Galleries owned by Larry Gagosian, the powerful and well-connected dealer who has spent his career goosing the prices of contemporary art higher and higher: 14.

Restaurants owned by the chef Masayoshi Takayama, who has spent his career charging more for Japanese food than anyone else in the United States: five.

Restaurants the two men own together: one, Kappo Masa, in the basement below Mr. Gagosian’s Madison Avenue gallery. […]

Now three months old, Kappo Masa is not the most expensive restaurant in New York. That distinction belongs to Mr. Takayama’s home base, Masa, in the Time Warner Center. (Price of dinner for one before tax, tip and drinks: $450.) Still, it is expensive in a way that’s hard to forget either during or after the meal. The cost of eating at Kappo Masa is so brutally, illogically, relentlessly high, and so out of proportion to any pleasure you may get, that large numbers start to seem like uninvited and poorly behaved guests at the table. […]

Stars I am giving it: zero.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

On January 2, 1977, the Shah of Iran made a painful admission about his country’s economy. “We’re broke,” he confided bluntly to his closest aide, court minister Asadollah Alam, in a private meeting. Alam predicted still more dangers to come: “We have squandered every cent we had only to find ourselves checkmated by a single move from Saudi Arabia,” he later wrote in a letter to the shah. “[W]e are now in dire financial peril and must tighten our belts if we are to survive.”

The two men were reacting to recent turmoil in the oil markets. A few weeks prior, at an OPEC meeting in Doha, the Saudis had announced they would resist an Iran-led majority vote to increase petroleum prices by 15 percent. (The shah needed the boost to pay for billions in new spending commitments.) King Khalid bin Abdulaziz Al Saud argued that a price hike wasn’t justified when Western economies were still mired in a recession — but he was also eager to place economic constraints on Iran at a time when the shah was ordering nuclear power plants and projecting influence throughout the Middle East. So the Saudis “flooded the markets,” ramping up oil production from 8 million to 11.8 million barrels per day and slashing crude prices. Unable to compete, Iran was quickly driven from the market: The country’s oil production plunged 38 percent in a month. Billions of dollars in anticipated oil revenues vanished, and Iran was forced to abandon its five-year budget estimates.

A damaging ripple effect persisted: Over the summer of 1977, industrial manufacturing in Iran fell by 50 percent. Inflation ran between 30 and 40 percent. The government made deep cuts to domestic spending to balance the books, but austerity only made matters worse when thousands of young, unskilled men lost their jobs. Before long, economic distress had eroded middle-class support for the shah’s monarchy — which collapsed two years later in the Iranian Revolution.

[…]

In November 2006, Nawaf Obaid, a Saudi security consultant connected to Prince Turki al-Faisal, then Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to Washington, wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post noting that if “[i]f Saudi Arabia boosted production and cut the price of oil in half … it would be devastating to Iran … [and] limit Tehran’s ability to continue funneling hundreds of millions each year to Shiite militias in Iraq and elsewhere.” Two years later, at the height of the global financial crisis, the Saudis acted: They flooded the market, and within six months, oil prices had fallen from their record high of $147 per barrel to just $33. Thus, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad began 2009, an election year, struggling with the sudden collapse in government oil revenues and forced to slash popular subsidies and social programs. The election’s contested outcome was accompanied by economic contraction and the worst political violence in Iran since the fall of the shah.

{ Foreign Policy | Continue reading }

image { Evander Batson }

previously { The Conventional Wisdom On Oil Is Always Wrong }

“Find your sugar baby,” the site exhorted its users.

This year, Paul Aronson, an 84-year-old from Manhattan, contacted a 17-year-old girl, Shaina Foster, through the site and took her out to dinner. On a second date, Ms. Foster brought along her twin sister, Shalaine.

For a few hours on Oct. 1, the evening looked as if it might turn into an old man’s fantasy. The three dined at an expensive restaurant in Midtown. Then Mr. Aronson invited the teenagers to have a drink with him at the four-story brick townhouse he owns on East 38th Street.

He bought a bottle of raspberry-flavored rum from a liquor store on the way, a defense lawyer said. But instead of receiving caresses or whispered flirtations, Mr. Aronson ended up tied to a coffee table for 20 hours. […]

Prosecutors say the two girls bound him with zip ties, took $470 in cash from his wallet and went on a spending spree with his credit cards, buying makeup and clothes. […]

Before he was tied up, Mr. Aronson had given the teenagers a tour of his townhouse and let them play with his tiny dog, a Yorkshire terrier named Muffins, Mr. Kennedy said. Then he poured them glasses of rum and asked them about their sex lives. […]

“He asked to do things I wasn’t going to do,” she told Detective Darryl Ng at the 17th Precinct after the girls were arrested on Oct. 21. “He is ugly, old and disgusting. I tied him up. I took his money and left. He was starting to creep me out.”

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

Leveraging the insight that periods, while a pain, also bring women together, JWT has created an augmented reality app that combines Chinese consumers’ love of technology, cute characters and selfies into a new branded platform for Sofy sanitary pads.

{ Campaign Asia | Continue reading | Thanks Tim }

“There’s as much biodiversity in the soils of Central Park as we found in the soil… from the Arctic to Antarctica” […] almost 170,000 different kinds of microbes. […] The team also found 2,000 species of microbes that are apparently unique to Central Park.

{ NPR | Continue reading }

Take the Danes, for instance. True, they claim to be the happiest people in the world, but why no mention of the fact they are second only to Iceland when it comes to consuming anti- depressants? […] The Danes also have the highest level of private debt in the world (four times as much as the Italians, to put it into context; enough to warrant a warning from the IMF), while more than half of them admit to using the black market to obtain goods and services.

Perhaps the Danes’ dirtiest secret is that, according to a 2012 report from the Worldwide Fund for Nature, they have the fourth largest per capita ecological footprint in the world. Even ahead of the US. […] According to the World Cancer Research Fund, the Danes have the highest cancer rates on the planet. “But at least the trains run on time!” I hear you say. No, that was Italy under Mussolini. The Danish national rail company has skirted bankruptcy in recent years, and the trains most assuredly do not run on time. […]

I am very fond of the Finns, a most pragmatic, redoubtable people with a Sahara-dry sense of humour. But would I want to live in Finland? In summer, you’ll be plagued by mosquitos, in winter, you’ll freeze – that’s assuming no one shoots you, or you don’t shoot yourself. Finland ranks third in global gun ownership behind only America and Yemen; has the highest murder rate in western Europe, double that of the UK; and by far the highest suicide rate in the Nordic countries.

The Finns are epic Friday-night bingers and alcohol is now the leading cause of death for Finnish men.

{ Guardian | Continue reading | More: Nordic nations respond to the original article }

She also learned an old cop trick: If you’re recovering a body in an apartment building, ask every tenant to make coffee — it covers the smell. “Oldest trick in the book,” one officer told her. […]

She began, as all autopsies do, by inserting a needle into the side of each eye to collect fluid — a delicate procedure Melinek perfected after once popping out a cadaver’s glass eyeball. […] Then she removed Booker’s testes, took a samples from each, and put them back in the scrotum. […]

There was the subway jumper at Union Square, for example, whose body was recovered on the tracks of the uptown 4 train with no blood — none at the scene, none in the body itself. She’d never seen anything like it, and only CME Hirsch could explain: The massive trauma to the entire body caused the bone marrow to absorb all the blood. […]

In one case, a man was shot in the chest, but the bullet was found in his liver.

{ NY Post | Continue reading }

photo { Hiroshi Sugimoto }

Polygyny rates are higher in western Africa than in eastern Africa. The African slave trades help explain this difference. More male slaves were exported in the transatlantic slave trades from western Africa, while more female slaves were exported in the Indian Ocean slave trades from eastern Africa. The slave trades led to prolonged periods of abnormal sex ratios, which affected the rates of polygyny across Africa.

{ Economic Development and Cultural Change | Continue reading }

{ Oscar Murillo has recreated a candy-making factory inside a New York gallery }

related { In 1963, Spoerri enacted a sort of performance art called Restaurant de la Galerie J in Paris, for which he cooked on several evenings }

While both tourism research and photography research have grown into substantial academic disciplines, little has been written about their point of intersection: tourist photography. In this paper, I argue that a number of philosophically oriented theories of photography may offer useful perspectives on tourist photography. […]

When I was observing photographing tourists on the Pont Neuf and in the Jardin des Tuileries in Paris, one of the things that struck me was the fact that some tourists, when they came across a sculpture, first took a picture of it, and only started looking after the picture had been taken. Perhaps Sontag is right to argue that the production of pictures serves to appease the tourist’s anxiety about not working; in any case, this type of predatory photographic behavior promotes the accumulation of images to a goal in itself rather than a means to produce meaning or memories.

{ Dennis Schep/Depth of Field | Continue reading }

{ Traditional rug-making techniques meet contemporary political imagery | full story }

{ Base Jumpers Leap Off Of One World Trade Center | Police used surveillance footage to track down the men in a six-month investigation. }

unrelated:

{ Jordan Wolfson’s Animatronic dancer doll on view at David Zwirner Gallery }

Australia has begun exporting camels to Saudi Arabia.

More than 100 animals are being shipped from the Australian port city of Darwin and are due to arrive in Saudi Arabia in early July [2002].

The vast majority are destined for restaurant tables in a major camel-consuming nation.

{ BBC | Continue reading }

photo { Janet Biggs, Point of No Return, 2013 }

{ The Statue of Liberty under construction in Paris | more photos | Wikipedia }

{ Carefree baby seal suns itself on Queens beach }

{ Two women arrested for defying a Chicago edict banning abbreviated bathing suits on beaches, 1922 | Another arrest | Policeman measuring the distance between knee and suit }

{ New York Times, 1919 | PDF }

{ 29-year-old Akari Aoki slowly creeps down the streets of Tokyo in her zombie persona | slideshow }

One of them had a connection with dealers from South Jamaica — and brokered an arrangement where the New Yorkers would purchase narcotics from their California partners and then sell the drugs on consignment in the city, the sources said.

Their first transaction went smoothly, with the California trio shipping one kilo to their Queens partners, who sold the coke and promptly mailed a share of the money back to California, according to the sources.

But the New York dealers were slow sending the Californians their cut after a second transaction, the sources said.

And in their third and final deal, the South Jamaica goons not only kept all the proceeds after selling three kilos — they then tried to lure their business partners to New York City to assassinate them, according to the sources.

But only Woodard showed up on Dec. 10, 2012 […] and was murdered execution-style by a gunman in broad daylight on busy West 58th Street off Seventh Avenue.

{ NY Post | Continue reading }

{ North Brother Island was in use by New York City from 1885 to 1963 as a hospital complex to quarantine and treat people suffering from smallpox and typhoid fever then a rehab center and a housing project for WWII vets. In the 1950s a center opened to treat adolescent drug addicts. Heroin addicts were confined to this island and locked in a room until they were clean. By the early 1960s widespread staff corruption and patient recidivism forced the facility to close. It is now uninhabited and designated as a bird sanctuary. | Rsvlts | more photos | Read more: NY Times, Wikipedia }