gowanus to 543 Union Street, at Nevins, an old warehouse with many studios inside. Ascending to the top level, past a giant safe, we took a detour to the roof, which afforded us beautiful views in all directions of Brooklyn’s rooftops and church spires, the thick cumulous clouds glowing in the slanting evening light. Then it was back downstairs to Bevill’s fascinating story-quilts (pictured) and tempting little packages, which seem to carry all of American folk history in them. I was also fond of her book Painted Shut: An Anthology of Art Traumas, which consisted of short passages of real people telling stories of disastrous experiences with art (for example, an educator being told at a seminar to teach his kids to paint with “happy colors”), coupled with illustrations by Bevill.

In the next room over, we found the installation work of Kenan Juska, who collects the fabulous junk to be found in New York — abandoned cassette tapes, matchbooks, advertisements, cans, electronic bits and pieces — and assembles it into compelling collages. I was reminded of something I realized while exploring the art scene in Korea: New York has really great junk. This kind of scrap art is something we simply never saw in Korea, probably because they’ve got a lot fewer scraps lying around than we do, having been bombed to smithereens some 50 years back. And then there’s Italy, which had such exquisite junk buried about the place that it served to launch an entire cultural rebirth. I suppose my point is that the quality of the local junk has perhaps an underrated influence on a region’s art.

Another unusual studio was that of stained-glass artist Ernest Porcelli, where you could see stained glass in every phase of its development, from the numbered sketches that show where each pane will go, to the raw glass in various colors and textures, to pieces that have begun to be laid out, to finished works with the seams filled in.

Elizabeth O’Reilly does paintings of the Gowanus area (pictured), while Joanne McFarland paints exquisitely realized Brooklyn brownstones. The drawings of Joanne Pasila, who recently moved to the city from rural Massachussets, seem to have absorbed the urban rhythms of her new environment.

Carla Roley showed elegant photographs of Vietnam and the Western United States. I was charmed by Joelle Shallon’s colorful abstract paintings in unusual shapes. Other artists included Robin Feld, Leslie Kushner, Marion Lerner-Levine and Margaret Neill.

By now time was running short, and I wanted to see the studio of Melanie Fischer, which in past years had been turned into fantastic environments (something similar is pictured). When you look at the tour map, #14 looks like it’s right in the heart of the densest section, but the blocks on either side are empty and windblown, so Fischer and her collaborator this year, Anita Welsh, liberally decorated the sidewalks with big chalk arrows, admonitions to keep going, an “ALMOST THERE,” and even a few ellipses to get travelers through the tough patches. Upon arrival, we were welcomed by an elaborately crayoned staircase that led to Fischer’s long, narrow, skylit studio. The work on display was mostly from last year, with a couple of exceptions. First of all, there was Welsh’s contribution of scrub brushes in which the bristles had been replaced by crayons, and which had been used to decorate a section of floor. She’d also melted down crayons and made them into soap bars, presumably for uncleaning purposes. The other new work, six months old and still in progress, was Fischer’s baby, which has understandably distracted her from the important but time-consuming work of, say, filling her studio with dirt, like she did last year.

When we left Fischer it was after six o’clock — past closing time — but as we headed back toward Nevins St., we spotted an open door and decided to head on in. Some of the artists at #15 were packing up already, but they graciously allowed us to wander through and see what there was to see. I remembered a number of them from last year, including Felicity Faulkner, who was busily wrapping up her paintings when we entered. When she saw my notebook, she suggested I describe her paintings (pictured) as “strong optical work” and added that that’s what everyone says. Nor is she wrong about that, so I’ll let it stand. She also told me I could describe her as a “charming English lady.”

Tucked into a corner, in a room painted a bright pastel pumpkin, were the Hindu-inspired collages of yoga teacher Esther Jyoti Larson. I also greatly enjoyed the sculptures and photographs of Jim Gratson, who constructed Chinese characters out of wood blocks and whose photos included pictures of a bundled-up kid half-buried in snow as he makes snow angels and another series of a little girl under water in a swimming pool.

Also unduly impressed by my notebook was Janice Everett, another charming English lady who did mostly design-oriented drawings in black and white (and who I happen to find totally hot, even though she’s probably 20 years my senior). “Are you press?” she asked me. “You look very official.” When I told her that I was merely a blogger, I found myself surrounded by several people my parents’ age who sought knowledge at the font of computer wisdom. “How do I find blogs?” “Can I leave my laptop on all the time?” Then, as I was about to go, Everett asked me excitedly if I had seen her bush drawings, and it took me a moment to realize that she meant her Bush drawings (pictured), a series of the president looking sour in the aftermath of Katrina, entitled “Bush and His Shadow.” So I gave them a look, and then we were on our way, done with the Annual Gowanus Artists Studio Tour for another year, and headed over to Cafe Mexicano for hot chocolate and excellent Mexican dinners for cheap.

My apologies to the artists I’ve failed to mention, and those whose studios I failed to see (#11, #12 and #13). And to all the artists, thanks for opening up your studios and sharing your work, and for doing the work in the first place. See you next year!

Topic: Around Town

Tucked around the Gowanus Canal, nestled into apartments and converted factories and other odd spaces, a surprising number of artists are at work, and once a year they give us the chance to see what they’ve been up to. Yesterday was day one of AGAST, the Annual Gowanus Artists Studio Tour, which I was exploring for my third time, in the company of my friend Daniel. Oh, and just for reference, the tour is FREE. And lots of artists provide munchies besides.

So here’s what we saw, numbered according to the tour map.

Note: If any of this information is wrong, or if any of the artists want their work removed from this site, please contact me and let me know.

Our first stop, on 3rd Street between Smith and Hoyt, was #22, the apartment/studio of painter Dean Dalfonzo, who was showing mostly nudes and large fruit, along with a smattering of abstracts (he showed us a series of soft colorfield work he’d done for a beachhouse commission), tucked into his basement bedroom, which was also home to a drumset and a pair of guitars, one with an Uncle Tupelo sticker on it. Of his work, I most enjoyed the nudes against the stark background of a plain canvas (pictured).

A little further along 3rd was #21, where we saw the work of David Daniel Iliescu and David Lantow. I remembered Lantow as one of the highlights last year, and he didn’t disappoint. His paintings and drawings are intensely sculptural abstract forms, informed by “sea life and animal life,” as well as by the visual style of computer modeling, though the artist doesn’t himself use digital technology for his work. Lantow also mentioned Richard Serra’s Frank Stella’s idea that you should get to know all sides of the image, and Lantow’s oddly compelling forms do feel like you could pluck them from the paper and examine them in three dimensions.

Iliescu’s work, meanwhile, was mostly drypoint on photo paper, which created great glossy works full of strange, complex black and gray shapes and spaces. He was inspired, he said, by music, especially John Cage and his ideas of chance, and wanted to mix intention and chance in his work. One piece he said was based on “some abstract poetry by some Romanian poet.” And then there was his “better use of the TV,” where he had hung a piece of blackened photo paper, with an abstract drawing scratched away, over a flickering television screen, so that the light behind filtered through the design.

As for Gabriel Phipps, who was supposed to be showing on the second floor of the same building, we knocked but got no answer.

Turning north along the grotty industrial weirdness of Bond Street, we came to #17, the studio of Kingsley Parker, an accomplished painter and woodcut artist whose depictions of old maps, big ships and small planes on desert islands evoked the adventure, muscularity and danger of the late age of exploration and the Pacific war in World War II.

Next along the route was #19, where we were welcomed into the three-storey home of painter Joseph Mariano. Just ascending the staircase was an experience. I’m used to seeing Brooklyn’s brownstones chopped into separate apartments, so it was fascinating to see one still used as a family home. The stairway was lined with family photos, the artist’s work, decorative blankets and even framed glass panes painted by the kids or grandkids. The studio, on the third floor, was full of gentle portraits and still lifes.

The atmosphere of #17 couldn’t have been more different. A thoroughly modern ground-floor space occupied by ten different artists (Paola Borgatta, Colleen Carlson, Leslie Ferretti, Shizue Imai, Yumiko Kuga, Peter Lane, Amanda Moffat, Toshie Otsuka, Pamela Sunday and Joan Walton), New Clay Studios offered a wide range of fascinating ceramic craft and sculpture to enjoy, not to mention the best array of snacks on the tour: apple cider, chocolate, a crate of crisp, tart apples, and rugelach. Rugelach! Of the actual art, I was particularly impressed with Colleen Carlson’s “Strandbuilt” series (pictured), which consisted of everything from dishes and fruit stands to a purse and a pair of buttocks, all constructed from carefully laid strands of ceramic, a technique I’d never seen before.

Next up was #2, over on Baltic Street, where ceramicist Rene Murray greeted us by showing us her beige-brick gas kiln and encouraging us to check out her garden, a lush green enclosure full of dripping hemlocks and junipers. Her most distinctive work was a series of imaginary cityscapes constructed in curious perspective, full of too-steep stairways surprising angles.

Our furthest point north — what we kept referring to as the “outpost,” where we hoped to be greeted by weary border guards armed with harquebuses to ward off the Mongols — was #1 on the tour, way up between Dean and Bergen on 3rd Avenue, next to the defunct “Andrey’s Caфe.” In an old industrial building, two middle-aged women sat on a sofa across from a terrifying machine of some sort and greeted guests, sending us upstairs to see the work of photographer Robert Redmond, who was showing solidly professional, elegantly composed images of Brooklyn and the region, including a gorgeous shot of the Brooklyn Bridge through a smashed warehouse window; and the abstracts of painter Charles Wilkinson. But alas, no harquebuses.

#4, on Butler St., was another converted industrial space, showing Jeff Leonard’s glassy abstract paintings full of intricate detail, Charles Truett’s big canvases of spattered primary color, and paintings by Jessica Baker based on the erotic sculpture that adorns the temples of Kajuraho, India. She and I had a fun little chat, as travelers to India do, about near-death bus experiences and hallucinatory states achieved through severe diarrhea.

Next stop was another highlight from previous years, the third-floor studio of painter Sam Clayton (#3), whose large paper and canvas paintings of torsos, often involving complexly textured surfaces, bring to mind the work of Lucian Freud, as well as that of Michelangelo. Clayton is one of the finest artists on the tour, in the sense that he has an extraordinary technical command combined with an enormously powerful visual sensibility. By removing the heads and in most cases hands from his paintings, he strips away the places we look first for meaning. You would think that this might turn the torsos into something abstract, but it has the opposite effect: by forcing us to read them in detail, Clayton gives these muscular torsos a kind of force and intensity and seriousness that is fitting for the part of the body that contains the viscera. But Clayton isn’t a one-note artist: against the monumental quality of the torsos, his smaller landscapes of California — Napa mountains and vinyards, deserts outside of Twenty-nine Palms — have a soft intimacy that expertly capture the laid-back beauty of my home state.

By the time we reached stop #5, it was late in the day, and unfortunately my notes are somewhat confused. There seem to have been considerably more artists than the three listed in the guide. Christopher Doogan’s cartoony woodcuts included an energetic pair of boots that reminded me of Van Gogh’s painting of his shoes, as well as a lovely scene of three old women making dumplings and gossiping. Photographer Dana Matthews offered several compelling series. Among her “Bordello Series,” I was struck by a photograph of a pregnant woman with cropped hair, shown sideways, wearing nothing but a Napoleon-style military tunic and standing before an ottoman. It seemed to combine a whole range of photographic cliches into something new and charged. Tamar Cohen showed a charming series she calls “Babyface,” which are oil paintings of babies, with childish nicknames dancing about the tykes in script etched into the paint. I was especially impressed with the work of Bonnie Steinsnyder, another highlight from last year, whose multipanel paintings and drawings of urban scenes, often divided into sections by strips of found material, skillfully integrate the graphic wit of comics into the non-linear-narrative form of painting, and whose “Goth Club” (pictured) is a marvelous piece of reportage.

Just up the block at #6, another industrial building full of studios, we saw the playful clothes and sculptures of Feral Childe, the collaborative team of Alice Wu and Moriah Carlson, complete with pink-fur bench and one of the artists in something very like a clown suit. Another artist with a sense of humor was Doug Anson, whose works on paper parodied the fascinations of middle school boys, full of guns, skulls and rock stars (the bearded “Bass Player” and “Drummer” were a hoot). The haunting paintings of Toto Feldman will stay with me for some time. Young girls, invariably naked and with ram’s horns, seem to be playing out some kind of Narnian drama in the interstices of an imaginary Florida, complete with faceless motels and windblown palm trees. Other galleries at #6 included those of photographer Jeff Amram and painter Rebecca Miller.

Crossing 3rd Avenue, we came to #7, in the same building as the Spoke the Hub dance studio. Unusual among the participats in AGAST was JCA, an architecture firm. But I was especially struck by the large paintings of Jacob Roesch and Dale Williams. Roesch’s large, naturalistic canvases captured richly complex emotional moments, like the mix of chagrin, resignation and deep thought in the face and posture of a middle-aged man playing croquet (pictured). The energy of Dale Williams’s drawings was completely different: fierce, raw, punk, informed by comics with their exaggerated images and screeds of text. They called to mind Philip Guston’s paintings of a cartoon Nixon with a giant phlebitic leg. I was also taken with the sculptural work of Heather Cox, which included nets made of nail clippers (surprisingly beautiful) and a wedding cake made of aspirins. Other artists at #7 included Jessica Lipsky, Regina McFadden, Richard Egan, Patrick Barrett and Ella Yang. Next door, at #18, we saw the Rubenesque sculptures of Lawrence Berger.

As the clock ran out on us for day 1, we finished up at the home of photographer Ann Rosen, whose long-haired 15-year-old son answered the door and looked none too happy about it. Rosen has a disarmingly simple approach to portrait photography, taking pictures of families and framing them in written snippets of their life stories for her In the Presence of Family series (pictured), which captures Brooklyn families in all their ethnic complexity. Also on view were her landscapes from Japan, but I was sad to see fewer of her ghostly double-exposure photos of families than in past years.

And that wraps up Day 1, an exhausting but eminently worthwhile journey into the surprisingly rich artistic world of the Gowanus. Stay tuned for Day 2!

More good BBC coverage of the talks between Donald Rumsfeld and his South Korean counterpart, Yoon Kwang-ung, and on the changes in the relationship between the two countries: Seoul presses US on army control, US agrees to slow S Korea pull-out. Meanwhile, South Korea will need to straighten out its own military: South Koreans baulk at boot camp.

Two important articles on the BBC website this evening regarding changes to the American presence in South Korea (1, 2)

When it comes to the US troop presence in their homeland, South Koreans aren’t sure what they want. On the one hand, their government has responded with shock and dismay to the American announcement that we’ll be withdrawing a third or more of our troops over the next year, and pulling the rest back from the DMZ, where they have guarded the invasion corridors between the North and Seoul since the 1950s.

But a few years ago, when we were in Korea, there were massive anti-American demonstrations in the wake of the accidental killing of two Korean girls by a heavy military vehicle, with strong demands that the US troops at least clear out of Seoul. And President Roh Moo-hyun has called for a change in the longstanding arrangement by which an American general would be commander in the event of an actual conflict.

The US doesn’t want to give up control — no surprise there — but we are more than happy to let the Koreans step up and pay for more of their own defense, and we aren’t too sad about stepping back from the border either. Personally, I think the South Koreans should take this as a major opportunity. I think the Americans are right to point out that while it made sense for America to spend billions defending South Korea when the latter was a poor, struggling country, it is now time for the world’s 13th-largest economy to pay much more of its own way. (As for South Korea’s position on its own success, there’s plenty of ambiguity there as well: the government clings to its developing-country status, despite the increasing preposterousness of the notion, in an attempt to maintain some degree of solidarity and influence with the countries of the Non-Aligned Movement and other developing states.)

The South Koreans should accept this burden, which will greatly increase their international stature and their standing with the American government. If they’re footing the bigger bill, it will be easier for the South Korean leadership to demand control over military action on the Peninsula.

And it will help Korea to emerge at last from more than a century of dependency, something that has enormous symbolic importance for the Korean people. Indeed, if North Korea has any legitimacy at all in the minds of South Koreans, it is because it is seen as more fully independent, though of course it relies on China. If South Korea becomes not only the richer, more democratic of the two states, but also the more independent, that will undermine the last shred of credibility to which the North clings.

Slate today has an article on how Korea has become the world capital of cloning research. (And no, I don’t mean the North Korean variety.)

A couple of weeks ago, I posted a long manifesto on what the Democrats should do now that the Republican establishment appears to be imploding. I was pleased to see that in this week’s New Yorker, the Talk of the Town gave its own answer to that question — one that sounds a lot like mine, although way more consise. Worth a look.

Gothamist, under the apt headline “Worst Idea Ever,” today reports on a “subway surfer” who sustained critical injuries when he was thrown from the roof of an A train.

I remember that a number of years ago the Village Voice ran a cover story on the subway-surfing phenomenon in which they profiled several roof-riders, half-heartedly trying to spin the whole thing like it was a daring anti-establishment gesture by disaffected youth, akin to graffiti-writing. When one of their friends was killed while riding a subway roof, the rest of the gang quit for a while, but then decided to start up again so that their comrade’s death wouldn’t be meaningless. Go figure.

I also recall that in the aftermath of the article, which caused a stir, Mayor Giuliani was asked whether the NYPD or the MTA would be doing anything to protect subway surfers. Giuliani had a tendency to be hard-hearted, but in this case I think he hit the right note when he declared that anyone who rides the subway on the roof is pretty obviously misusing city property, and they’re on their own with the consequences.

Elections were held yesterday for non-permanent seats on the Security Council for the 2006-2007 term, and today I was charged with drafting letters of congratulation from our ambassador to the ambassadors of the winning states. Because Security Council seats are alloted by region, the real horse-trading goes on within each regional group to decide which country will be put forward as the candidate, while the final election in the General Assembly is mostly a formality.

That meant that the Republic of Korea was for the most part able to support all of the winners. But there was one country that Korea voted against, having made a prior commitment to a rival. This didn’t make any actual difference — the vote wasn’t at all close — but it nevertheless created a certain tension when our Mission called to congratulate their Mission, or so I was told.

And so I made a slight adjustment in the congratulatory letter. Instead of saying “I look forward to continuing our work together, thus deepening our friendship and our cooperative relationship,” as I had in the other letters, I changed it to “I look forward to continuing our work together in a spirit of friendship and cooperation.” It’s a small difference, and one that sent the diplomat who’d asked for the letters back into my office asking why I’d made the distinction. I explained that the former implied that everything is friendly and cooperative already, while the latter leaves room for the notion that the relationship may be rocky at the moment while promising that it will improve.

This is the sort of thing I do for a living.

So it looks like I’ll be attending my first actual UN meetings in the next couple of weeks.

The Republic of Korea hosted this year’s Sixth Global Forum on Reinventing Government. The theme was “Toward Participatory and Transparent Governance,” and the Forum produced an outcome document, known as the Seoul Declaration, that makes recommendations on improving governance.

Now Korea is working to get a resolution passed in the General Assembly endorsing the Seoul Declaration, which would follow similar resolutions for past Global Forum outcome documents, and they’re trying to gather as many cosponsor countries as possible. Which is where I come in: I’ll attend two cosponsor meetings, one at the Mission and one at the UN Secretariat, taking notes as the representatives of various states make their suggestions regarding the final shape of the resolution and editing Korea’s statements on the fly. This will be my first opportunity to attend a meeting with representatives of other states, and I look forward to it.