By Jennifer Egan
The New Yorker
March 8, 2010

Late at night, when there’s nowhere left to go, we go to Alice’s house. Scotty drives his pickup, two of us squeezed in the front with him, blasting bootleg tapes of the Stranglers, the Mutants, Negative Trend, the other two stuck in the back, where you freeze all year long, getting tossed in the actual air when Scotty crests the hills. Still, if it’s Bennie and me I hope for the back, so that I can push against his shoulder in the cold, and hold him for a second when we hit a bump.

The first time we go to Sea Cliff, where Alice lives, she points up a hill at fog sneaking through the eucalyptus trees and says that her old school is up there: an all-girls school that her little sisters go to now. K through six, you wear a green plaid jumper and brown shoes, after that a blue skirt and white sailor top, and you can pick your own shoes. Scotty goes, “Can we see them?” and Alice goes, “My uniforms?” but Scotty says, “Your alleged sisters.”

Alice leads the way upstairs, Scotty and Bennie right behind her. They’re both fascinated by Alice, but it’s Bennie who entirely loves her. And Alice loves Scotty, of course.

Bennie’s shoes are off, and I watch his brown heels sink into the white cotton-candy carpet, so thick that it muffles every trace of us. Jocelyn and I come last. She leans close to me, and inside her whisper I smell cherry gum covering up the five hundred cigarettes she’s smoked. I can’t smell the gin we drank at the beginning of the night, taking it from my dad’s hidden supply and pouring it into Coke cans so that we could drink it on the street.

Jocelyn goes, “Watch, Rhea. They’ll be blond like her, the sisters.”

I go, “According to?”

“Rich children are always blond,” Jocelyn says. “It has to do with vitamins.”

Believe me, I don’t mistake this for information. I know everyone that Jocelyn knows.

The room is dark except for a pink night-light. I stop in the doorway and Bennie hangs back, too, but the other three go crowding into the space between the beds. Alice’s little sisters are sleeping on their sides, the covers tucked around their shoulders. One looks like Alice, with pale wavy hair; the other is dark, like Jocelyn. I’m afraid that they’ll wake up and be scared of us, in our dog collars and safety pins and shredded T-shirts. I think, We shouldn’t be here. Scotty shouldn’t have asked to come in. Alice shouldn’t have said yes, but she says yes to everything that Scotty asks. I think, I want to lie down in one of those beds and go to sleep.

“Ahem,” I whisper to Jocelyn as we’re leaving the room. “Dark hair.”

She whispers back, “Black sheep.”

1980 is almost here, thank God. The hippies are getting old. They blew their brains on acid, and now they’re begging on street corners all over San Francisco. Their hair is tangled and their bare feet are as thick and gray as shoes. We’re sick of them.

At school, we spend every free minute in the Pit. It’s not a pit, in the strictly speaking sense; it’s a strip of pavement above the playing fields. We inherited it from last year’s Pitters, who graduated, but still we get nervous walking in if other Pitters are already there: Tatum, who wears a different color Danskin every day, or Wayne, who grows sinsemilla in his actual closet, or Boomer, who’s always hugging everyone since his family did est. I’m nervous walking in unless Jocelyn is already there, or (for her) I am. We stand in for each other.

On warm days, Scotty plays his guitar. Not the electric he uses for Flaming Dildos gigs but a lap steel guitar that you hold a different way. Scotty actually built this instrument—bent the wood, glued it, painted on the shellac. Everyone gathers around; there’s no way not to when Scotty plays. One time the entire J.V. soccer team climbed up to listen, all of them looking around in their jerseys and long red socks like they didn’t know how they’d got there. Scotty is magnetic. And I say this as someone who does not love him.

The Flaming Dildos have had a lot of names: the Crabs, the Croks, the Crimps, the Crunch, the Scrunch, the Gawks, the Gobs, the Flaming Spiders, the Black Widows. Every time Scotty and Bennie change the name, Scotty sprays black paint over his guitar case and Bennie’s bass case, and then he makes a stencil of the new name and sprays it on. We don’t know how Bennie and Scotty decide if they’re going to keep a name, because they don’t actually talk. But they agree on everything, maybe through E.S.P. Jocelyn and I write all the lyrics and work out the tunes with Bennie and Scotty. We sing with them in rehearsal, but we don’t like being onstage. Alice doesn’t, either—the only thing we have in common with her.

Bennie transferred here last year from a high school in Daly City. We don’t know where he lives, but some days we visit him after school at Green Apple Records, on Clement, where he works. If Alice comes with us, Bennie will take his break and share a pork bun in the Chinese bakery next door, while the fog gallops past the windows. Bennie has light-brown skin and excellent eyes, and he irons his hair into a Mohawk as shiny black as a virgin LP. He’s usually looking at Alice, so I can watch him as much as I want.

Down the path from the Pit is where the Cholos hang out, with their black leather coats and clicky shoes and dark hair in almost invisible nets. Sometimes they talk to Bennie in Spanish, and he smiles at them but never answers. “Why do they keep speaking Spanish to him?” I go to Jocelyn, and she looks at me and goes, “Rhea, Bennie’s a Cholo. Isn’t that obvious?”

“That’s factually crazy,” I go, and my face gets hot. “He has a Mohawk. And he’s not even friends with them.”

Jocelyn goes, “Not all Cholos are friends.” Then she says, “The good part is: rich girls won’t go with Cholos. So he’ll never get Alice, period-the-end.”

Jocelyn knows that I’m waiting for Bennie. But Bennie is waiting for Alice, who’s waiting for Scotty, who’s waiting for Jocelyn, who’s known Scotty the longest and makes him feel safe, I think, because even though Scotty is magnetic, with bleached hair and a studly chest that he likes to uncover when it’s sunny out, his mother killed herself three years ago with sleeping pills. Scotty’s been quieter since then, and in cold weather he shivers like someone is shaking him.

Jocelyn loves Scotty back, but she isn’t in love with him. Jocelyn is waiting for Lou, an adult man who picked her up hitchhiking. Lou lives in L.A., but he said he would call her the next time he comes to San Francisco. That was weeks ago.

No one is waiting for me. Usually the girl in a story that no one is waiting for is fat, but my problem is more rare: I have freckles. I look like someone threw handfuls of mud at my face. When I was little, my mom told me that my freckles were special. Thank God I’ll be able to remove them, when I’m old enough and can pay for it myself. Until that time I have my dog collar and my green rinse, because how can anyone call me “the girl with freckles” when my hair is green?

Jocelyn has chopped black hair that looks permanently wet, and twelve ear piercings that I gave her with a needle, not using ice. She has a beautiful half-Chinese face. It makes a difference.

Jocelyn and I have done everything together since fourth grade: hopscotch, jump rope, charm bracelets, buried treasure, Harriet the Spying, blood sisters, crank calls, pot, coke, quaaludes. She’s seen my dad puking into the hedge outside our building, and I was with her on Polk Street the night she recognized one of the leather boys hugging outside the White Swallow—it was her dad, who was on a “business trip,” back before he moved away. So I still can’t believe that I missed the day she met Lou. She was hitchhiking home from downtown and he pulled up in a red Mercedes and drove her to an apartment that he uses on his trips to San Francisco. He unscrewed the bottom of a can of Right Guard, and a baggie of cocaine dropped out. Lou did some lines off Jocelyn’s bare butt and they went all the way twice, not including when she went down on him. I made Jocelyn repeat every detail of this story until I knew everything she knew, so that we could be equal again.

Lou is a music producer who knows Bill Graham personally. There were gold and silver record albums on his walls and a thousand electric guitars.

The Flaming Dildos rehearsal is on Saturday, in Scotty’s garage. When Jocelyn and I get there, Alice is setting up the new tape recorder that her stepfather bought her, with a real microphone. She’s one of those girls who like machines—another reason for Bennie to love her. Joel, the Dildos’ steady drummer, arrives next, driven by his dad, who waits outside in his station wagon through the whole practice, reading books about the Second World War. Joel is A.P. everything, and he’s applied to Harvard, so I guess his dad isn’t taking any chances.

Where we live, in the Sunset, the ocean is always just over your shoulder and the houses have Easter-egg colors. But the second Scotty lets the garage door slam down we’re suddenly enraged, all of us. Pretty soon we’re screaming out the songs, which have titles like “Pet Rock” and “Do the Math” and “Pass Me the Kool-Aid,” but when we holler them in Scotty’s garage the lyrics might as well be fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck. Every once in a while a kid from band or orchestra pounds on the garage door to try out with us (invited by Bennie). Today we audition a sax, a tuba, and a banjo, but sax and banjo keep hogging the stage and tuba covers her ears as soon as we start to play. Practice is almost over when there’s another bang on the garage door and Scotty ropes it up. An enormous pimpled kid in an AC/DC T-shirt is standing there, holding a violin case. He goes, “I’m looking for Bennie Salazar?”

Jocelyn and Alice and I stare at one another in shock, and it feels for a second like we’re all three friends, like Alice is part of “us.”

“Hey, Marty,” Bennie says. “Perfect timing. Everybody, this is Marty.”

Marty plugs in his violin and we launch into our best song, “What the Fuck?”:

You said you were a fairy princess
You said you were a shooting star
You said we’d go to Bora-Bora
Now look at where the fuck we are.

Bora-Bora was Alice’s idea—we’d never heard of it. While everyone roars the chorus (“What the fuck? / What the fuck? / What the fuck?”), I watch Bennie listen, his eyes closed, his Mohawk like a million antennas pricking up from his head. When the song ends, he opens his eyes and grins. “I hope you got that, Al,” he goes, and Alice rewinds the tape to make sure.

Alice takes all our tapes and turns them into one top tape, and Bennie and Scotty drive from club to club, trying to get people to book the Flaming Dildos for a gig. Our big hope is the Mab, of course: the Mabuhay Gardens, on Broadway, where all the punk bands play. We go there every Saturday night, after practice. We’ve heard the Dead Kennedys there, and Eye Protection, the Germs, and a trillion other bands. The bar is expensive, so we drink from my dad’s supply ahead of time. Jocelyn needs to drink more than me to get buzzed, and when she feels the booze hit she takes a long breath, like she’s finally herself again.

In the Mab’s graffiti-splattered bathroom we eavesdrop and find out how Ricky Sleeper fell off the stage at a gig, how Joe Rees, of Target Video, is making an entire movie of punk rock, how two sisters we always see at the club have started turning tricks to pay for heroin. Knowing all this takes us one step closer to being real, but not completely. When does a fake Mohawk become a real Mohawk? Who decides? How do you know if it’s happened?

During the shows we slam-dance in front of the stage. We tussle and push and get knocked down and pulled back up until our sweat is mixed up with real punks’ sweat and our skin has touched their skin. Bennie does less of this than the rest of us. I think he actually listens to the music.

One thing I’ve noticed: there are no real punk rockers with freckles. They don’t exist.

One night, Jocelyn answers her phone and it’s Lou, going, “Hello, Beautiful.” He says he’s been calling for days and days, but the phone just rings. “Why not try calling at night?” I ask, when Jocelyn repeats this.

That Saturday, after rehearsal, she goes out with Lou. The rest of us go to the Mab, then back to Alice’s house. By now we treat the place like we own it: we eat the yogurt her mom makes in glass cups on a warming machine, we lie on the living-room couch with our sock feet on the armrests. One night, her mom made us hot chocolate and brought it into the living room on a gold tray. She had big tired eyes and tendons moving in her neck. Jocelyn whispered in my ear, “Rich people like to hostess, so they can show off their nice stuff.”

Tonight, maybe because Jocelyn isn’t here, I ask Alice if she still has those school uniforms she mentioned the first time we came over. She looks surprised. “Yeah,” she goes. “I do.”

I follow her up the fluffy stairs to her actual room, which I’ve never seen. It’s smaller than her sisters’ room, with blue shag carpeting and crisscross wallpaper in blue and white. Her bed is under a mountain of stuffed animals, which all turn out to be frogs: bright green, light green, Day-Glo green, some with stuffed flies attached to their tongues. Her bedside lamp is shaped like a frog, plus her pillow.

I go, “I didn’t know you were so into frogs,” and Alice goes, “How would you?”

I haven’t really been alone with Alice before. She seems not as nice as she is when Jocelyn is around.

She opens her closet, stands on a chair, and pulls down a box with some uniforms inside: one of the green plaid one-pieces she wore when she was little, a sailor-suit two-piece from later on. I go, “Which did you like better?”

“Neither,” she says. “Who wants to wear a uniform?”

I go, “I would.”

“Is that a joke?”

“What kind of joke would it be?”

“The kind where you and Jocelyn laugh about how you made a joke and I didn’t get it.”

My throat turns very dry. I go, “I won’t. Laugh with Jocelyn.”

Alice shrugs. “Ask me if I care,” she says.

We sit on her rug, the uniforms across our knees. Alice wears ripped jeans and drippy black eye makeup, but her hair is long and gold. She isn’t a real punk, either.

After a while I go, “Why do your parents let us come here?”

“They’re not my parents. They’re my mother and stepfather.”

“O.K.”

“They want to keep an eye on you, I guess.”

The foghorns are extra loud in Sea Cliff, like we’re alone on a ship sailing through the thickest fog. I hug my knees, wishing so much that Jocelyn was with us.

“Are they right now?” I ask, softly. “Keeping an eye?”

Alice takes a huge breath and lets it back out. “No,” she goes. “They’re asleep.”

Marty the violinist isn’t even in high school—he’s a sophomore at S.F. State, where Jocelyn and I and Scotty (if he passes Algebra II) are headed next year. Jocelyn tells Bennie, “The shit will hit the fan if you put that dork onstage.”

“We’ll find out,” Bennie says, and he looks at his watch like he’s thinking. “In two weeks and four days and six hours and I’m not sure how many minutes.”

We stare at him, not comprehending. Then he tells us: Dirk Dirksen, from the Mab, gave him a call. Jocelyn and I shriek and hug onto Bennie, which for me is like touching something electric, his actual body in my arms. I can remember every hug I’ve given him. I learn something each time: how warm his skin is, how he has muscles like Scotty even though he never takes his shirt off. This time I feel his heartbeat on my palm when I hold his back. Jocelyn goes, “Who else knows?”

Scotty, of course. Alice, too, but it’s only later that this bothers us.

I have cousins in Los Angeles, so Jocelyn calls Lou from our apartment, where the charge won’t stand out on the phone bill. I’m two inches away from her on my parents’ flowered bedspread as she dials the phone with a long black fingernail. I hear a man’s voice answer and it shocks me that he’s real, that Jocelyn didn’t make him up, even though I never supposed that she had. He doesn’t say, “Hey, Beautiful,” though. He says, “I told you to let me call you.”

Jocelyn goes, “Sorry,” in an empty little voice. I grab the phone and go, “What kind of hello is that?” Lou goes, “Who the Christ am I talking to?” and I tell him, “Rhea.” Then he goes, in a calmer voice, “Nice to meet you, Rhea. Now, would you hand the phone back to Jocelyn?”

This time she pulls the cord away. Lou seems to be doing most of the talking. After a minute or two, Jocelyn hisses at me, “You have to leave. Go!”

I walk out of my parents’ bedroom into our kitchen. There’s a fern hanging from the ceiling by a chain, dropping little brown leaves in the sink. The curtains have a pineapple pattern. My two brothers are on the balcony, grafting bean plants for a science project. After a while, Jocelyn comes out. Happiness is floating up from her hair and skin. Ask me if I care, I think.

Later she tells me that Lou said yes: he’ll come to the Dildos gig at the Mab, and maybe he’ll give us a record contract. “It’s not a promise,” he warned her. “But we’ll have a good time anyway, right, Beautiful? Don’t we always?”

The night of the concert, I go with Jocelyn to meet Lou for dinner at Vanessi’s, a restaurant just down Broadway from the Mab, where tourists and rich people sit outside drinking Irish coffees and gawking at us when we walk by. We could have invited Alice, but Jocelyn goes, “Her parents probably take her to Vanessi’s all the time.” I go, “You mean her mother and stepfather.”

A man is sitting in a round corner booth, smiling teeth at us, and that man is Lou. He looks as old as my dad, meaning forty-three. He has shaggy blond hair and he’s handsome, I guess, the way dads can sometimes be.

Lou actually does say, “C’mere, Beautiful,” and he lifts an arm to Jocelyn. He’s wearing a light-blue denim shirt and some kind of copper bracelet. She slides around the table and fits right under his arm. “Rhea,” Lou goes, and lifts up his other arm for me, so instead of sliding in next to Jocelyn, like I was just about to do, I end up on Lou’s other side. His arm comes down around my shoulder. And, like that, we’re Lou’s girls.

A week ago, I looked at the menu outside Vanessi’s and saw linguine with clams. All week long I’ve been planning to order that dish. Jocelyn picks the same, and, after we order, Lou hands her something under the table. We both slide out of the booth and go to the ladies’ room. It’s a tiny brown bottle full of cocaine. There’s a miniature spoon attached to a chain, and Jocelyn heaps up the spoon two times for each nostril. She sniffs and makes a little sound and closes her eyes. Then she fills the spoon again and holds it for me. By the time I walk back to the table I’ve got eyes blinking all over my head, seeing everything in the restaurant at once. Maybe the coke we’ve done before this wasn’t really coke. We sit down and tell Lou about a new band we’ve heard of called Flipper, and Lou tells us about being on a train in Africa that didn’t completely stop at the stations—it just slowed down so that people could jump off or on. I go, “I want to see Africa!” and Lou goes, “Maybe we’ll go together, the three of us,” and it seems like this really might happen. He tells us, “The soil in the hills is so fertile it’s red,” and I go, “My brothers are grafting bean plants, but the soil is just regular brown soil,” and Jocelyn goes, “What about the mosquitoes?” and Lou goes, “I’ve never seen a blacker sky or a brighter moon,” and I realize that I’m beginning my adult life right now, on this night.

When the waiter brings my linguine I can’t take one bite. Only Lou eats: an almost raw steak, a Caesar salad, red wine. He’s one of those people who never stop moving. Three times people come to our table to say hello to him, but he doesn’t introduce us.

Back on Broadway he keeps an arm around each of us. We pass the usual things: the scuzzy guy in a fez trying to lure people into the Casbah, the strippers lounging in the doorways of the Condor and Big Al’s. Traffic pushes along Broadway, people honking and waving from their cars like we’re all at one gigantic party. With my thousand eyes it looks different, like I’m a different person seeing it. I think, After my freckles are gone, my whole life will be like this.

The door guy at the Mab recognizes Lou and whisks us past the snaking line of people waiting for the Cramps and the Nuns, who are playing later on. Inside, Bennie and Scotty and Joel are onstage, setting up with Alice. Jocelyn and I put on our dog collars and safety pins in the bathroom. When we come back out, Lou’s already introducing himself to the band. Bennie shakes Lou’s hand and goes, “It’s an honor, sir.”

The Flaming Dildos open with “Snake in the Grass.” No one is dancing or even really listening; people are still coming into the club or killing time until the bands they’re here for start playing. Normally Jocelyn and I would be directly in front of the stage, but tonight we stand back, leaning against a wall with Lou. He’s bought us both gin-and-tonics. I can’t tell if the Dildos sound good or not. I can barely hear them, my heart is beating too hard and my thousand eyes are peering all over the room. According to the muscles on the side of Lou’s face, he’s grinding his teeth.

Marty comes on for the next number, but he spazzes out and drops his violin. The barely interested crowd gets just interested enough to yell some insults when he crouches to replug it, with his plumber’s crack showing. I can’t even look at Bennie, it matters so much.

When they start playing “Do the Math,” Lou yells in my ear, “Whose idea was the violin?”

I go, “Bennie’s.”

“Kid on bass?”

I nod, and Lou watches Bennie for a minute and I watch him, too. Lou goes, “Not much of a player.”

“But he’s—” I try to explain. “The whole thing is his—”

Something gets tossed at the stage that looks like glass, but, when it hits Scotty’s face, thank God it’s only ice from a drink. Scotty flinches but keeps on playing, and then a Budweiser can flies up and clips Marty right in the forehead. Jocelyn and I look at each other, panicked, but when we try to move Lou anchors us. The Dildos start playing “What the Fuck?” but now garbage is spewing at the stage, chucked by four guys with safety-pin chains connecting their nostrils to their earlobes. Every few seconds another drink strikes Scotty’s face. Finally he just plays with his eyes shut. Alice is trying to tackle the garbage throwers now and they shove her back and suddenly people are slam-dancing hard, the kind of dancing that’s basically fighting. Joel clobbers his drums as Scotty tears off his dripping T-shirt and snaps it at one of the garbage throwers, hitting him right in the face with a twangy crack—snrack—like my brothers snapping bath towels, but sharper. The Scotty magnet is starting to work—people are watching his bare muscles shining with sweat and beer. Then one of the garbage throwers tries to storm the stage, but Scotty kicks him in the chest with the flat of his boot—there’s a kind of gasp from the crowd as the guy flies back. Scotty’s smiling now, grinning like I almost never see him grin, wolf teeth flashing, and I realize that, of all of us, Scotty is the truly angry one.

I turn to Jocelyn, but she’s gone. Maybe my thousand eyes are what tell me to look down. I see Lou’s fingers spread out over her black hair. She’s kneeling in front of him, giving him head, like the music is a disguise and no one can see them. Maybe no one does. Lou’s other arm is still around me, which I guess is why I don’t run, although I could. I stand there while Lou mashes Jocelyn’s head against himself again and again until I don’t know how she can breathe, until it starts to seem like she’s not even Jocelyn but some kind of animal or machine that can’t be broken. I force myself to look at the band, Scotty snapping the wet shirt and knocking people with his boot. Lou is grasping my shoulder, squeezing it harder, turning his head into my neck, and letting out a hot, stuttering groan that I can hear even through the music. He’s that close. A sob cracks open in me. Tears leak out from my eyes, but only from the two in my face. The other thousand eyes are closed.

The walls of Lou’s apartment are covered with electric guitars and gold and silver LPs, just like Jocelyn said. But she never mentioned that it was on the thirty-fifth floor, six blocks away from the Mab. She didn’t even tell about the green marble slabs in the elevator. I think that was a lot to leave out.

In the kitchen, Jocelyn pours Fritos into a dish and takes a glass bowl of green apples out of the refrigerator. She’s already passed around quaaludes, offering one to every person except me. I think she’s afraid to look at me. Who’s the hostess now? I want to ask.

In the living room, Alice sits with Scotty, who is wearing a Pendleton shirt from Lou’s closet and looks pale and shaky, maybe from having stuff thrown at him, maybe because he now understands for real that Jocelyn has a boyfriend and that it isn’t him and never will be. Marty is there, too; he’s got a cut on his cheek and an almost black eye and he keeps saying, “That was intense,” to no one in particular. Joel got driven straight home, of course. Everyone agrees that the gig went well.

When Lou leads Bennie up a spiral staircase to his recording studio, I tag along. He calls Bennie “Kiddo” and explains each machine in the room, which is small and warm, with black foam points all over the walls. Lou’s legs move restlessly and he eats a green apple with loud cracking noises, like he’s gnawing rock. Bennie glances out the door toward the rail overlooking the living room, trying to get a glimpse of Alice. I keep being about to cry. I’m worried that what happened in the club counts as having sex with Lou—that I was part of it.

Finally I go back downstairs. Off the living room I notice a door partly open, a big bed just beyond. I go in and lie face down on a velvet bedspread. A peppery incense smell trickles around me. The room is cool and dim, with photographs in frames on both sides of the bed. My whole body hurts. After a few minutes someone else comes in and lies down next to me, and I know it’s Jocelyn. We don’t say anything—we just lie there side by side in the dark. Finally I go, “You should’ve told me.” “Told you what?” she goes, but I don’t even know. Then she goes, “There’s too much,” and I feel like something is ending, right at that minute.

After a while Jocelyn turns on a lamp by the bed. “Look,” she goes. She’s holding a framed picture of Lou in a swimming pool surrounded by kids, the two littlest ones almost babies. I count six. Jocelyn goes, “They’re his children. That blond girl, she’s almost twenty.”

I lean close to the picture. Lou looks so happy, surrounded by his kids like any normal dad, that I can’t believe the Lou with us is the same man. He comes into the bedroom a minute later, rock-crunching another apple. I realize that the bowl of green apples is completely for Lou—he eats them non-stop. I slide off the bed without looking at him, and he shuts the door behind me.

It takes me a second to get what’s going on in the living room. Scotty is sitting cross-legged, picking at a gold guitar in the shape of a flame. Alice is behind him with her arms around his neck, her face next to his, her hair falling into his lap. Her eyes are closed with joy. I forget who I actually am for a second—all I can think is how Bennie will feel when he sees this. I look around for him, but there’s just Marty peering at the albums on the wall, trying to be inconspicuous. And then I notice the music flooding out of every part of the apartment at once—the couch, the walls, even the floor—and I know Bennie’s alone in Lou’s studio, pouring music around us. A minute ago it was “Don’t Let Me Down.” Then it was Blondie’s “Heart of Glass.” Now it’s Iggy Pop’s “The Passenger”:

I am the passenger
And I ride and I ride
I ride through the city’s backsides
I see the stars come out of the sky.

Listening, I think, You will never know how much I understand you.

I notice Marty looking over at me kind of hesitantly, and I see how this is supposed to work: I’m the dog, so I get Marty. I slide open a glass door and step out onto Lou’s balcony. I’ve never seen San Francisco from so high up: it’s a soft blue-black, with colored lights and fog like gray smoke. Long piers reach out into the flat, dark bay. There’s a mean wind, so I go in for my jacket then come back out and curl up tight on a white plastic chair. I stare at the view until I start to feel calmer. I think, The world is actually huge. That’s the part no one can really explain.

After a while the door slides open. I don’t look up, thinking it’s Marty, but it turns out to be Lou. He’s barefoot, wearing shorts. His legs are tanned, even in the dark. I go, “Where’s Jocelyn?”

“Asleep,” he says. He’s standing at the railing, looking out. It’s the first time I’ve seen him be still.

I go, “Do you even remember being our age?”

Lou grins at me in my chair, but it’s a copy of the grin he had at dinner. “I am your age,” he goes.

“Ahem,” I go. “You have six kids.”

“So I do,” he goes. He turns his back, waiting for me to disappear. I think, I didn’t have sex with this man. I don’t even know him. Then he says, “I’ll never get old.”

“You’re already old,” I tell him.

He swivels around and peers at me huddled in my chair. “You’re scary,” he goes. “You know that?”

“It’s the freckles,” I go.

“It’s not the freckles, it’s you.” He keeps looking at me, and then something shifts in his face and he goes, “I like it.”

“Do not.”

“I do. You’re gonna keep me honest, Rhea.”

I’m surprised he remembers my name. I go, “It’s too late for that, Lou.”

Now he laughs, really laughs, and I understand that we’re friends, Lou and I. Even if I hate him, which I do. I get out of my chair and walk to the railing, where he is.

“People will try to change you, Rhea,” Lou goes. “Don’t let ’em.”

“But I want to change.”

“Don’t,” he goes, serious. “You’re beautiful. Stay like this.”

“But the freckles,” I go, and my throat gets that ache.

“The freckles are the best part,” Lou says. “Some guy is going to go apeshit for those freckles. He’s going to kiss them one by one.”

I start to cry. I don’t even hide it.

“Hey,” Lou goes. He leans down so our faces are together and stares straight into my eyes. He looks tired, like someone walked on his skin and left footprints. He goes, “The world is full of shitheads, Rhea. Don’t listen to them—listen to me.”

And I know that Lou is one of those shitheads. But I listen.

Two weeks later, Jocelyn runs away. I find out at the same time as everyone else.

Her mother comes straight to our apartment. She and my parents sit me down: What do I know? Who is this new boyfriend? I tell them, “Lou. He lives in L.A. and has six children. He knows Bill Graham personally.” I think that Bennie might know who Lou actually is, so Jocelyn’s mom comes to our school to talk to Bennie Salazar. But he’s hard to find. Now that Alice and Scotty are together, Bennie has stopped coming to the Pit. Before, he and Scotty didn’t talk because they were like one person. Now it’s like they’ve never met.

I can’t stop wondering: if I’d pulled away from Lou and fought the garbage throwers, would Bennie have settled for me the way Scotty settled for Alice? Could that one thing have made all the difference?

They track down Lou in a matter of days. He tells Jocelyn’s mom that she hitchhiked all the way to his house without even warning him. He says that she’s safe, he’s taking care of her, it’s better than having her on the street. He promises to bring her home when he comes to the city the next week. Why not this week? I wonder.

While I’m waiting for Jocelyn, Alice invites me over. We take the bus from school, a long ride to Sea Cliff. Her house looks smaller in daylight. In the kitchen, we mix honey with her mother’s homemade yogurts and eat two each. We go up to her room, where all the frogs are, and sit on her built-in window seat. Alice tells me that she’s planning to get real frogs and keep them in a terrarium. She’s calm and happy now that Scotty loves her. I can’t tell if she’s real, or if she’s just stopped caring whether she’s real or not. Or is not caring what makes a person real?

I wonder if Lou’s house is near the ocean. Does Jocelyn look at the waves? Do they ever leave Lou’s bedroom? Are his children there? I keep getting lost in these questions. Then I hear giggling, pounding from somewhere. I go, “Who’s that?”

“My sisters,” Alice goes. “They’re playing tetherball.”

We head downstairs and outside, into Alice’s back yard, where I’ve been only in the dark. It’s sunny now, with flowers in patterns and a tree with lemons on it. At the edge of the yard, two little girls are slapping a bright-yellow ball around a silver pole. They turn to us, laughing in their green uniforms. ♦

Health reform is back from the dead. Many Democrats have realized that their electoral prospects will be better if they can point to a real accomplishment. Polling on reform — which was never as negative as portrayed — shows signs of improving. And I’ve been really impressed by the passion and energy of this guy Barack Obama. Where was he last year?

But reform still has to run a gantlet of misinformation and outright lies. So let me address three big myths about the proposed reform, myths that are believed by many people who consider themselves well-informed, but who have actually fallen for deceptive spin.

The first of these myths, which has been all over the airwaves lately, is the claim that President Obama is proposing a government takeover of one-sixth of the economy, the share of G.D.P. currently spent on health.

Well, if having the government regulate and subsidize health insurance is a “takeover,” that takeover happened long ago. Medicare, Medicaid, and other government programs already pay for almost half of American health care, while private insurance pays for barely more than a third (the rest is mostly out-of-pocket expenses). And the great bulk of that private insurance is provided via employee plans, which are both subsidized with tax exemptions and tightly regulated.

The only part of health care in which there isn’t already a lot of federal intervention is the market in which individuals who can’t get employment-based coverage buy their own insurance. And that market, in case you hadn’t noticed, is a disaster — no coverage for people with pre-existing medical conditions, coverage dropped when you get sick, and huge premium increases in the middle of an economic crisis. It’s this sector, plus the plight of Americans with no insurance at all, that reform aims to fix. What’s wrong with that?

The second myth is that the proposed reform does nothing to control costs. To support this claim, critics point to reports by the Medicare actuary, who predicts that total national health spending would be slightly higher in 2019 with reform than without it.

Even if this prediction were correct, it points to a pretty good bargain. The actuary’s assessment of the Senate bill, for example, finds that it would raise total health care spending by less than 1 percent, while extending coverage to 34 million Americans who would otherwise be uninsured. That’s a large expansion in coverage at an essentially trivial cost.

And it gets better as we go further into the future: the Congressional Budget Office has just concluded, in a new report, that the arithmetic of reform will look better in its second decade than it did in its first.

Furthermore, there’s good reason to believe that all such estimates are too pessimistic. There are many cost-saving efforts in the proposed reform, but nobody knows how well any one of these efforts will work. And as a result, official estimates don’t give the plan much credit for any of them. What the actuary and the budget office do is a bit like looking at an oil company’s prospecting efforts, concluding that any individual test hole it drills will probably come up dry, and predicting as a consequence that the company won’t find any oil at all — when the odds are, in fact, that some of the test holes will pan out, and produce big payoffs. Realistically, health reform is likely to do much better at controlling costs than any of the official projections suggest.

Which brings me to the third myth: that health reform is fiscally irresponsible. How can people say this given Congressional Budget Office predictions — which, as I’ve already argued, are probably too pessimistic — that reform would actually reduce the deficit? Critics argue that we should ignore what’s actually in the legislation; when cost control actually starts to bite on Medicare, they insist, Congress will back down.

But this isn’t an argument against Obamacare, it’s a declaration that we can’t control Medicare costs no matter what. And it also flies in the face of history: contrary to legend, past efforts to limit Medicare spending have in fact “stuck,” rather than being withdrawn in the face of political pressure.

So what’s the reality of the proposed reform? Compared with the Platonic ideal of reform, Obamacare comes up short. If the votes were there, I would much prefer to see Medicare for all.

For a real piece of passable legislation, however, it looks very good. It wouldn’t transform our health care system; in fact, Americans whose jobs come with health coverage would see little effect. But it would make a huge difference to the less fortunate among us, even as it would do more to control costs than anything we’ve done before.

This is a reasonable, responsible plan. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

Through April 3, 2010

Gavin Brown

This morning, I started my day in the local Pret A Manger huddled over a skinny latte and a gay porn magazine called Butt. I can’t think of many porn mags, gay or straight, that I’d be happy to read at 8.30am in Pret, if at all. But then Butt, with its apparently unpretentious Courier typeface, small format and smiling cover boy isn’t really like the rest. Did I mention that it’s printed on blushing pink paper too?

This was, of course, in the pursuit of knowledge not thrills, though I have to say, it was a pretty good read (an interview with two gay butchers in Beijing!). Butt was the first publication to be launched – in 2001 – by the Dutch team of writer/editor Gert Jonkers and art director Jop van Bennekom, who on Tuesday night unwrapped their third project in Paris. At a party of cherry-picked guests in a plush maison particulière in the rue du Bac, the first copies of The Gentlewoman, a new fashion and culture magazine for women, were circulated among the 80 attendees.

Expectations for The Gentlewoman – aimed at a thoughtful and sophisticated female reader – have been high among the planet’s style afficionados. It follows in the footsteps of Jonkers and Van Bennekom’s second project, a perfectly manicured men’s style magazine called Fantastic Man which crept up on the fashion world in 2005. Where Butt was undressed and sexy – there’s a lot of hairy chests, naked bottoms and visible excitement among those dense pages of Courier type – Fantastic Man appeared like some fabulously well-attired alternative. Interview subjects are referred to as “Mister”; clothes are modelled by handsome 30- and 40- somethings with smart day jobs (they’ve included Giles Deacon and Roland Mouret); each issue has pages of recommendations by arbiters of taste, from graphic designer Peter Saville to Tate Modern curator Stuart Comer; and only a Fantastic Man’s tailor needs to know if he dresses to the right or the left. It has, says Jonkers, ” a nice formality to it” – a formality that sometimes teeters just this side of ironic and camp.

Jonkers and van Bennekom’s publishing empire is something of a cottage industry (no pun intended), operating from a small office in Amsterdam and another in Shoreditch, central London. They met on Boulevard, a Dutch lifestyle magazine, and have a range of experience. Jonkers , 43, was fashion critic of de Volkskrant for many years; van Bennekom, 40, is cultishly celebrated for a ground-breaking magazine called Re, which dealt with one subject per issue (including ‘The Home’ and ‘Boredom’).

Money made on projects is reinvested, all expenses are spared. There is a smattering of staff and no-one earns much. Which all goes to prove that you can make a successful high-end fashion magazine without a vast flower and limousine budget; a certain kind of perfectionism is free. The response to the twice-yearly Fantastic Man has been, well, fantastic, with a current international circulation of around 70,000. It talks directly to its reader who, it implies, shares its values, its wardrobe, its deep concern for life’s finer details. It is not aspirational; it politely assumes you’ve arrived. It profiles men who have interesting lives: in fashion (Tom Ford, Claude Montana); architecture (Rem Koolhaas); or art (Steve McQueen, Frieze director Matthew Slotover); or others (they interviewed a chemist once). “We’re always looking for people who don’t have anything to sell,” explains Jonkers. “Where there is no hidden agenda.”

Jonkers and van Bennekom have a long and healthy relationship with the fashion world. Belgium designer Bernhard Willhelm appeared on Butt’s first cover (Wolfgang Tillmans took the pictures). Karl Lagerfeld came upon the launch issue by chance in Colette in Paris and immediately placed an order for all subsequent copies (it comes out – mostly but not always – four times a year). Gucci was the first advertiser, thanks to Tom Ford’s appreciation of the product, and then Dior Homme (because Hedi Slimane totally got it too). In autumn 2006, Helmut Lang chose Fantastic Man to reintroduce himself to the world, after leaving his own label when it was sold to Prada in 2004. Bruce Webber took the photographs. Now, the much sought-after Phoebe Philo has chosen to give one of her very few interviews, in her new role as creative director at Celine, to The Gentlewoman, and she is its cover star.

Jonkers and van Bennekom see The Gentlewoman as inevitable. “It was the natural thing to do. If you’re interested in style and imagery and stories, it’s strange to exclude 50 per cent of the world,” says Jonkers. They have worked on the idea for two years, finally settling on an editor, Penny Martin, last year. “I feel like the honorary girl in the sixth form at the boys’ school, ” she says.

Martin came from the experimental world of Showstudio – a ridiculously cool and well-connected website almost entirely financed by photographer Nick Knight which largely explores what can happen to fashion online. She put in seven years as editor-in-chief there.

She is also Professor of Fashion Photography at the London College of Fashion and has an (unfinished) PhD on British Vogue to her name. At first she was terrified of “joining the brand that everyone loves. You feel you can only let everyone down”. But then “I realised that the magazines I grew up reading didn’t exist anymore. Back then, you had Marina Warner and Antonia Fraser writing in Vogue. Now the focus is all on merchandise, and the readers are consumers.”

Martin, 37, is Scottish which means, she says, that she conveniently holds the same Protestant values as her new Dutch employers (Jonkers’ father was a Protestant preacher; Martin’s was in the Average White Band).

She is passionate and political and married to a man she met when both were 21 and who works in public health, not fashion. “I’m surrounded by bright women, and I don’t see them represented,” says Martin. “My idea for the magazine was to give them a voice. There’s been a silencing going on. Look at Sex and the City. That programme is absolutely corrupt. The characters in it are not people, they’re projection objects.” The magazine’s name and logo was conjured up by van Bennekom. “It’s an ambitious title,” he says, “that poses a question about behaviour, and a very modernist logo that makes it clear it is of today and tomorrow, and the very opposite of a 19th-century gentlewoman.”

In Martin’s hands, it becomes an exploration of many things that women can be – a world of personalities that includes wine makers and long-distance swimmers, and rather fewer models and actresses than we are used to seeing crammed in between the advertising.

“We really wanted Chelsea Clinton,” muses Martin. But she got American artist Jenny Holzer, a woman who makes incredible ice cream, and an interview with Japanese architect Kasuyo Sejima (by myself) instead. Fashion is of the Prada, Comme des Garcons, Jil Sander variety – graphic and grown-up; photography is unromantically clear.

“We do not deal in fantasy,” says Jonkers. “From Butt onwards, we wanted to make reality-based magazines with long interviews. This started when I was looking at gay magazines and thinking, ‘Why am I supposed to like reading about Kylie, or a spa in Thailand?’” For the many women who feel the same flicking through the female equivalents, The Gentlewoman will be good news indeed.

The performance artist Marina Abramovic divides her time between a SoHo loft and a star-shaped country house. More Photos »

By ELAINE LOUIE
NY Times Published: March 3, 2010

FOR Marina Abramovic, a 63-year-old Yugoslavian-born performance artist, the star is a potent symbol, and it makes frequent appearances in her work. Ms. Abramovic, whose retrospective, “Marina Abramovic: The Artist is Present,” opens this month at the Museum of Modern Art, constructed and set a large star on fire in an early piece, lying down inside it. During another widely publicized performance, she carved a star around her navel in what she describes as an anti-Communist act.
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Variations on a Theme

“I come from a Communist country,” she said. “The star is on my birth certificate and on every book in the school — they remind me of the restrictions of freedom.”

So it’s no accident that the house she owns in Malden Bridge, N.Y., in Columbia County, is star-shaped.

It took “30 seconds” to make the decision to buy it, she said. Not only did the shape have personal significance, she explained, “it’s a beautiful harmony of space and light, and a 360-degree view.”

Like Ms. Abramovic’s loft in SoHo, where she will spend most of her time while her show is at MoMA, the 3,400-square-foot house was designed by Dennis Wedlick, a Manhattan architect. It was built in the early 1990s for a doctor and his three adult children, so that every member of the family could have his own wing. (Each of the four bedrooms on the third floor occupies a different point of the six-pointed star; the two bathrooms are in the remaining points.)

But when Ms. Abramovic, a self-described minimalist, bought it in 2007, for $1.25 million, she said, there were murals painted throughout the house and the floors were a grainy yellow pine that she hated.

“The house was heavy,” she said.

That’s how she met Mr. Wedlick.

Ms. Abramovic, who is not known for her reticence, simply called and left him a message saying, “This is Marina. I just bought your star house, and I have a sofa arriving tomorrow, and I need you here.”

“It caught me off guard,” said Mr. Wedlick, who had no idea who Marina was. It took him two weeks to call her back, he said, but when they finally met, “I totally fell in love with her. She has the most ordinary persona for someone who does such extraordinary, controversial work.”

“Marina doesn’t point out details,” he continued. “She only tells you one or two ideas. She never changes her mind; she makes a decision and goes on.”

Perhaps because of that, he found her very easy to work with. “She said, ‘Dennis, make this white,’ ” he recalled. “She gave us $250,000 and eight weeks.”

Following Ms. Abramovic’s instructions to strip the house bare, he had the walls and ceilings painted white. The floors were refinished with a sealer called Bona Naturale, to soften the grain without adding sheen, so that they would be smooth and pale as well. Columns flanking some entrances were removed, as was the circular driveway.

“Americans like to park their cars in front of the house,” Ms. Abramovic said. “This is unacceptable. A car should be parked out behind the barn.”

There is still color, but in discrete bursts: the orange of a 1965 Olivier Mourgue Djinn Relaxer, the cobalt blue of a 1968 Bouloum chaise, the red of a 1968 Kazuhide Takahama Suzanne sofa.

“She likes bright colors as a sculptural piece, as a moment,” Mr. Wedlick said.

The renovation went so well that as soon as it was completed, Ms. Abramovic gave Mr. Wedlick $750,000 and four months to redo her city home, a 2,500-square-foot loft she had purchased in 2001 for $1.5 million. (Sean Kelly, her Manhattan gallerist, sells photos of her performances for between $40,000 and $350,000, which has helped finance her renovations.)

There, to eliminate any sign of messiness for his fastidious client, he structured the design around a 370-square-foot translucent cube that contains the kitchen, the dressing room, the laundry room and a guest bathroom, and can be closed off with aluminum-framed frosted-glass doors. Some of the kitchen cabinets are clad in turquoise-lacquered wood, others in Granny Smith-green glass.

“A city is so gray,” Ms. Abramovic said. “Green is healing to the eye.” When the cube is closed, she noted, it glows a soft blue-green, like a “light box.”

She furnished the loft, like the country house, with brilliantly colored furniture, including orange and lavender sofas by Patricia Urquiola, her favorite designer. “Orange is the sun,” she said, “and lavender is the most spiritual color of all — violet gives you calmness.”

She also has an Antibodi chaise covered with felt flowers, a substitute for real ones: “I don’t have time for flowers.”

It’s a long way from her first decorating project, which she undertook at 14, emptying her rooms in the family’s Belgrade apartment of everything but a bed, a table and a chair — “I like function,” she said — and painting the walls black using 350 pots of shoe polish she had sequestered. Her mother opened the door and screamed.

“I was not an easy child,” she said. “But she was not an easy mother, either.”

That was the day, she said, that she became a minimalist.

Some of the furniture in her homes, where she lives alone, was chosen by Paolo Canevari, an Italian artist from whom she was recently divorced, after a 12-year relationship. “He loved objects, and I was always fighting to have less,” she said.

Asked if she plans to marry again, she replied decisively: “Never, ever, ever.”

“I’m not exactly a housewife,” she said. “My work is my life.”

An earlier relationship with a German artist called Ulay, who was her collaborator, also lasted 12 years, and when they broke up, they didn’t do it casually — they created a performance. Starting at opposite ends of the Great Wall of China, they walked toward one another until they met in the middle, three months later, and shook hands to make it official.

“I am too much woman for one man,” she concluded.

For her, she said, home is now a place to think, to read and — in the country, at least — to entertain. In the city, any guests must abide by her rules: “They can stay only three days, no more.”

Pointing to an austere-looking vintage piece with a thin, hard platform, she added: “And they have to stay on this uncomfortable daybed.”

Claude Parent: Graphic and Built Works, at the Cité de l’Architecture et du Patrimoine in Paris, features the Église Sainte-Bernadette du Banlay, in Nevers.

By NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF
NY Times Published: March 9, 2010

PARIS — There’s something both touching and disturbing at the heart of “Claude Parent: Graphic and Built Works,” a marvelous exhibition at the Cité de l’Architecture et du Patrimoine, Paris’s architecture museum, and it has to do with what the show tells us about our diminished cultural expectations

Organized by Frédéric Migayrou and Francis Rambert, the show takes us back to a bolder and more innocent age. In the process, it re-establishes the 87-year-old Mr. Parent as a pivotal force in European architecture after decades of neglect by the design mainstream — a force whose influence can be clearly felt in the works of younger luminaries like Wolf Prix, Rem Koolhaas and Jean Nouvel.

Mr. Parent’s work, most of which was designed in the 1960s and 1970s, appears to point a finger at our own world. Its concrete forms, full of ramped spaces and oblique angles, come across as acts of defiance, against both the excesses of global consumer culture and the architects who are hired to dress it up. Its confidence would be impossible to summon today.

Mr. Parent began his career as France was just emerging from its postwar misery, and like others of his generation — Serge Gainsbourg and Boris Vian were contemporaries — he cultivated a theatrical persona and an open distaste for bourgeois uptightness. He was often seen zipping around Paris in an Army jeep or a Bentley convertible and once plastered the Boulevard Raspail with posters bearing slogans like “Put yourself at risk!” and “One day you will live in cities that resemble petrified oceans!” His dream, he said recently, was that architecture would one day share a place in the popular consciousness with soft drinks.

The Paris show begins by mapping out the twists and turns in Mr. Parent’s early creative struggle, including a series of remarkable collaborations with artists and sculptors. A photograph of a modern glass-and-steel house built in 1962 for the engineer and sculptor André Bloc focuses on a big exterior spiral staircase, emphasizing Mr. Parent’s early fascination with movement. (He said that he wanted the house, which sits at the edge of a steep hill, to rest on its site “as delicately as a mosquito landing on your arm.”)

In contrast, a small experimental theater designed later that year in collaboration with Bloc for a site in Dakar evokes the surreal, womblike forms of Frederick Kielser’s “Endless House.” Its smooth ovoid form, which enclosed a stage and seats that could in theory be reconfigured at will, resembles a polished stone.

In a later project, the unbuilt Lunatour designed in 1964 in collaboration with the sculptor Jean Tinguely, Mr. Parent creates a fantastical tower packed with carousels, ramps and escalators and emblazoned with gigantic advertising images. Conceived as a vertical city in miniature, the structure glorifies what Guy Debord called the “society of the spectacle” — the delirium at the core of popular consumer culture.

These early experiments crystallize in a series of mostly unbuilt civic projects designed between the mid-1960s and the early ’70s. These monumental buildings at first seem to have been inspired by the postwar Brutalism of architects like Le Corbusier and Peter and Alison Smithson. In fact, they are firmly planted in the technological assurance and psychic anxieties of the cold war period.

The Église Sainte-Bernadette du Banlay, completed in 1966 in the small city of Nevers, can be read as a brash critique of Le Corbusier’s 1954 Chapel of Notre Dame du Haut — one of the great monuments of postwar Modernism. Le Corbusier’s composition of concave and convex forms evokes primitive temples and mosques; Mr. Parent’s building — massive concrete walls with rounded corners and slot windows — is the expression of a culture living under the constant threat of nuclear annihilation and still haunted by the devastation of World War II.

Inside, two sloped seating areas converge under the light of a long, narrow window running the length of the roof, creating a space of disquieting solitude. The message is ambiguous. Is it a safe haven from the vulgarities of the new consumer society? Or the final resting place for a fixed moral order that is dying out?

Either way, this zone of intimate, even tender social encounters carefully sheltered from the outside world became a recurring motif in Mr. Parent’s work, and is the aspect of it that can make it so moving despite its aggressive qualities.

For a 1966 proposal for the unbuilt Palais des Expositions in Ardennes, Mr. Parent created a gigantic slab building that extends out over the Meuse River from the edge of a small plaza. When I first saw it, the project reminded me of an afternoon in the Santa Monica Mountains when I looked up from a backyard and caught a glimpse of a stealth bomber drifting ominously across a California sky. Yet it also evokes something mystical. The enormous roof, which slopes upward as it reaches out over the water, is an informal public amphitheater. Ramps and stairs spiral down into the cavernous main hall and out through the belly of the building to the water below, a sequence suggesting a shared descent into the sanctuary of a prehistoric cave.

Perhaps the most memorable project is Mr. Parent’s losing entry in the 1971 competition for the Centre Pompidou: an enormous pyramid-shaped hill covered in dense vegetation. Inside, visitors would have moved up and down on ramps spiraling among the museum’s galleries. It is as if Wright’s famous Guggenheim ramp had been buried inside a funerary mound, an image as cheeky as his earlier take on Le Corbusier’s chapel.

The show goes on to examine a number of nuclear plants Mr. Parent designed in the late 1970s, when France was developing its image as a technological leader. There are also a series of increasingly utopian drawings of ribbonlike cities that unfurl across barren landscapes and oblique towers that pierce through the earth’s surface.

Yet nothing matches the work he created in the five years from 1966 to 1971. And part of the pleasure of seeing it again today is realizing the degree to which these designs anticipate current trends in architectural thought. The ramped surfaces bring to mind the fluid spaces of the emerging information age; the Brutalist forms echo our recent fascination with large-scale urban infrastructure.

Those who follow contemporary architectural trends closely may even notice more direct influences, like the similarity between Mr. Parent’s proposal for an Education Ministry building at La Défense and Coop Himmelblau’s European Bank design, currently under construction in Frankfurt. (Both Wolf Prix, a founder of Coop Himmelblau, and Jean Nouvel, who worked in Mr. Parent’s office in the 1960s, consider Mr. Parent a mentor. Mr. Nouvel, who designed the installation for the show, even dedicated his proposal for a new Paris Philharmonic hall to him.)

Mr. Parent, for his part, sees all of these projects as elements in a more ambitious urban vision that he calls “the oblique city” — the final stage after the fall of the traditional horizontal village and the densely packed, vertical city of modernity. New York, to Mr. Parent and his longtime collaborator, the cultural theorist Paul Virilio, represented a conclusion: “The epitome and the end of verticality.” His inclined forms were meant as a way to resolve the schism between ancient and modern precedents, and to reconnect us with the natural undulations of the earth’s surface.

Some may find this idea terrifying. But I suspect the work will only get more seductive as time passes. As the deadening visual noise and consumer distractions of our cities continue to thicken, the quiet force of Mr. Parent’s designs begins to look like a heroic resistance. At their core, they embody a desire to preserve a small kernel of humanity amid all the waste.

February 25 - April 4, 2010

Rachel Uffner

By Bettina Boxall
LA Times March 9, 2010

Reporting from Orange Cove, Calif. - Harvey Bailey was 11 when Friant Dam started spitting the San Joaquin River into an irrigation canal the size of a freeway.

His father and other growers laid bets on when the river’s cool waters would reach their little farm town on the east side of the San Joaquin Valley, promising an end to the region’s irrigation woes. Life magazine published a big photo spread on the canal’s opening.

“It was a huge event,” recalled Bailey, 72, president of the Orange Cove Irrigation District.

Now he hopes another dam will rise on the San Joaquin, at a narrow spot seven miles upriver from Friant, called Temperance Flat.

Backed by the Schwarzenegger administration and Central Valley farm interests, the $3.3-billion dam and reservoir at Temperance Flat would be the biggest water storage project in California in more than three decades.

But amid a deep recession and an endemic budget crisis in Sacramento, some are questioning whether it’s worth the investment and whether taxpayers should keep subsidizing water projects that primarily benefit California agribusiness.

“Let’s spend it where it would have the biggest effect: conservation and efficiency,” said Pacific Institute president Peter Gleick. “It’s a fallacy to believe all we have to do is build a couple of big dams and our problems will be over.”

Bailey and his brother Lee grow oranges, lemons and olives on 1,100 acres they own and 900 more they manage in the citrus belt that runs in a shiny green grid along the flanks of the Sierra Nevada.

Orange Cove gets its name from the hills that embrace it, sheltering groves from the cold.

“Family been here since ‘10,” Bailey said, meaning 1910.

Like most other Central Valley settlers, his grandparents pumped groundwater to irrigate fields or grew crops that could survive on the valley’s scant rainfall.

But aquifer levels nose-dived in the years before World War II. Citrus groves were abandoned. “You could see across 10 acres because there weren’t any leaves on the trees,” Bailey said.

The federal government came to the rescue with the Central Valley Project, the nation’s biggest irrigation operation, which erected Friant Dam in the pine-flecked Sierra foothills about 40 miles northwest of Orange Cove. It was completed in 1942.

Two monster canals guzzled water from Millerton Lake, the reservoir formed by the dam. The Madera ran north and the Friant-Kern snaked south, feeding the east side’s myriad irrigation ditches.

The river’s Chinook salmon soon vanished and some 60 miles of riverbed downstream from Friant turned to desert in all but the wettest years.

The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation knew when it planned the dam that it would rob the lower San Joaquin, which meanders north to meet the Sacramento River and forms a sprawling delta leading to San Francisco Bay.

Drying up the San Joaquin was a problem for the corporate descendants of the 19th century cattle empire amassed by two San Francisco butchers, Henry Miller and Charles Lux. They held rights to the lower river, which they used to green 250,000 acres on the valley’s baking west side, running from Mendota north to Patterson.

To keep them happy, the Bureau of Reclamation built the Delta Mendota Canal to ferry supplies 117 miles upstream from the delta to a spot near Mendota, where the water was dumped into the desiccated San Joaquin for use by the Miller-Lux successors, known as exchange contractors. Their rights predate the Central Valley Project, so they pay nothing for an annual allocation of water greater than the city of Los Angeles uses in a year.

Not only are their supplies free, the exchange contractors are at the head of the line. If there isn’t enough delta water to fill their allotments, the bureau has to give them river water from Millerton, raiding other irrigators’ supplies.

That has yet to happen. But as the delta’s environmental problems grow and its fish populations teeter on the edge of extinction, the state and federal water projects that draw from it have been hit with increasingly severe pumping restrictions.

Sometime soon, the exchange contractors may have to take supplies from Friant, stirring unrest on the San Joaquin that could threaten their deal. Build more storage, they reason, and peace will reign.

“When the dog isn’t hungry, he doesn’t go out hunting,” said Steve Chedester, executive director of the San Joaquin River Exchange Contractors Water Authority.

The push for another reservoir on the San Joaquin is not new. The concrete had barely set on Friant when grousing began: It was built in the wrong place. Millerton was too small to capture all the high flows of Sierra snowmelt.

“They made a boo-boo,” said Mario Santoyo, assistant general manager of the Friant Water Authority, which represents districts supplied by Millerton.

Santoyo, 53, is the son of Central Valley farmworkers. His father, who laid irrigation pipes in other men’s fields, was politically invisible.

Not Santoyo. A veteran water manager, he helped found the 4-year-old California Latino Water Coalition, which is allied with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and is a vocal proponent of building more dams and reservoirs.

Santoyo said he worries that Friant farmers are being squeezed both by the delta’s environmental restrictions and by a 2006 court settlement that requires them to release some of their water into the river to revive a once-bounteous Chinook salmon run.

“Things are only going to get worse,” Santoyo said.

In his campaign for Temperance, Santoyo may encounter opposition broader than the expected environmental groups: urban taxpayers and budget guardians.

In 1960, California voters approved a big bond to build the State Water Project, a network of dams and aqueducts that captures Northern California water and ships it through the delta to the south’s subdivisions and cities.

The primarily urban water agencies, and ultimately their rate-payers, are repaying most of the bond, with interest. They also shoulder almost all of the system’s annual operating costs.

Bailey and the other irrigators in the Central Valley Project have, in contrast, enjoyed the equivalent of a 60-year, interest-free loan. They have so far repaid about 19% of their $1.2-billion share of the federal project’s capital costs. And under reclamation law, the government charges them no interest.

Though as much as three-fourths of Temperance Flat’s releases could go to growers, they say they can’t afford to take on that proportion of the dam’s costs.

Standing in a newly planted citrus grove, Bailey does some budget calculations and shakes his head. “There’s no way you could pay $1,500 an acre for water,” he says flatly.

Temperance, which would boost the state’s annual water supply by a small fraction of California’s total demand, could win a big chunk of state taxpayer funding through the $11-billion water bond measure slated for the November ballot.

But the bond, which would set aside $3 billion for unspecified surface and groundwater storage, can pay no more than half of any project’s total cost. So dam backers would still have to turn elsewhere for money — most likely to the federal government or urban Southern California.

“If it’s just going to be on the backs of ag, it’s probably not going to be doable,” Santoyo said. “Municipalities are going to have to play a major role in this.”

Government planners have devised a scenario under which some water from Temperance could go to the State Water Project that helps supply the Southland.

But officials with the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California aren’t making any commitments.

“We’re certainly not going to write a check without a benefit,” said Jeffrey Kightlinger, the district’s general manager. If agriculture needs financing partners, he said, “they are going to have to go out and get them and make it attractive.”

Closes March 13

Michael Kohn

Washington

FOR a quarter-century, American economic policy has assumed that the keys to durable national prosperity are deregulation, free trade and a swift transition to a post-industrial, services-dominated future.

Such policies, advocates say, drive innovation, which leads to enormous labor productivity and wage gains — more than enough, supposedly, to make up for the labor disruptions that accompany free trade and de-industrialization.

In reality, though, wage gains for the average worker have lagged behind productivity since the early 1980s, a situation that free-traders usually attribute to workers failing to retrain themselves after seeing their jobs outsourced.

But what if wages lag because productivity itself is being grossly overstated, especially in the nation’s manufacturing sector? Then, suddenly, a cornerstone of American economic policy would begin to crumble.

Productivity measures how many worker hours are needed for a given unit of output during a given time period; when hours fall relative to output, labor productivity increases. In 2009, the data show, Americans needed 40 percent fewer hours to produce the same unit of output as in 1980.

But there’s a problem: labor productivity figures, which are calculated by the Labor Department, count only worker hours in America, even though American-owned factories and labs have been steadily transplanted overseas, and foreign workers have contributed significantly to the final products counted in productivity measures.

The result is an apparent drop in the number of worker hours required to produce goods — and thus increased productivity. But actually, the total number of worker hours does not necessarily change.

This oversight is no secret: as Labor Department officials acknowledged at a 2004 conference, their statistical methods deem any reduction in the work that goes into creating a specific unit of output, whatever the cause, to be a productivity gain.

This continuing mismeasurement leads economists and all those who rely on them to assume that recorded productivity gains always signify greater efficiency, rather than simple offshoring-generated cost cuts — leaving the rest of us scratching our heads over stagnating wages.

Of course, just because productivity is mismeasured doesn’t mean that genuine innovations can’t improve living standards. It does mean, however, that Americans are flying blind when it comes to their economy’s strengths and weaknesses, and consequently drawing the wrong policy lessons.

Above all, if offshoring has been driving much of our supposed productivity gains, then the case for complete free trade begins to erode. If often such policies simply increase corporate profits at the expense of American workers, with no gains in true productivity, then they don’t necessarily strengthen the national economy.

In this regard, the case for free trade as a stimulus for innovation weakens, too. Because productivity gains in part reflect job offshoring, not just the benefits of technology or better business practices, then the American economy has been much less innovative than widely assumed.

How can we actually increase innovation and real productivity? Manufacturing, long slighted by free-market extremists, needs to be promoted, not pushed offshore, since it has historically accounted for the bulk of research and development spending and employs the bulk of American science and technology workers — who in turn spur further innovation and real productivity.

Promoting manufacturing will require major changes in tax and trade policies that currently foster offshoring, including implementing provisions to punish currency manipulation by countries like China and help American producers harmed by discriminatory foreign value-added tax systems. It also means revitalizing government and corporate research and development, which has languished since its heyday in the 1960s.

Much of government policy and business strategy rides on false assumptions about innovation, and although the Obama administration acknowledges the problem, it has done nothing to correct it. With the economy still in need of government life support and the future of American manufacturing in doubt, relying on faulty productivity data is a formula for disaster.

Alan Tonelson, a fellow at the United States Business and Industry Council, is the author of “The Race to the Bottom.” Kevin L. Kearns is the president of the council, which is an association of small manufacturers.

Sterling Ruby: 2TRAPS
Through March 20, 2010

Pace Wildenstein

Through March 27, 2010

Pace Wildenstein

I was traveling via Los Angeles International Airport — LAX — last week. Walking through its faded, cramped domestic terminal, I got the feeling of a place that once thought of itself as modern but has had one too many face-lifts and simply can’t hide the wrinkles anymore. In some ways, LAX is us. We are the United States of Deferred Maintenance. China is the People’s Republic of Deferred Gratification. They save, invest and build. We spend, borrow and patch.

And this contrast is playing out in the worst way — just slowly enough so the crisis never seems acute enough to take urgent action. But, eventually, infrastructure, education and innovation policies matter. Businesses prefer to invest with the Jetsons more than the Flintstones, which brings me to the subject of this column.

I had a chance last week to listen to Paul Otellini, the chief executive of Intel, the microchip maker and one of America’s crown jewel companies. Otellini was in Washington to talk about competitiveness at Brookings and the Aspen Institute. At a time when so much of our public policy discussion is dominated by health care and bailouts, my public service for the week is to share Mr. Otellini’s views on start-ups.

While America still has the quality work force, political stability and natural resources a company like Intel needs, said Otellini, the U.S. is badly lagging in developing the next generation of scientific talent and incentives to induce big multinationals to create lots more jobs here.

“The things that are not conducive to investments here are [corporate] taxes and capital equipment credits,” he said. “A new semiconductor factory at world scale built from scratch is about $4.5 billion — in the United States. If I build that factory in almost any other country in the world, where they have significant incentive programs, I could save $1 billion,” because of all the tax breaks these governments throw in. Not surprisingly, the last factory Intel built from scratch was in China. “That comes online in October,” he said. “And it wasn’t because the labor costs are lower. Yeah, the construction costs were a little bit lower, but the cost of operating when you look at it after tax was substantially lower and you have local market access.”

These local incentives matter because smart, skilled labor is everywhere now. Intel can thrive today — not just survive, but thrive — and never hire another American. Asked if his company was being held back by weak science and math education in America’s K-12 schools, Otellini explained:

“As a citizen, I hate it. As a global employer, I have the luxury of hiring the best engineers anywhere on earth. If I can’t get them out of M.I.T., I’ll get them out of Tsing Hua” — Beijing’s M.I.T.

It gets worse. Otellini noted that a 2009 study done by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation and cited recently in Democracy Journal “ranked the U.S. sixth among the top 40 industrialized nations in innovative competitiveness — not great, but not bad. Yet that same study also measured what they call ‘the rate of change in innovation capacity’ over the last decade — in effect, how much countries were doing to make themselves more innovative for the future. The study relied on 16 different metrics of human capital — I.T. infrastructure, economic performance and so on. On this scale, the U.S. ranked dead last out of the same 40 nations. … When you take a hard look at the things that make any country competitive. … we are slipping.”

If the government just boosted the research and development tax credit by 5 percent and lowered corporate taxes, argued Otellini, and we “started one or two more projects in companies around the country that made them more productive and more competitive, the government’s tax revenues are going to grow.” With the generous research and development tax credits and lower corporate taxes they receive, Intel’s chief competitors in South Korea basically have “zero cost of money,” said Otellini. Intel can compete against that with superior technology, but many other U.S. firms can’t.

Does the Obama team get it? Otellini compared the Obama administration to a “diode” — an electronic device that conducts electric current in only one direction. They are very good at listening to Silicon Valley, he said, but not so good at responding.

“I’d like to see competitiveness and education take a higher role than they are today,” he said. “Right now, they’re going to try to push this health care thing over the line, and, after that, deal with the next thing. God, I’d just like this [our competitiveness] to be the next thing. Something has to pay for” everything government is doing today.

We had to do the bailouts, the buy-ups and the jobs bills to stop the bleeding. But now we need to focus on the policies that spawn new firms and keep our best at the top. “Having run a company through a major transition, it’s a lot easier to change when you can than when you have to,” said Otellini. “The cost is less. You have more time. I am a little worried that by the time we wake up to the crisis we will be in the abyss.”

March 12 - May 15, 2010

Opening reception
March 12, 2010 6-8pm

Blum and Poe

by Richard Rodriguez
The Wilson Quarterly
Winter 2010 Issue

The funeral for Cesar Chavez took place in an open field near Delano, a small agricultural town at the southern end of California’s Central Valley. I remember an amiable Mexican disorder, a crowd listening and not listening to speeches and prayers delivered from a raised platform beneath a canvas tent. I do not remember a crowd numbering 30,000 or 50,000, as some estimates have ­it—­but then I do not remember. Perhaps a cool, perhaps a warm spring sun. Men in white shirts carried forward a pine box. The ease of their movement suggested the lightness of their ­burden.

When Cesar Chavez died in his sleep in 1993, not yet a very old man at 66, he died—as he had so often portrayed himself in life—as a loser. The United Farm Workers (UFW) union he had co­founded was in decline; the union had 5,000 members, equivalent to the population of one very small Central Valley town. The labor in California’s agricultural fields was largely taken up by Mexican migrant workers—the very workers Chavez had been unable to reconcile to his American union, whom he had branded “scabs” and wanted reported to immigration authorities.

I went to the funeral because I was writing a piece on Chavez for The Los Angeles Times. It now occurs to me that I was present at a number of events involving Cesar Chavez. I was a teenager at the edge of the crowd in 1966, when Chavez led UFW marchers to the steps of the capitol in Sacramento to generate support for a strike against grape growers. A few years later, I went to hear him speak at Stanford University. I can recall everything about the occasion except why I was there. I remember a golden light of late afternoon; I remember the Reverend Robert McAfee Brown introducing Cesar Chavez. Something about Chavez embarrassed me. It was as though someone from my family had turned up at Stanford to lecture undergraduates on the hardness of a Mexican’s life. I stood at the back of the room. I did not join in the standing ovation. I would not give him anything. And yet, of course, there was something compelling about his ­homeliness.

In her thoroughly researched and thoroughly unsentimental book The Union of Their Dreams: Power, Hope, and Struggle in Cesar Chavez’s Farm Worker Movement, journalist Miriam Pawel chronicles the lives of a collection of ­people—­farm workers, idealistic college students, young East Coast lawyers, a Presbyterian minister, and ­others—­who gave years of their lives at subsistence pay to work for the UFW. By the end of her book, every person Pawel profiles has left the ­union—­has been fired or has quit in disgust or frustration. Nevertheless, it is not beside the point to notice that Cesar Chavez inspired such a disparate, devoted ­company.

We easily forget that the era we call “the Sixties” was not only a time of vast civic disaffection; it was also a time of religious idealism. At the forefront of what amounted to the religious revival of America in those years were the black Protestant ministers of the civil rights movement, ministers who insisted upon a moral dimension to the rituals of everyday American ­life—­eating at a lunch counter, riding a bus, going to ­school.

Cesar Chavez similarly cast his campaign for better wages and living conditions for farm workers as a religious movement. He became for many Americans, especially Mexican Americans (my parents among them), a figure of spiritual authority. I remember a small brown man with an Indian aspect leading labor protests that were also medieval religious processions of women, children, nuns, college students, burnt old ­men—­under the banner of Our Lady of ­Guadalupe.

By the time he had become the most famous Mexican American anyone could name—his face on the cover of ­Time—­the majority of Mexican Americans lived in cities, far from the tragic fields of California’s Central Valley that John Steinbeck had made famous a generation before. Mexican Americans were more likely to work in construction or in ­service-­sector jobs than in the ­fields.

Cesar Chavez was born in Yuma, Arizona, in 1927. During the hardscrabble years of his youth, he dropped out of school to work in the fields of Arizona and California. As a young man he accumulated an autodidact’s library. He read books on economics, philosophy, history. (Years later, Chavez was apt to quote Winston Churchill at UFW staff meetings.) He studied the black civil rights movement, particularly the writings of Martin Luther King Jr. He studied most intently the lives and precepts of St. Francis of Assisi and Mohandas ­Gandhi.

It is heartening to learn about private acts of goodness in notorious lives. It is discouraging to learn of the moral failures of famously good people. The former console. But to learn that the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. was a womanizer is to be confronted with the knowledge that flesh is a complicated medium for grace. To learn that there were flaws in the character of Cesar Chavez is again to test the meaning of a good life. During his lifetime, Chavez was considered by many to be a saint. Pawel is writing outside the hagiography, but while reading her book, I found myself wondering about the nature of sanctity. Saints? Holiness? I apologize for introducing radiant ­nouns.

The first portrait in The Union of Their Dreams is of Eliseo Medina. At the advent of the UFW, Eliseo was a shy teenager, educated only through the eighth grade. Though he was not confident in English, Medina loved to read El Malcriado, the feisty bilingual weekly published by the UFW. He remembered that his life changed the Thursday night he went to hear Chavez in the social hall of Our Lady of Guadalupe Church in Delano. He was “disappointed by the leader’s unimpressive appearance.” But by the end of the evening, he had determined to join the ­union.

No Chavez speech I have read or heard approaches the rhetorical brilliance of the Protestant ministers of the black civil rights movement. Chavez was, however, brilliantly theatrical. He seemed to understand, the way Charlie Chaplin understood, how to make an embarrassment of ­himself—­his mulishness, his silence, his witness. His presence at the edge of a field was a blight of ­beatitude.

Chavez studied the power of abstinence. He internalized his resistance to injustice by refusing to eat. What else can a poor man do? Though Chavez had little success encouraging UFW volunteers to follow his example of fasting, he was able to convince millions of Americans (as many as 20 million, by some estimates) not to buy grapes or ­lettuce.

Farmers in the Central Valley were bewildered to find themselves roped into a religious parable. Indeed, Valley growers, many of them Catholics, were distressed when their children came home from parochial schools and reported that Chavez was used as a moral exemplum in religion ­class.

At a time in the history of American entrepreneurialism when Avis saw the advantage of advertising itself as “Number Two” and Volkswagen sold itself as the “bug,” Chavez made the smallness of his union, its haphazardness, a kind of boast. In 1968, during his most publicized fast to support the strike of grape pickers, Chavez issued this statement (he was too weak to read aloud): “Those who oppose our cause are rich and powerful and they have many allies in high places. We are poor. Our allies are few.”

Chavez ended his 1968 fast in a tableau that was rich with symbol and irony. Physically diminished (in photographs his body seems unable to sustain an erect, seated position), he was handed bread (sacramental ministration after his trial in the desert) by Chris Hartmire, the Presbyterian minister who gave so much of his life to serving Chavez and his union. The Protestant activist was feeding the Catholic ascetic. Alongside Chavez sat Robert F. Kennedy, then a U.S. senator from New York. The poor and the meek also have allies in high ­places.

Here began a conflict between deprivation and success that would bedevil Chavez through three decades. In a way, this was a struggle between the Mexican Cesar Chavez and the American Cesar Chavez. For it was Mexico that taught Chavez to value a life of suffering. It was America that taught him to fight the causes of ­suffering.

The speech Chavez had written during his hunger strike of 1968, wherein he compared the UFW to David fighting Goliath, announced the Mexican ­theme: “I am convinced that the truest act of courage, the strongest act of manliness is to sacrifice ourselves for others in a totally ­non-­violent struggle for justice. To be a man is to suffer for others. God help us to be ­men.” (Nearly three decades later, in the program for Chavez’s funeral, the wording of his psalm was revised—“humanity” substituted for “manliness”: To be human is to suffer for others. God help me to be human.)

Nothing else Chavez would write during his life had such haunting power for me as this public prayer for a life of suffering; no utterance would sound so Mexican. Other cultures in the world assume the reality of suffering as something to be overcome. Mexico assumes the inevitability of suffering. That knowledge informs the folk music of Mexico, the bitter humor of its proverbs, the architecture of its stoicism. To be a man is to suffer for others. The code of machismo (which in American English translates too crudely to sexual bravado) in Mexico derives from a medieval chivalry whereby a man uses his strength to protect those less powerful. God help us to be men.

Mexicans believe that in 1531 the Virgin Mary appeared in brown skin, in royal Aztec raiment, to a converted Indian peasant named Juan Diego. The Virgin asked that a church be erected on the site of her four apparitions so that Mexican Indians could come to her and tell her of their suffering. Our Lady of Guadalupe was a part of every UFW ­demonstration.

Though he grew up during the American Depression, Chavez breathed American optimism and American activism. In the early 1950s, while still a farm worker, he met Fred Ross of the Community Service Organization, a group inspired by the principles of the radical organizer Saul Alinsky. Chavez later became an official in the CSO, and eventually its president. He persuaded notoriously apathetic Mexican Americans to register to vote by encouraging them to believe they could change their lives in ­America.

If you would understand the tension between Mexico and the United States that is playing out along our mutual border, you must understand the psychic tension between Mexican ­stoicism—­if that is a rich enough word for ­it—­and American optimism. On the one side, Mexican peasants are tantalized by the American possibility of change. On the other side, the tyranny of American optimism has driven Americans to neurosis and ­depression—­when the dream is elusive or less meaningful than the myth promised. This constitutes the great irony of the Mexican-American border: American sadness has transformed the drug lords of Mexico into billionaires, even as the peasants of Mexico scramble through the darkness to find the American ­dream.

By the late 1960s, as the first UFW contracts were being signed, Chavez began to brood. Had he spent his poor life only to create a middle class? Lionel Steinberg, the first grape grower to sign with the UFW, was drawn by Chavez’s charisma but chagrined at the union’s disordered operations. “Is it a social movement or a trade union?” Steinberg wondered. He urged Chavez to use experienced negotiators from the AFL-­CIO.

Chavez paid himself a subsistence annual wage of $5,000. “You can’t change anything if you want to hold onto a good job, a good way of life, and avoid suffering.” The ­world-­famous labor leader would regularly complain to his poorly ­paid staff about the phone bills they ran up and about what he saw as the misuse of a fleet of ­second-­hand UFW cars. He held the union hostage to the purity of his intent. Eliseo Medina, who had become one of the union’s most effective organizers, could barely support his young family and, without even the prospect of establishing a savings account, asked Chavez about setting up a trust fund for his infant son. Chavez promised to get back to him but never did. Shortly after, discouraged by the mismanagement of the union, Medina ­resigned.

In 1975, Chavez helped to pass legislation prohibiting the use of the short-handled ­hoe—­its ­two-­foot-­long haft forced farm workers to stoop all day. That achievement would outlast the decline of his union. By the early 1970s, California vegetable growers had begun signing sweetheart contracts with the rival Teamsters Union. The UFW became mired in scraps with unfriendly politicians in Sacramento. Chavez’s attention wandered. He imagined a “Poor Peoples Union” that would reach out to senior citizens and people on welfare. He contacted church officials within the Vatican about the possibility of establishing a religious society devoted to service to the poor. He grew interested in the Hutterite communities of North America and the Israeli kibbutzim as possible ­models.

Chavez visited Synanon, the drug rehabilitation commune headed by Charles Dederich, shortly before some of its members were implicated in a series of sexual scandals and criminal assaults. Chavez borrowed from Synanon a version of a disciplinary practice called “the Game,” whereby UFW staff members were obliged to stand in the middle of a circle of peers and submit to fierce criticism. Someone sympathetic to Chavez might argue that the Game was an inversion of an ancient monastic discipline meant to teach humility. Someone less sympathetic might conclude that Chavez was turning into a petty tyrant. I think both estimations are ­true.

From his reading, Chavez would have known that St. Francis of Assisi desired to imitate the life of Jesus. The followers of Francis desired to imitate the life of Francis. Within 10 years of undertaking his mendicant life, Francis had more than 1,000 followers. Francis realized he could not administer a growing religious order by personal example. He relinquished the administration of the Franciscans to men who had some talent for organization. Cesar Chavez never gave up his position as head of the ­UFW.

In 1977 Chavez traveled to Manila as a guest of President Ferdinand Marcos. He ended up praising the old dictator. There were darker problems within the UFW. It was rumored that some within the inner circle were responsible for a car crash that left Cleofas Guzman, an apostate union member, with permanent brain damage.

Chavez spent his last years protesting the use of pesticides in the fields. In April of 1993, he ­died.

In death, Cesar Chavez became a Mexican saint and an American ­hero. The year after his death, Chavez was awarded the National Medal of Freedom by President Bill Clinton. In 2002, the U.S. Postal Service unveiled a 37-cent stamp bearing the image of Cesar Chavez. Politicians throughout the West and the Southwest attached Chavez’s name to parks and schools and streets and civic buildings of every ­sort.

In 1997 American painter Robert Lentz, a Franciscan brother, painted an icon of “Cesar Chavez of California.” Chavez is depicted with a golden halo. He holds in his hand a scrolled broadsheet of the U.S. Constitution. He wears a pink sweatshirt bearing the UFW ­insignia.

That same year, executives at the advertising agency TBWA/Chiat/Day came up with a campaign for Apple computers that featured images of some famous ­dead—­John Lennon, Albert Einstein, Frank ­Sinatra—­alongside a ­grammar-­crunching motto: THINK ­DIFFERENT.

I remember sitting in bad traffic on the San Diego Freeway and looking up to see a photograph of Cesar Chavez on a billboard. His eyes were downcast. He balanced a rake and a shovel over his right shoulder. In the upper-­left-­hand corner was the corporate logo of a bitten ­apple.

via

The Bible Illuminated: R. Crumb’s Book of Genesis

March 4 through April 24, 2010

David Zwirner

Pawel in the Warsaw synagogue. A former truck driver and neo-Nazi skinhead, Pawel, 33, has since become an Orthodox Jew, covering his shaved head with a yarmulke and shedding his fascist ideology for the Torah.

By DAN BILEFSKY
NY Times Published: February 27, 2010

WARSAW — When Pawel looks into the mirror, he can still sometimes see a neo-Nazi skinhead staring back, the man he was before he covered his shaved head with a skullcap, traded his fascist ideology for the Torah and renounced violence and hatred in favor of God.

“I still struggle every day to discard my past ideas,” said Pawel, a 33-year-old ultra-Orthodox Jew and former truck driver, noting with little irony that he had to stop hating Jews in order to become one. “When I look at an old picture of myself as a skinhead, I feel ashamed. Every day I try and do teshuvah,” he said, using the Hebrew word for repentance. “Every minute of every day. There is a lot to make up for.”

Pawel, who also uses his Hebrew name Pinchas, asked that his last name not be used for fear that his old neo-Nazi friends could harm him or his family.

Twenty years after the fall of Communism, Pawel is perhaps the most unlikely example of the Jewish revival under way in Poland, of a moment in which Jewish leaders here say the country is finally showing solid signs of shedding the rabid anti-Semitism of the past.

Before 1939, Poland was home to more than three million Jews, more than 90 percent of whom were killed by the Nazis. Most who survived emigrated. Of the fewer than 50,000 who remained in Poland, many abandoned or hid their Judaism during decades of Communist oppression in which political pogroms against Jews persisted.

Today, though, Michael Schudrich, the chief rabbi of Poland, said he considered Poland the most pro-Israel country in the European Union. He said the attitude of Pope John Paul II, a Pole, who called Jews “our elder brothers,” had finally entered the public consciousness.

Ten years after the revelation that 1,600 Jews of the town of Jedwabne were burned alive by their Polish neighbors in July 1941, he said the national myth that all Poles were victims of World War II had finally been shattered.

“Before 1989 there was a feeling that it was not safe to say, ‘I am a Jew,’ ” Rabbi Schudrich said. “But two decades later, there is a growing feeling that Jews are a missing limb in Poland. The level of anti-Semitism remains unacceptable, but the image of the murderous Pole seared in the consciousness of many Jews after the war doesn’t correspond to the Poland of 2010.”

The small Jewish revival has been under way for several years around eastern Europe. Hundreds of Poles, a majority of them raised as Catholics, are either converting to Judaism or discovering Jewish roots submerged for decades in the aftermath of World War II.

In the past five years, Warsaw’s Jewish community had grown to 600 families from 250. The cafes and bars of the old Jewish quarter in Krakow brim with young Jewish converts listening to Israeli hip hop music.

Michal Pirog, a popular Polish dancer and television star, who recently proclaimed his Jewish roots on national television, said the revelation had won him more fans than enemies. “Poland is changing,” he said. “I am Jewish and I feel good,” he said.

Pawel’s metamorphosis from baptized Catholic skinhead to Jew began in a bleak neighborhood of concrete tower blocks in Warsaw in the 1980s, where Pawel said he and his friends reacted to the gnawing uniformity of socialism by embracing anti-Semitism. They shaved their heads, carried knives and greeted one another with the raised right arm gesture of the Nazi salute.

“Oy vey, I hate to admit it, but we would beat up local Jewish and Arab kids and homeless people,” Pawel said on a recent day from the Nozyk Synagogue here. “We sang about stupid stuff like Satan and killing people. We believed that Poland should only be for Poles.”

One day, he recalled, he and his friends skipped school and took a train to Auschwitz, the Nazi death camp, near Krakow. “We made jokes that we wished the exhibition had been bigger and that the Nazis had killed even more Jews,” he said.

Even as Pawel embraced the life of a neo-Nazi, he said that he had pangs that his identity was built on a lie. His churchgoing father seemed overly fond of quoting the Old Testament. His grandfather hinted about past family secrets.

“One time when I told my grandfather that Jews were bad, he exploded and screamed at me, ‘If I ever hear you say such a thing again under my roof, you will never come back!’ ”

Pawel joined the army and married a fellow skinhead at age 18. But his sense of self changed irrevocably at the age of 22, when his wife, Paulina, suspecting that she had Jewish roots, went to a genealogical institute and discovered Pawel’s maternal grandparents on a register of Warsaw Jews, along with her own grandparents.

When Pawel confronted his parents, he said, they broke down and told him the truth: his maternal grandmother was Jewish and had survived the war by being hidden in a monastery by a group of nuns. His paternal grandfather, also a Jew, had seven brother and sisters, most of whom had perished in the Holocaust.

“I went to my parents and said, ‘What the hell’? Imagine, I was a neo-Nazi and heard this news? I couldn’t look in the mirror for weeks,” he said. “My parents were the typical offspring of Jewish survivors of the war, who decided to conceal their Jewish identity to try and protect their family.”

Shaken by his own discovery, Pawel said he spent weeks of cloistered and tortured reflection but was finally overcome by a strong desire to become Jewish, even Orthodox. He acknowledged that he was drawn to extremes. He said his transformation was arduous, akin to being reborn. He even forced himself to reread “Mein Kampf” but could not get to the end because he felt physically repulsed.

“When I asked a rabbi, ‘Why do I feel this way?’ he replied, ‘The sleeping souls of your ancestors are calling out to you.’ ”

At age 24, he was circumcised. Two years later, he decided to become an ultra-Orthodox Jew. He and his wife are raising their two children in a Jewish home.

Pawel noted that he was still singled out by the same anti-Semites who once counted him among their ranks. “When younger people see me on the street with my top hat and side curls they sometimes laugh at me,” he said. “But it is the old ladies who are the meanest. Sometimes, they use the language I used when I was a skinhead and say, ‘Get out and go back to your country’ or ‘Jew go home!’ ”

And now he is studying to become a shochet, a person charged with killing animals according to Jewish dietary laws. “I am good with knives,” he explained.

Jennifer Bornstein, Sunset Blvd, west of Martel Ave, on the south side of the street, facing east.

The MAK Center for Art and Architecture at the Schindler House is pleased to present its most ambitious project to date: How Many Billboards? Art in Stead. This large-scale urban exhibition debuts 21 newly commissioned works by leading contemporary artists, presented simultaneously on billboards in Los Angeles in February and March 2010.

map of project

By AL GORE
NY Times Published: February 27, 2010

It would be an enormous relief if the recent attacks on the science of global warming actually indicated that we do not face an unimaginable calamity requiring large-scale, preventive measures to protect human civilization as we know it.

Of course, we would still need to deal with the national security risks of our growing dependence on a global oil market dominated by dwindling reserves in the most unstable region of the world, and the economic risks of sending hundreds of billions of dollars a year overseas in return for that oil. And we would still trail China in the race to develop smart grids, fast trains, solar power, wind, geothermal and other renewable sources of energy — the most important sources of new jobs in the 21st century.

But what a burden would be lifted! We would no longer have to worry that our grandchildren would one day look back on us as a criminal generation that had selfishly and blithely ignored clear warnings that their fate was in our hands. We could instead celebrate the naysayers who had doggedly persisted in proving that every major National Academy of Sciences report on climate change had simply made a huge mistake.

I, for one, genuinely wish that the climate crisis were an illusion. But unfortunately, the reality of the danger we are courting has not been changed by the discovery of at least two mistakes in the thousands of pages of careful scientific work over the last 22 years by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In fact, the crisis is still growing because we are continuing to dump 90 million tons of global-warming pollution every 24 hours into the atmosphere — as if it were an open sewer.

It is true that the climate panel published a flawed overestimate of the melting rate of debris-covered glaciers in the Himalayas, and used information about the Netherlands provided to it by the government, which was later found to be partly inaccurate. In addition, e-mail messages stolen from the University of East Anglia in Britain showed that scientists besieged by an onslaught of hostile, make-work demands from climate skeptics may not have adequately followed the requirements of the British freedom of information law.

But the scientific enterprise will never be completely free of mistakes. What is important is that the overwhelming consensus on global warming remains unchanged. It is also worth noting that the panel’s scientists — acting in good faith on the best information then available to them — probably underestimated the range of sea-level rise in this century, the speed with which the Arctic ice cap is disappearing and the speed with which some of the large glacial flows in Antarctica and Greenland are melting and racing to the sea.

Because these and other effects of global warming are distributed globally, they are difficult to identify and interpret in any particular location. For example, January was seen as unusually cold in much of the United States. Yet from a global perspective, it was the second-hottest January since surface temperatures were first measured 130 years ago.

Similarly, even though climate deniers have speciously argued for several years that there has been no warming in the last decade, scientists confirmed last month that the last 10 years were the hottest decade since modern records have been kept.

The heavy snowfalls this month have been used as fodder for ridicule by those who argue that global warming is a myth, yet scientists have long pointed out that warmer global temperatures have been increasing the rate of evaporation from the oceans, putting significantly more moisture into the atmosphere — thus causing heavier downfalls of both rain and snow in particular regions, including the Northeastern United States. Just as it’s important not to miss the forest for the trees, neither should we miss the climate for the snowstorm.

Here is what scientists have found is happening to our climate: man-made global-warming pollution traps heat from the sun and increases atmospheric temperatures. These pollutants — especially carbon dioxide — have been increasing rapidly with the growth in the burning of coal, oil, natural gas and forests, and temperatures have increased over the same period. Almost all of the ice-covered regions of the Earth are melting — and seas are rising. Hurricanes are predicted to grow stronger and more destructive, though their number is expected to decrease. Droughts are getting longer and deeper in many mid-continent regions, even as the severity of flooding increases. The seasonal predictability of rainfall and temperatures is being disrupted, posing serious threats to agriculture. The rate of species extinction is accelerating to dangerous levels.

Though there have been impressive efforts by many business leaders, hundreds of millions of individuals and families throughout the world and many national, regional and local governments, our civilization is still failing miserably to slow the rate at which these emissions are increasing — much less reduce them.

And in spite of President Obama’s efforts at the Copenhagen climate summit meeting in December, global leaders failed to muster anything more than a decision to “take note” of an intention to act.

Because the world still relies on leadership from the United States, the failure by the Senate to pass legislation intended to cap American emissions before the Copenhagen meeting guaranteed that the outcome would fall far short of even the minimum needed to build momentum toward a meaningful solution.

The political paralysis that is now so painfully evident in Washington has thus far prevented action by the Senate — not only on climate and energy legislation, but also on health care reform, financial regulatory reform and a host of other pressing issues.

This comes with painful costs. China, now the world’s largest and fastest-growing source of global-warming pollution, had privately signaled early last year that if the United States passed meaningful legislation, it would join in serious efforts to produce an effective treaty. When the Senate failed to follow the lead of the House of Representatives, forcing the president to go to Copenhagen without a new law in hand, the Chinese balked. With the two largest polluters refusing to act, the world community was paralyzed.

Some analysts attribute the failure to an inherent flaw in the design of the chosen solution — arguing that a cap-and-trade approach is too unwieldy and difficult to put in place. Moreover, these critics add, the financial crisis that began in 2008 shook the world’s confidence in the use of any market-based solution.

But there are two big problems with this critique: First, there is no readily apparent alternative that would be any easier politically. It is difficult to imagine a globally harmonized carbon tax or a coordinated multilateral regulatory effort. The flexibility of a global market-based policy — supplemented by regulation and revenue-neutral tax policies — is the option that has by far the best chance of success. The fact that it is extremely difficult does not mean that we should simply give up.

Second, we should have no illusions about the difficulty and the time needed to convince the rest of the world to adopt a completely new approach. The lags in the global climate system, including the buildup of heat in the oceans from which it is slowly reintroduced into the atmosphere, means that we can create conditions that make large and destructive consequences inevitable long before their awful manifestations become apparent: the displacement of hundreds of millions of climate refugees, civil unrest, chaos and the collapse of governance in many developing countries, large-scale crop failures and the spread of deadly diseases.

It’s important to point out that the United States is not alone in its inaction. Global political paralysis has thus far stymied work not only on climate, but on trade and other pressing issues that require coordinated international action.

The reasons for this are primarily economic. The globalization of the economy, coupled with the outsourcing of jobs from industrial countries, has simultaneously heightened fears of further job losses in the industrial world and encouraged rising expectations in emerging economies. The result? Heightened opposition, in both the industrial and developing worlds, to any constraints on the use of carbon-based fuels, which remain our principal source of energy.

The decisive victory of democratic capitalism over communism in the 1990s led to a period of philosophical dominance for market economics worldwide and the illusion of a unipolar world. It also led, in the United States, to a hubristic “bubble” of market fundamentalism that encouraged opponents of regulatory constraints to mount an aggressive effort to shift the internal boundary between the democracy sphere and the market sphere. Over time, markets would most efficiently solve most problems, they argued. Laws and regulations interfering with the operations of the market carried a faint odor of the discredited statist adversary we had just defeated.

This period of market triumphalism coincided with confirmation by scientists that earlier fears about global warming had been grossly understated. But by then, the political context in which this debate took form was tilted heavily toward the views of market fundamentalists, who fought to weaken existing constraints and scoffed at the possibility that global constraints would be needed to halt the dangerous dumping of global-warming pollution into the atmosphere.

Over the years, as the science has become clearer and clearer, some industries and companies whose business plans are dependent on unrestrained pollution of the atmospheric commons have become ever more entrenched. They are ferociously fighting against the mildest regulation — just as tobacco companies blocked constraints on the marketing of cigarettes for four decades after science confirmed the link of cigarettes to diseases of the lung and the heart.

Simultaneously, changes in America’s political system — including the replacement of newspapers and magazines by television as the dominant medium of communication — conferred powerful advantages on wealthy advocates of unrestrained markets and weakened advocates of legal and regulatory reforms. Some news media organizations now present showmen masquerading as political thinkers who package hatred and divisiveness as entertainment. And as in times past, that has proved to be a potent drug in the veins of the body politic. Their most consistent theme is to label as “socialist” any proposal to reform exploitive behavior in the marketplace.

From the standpoint of governance, what is at stake is our ability to use the rule of law as an instrument of human redemption. After all has been said and so little done, the truth about the climate crisis — inconvenient as ever — must still be faced.

The pathway to success is still open, though it tracks the outer boundary of what we are capable of doing. It begins with a choice by the United States to pass a law establishing a cost for global warming pollution. The House of Representatives has already passed legislation, with some Republican support, to take the first halting steps for pricing greenhouse gas emissions.

Later this week, Senators John Kerry, Lindsey Graham and Joe Lieberman are expected to present for consideration similar cap-and-trade legislation.

I hope that it will place a true cap on carbon emissions and stimulate the rapid development of low-carbon sources of energy.

We have overcome existential threats before. Winston Churchill is widely quoted as having said, “Sometimes doing your best is not good enough. Sometimes, you must do what is required.” Now is that time. Public officials must rise to this challenge by doing what is required; and the public must demand that they do so — or must replace them.

Al Gore, the vice president from 1993 to 2001, is the founder of the Alliance for Climate Protection and the author of “Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis.” As a businessman, he is an investor in alternative energy companies.

By SINDYA N. BHANOO
NY Times Published: February 22, 2010

Just why the brain erases certain memories has long been a topic of interest to scientists.

Now, new research suggests that short-term memory is erased by the brain on purpose, so that new, more relevant memories can be recorded.

At least in fruit flies.

Researchers from China and the United States have found that flies have a protein called Rac that does the job of eroding a memory when needed. The researchers experimented with Rac levels in fruit flies and subjected the flies to two circumstances: a foul smelling odor and a foul smelling odor that also came with an electric shock.

Under normal circumstances, after being exposed to both situations, flies picked the lesser of the two evils — the foul odor without the shock.

The scientists then changed the shock to be tied with the first odor instead of the second.

The flies noted this new information, and erased their original memory. The shock, in their minds, was now correctly tied to the first odor. When exposed to both odors, they again correctly picked the odor without the shock.

But when the experiment was repeated after the memory-eroding protein was blocked, there was utter confusion.

The flies had not erased their first memory, and had made a second memory. Unable to pick which odor to fly toward, they zigzagged back and forth.

Humans also have the protein Rac, and Yi Zhong, the paper’s lead author, believes that further study may reveal how human memories are made.

There is also hope that once they are better understood, Rac levels can be controlled to help people with abnormal memory, said Dr. Zhong of Tsinghua University in China and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York.

The findings were in last week’s edition of the journal Cell.

“The white room that Loos designed for Lina, his blonde, blue-eyed, nineteen-year-old wife, was the most intimate place in the house. The white walls, the white draperies and the white angora sheepskins created a sensual and delicate fluidity; every object in the room was white. Even the closets were concealed behind pale linen drapes. this was an architecture of silence, of a sentimental and erotic approach. Its contrast with the more public living spaces attests to a method of composition that was strictly governed by the psychological status of each room.” – Panayotis Tournikiotis, Adolf Loos, Princeton Architectural Press, 2002, p. 36.

Ornament and Crime

Blinky Palermo’s “To the People of New York City (Part IX),” from the Dia’s permanent collection.

By CAROL VOGEL
NY Times Published: February 25, 2010

There are artists whose work is much loved in Europe but barely noticed in this country. Martin Kippenberger, the German painter who died in 1997, fell into this category until last year, when the Museum of Modern Art presented a major retrospective. Suddenly his canvases started turning up at auctions in New York, where they brought prices that were higher than anticipated. Now another European name — the German abstract painter Blinky Palermo — is getting his posthumous American moment.

Two institutions with bases in the Hudson Valley — the Dia Art Foundation and the Center for Curatorial Studies and Art in Contemporary Culture at Bard College — will present a joint retrospective, the first in the United States, of works by Palermo, who died in 1977. Organized by Lynne Cooke, Dia’s curator at large, it will include about 60 pieces, many of which have never been shown here.

The show will go on a yearlong tour starting in October at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, moving to the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington next February and winding up in 2011 at Dia:Beacon (the foundation’s seven-year-old museum on the Hudson River) and Bard in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y.

“It’s about time that someone decided to do an exhibition of Palermo’s work in this country,” said Philippe Vergne, Dia’s director. “There’s a myth that surrounds him because his life was too short and his work is too rare. There are so many connections between Palermo and American abstraction.”

Palermo, who died when he was just 34, studied with Joseph Beuys in the late 1960s in Düsseldorf. Palermo, whose original name was Peter Schwarze, lived in the United States from 1973 to 1976; once back in Europe, he produced a monumental painting on 15 parts — bands of red, yellow and black, the colors of the German flag — that he titled “To the People of New York City.” It is his best-known work and his last. It is also in Dia’s permanent collection.

Dia has always been a Palermo supporter. Its founder, Heiner Friedrich, represented Palermo, a friend, through his Munich gallery in the mid-1960s. Bard has a Palermo connection too. Marieluise Hessel, the German-born philanthropist whose collection of contemporary art is housed in a museum named for her at Bard, was an early supporter of Palermo’s work.

The partnership is a first for Dia and Bard. Since the Dia:Beacon galleries have natural light, which can be harmful to pieces like Palermo’s cloth pictures — colored materials sewn together along horizontal or vertical seams and attached to stretchers — Bard will show those along with a comprehensive survey of his career.

Tom Eccles, executive director of the center at Bard, said, “We have taken down all the walls in our gallery so it looks almost like an aircraft hangar,” making it a perfect space for many of Palermo’s odd-shaped works.

If we’re lucky, Thursday’s summit will turn out to have been the last act in the great health reform debate, the prologue to passage of an imperfect but nonetheless history-making bill. If so, the debate will have ended as it began: with Democrats offering moderate plans that draw heavily on past Republican ideas, and Republicans responding with slander and misdirection.

Nobody really expected anything different. But what was nonetheless revealing about the meeting was the fact that Republicans — who had weeks to prepare for this particular event, and have been campaigning against reform for a year — didn’t bother making a case that could withstand even minimal fact-checking.

It was obvious how things would go as soon as the first Republican speaker, Senator Lamar Alexander, delivered his remarks. He was presumably chosen because he’s folksy and likable and could make his party’s position sound reasonable. But right off the bat he delivered a whopper, asserting that under the Democratic plan, “for millions of Americans, premiums will go up.”

Wow. I guess you could say that he wasn’t technically lying, since the Congressional Budget Office analysis of the Senate Democrats’ plan does say that average payments for insurance would go up. But it also makes it clear that this would happen only because people would buy more and better coverage. The “price of a given amount of insurance coverage” would fall, not rise — and the actual cost to many Americans would fall sharply thanks to federal aid.

His fib on premiums was quickly followed by a fib on process. Democrats, having already passed a health bill with 60 votes in the Senate, now plan to use a simple majority vote to modify some of the numbers, a process known as reconciliation. Mr. Alexander declared that reconciliation has “never been used for something like this.” Well, I don’t know what “like this” means, but reconciliation has, in fact, been used for previous health reforms — and was used to push through both of the Bush tax cuts at a budget cost of $1.8 trillion, twice the bill for health reform.

What really struck me about the meeting, however, was the inability of Republicans to explain how they propose dealing with the issue that, rightly, is at the emotional center of much health care debate: the plight of Americans who suffer from pre-existing medical conditions. In other advanced countries, everyone gets essential care whatever their medical history. But in America, a bout of cancer, an inherited genetic disorder, or even, in some states, having been a victim of domestic violence can make you uninsurable, and thus make adequate health care unaffordable.

One of the great virtues of the Democratic plan is that it would finally put an end to this unacceptable case of American exceptionalism. But what’s the Republican answer? Mr. Alexander was strangely inarticulate on the matter, saying only that “House Republicans have some ideas about how my friend in Tullahoma can continue to afford insurance for his wife who has had breast cancer.” He offered no clue about what those ideas might be.

In reality, House Republicans don’t have anything to offer to Americans with troubled medical histories. On the contrary, their big idea — allowing unrestricted competition across state lines — would lead to a race to the bottom. The states with the weakest regulations — for example, those that allow insurance companies to deny coverage to victims of domestic violence — would set the standards for the nation as a whole. The result would be to afflict the afflicted, to make the lives of Americans with pre-existing conditions even harder.

Don’t take my word for it. Look at the Congressional Budget Office analysis of the House G.O.P. plan. That analysis is discreetly worded, with the budget office declaring somewhat obscurely that while the number of uninsured Americans wouldn’t change much, “the pool of people without health insurance would end up being less healthy, on average, than under current law.” But here’s the translation: While some people would gain insurance, the people losing insurance would be those who need it most. Under the Republican plan, the American health care system would become even more brutal than it is now.

So what did we learn from the summit? What I took away was the arrogance that the success of things like the death-panel smear has obviously engendered in Republican politicians. At this point they obviously believe that they can blandly make utterly misleading assertions, saying things that can be easily refuted, and pay no price. And they may well be right.

But Democrats can have the last laugh. All they have to do — and they have the power to do it — is finish the job, and enact health reform.

untitled
2010
steel, brass, paint
234×180 x 160cm

Modern Art at Independent
548 West 22nd Street, New York
4 – 7 March, 2010

Modern Art

Autism was first identified in 1943 in an obscure medical journal. Since then it has become a frighteningly common affliction, with the Centers for Disease Control reporting recently that autism disorders now affect almost 1 percent of children.

Over recent decades, other development disorders also appear to have proliferated, along with certain cancers in children and adults. Why? No one knows for certain. And despite their financial and human cost, they presumably won’t be discussed much at Thursday’s White House summit on health care.

Yet they constitute a huge national health burden, and suspicions are growing that one culprit may be chemicals in the environment. An article in a forthcoming issue of a peer-reviewed medical journal, Current Opinion in Pediatrics, just posted online, makes this explicit.

The article cites “historically important, proof-of-concept studies that specifically link autism to environmental exposures experienced prenatally.” It adds that the “likelihood is high” that many chemicals “have potential to cause injury to the developing brain and to produce neurodevelopmental disorders.”

The author is not a granola-munching crank but Dr. Philip J. Landrigan, professor of pediatrics at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York and chairman of the school’s department of preventive medicine. While his article is full of cautionary language, Dr. Landrigan told me that he is increasingly confident that autism and other ailments are, in part, the result of the impact of environmental chemicals on the brain as it is being formed.

“The crux of this is brain development,” he said. “If babies are exposed in the womb or shortly after birth to chemicals that interfere with brain development, the consequences last a lifetime.”

Concern about toxins in the environment used to be a fringe view. But alarm has moved into the medical mainstream. Toxicologists, endocrinologists and oncologists seem to be the most concerned.

One uncertainty is to what extent the reported increases in autism simply reflect a more common diagnosis of what might previously have been called mental retardation. There are genetic components to autism (identical twins are more likely to share autism than fraternal twins), but genetics explains only about one-quarter of autism cases.

Suspicions of toxins arise partly because studies have found that disproportionate shares of children develop autism after they are exposed in the womb to medications such as thalidomide (a sedative), misoprostol (ulcer medicine) and valproic acid (anticonvulsant). Of children born to women who took valproic acid early in pregnancy, 11 percent were autistic. In each case, fetuses seem most vulnerable to these drugs in the first trimester of pregnancy, sometimes just a few weeks after conception.

So as we try to improve our health care, it’s also prudent to curb the risks from the chemicals that envelop us. Senator Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey is drafting much-needed legislation that would strengthen the Toxic Substances Control Act. It is moving ahead despite his own recent cancer diagnosis, and it can be considered as an element of health reform. Senator Lautenberg says that under existing law, of 80,000 chemicals registered in the U.S., the Environmental Protection Agency has required safety testing of only 200. “Our children have become test subjects,” he noted.

One peer-reviewed study published this year in Environmental Health Perspectives gave a hint of the risks. Researchers measured the levels of suspect chemicals called phthalates in the urine of pregnant women. Among women with higher levels of certain phthalates (those commonly found in fragrances, shampoos, cosmetics and nail polishes), their children years later were more likely to display disruptive behavior.

Frankly, these are difficult issues for journalists to write about. Evidence is technical, fragmentary and conflicting, and there’s a danger of sensationalizing risks. Publicity about fears that vaccinations cause autism — a theory that has now been discredited — perhaps had the catastrophic consequence of lowering vaccination rates in America.

On the other hand, in the case of great health dangers of modern times — mercury, lead, tobacco, asbestos — journalists were too slow to blow the whistle. In public health, we in the press have more often been lap dogs than watchdogs.

At a time when many Americans still use plastic containers to microwave food, in ways that make toxicologists blanch, we need accelerated research, regulation and consumer protection.

“There are diseases that are increasing in the population that we have no known cause for,” said Alan M. Goldberg, a professor of toxicology at the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University. “Breast cancer, prostate cancer, autism are three examples. The potential is for these diseases to be on the rise because of chemicals in the environment.”

The precautionary principle suggests that we should be wary of personal products like fragrances unless they are marked phthalate-free. And it makes sense — particularly for children and pregnant women — to avoid most plastics marked at the bottom as 3, 6 and 7 because they are the ones associated with potentially harmful toxins.