A WORLD OF CERAMICS

By EVE M. KAHN
NY Times Published: September 2, 2010

In North Carolina, 18th-century immigrant potters developed signature styles. Quakers from England preferred sunburst motifs on red backgrounds, while German Lutherans and Calvinists specialized in polka dots and stripes on black vessels. Moravians from Bohemia molded green flasks in turtle and owl forms and painted pomegranates and lilies to symbolize Jesus’ wounds and rebirth.

The products were all made near Greensboro. When they are shown together, “it’s going to be such a flood of pattern and color,” said Robert Hunter, a curator of “Art in Clay: Masterworks of North Carolina Earthenware,” now at the Milwaukee Art Museum. The exhibition ranks as “the largest and certainly the most revisionist” display of the material ever organized, Mr. Hunter said. Luke Beckerdite, a curator of the show, explained, “For so long, everyone thought all of this was Moravian.”

About half of the 120 pieces are loans from Old Salem Museums and Gardens in Winston-Salem, N.C., near the sites of Moravian workshops. Archaeological digs there and at other settlers’ kilns have not yet been completed, Mr. Beckerdite said. Shards keep turning up that suggest how communities experimented with forms. The excavations, he said, “will be key to establishing the final word.”

Milwaukee Art Museum

Thanks to Kelly Breslin

Next week, President Obama is scheduled to propose new measures to boost the economy. I hope they’re bold and substantive, since the Republicans will oppose him regardless — if he came out for motherhood, the G.O.P. would declare motherhood un-American. So he should put them on the spot for standing in the way of real action.

But let’s put politics aside and talk about what we’ve actually learned about economic policy over the past 20 months.

When Mr. Obama first proposed $800 billion in fiscal stimulus, there were two groups of critics. Both argued that unemployment would stay high — but for very different reasons.

One group — the group that got almost all the attention — declared that the stimulus was much too large, and would lead to disaster. If you were, say, reading The Wall Street Journal’s opinion pages in early 2009, you would have been repeatedly informed that the Obama plan would lead to skyrocketing interest rates and soaring inflation.

The other group, which included yours truly, warned that the plan was much too small given the economic forecasts then available. As I pointed out in February 2009, the Congressional Budget Office was predicting a $2.9 trillion hole in the economy over the next two years; an $800 billion program, partly consisting of tax cuts that would have happened anyway, just wasn’t up to the task of filling that hole.

Critics in the second camp were particularly worried about what would happen this year, since the stimulus would have its maximum effect on growth in late 2009 then gradually fade out. Last year, many of us were already warning that the economy might stall in the second half of 2010.

So what actually happened? The administration’s optimistic forecast was wrong, but which group of pessimists was right about the reasons for that error?

Start with interest rates. Those who said the stimulus was too big predicted sharply rising rates. When rates rose in early 2009, The Wall Street Journal published an editorial titled “The Bond Vigilantes: The disciplinarians of U.S. policy makers return.” The editorial declared that it was all about fear of deficits, and concluded, “When in doubt, bet on the markets.”

But those who said the stimulus was too small argued that temporary deficits weren’t a problem as long as the economy remained depressed; we were awash in savings with nowhere to go. Interest rates, we said, would fluctuate with optimism or pessimism about future growth, not with government borrowing.

When in doubt, bet on the markets. The 10-year bond rate was over 3.7 percent when The Journal published that editorial; it’s under 2.7 percent now.

What about inflation? Amid the inflation hysteria of early 2009, the inadequate-stimulus critics pointed out that inflation always falls during sustained periods of high unemployment, and that this time should be no different. Sure enough, key measures of inflation have fallen from more than 2 percent before the economic crisis to 1 percent or less now, and Japanese-style deflation is looking like a real possibility.

Meanwhile, the timing of recent economic growth strongly supports the notion that stimulus does, indeed, boost the economy: growth accelerated last year, as the stimulus reached its predicted peak impact, but has fallen off — just as some of us feared — as the stimulus has faded.

Oh, and don’t tell me that Germany proves that austerity, not stimulus, is the way to go. Germany actually did quite a lot of stimulus — the austerity is all in the future. Also, it never had a housing bubble that burst. And with all that, German G.D.P. is still further below its precrisis peak than American G.D.P. True, Germany has done better in terms of employment — but that’s because strong unions and government policy have prevented American-style mass layoffs.

The actual lessons of 2009-2010, then, are that scare stories about stimulus are wrong, and that stimulus works when it is applied. But it wasn’t applied on a sufficient scale. And we need another round.

I know that getting that round is unlikely: Republicans and conservative Democrats won’t stand for it. And if, as expected, the G.O.P. wins big in November, this will be widely regarded as a vindication of the anti-stimulus position. Mr. Obama, we’ll be told, moved too far to the left, and his Keynesian economic doctrine was proved wrong.

But politics determines who has the power, not who has the truth. The economic theory behind the Obama stimulus has passed the test of recent events with flying colors; unfortunately, Mr. Obama, for whatever reason — yes, I’m aware that there were political constraints — initially offered a plan that was much too cautious given the scale of the economy’s problems.

So, as I said, here’s hoping that Mr. Obama goes big next week. If he does, he’ll have the facts on his side.

Now Open
1549 Echo Park Avenue

cookbook

Kanagawa Institute of Technology

via

Looking with Mirror Apparatus, 2008
Oil, wax, Plexiglas and mirror on cut linen 84 x 58 inches 213.4 x 147.3 cm

Slide Paintings
Opens September 9 – October 16, 2010

Marc Foxx

Aug 16, 2010
Archinect

This house in the Osaka Prefecture Sakai City of Japan was built as a single family residence for three. It is located in a quiet residential neighborhood near the old Hamadera Suwanomori tram station. The client purchased the plot in this part of town because his childhood memories are deeply rooted within this neighborhood.

In the North, the house faces a narrow 4 meter-wide road, and in the West and East, it is framed by neighboring houses. In the South, house connects to the lush green area of the Suwanomori shinto shrine. It was a main request, that the green in the South was to be felt in the plans.

The interior is sprinkled with natural light through many small windows and ceiling lights which achive a bright space and avoid installing big east/west windows. The space is dominated by the split-level circulation and the material choices.

Both east and west walls have been fully utilized as bookshelfs to act as book storage and also display the growth of the family’s child. The design mentality that seeks to avoid clutter and uselessness has the bookshelf walls also act as additional layers of insulation against the outside heat.

The spatial configuration is designed in a way that lets the inhabitants feel as close to nature as possible: natural light and the rich green from the South coming in, and natural ventilation that can be controlled through additional openings and shutters in the North, South, East and West, depending on the respective season.

To obtain this, an opening with shutters on the first floor facing the South toggles ventilation, according to the current climate situation, and maintains privacy from the outside. An additional dividing wall can be created with half room-high folding doors.

Special energy was devoted to creating a union between the single shades of plywood used on the floor, the wall, ceilings, and fittings. A careful selection was applied to the arrangement of colors, paints, and wood stains to give the space a light attitude. The client’s personal mark can be felt here and there.

The idea was to create a timeless and environmentally friendly residence that adjusts naturally to the family’s changing needs as time passes.

Archinect

Untitled (Scars), 2008, concrete, dye, ink, hair, acrylic paint, linen, wood, staples, 17 x 14 inches (43.2 x 35.6 cm)

Discipline Joy Lake, 2008, concrete, dye, ink, hair, acrylic paint, linen, wood, staples, 17 x 14 inches (43.2 x 35.6 cm)

Saw these a while ago and can’t stop thinking about them

David Kordansky

Orange County, Calif., has been a national symbol of conservatism for more than 50 years, but the percentage of registered Republican voters dropped to 43 percent in June, the lowest level in 70 years. But it has always boasted of a zesty political brand: almost defiantly conservative, a land of gated communities and great wealth that produced a steady stream of colorful conservative figures. A view of Newport Ridge, a high-end housing development in southern Orange County.

By ADAM NAGOURNEY
NY Times Published: August 29, 2010

SANTA ANA, Calif. — Orange County has been a national symbol of conservatism for more than 50 years: birthplace of President Richard M. Nixon and home to John Wayne, a bastion for the John Birch Society, a land of orange groves and affluence, the region of California where Republican presidential candidates could always count on a friendly audience.

But this iconic county of 3.1 million people passed something of a milestone in June. The percentage of registered Republican voters dropped to 43 percent, the lowest level in 70 years.

It was the latest sign of the demographic, ethnic and political changes that are transforming the county and challenging long-held views of a region whose colorful — its detractors might suggest zany — reputation extends well beyond the borders of this state.

At the end of 2009, nearly 45 percent of the county’s residents spoke a language other than English at home, according to county officials. Whites now make up only 45 percent of the population; this county is teeming with Hispanics, as well as Vietnamese, Korean and Chinese families. Its percentage of foreign-born residents jumped to 30 percent in 2008 from 6 percent in 1970, and visits to some of its corners can feel like a trip to a foreign land.

The demographic changes that have swept the county reflect what is happening across the state and much of the nation. It has happened slowly but surely over the course of a generation, becoming increasingly apparent not only in a drive through the 34 cities that fill this sprawling 789-square-mile county south of Los Angeles, but also, most recently, in the results of a presidential election. In 2008, Barack Obama drew 48 percent of the vote here against Senator John McCain of Arizona. (By comparison, in 1980, Jimmy Carter received just 23 percent against Ronald Reagan, the conservative hero whose election as California governor in 1966 and 1970 was boosted in no small part by the affection for him here.)

“I was a city planner in San Diego in 1960 when Orange County was just orange groves and typecast as a conservative stronghold,” said Marshall Kaplan, the executive director of the Merage Foundations, which runs educational and other programs for recent immigrants here. “It isn’t anymore. I live in Irvine. My wife is Asian. In Irvine, I sometimes feel like I’m her affirmative action program.”

Manuel Gomez, the vice chancellor of student affairs at the University of California, Irvine, said the county where he was born 63 years ago is almost unrecognizable to him today. “With diversity comes more cultural voices and political voices,” he said. “And certainly better food.”

Orange County is not unique in being a reliable Republican region in California. But this county has always boasted of a zesty political brand: almost defiantly conservative, the anti-Los Angeles, a land of gated communities and great wealth that managed to produce a steady stream of colorful conservative figures, including the televangelist Robert H. Schuller and former Representative Robert K. Dornan — B-1 Bob, as he was known, for his advocacy of military projects. (In a sign of what was to come, Mr. Dornan lost the House seat in 1996 to a Democratic Latina, Loretta Sanchez).

With such world-famous attractions as Disneyland and Mr. Schuller’s Crystal Cathedral and enclaves like Laguna Beach and Balboa Island, Orange County is as much a symbol in California as it is nationally.

Indeed, to some measure, the extent of the county’s transformation may seem magnified simply because of the way people thought of it in the past. “The new Orange County is not a repudiation of the old,” said Kevin Starr, a California historian. “For all the attention paid the right-wingers there, they never really took up the whole place. They were just more mediagenic than everyone else.”

Still, by any measure, this is no longer Nixon’s Orange County.

Here in Santa Ana, a sign on a downtown furniture store the other day advertised a sale in Spanish only; nearly 95 percent of the enrollment in the public schools is Latino. The mayor of Irvine, Sukhee Kang, was born in Korea, making him the first Korean-American to run a major American city. “We have 35 languages spoken in our city,” Mr. Kang said.

A few miles away in Westminster — where Vietnamese immigrants began arriving about 30 years ago, earning the area the name Little Saigon — is a dazzling sea of Vietnamese characters on storefronts and billboards (including one for McDonald’s). “I’ve been here for 30 years,” said Kinh Tram, 59, as he sat in front of a two-story mall that was crowded with other Vietnamese immigrants. “When I first came here, most of these were open lots.”

There are pockets of deep poverty spread across a county long identified with suburban affluence and escape from urban Los Angeles. About 25 percent of residents here did not have health insurance at some point during 2009, according to a report released last week by the U.C.L.A. Center for Health Policy Research. Less than a mile from the entrance to Disneyland is a Latino enclave of low-income housing where trucks arrive every morning, with names like Yucatán Produce, to sell groceries and household goods to people who cannot afford a car to drive to the store.

Orange remains a Republican county, at least relatively: an influx of immigrants certainly does not equate to automatic Democratic gains, here or anywhere else across the country. Many Vietnamese immigrants are socially conservative and run for office as Republicans. Until the increased identification of the Republican Party with tough measures on immigration in recent years, Latino voters were also clearly in play for Republicans. Most elected officials in Orange County are Republicans.

But the political texture of this county, which is larger in population than Nevada or Iowa, is changing, and many officials say it is only a matter of time before many Republican officeholders get swept out with the tide.

While Republicans have been on a steady decline — in 1990, they made up 56 percent of the electorate — the percentage of independent voters, as in much of the state, soared to 20 percent this past June from 8.6 percent in 1990. President Obama’s strong showing here in 2008 continued a nearly 30-year pattern in which the vote for Democratic presidential candidates has steadily increased.

Mr. Tram, the Vietnamese immigrant in Westminster, said that he had voted for Mr. Obama and that he thought most of his Vietnamese friends had done the same. “The Republicans are for rich people,” he said.

A large reason for this transformation is immigration. But the changes also reflect how the regional economy has changed, with the shrinking of the aerospace industry, which supported the once dominant, mostly white middle-class community here. That has largely been taken over by service, tourism and high-tech jobs, the result being that this county is a contrast of the extremely wealthy and the lower middle class.

“It’s less of a middle-class suburb today,” said Michael M. Ruane, the director of the Orange County Community Indicators Project, which studies economic and demographic trends in the county. “You have areas of poverty and areas of great affluence and less of a middle.”

Even fans of the recent hit television series “The O.C.,” whose main characters were prosperous white residents of Newport Beach, got little hint of the diversity of the region. “The county is becoming more like California,” Mr. Ruane said. “The national image that it is an entirely conservative and entirely Republican county is wrong. Voter registration patterns and voting have shifted as a result of these demographic shifts.”

The last time a Democrat sat in the White House, he faced a nonstop witch hunt by his political opponents. Prominent figures on the right accused Bill and Hillary Clinton of everything from drug smuggling to murder. And once Republicans took control of Congress, they subjected the Clinton administration to unrelenting harassment — at one point taking 140 hours of sworn testimony over accusations that the White House had misused its Christmas card list.

Now it’s happening again — except that this time it’s even worse. Let’s turn the floor over to Rush Limbaugh: “Imam Hussein Obama,” he recently declared, is “probably the best anti-American president we’ve ever had.”

To get a sense of how much it matters when people like Mr. Limbaugh talk like this, bear in mind that he’s an utterly mainstream figure within the Republican Party; bear in mind, too, that unless something changes the political dynamics, Republicans will soon control at least one house of Congress. This is going to be very, very ugly.

So where is this rage coming from? Why is it flourishing? What will it do to America?

Anyone who remembered the 1990s could have predicted something like the current political craziness. What we learned from the Clinton years is that a significant number of Americans just don’t consider government by liberals — even very moderate liberals — legitimate. Mr. Obama’s election would have enraged those people even if he were white. Of course, the fact that he isn’t, and has an alien-sounding name, adds to the rage.

By the way, I’m not talking about the rage of the excluded and the dispossessed: Tea Partiers are relatively affluent, and nobody is angrier these days than the very, very rich. Wall Street has turned on Mr. Obama with a vengeance: last month Steve Schwarzman, the billionaire chairman of the Blackstone Group, the private equity giant, compared proposals to end tax loopholes for hedge fund managers with the Nazi invasion of Poland.

And powerful forces are promoting and exploiting this rage. Jane Mayer’s new article in The New Yorker about the superrich Koch brothers and their war against Mr. Obama has generated much-justified attention, but as Ms. Mayer herself points out, only the scale of their effort is new: billionaires like Richard Mellon Scaife waged a similar war against Bill Clinton.

Meanwhile, the right-wing media are replaying their greatest hits. In the 1990s, Mr. Limbaugh used innuendo to feed anti-Clinton mythology, notably the insinuation that Hillary Clinton was complicit in the death of Vince Foster. Now, as we’ve just seen, he’s doing his best to insinuate that Mr. Obama is a Muslim. Again, though, there’s an extra level of craziness this time around: Mr. Limbaugh is the same as he always was, but now seems tame compared with Glenn Beck.

And where, in all of this, are the responsible Republicans, leaders who will stand up and say that some partisans are going too far? Nowhere to be found.

To take a prime example: the hysteria over the proposed Islamic center in lower Manhattan almost makes one long for the days when former President George W. Bush tried to soothe religious hatred, declaring Islam a religion of peace. There were good reasons for his position: there are a billion Muslims in the world, and America can’t afford to make all of them its enemies.

But here’s the thing: Mr. Bush is still around, as are many of his former officials. Where are the statements, from the former president or those in his inner circle, preaching tolerance and denouncing anti-Islam hysteria? On this issue, as on many others, the G.O.P. establishment is offering a nearly uniform profile in cowardice.

So what will happen if, as expected, Republicans win control of the House? We already know part of the answer: Politico reports that they’re gearing up for a repeat performance of the 1990s, with a “wave of committee investigations” — several of them over supposed scandals that we already know are completely phony. We can expect the G.O.P. to play chicken over the federal budget, too; I’d put even odds on a 1995-type government shutdown sometime over the next couple of years.

It will be an ugly scene, and it will be dangerous, too. The 1990s were a time of peace and prosperity; this is a time of neither. In particular, we’re still suffering the after-effects of the worst economic crisis since the 1930s, and we can’t afford to have a federal government paralyzed by an opposition with no interest in helping the president govern. But that’s what we’re likely to get.

If I were President Obama, I’d be doing all I could to head off this prospect, offering some major new initiatives on the economic front in particular, if only to shake up the political dynamic. But my guess is that the president will continue to play it safe, all the way into catastrophe.

San Pedro bassist Mike Watt at his studio at Angel’s Gate Cultural Center. (Bob Chamberlin / Los Angeles Times)

By John Payne
Special to the Los Angeles Times
August 29, 2010

Mike Watt banged up a knee while onstage thumping his bass with legendary proto- punk band the Stooges a few weeks back, so, at least for a while, there won’t be any kayaking or morning bicycle rides around his beloved San Pedro for the local art-punk champ. But that doesn’t mean he’s going to stop playing.

“I’m still doing the gigs,” he says with a crusty laugh, “I ain’t quit, but it’s like an ironing board, man. It’s totally stiff, and it’s just immobilized. But I got more gigs to do. I gotta stay in motion.”

That means he’ll soon be hopping back in the van to crisscross the country, like he’s done countless times since his days with the esteemed L.A. punk trio Minutemen, which formed 30 years ago. In that time, he’s gone through four vans: “This one is only a few years old, it’s got 248,000 miles … it’s a big country.”

One of the hardest-working men in showbiz, Watt is renowned for his slapping bass and wild enthusiasm in many bands both local and national. There’s his Material Girl tribute band the Madonnabes, and the original Punk Rock Karaoke with Eric Melvin of NOFX and Greg Hetson of Bad Religion. Watt’s been doing some shows recently with former Minutemen drummer George Hurley and recorded three albums with Hurley, Saccharine Trust guitarist Joe Baiza and various lead vocalists under the name Unknown Instructors. Also, there’s Hellride, Li’l Pit, Pair of Pliers, the Jom & Terry Show, Crimony, Dos, the Secondmen and Bootstrappers. He’s got his Missingmen band going too, as well as a weekly Web radio program, “The Watt From Pedro Show” (twfps.com), his Hootpage blog and loads of other things — including his third opera.

This summer, the bassist has been occupied with Iggy Pop’s revitalized Stooges, with whom Watt has been playing since Coachella in 2003. It’s a longer period than Watt’s stint with the formative band of his musical life, Minutemen, which “was five years and 11 months.” His time spent under Pop’s tutelage has been extremely valuable, he says.

“Iggy’s a great cat, as a music person, but he actually knows a lot about culture,” says Watt. “He’s very intelligent. I’ve learned so much about being a better bass player from that guy. There’s these guys that don’t operate machines, they have different perspectives of the sound; they’re more like conductors, almost like a bridge to the people. So they can help you, especially with bass, because it’s kind of mysterious how bass works. It’s not just a guitar. It’s a weird thing, kinda like grout between the tiles.

“Iggy’s songs are so much a part of our scene, they’re like the Source,” he says with a trace of awe. “I never believed I’d be in that situation.”

He’s being typically modest. Says former SST Records labelmate Henry Rollins, “Mike is the only living bass player I know who could be in the Stooges. To hit that pocket the way they do, they needed a bass player who understands what makes it work, and that’s Mike Watt.”

Watt likes being the grout, he’ll tell you over and over. It’s an idea he got from his late Minutemen bandmate D. Boon, who died in a van crash in 1985.

“A lotta my stuff comes from playing with D. Boon. Boon was all for pushing the bass out, in a more egalitarian thing. It was more like political ideas in a band, the way he’d pull back on his guitar. And that’s where a lot of my style, whatever, comes from. But all bands are not like the Minutemen.”

“If you ever see Watt play or listen to his records,” says longtime Watt collaborator guitarist Nels Cline, “you notice that he always brings every ounce of his being to all that he does. The Minutemen were the beginning of my personal involvement in what could be called the punk scene in L.A., which was a scene — at least in the initial stages — that as a jazz-type dude I thought had little to do with me. But upon seeing the Minutemen, I realized that it had a lot to do with me, because of the vastness of their music, the originality of how they expressed themselves.”

The amiable, gregarious Watt is a beloved and valuable figure on the L.A. scene who can always be counted on to push his music forward. His recent recording project Floored by Four released its debut full length on Sean Lennon’s Chimera label. It was made in New York with a quartet also featuring guitarist Cline (best known these days for his work in Wilco), ex-Cibo Matto keyboardist Yuka Honda and drummer Dougie Bowne. The result is risk-taking, spontaneous and thought-provoking electric music — that’s also a lot of fun to listen to.

In crafting the album, Watt played or sang each player a very basic bass part to improvise around and sat back to be the glue as each worked his or her magic.

“Writing songs on bass is pretty weird,” he says, “but I kinda like it because it leaves a lot of room for other people. And I’m playing the bass and saying, well, what do you wanna do? If you’ve got all these years of improvisation and stuff — like us four, you can just jump on it.”

Floored by Four is one of many projects on Watt’s plate. He has the freedom to stay busy but likes even more the opportunity to keep growing, however far it may take him from his “punk” roots. He’s got another three albums recorded with Cline coming out; a project with a Canadian artist he’s never met (they exchanged files over the Internet); another album with his longstanding Missingmen crew; more work with Unknown Instructors. At his count, there’s a total of about “13 to 14″ items in the pipeline.

Watt’s most crucial current “proj,” as he calls them, is his third punk opera, to be titled “Hyphenated-Man.” The follow-up to 1997′s “Contemplating the Engine Room” and 2004′s “The Secondman’s Middle Stand,” it was recorded in Pere Ubu bassist Tony Maimone’s New York studio with Watt’s Missingmen crew (former Slovenly guitarist Tom Watson and drummer Raul Morales), and it too is all about establishing a new freedom in the way music called rock might be shaped and what its sources of inspiration might be.

Inspired by the Minutemen’s oft-brief tunes, many of which clocked in at under a minute, as well as by painter Hieronymous Bosch, Watt is creating “Hyphenated-Man” out of 30 little songs that, combined, will reveal a broader whole. The idea is similar to, he says, the life he’s been living, or hopes for. He wrote it all on D. Boon’s Telecaster.

“This third opera is different from the other two,” he says. “The first one had a sad ending, the second one a happy ending. This one, there’s no ending. It’s all middle.” The theme is suggestive of its author, who, at 52, is a middle-aged man, still doing what he does and looking to glimpse an overview on what it all’s about.

“‘Hyphenated-Man’ is a voyage into the middle, without being all sappy about it. You played the game, but still you confront yourself: What is ‘Man’? In middle age you start asking yourself these questions, and it’s not like you’ve gotta figure it out. But you’re more open. There’s more questions than answers.”

Meanwhile, Watt keeps pushing forward with the same drive and determination that mark his best basslines.

“The recorded work is real important to me, because I’ve never had children, and they’re still gonna be here when I’m gone,” he says. “All my focus lately has been in trying to get all these things done, and out, and fighting for trippy places to put my bass, situations where I’m not just stuck in the ‘I Love Lucy’ rerun.”

Mike Watt’s got a legacy to uphold, of relevant, progressive and utterly smoking music.

“I’ve gotta keep going. D. Boon would want me to keep going. Keep the child’s eye wandering, I’ve been told. Be excited about things, just fire it up. Go for it. And don’t make it more complicated than that.”

ANOTHER weekend, another grass-roots demonstration starring Real Americans who are mad as hell and want to take back their country from you-know-who. Last Sunday the site was Lower Manhattan, where they jeered the “ground zero mosque.” This weekend, the scene shifted to Washington, where the avatars of oppressed white Tea Party America, Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin, were slated to “reclaim the civil rights movement” (Beck’s words) on the same spot where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. had his dream exactly 47 years earlier.

Vive la révolution!

There’s just one element missing from these snapshots of America’s ostensibly spontaneous and leaderless populist uprising: the sugar daddies who are bankrolling it, and have been doing so since well before the “death panel” warm-up acts of last summer. Three heavy hitters rule. You’ve heard of one of them, Rupert Murdoch. The other two, the brothers David and Charles Koch, are even richer, with a combined wealth exceeded only by that of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett among Americans. But even those carrying the Kochs’ banner may not know who these brothers are.

Their self-interested and at times radical agendas, like Murdoch’s, go well beyond, and sometimes counter to, the interests of those who serve as spear carriers in the political pageants hawked on Fox News. The country will be in for quite a ride should these potentates gain power, and given the recession-battered electorate’s unchecked anger and the Obama White House’s unfocused political strategy, they might.

All three tycoons are the latest incarnation of what the historian Kim Phillips-Fein labeled “Invisible Hands” in her prescient 2009 book of that title: those corporate players who have financed the far right ever since the du Pont brothers spawned the American Liberty League in 1934 to bring down F.D.R. You can draw a straight line from the Liberty League’s crusade against the New Deal “socialism” of Social Security, the Securities and Exchange Commission and child labor laws to the John Birch Society-Barry Goldwater assault on J.F.K. and Medicare to the Koch-Murdoch-backed juggernaut against our “socialist” president.

Only the fat cats change — not their methods and not their pet bugaboos (taxes, corporate regulation, organized labor, and government “handouts” to the poor, unemployed, ill and elderly). Even the sources of their fortunes remain fairly constant. Koch Industries began with oil in the 1930s and now also spews an array of industrial products, from Dixie cups to Lycra, not unlike DuPont’s portfolio of paint and plastics. Sometimes the biological DNA persists as well. The Koch brothers’ father, Fred, was among the select group chosen to serve on the Birch Society’s top governing body. In a recorded 1963 speech that survives in a University of Michigan archive, he can be heard warning of “a takeover” of America in which Communists would “infiltrate the highest offices of government in the U.S. until the president is a Communist, unknown to the rest of us.” That rant could be delivered as is at any Tea Party rally today.

Last week the Kochs were shoved unwillingly into the spotlight by the most comprehensive journalistic portrait of them yet, written by Jane Mayer of The New Yorker. Her article caused a stir among those in Manhattan’s liberal elite who didn’t know that David Koch, widely celebrated for his cultural philanthropy, is not merely another rich conservative Republican but the founder of the Americans for Prosperity Foundation, which, as Mayer writes with some understatement, “has worked closely with the Tea Party since the movement’s inception.” To New Yorkers who associate the David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center with the New York City Ballet, it’s startling to learn that the Texas branch of that foundation’s political arm, known simply as Americans for Prosperity, gave its Blogger of the Year Award to an activist who had called President Obama “cokehead in chief.”

The other major sponsor of the Tea Party movement is Dick Armey’s FreedomWorks, which, like Americans for Prosperity, is promoting events in Washington this weekend. Under its original name, Citizens for a Sound Economy, FreedomWorks received $12 million of its own from Koch family foundations. Using tax records, Mayer found that Koch-controlled foundations gave out $196 million from 1998 to 2008, much of it to conservative causes and institutions. That figure doesn’t include $50 million in Koch Industries lobbying and $4.8 million in campaign contributions by its political action committee, putting it first among energy company peers like Exxon Mobil and Chevron. Since tax law permits anonymous personal donations to nonprofit political groups, these figures may understate the case. The Kochs surely match the in-kind donations the Tea Party receives in free promotion 24/7 from Murdoch’s Fox News, where both Beck and Palin are on the payroll.

The New Yorker article stirred up the right, too. Some of Mayer’s blogging detractors unwittingly upheld the premise of her article (titled “Covert Operations”) by conceding that they have been Koch grantees. None of them found any factual errors in her 10,000 words. Many of them tried to change the subject to George Soros, the billionaire backer of liberal causes. But Soros is a publicity hound who is transparent about where he shovels his money. And like many liberals — selflessly or foolishly, depending on your point of view — he supports causes that are unrelated to his business interests and that, if anything, raise his taxes.

This is hardly true of the Kochs. When David Koch ran to the right of Reagan as vice president on the 1980 Libertarian ticket (it polled 1 percent), his campaign called for the abolition not just of Social Security, federal regulatory agencies and welfare but also of the F.B.I., the C.I.A., and public schools — in other words, any government enterprise that would either inhibit his business profits or increase his taxes. He hasn’t changed. As Mayer details, Koch-supported lobbyists, foundations and political operatives are at the center of climate-science denial — a cause that forestalls threats to Koch Industries’ vast fossil fuel business. While Koch foundations donate to cancer hospitals like Memorial Sloan-Kettering in New York, Koch Industries has been lobbying to stop the Environmental Protection Agency from classifying another product important to its bottom line, formaldehyde, as a “known carcinogen” in humans (which it is).

Tea Partiers may share the Kochs’ detestation of taxes, big government and Obama. But there’s a difference between mainstream conservatism and a fringe agenda that tilts completely toward big business, whether on Wall Street or in the Gulf of Mexico, while dismantling fundamental government safety nets designed to protect the unemployed, public health, workplace safety and the subsistence of the elderly.

Yet inexorably the Koch agenda is morphing into the G.O.P. agenda, as articulated by current Republican members of Congress, including the putative next speaker of the House, John Boehner, and Tea Party Senate candidates like Rand Paul, Sharron Angle, and the new kid on the block, Alaska’s anti-Medicaid, anti-unemployment insurance Palin protégé, Joe Miller. Their program opposes a federal deficit, but has no objection to running up trillions in red ink in tax cuts to corporations and the superrich; apologizes to corporate malefactors like BP and derides money put in escrow for oil spill victims as a “slush fund”; opposes the extension of unemployment benefits; and calls for a freeze on federal regulations in an era when abuses in the oil, financial, mining, pharmaceutical and even egg industries (among others) have been outrageous.

The Koch brothers must be laughing all the way to the bank knowing that working Americans are aiding and abetting their selfish interests. And surely Murdoch is snickering at those protesting the “ground zero mosque.” Last week on “Fox and Friends,” the Bush administration flacks Dan Senor and Dana Perino attacked a supposedly terrorism-tainted Saudi prince whose foundation might contribute to the Islamic center. But as “The Daily Show” keeps pointing out, these Fox bloviators never acknowledge that the evil prince they’re bashing, Walid bin Talal, is not only the biggest non-Murdoch shareholder in Fox News’s parent company (he owns 7 percent of News Corporation) and the recipient of Murdoch mammoth investments in Saudi Arabia but also the subject of lionization elsewhere on Fox.

No less a Murdoch factotum than Neil Cavuto slobbered over bin Talal in a Fox Business Channel interview as recently as January, with nary a question about his supposed terrorist ties. Instead, bin Talal praised Obama’s stance on terrorism and even endorsed the Democrats’ goal of universal health insurance. Do any of the Fox-watching protestors at the “ground zero mosque” know that Fox’s profits are flowing to a Obama-sympathizing Saudi billionaire in bed with Murdoch? As Jon Stewart summed it up, the protestors who want “to cut off funding to the ‘terror mosque’ ” are aiding that funding by watching Fox and enhancing bin Talal’s News Corp. holdings.

When wolves of Murdoch’s ingenuity and the Kochs’ stealth have been at the door of our democracy in the past, Democrats have fought back fiercely. Franklin Roosevelt’s triumphant 1936 re-election campaign pummeled the Liberty League as a Republican ally eager to “squeeze the worker dry in his old age and cast him like an orange rind into the refuse pail.” When John Kennedy’s patriotism was assailed by Birchers calling for impeachment, he gave a major speech denouncing their “crusades of suspicion.”

And Obama? So far, sadly, this question answers itself.

By GUY DEUTSCHER
NY Times Published: August 26, 2010

Seventy years ago, in 1940, a popular science magazine published a short article that set in motion one of the trendiest intellectual fads of the 20th century. At first glance, there seemed little about the article to augur its subsequent celebrity. Neither the title, “Science and Linguistics,” nor the magazine, M.I.T.’s Technology Review, was most people’s idea of glamour. And the author, a chemical engineer who worked for an insurance company and moonlighted as an anthropology lecturer at Yale University, was an unlikely candidate for international superstardom. And yet Benjamin Lee Whorf let loose an alluring idea about language’s power over the mind, and his stirring prose seduced a whole generation into believing that our mother tongue restricts what we are able to think.

In particular, Whorf announced, Native American languages impose on their speakers a picture of reality that is totally different from ours, so their speakers would simply not be able to understand some of our most basic concepts, like the flow of time or the distinction between objects (like “stone”) and actions (like “fall”). For decades, Whorf’s theory dazzled both academics and the general public alike. In his shadow, others made a whole range of imaginative claims about the supposed power of language, from the assertion that Native American languages instill in their speakers an intuitive understanding of Einstein’s concept of time as a fourth dimension to the theory that the nature of the Jewish religion was determined by the tense system of ancient Hebrew.

Eventually, Whorf’s theory crash-landed on hard facts and solid common sense, when it transpired that there had never actually been any evidence to support his fantastic claims. The reaction was so severe that for decades, any attempts to explore the influence of the mother tongue on our thoughts were relegated to the loony fringes of disrepute. But 70 years on, it is surely time to put the trauma of Whorf behind us. And in the last few years, new research has revealed that when we learn our mother tongue, we do after all acquire certain habits of thought that shape our experience in significant and often surprising ways.

Whorf, we now know, made many mistakes. The most serious one was to assume that our mother tongue constrains our minds and prevents us from being able to think certain thoughts. The general structure of his arguments was to claim that if a language has no word for a certain concept, then its speakers would not be able to understand this concept. If a language has no future tense, for instance, its speakers would simply not be able to grasp our notion of future time. It seems barely comprehensible that this line of argument could ever have achieved such success, given that so much contrary evidence confronts you wherever you look. When you ask, in perfectly normal English, and in the present tense, “Are you coming tomorrow?” do you feel your grip on the notion of futurity slipping away? Do English speakers who have never heard the German word Schadenfreude find it difficult to understand the concept of relishing someone else’s misfortune? Or think about it this way: If the inventory of ready-made words in your language determined which concepts you were able to understand, how would you ever learn anything new?

SINCE THERE IS NO EVIDENCE that any language forbids its speakers to think anything, we must look in an entirely different direction to discover how our mother tongue really does shape our experience of the world. Some 50 years ago, the renowned linguist Roman Jakobson pointed out a crucial fact about differences between languages in a pithy maxim: “Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey.” This maxim offers us the key to unlocking the real force of the mother tongue: if different languages influence our minds in different ways, this is not because of what our language allows us to think but rather because of what it habitually obliges us to think about.

Consider this example. Suppose I say to you in English that “I spent yesterday evening with a neighbor.” You may well wonder whether my companion was male or female, but I have the right to tell you politely that it’s none of your business. But if we were speaking French or German, I wouldn’t have the privilege to equivocate in this way, because I would be obliged by the grammar of language to choose between voisin or voisine; Nachbar or Nachbarin. These languages compel me to inform you about the sex of my companion whether or not I feel it is remotely your concern. This does not mean, of course, that English speakers are unable to understand the differences between evenings spent with male or female neighbors, but it does mean that they do not have to consider the sexes of neighbors, friends, teachers and a host of other persons each time they come up in a conversation, whereas speakers of some languages are obliged to do so.

On the other hand, English does oblige you to specify certain types of information that can be left to the context in other languages. If I want to tell you in English about a dinner with my neighbor, I may not have to mention the neighbor’s sex, but I do have to tell you something about the timing of the event: I have to decide whether we dined, have been dining, are dining, will be dining and so on. Chinese, on the other hand, does not oblige its speakers to specify the exact time of the action in this way, because the same verb form can be used for past, present or future actions. Again, this does not mean that the Chinese are unable to understand the concept of time. But it does mean they are not obliged to think about timing whenever they describe an action.

When your language routinely obliges you to specify certain types of information, it forces you to be attentive to certain details in the world and to certain aspects of experience that speakers of other languages may not be required to think about all the time. And since such habits of speech are cultivated from the earliest age, it is only natural that they can settle into habits of mind that go beyond language itself, affecting your experiences, perceptions, associations, feelings, memories and orientation in the world.

BUT IS THERE any evidence for this happening in practice?

Let’s take genders again. Languages like Spanish, French, German and Russian not only oblige you to think about the sex of friends and neighbors, but they also assign a male or female gender to a whole range of inanimate objects quite at whim. What, for instance, is particularly feminine about a Frenchman’s beard (la barbe)? Why is Russian water a she, and why does she become a he once you have dipped a tea bag into her? Mark Twain famously lamented such erratic genders as female turnips and neuter maidens in his rant “The Awful German Language.” But whereas he claimed that there was something particularly perverse about the German gender system, it is in fact English that is unusual, at least among European languages, in not treating turnips and tea cups as masculine or feminine. Languages that treat an inanimate object as a he or a she force their speakers to talk about such an object as if it were a man or a woman. And as anyone whose mother tongue has a gender system will tell you, once the habit has taken hold, it is all but impossible to shake off. When I speak English, I may say about a bed that “it” is too soft, but as a native Hebrew speaker, I actually feel “she” is too soft. “She” stays feminine all the way from the lungs up to the glottis and is neutered only when she reaches the tip of the tongue.

In recent years, various experiments have shown that grammatical genders can shape the feelings and associations of speakers toward objects around them. In the 1990s, for example, psychologists compared associations between speakers of German and Spanish. There are many inanimate nouns whose genders in the two languages are reversed. A German bridge is feminine (die Brücke), for instance, but el puente is masculine in Spanish; and the same goes for clocks, apartments, forks, newspapers, pockets, shoulders, stamps, tickets, violins, the sun, the world and love. On the other hand, an apple is masculine for Germans but feminine in Spanish, and so are chairs, brooms, butterflies, keys, mountains, stars, tables, wars, rain and garbage. When speakers were asked to grade various objects on a range of characteristics, Spanish speakers deemed bridges, clocks and violins to have more “manly properties” like strength, but Germans tended to think of them as more slender or elegant. With objects like mountains or chairs, which are “he” in German but “she” in Spanish, the effect was reversed.

In a different experiment, French and Spanish speakers were asked to assign human voices to various objects in a cartoon. When French speakers saw a picture of a fork (la fourchette), most of them wanted it to speak in a woman’s voice, but Spanish speakers, for whom el tenedor is masculine, preferred a gravelly male voice for it. More recently, psychologists have even shown that “gendered languages” imprint gender traits for objects so strongly in the mind that these associations obstruct speakers’ ability to commit information to memory.

Of course, all this does not mean that speakers of Spanish or French or German fail to understand that inanimate objects do not really have biological sex — a German woman rarely mistakes her husband for a hat, and Spanish men are not known to confuse a bed with what might be lying in it. Nonetheless, once gender connotations have been imposed on impressionable young minds, they lead those with a gendered mother tongue to see the inanimate world through lenses tinted with associations and emotional responses that English speakers — stuck in their monochrome desert of “its” — are entirely oblivious to. Did the opposite genders of “bridge” in German and Spanish, for example, have an effect on the design of bridges in Spain and Germany? Do the emotional maps imposed by a gender system have higher-level behavioral consequences for our everyday life? Do they shape tastes, fashions, habits and preferences in the societies concerned? At the current state of our knowledge about the brain, this is not something that can be easily measured in a psychology lab. But it would be surprising if they didn’t.

The area where the most striking evidence for the influence of language on thought has come to light is the language of space — how we describe the orientation of the world around us. Suppose you want to give someone directions for getting to your house. You might say: “After the traffic lights, take the first left, then the second right, and then you’ll see a white house in front of you. Our door is on the right.” But in theory, you could also say: “After the traffic lights, drive north, and then on the second crossing drive east, and you’ll see a white house directly to the east. Ours is the southern door.” These two sets of directions may describe the same route, but they rely on different systems of coordinates. The first uses egocentric coordinates, which depend on our own bodies: a left-right axis and a front-back axis orthogonal to it. The second system uses fixed geographic directions, which do not rotate with us wherever we turn.

We find it useful to use geographic directions when hiking in the open countryside, for example, but the egocentric coordinates completely dominate our speech when we describe small-scale spaces. We don’t say: “When you get out of the elevator, walk south, and then take the second door to the east.” The reason the egocentric system is so dominant in our language is that it feels so much easier and more natural. After all, we always know where “behind” or “in front of” us is. We don’t need a map or a compass to work it out, we just feel it, because the egocentric coordinates are based directly on our own bodies and our immediate visual fields.

But then a remote Australian aboriginal tongue, Guugu Yimithirr, from north Queensland, turned up, and with it came the astounding realization that not all languages conform to what we have always taken as simply “natural.” In fact, Guugu Yimithirr doesn’t make any use of egocentric coordinates at all. The anthropologist John Haviland and later the linguist Stephen Levinson have shown that Guugu Yimithirr does not use words like “left” or “right,” “in front of” or “behind,” to describe the position of objects. Whenever we would use the egocentric system, the Guugu Yimithirr rely on cardinal directions. If they want you to move over on the car seat to make room, they’ll say “move a bit to the east.” To tell you where exactly they left something in your house, they’ll say, “I left it on the southern edge of the western table.” Or they would warn you to “look out for that big ant just north of your foot.” Even when shown a film on television, they gave descriptions of it based on the orientation of the screen. If the television was facing north, and a man on the screen was approaching, they said that he was “coming northward.”

When these peculiarities of Guugu Yimithirr were uncovered, they inspired a large-scale research project into the language of space. And as it happens, Guugu Yimithirr is not a freak occurrence; languages that rely primarily on geographical coordinates are scattered around the world, from Polynesia to Mexico, from Namibia to Bali. For us, it might seem the height of absurdity for a dance teacher to say, “Now raise your north hand and move your south leg eastward.” But the joke would be lost on some: the Canadian-American musicologist Colin McPhee, who spent several years on Bali in the 1930s, recalls a young boy who showed great talent for dancing. As there was no instructor in the child’s village, McPhee arranged for him to stay with a teacher in a different village. But when he came to check on the boy’s progress after a few days, he found the boy dejected and the teacher exasperated. It was impossible to teach the boy anything, because he simply did not understand any of the instructions. When told to take “three steps east” or “bend southwest,” he didn’t know what to do. The boy would not have had the least trouble with these directions in his own village, but because the landscape in the new village was entirely unfamiliar, he became disoriented and confused. Why didn’t the teacher use different instructions? He would probably have replied that saying “take three steps forward” or “bend backward” would be the height of absurdity.

So different languages certainly make us speak about space in very different ways. But does this necessarily mean that we have to think about space differently? By now red lights should be flashing, because even if a language doesn’t have a word for “behind,” this doesn’t necessarily mean that its speakers wouldn’t be able to understand this concept. Instead, we should look for the possible consequences of what geographic languages oblige their speakers to convey. In particular, we should be on the lookout for what habits of mind might develop because of the necessity of specifying geographic directions all the time.

In order to speak a language like Guugu Yimithirr, you need to know where the cardinal directions are at each and every moment of your waking life. You need to have a compass in your mind that operates all the time, day and night, without lunch breaks or weekends off, since otherwise you would not be able to impart the most basic information or understand what people around you are saying. Indeed, speakers of geographic languages seem to have an almost-superhuman sense of orientation. Regardless of visibility conditions, regardless of whether they are in thick forest or on an open plain, whether outside or indoors or even in caves, whether stationary or moving, they have a spot-on sense of direction. They don’t look at the sun and pause for a moment of calculation before they say, “There’s an ant just north of your foot.” They simply feel where north, south, west and east are, just as people with perfect pitch feel what each note is without having to calculate intervals. There is a wealth of stories about what to us may seem like incredible feats of orientation but for speakers of geographic languages are just a matter of course. One report relates how a speaker of Tzeltal from southern Mexico was blindfolded and spun around more than 20 times in a darkened house. Still blindfolded and dizzy, he pointed without hesitation at the geographic directions.

How does this work? The convention of communicating with geographic coordinates compels speakers from the youngest age to pay attention to the clues from the physical environment (the position of the sun, wind and so on) every second of their lives, and to develop an accurate memory of their own changing orientations at any given moment. So everyday communication in a geographic language provides the most intense imaginable drilling in geographic orientation (it has been estimated that as much as 1 word in 10 in a normal Guugu Yimithirr conversation is “north,” “south,” “west” or “east,” often accompanied by precise hand gestures). This habit of constant awareness to the geographic direction is inculcated almost from infancy: studies have shown that children in such societies start using geographic directions as early as age 2 and fully master the system by 7 or 8. With such an early and intense drilling, the habit soon becomes second nature, effortless and unconscious. When Guugu Yimithirr speakers were asked how they knew where north is, they couldn’t explain it any more than you can explain how you know where “behind” is.

But there is more to the effects of a geographic language, for the sense of orientation has to extend further in time than the immediate present. If you speak a Guugu Yimithirr-style language, your memories of anything that you might ever want to report will have to be stored with cardinal directions as part of the picture. One Guugu Yimithirr speaker was filmed telling his friends the story of how in his youth, he capsized in shark-infested waters. He and an older person were caught in a storm, and their boat tipped over. They both jumped into the water and managed to swim nearly three miles to the shore, only to discover that the missionary for whom they worked was far more concerned at the loss of the boat than relieved at their miraculous escape. Apart from the dramatic content, the remarkable thing about the story was that it was remembered throughout in cardinal directions: the speaker jumped into the water on the western side of the boat, his companion to the east of the boat, they saw a giant shark swimming north and so on. Perhaps the cardinal directions were just made up for the occasion? Well, quite by chance, the same person was filmed some years later telling the same story. The cardinal directions matched exactly in the two tellings. Even more remarkable were the spontaneous hand gestures that accompanied the story. For instance, the direction in which the boat rolled over was gestured in the correct geographic orientation, regardless of the direction the speaker was facing in the two films.

Psychological experiments have also shown that under certain circumstances, speakers of Guugu Yimithirr-style languages even remember “the same reality” differently from us. There has been heated debate about the interpretation of some of these experiments, but one conclusion that seems compelling is that while we are trained to ignore directional rotations when we commit information to memory, speakers of geographic languages are trained not to do so. One way of understanding this is to imagine that you are traveling with a speaker of such a language and staying in a large chain-style hotel, with corridor upon corridor of identical-looking doors. Your friend is staying in the room opposite yours, and when you go into his room, you’ll see an exact replica of yours: the same bathroom door on the left, the same mirrored wardrobe on the right, the same main room with the same bed on the left, the same curtains drawn behind it, the same desk next to the wall on the right, the same television set on the left corner of the desk and the same telephone on the right. In short, you have seen the same room twice. But when your friend comes into your room, he will see something quite different from this, because everything is reversed north-side-south. In his room the bed was in the north, while in yours it is in the south; the telephone that in his room was in the west is now in the east, and so on. So while you will see and remember the same room twice, a speaker of a geographic language will see and remember two different rooms.

It is not easy for us to conceive how Guugu Yimithirr speakers experience the world, with a crisscrossing of cardinal directions imposed on any mental picture and any piece of graphic memory. Nor is it easy to speculate about how geographic languages affect areas of experience other than spatial orientation — whether they influence the speaker’s sense of identity, for instance, or bring about a less-egocentric outlook on life. But one piece of evidence is telling: if you saw a Guugu Yimithirr speaker pointing at himself, you would naturally assume he meant to draw attention to himself. In fact, he is pointing at a cardinal direction that happens to be behind his back. While we are always at the center of the world, and it would never occur to us that pointing in the direction of our chest could mean anything other than to draw attention to ourselves, a Guugu Yimithirr speaker points through himself, as if he were thin air and his own existence were irrelevant.

IN WHAT OTHER WAYS might the language we speak influence our experience of the world? Recently, it has been demonstrated in a series of ingenious experiments that we even perceive colors through the lens of our mother tongue. There are radical variations in the way languages carve up the spectrum of visible light; for example, green and blue are distinct colors in English but are considered shades of the same color in many languages. And it turns out that the colors that our language routinely obliges us to treat as distinct can refine our purely visual sensitivity to certain color differences in reality, so that our brains are trained to exaggerate the distance between shades of color if these have different names in our language. As strange as it may sound, our experience of a Chagall painting actually depends to some extent on whether our language has a word for blue.

In coming years, researchers may also be able to shed light on the impact of language on more subtle areas of perception. For instance, some languages, like Matses in Peru, oblige their speakers, like the finickiest of lawyers, to specify exactly how they came to know about the facts they are reporting. You cannot simply say, as in English, “An animal passed here.” You have to specify, using a different verbal form, whether this was directly experienced (you saw the animal passing), inferred (you saw footprints), conjectured (animals generally pass there that time of day), hearsay or such. If a statement is reported with the incorrect “evidentiality,” it is considered a lie. So if, for instance, you ask a Matses man how many wives he has, unless he can actually see his wives at that very moment, he would have to answer in the past tense and would say something like “There were two last time I checked.” After all, given that the wives are not present, he cannot be absolutely certain that one of them hasn’t died or run off with another man since he last saw them, even if this was only five minutes ago. So he cannot report it as a certain fact in the present tense. Does the need to think constantly about epistemology in such a careful and sophisticated manner inform the speakers’ outlook on life or their sense of truth and causation? When our experimental tools are less blunt, such questions will be amenable to empirical study.

For many years, our mother tongue was claimed to be a “prison house” that constrained our capacity to reason. Once it turned out that there was no evidence for such claims, this was taken as proof that people of all cultures think in fundamentally the same way. But surely it is a mistake to overestimate the importance of abstract reasoning in our lives. After all, how many daily decisions do we make on the basis of deductive logic compared with those guided by gut feeling, intuition, emotions, impulse or practical skills? The habits of mind that our culture has instilled in us from infancy shape our orientation to the world and our emotional responses to the objects we encounter, and their consequences probably go far beyond what has been experimentally demonstrated so far; they may also have a marked impact on our beliefs, values and ideologies. We may not know as yet how to measure these consequences directly or how to assess their contribution to cultural or political misunderstandings. But as a first step toward understanding one another, we can do better than pretending we all think the same.

Guy Deutscher is an honorary research fellow at the School of Languages, Linguistics and Cultures at the University of Manchester. His new book, from which this article is adapted, is “Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages,” to be published this month by Metropolitan Books.

Thanks to Jonathan Maghen

By Vince Aletti
August 30, 2010
The New Yorker

If it did nothing more than provide a context for Brancusi’s luminous photographs of the sculptures in his studio, MOMA’s “The Original Copy: Photography of Sculpture, 1839 to Today” would be a success. But there are many pleasures in the curator Roxana Marcoci’s stimulating survey of the long-standing love affair between the two mediums. What began in the nineteenth century as the simple documentation of monumental works evolved into more detailed and interpretive images, sometimes by sculptors themselves or by sympathetic collaborators: Steichen illuminated Rodin, Man Ray defined Duchamp. Soon, photographers were redefining sculpture, not just by exploring its real-world context but by ignoring and subverting the monument to focus instead on an eggbeater, a wig stand, a wad of chewing gum, or an arrangement of mirrors in the sand. With work by Ana Mendieta, Charles Ray, Erwin Wurm, and others, Marcoci also makes a persuasive case for the sculptural presence in performance art. Following no predictable path, her show offers surprises and provocations at every turn. ♦

MOMA

SAN FRANCISCO — Discerning Internet users know that glowing online reviews of things like books or restaurants cannot always be trusted. But federal regulators are serving notice that if you stand to gain financially from the review you are writing, you should be upfront about it.

The Federal Trade Commission said on Thursday that a California marketing company had settled charges that it engaged in deceptive advertising by having its employees write and post positive reviews of clients’ games in the Apple iTunes Store, without disclosing that they were being paid to do so.

The charges were the first to be brought under a new set of guidelines for Internet endorsements that the agency introduced last year. The guidelines have often been described as rules for bloggers, but they also cover anyone writing reviews on Web sites or promoting products through Facebook or Twitter.

They are meant to impose on the Internet the same kind of truth-in-advertising principles that have long existed offline.

Under the settlement, Reverb Communications and one of its executives, Tracie Snitker, agreed to remove all of the iTunes reviews that appeared to have been written by ordinary people but were actually written by employees of the company, which is based in Twain Harte, Calif.

The settlement also bars Reverb and Ms. Snitker from making similar endorsements of any product or service without disclosing any relevant connections. The settlement did not involve any monetary penalties.

“We hope that this case will show advertisers that they have to be transparent in their practices and help guide other ad agencies,” said Stacey Ferguson, a lawyer in the advertising practices division of the trade commission’s Bureau of Consumer Protection.

Ms. Snitker declined to be interviewed, but in a statement she said that in discussions with the trade commission, “it became apparent that we would never agree on the facts of the situation.”

“Rather than continuing to spend time and money arguing, and laying off employees to fight what we believed was a frivolous matter, we settled this case and ended the discussion,” she said. Ms. Snitker said that the settlement did not involve any admission of lawbreaking.

When the guidelines were announced, many bloggers and users of services like Twitter complained of government overreach, and worried that they would have to disclose even tenuous connections with companies or services they wrote about.

But Jonathan Zittrain, a professor at Harvard Law School and co-founder of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, said the commission’s first enforcement action under the guidelines should be seen as good news by those who were concerned.

“This case sort of shows that what they have in mind is not the individual blogger or Twitterer, but rather a professional endorser,” Professor Zittrain said.

The action could be useful to public relations companies that want to resist requests from clients that they play dirty, he said.

“When a client says ‘Where are my good reviews? I am paying for them,’ you can say, ‘We can’t do it because it is illegal,’ ” Professor Zittrain said.

According to the commission’s complaint, Reverb employees, including Ms. Snitker, posted positive reviews about clients’ games from November 2008 to May 2009. The reviews were posted under account names that would give readers the impression that they had been placed by ordinary consumers, the complaint says.

The reviews typically gave the games four or five stars and included comments like “Amazing new game” and “One of the best apps just got better.”

The complaint does not identify the game developers whose work was reviewed. Reverb’s Web site lists more than 60 current and former clients, including Digital Leisure, Harmonix and MTV Games. The complaint said Reverb was paid a commission of a portion of sales by its game developer clients.

Given that fake reviews are widely understood to be common in the iTunes Store and on many Web sites, it was not clear why the trade commission had singled out Reverb. But the blog MobileCrunch reported last August that it had obtained a company document in which Reverb said it had hired “a small team of interns” whose tasks included “writing influential game reviews.”

Eric Goldman, former general counsel of Epinions.com, which reviews consumer products, said fake reviews were “a pervasive problem on the Internet.”

“It is a problem that every review site has to grapple with,” said Mr. Goldman, now a law professor at Santa Clara University and director its High Tech Law Center. “Many sites don’t have rigorous policing mechanisms, so it is very hard to verify the trustworthiness of reviews.”

While the case against Reverb is the first brought under the commission’s new guidelines, it is not the first of its kind. Last year, Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo announced that the State of New York had reached a $300,000 settlement with Lifestyle Lift, a cosmetic surgery outfit, over faked reviews of its products on the Internet.

In a press release, the attorney general said the action was “a strike against the growing practice of ‘astroturfing,’ in which employees pose as independent consumers to post positive reviews and commentary to Web sites and Internet message boards about their own company.”

A portrait of a samurai, an 1860 salt print, attributed to the studio of C. D. Fredricks & Company.

By MARTHA SCHWENDENER
NY Times Published: August 26, 2010

It’s obvious from the start that “Samurai in New York” isn’t going to be about robed warriors taking the city, in spite of the sensational name. The show’s subtitle — “The First Japanese Delegation, 1860” — makes that pretty clear, and the introductory wall text spells it out: The visit in question, 150 years ago, was “all about trade,” a matter of setting up a business agreement.

And yet “Samurai” is one of those small, in-the-hallway exhibitions at the Museum of the City of New York that delivers more than you’d expect. In this case it offers a lot to think about in terms of photography and its role in early publicity and celebrity culture as well as a fascinating look at how different societies responded to 19th-century stirrings of globalization.

The event commemorated is significant: a visit to the United States by more than 70 samurai, elite members of the Japanese military, who were the first known group to leave Japan in more than 200 years. The reasons for this isolation date back to the 17th century, when the ruling Tokugawa Shogunate closed the country in response to the efforts of Spanish and Portuguese missionaries to convert Japanese to Catholicism. After 1630 no foreigners could enter the country, and no Japanese could leave, on penalty of death.

The visit was possible after Commodore Matthew C. Perry of the United States sailed into Tokyo Bay in 1854, after being dispatched by President Millard Fillmore on the errand, and reached a trade agreement with the Japanese. Six years later the samurai were sent to deliver a treaty of amity and commerce to President James Buchanan and ordered to avoid fraternizing with their American hosts. But good old aggressive American hospitality took over. There were parades and parties, and Walt Whitman even wrote a poem, which was printed on Page 2 of The New York Times. And the samurai were asked to pose for photographs.

“Ever since our arrival at the American capital,” Norimasa Muragaki, an ambassador, wrote in his diary on June 4, 1860, in Washington, “we have frequently been asked by photographers to allow our photographs to be taken, but we have hitherto refused, as it is not the custom in our country. Today, however, we had to submit, in deference to the President’s wishes.” He ended, “We therefore, for the first time, faced the photograph machine.”

After that initial session, the samurai — particularly lower-ranking members — spent plenty of time facing cameras. The show includes a silver print of a photograph by Mathew Brady of samurai with United States naval officers, taken in the Washington Navy Yard. A reproduction of an illustration from Frank Leslie’s Illustrated, a weekly newspaper, shows Brady, later known for his grisly Civil War pictures, with a box camera, photographing the gifts brought by the Japanese. Here you can see how, in the 1860s, the proto-photojournalist with a camera the size of a television console was still working in the shadow of the sketch artist.

The most interesting objects, however, are the small cartes-de-visite photographs, which in the cases of famous subjects like the samurai were treated as trading cards, and the stereographic images, printed on cards that would be inserted into viewing devices. The samurai’s poses are stiff and formal: not only an exigency of early photography — the need to hold still — but also evidence of Bushido, the strict code of behavior to which the military elite was bound.

In one photograph a young man wears traditional samurai dress but also Western leather shoes. Another shows a woman, identified only as a “New York Lady” flanked by members of the delegation. Painted studio backdrops create even odder juxtapositions, as the “exotic” samurai pose in front of palm trees or what appear to be scenes of India or Classical Greece or Rome. (A clue to which Americans might have been particularly interested in these images: The photograph of the samurai in leather shoes is owned the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University.)

The jarring collision of cultures is also seen in a Japanese woodcut commissioned by one of the delegates upon his return home. In it a hot-air balloon with two American flags poking out of its basket rises up over a couple of gentlemen in Western top hats. The print also features a haiku in Japanese calligraphy, describing the event witnessed by its author during the Philadelphia leg of the trip.

“Samurai in New York” presents the visit as an extraordinary moment for both countries, but especially the one that had been closed to the world for so long. Americans could take credit for introducing the Japanese to photography. But the delegates might have picked up something else as well. A week before their departure in June 1860 an article appeared in The New York Times, describing the delegates’ activities. “Their baggage already increases to such huge proportions,” it said, “that even the capacious ‘Niagara’ bids fair to be well filled, and still they shop.”

Unfortunately no photographs of these shopaholic samurai are included in the show.

“Samurai in New York: The First Japanese Delegation, 1860” runs through Nov. 7 at the Museum of the City of New York, Fifth Avenue at 103rd Street; mcny.org.

Having shed much of his dignity, core convictions and reputation for straight talk, Senator John McCain won his primary on Tuesday against the flat-earth wing of his party. Now McCain can go search for his lost character, which was last on display late in his 2008 campaign for president.

Remember the moment: a woman with matted hair and a shaky voice rose to express her doubts about Barack Obama. “I have read about him,” she said, “and he’s not — he’s an Arab.”

McCain was quick to knock down the lie. “No, ma’am,” he said, “he’s a decent family man, a citizen.”

That ill-informed woman — her head stuffed with fabrications that could be disproved by a pre-schooler — now makes up a representative third or more of the Republican party. It’s not just that 46 percent of Republicans believe the lie that Obama is a Muslim, or that 27 percent in the party doubt that the president of the United States is a citizen. But fully half of them believe falsely that the big bailout of banks and insurance companies under TARP was enacted by Obama, and not by President Bush.

Take a look at Tuesday night’s box score in the baseball game between New York and Toronto. The Yankees won, 11-5. Now look at the weather summary, showing a high of 71 for New York. The score and temperature are not subject to debate.

Yet a president’s birthday or whether he was even in the White House on the day TARP was passed are apparently open questions. A growing segment of the party poised to take control of Congress has bought into denial of the basic truths of Barack Obama’s life. What’s more, this astonishing level of willful ignorance has come about largely by design, and has been aided by a press afraid to call out the primary architects of the lies.

The Democrats may deserve to lose in November. They have been terrible at trying to explain who they stand for and the larger goal of their governance. But if they lose, it should be because their policies are unpopular or ill-conceived — not because millions of people believe a lie.

In the much-discussed Pew poll reporting the spike in ignorance, those who believe Obama to be Muslim say they got their information from the media. But no reputable news agency — that is, fact-based, one that corrects its errors quickly — has spread such inaccuracies.
Rush LimbaughStephen Lovekin/Getty Images Rush Limbaugh

So where is this “media?” Two sources, and they are — no surprise here — the usual suspects. The first, of course, is Rush Limbaugh, who claims the largest radio audience in the land among the microphone demagogues, and his word is Biblical among Republicans. A few quick examples of the Limbaugh method:

“Tomorrow is Obama’s birthday — not that we’ve seen any proof of that,” he said on Aug. 3. “They tell us Aug. 4 is the birthday; we haven’t seen any proof of that.”

Of course, there is proof as clear as that baseball box score. Look here, www.factcheck.org, for starters, one of many places posting Obama’s Hawaiian birth certificate.

On the Muslim deception, Limbaugh has sprinkled lie dust all over the place. “Obama says he’s a Christian, but where’s the evidence?” he said on Aug. 19. He has repeatedly called the president “imam Obama,” and said, “I’m just throwing things out there, folks, because people are questioning his Christianity.”

You see how he works. He drops in suggestions, hints, notes that “people are questioning” things. The design is to make Obama un-American. Then he says it’s a tweak, a provocation. He says this as a preemptive way to keep the press from calling him out. And it works; long profiles of Limbaugh have largely gone easy on him.

Once Limbaugh has planted a lie, a prominent politician can pick it up, with little nuance. So, over the weekend, Kim Lehman, one of Iowa’s two Republican National Committee members, went public with doubts on Obama’s Christianity. Of course, she was not condemned by party leaders.

It’s curious, also, that any felon, drug addict, or recovering hedonist can loudly proclaim a sudden embrace of Jesus and be welcomed without doubt by leaders of the religious right. But a thoughtful Christian like Obama is still distrusted.

“I am a devout Christian,” Obama told Christianity Today in 2008. “I believe in the redemptive death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.” That’s not enough, apparently, for Rev. Franklin Graham, the partisan son of the great evangelical leader, who said last week that Obama was “born a Muslim because of the religious seed passed on from his father.”

Actually, he was born from two non-practicing parents, and his Kenyan father was absent for all of his upbringing. Obama came to his Christianity like millions of people, through searching and questioning.

Finally, there is Fox News, whose parent company has given $1 million to Republican causes this year but still masquerades as a legitimate source of news. Their chat and opinion programs spread innuendo daily. The founder of Politifact, another nonpartisan referee to the daily rumble, said two of the site’s five most popular items on its Truth-o-meter are corrections of Glenn Beck.

Beck tosses off enough half-truths in a month to keep Politifact working overtime. Of late, he has gone after Michelle Obama, whose vacation in Spain was “just for her and approximately 40 of her friends.” Limbaugh had a similar line, saying the First Lady “is taking 40 of her best friends and leasing 60 rooms at a five-star hotel — paid for by you.”

The White House said Michelle Obama and her daughter Sasha were accompanied by just a few friends — and they paid their own costs. But, wink, wink, the damage is done. He’s Muslim and foreign. She’s living the luxe life on your dime. They don’t even have to mention race. The code words do it for them.

Climate-change denial is a special category all its own. Once on the fringe, dismissal of scientific consensus is now an article of faith among leading Republicans, again taking their cue from Limbaugh and Fox.

It would be nice to dismiss the stupid things that Americans believe as harmless, the price of having such a large, messy democracy. Plenty of hate-filled partisans swore that Abraham Lincoln was a Catholic and Franklin Roosevelt was a Jew. So what if one-in-five believe the sun revolves around the earth, or aren’t sure from which country the United States gained its independence?

But false belief in weapons of mass-destruction led the United States to a trillion-dollar war. And trust in rising home value as a truism as reliable as a sunrise was a major contributor to the catastrophic collapse of the economy. At its worst extreme, a culture of misinformation can produce something like Iran, which is run by a Holocaust denier.

It’s one thing to forget the past, with predictable consequences, as the favorite aphorism goes. But what about those who refuse to comprehend the present?

By MATT RICHTEL
NY Times Published: August 24, 2010

SAN FRANCISCO — It’s 1 p.m. on a Thursday and Dianne Bates, 40, juggles three screens. She listens to a few songs on her iPod, then taps out a quick e-mail on her iPhone and turns her attention to the high-definition television.

Just another day at the gym.

As Ms. Bates multitasks, she is also churning her legs in fast loops on an elliptical machine in a downtown fitness center. She is in good company. In gyms and elsewhere, people use phones and other electronic devices to get work done — and as a reliable antidote to boredom.

Cellphones, which in the last few years have become full-fledged computers with high-speed Internet connections, let people relieve the tedium of exercising, the grocery store line, stoplights or lulls in the dinner conversation.

The technology makes the tiniest windows of time entertaining, and potentially productive. But scientists point to an unanticipated side effect: when people keep their brains busy with digital input, they are forfeiting downtime that could allow them to better learn and remember information, or come up with new ideas.

Ms. Bates, for example, might be clearer-headed if she went for a run outside, away from her devices, research suggests.

At the University of California, San Francisco, scientists have found that when rats have a new experience, like exploring an unfamiliar area, their brains show new patterns of activity. But only when the rats take a break from their exploration do they process those patterns in a way that seems to create a persistent memory of the experience.

The researchers suspect that the findings also apply to how humans learn.

“Almost certainly, downtime lets the brain go over experiences it’s had, solidify them and turn them into permanent long-term memories,” said Loren Frank, assistant professor in the department of physiology at the university, where he specializes in learning and memory. He said he believed that when the brain was constantly stimulated, “you prevent this learning process.”

At the University of Michigan, a study found that people learned significantly better after a walk in nature than after a walk in a dense urban environment, suggesting that processing a barrage of information leaves people fatigued.

Even though people feel entertained, even relaxed, when they multitask while exercising, or pass a moment at the bus stop by catching a quick video clip, they might be taxing their brains, scientists say.

“People think they’re refreshing themselves, but they’re fatiguing themselves,” said Marc Berman, a University of Michigan neuroscientist.

Regardless, there is now a whole industry of mobile software developers competing to help people scratch the entertainment itch. Flurry, a company that tracks the use of apps, has found that mobile games are typically played for 6.3 minutes, but that many are played for much shorter intervals. One popular game that involves stacking blocks gets played for 2.2 minutes on average.

Today’s game makers are trying to fill small bits of free time, said Sebastien de Halleux, a co-founder of PlayFish, a game company owned by the industry giant Electronic Arts.

“Instead of having long relaxing breaks, like taking two hours for lunch, we have a lot of these micro-moments,” he said. Game makers like Electronic Arts, he added, “have reinvented the game experience to fit into micro-moments.”

Many business people, of course, have good reason to be constantly checking their phones. But this can take a mental toll. Henry Chen, 26, a self-employed auto mechanic in San Francisco, has mixed feelings about his BlackBerry habits.

“I check it a lot, whenever there is downtime,” Mr. Chen said. Moments earlier, he was texting with a friend while he stood in line at a bagel shop; he stopped only when the woman behind the counter interrupted him to ask for his order.

Mr. Chen, who recently started his business, doesn’t want to miss a potential customer. Yet he says that since he upgraded his phone a year ago to a feature-rich BlackBerry, he can feel stressed out by what he described as internal pressure to constantly stay in contact.

“It’s become a demand. Not necessarily a demand of the customer, but a demand of my head,” he said. “I told my girlfriend that I’m more tired since I got this thing.”

In the parking lot outside the bagel shop, others were filling up moments with their phones. While Eddie Umadhay, 59, a construction inspector, sat in his car waiting for his wife to grocery shop, he deleted old e-mail while listening to news on the radio. On a bench outside a coffee house, Ossie Gabriel, 44, a nurse practitioner, waited for a friend and checked e-mail “to kill time.”

Crossing the street from the grocery store to his car, David Alvarado pushed his 2-year-old daughter in a cart filled with shopping bags, his phone pressed to his ear.

He was talking to a colleague about work scheduling, noting that he wanted to steal a moment to make the call between paying for the groceries and driving.

“I wanted to take advantage of the little gap,” said Mr. Alvarado, 30, a facilities manager at a community center.

For many such people, the little digital asides come on top of heavy use of computers during the day. Take Ms. Bates, the exercising multitasker at the expansive Bakar Fitness and Recreation Center. She wakes up and peeks at her iPhone before she gets out of bed. At her job in advertising, she spends all day in front of her laptop.

But, far from wanting a break from screens when she exercises, she says she couldn’t possibly spend 55 minutes on the elliptical machine without “lots of things to do.” This includes relentless channel surfing.

“I switch constantly,” she said. “I can’t stand commercials. I have to flip around unless I’m watching ‘Project Runway’ or something I’m really into.”

Some researchers say that whatever downside there is to not resting the brain, it pales in comparison to the benefits technology can bring in motivating people to sweat.

“Exercise needs to be part of our lives in the sedentary world we’re immersed in. Anything that helps us move is beneficial,” said John J. Ratey, associate clinical professor of psychiatry at the Harvard Medical School and author of “Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain.”

But all things being equal, Mr. Ratey said, he would prefer to see people do their workouts away from their devices: “There is more bang for your buck doing it outside, for your mood and working memory.”

Of the 70 cardio machines on the main floor at Bakar Fitness, 67 have televisions attached. Most of them also have iPod docks and displays showing workout performance, and a few have games, like a rope-climbing machine that shows an animated character climbing the rope while the live human does so too.

A few months ago, the cable TV went out and some patrons were apoplectic. “It was an uproar. People said: ‘That’s what we’re paying for,’ ” said Leeane Jensen, 28, the fitness manager.

At least one exerciser has a different take. Two stories up from the main floor, Peter Colley, 23, churns away on one of the several dozen elliptical machines without a TV. Instead, they are bathed in sunlight, looking out onto the pool and palm trees.

“I look at the wind on the trees. I watch the swimmers go back and forth,” Mr. Colley said. “I usually come here to clear my head.”

I was surprised — but probably shouldn’t have been — that so many people had never heard of Bobby Thomson, who died at his home in Savannah, Ga., last week at the age of 86.

Thomson was among a small handful of public figures whose names have resonated most strongly with me through nearly my entire life. I was fresh out of kindergarten when he hit the most famous home run in history — the “shot heard round the world” that deeply traumatized the Brooklyn Dodgers and their fans and propelled the New York Giants into the 1951 World Series against the Yankees.

My dad, Chester Herbert (who was only in his 20s at the time), had an upholstery shop on Central Avenue in East Orange, N.J., and I was in the back of the shop with a cast of characters straight out of Damon Runyon. My mother’s name was Adelaide, and there were assorted craftsmen and hangers-on with names like Moe and Brownie and Earl Love and my beloved Uncle Breeze.

We were listening to the game on the radio. Nearly everyone was rooting for the Giants. But things looked beyond bleak when Thomson came to bat in the bottom of the ninth in the third and deciding game of a playoff series to determine who would win the National League pennant. There was one out and two runners were on base, and the archrival Dodgers were ahead, 4-2.

When Thomson hit the home run to suddenly and shockingly end both the game and the series, an astonishing celebration erupted in the back of the shop. My father hugged my mother, and they were jumping up and down. Then he picked me up and asked if I realized what had just happened. I didn’t, really — but according to family lore I started yelling, “We won! We won!”

My dad clipped all the newspaper accounts of Thomson’s feat and kept them for many years. I don’t know how many times we read them together when I was in first and second grade, and of course we had no idea that I would end up writing for three of the papers.

That magical moment of pure, unadulterated joy was the beginning of my love for the game of baseball. It seemed only appropriate that a player named Bobby, which is what everyone called me at the time, was the hero. Why not? I would hit imaginary homers in the park and race around the bases screaming, “The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant!”

My parents explained the game to me, and I became obsessed with the players on that team, not just Thomson but guys like Sal Maglie, known as “The Barber,” and Monte Irvin and Whitey Lockman and a 20-year-old rookie who was on deck when Thomson hit the homer, Willie Mays.

There was an outfielder on that team named Hank Thompson. Bobby Thomson was white and Hank Thompson was black. I asked my father if they were brothers. He laughed and said: “No. You know how you can tell they’re not brothers?”

I said I didn’t. He said, “Hank Thompson spells his last name t-h-o-m-p-s-o-n. Bobby Thomson doesn’t have a ‘p’ in his last name. If they were brothers they would spell their names the same.”

It was years before I realized what a terrific thing that was to say to a kid.

I interviewed Willie Mays several years ago, and he told me a sweet story about him and Joe DiMaggio in that 1951 World Series, which the Giants lost to the Yankees, four games to two. “I never told this to anybody,” said Mays, “but Joe hit a home run in the Polo Grounds in that series, and I knew that was his last year, so I was happy for him even though I was playing against him. So what I did was, I started clapping. And you just didn’t do that in New York. But there I was standing in the outfield for the Giants clapping for Joe as he’s rounding the bases.”

As Mays and I shot the breeze about his early days with the Giants, he wistfully said, “Those were good times, man.”

They were great times for a kid growing up in New Jersey. The afternoons moved more slowly, and the summers seemed to last a little longer. You could hit a home run in your imagination every time you came up to the plate.

My Uncle Breeze is still around, still working. He fell in love with photography and takes photos at weddings and birthday parties in South Jersey. But nearly everyone else from the back of the shop is gone. I’d give anything — anything at all — to see them again just one more time.

The Golden Gate Bridge under construction, around 1935. The actual building of the bridge took over four years, with men sometimes perched more than 500 feet above the water in wind or fog.

By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
NY Times Published: August 23, 2010

It’s the western bookend to the Brooklyn Bridge — as iconic an American edifice as the Statue of Liberty, and a favorite spot for lovers, photographers and suicides. It’s been hailed as one of the modern wonders of the world, “perhaps the most successful combination of site and structure since the Parthenon,” a “democratic masterpiece” and a “giant harp hung in the western sky.”

Despite the many existing odes to the Golden Gate Bridge, Kevin Starr seems particularly well equipped to write a biography of that famous orange bridge. The author of more than half a dozen histories of California, Mr. Starr — a professor of history at the University of Southern California and state librarian of California emeritus — has written frequently about the myths and metaphors that festoon the Golden State, and he seems to instinctively understand the place that the Golden Gate Bridge has come to occupy in the national imagination as a symbol of American enterprise and the gateway to the Pacific.

Curiously enough, the passages in “Golden Gate” devoted to explicating the bridge’s symbolism and allure are its least persuasive: pretentious, clichéd, derivative and pompously theoretical. “In its American context, taken historically,” Mr. Starr writes, “the Bridge aligns itself with the thought of Jonathan Edwards, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and other transcendentalists in presenting an icon of transcendence: a defiance of time pointing to more elusive realities. Were Edwards, Emerson, or the Swedish theologian Emanuel Swedenborg, a mystic thinker of great importance to the formation of American thought, alive today, they would no doubt see in the Golden Gate Bridge a fusion of material and trans-material forces held in delicate equipoise.”

It is when Mr. Starr turns from interpreting the bridge to recounting the story of its construction that his narrative takes off. Though it’s a story told many times before — most notably by John van der Zee in “The Gate: The True Story of the Design and Construction of the Golden Gate Bridge” (1986) and Allen Brown in “Golden Gate: Biography of a Bridge” (1965) — Mr. Starr does an agile job of situating the tale within the larger context of San Francisco’s efforts to rebuild after the Great Earthquake of 1906 and the nation’s march from the Roaring Twenties into the slough of the Great Depression.

He reminds us that the bridge, first proposed in 1921, initially encountered vociferous opposition from a variety of interests, including ferry companies (which saw the bridge as stealing their business) and environmental groups like the Sierra Club (which argued that such an edifice would profane the natural beauty of the site). There were also protests, Mr. Starr recounts, that “the Bridge was too costly, tolls would prove insufficient to redeem taxpayer-backed bonds, the geological foundations for the south pier were inadequate.”

Arguments that a bridge was vital for San Francisco’s development as a modern metropolis and the demands of commuters from Marin County and beyond would prevail in the end, however, and the bridge would help fuel the Bay Area’s exponential growth in the decades to come.

As it turns out, the years of wrangling over the bridge’s construction would lead to a design triumph. Mr. Starr describes the original plan of the Chicago entrepreneur Joseph Strauss as “an undistinguished example of industrial design” — an “upside-down rat trap,” in one opponent’s words. The revised blueprint, devised by a team of noted engineers and architects, would result in that rare thing: a triumph of design by committee.

The self-promoting Strauss would get credit for the Golden Gate, but Mr. van der Zee wrote in his book that it was Charles Alton Ellis, a University of Illinois professor and design engineer with enormous mathematical prowess, who was really the presiding genius behind the bridge. In this volume, Mr. Starr acknowledges that “Strauss turned the design of the suspension system, which is to say, the very essence of the Bridge” over to Ellis, who together with the civil engineer Leon Moisseiff, would grapple with the daunting challenge of designing a super long suspension bridge, subject to the intense tidal actions of the strait below, as well as high winds, fog and possibly earthquakes.

Crucial contributions, Mr. Starr says, were made by other consultants as well. Othmar Hermann Ammann (the chief designer of the George Washington Bridge) helped with the assembling of the bridge’s various components. John Eberson, a leading architect of movie theaters, developed the Art Deco vocabulary for the towers. And Irving Morrow, a local architect and skilled illustrator, refined those ideas further, accentuating, in Mr. Starr’s words, “the stepped-back segments rising vertically on all sides” of the twin towers.

The actual process of building the bridge, which began in January 1933 and ended in the spring of 1937, would be herculean. Mr. Starr writes that “the construction of the anchorages involved the removal of 3.25 million cubic feet of earth and pouring of concrete into frameworks twelve stories high, the equivalent of building two skyscrapers”; and that each of the bridge’s two transverse cables was 36 3/8 inches in diameter and under “63 million pounds of pull or tension from its own weight.”

Workers were perched 500 to 600 feet above the water and faced cold winds blowing in from the ocean. “In the summer,” Mr. Starr writes, “fog banks compounded the cold and obscured vision, which was a frightening thing, given the fact that at all times the Bridge site was an orchestration of dangerous objects in constant movement: steel being swung into place; tools and construction material being accidentally dropped; superheated rivets being heated aloft on precariously perched forges, then funneled through tubes to riveters working in near darkness inside the steel cells, or, if outside, tossed from forge to riveter through the air and caught with handheld funnels.”

As for the bridge’s famous color, international orange, it was not an obvious choice. Mr. Starr reports that Ammann favored gray (as used for the George Washington Bridge), and others wanted black. While the Navy “preferred a yellow and black striping to facilitate visibility for ships entering or leaving the Gate through low-lying fog,” the Army Air Corps wanted a red-and-white color scheme more visible from the air. The reddish-orange paint was primer, used to protect the bridge against the elements, and it gradually went from being a default choice to the color of choice.

In an over-the-top burst of purple prose, Mr. Starr observes that international orange not only “unified the Bridge into one compelling statement,” but also summoned memories of “the gold of the Gold Rush that had created the Bay Area, and the gold of the Golden Horn of the Bosporus first suggested by John Frémont when he named the site in 1846 and by metaphor evoked a color-drenched city of towers, domes, and stepped-back structures rising like Constantinople from blue waters along green hillsides, their red-tiled roofs touching a sun-flooded azure sea.”

We need to pinch pennies these days. Don’t you know we have a budget deficit? For months that has been the word from Republicans and conservative Democrats, who have rejected every suggestion that we do more to avoid deep cuts in public services and help the ailing economy.

But these same politicians are eager to cut checks averaging $3 million each to the richest 120,000 people in the country.

What — you haven’t heard about this proposal? Actually, you have: I’m talking about demands that we make all of the Bush tax cuts, not just those for the middle class, permanent.

Some background: Back in 2001, when the first set of Bush tax cuts was rammed through Congress, the legislation was written with a peculiar provision — namely, that the whole thing would expire, with tax rates reverting to 2000 levels, on the last day of 2010.

Why the cutoff date? In part, it was used to disguise the fiscal irresponsibility of the tax cuts: lopping off that last year reduced the headline cost of the cuts, because such costs are normally calculated over a 10-year period. It also allowed the Bush administration to pass the tax cuts using reconciliation — yes, the same procedure that Republicans denounced when it was used to enact health reform — while sidestepping rules designed to prevent the use of that procedure to increase long-run budget deficits.

Obviously, the idea was to go back at a later date and make those tax cuts permanent. But things didn’t go according to plan. And now the witching hour is upon us.

So what’s the choice now? The Obama administration wants to preserve those parts of the original tax cuts that mainly benefit the middle class — which is an expensive proposition in its own right — but to let those provisions benefiting only people with very high incomes expire on schedule. Republicans, with support from some conservative Democrats, want to keep the whole thing.

And there’s a real chance that Republicans will get what they want. That’s a demonstration, if anyone needed one, that our political culture has become not just dysfunctional but deeply corrupt.

What’s at stake here? According to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, making all of the Bush tax cuts permanent, as opposed to following the Obama proposal, would cost the federal government $680 billion in revenue over the next 10 years. For the sake of comparison, it took months of hard negotiations to get Congressional approval for a mere $26 billion in desperately needed aid to state and local governments.

And where would this $680 billion go? Nearly all of it would go to the richest 1 percent of Americans, people with incomes of more than $500,000 a year. But that’s the least of it: the policy center’s estimates say that the majority of the tax cuts would go to the richest one-tenth of 1 percent. Take a group of 1,000 randomly selected Americans, and pick the one with the highest income; he’s going to get the majority of that group’s tax break. And the average tax break for those lucky few — the poorest members of the group have annual incomes of more than $2 million, and the average member makes more than $7 million a year — would be $3 million over the course of the next decade.

How can this kind of giveaway be justified at a time when politicians claim to care about budget deficits? Well, history is repeating itself. The original campaign for the Bush tax cuts relied on deception and dishonesty. In fact, my first suspicions that we were being misled into invading Iraq were based on the resemblance between the campaign for war and the campaign for tax cuts the previous year. And sure enough, that same trademark deception and dishonesty is being deployed on behalf of tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans.

So, for example, we’re told that it’s all about helping small business; but only a tiny fraction of small-business owners would receive any tax break at all. And how many small-business owners do you know making several million a year?

Or we’re told that it’s about helping the economy recover. But it’s hard to think of a less cost-effective way to help the economy than giving money to people who already have plenty, and aren’t likely to spend a windfall.

No, this has nothing to do with sound economic policy. Instead, as I said, it’s about a dysfunctional and corrupt political culture, in which Congress won’t take action to revive the economy, pleads poverty when it comes to protecting the jobs of schoolteachers and firefighters, but declares cost no object when it comes to sparing the already wealthy even the slightest financial inconvenience.

So far, the Obama administration is standing firm against this outrage. Let’s hope that it prevails in its fight. Otherwise, it will be hard not to lose all faith in America’s future.

August Künzel

The L.A. Times sports journalist lived most of his life wanting to be a woman. He discovered too late that he wanted his wife even more

By Steve Friess
Thursday, Aug 19 2010
LA Weekly

Christine Daniels lay inert. The ash-blond hair that once framed a face envied by her peers was now an unwashed tangle hiding an inexorable melancholy. Her stomach was in sharp, constant pain and her mind was heavy with guilt. She ate, showered and dressed only when her caretaker demanded she do so, which was why she was in what seemed like a trance when she spoke.

“Do you know what today was supposed to be?” Daniels asked her doting friend, Amy LeCoe.

“What was today supposed to be?” LeCoe responded.

“It’s the day I was supposed to have my surgery.”

“How do you feel about that?”

Daniels grew even quieter, LeCoe recalls.

“Don’t tell anybody,” Daniels said. “But I don’t feel like I’m going to be Christine anymore. I feel like pulling the plug.”

The declaration wasn’t altogether unexpected, LeCoe says. By this point, in July 2008, the once-gregarious Christine Daniels, a formerly male sports writer who had shocked the nation 15 months earlier by writing in the Los Angeles Times that, going forward, she wished to be known as a woman, had been in emotional decline for months.

LeCoe knew Daniels had stopped taking feminizing hormones and ceased receiving hair-removing electrolysis treatments. Daniels’ groundbreaking L.A. Times blog on transitioning to womanhood, “Woman in Progress,” had not only stopped appearing but had mysteriously disappeared from the newspaper’s Web site and archives, leaving countless supporters and advocates worldwide without their new transgender hero.

Daniels shut out virtually every other transgender friend except LeCoe, who struck a nonjudgmental tone and persisted in demanding that Daniels let her help. Deep inside, LeCoe struggled to reconcile what it meant that the woman who had once been the role model for her own transition was crumbling. But she did her best not to let her doubts show.

“Don’t decide so quickly,” LeCoe said. “Maybe you’ll reconsider it when you feel better.”

“I have been feeling this way for a while,” Daniels gasped through tears. “I can’t do it anymore.”

“Which part can’t you do?” LeCoe asked.

More silence, then: “I had the perfect life with Lisa, and I threw it all away.”

Seventeen months later, Daniels would be found dead from carbon-monoxide poisoning in a 1997 Toyota Camry in the subterranean garage of a dreary apartment building on Sepulveda just north of National. By then, Daniels was again officially known by her male birth name, Mike Penner, though both her names were included atop the official coroner’s report. The document described how Penner had snaked a hose from the exhaust pipe into the car with the engine running, how a neighbor had pulled him from the car and attempted CPR, how death was declared at Brotman Medical Center and how a suicide note had been found in the apartment.

The death of 52-year-old Penner would become as big a news story as her coming out as transgender in the pages of a major American newspaper, and as disturbing and perplexing as Daniels’ decision in the fall of 2008 to return to life as a male.

What drove Penner’s decision to take his life? News organizations and bloggers noted sadly that Daniels’ gender confusion had had a tragic end, and the L.A. Times itself would write a lengthy story months after her death that also suggested it was Daniels’ sense of being torn between two worlds that contributed to her decision to commit suicide.

But it wasn’t like that.

The parts of the Penner saga that the public knows — from Christine Daniels’ dramatic public coming out to Mike Penner’s desperately sad suicide — spanned 31 months. But the story actually began much earlier.

In many ways, Penner’s path was standard-issue for those born male who have an inexplicable yet ultimately undeniable desire to be female. He would sneak into his mother’s closet in their Anaheim home to try on shoes and dabble with her makeup, then scrub it off shamefully before vowing never to do it again. Then, of course, he would do it again, a new helping of guilt raining down on his Catholic soul.

These were the 1960s and early ’70s, a prehistoric era even for gays and lesbians, let alone those compelled to experiment with the trappings of the opposite gender. It wasn’t until the late 1980s, in fact, that gender-identity disorder was recognized as legitimate by the American Psychiatric Association.

Penner’s story parts ways with most of his counterparts because of the man he became. By all accounts, Penner was infatuated by sports out of genuine enthusiasm, not as some means of defying this yearning or bolstering his masculinity. He grew to a slim, athletic 6 feet 3 and was known as an avid soccer player who channeled this fascination and his innate writing ability into a career as a sports journalist.

He arrived at the L.A. Times in 1983, around the same time as sportswriter Rick Reilly, a future columnist for Sports Illustrated and ESPN magazine. Penner went on to cover several Olympics and World Cups, as well as pro baseball and football.

While covering the U.S. Open tennis tournament in New York in 1984, Penner met fellow sportswriter Lisa Dillman, then with the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. He helped her get her job at the L.A. Times and they wed in 1987.

Dillman has never spoken on the record about her husband’s transition, and Penner never answered the media’s questions about their relationship. Daniels also never wrote of it in her blog on transgenderism, according to those who read it when it was available online.

The L.A. Times, in its March story about Penner, indicated that it was unclear when Dillman learned about her husband’s interest in cross-dressing. This much is known: In May 2005, when Penner traveled to Port Angeles, Washington, to a transgender retreat known as Esprit, he told new friends that Lisa was aware of where he was.

Reilly, in an ESPN column in January eulogizing his friend, wrote that Daniels told him she used to keep a dress, wig and pearls in a toolbox behind the couple’s bed board.

Claire Winter, a transgender friend and mentor who lives in Seattle, says Daniels “had struck an arrangement with Lisa that she’d explore these things. I’m pretty sure Lisa knew what she was doing.”

Other friends of Daniels’ have similar understandings. “Lisa was not kept in the dark about this,” says Susan Horn, who had met Daniels at an L.A. clothing store for transgender women. “Christine would talk about how Lisa insisted Christine park her car in the alley and go out the back gate and into the car if she dressed at home before going out.”

The first known sighting of Christine Daniels by the transgender group that became her clique was in 2004 at Countessa’s Closet, a small shop of roughly 1,000 square feet nestled in a dumpy Studio City strip mall that is routinely cited by male-to-female transgender Angelenos as their first major step in experimenting with a public transition.

The proprietor, Countessa (she goes by one name), is a woman who has developed a niche providing a refuge where those exploring their gender identity may try on clothes, take makeup-application lessons from the owner and meet one another.

Countessa recalls a shy, gawky blond man with bright blue eyes, browsing in slacks and a work shirt one afternoon.

“This is like a real ladies’ shop,” Penner said to Countessa.

“Of course it is,” she replied. “Do you know what you’re looking for?”

“No, not exactly.”

“Is it for you or is it somebody else?”

“It’s for me.”

With that verbal admission, the journalist who dwelled in the macho universe of a major metro sports department and pro-sports locker rooms began a process of explicitly moving toward the identity he always felt buried within. Like many transgender people who later became friends, Penner would slip over to the shop after work or on weekends and shuck “male mode” garb for wigs, dresses, jewelry and shoes. Within those confines, Daniels became legendary for taking so much time in the bathroom to fix herself up — so much so that a friend made a framed sign and hung it on the door, mocking her by warning others that if the potty was unavailable for long periods, Daniels was the culprit.

“Countessa’s retreat has been called a sanctuary,” Daniels wrote in a November 2005 card that the proprietor framed for display. “You need to know why. Once inside, you have the feeling that nothing bad can happen to you. … Christina has never felt better or looked better.” (Among certain friends, Daniels called herself Christina.)

Such stores, which exist in most major cities, not only spare a man the embarrassment of trying on women’s clothes in mainstream stores but also are a source of garments in the larger sizes that transgender women usually require.

This is where Daniels met Horn, and “Diana,” who asked the Weekly not to use her real name because she’s not openly transgender at work. The duo later took Daniels to Metropolitan Community Church, which became Daniels’ spiritual home. Daniels also learned at Countessa’s about a support group for transitioning people at the L.A. Gender Center, which is where she met LeCoe.

In August 2005, Horn and Daniels shared a milestone moment for any transgender person: the first time Daniels went out in public in her transgender persona. They met at Countessa’s to get dressed and then headed to Sisley, an Italian restaurant in Encino.

“We drove over to this mall and I kept telling her, ‘Nobody’s gonna bother us, even if they recognize us as being transsexual,’ ” says Horn, an L.A. paralegal who lost her family and her career as a lawyer when she transitioned.

“We sat down at the restaurant. A very cute waiter came over and said, ‘Can I help you, ladies?’ As soon as those words left his mouth, you could feel Christine relax. She was just ecstatic.” After dinner, Daniels used a women’s public restroom for the first time — at a movie theater where they saw The 40-Year-Old Virgin.

The friendship with Horn was rocky, though. For a long time, Daniels did not let on to her friends that she was a noted sports columnist. Horn figured it out in June 2006 when she read a piece by Penner about the World Cup in Germany in which he had noted that someone’s “pores were as big as a garage.” That seemed an odd observation for a typical male sportswriter to make, Horn said, so she pieced together a few other clues and perkily confronted Daniels.

“Next time I saw her, I said, ‘I know who you are!’ and she was terrified,” Horn said. “I thought she’d get a good giggle out of it. She was angry at me for weeks.”

Still, Daniels accompanied Horn to her first ear piercing.

Daniels also began helping others with their transitions. She counseled Diana’s upset wife when she learned of her husband’s transgenderism. After Horn and Diana took Daniels to Metropolitan Community Church, Daniels began floating the idea of forming a group that would call itself the Social Butterflies, transgender women who have regular outings at trans-friendly restaurants.

And that was all before she became famous.

By late 2006, Mike Penner could no longer keep Christine Daniels out of Dillman’s range. The reason was hormones.

After a couple of years of socializing at Countessa’s, praying at Metropolitan Community Church, undergoing individual and group therapy and attending conferences around the country, Daniels was emerging fast and furiously. Presenting as Mike, in fact, had become tormenting. When the time came for Daniels to revert to male mode toward the end of outings or visits at Countessa’s, Diana recalls, a devastating mood swing would occur. “He’d be lying on the floor crying,” she says.

Mike was reserved, even shy. As Christine, he transformed into an extroverted, emotional person. LeCoe recalls that at church, Daniels would sob on cue when the Rev. Neil Thomas would declare, “God loves you the way you are, he accepts you the way you are, your status has nothing to do with your salvations.”

Reilly, in his eulogy column, described the jarring difference thus: “Christine was the opposite: gregarious, 100 mph talker, always looking to cover an event, to be seen, the Funmeter pegged, the curls bouncing. She was flirty, always lightly grabbing your arm when she talked, covering her mouth when she laughed, which seemed like all the time.”

Penner moved out of the suburban Orange County home he shared with Dillman around New Year’s 2007. The couple knew hormone therapy would prompt physical changes Dillman could not ignore, so Penner moved into a 700-square-foot apartment at the end of a circuitous and dank hallway in L.A.’s fortress-like, nondescript Westwood Villa Apartments.

LeCoe lunched with Daniels at a Japanese restaurant just before New Year’s and heard about the couple’s final Christmas together, in which “they exchanged practical presents that would be useful for life alone,” LeCoe says, adding that Daniels seemed convinced that Dillman eventually would come around and embrace her.

In the months that followed, Daniels became consumed by her transition, speaking endlessly about her desire to have sex-reassignment surgery.

The handful of American surgeons who perform sex-change operations follow a Standards of Care model requiring male-to-female patients to undergo a rigorous regimen of hormones and electrolysis to remove hair from not only the face but also the genital area. Surgery must be approved by at least two psychiatrists who can vouch for mental stability and, most importantly, the patient must live publicly as the target gender for at least a year.

Daniels’ friends found her eagerness at once heartening and worrisome.

In late February 2007, Penner sat down with his boss, Los Angeles Times Sports Editor Randy Harvey, who noticed that the writer’s hair and nails were longer. Penner broke the news of his transition.

By all accounts, Harvey was exceedingly gracious, dissuading Penner when he suggested a move to the entertainment section of the paper. Harvey also told Penner something that Daniels’ transgender friends had been arguing: A male sports columnist at one of the nation’s biggest newspapers cannot transition on the job and change bylines without making news. Harvey persuaded Penner to write about the transition.

“Other people have second-guessed me, and certainly I have second-guessed if that was the right thing to do, to encourage Mike to write that column,” Harvey says. “Would things ultimately have turned out differently? I don’t know. I thought it was the right thing at the time.”

So write it, Daniels did. The piece that appeared in the L.A. Times on April 26, 2007, cleverly headlined “Old Mike, New Christine,” was a landmark. It was a breezy declaration that after 23 years writing as Mike Penner, he would take a break and return to live — and write — as Christine Daniels.

In an eloquent 826-word column, Penner summed up the typical journey of those who accept what they always sensed, that they were born into a body of the wrong sex, and that with this acceptance comes a duty to change: “I am a transsexual sportswriter. It has taken more than 40 years, a million tears and hundreds of hours of soul-wrenching therapy for me to work up the courage to type those words.”

The piece was an instant Web sensation; a team of transgender friends screened Daniels’ e-mails and tabulated that more than 1,000 came in within the first 48 hours. Just seven were negative, says Winter, Daniels’ friend in Seattle. Overnight, Daniels became one of the most famous transgender people in a culture that has precious few transgender celebrities.

Supporters tried to prepare her for her newfound celebrity.

In advance of April 26, Daniels found herself on the phone and exchanging e-mails nonstop with several prominent transgender advocates trying to coach her. The fear was that Daniels could find herself becoming another Susan Stanton — the Largo, Florida, city manager fired that March after transitioning on the job.

Stanton was appearing on Larry King Live and other shows, seemingly unprepared for and discomfited by certain invasive questions. Winter says the transgender community worried that Daniels could be similarly vulnerable.

“The people who are just starting really don’t know what’s ahead, don’t know what’s coming at them,” Winter says. “They’re just trying to analyze how they’re feeling. To do that in a fishbowl is unimaginable.”

Stanton says she chatted with Daniels, too, although she says she wasn’t sure how to advise the sportswriter because their circumstances were so different. Stanton had lost her job but retained the support of her wife and son; Daniels was embraced by the Times in a way activists viewed as a model to be venerated but was no longer living with Dillman.

“Christine told me she felt so bad for me compared to what she had on her side,” recalls Stanton, now city manager in Lake Worth, Florida, and subject of the HBO documentary Her Name Was Steven. “And I remember thinking, ‘You know, I’m envious, but I think over time my relationship with my family is going to be more sustaining.’ ”

Daniels heard from so many voices in those weeks that four days before her piece appeared, she lashed out. In an e-mail to Winter, she griped that she felt “overwhelmed by everything and everyone. I feel as if I am being used as a pawn by the trans community (and maybe the Times as well). I have been close to tears many times. … I am flat-out exhausted.”

And this was still only the beginning.

The initial surge of public and professional support was thrilling for Daniels. She started writing the “Woman in Progress” blog and found herself in high demand giving speeches to transgender and GLBT groups. She gave interviews and was being venerated by friends, supporters and advocates.

“I think that all of a sudden, the transgender community — me included — latched on to her for strength,” LeCoe says. “Once she was out, boy, was she out. I think it was a pretty wild ride for her, and I think she probably enjoyed some of it, yes.”

At the Times, too, there was a noticeable shift. The night before Penner’s column appeared, Harvey and another editor phoned 45 L.A. Times staff members to tell them, so they would not be caught off-guard.

Harvey said not one person expressed discomfort.

Daniels seemed to revel in that acceptance. Says Harvey: “Mike seldom came to the office, and when he did, he kept to himself. He had friends, but he was shy and he didn’t seek out conversation.

“As Christine, she would come to the office and openly engage people in conversation,” Harvey says. “It was the same underlying sweetness about Christine that was also evident with Mike, but there was a difference.”

Dillman, however, was noticeably scarce in the newsroom, he says. “She was not comfortable being there when Christine was there.”

Daniels’ perhaps overly optimistic outlook was summed up in a June 2007 interview with Queercents.com, a finance Web site. She was asked, “Money can buy hormones and a closet full of fabulous shoes, but does it buy happiness?”

Her e-mailed response contained a formula: “Hormones + legal name change + setting the stage for a new life = happiness, no doubt about that.”

Daniels’ simplistic expectations could sound familiar to anyone who has gone through a divorce. In the first several months, many people often feel a wave of euphoria from the newfound freedom, the realization of fantasy and the ability to be positive and eagerly anticipate the future. Inevitably, however, the euphoria gives way to reality — and sometimes that reality includes sadness over the loss of a soul mate.

But in the spring of 2007, Daniels was still riding the wave. A fellow sportswriter recruited Daniels to co-coach the soccer team of his young daughter, LeCoe says. Friends invited Daniels to attend their wedding, an event she blogged about. And Reilly, then still at Sports Illustrated, wrote a glowing piece in July that seemed to set the tone in the sports-journalism world about what an enlightening thrill it was to meet Daniels.

On July 19, 2007, after weeks of placing the legally required notices in local newspapers announcing the intent to change names, Michael Daniel Penner became Christine Michelle Daniels, as decreed by the Superior Court of California. The origin of most of that name is obvious: Michael begat Michelle, Daniel begat Daniels. Christine was an homage to Christine Jorgensen, the World War II veteran famous for having had what is believed to be the first male-to-female sex-reassignment surgery.

July 19 was significant for another reason. It was the day Daniels’ divorce attorney filed her first response to Dillman’s divorce filing. Dillman had submitted the papers on May 23, Daniels’ first day at the Times in her female persona.

“The fact that Lisa responded to Christine’s transition announcement as quickly as she did by filing for divorce — all of which was understandable — was a huge blow,” Winter says. It was only the tip of the iceberg.

Behind the scenes, Daniels’ transition was marred by a series of blowout arguments with Dillman and Dillman’s parents, Daniels’ friends tell the Weekly.

“It was particularly tragic because Christine had been very close to Lisa’s family,” Winter says. “The family felt like Mike did something to their daughter. How could he do this to her? There were definitely confrontations, a lot of them.”

Daniels went to great lengths to shield Dillman from scrutiny. But Dillman avoided Daniels. LeCoe said Dillman told Daniels, “I don’t even want to see you around the office unless I absolutely have to, and then I want to be as far away as possible. I don’t want to be associated with it. I don’t ever want to see you that way.”

Daniels was crushed by Dillman’s distance.

The same week as the divorce filing, Daniels suffered another blow. She covered a press conference for the L.A. arrival of British soccer superstar David Beckham. Also at the event was Paul Oberjuerge, a writer for the San Bernardino County Sun — and someone who didn’t get Reilly’s virtual memo to leave Daniels alone.

Oberjuerge took the opportunity to assess Daniels’ transition. “She looks like a guy in a dress, pretty much,” he wrote on the paper’s Web site. “Except anyone paying any attention isn’t going to be fooled — as some people are by veteran transvestites. Maybe this is cruel, but there were women in that room who were born women in body, as well as soul. And the difference between them and Christine was, in my mind, fairly stark. It seemed almost as we’re all going along with someone’s dress-up role-playing. …”

The words greatly upset Daniels. Even an online outpouring of outrage on her behalf, which prompted The Sun to remove the post, didn’t seem to make it better, because Oberjuerge had cut to the heart of one of the biggest issues for male-to-female transsexuals: whether they “pass.”

“Christine probably had a fragile side that was in some ways quite feminine and in some ways quite attractive,” LeCoe says. “She had a winsome side; she got her feelings hurt easily.” (Oberjuerge, no longer with The Sun, did not respond to the Weekly’s requests for comment.)

That setback notwithstanding, life remained largely upbeat for Daniels in the summer and fall of 2007. That September, she and Winter met well-known sex-change surgeon Dr. Marcie Bowers at a transgender conference in Atlanta known as Southern Comfort and, shortly thereafter, the friends had appointments to have sex-change surgeries on the same day in July 2008, at Bowers’ Colorado clinic.

“That was something we were really excited about,” Winter says. “Christine was so enthused by the female sex marker on her driver’s license. It’s a symbol of cultural acceptance.”

Bowers recalls her first meeting with Daniels, about whom she had heard a great deal. She sums up her impressions: “For as good as she looked, she seemed a little bit shy and insecure. But she was a lovely woman and seemed to have herself together.”

In truth, the euphoria wave was cresting.

The first outward indication was a big one. Friends say it was a catalyst in her downfall. Others say it was merely a manifestation of Daniels’ rising inner turmoil. The occasion was a disastrous photo shoot intended for Vanity Fair.

Shortly after Daniels’ 50th birthday, in October, she went to the L.A. studio of photographer Robert Maxwell. Accounts of what occurred there vary so starkly that they are hard to reconcile.

Maxwell was unreachable by the Weekly but told the L.A. Times in March that he intended to shoot Daniels in a “conservative, classy-type look.” He claimed that she was unstable and weepy, bawling that she was ugly.

“I was trying to say all the right things,” Maxwell told the Times. “How do you tell someone who looks like a man, ‘You’re a beautiful woman’? I don’t know.” Vanity Fair reporter Evan Wright backed up Maxwell, telling the Times he feared Daniels was suicidal and pulled the plug on the piece because Wright, too, was unsure how to cover Daniels without disparaging her “fantasy conception … [of] who she is.”

This account infuriates Daniels’ transgender confidantes. The sportswriter had told more than a half-dozen friends a very different version: that Maxwell’s aim was to sex her up and that he pushed her to pose in provocative ways.

She had told her friends that, far from Wright calling off the piece, Daniels had to fight him to stop the project from moving forward. Winter and others, in fact, say they helped Daniels draft a letter demanding that Vanity Fair kill the piece.

Daniels described the event this way in an e-mail to Winter and other friends that week: “They promised me, and I quote, ‘This will be done YOUR way, you will be happy and look beautiful.’ It was a total debacle, probably the worst experience of my transition. [The] photographer apparently wanted to portray me as a man in a dress, my worst fear, as I expressed numerous times. I was in tears by the end of it and a wreck for three days afterward. I felt betrayed, totally abused, and very, very vulnerable and exposed and alone in the world.”

Then things began to snowball.

The Vanity Fair fiasco exposed a growing rift between Daniels and some in the transgender community over how she was portraying transsexuality in her blog. They felt she was focusing too much on appearances, setting herself up for exactly the sort of treatment she said she received from Maxwell.

Daniels had a falling-out via e-mail with Stanton, the fired city manager in Florida. “She was writing a blog about how great it is to dress and color her hair and wear makeup and it was kind of very tranny,” Stanton says. “I was really nervous about this. A lot of people are saying, ‘Oh, you look so gorgeous.’ Then other people will say, ‘My goodness, look at this pervert on the TV. That’s nothing but a man in drag.’

“It’s not about that,” Stanton tells the Weekly. “It’s about being true to who we are.”

Daniels didn’t take kindly to the critique, e-mailing back to end the friendship. “I think what I’m doing is correct. If you’ve got a problem with it, it’s your problem. … I’m a real woman who loves makeup and clothes, shoes. A woman, not a trans-anything who needs to quote-unquote represent some undefined community. For the first time in my life, I’m being true to myself, and my true self loves makeup, clothes, shoes.”

As 2007 came to a close, Daniels began dealing similarly with many in the transgender activist community, friends say. She said she felt used by the trans community.

She also was increasingly despondent that the situation with Dillman was not improving.

Winter explains: “So many people were placing her in heroine status, she was starting to feel pressure to live up to her instant reputation. She would say, ‘I’m here for a purpose, I should be doing better than I am. Why am I so depressed or lonely?’

“She was really riding a huge crest, but eventually the party settles down and people get back to work, and life gets back to some semblance of normalcy,” Winter says. “What you’re left with once the confetti settles is realizing you’ve lost a lot of friends and you’re lonely.”

Daniels began to withdraw.

She canceled a speech in January 2008 to a Denver transgender conference called Gold Rush and didn’t appear in March when she was nominated for a GLAAD Media Award in Los Angeles.

Dr. Bowers knew something was gravely wrong in January when her office contacted Daniels about moving the July 2008 surgery date by a week because of a scheduling conflict. Daniels became disproportionately upset and refused to take further calls from the clinic.

“We were surprised by the degree of disappointment — it was just a week,” Dr. Bowers says. “We tried to scramble a few ways to say, ‘Look, we can do this, we can do this.’ I don’t usually call patients at home to apologize, but I did in this case. I sensed something was off.”

More alarming to LeCoe, at Easter, Daniels dropped out at the last minute from plans to see a passion play at her church, and her attendance at church fell sharply.

Daniels told people she was too busy caring for her mother, who was in the throes of rapidly accelerating dementia and died that spring. (Penner’s father died when he was 12.)

At the L.A. Times, Harvey sensed a shift. He called Daniels to joke with her about something and she became offended. “I thought, ‘Okay, there’s a change here,’ ” he says. “That’s when I began to think she doesn’t seem as happy as she was.”

In April 2008, Daniels took medical leave from the Times, complaining of severe abdominal pain and telling co-workers her mother’s decline and death were taking a tremendous psychological toll.

Daniels would never return to the paper. Her final byline appeared on April 4, 2008, less than a year after her first.

By May, LeCoe had realized the extent of Daniels’ physical and emotional problems. It wasn’t easy to find out. Daniels cut off friends such as Winter largely by not returning calls and e-mails. LeCoe and Diana were more relentless about stopping by her apartment, a turn of good fortune for Daniels, as LeCoe would become her primary caretaker.

“I became aware that Christine was really, really ill in May, when she was having a lot of stomach problems,” LeCoe says. “They were taking a toll on her digestive tract. She was constipated, had ulcers that caused her a lot of pain digesting food. She would say, ‘I think I’m dying.’”

Daniels was hospitalized in June 2008. Doctors determined that the stress of so many traumas — the devastating Vanity Fair shoot, the paranoia over being used by other transgender people for their causes, an acute loneliness that followed the post-coming-out euphoria, the death of her mother, and Dillman’s continuing distance — was manifesting as abdominal pain.

In the hospital, Daniels was diagnosed as severely depressed. Doctors prescribed a regimen of powerful psychotropic drugs that included the antipsychotic Zyprexa and the antidepressant Elavil. LeCoe remembers those drugs because she monitored Daniels to ensure she took them.

Daniels moved in with LeCoe for the summer, and it was in LeCoe’s living room that the last phase began in the dismantling of Christine Daniels. The reporter tore up several spiral-bound journals that she had kept while in transgender therapy, gave away her clothes and jewelry to friends and stopped doing anything to feminize herself.

And then the ultimate step: Daniels ordered LeCoe and others to start calling her Mike again.

LeCoe says it felt like the reverse of what the wife of a male-to-female transsexual sees during the transition. Christine morphed back into Mike by shucking the hormones, allowing patchy facial hair to return and her breasts to deflate.

“It broke my heart, but I couldn’t judge her,” LeCoe says. “That would have been hypocritical.”

De-transitioning is so unusual that there are no solid data about it. Psychiatrists who treat transgender people say it happens in less than 5 percent of cases.

Transgender activists say “going back” is inaccurate. People who choose to abandon transition are simply giving in to overwhelming stress and grief over what they lost from their previous life.

Certainly Penner’s decision to stop taking the feminizing hormones played a role in his deteriorating life, but the extent can’t be known. No studies have been conducted to determine whether withdrawal from the hormones can cause depression, but mental-health professionals who work with transgender people say patients who have stopped taking the drugs report feelings of distress.

“When they start taking hormones, they begin to express changes in their psyche — they’re more able to focus, more able to feel empathy, concern for others,” says Antioco Carrillo, a counselor with many transgender clients at the nonprofit Community Counseling Center in Las Vegas. “Once they go through the process, when they have stopped it, they go back to being depressed because it contradicts what they experienced. I don’t know if it’s the medication, but it is about the worldview.”

Bowers believes Penner put one foot in the grave by abandoning the transition. “If we had done surgery, it probably would have saved her life. Now she died as an unhappy soul who never got a chance to align her body and soul, and that’s the greatest tragedy about her.”

Although many issues were at play at this point, one stood out: Penner repeatedly told friends his return to a male lifestyle was a last-ditch effort to reunite with his wife in some way.

“I questioned whether or not there was any hope there, and I told Mike that, and Mike seemed intellectually to understand that,” LeCoe says. “It’s like, ‘Oh, yeah, nothing’s promised.’ But there was that hope that if Christine was gone and never coming back, then just maybe.

“There was at least a time when Mike would say, ‘I’d settle for being her close friend. I’ll settle for anything.’ ”

Penner’s byline returned to the L.A. Times in October 2008 without any public notification, and his divorce from Dillman became final on October 24. Penner and Dillman began to lunch together occasionally after that, but it was always awkward, LeCoe says.

Friends say Mike Penner 2.0 was sullen, visibly depressed and quiet, the opposite of Christine Daniels. And occasionally, there were mixed signals, like the time Diana suggested they go to a play in Malibu and Penner asked if maybe he ought to go as Christine. (He did not.)

At one point that fall, LeCoe accidentally called him “Christine,” then quickly apologized. “No, that’s okay,” Penner told her. “One of the best years of my life was spent being Christine. But I’m never going back.”

Late in 2008, Penner went back to Metropolitan Community Church. It was the last time the Rev. Thomas saw him. The two stole away for a brief, private chat after the service, and Penner surprised the pastor.

“He looked at me and he said, ‘Don’t you ever believe that I’ve given up being Christine,’ ” Thomas recalls. “I knew exactly what he meant. Everything about his body, everything about his fabric, everything that made him human was still screaming, that had been screaming for 40 years, that got to the point of Mike transitioning to Christine.

“But he hoped returning to Mike could possibly lead to reconciliation with Lisa. He loved Lisa, there was no doubt about it.”

That it took Penner as long as it did — until November 27, 2009 — to kill himself is, in retrospect, surprising. LeCoe and Diana spent the summer of 2009 contending with what were clearly attempts at drug overdoses and Penner’s constant talk of ending it all. Nobody knows how consistently Penner was taking his antidepressant medication, but the wild mood swings and suicidal chatter increased.

Penner was hospitalized twice in 2009, once in a psychiatric hospital after his brother, L.A. Times copy editor John Penner, learned he had made suicidal comments. LeCoe met and bonded with John Penner at that point. He told LeCoe he had never seen his brother happier than in the heyday of his life as Christine.

Two days before his death, Penner called LeCoe and asked if she could help him obtain a gun. LeCoe asked why and Penner said, “I’m at my rope’s end here.”

LeCoe refused to discuss the matter further and reminded Penner she had already repeatedly refused to assist in Penner’s self-destructive plans. She and Diana insisted on taking Penner out for dinner that night, and when they arrived the mood seemed deceptively lighter.

“You’ve already given me your answer — we won’t discuss that anymore,” Penner told LeCoe. “I will obey your rules. Let’s not discuss it. I’m hungry.”

On Thanksgiving, Penner sent what would seem like a valedictory e-mail to LeCoe and Diana: “I want to thank you for your friendship. It’s meant the world to me.”

The next night, he put on a blue long-sleeved shirt, black jeans and black-and-white Adidas sneakers, got in his Camry in the garage beneath his apartment and breathed carbon monoxide until he died.

It was a year to the day after his divorce had been finalized.

“Christine died of a broken heart,” Diana says. “She wasn’t confused about whether she was meant to be a woman. Any other reading of the situation is disrespectful to her memory.”

Mike Penner and Christine Daniels had separate funerals. Penner was laid to rest in Orange County in an event closed to media but populated by dozens of journalist colleagues. A group of Daniels’ transgender friends tried to attend but were turned away at the door for not being on the guest list, a concept the Rev. Thomas says hearkened back to the darkest days of the 1980s, when gay friends and even lovers of someone who had died of AIDS were similarly refused.

“That is why we decided to do a memorial service here at MCC for the folks who needed closure,” Thomas says of the second, far more public remembrance of Daniels, covered extensively by the local gay media.

Amy LeCoe was the sole transgender friend of Mike Penner’s who was invited to the Orange County funeral. The eulogies acknowledged the existence of Christine, and speakers noted that both Mike and Christine were consistently kind, loving people.

As LeCoe was leaving, Penner’s brother John stopped her to hug her; he said he doubted Penner would have lived as long as he did were it not for her care.

And then, something startling occurred. As she walked by Dillman, who had never met any of Penner’s transgender friends, the ex-wife halted another conversation to greet LeCoe.

“I know what you did for Mike and I just want to thank you,” Dillman said. She gripped LeCoe’s hand with what LeCoe describes as a “very warm, two-handed handshake.”

“You’re really welcome,” LeCoe replied. “I’m sorry I couldn’t do more.”

The two women cried together for a moment, then LeCoe walked on.

Thanks to Danielle Kays

By NICHOLAS SCHMIDLE
NY Times Published: August 19, 2010

A shopkeeper in Italy placed an order with a Chinese sneaker factory in Putian for 3,000 pairs of white Nike Tiempo indoor soccer shoes. It was early February, and the shopkeeper wanted the Tiempos pronto. Neither he nor Lin, the factory manager, were authorized to make Nikes. They would have no blueprints or instructions to follow. But Lin didn’t mind. He was used to working from scratch. A week later, Lin, who asked that I only use his first name, received a pair of authentic Tiempos, took them apart, studied their stitching and molding, drew up his own design and oversaw the production of 3,000 Nike clones. A month later, he shipped the shoes to Italy. “He’ll order more when there’s none left,” Lin told me recently, with confidence.

Lin has spent most of his adult life making sneakers, though he only entered the counterfeit business about five years ago. “What we make depends on the order,” Lin said. “But if someone wants Nikes, we’ll make them Nikes.” Putian, a “nest” for counterfeit-sneaker manufacturing, as one China-based intellectual-property lawyer put it, is in the south­eastern Chinese province of Fujian, just across the strait from Taiwan. In the late 1980s, multinational companies from all industries started outsourcing production to factories in the coastal provinces of Fujian, Guangdong and Zhejiang. Industries tended to cluster in specific cities and sub­regions. For Putian, it was sneakers. By the mid-1990s, a new brand of factory, specializing in fakes, began copying authentic Nike, Adidas, Puma and Reebok shoes. Counterfeiters played a low-budget game of industrial espionage, bribing employees at the licensed factories to lift samples or copy blueprints. Shoes were even chucked over a factory wall, according to a worker at one of Nike’s Putian factories. It wasn’t unusual for counterfeit models to show up in stores before the real ones did.

“There’s no way to get inside anymore,” Lin told me, describing the enhanced security measures at the licensed factories: guards, cameras and secondary outer walls. “Now we just go to a shop that sells the real shoes, buy a pair from the store and duplicate them.” Counterfeits come in varying levels of quality depending on their intended market. Shoes from Putian are designed primarily for export, and in corporate-footwear and intellectual-property-rights circles, Putian has become synonymous with high-end fakes, shoes so sophisticated that it is difficult to distinguish the real ones from the counterfeits.

In the last fiscal year, U.S. Customs and Border Protection seized more than $260 million worth of counterfeit goods. The goods included counterfeit Snuggies, DVDs, brake pads, computer parts and baby formula. But for four years, counterfeit footwear has topped the seizure list of the customs service; in the last fiscal year it accounted for nearly 40 percent of total seizures. (Electronics made up the second-largest share in that year, with about 12 percent of the total.) The customs service doesn’t break down seizures by brand, but demand for the fake reflects demand for the real, and Nike is widely considered to be the most counterfeited brand. One Nike employee estimated that there was one fake Nike item for every two authentic ones. But Peter Koehler, Nike’s global counsel for brand and litigation, told me that “counting the number of counterfeits is frankly impossible.”

The factory is off-white, five stories tall and fronted by a brown metal gate. It was a seasonable summer afternoon when I visited. Lin is 32, with a wispy mustache and a disarming smirk. He met me outside the factory and took me through the gate. We scaled two flights of aluminum stairs and entered a production floor echoing with the grinding and hissing noises of industrial labor. A few dozen workers stuffed shoe tongues with padding, brushed glue onto foot molds and ran laces through nearly finished sneakers. Nike and Adidas boxes were stacked in one corner, a pile of Asics uppers in another. On this particular day, the factory was churning out hundreds of trail runners.

A help-wanted notice on the wall beside the gated entrance sought individuals with stitching skills for all shifts; the bulletin made no mention that the work was illegal. Such things are often just assumed in Putian. Managing a fake-shoe factory puts Lin in the middle of a multibillion-dollar transnational enterprise that produces, distributes and sells counterfeits. Of course, like coca farmers in Bolivia and opium croppers in Afghanistan, Lin doesn’t make the big money; that’s for the networks running importation and distribution. Last year, for example, the F.B.I. arrested several people of Balkan origin in New York and New Jersey for their suspected roles in “the importation of large amounts of cocaine, heroin, marijuana, oxycodone, anabolic steroids, over a million pills of Ecstasy and counterfeit sneakers.” Dean Phillips, the chief of the F.B.I.’s Asian/African Criminal Enterprise Unit, describes counterfeiting as a “smart play” for criminals. The profits are high while the penalties are low. An Interpol analyst added: “If they get caught with a container of counterfeit sneakers, they lose their goods and get a mark on their customs records. But if they get caught with three kilos of coke, they’re going down for four to six years. That’s why you diversify.”

In September 2007, police officers in New York City seized 291,699 pairs of fake Nikes from two warehouses in Brooklyn. The early-­morning raids were part of a simultaneous crackdown on a counterfeiting ring with tentacles in China, New York and at least six other American states. Employing undercover agents and wiretapping, the joint operation — run by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the New York State Police, the Niagara Falls Police Department and the New York Police Department — exposed a scheme in which counterfeit Nikes arrived from China, were stored in Brooklyn and then shipped, often via UPS, to stores in Buffalo, Rochester, Pittsburgh, Dallas, Milwaukee, Chicago, Newark, Pawtucket, R.I., and Indian­apolis. Lev J. Kubiak, an immigration agent involved in the case, said the total street value of the seized goods (had they been legitimately trademarked) “turned out to be just over $31 million.” Establishing provenance on the sneakers proved difficult. “Naturally the importation docs were not truthful,” an immigration spokeswoman wrote in an e-mail message, when I asked her where the shoes originated. “But probably in or near Putian.”

After touring the assembly line, Lin and I walked up another flight of stairs to the roof of the factory. A mild breeze blew off the creek that snaked behind the building. Half-constructed high-rise apartments, ensconced in scaffolding and green mesh, stood beside towering cranes. The pace of development in Putian, a secondary provincial city with a population of about three million, was dizzying. A cluster of unfinished apartment buildings visible from my hotel window seemed to be a floor higher every morning.

We sat in Lin’s rooftop office around a small table topped with a chessboard-size tea-making contraption. Lin proceeded to sweep the excess water off the tea table with a paint brush and then make a pot of green tea while recounting the transaction with the Italian shopkeeper earlier this year. After pouring cups for my translator and me, Lin excused himself and ran downstairs. He returned with three samples, including a single fake Nike Tiempo, the first of the batch, which was sent to the Italian buyer to make sure it met his standards. Scribbled on the side of the shoe in navy blue pen was a date and the man’s signature. While looking the shoes over myself, I noticed the label on the inside of the tongue read “Made in Vietnam.” That was all part of the subterfuge, Lin said, adding that there are “different levels of counterfeit. Some are low quality and don’t look anything like the originals. But some are high quality and look just like the real ones. The only way to tell the difference between the real ones and ours is by the smell of the glue.” He took back the shoe, buried his nose in the footbed and inhaled.

National Intellectual Property Rights Coordination Center is the anticounterfeiting headquarters in the United States. Situated among short stacks of concrete office buildings in Arlington, Va., the center brings together representatives from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Customs and Border Protection, the Food and Drug Administration, the F.B.I., the Patent and Trademark Office, the United States Postal Service, the Defense Criminal Investigative Service, the Naval Criminal Investigative Service and other government agencies. J. Scott Ballman, an immigration agent with short, sandy hair and a Tennessee accent, is the center’s deputy director. Since joining customs in the early 1980s, Ballman has tracked the evolution of law enforcement’s response to intellectual-property violators as closely as anyone. (Customs split after 9/11 into Customs and Border Protection, which handles interdiction, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which deals with investigations.) He worked on what he says was the first undercover intellectual-property case for the customs service when he and a team of agents investigated and ultimately arrested a group in Miami for assembling counterfeit watches in 1985. “Most production of this stuff has since been pushed out of the United States,” he told me.

In 1998, the National Security Council studied the impact of intellectual-­property crimes and concluded that federal law-enforcement efforts lacked coordination. An executive order soon followed, sketching out the role of the National Intellectual Property Rights Coordination Center. Two years later a makeshift office opened in Washington, but after 9/11, chasing counterfeit goods lost priority. Ballman said: “Resources and focus changed overnight. Agents were detailed elsewhere and moved away from thinking about I.P. to counterterrorism and weapons of mass destruction.”

The Obama administration has made intellectual property more of a focus. “Our single greatest asset is the innovation and the ingenuity and creativity of the American people,” President Obama said in a speech in March. “But it’s only a competitive advantage if our companies know that someone else can’t just steal that idea and duplicate it with cheaper inputs and labor.” To implement his intellectual-property strategy, Obama appointed an intellectual-property-enforcement coordinator, while Immigration and Customs Enforcement invigorated the property-rights coordination center.

Can such efforts make a difference? “You’re not going to arrest your way out of this,” Bob Barchiesi, president of the International Anticounterfeiting Coalition, told me in a despairing tone this past spring. As long as there is a demand, he insisted, there will be supply. He had just returned from a trip to China, the point of origin for nearly 80 percent of all goods seized by Customs and Border Protection in the previous fiscal year. One day, Barchiesi observed a factory raid where counterfeit jeans were seized by the Chinese authorities. The factory, its employees and all its equipment remained in place. Barchiesi called the raid a “propaganda show.”

Efforts to have intellectual-property rights honored in China are not new. Soon after Gilbert Stuart completed his Athenaeum portrait of George Washington in 1796, the one that’s reproduced today on the front of every $1 bill, a Philadelphia ship captain named John Swords set sail for southeast China. Once in Canton, in modern-day Guangdong province, Swords ordered 100 unauthorized replicas of the Washington portrait, which were painted on glass. (Two replicas had somehow already made their way to China and served as the template.) Stuart was furious when he learned of Swords’s activities and, in 1801, he sued Swords in a Pennsylvania court and won. The damage was probably done, however. Even more than a century later, Antiques Magazine observed, “a good many portraits of George Washington painted on glass are knocking about the country.”

But China’s counterfeiting dynamic is more complicated than foreign goods being copied in places like Putian. Chinese sneaker brands, for instance, are also counterfeited. And the domestic debate about ensuring intellectual-property rights dates to at least the middle of the 19th century, said Mark Cohen, who moved to Beijing in 2004 to be the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s first permanent intellectual-property representative at the American Embassy. (He has since become co-chairman of the American Chamber of Commerce’s intellectual-property committee.) One initiative of the Taiping Rebellion during the 1850s, Cohen told me, was to “draft a patent law to encourage Chinese innovation.” Over a cappuccino one morning at an upscale cafe in Beijing, Cohen criticized the notion of Chinese government negligence, which he called overly simplistic. “People come to this environment with certain assumptions that all this counterfeiting must mean that there’s no one enforcing,” he said. “But there’s loads of people enforcing! There’s enough I.P. officials” — at least several hundred thousand by his estimate — “to make a small European country.”

Numbers don’t necessarily spell efficiency, of course. Joe Simone, an intellectual-property lawyer with Baker & McKenzie in China, said: “This is police work, but [the Chinese government] isn’t putting enough police on it. Ninety-nine percent of the enforcement work is nothing but bureaucrats.” He questioned whether the current enforcement system was effective. Lin, the counterfeiter from Putian, told me about instances in which local authorities had searched his factory or even forced him to close in daytime, leaving him to run the factory at night. But production always goes on.

Beijing’s top intellectual-property officials, meanwhile, seem to disagree over what even constitutes counterfeiting. Last year, a debate occurred between the heads of the State Intellectual Property Office and the National Copyright Administration. The dispute revolved around shanzhai, a term that translates literally into “mountain fortress”; in contemporary usage, it connotes counterfeiting that you should take pride in. There are shanzhai iPhones and shanzhai Porsches.

In February 2009, a reporter asked Tian Lipu, the commissioner of the State Intellectual Property Office, whether shanzhai was something to be esteemed. “I am an intellectual-property-rights worker,” Tian curtly replied. “Using other people’s intellectual property without authorization is against the law.” Chinese culture, he added, was not about imitating and plagiarizing others. But one month later, Liu Binjie, from the National Copyright Administration, drew a distinction between shanzhai and counterfeiting. “Shanzhai shows the cultural creativity of the common people,” Liu said. “It fits a market need, and people like it. We have to guide shanzhai culture and regulate it.” Soon after that, the mayor of Shenzhen, an industrial city near Hong Kong, reportedly urged local businessmen to ignore lofty debates about what is and isn’t defined as counterfeiting and to “not worry about the problem of fighting against plagiarism” and “just focus on doing business.”

This contradictory political environment parallels — or perhaps fosters — a seemingly confused corporate response. There is no doubt that, as with Washington’s Athenaeum portrait, there are today a “good many” fake sneakers “knocking about” China, the United States, Italy and the rest of the world. But none of the major footwear companies I contacted ventured an estimate of the scale of their counterfeiting problems. For them, it’s something better not discussed. Peter Humphrey, the founder of a risk consultancy firm in Beijing called ChinaWhys, suggested this could be for one of two reasons: a wariness of “upsetting the Chinese authorities” or being “afraid to admit publicly too loud” that they have a counterfeiting problem. “Because when word gets around the consumer market,” Humphrey said, “then everyone starts wondering if their shoes are real or not.”

How do counterfeit products translate to the bottom line of the legitimate company? Is each fake Nike or Adidas tennis shoe a lost sale? A senior employee at a major athletic-footwear company, speaking on condition of anonymity, reflected on counterfeiting as a simple fact of industrial life: “Does it cut into our business? Probably not. Is it frustrating? . . . Of course. But we put it as a form of flattery, I guess.”

It could also be a form of industrial training. In Putian, Lin told me of his real ambitions. “Making counterfeit shoes is a transitional choice,” he said. “We are developing our own brand now. In the longer term we want to make all our own brands, to make our own reputation.” Lin’s goals seemed in line with China’s de facto counterfeiting policy: to discourage it as a matter of law, but also to hope, as a matter of laissez-faire industrial-development policy, that the skills being acquired will eventually result in strong legitimate businesses.

Putian’s counterfeit-sneaker industry operates in the open. Just type “Putian Nike” into any Internet search engine, and hundreds of results immediately turn up, directing you to Putian-based Web sites selling fake shoes. (Putian’s counterfeit-sneaker business has become so renowned that Alibaba.com, an online marketplace, offers a page warning buyers to exercise caution when dealing with suppliers from Putian.) “People who make the product and sell the product are no longer secret,” says Harley Lewin, an intellectual-property lawyer at the firm McCarter & English. “Where sellers in the past were unwilling to disclose who they were, these days it’s a piece of cake” to find them.

Student Street in downtown Putian is a leafy, two-lane road lined with stores stocked with nothing but fake tennis shoes. I spent an afternoon browsing their wares. Like the products inside, the stores varied in quality. One resembled an Urban Outfitters — exposed brick and ductwork, sunlight beaming through a windowed facade, down-tempo electronica playing in the background — but the majority of the stores appeared to value enterprise over aesthetics, with storefronts made of metal shutters left ajar to indicate they were open for business. I ducked into one and discovered a single room with two opposing walls covered in sneakers shrink-wrapped in clear plastic: Air Jordans, the latest LeBron James models, Vibram FiveFingers and more. It was like a Foot Locker for fakes.

I pulled a pair of black Nike Frees from the rack, spun them in my hands, folded the sole back and forth, tugged at the stitching and sniffed the glue; every budding aficionado has their tasting routine. (I never could detect the smell of “bad” glue.) The shoes, which cost about $12 at the Student Street shops, seemed indistinguishable from the pair my wife bought for $85 in the United States. “I don’t know if I could tell a [fake] shoe right off the bat,” Ballman, the deputy director of the National Intellectual Property Rights Coordination Center, told me. If someone who specialized in intellectual-property-rights enforcement most of his career wasn’t sure he could tell the difference, how could I? (Ballman said the key was that fake shoes have a “heavy” glue smell.) As one Chinese salesman selling counterfeits in Beijing told me: “The shoes are original. It’s just the brands that are fake.”

“Are you looking to buy or sell?” a tall, 30-something woman with bangs asked as I examined the Nike Frees. Her husband sat behind her, facing a large desktop-computer monitor. Their young daughter sat at another computer, wearing a headset and playing video games. The shop doubled as a wholesaler. The woman later confided that she and her husband ran a small factory as well as the store. They were on the lookout for ways to get their sneakers to market and for sales agents who could sell their shoes in the West. “We can give a discount if you order in bulk,” she said.

I asked how long it would take to make 2,000 pairs. “Once you send us the model, about a month,” she said. Her husband spoke up and assured me that the shoes “would be the highest quality,” adding, “we’ll use all the same materials. All the best materials are available in Putian.” (Lin, however, disputed that and said that using the same materials would quickly drive the price up.)

“How would I get 2,000 pairs of counterfeits past customs agents in the United States?” I asked.

“They won’t come from Putian,” he said. Or at least the documents wouldn’t indicate that. “We usually ship through Hong Kong on our way to America. Don’t worry. We do this all the time.”

A week later, I flew to Hong Kong to meet with a private detective named Ted Kavowras. Kavowras runs Panoramic Consulting, an investigative firm employing 30 people in China and Hong Kong. (He is also the China and Hong Kong ambassador for the World Association of Detectives.) His forte is investigating counterfeit factories and distribution networks. “Until seven years ago, to export from China was much more complex, because you didn’t have the Internet and didn’t have that window into the world,” he told me one evening over Diet Cokes and skewers of grilled octopus at a small Japanese restaurant near his office. “So most of the exports that came out of China had to go through these state-owned shipping companies. It was all pretty centralized. Now it’s pretty much a free-for-all.”

Kavowras is a pear-shaped 48-year-old with pasty skin and a brash demeanor. The night after we met for Japanese food, he showed up at a fancy steakhouse wearing a black velour Fila tracksuit. (“What? I’m from Brooklyn,” he said with a shoulder shrug and pursed lips.) Kavowras grew up in New York City and joined the New York Police Department soon after graduating from high school. Three years later he retired on disability. He ended up working “a lot of law-enforcement stuff,” including security-­guard duties, but he found it unrewarding. “When you’re not the real thing, you’re not the real thing,” he said. Kavowras then worked in production with The New York Times but quit after five years and moved to Asia. In 1994, Pinkerton offered him a job in Guangzhou, China. “I was at the right place at the right time with the right skill set,” he said. Five years later, Kavowras formed Panoramic.

Kavowras estimates that he works about 800 cases a year, encompassing everything from sneakers to watches to industrial mining pumps. In 2002, New Balance hired him to nose around a factory run by one of its former licensees in China, a Taiwanese businessman named Horace Chang. According to press reports, Chang had more or less gone rogue. Though he had been previously contracted by New Balance to make and distribute sneakers, relations turned bad, and New Balance canceled the contract. But Chang continued making shoes that bore the New Balance trademark without permission. New Balance asked Kavowras to get inside Chang’s operation and report back. “I use a wonderful investigative methodology that works like a dream,” Kavowras said when I asked him how a former street cop from Brooklyn goes undercover in China. “Drug dealers have to deal drugs, and counterfeiters have to sell their goods. When I show up at a counterfeit factory, I look like a pretty girl on prom night. I look like a big buyer who they can export a lot of goods to.” Chang eventually quit making counterfeit New Balance shoes.

If there’s one commonality throughout the counterfeit world, it’s deception. Along the top of a file cabinet in Kavowras’s office, located at the end of a hallway on an upper floor of a quiet building, was a row of putty heads that a Hollywood makeup artist had designed so that Kavowras and his staff could experiment with disguises: hats, sunglasses, beards and mustaches, fake teeth. “I’m the only working actor who’s not waiting tables on the weekend,” Kavowras joked. A half-dozen fax machines were programmed to display the country codes and phone numbers of the overseas companies that Kavowras and his colleagues pretended to represent. Each employee kept a tray stacked with various business cards to corroborate their multiple identities. “The bigger the lie, the more they believe,” said Kavowras, who also rents four shell offices around Hong Kong where he meets “targets.”

Kavowras crossed the office to a shelf piled with purses and backpacks embedded with hidden cameras. I asked him how the recession had affected the detective business. “Business definitely slowed down last year,” he said. Corporate brand-protection budgets were slashed, and Kavowras’s caseload dropped. “But we’ve been twice as busy this year. Whatever companies avoided last year came back to haunt them this year. You can’t run away from these issues. Some people say, ‘Oh, it’s just China, we don’t really have a market in China.’ But if it’s in China, it’s going to get out. It’s going to wash up on beaches all over the world.”

Where did he see the counterfeit industry going next?

“It’s a constant battle,” he said.

“Like ‘the War on Drugs’-kind of constant battle?” I asked.

“That’s different,” he said. Kavowras popped in a set of fake teeth and smiled. “I see the battle staying the same, just the battleground changing. More and more industrial work is shifting to Vietnam. Cambodia too, though it’s still a bit messy there. It’s going to become more international.” And that, in all likelihood, will mean more agents, more detectives and more money spent to pursue fake sneakers that no one is quite sure they can identify.

Thanks to Nate Lentz

Five months after a storm sent the Hudson surging over the garden of Joan Dye Gussow, theplot reflects changes she had long wanted to make.

By ANNE RAVER
NY Times Published: August 18, 2010

EARLY one morning a couple of weeks ago, I helped Joan Dye Gussow, 81, lug three bags of topsoil to the riverbank, before it became too hot and humid to work in her garden, which sweeps down from her house to the Hudson River.

It was hard to get a grip on the heavy plastic bag, but Ms. Gussow, a nutritionist and matriarch of the eat-locally-think-globally food movement, is amazingly sturdy for an octogenarian, and she marched me down the wide clover path toward the river.

“It likes being walked on,” she said of the white clover, as we trudged past her tomato cages full of ripening San Marzanos and Sungolds, self-seeded rainbow chard, sweet potatoes, newly planted peas, Malabar spinach and many other vegetables that make up Ms. Gussow’s year-round food supply.

More than 35 years before Fritz Haeg started his Edible Estates: Attack on the Front Lawn project in 2005 — his effort to turn the country’s lawns into vegetable patches — Ms. Gussow and her husband, Alan, an artist, were already in that mode. They laid down trash, kitchen waste and weeds, covered with newspapers and salt hay (killing the grass and making compost at the same time) on the front lawn of their Victorian in Congers, N.Y. Their goal: to grow food for themselves and their two young sons, Adam and Seth.

They farmed that lawn for more than two decades before moving here, to do the same thing, in 1995.

Ms. Gussow had gone back to school in 1969 to earn a doctorate in nutrition at Columbia University, at a time when nutrition was all about vitamins and chemistry, not how food was grown and where it came from. She began connecting the dots between what Americans were eating and how that food — be it factory-farmed chicken or Twinkies — was produced.

She created a legendary course, Nutritional Ecology, which she still teaches today, with a former student, Toni Liquori, who as director of School Food Focus, a nationwide program, works with school districts to buy more healthful, locally grown food.

Because Ms. Gussow dared to talk about energy use, pollution, diabetes and obesity as the true costs of food, she was initially viewed as a maverick crank, but her connections inspired the work of people like Michael Pollan, whose book “In Defense of Food,” echoes many of her revelations.

“She has been a powerful influence on the food movement,” said Mr. Pollan, adding that he admires her “clarity of thinking” and her ability to cut through complex issues to the simple truth: “We all know nutrients are important,” he said. “But Joan says, ‘Eat food.’ That’s the kernel of ‘In Defense of Food.’ ”

Ms. Gussow’s thinking, like Mr. Pollan’s, has always been grounded in the garden.

That muggy morning, as temperatures headed for the high 90s, we dumped the bags of soil near the boardwalk, where, only a few feet away, mallards were paddling peacefully in the quiet water. It was hard to imagine that in March a storm had brought the river surging over the boardwalk, tearing up its boards and pilings, ripping raised beds out of the ground as it moved toward the house, burying the long narrow garden — 36 by 100 feet — under two feet of water.

You can read the story on Ms. Gussow’s Web site, joansgarden.org: “I found myself quite numb — not hysterical as I might have expected. I think it’s age,” she wrote, after sloshing about in her rubber boots the morning after. “There’s absolutely nothing I could have done to prevent it.”

The day of the storm, March 13, had been a momentous one: she had finished the revisions to her new book, “Growing Older: A Chronicle of Death, Life and Vegetables,” published by Chelsea Green, and due out in November. And for the first time in her long writing life — she has written, co-written or edited five books — she was about to get an advance.

The morning after, finding herself blocked by the debris of what used to be raised beds and the boardwalk, she went inside to call Dave Avdoyan, the landscaper who had built the boxes for those beds, as well as a low stone wall on the north side of the garden, which in recent years had blocked river water rising in a storm. Now it, too, was submerged.

She figured her plants, including her beloved fruit trees and azaleas, were a total loss. But Mr. Avdoyan surveyed the wreckage, looked over the fence at the empty lot next door, which had better drainage and wasn’t as flooded, and proposed a radical solution: using the lot as a staging area and trucking in enough fill to raise her bathtub of a garden two feet.

Now, looking about at her ebullient plants, many resurrected from the flood, Ms. Gussow said: “I’m not religious and I’m not superstitious, but I really feel that Mother Nature took care of me. This was the first time in 100 years this lot was open. The owner took down the house in January, and was not going to rebuild until April.”

And she had the advance to pay what ended up costing $10,000 for the materials and labor. “It feels like a gift to me,” she said. “This amazing event occurred, and gave me the opportunity to do something I’d been wanting to do for years.”

Over the next few weeks, friends from the city picked up lumber, and a neighbor stacked bricks and pavers from the paths on the boardwalk. Former students helped move hundreds of plants, stashing them in the driveway, on the deck, any corner they could find. Mr. Avdoyan and a helper rebuilt the boardwalk and friends replaced the filter cloth behind the rocks to keep soil from washing out with the river.

Then, on March 30, a high tide flooded the garden again.

Another week went by, and finally, Mr. Avdoyan set to work with his Caterpillar, forklifting plants like the still-blooming peach tree, the low ilex hedges and the azaleas right out of the ground, and trundling them over to the empty lot, where they were set in mounds of donated soil and compost.

After Mr. Avdoyan trucked in 200 yards of fill, a crew of 17 staff members from Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture, in Pocantico Hills, N.Y., came down to spread 30 yards of soil and compost from McEnroe Organic Farm, in Millerton, N.Y., donated by Helena Durst. Then they laid down pavers and bricks for walkways that now lie flush with the vegetable beds.

“I’m so happy the wood is gone — it wasn’t pretty,” Ms. Gussow said, referring to the planting boxes, as we walked down the cross paths, admiring her crops.

“It was a lot of work,” she said, recalling how she singlehandedly repotted hundreds of plants, including precious lily bulbs.

I loved the soft, wide path of white clover, which rarely has to be mowed, and made a mental note to plant one in my own garden. Ditto for the perennial arugula, which was thriving beneath the trifoliate orange tree given to her by Barbara Kingsolver, who also lives off the land. The arugula, which returns year after year, was given to her by Larry Bogdanow, an architect and gardener, at the Just Food benefit held at Sotheby’s on April 25, where 300 locavores toasted and roasted Ms. Gussow, as the mother of their movement.

Other flood victims were thriving here as well: The kiwi vines, lifted out of their root-bound urns by the flood, are now climbing their trellis. The peach tree, relocated in a sunnier spot, bore 75 peaches in late June.

I had been in this garden in 2001, when Ms. Gussow’s first memoir, “This Organic Life: Confessions of a Suburban Homesteader,” was published. That book chronicled the constant floods and the battles with woodchucks and neighbors that she and Alan had begun waging six years earlier, when they moved into their 150-year-old house, a former Odd Fellows Hall that sat right on the street. But its backyard faced east, toward the sunrise, and ran right to the river. The house turned out to be so rotten they had to demolish it and rebuild. Alan had only two and a half years to enjoy it before he died of cancer, in May 1997.

“Growing Older” picks up that story, beginning with Ms. Gussow’s revelation that, to her surprise, she did not miss her husband, or even grieve for him.

“I kept experiencing it as a strange liberation from things I hadn’t known I was imprisoned by,” she writes. Such honesty is characteristic of Ms. Gussow, whether she is discussing intimate relationships or the one the United States has with oil.

In a recent speech before the Society of Nutrition Education in Reno, Nev., she did not mince words. “Your children’s children will never see an iceberg,” she told the audience. “They will never see a glacier. There will be no penguins, no polar bears.”

And here we stood in her garden, which was simmering in a week of high humidity, with no rain. The morning news had told of wildfires burning up the forests in Russia, and of hundreds of people dying from the heat.

We came inside, because it was too hot to work, to make a breakfast of those luscious Marzanos, simmered in a little oil and cumin, and eggs.

“If we work out there in that sunshine, we would die,” Ms. Gussow said, pulling the label off the little plastic bag that had held the cumin, so she could use it again for something else. (Is cumin good for you? I asked. “I have no idea,” she replied. “I tend not to eat for that reason.”)

Her hero is Bill McKibben, the environmental activist whose latest book, “Eaarth,” will be a key text in her course at Columbia this fall.

She summed up his message: “It’s too late to live on Earth. We have to figure out how to live on this new planet. It’s not the planet we grew up on.”

Every year, she tries to prepare her students for the despair they inevitably feel as they consume the readings she has compiled on the world’s population, poverty, hunger, pollution, disease, loss of habitat and farmland, melting ice caps, oil spills and the like.

“All you can do is say: ‘You can’t be optimistic about the state of the world — what you can be is open-minded. You’re going to look for solutions, and you’re going to make your own life mean something. You can no longer think that accumulating money or the biggest house is the answer,’ ” she said.

She is encouraged by all the young people going into agriculture.

“In this unreal world of electronic communication, they want to do something real, with their hands,” she said. “It’s very creative and very intellectually challenging, despite what people think.”

Ms. Gussow figures she has a good 20 years, at least, to garden in this watery paradise. But time is finite.

“Would I be down to 15 springs before the pawpaw tree I planted as a seed finally began to bear?” she writes in “Growing Older.”

She is already at work on her next book. It’s called “Starting Over at 81.”

How to Keep the Crops In and the Woodchucks Out

HERE are some tips for vegetable gardeners from Joan Dye Gussow.

Make your own sweet-potato slips by suspending a sweet potato, speared with toothpicks, over a glass jar filled with water. It should form roots in a week or so and begin sprouting from the top. If it doesn’t, turn it upside down; roots will grow from the bottom and the top will sprout. When sprouts have leaves, snap the shoots off at the base and root in a glass of water.

Keep woodchucks, rabbits and other varmints out of the broccoli and cabbage patch by placing a piece of construction wire, curved in a hoop, over the plants, along the length of the bed. Add a layer of chicken wire. The mini-hoop house offers support as plants like brussels sprouts grow, and critters cannot get to tempting crops.

Use 16-inch-square pavers, edged with brick, to make a path two feet across, wide enough for walking or rolling a wheelbarrow. The path gives a crisp look to the crops in the beds on either side, which, in Ms. Gussow’s new garden, are now flush with it, not raised and edged with wood.

Ms. Gussow used to start her own chilies, eggplants and tomatoes from seed, but now she orders plants from Cross Country Nurseries (908-996-4646, chileplants.com), in Rosemont, N.J. The company ships live plants nationwide from April through June, and fresh chilies from September to frost.

To preserve chard, de-stem the leaves, then roll them up to julienne and lightly sauté. Put cupfuls on a tray and freeze. Place frozen cupfuls in a plastic bag, and stash in the freezer, to be used as needed.

The floral-and-tough look of Julia Louis- Dreyfus as Elaine Benes on “Seinfeld” is this summer’s downtown inspiration.

By WILLIAM VAN METER
NY Times Published: August 18, 2010

ON a recent August night, young women in stilettos teetered precariously through the cobblestone streets of the meatpacking district in Manhattan. Appropriately for the neighborhood, they were squeezed into minidresses that were as snug as sausage casings. But a few blocks south, far away from the blare of Hummer limousine horns, at the fashionable opening of the Algus Greenspon Gallery on Morton Street, a more demure look prevailed.

Like a modest Robert Palmer-girl army, the women mingled in floor-length print dresses and brown lace-up boots with their hair in messy secretary buns. The genesis of the look could have been those unforgettable images of fundamentalist Mormon women that dominated the news a couple of years back. But if you squinted, what you saw was a sea of Elaines. Listen and you could almost hear the funky slap bass that played as segue music on “Seinfeld.” Could it be that the stars have somehow aligned to make Elaine Benes the summer’s downtown fashion muse?

Over the years, Elaine has stood out as a beacon of a faded era, in long floral skirts, blazers with padded shoulders and granny shoes with socks. Just about every inch of her skin was covered as if she were photosensitive. Unlike other 1990s series with a more easily imitable style (see “Melrose Place”), “Seinfeld” was decidedly anti-fashion. But now, if you happen upon an old episode, Elaine just looks cool — and of-the-moment.

“She was definitely feminine,” said Julia Louis-Dreyfus, who played Elaine, Jerry’s headstrong foil, from 1990 to 1998, “but she didn’t have girlfriends. She was one of the guys. It wasn’t about trying to look sexy. It was about looking like a girl who pushes people around.”

Ms. Louis-Dreyfus often collaborated with Charmaine Simmons, the “Seinfeld” costume designer, to create Elaine’s look. The floral dresses and skirts were her trademark, and on one recently broadcast rerun, she is a vision in a full-on floral clown suit (complete with a pie collar), worn with a denim vest.

“The other part of it, too, was the shirts Elaine wore,” Ms. Louis-Dreyfus said. “They were often very lacey or had a lace inset or a demure collar and were worn underneath something tough, like a leather coat or denim jacket. For a long time, actually, the jacket was mine. It was a Ralph Lauren cowboy jacket with fringe. I have that somewhere. I wonder where that is? That was a lot of the look. And also cowboy boots.”

“At the time, I thought people were wearing this look,” she added. “Either that or just me and my four friends were. That is a possibility.”

Large brooches figured heavily into the formula, as well.

“There are certain trends you can’t imagine rearing their heads, but then, there they are,” Anne Slowey, the fashion news director of Elle, said of the Elaine look, which she calls “Upper West Side grunge.” “You see someone like Chloë Sevigny wearing it, and you’re like, ‘Oh wait, I want to do that, too.’ The Chloë Sevigny version is shorter and cuter. It’s a flirtier, cleaned-up version, but it is derivative. Who would ever think Elaine from ‘Seinfeld’ would be a style icon?”

Ms. Sevigny does not own a television and is not overly familiar with the show. “I remember her hair with the poof at the front,” she said, “but I don’t think too many girls are doing that.” But she has noticed the return of the floral skirt. “The girls are doing it on the street,” she said, “but it’s not ankle length. It’s more midcalf.”

Still, Ms. Sevigny’s new resort collection for Opening Ceremony, heavy on mix-and match patterns — some with lace embellishments, even one with a Peter Pan collar — is the perfect, if inadvertent, modern take on Elaine.

“Girls like the floral,” Ms. Sevigny said. “A little femininity and delicacy. Pair it with a heavy boot. It works!”

The Elaine look incorporates so many styles — early American settler, gypsy, business casual, pious zealot — that it was likely only a matter of time before one of them provided inspiration for designers. Indeed, the recent resort collections featured more calico than an alley of cats, and a chic Elaine specter hovered over lines as diverse as Prada and Rebecca Taylor, each with a multitude of prim prints.

For Lyz Olko, a designer of the punk-chic label Obesity and Speed, the layered floral/tough girl Elaine look is nostalgic. “My entire wardrobe consists of floral, denim and black leather,” she said. Recently Ms. Olko, a self-proclaimed pack rat, retrieved many of her ’90s dresses from storage to wear again. (“I was also into floral print rompers,” she noted, “but I’ve retired them.”) On a recent thrifting excursion, she emptied an entire rack of floral dresses into her cart.

“I went into Screaming Mimi’s the other day,” she said of the venerable vintage shop in NoLIta, “and it was all dresses you would see in Arizona.”

This June, Lauren Boyle, an editor at the subversive online fashion magazine Dis, explicitly pitted floral against tough in a much-talked-about feature, pairing Laura Ashley-clad models with punks, goths and ravers. The prairie girls looked more sinister. (“I have a history with Laura Ashley,” Ms. Boyle said of her inspiration. “My bedroom was decorated in it growing up, from hat boxes to wallpaper.”)

Jaime Perlman, the art director of British Vogue, actually calls some of the vintage pieces in her wardrobe “Elaine dresses.” “She contrasted the androgyny of her men’s jackets with that big hairdo,” Ms. Perlman said. “It looked so effortless. Elaine embodies both this season’s trends of the early ’90s and the working woman.”

How does one explain the head-to-toe Elaine fashion renaissance? It’s not as if it is a result of a TBS “Seinfeld” marathon projected on the wall of the Jane Hotel. Most of the Jane habitués are too young to realize whom they are referencing. One theory was offered by the fashion stylist Mel Ottenberg. “The look doesn’t come from outer space,” he said. “Girls who were obsessed with micro-minis are now so anti-that, and they’re embarrassed at what they were wearing two years ago. This is a more covered-up look and looking like you have a brain. Elaine had a job. She worked at J. Peterman. She was a go-getter.”

Of course, the wild-card element in Elaine’s look was that Ms. Louis-Dreyfus was pregnant twice during the years the show was shot. “Nowadays pregnant women wear tight-fitting tops,” she said. “That was not the look when I was pregnant. It was all about being blousy. But we didn’t work my pregnancy into the story lines of ‘Seinfeld.’ I had my big vat of sponges.”

Ms. Louis-Dreyfus said that toward the end of the series, her character’s look took on a slimmer, darker palette. “It cooled down, but I still wouldn’t call it subtle,” she said.

Her personal style evolved, also.

“God, fashion is so strange,” she said. “I’m glad I don’t dress like that anymore. On the other hand, maybe I will again since everyone’s doing it.”

At least Elaine’s dancing hasn’t caught on.