Egg Hunt 2015

I'm treasuring this Easter, because I don't know how many more there will be in my house.

Clara thinks Ben has found an egg.

Dr. Seuss House, Willow, Alaska

Lots of people put additions on their houses, but some are more ambitious (or crazier) than others.

Men in Knitwear

I am shocked, shocked I tell you, by these images. They come from a knitting site called stitchseekers.com. If you order this calendar you not only get the hot men, you get the pattern for the bit of knitwear they are modeling. What happened to sweet old knitting ladies when I wasn't paying attention?

I mean, really.

Dreadful Hammers

As 19th-century geology established that the earth is millions of years old, not 6,000, John Ruskin lamented the impact of these revelations on his faith:

If only the geologists would let me alone, I could do very well, but those dreadful hammers! I hear the clink of them at the end of every cadence of the Bible verses.

Rosalba Carriera

Rosalba Carriera (1673-1757) was a Venetian painter who rose to fame and fortune painting miniature portraits on the inside of snuff boxes. Stylish aristocrats from all over Europe, stopping off in Venice on their grand tours, clamored to have Carriera immortalize them or their lovers in a pocket-sized edition. Her most famous such works were a series billed as The Twelve Most Beautiful Women in Venice. No slouch at marketing was our Rosalba. Once she got famous she moved on to full-sized portraits like this, which is Maria Theresa, second Hapsburg Archduchess, 1730.

I haven't been able to find many of her snuff boxes, but here is one, a portrait of Horace Walpole,

This work, titled A Muse, is probably also a portrait of some noble person; the Getty calls such works teste di fantasia, "fanciful renderings of beautiful women with a mythological appearance." The velvety sheen comes from blended pastels, a technique Carriera perfected in her snuffbox days. The Getty calls it "18th-century air brushing." She had two artistic sisters who helped her keep up with the work load.

Cardinal Melchior de Polignac -- now there's a name that says "international aristocrat."

Caterina Sagredo Barbarigo

Charles Sackville, second Duke of Dorset.

In 1721 Carriera made a triumphant trip to Paris, where she painted dozens of portraits and was elected to the Academy by acclamation. Louis XV.

And the French painter Watteau, done on the same trip.

Two fascinating self-portraits.

Spring Keeps Springing

Washington, this week.

Meanwhile in Yemen

The Saudi intervention in Yemen is providing a good look at what a more militaristic policy toward Iran and its allies would actually achieve:

The Houthis, portrayed as Iranian proxies by the Saudis but few others, have continued their advances despite nine nights of Saudi-led airstrikes. On Thursday, Houthi fighters captured a presidential palace in the southern port of Aden, killed a Saudi soldier in a skirmish at the border and wounded five others.

Islamist militants, meanwhile, capitalized on the chaos caused by the airstrikes to free a leader of Al Qaeda and hundreds of others from prison and to partly seize control of a crucial city in the south. . . .

The war on Yemen is just a week old, but it is already backfiring and harming regional security.

How is this sort of thing better than negotiations? Isn't there enough war and chaos in the Middle East already?

Why Conservatives Oppose the Iran Deal

Because they always oppose deals with hostile countries, no matter what they say or who negotiated them. Jonathan Chait:

In the 1960s, the United States worked with the Soviets to sign the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, a pact to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons to states that had not yet obtained them. National Review denounced it as “immoral, foolish, and probably most impractical, a policy that makes nonsense of our defensive alliance in Europe, that favors our enemies and slights our allies.” Ironically, the NPT is now the legal basis for the international effort to prevent Iran from obtaining nukes. So the nuclear agreement conservatives originally denounced as folly is now the very thing they demand be upheld.

The right also fiercely opposed Richard Nixon’s opening to China. Conservative columnists called the administration’s recognition of the communist regime “the liquidation of the anti-Communist stance of the American Government” and compared it to (of course) Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement of Hitler. They likewise denounced Nixon’s policy of detente with the Soviet Union as “one of the greater triumphs of the Soviet propaganda machine,” and the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT) as “profoundly unwise.”

One could go on; if there has ever been an agreement with any of our enemies that American conservatives have supported, I can't think of it.

Always believing the best about your enemies may be foolish, but always believing the worst makes it impossible to get along in the world.

The Ongoing March of Clean Energy

Last year half of all investment in energy production worldwide was in renewable energy; this represents a 17% increase in such investment, to $270 billion. That's 103 Gigawatts of capacity in a single year. To put it another way, more solar and wind power capacity was ordered in 2014 than existed in the world in 2000. And this isn't being driven by nervous Greens in Europe. Four of the countries making big investments were China, India, Brazil, and South Africa; across the developing world investment in clean energy rose 36%.

An Agreement with Iran and the Future of Peace

I won't pretend to understand the details of the framework nuclear agreement with Iran, but the experts I respect think it is a good deal, putting very large obstacles in the path of any future Iranian push for a bomb. That this could be achieved despite the intense suspicion between the US and Iranian governments strikes me as almost miraculous. Credit goes to President Obama, to Secretary of State Kerry, and to all other professionals from the State Department and EU who worked so long and hard to make this happen; and to President Rouhani of Iran, Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, and their negotiating team.

The most intelligent critics of any deal with Iran are not really focused on the nuclear issue. Their attitude is that Iran is too powerful in the Middle East already, and too eager to pursue more power through arming rebels and Shiite militias and generally making mischief, and that lifting sanctions will only make things worse. John Boehner:

My concerns about Iran’s efforts to foment unrest, brutal violence and terror have only grown. It would be naïve to suggest the Iranian regime will not continue to use its nuclear program, and any economic relief, to further destabilize the region.

Reuel Marc Gerecht:

this diplomatic process accelerates the nuclearization of the region, throws jet fuel on the war between the Sunnis and the Shia, and puts America into a much worse strategic position in the Middle East.

But this sort of thinking puts the US back on the side of the Sunni dictators whose rule has kept the whole region in squalor and unrest for decades, the hopeless situation that led Bush to launch his invasion of Iraq, trying to revolutionize the Muslim world with shock and awe. I find a lot to hate about the current Iranian government. But I think the Iranian people are the best hope for peace in the region, and I agree with Obama (and the Pentagon, and the State Department) that our long-term strategy ought to be focused on waiting out the regime until the increasingly pro-western people eventually come to power.

President Obama's speech was carried live on Iranian television, the first time they have ever run such a speech unedited. Thousands of young Iranians were celebrating in the streets last night. We have all learned the hard way not to mistake big city protesters for the majority in any Muslim country, but it seems to me that the agreement can only help the people in Iran we want to be our friends and marginalize our real enemies. One tweet the Times reprinted said

In a party. Most people have a glass in one hand and a mobile with anti filter and Twitter in the other.

Meanwhile the news from Kenya is that the Sunni fanatics -- the common enemies of the US and Iran -- have carried out another massacre, this time of Christian university students.

Who are the real monsters in the world right now? Where are there forces of civilization we might ally with against them?

War between the US and Iran would not only be a disaster in the short term, it would cut off one of the most promising avenues toward peace, betraying the people of Iran with whom the future of the region rests whether we like it or not.

Eric Sloane and the Age of Wood

Eric Sloane (1905-1985) was born in New York City and named Everard Jean Hinrichs. His family was respectably upper middle class, but Sloane fought with his father, his teachers, and everyone else who had ideas about what he ought to be doing. Ignoring them, he devoted his time to art and aviation. He hung around a lot with Fredrick Goudy, an artist, inventor, and font designer who was a neighbor of his parents. From Goudy he learned to hand paint letters and design eye-catching signs. As soon as his sign-painting skills had reached a commercial level, at 14, he began to cadge jobs for himself and gradually assert his independence. He attended classes for a while at the Art Students League of New York. There he changed his name, taking Eric from the middle letters of America and Sloane from John French Sloan, one of his teachers.

Sloane had always loved hanging around the pioneer pilots flying out of Roosevelt Field, Long Island, and began to paint names and slogans on their planes. According to his autobiography, he was taught to fly by Wiley Post in exchange for teaching Post how to paint. Alas Sloane was not notably truthful about his early life, so believe that one or not as you see fit. Sloane certainly learned to fly somehow, and he fell in love with clouds. He painted them for the rest of his life. The first painting he ever sold was of clouds -- he later said he sold it to Amelia Erhardt, ahem -- and his most viewed work is a huge cloudscape that covers a whole wall of the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum in Washington DC.

In 1925, at the age of 20, Sloane cut himself off from his family and worked his way across America, supporting himself as a sign painter. He kept painting formal works as well, some of clouds, others landscapes in the style of the Hudson River School. Few of his early works survive, partly because once he got rich he tried to buy them all back and destroy them.

Sloane did not start doing the sort of work I know and love until the 1950s, when he bought a Connecticut farmhouse and set about restoring it. He began to identify with early American settlers in an almost mystical way, and he formulated a theory that they lived more fully and sensed the world more keenly than their degenerate, coddled, city-dwelling descendants. In 1956 he discovered the diary of Noah Blake, the account of a teenage boy living on a New England farm in 1805; this was later published with Sloane's illustrations.

Sloane became one of America's leading authorities on old wooden buildings, especially barns, and the tools and methods used to build them. He was fascinated by the relationship that old fashioned craftsmen had to wood; one of his 30 books was titled A Reverence for Wood. Another, from which this drawing comes, is A Museum of Early American Tools.

I first discovered Sloane in the 90s, when I found that my career rather suddenly involved excavating the sites of colonial and antebellum farms. At the time I knew nothing about barns or traditional building practices, and all I knew about old woodworking tools was that I had seen a few on the walls of restaurants. I found Sloane's works to be a wonderful way of learning about these things. Plus, they're beautiful.

Some of Sloane's many wonderful diagrams showing how things were made and worked. His books are a terrific resource for anyone who needs to know about old American buildings, and a delight for the curious.

They Were the Enemy

Times reporter Rod Norland is in Tikrit, roaming the streets under escort, confirming that most of the city has fallen to Iraqi forces. Militiamen he interviewed said that last major fight was late Wednesday at Saddam Hussein's old palace. Many fighters for the Islamic State seem to have escaped, or maybe there weren't ever as many of them as feared. They did leave behind lots of bombs; above is what CNN says is a suicide bulldozer, packed with barrel bombs.

Here's a surreal detail from Norland:

Muen al-Khadimy, one of the popular mobilization’s top leaders and a senior official in the Badr Organization, toured Tikrit on Thursday with an odd entourage of fighters and supply vehicles, including a pickup truck loaded entirely with tubs of date pastries and dozens of artists’ easels.

The Popular Mobilization Forces is what Iraqis call the Shiite militias raised to fight the Islamic State. I was also struck by this statement:

There were no Islamic State prisoners at all taken in the recent fight, said Mr. Khadimy, the senior Badr official. “To be honest, everywhere we captured them we killed them because they were the enemy,” he said. Then, perhaps realizing how that sounded, he explained that any ISIS fighters who were about to be captured were assumed to be suicide bombers, so they were killed as a precaution.

The spread of suicide bombing as a tactic has had many bad effects, and now we can add that it is a good reason to shoot anyone trying to surrender.

A Door of Hell Opens in Sanaa

Yemeni bloggers and tweeters have launched a campaign to end the war in their troubled country focused around the hashtag #kefaya, Arabic for "enough". One wrote,

A door of hell has just been opened in Sanaa.

It makes me sad. Here are thousand of people who just want to be left alone to get on with their lives, but the world won't allow that. Between the Sunni radicals, the Shiite militias, the various thugs who have served as president, the Saudis and Iran, they are going to be torn to pieces.

Right now most of their anger is directed at the bombing campaign launched by Saudi Arabia to stop the Iranian backed Houthi militias from taking over the country. Here is a pretty typical specimen:

This makes me think that the Saudi campaign is doomed -- so far the main effect has been to bring the urban middle class more firmly to the side of the Houthis, and against that alliance the Saudis' friends have no chance of taking control of the country. But now that the Saudis have committed themselves they are not going to give up easily, and the people of Yemen are going to pay a high price no matter how it ends.

A Coyote in Queens

Coyote spotted on the roof of the L.I.C. Bar on Vernon Avenue, Queens. From National Geographic.

Bossard's Temple of Art

Johann Michael Bossard (1874–1950) was a Swiss-born artist who spent most of his career teaching in Hamburg. Between 1911 and 1950, in the countryside south of the city, he and his wife Jutta created a strange home/studio/work of art they called the Kunststätte, which is probably best translated by a trendy word like "artspace."

Overall view. The building behind the house in the Kunsttempel, the Temple of Art.

And what a weird space it is.

The sculpture garden. Of all the ways to be remembered after you die, creating a really bizarre house strikes me as one of the most interesting and least harmful.

Declaring Victory in Tikrit

Iraq's Prime Minister declared today that Tikrit has fallen to Iraqi forces, but this claim is contradicted by his own commanders at the scene:

In Tikrit, however, an Iraqi general, who asked not to be named so as to avoid openly contradicting the prime minister, said that reports of Tikrit’s fall were at best premature. “God willing, it will fall,” he said.

Other military officers and a civilian official reached in Tikrit said it was true that Iraqi forces had advanced into the center of the city and had entered government buildings and parts of the Republican Palace. But they said that parts of the palace remained in Islamic State hands and that fighting was continuing.

A Pentagon spokesman said in a statement that “we can confirm” the security forces’ “advancement into Tikrit to liberate the city center as well as other parts of the city.”

So at least the offensive is moving again. I can't believe that American airstrikes have crippled the Islamic State's forces in just six days, but maybe they have shifted the morale equation enough to make this advance possible. But the befuddled situation in the Iraqi government makes me nervous.

UPDATE

This is from an interesting article by Mike Giglio about how much the Islamic State relies on booby traps and IEDs rather than conventional defensive warfare:

Soldiers who push into ISIS territory looking for a fight often find themselves instead facing explosive traps and sniper fire. “There is no confrontation between fighters,” complained a fighter with the Badr Brigades, one of the largest in the coalition of Shiite militias that has taken up arms against ISIS, which preaches an extremist version of Sunni Islam. “It’s not like a normal war.”

And this:

The peshmerga have defused or detonated more than 6,000 IEDs along their 650-mile front with ISIS since the war began in August, Kurdish officials said. Those were the ones they’d been able to find. Mohammad pointed to the fields that stretched to a set of hills on one side of the road and the village with the flattened home on the other. “To be honest, we believe that those open fields beneath the hills, and the hills, are filled with IEDs. All those houses are full of IEDs,” he said.

So maybe what was stopping the Iraqi forces was their or their officers' fear of IEDs, and all that was necessary to get the offensive going was American bombing of a few locations known to be booby trapped and then a bit of nerve.

Signs of Spring

Magnolia blooms in Washington, yesterday.

Sleeping in Wartime

Back in 2003, a few days after the invasion of Iraq, George W. Bush ran into Colin Powell in a White House corridor.

President Bush: I'm sleeping like a baby.

Secretary Powell: I'm sleeping like a baby, too. I wake up screaming every two hours.

This is from George Packer, The Unwinding.