Through September 5, 2011

Museum of Modern Art Madrid

By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Times Published: August 7, 2011

To understand the furor over the decision by Standard & Poor’s, the rating agency, to downgrade U.S. government debt, you have to hold in your mind two seemingly (but not actually) contradictory ideas. The first is that America is indeed no longer the stable, reliable country it once was. The second is that S.& P. itself has even lower credibility; it’s the last place anyone should turn for judgments about our nation’s prospects.

Let’s start with S.& P.’s lack of credibility. If there’s a single word that best describes the rating agency’s decision to downgrade America, it’s chutzpah — traditionally defined by the example of the young man who kills his parents, then pleads for mercy because he’s an orphan.

America’s large budget deficit is, after all, primarily the result of the economic slump that followed the 2008 financial crisis. And S.& P., along with its sister rating agencies, played a major role in causing that crisis, by giving AAA ratings to mortgage-backed assets that have since turned into toxic waste.

Nor did the bad judgment stop there. Notoriously, S.& P. gave Lehman Brothers, whose collapse triggered a global panic, an A rating right up to the month of its demise. And how did the rating agency react after this A-rated firm went bankrupt? By issuing a report denying that it had done anything wrong.

So these people are now pronouncing on the creditworthiness of the United States of America?

Wait, it gets better. Before downgrading U.S. debt, S.& P. sent a preliminary draft of its press release to the U.S. Treasury. Officials there quickly spotted a $2 trillion error in S.& P.’s calculations. And the error was the kind of thing any budget expert should have gotten right. After discussion, S.& P. conceded that it was wrong — and downgraded America anyway, after removing some of the economic analysis from its report.

As I’ll explain in a minute, such budget estimates shouldn’t be given much weight in any case. But the episode hardly inspires confidence in S.& P.’s judgment.

More broadly, the rating agencies have never given us any reason to take their judgments about national solvency seriously. It’s true that defaulting nations were generally downgraded before the event. But in such cases the rating agencies were just following the markets, which had already turned on these problem debtors.

And in those rare cases where rating agencies have downgraded countries that, like America now, still had the confidence of investors, they have consistently been wrong. Consider, in particular, the case of Japan, which S.& P. downgraded back in 2002. Well, nine years later Japan is still able to borrow freely and cheaply. As of Friday, in fact, the interest rate on Japanese 10-year bonds was just 1 percent.

So there is no reason to take Friday’s downgrade of America seriously. These are the last people whose judgment we should trust.

And yet America does have big problems.

These problems have very little to do with short-term or even medium-term budget arithmetic. The U.S. government is having no trouble borrowing to cover its current deficit. It’s true that we’re building up debt, on which we’ll eventually have to pay interest. But if you actually do the math, instead of intoning big numbers in your best Dr. Evil voice, you discover that even very large deficits over the next few years will have remarkably little impact on U.S. fiscal sustainability.

No, what makes America look unreliable isn’t budget math, it’s politics. And please, let’s not have the usual declarations that both sides are at fault. Our problems are almost entirely one-sided — specifically, they’re caused by the rise of an extremist right that is prepared to create repeated crises rather than give an inch on its demands.

The truth is that as far as the straight economics goes, America’s long-run fiscal problems shouldn’t be all that hard to fix. It’s true that an aging population and rising health care costs will, under current policies, push spending up faster than tax receipts. But the United States has far higher health costs than any other advanced country, and very low taxes by international standards. If we could move even part way toward international norms on both these fronts, our budget problems would be solved.

So why can’t we do that? Because we have a powerful political movement in this country that screamed “death panels” in the face of modest efforts to use Medicare funds more effectively, and preferred to risk financial catastrophe rather than agree to even a penny in additional revenues.

The real question facing America, even in purely fiscal terms, isn’t whether we’ll trim a trillion here or a trillion there from deficits. It is whether the extremists now blocking any kind of responsible policy can be defeated and marginalized.

Untitled (Nugget)
1986
Gelatin silver print
20 x 23.6 inches (50 x 60 cm)

Photoworks 1964-2000
Through September 23, 2011

Leo Koenig

Thanks to Arthur Ou

NY Times Editorial
Published: August 6, 2011

A week later and we are still amazed at how the Republicans in Congress pulled it off. They held the economy hostage, won some cheap political points, and all of us will spend the next decade paying the ransom as government programs — $900 billion over 10 years in the first round — are slashed and the recovery is put at risk.

The only glimmer of hope is that the battle is not completely over — if President Obama is finally willing to fight.

Under the terms of the ill-conceived debt agreement, Congress has to propose another $1.5 trillion in deficit reduction measures by December. Just to ensure that rationality does not have a chance, Republican leaders said they would not put anyone on the deficit-cutting “super-committee” who might entertain the idea of raising taxes.

A week later and we are even more amazed by the failure of Mr. Obama and the Democratic leadership to stand up to this intransigence. If they do not start pushing back, with the same ferocity, the results will be disastrous.

Standard & Poor’s made its judgment about both the political standoff and the all-cuts, no-new-revenues deal on Friday when it lowered the country’s long-term debt rating one notch, down from AAA. And while “no new taxes” pledges are almost always big political winners, Americans are also figuring out that the country cannot keep on this way. According to the latest New York Times/CBS News Poll, 63 percent support raising taxes on households that earn more than $250,000 a year to help address the deficit.

If that is not enough to energize the White House, here are a few more facts. To avoid across-the-board cuts, Congress must enact at least another $1.2 trillion in deficit reduction measures over the 10 years. For all of the talk of “big government,” there is no way to cut that much in discretionary programs without crippling basic functions. Lawmakers could eliminate the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Pell Grants, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health and Head Start and still not cut $110 billion annually.

Entitlement reform is essential. But it is unlikely that lawmakers will agree on deep cuts to Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. Finally, asserting that deficits can be tamed with spending cuts alone ignores that the Bush tax cuts — costing $1.8 trillion from 2002 to 2009 — are a big reason we got into this deep hole.

Here is the bottom line. There is no economically sensible or politically honest way to address the deficit without also increasing revenues and reforming the tax code. The major challenges are these:

LET THE BUSH CUTS EXPIRE Mr. Obama vowed to let the high-end tax cuts (for people making more than $250,00) expire in 2010. But in a preview of the debt fight, he agreed to extend the cuts for two more years when Republicans held unemployment benefits and other measures hostage.

Letting all of the cuts expire at the end of 2012 would save $3.8 trillion over the next decade. Letting the tax cuts expire for those making more than $250,000 would save $700 billion. That would make a real dent in the $2.4 trillion in total deficit reduction envisioned in the debt limit deal.

A sensible and fair approach would be to let the high-end tax cuts expire as scheduled, but keep the other tax cuts for another year. That would keep more cash in the hands of people most likely to spend it and prop up consumer demand while the economy is weak. It would give Congress and the administration time to undertake tax reform.

MAKE REAL REFORMS Most Congressional Republicans are willing to embrace reform, but only if it is “revenue neutral.” There is no question that the system is overly complicated; it is also riddled with hugely costly special deals for special interests. Any reform must streamline the code, make it fairer and — most important — raise more revenue.

TARGET TAX BREAKS AND LOWER RATES Each year, the government provides $1 trillion in tax breaks. Some of the largest breaks — for itemized deductions and retirement savings — should be retained because they subsidize important goals, like home ownership and old-age security. Right now, wealthier taxpayers get the greatest benefit. The process needs to be reformed so that most of the help flows to those who most need it: low- and middle-income taxpayers.

At the same time, super-low tax rates for investment income should be ended. Capital gains are taxed at a top rate of 15 percent, compared with a top rate for wages and salary of 35 percent. Proponents argue that the lower rate is an incentive to invest, but research shows that it also encourages gaming of the system. Tax breaks that have outlived their purpose must be ended, starting with subsidies for the oil industry, which is making billions in profits.

The revenue from such reforms could be used to pay down the deficit and allow all tax rates to be lowered, improving incentives to work. The amount of revenue raised and the drop in tax rates will depend on how much tax breaks are curbed.

OTHER TAXES Congress should consider raising revenues in other ways, like a value-added tax, or carbon taxes. That way all of the needed revenue for deficit reduction, and for what government provides, does not need to be squeezed from the income tax. A value-added tax is conducive to saving, and a carbon tax helps protect the environment.

The public is open to new taxes, and the economic facts are clear. Until tax increases are considered in equal measure to spending cuts, there will be no budget fix.

coming soon to lacma

thanks to andy goldman

By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Times Published: August 4, 2011

In case you had any doubts, Thursday’s more than 500-point plunge in the Dow Jones industrial average and the drop in interest rates to near-record lows confirmed it: The economy isn’t recovering, and Washington has been worrying about the wrong things.

It’s not just that the threat of a double-dip recession has become very real. It’s now impossible to deny the obvious, which is that we are not now and have never been on the road to recovery.

For two years, officials at the Federal Reserve, international organizations and, sad to say, within the Obama administration have insisted that the economy was on the mend. Every setback was attributed to temporary factors — It’s the Greeks! It’s the tsunami! — that would soon fade away. And the focus of policy turned from jobs and growth to the supposedly urgent issue of deficit reduction.

But the economy wasn’t on the mend.

Yes, officially the recession ended two years ago, and the economy did indeed pull out of a terrifying tailspin. But at no point has growth looked remotely adequate given the depth of the initial plunge. In particular, when employment falls as much as it did from 2007 to 2009, you need a lot of job growth to make up the lost ground. And that just hasn’t happened.

Consider one crucial measure, the ratio of employment to population. In June 2007, around 63 percent of adults were employed. In June 2009, the official end of the recession, that number was down to 59.4. As of June 2011, two years into the alleged recovery, the number was: 58.2.

These may sound like dry statistics, but they reflect a truly terrible reality. Not only are vast numbers of Americans unemployed or underemployed, for the first time since the Great Depression many American workers are facing the prospect of very-long-term — maybe permanent — unemployment. Among other things, the rise in long-term unemployment will reduce future government revenues, so we’re not even acting sensibly in purely fiscal terms. But, more important, it’s a human catastrophe.

And why should we be surprised at this catastrophe? Where was growth supposed to come from? Consumers, still burdened by the debt that they ran up during the housing bubble, aren’t ready to spend. Businesses see no reason to expand given the lack of consumer demand. And thanks to that deficit obsession, government, which could and should be supporting the economy in its time of need, has been pulling back.

Now it looks as if it’s all about to get even worse. So what’s the response?

To turn this disaster around, a lot of people are going to have to admit, to themselves at least, that they’ve been wrong and need to change their priorities, right away.

Of course, some players won’t change. Republicans won’t stop screaming about the deficit because they weren’t sincere in the first place: Their deficit hawkery was a club with which to beat their political opponents, nothing more — as became obvious whenever any rise in taxes on the rich was suggested. And they’re not going to give up that club.

But the policy disaster of the past two years wasn’t just the result of G.O.P. obstructionism, which wouldn’t have been so effective if the policy elite — including at least some senior figures in the Obama administration — hadn’t agreed that deficit reduction, not job creation, should be our main priority. Nor should we let Ben Bernanke and his colleagues off the hook: The Fed has by no means done all it could, partly because it was more concerned with hypothetical inflation than with real unemployment, partly because it let itself be intimidated by the Ron Paul types.

Well, it’s time for all that to stop. Those plunging interest rates and stock prices say that the markets aren’t worried about either U.S. solvency or inflation. They’re worried about U.S. lack of growth. And they’re right, even if on Wednesday the White House press secretary chose, inexplicably, to declare that there’s no threat of a double-dip recession.

Earlier this week, the word was that the Obama administration would “pivot” to jobs now that the debt ceiling has been raised. But what that pivot would mean, as far as I can tell, was proposing some minor measures that would be more symbolic than substantive. And, at this point, that kind of proposal would just make President Obama look ridiculous.

The point is that it’s now time — long past time — to get serious about the real crisis the economy faces. The Fed needs to stop making excuses, while the president needs to come up with real job-creation proposals. And if Republicans block those proposals, he needs to make a Harry Truman-style campaign against the do-nothing G.O.P.

This might or might not work. But we already know what isn’t working: the economic policy of the past two years — and the millions of Americans who should have jobs, but don’t.

A sheriff’s deputy aims his gun outside the Silver Dollar Bar where newsman Ruben Salazar died in 1970 after being struck in the head by a tear-gas canister on Aug. 29, 1970. (Raul Ruiz)

By Hector Tobar
The Los Angeles Times
August 4, 2011

Ruben Salazar had been lying on the floor of the Silver Dollar Bar for nearly three hours when a pair of homicide detectives from the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department finally arrived to examine his body.

It was Aug. 29, 1970. Night had fallen. The bar was dark and still stank of tear gas, so Dets. Donald Cannon and Conrad Alvarez donned masks and used “battle lamp” flashlights. Among the many facts in their report — the position of Salazar’s body, the location of the tear-gas canister that killed him — they noted the button pinned to his jacket:

“Chicano Moratorium. 8,000 Dead. Ya Basta! [Enough Already!]” Ruben Salazar had written several columns in support of Chicano activists opposed to the Vietnam War. Even in death, he was proclaiming his solidarity with their cause.

I found that small detail this week amid the hundreds of pages of documents from the Sheriff’s Department investigation of the killing. They were released earlier this year, after decades of pressure from Eastside activists.

Ruben Salazar was a columnist for The Times and also news director at KMEX, L.A.’s pioneering Spanish-language television station. He was the city’s leading Latino media voice, and he had been critical of police abuse. His death on a day of protest for Chicano rights has always seemed suspicious to the people who knew him.

This week, I finally got around to seeing the sheriff’s files myself.

Just about everything I saw smacks of an accident — a tragic and unlikely series of events set in motion by a bystander who thought he saw armed men enter the bar.

Four hours after first encountering Salazar’s body, Cannon and Alvarez interviewed Deputy Thomas Wilson, the man responsible for his death. Assigned to the Montrose station, Wilson had volunteered to help out with crowd control that day.

Wilson said he aimed a tear-gas gun at the bar entrance to get the suspected gunmen to come out (witnesses inside later told detectives they had seen no gunmen).

“When I fired the first round … I observed a hole appear in the curtain where the round had been fired through,” he said.

It was 1:15 a.m. on Aug. 30, and in the transcript of the interview, filled with verbal hesitations, I could almost feel Wilson’s nervousness. He’d just fired a lethal missile into a room he knew to be crowded with people, without being able to see precisely where he was aiming.

You can’t deliberately strike a target if you can’t see it. The projectile passed through Salazar’s skull. And the next day, an autopsy found inside his brain what appeared to be fibers from the curtain.

If that missile had passed a few inches higher, it would have grazed Salazar and he would have survived to write a column for The Times excoriating the Sheriff’s Department. After all, just hours earlier, he’d seen a largely peaceful gathering at an East L.A. park dispersed by baton-wielding deputies.

“The same law enforcement agency that chased after grandmothers and taco vendors in the park with nightsticks,” he might have written, “nearly killed me at a bar a few hours later.”

And yet there’s a lot in the department’s Salazar files that’s troubling.

Many of the documents reek of the paranoia of the day, common to so many American institutions in the Nixon era, when law enforcement saw it as their duty to harass dissenting groups. You can understand why a lot of people suspected Salazar was assassinated.

There’s clear evidence of the “us versus them” mentality in the department.

Lt. Richard Wallace, assigned to the East L.A. station, describes encountering two deputies who had “riled the crowd” by confiscating a flag and armbands belonging to the march organizers.

“I told [the deputy] that I thought it was a pretty stupid trick and that I had expected better of him,” Wallace said. Later, Wallace observed a helicopter hovering just 200 feet over the crowd, provoking much anger below.

Much of the file is filled with accounts of the scattered rioting on the Eastside that day.

But what does all that have to do with the investigation of Salazar’s death?

Nothing, really. The clear purpose, it seems to me, was to justify Deputy Wilson’s panicked and bumbling actions.

You can see one unnamed Sheriff’s Department higher-up preparing that argument in another document in the file: a draft report that includes passages that are typewritten and handwritten and glued together on 13 sheets.

“Deputy Wilson believed that the use of tear gas was the only course of action … to ‘protect himself [sic], the other deputies, and to protect the people that were across the street … although they were throwing rocks at us,’ ” the draft reads.

Salazar’s death wasn’t a murder. But it was a stupid and entirely preventable accident. No action was taken against Wilson, though Los Angeles County did pay $700,000 to the Salazar family to settle a wrongful-death lawsuit.

In February, an official review of the case found much to criticize in the department’s actions.

“It was not an era of openness and public transparency,” wrote the Los Angeles County Office of Independent Review. “The Sheriff’s Department … circled the wagon around its deputies…”

Eventually, L.A. came to embrace the kind of accountability of law enforcement that Salazar and so many other voices of his day demanded, and it’s fitting that among the first members of the public to see the Salazar documents were several veterans of the 1970 Chicano Moratorium itself. Each was allowed to examine the files for four hours.

There were no time constraints placed on my viewing of the documents in digital form, and others should be allowed to see this material as freely. It shouldn’t take much effort to provide to UCLA, Cal State Northridge and other universities the same digital copies that were given to me.

The Sheriff’s Department has been moving toward openness on the Salazar case for several months now; a few more steps could complete the journey.

Danielle Fetzer and Steven Pociunas, volunteers at Rawesome Foods in Venice, hug each other outside the store, whose owner was arrested Wednesday. (Genaro Molina, Los Angeles Times / August 4, 2011) L.A. County prosecutors allege that unpasteurized dairy products were sold illegally and did not meet health standards.

By Stuart Pfeifer and P.J. Huffstutter, Los Angeles Times
August 4, 2011

The owner of a Venice health food market and two other people were arrested on charges related to the allegedly unlawful production and sale of unpasteurized dairy products, a spokesman for the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office said.

The arrests of James Cecil Stewart, Sharon Ann Palmer and Eugenie Bloch on Wednesday marked the latest effort in a government crackdown on the sale of so-called raw dairy products.

Prosecutors in Los Angeles alleged that Stewart, 64, operates a Venice market called Rawesome Foods through which he illegally sold dairy products that did not meet health standards because they were unpasteurized or were produced at unlicensed facilities.

Palmer, 51, has operated Healthy Family Farms in Santa Paula since 2007 without the required licensing for milk production, prosecutors allege. She and her company face nine charges related to the production of unpasteurized milk products.

Bloch, a Healthy Family Farms employee, is charged with three counts of conspiracy.

The arrests followed a one-year investigation during which undercover agents purchased unpasteurized dairy products from Healthy Family Farms stands in Los Angeles, Ventura and Santa Barbara counties, said Matthew Krasnowski, a district attorney spokesman. The products included unpasteurized goat milk, cheese and yogurt.

The arrests came the same week that federal and state health officials warned the public about a food-borne illness outbreak tied to ground turkey contaminated with antibiotic-resistant salmonella, an outbreak in which one Californian has died and 76 others have fallen ill so far.

It also marks the latest salvo in the government’s crackdown on unpasteurized dairy products.

In June 2010 investigators raided the Venice grocery store, seizing stacks of unmarked jugs of raw milk, cartons of raw goat and cow milk, and blocks of unpasteurized goat cheese, among other grocery items. Regulators alleged that Rawesome broke the law by failing to have the proper permits to sell food to the public.

Still, no arrests were made and Rawesome reopened the same week. Stewart said at the time that Rawesome didn’t need such permits because it wasn’t technically a retailer. He contended that the store was a private club whose members paid an annual fee and service charges to obtain products directly from farmers.

While the raid was taking place in Venice, another was occurring at Palmer’s Healthy Family Farms in Ventura County. There, California agriculture officials said, the farm owner’s milk processing plant had not met standards to obtain a license to sell raw milk or raw milk products. Shortly after the raid, Palmer was back in business.

Demand for all manner of raw foods has been growing, spurred by heightened interest in locally produced, unprocessed products.

But government regulators contend such products can be dangerous; there is scientific evidence linking disease outbreaks to raw milk. The milk can transmit bacteria, which can result in diarrhea, dangerously high fevers and in some cases death.

Raw milk, in particular, has drawn regulatory scrutiny, largely because the politically powerful dairy industry has pressed the government to act. It is legal for licensed dairies to sell raw milk at retail outlets in California, according to research by the National Conference of State Legislatures. But the number of such outlets has dwindled amid retailer concerns over potential litigation.

June 12-October 2, 2011

Noguchi: California Legacy is comprised of three parts that examine the impact Noguchi had in California: 1) California Scenario: The Courage of the Imagination based on Noguchi’s South Coast Plaza sculpture garden commissioned by Henry T. Segerstrom thirty years ago; 2) What is Sculpture? Akari from the Venice Biennale, from the 1986 Venice Biennale exhibit in which Noguchi, that year’s United States Representative, exhibited his Akari light sculptures; and 3) Noguchi at Gemini G.E.L., consisting of the sculpture multiples that Noguchi created in 1982 at atelier Gemini G.E.L. in Los Angeles

Laguna Art Museum

By JOE NOCERA
NY Times Published: August 1, 2011

You know what they say: Never negotiate with terrorists. It only encourages them.

These last few months, much of the country has watched in horror as the Tea Party Republicans have waged jihad on the American people. Their intransigent demands for deep spending cuts, coupled with their almost gleeful willingness to destroy one of America’s most invaluable assets, its full faith and credit, were incredibly irresponsible. But they didn’t care. Their goal, they believed, was worth blowing up the country for, if that’s what it took.

Like ideologues everywhere, they scorned compromise. When John Boehner, the House speaker, tried to cut a deal with President Obama that included some modest revenue increases, they humiliated him. After this latest agreement was finally struck on Sunday night — amounting to a near-complete capitulation by Obama — Tea Party members went on Fox News to complain that it only called for $2.4 trillion in cuts, instead of $4 trillion. It was head-spinning.

All day Monday, the blogosphere and the talk shows mused about which party would come out ahead politically. Honestly, who cares? What ought to matter is not how these spending cuts will affect our politicians, but how they’ll affect the country. And I’m not even talking about the terrible toll $2.4 trillion in cuts will take on the poor and the middle class. I am talking about their effect on America’s still-ailing economy.

America’s real crisis is not a debt crisis. It’s an unemployment crisis. Yet this agreement not only doesn’t address unemployment, it’s guaranteed to make it worse. (Incredibly, the Democrats even abandoned their demand for extended unemployment benefits as part of the deal.) As Mohamed El-Erian, the chief executive of the bond investment firm Pimco, told me, fiscal policy includes both a numerator and a denominator. “The numerator is debt,” he said. “But the denominator is growth.” He added, “What we have done is accelerate forward, in a self-inflicted manner, the numerator. And, in the process, we have undermined the denominator.” Economic growth could have gone a long way toward shrinking the deficit, while helping put people to work. The spending cuts will shrink growth and raise the likelihood of pushing the country back into recession.

Inflicting more pain on their countrymen doesn’t much bother the Tea Party Republicans, as they’ve repeatedly proved. What is astonishing is that both the president and House speaker are claiming that the deal will help the economy. Do they really expect us to buy that? We’ve all heard what happened in 1937 when Franklin Roosevelt, believing the Depression was over, tried to rein in federal spending. Cutting spending spiraled the country right back into the Great Depression, where it stayed until the arrival of the stimulus package known as World War II. That’s the path we’re now on. Our enemies could not have designed a better plan to weaken the American economy than this debt-ceiling deal.

One thing Roosevelt did right during the Depression was legislate into being a social safety net to soften the blows that a free-market economy can mete out in tough times. During this recession, it’s as if the government is going out of its way to make sure the blows are even more severe than they have to be. The debt-ceiling debate reflects a harsher, less empathetic America. It’s sad to see.

My own view is that Obama should have played the 14th Amendment card, using its language about “the validity of the public debt” to unilaterally raise the debt ceiling. Yes, he would have infuriated the Republicans, but so what? They already view him as the Antichrist. Legal scholars believe that Congress would not have been able to sue to overturn his decision. Inexplicably, he chose instead a course of action that maximized the leverage of the Republican extremists.

Assuming the Senate passes the bill on Tuesday, the debt ceiling will be a nonissue until after the next election. But the debilitating deficit battles are by no means over. Thanks to this deal, a newly formed supercommittee of Congress is supposed to target another $1.2 trillion to $1.5 trillion in cuts by late November. If those cuts don’t become law by Dec. 23, automatic across-the-board cuts will be imposed, including deep reductions in defense spending.

As has been explained ad nauseam, the threat of defense cuts is supposed to give the Republicans an incentive to play fair with the Democrats in the negotiations. But with our soldiers still fighting in Afghanistan, which side is going to blink if the proposed cuts threaten to damage national security? Just as they did with the much-loathed bank bailout, which most Republicans spurned even though financial calamity loomed, the Democrats will do the responsible thing. Apparently, that’s their problem.

For now, the Tea Party Republicans can put aside their suicide vests. But rest assured: They’ll have them on again soon enough. After all, they’ve gotten so much encouragement.

How do you make someone cry for the sake of science? The answer lies in a young Ricky Schroder

By Richard Chin
Smithsonian.com, July 21, 2011

In 1979, director Franco Zeffirelli remade a 1931 Oscar-winning film called The Champ, about a washed-up boxer trying to mount a comeback in the ring. Zeffirelli’s version got tepid reviews. The Rotten Tomatoes website gives it only a 38 percent approval rating. But The Champ did succeed in launching the acting career of 9-year-old Ricky Schroder, who was cast as the son of the boxer. At the movie’s climax, the boxer, played by Jon Voight, dies in front of his young son. “Champ, wake up!” sobs an inconsolable T.J., played by Schroder. The performance would win him a Golden Globe Award.

It would also make a lasting contribution to science. The final scene of The Champ has become a must-see in psychology laboratories around the world when scientists want to make people sad.

The Champ has been used in experiments to see if depressed people are more likely to cry than non-depressed people (they aren’t). It has helped determine whether people are more likely to spend money when they are sad (they are) and whether older people are more sensitive to grief than younger people (older people did report more sadness when they watched the scene). Dutch scientists used the scene when they studied the effect of sadness on people with binge eating disorders (sadness didn’t increase eating).

The story of how a mediocre movie became a good tool for scientists dates back to 1988, when Robert Levenson, a psychology professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and his graduate student, James Gross, started soliciting movie recommendations from colleagues, film critics, video store employees and movie buffs. They were trying to identify short film clips that could reliably elicit a strong emotional response in laboratory settings.

It was a harder job than the researchers expected. Instead of months, the project ended up taking years. “Everybody thinks it’s easy,” Levenson says.

Levenson and Gross, now a professor at Stanford, ended up evaluating more than 250 films and film clips. They edited the best ones into segments a few minutes long and selected 78 contenders. They screened selections of clips before groups of undergraduates, eventually surveying nearly 500 viewers on their emotional responses to what they saw on-screen.

Some film scenes were rejected because they elicited a mixture of emotions, maybe anger and sadness from a scene depicting an act of injustice, or disgust and amusement from a bathroom comedy gag. The psychologists wanted to be able to produce one predominant, intense emotion at a time. They knew that if they could do it, creating a list of films proven to generate discrete emotions in a laboratory setting would be enormously useful.

Scientists testing emotions in research subjects have resorted to a variety of techniques, including playing emotional music, exposing volunteers to hydrogen sulfide (“fart spray”) to generate disgust or asking subjects to read a series of depressing statements like “I have too many bad things in my life” or “I want to go to sleep and never wake up.” They’ve rewarded test subjects with money or cookies to study happiness or made them perform tedious and frustrating tasks to study anger.

“In the old days, we used to be able to induce fear by giving people electric shocks,” Levenson says.

Ethical concerns now put more constraints on how scientists can elicit negative emotions. Sadness is especially difficult. How do you induce a feeling of loss or failure in the laboratory without resorting to deception or making a test subject feel miserable?

“You can’t tell them something horrible has happened to their family, or tell them they have some terrible disease,” says William Frey II, a University of Minnesota neuroscientist who has studied the composition of tears.

But as Gross says, “films have this really unusual status.” People willingly pay money to see tearjerkers—and walk out of the theater with no apparent ill effect. As a result, “there’s an ethical exemption” to making someone emotional with a film, Gross says.

In 1995, Gross and Levenson published the results of their test screenings. They came up with a list of 16 short film clips able to elicit a single emotion, such as anger, fear or surprise. Their recommendation for inducing disgust was a short film showing an amputation. Their top-rated film clip for amusement was the fake orgasm scene from When Harry Met Sally. And then there’s the two-minute, 51-second clip of Schroder weeping over his father’s dead body in The Champ, which Levenson and Gross found produced more sadness in laboratory subjects than the death of Bambi’s mom.

“I still feel sad when I see that boy crying his heart out,” Gross says.

“It’s wonderful for our purposes,” Levenson says. “The theme of irrevocable loss, it’s all compressed into that two or three minutes.”

Researchers are using the tool to study not just what sadness is, but how it makes us behave. Do we cry more, do we eat more, do we smoke more, do we spend more when we’re sad? Since Gross and Levenson gave The Champ two thumbs-up as the saddest movie scene they could find, their research has been cited in more than 300 scientific articles. The movie has been used to test the ability of computers to recognize emotions by analyzing people’s heart rate, temperature and other physiological measures. It has helped show that depressed smokers take more puffs when they are sad.

In a recent study, neuroscientist Noam Sobel at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel showed the film clip to women to collect tears for a study to test the sexual arousal of men exposed to weepy women. They found that when men sniffed tear-filled vials or tear-soaked cotton pads, their testosterone levels fell, they were less likely to rate pictures of women’s faces as attractive, and the part of their brains that normally light up in MRI scans during sexual arousal were less active.

Other researchers kept test subjects up all night and then showed them clips from The Champ and When Harry Met Sally. Sleep deprivation made people look about as expressive, the team found, as a zombie.

“I found it very sad. I find most people do,” says Jared Minkel of Duke University, who ran the sleep-deprivation study. “The Champ seems to be very effective in eliciting fairly pure feeling states of sadness and associated cognitive and behavioral changes.”

Other films have been used to produce sadness in the lab. When he needed to collect tears from test subjects in the early 1980s, Frey says he relied on a film called All Mine to Give, about a pioneer family in which the father and mother die and the children are divided up and sent to the homes of strangers.

“Just the sound of the music and I would start crying,” Frey says.

But Levenson says he believes the list of films he developed with Gross is the most widely used by emotion researchers. And of the 16 movies clips they identified, The Champ may be the one that has been used the most by researchers.
“I think sadness is a particularly attractive emotion for people to try to understand,” Gross says.

via

Allen Ginsberg/Corbis, via Magnolia Pictures

Timothy Leary, left, and Neal Cassady, who drove Ken Kesey’s psychedelic bus in 1964, in footage from “Magic Trip.”

By CHARLES McGRATH
NY Times Published: July 31, 2011

“Magic Trip: Ken Kesey’s Search for a Kool Place,” a film by Alex Gibney and Alison Ellwood that opens on Friday, is an exercise in what they call “archival vérité.” It’s a documentary that uses old footage to recreate a documentary that Kesey intended to make about his 1964 cross-country bus trip — the one so memorably chronicled in Tom Wolfe’s account, “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.”

In all Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, as his crew called themselves, shot some 40 hours of 16-millimeter film, but the project was never really finished. As Mr. Wolfe wrote, “Plunging in on those miles of bouncing, ricocheting, blazing film with a splicer was like entering a jungle where the greeny vines grew faster than you could chop them down in front of you.” Kesey showed all 40 hours unedited a couple of times and also hacked the footage up into various shorter versions before stowing the film cans in his barn, near Eugene, Ore., where they rusted away — until Mr. Gibney and Ms. Ellwood showed up.

Kesey was onto something similar to what we would now call reality television: scenes of people with odd names (Mal Function, Gretchen Fetchin, Generally Famished) getting stoned and behaving weirdly. After publishing the novels “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” and “Sometimes a Great Notion,” he had by 1964 wearied of writing or so fried his brain with hallucinogens that he embraced what he saw as a brand new art form: a drug-enabled psychic quest that would document itself as it was happening. The famous bus — a psychedelic-painted International Harvester with a sign in front that said “Furthur” and one in back that warned “Weird Load” — was wired for sound, and there was a movie camera on board. With Kesey sometimes directing and sometimes just standing back and watching, the Merry Pranksters filmed one another and also their interactions with an uncomprehending public when, for example, Neal Cassady drove the bus backward down a Phoenix street as the Pranksters, stoned on LSD, pretended to campaign for Barry Goldwater for president.

Mr. Gibney, who won an Academy Award for “Taxi to the Dark Side,” his 2007 documentary about American uses of torture during interrogation, and Ms. Ellwood, a film editor who has worked with him on several projects, including “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room,” first learned of the Kesey footage from a 2004 article in The New Yorker by Robert Stone, who was for a while one of the Pranksters. “That much footage — I thought, wow, what we could do with that,” Mr. Gibney said recently at the Chelsea office of his company, Jigsaw Productions.

But after acquiring the rights from Kesey’s widow (he died in 2001) the filmmakers realized that the footage was in terrible shape, scratched and deteriorating, and first had to be restored. With help from Martin Scorsese’s Film Foundation, technicians from the University of California, Los Angeles, worked on it for over a year. And then there was the problem, which took Ms. Ellwood and Don Fleming, an audio expert, several more years to solve, of making sense of a jumble of seemingly random, disconnected reels and snippets where the audio track did not match what was taking place on screen. The recording system was run through a generator on the bus, Mr. Gibney explained, which would unaccountably slow down and speed up.

Nor was anyone operating a clapper to help synchronize the audio and visual tracks. “In 40 hours they used the clapper once,” Mr. Gibney said. “That was in New York when Kesey hired a professional sound man, but he got so frustrated he quit.”

Ms. Ellwood grew so desperate to find moments that synched, she said, that she even hired a lip reader to transcribe what the people were mouthing, in hopes of finding matching audio.

On the other hand Mr. Gibney also found in Kesey’s barn some audiotape recorded about 10 years after the bus trip, in which various Pranksters comment on what’s happening on screen, and this made possible what is probably the most interesting feature of “Magic Trip”: its way of eliminating the talking heads so common in documentaries. There are a few moments of exposition, narrated in mock newsreel style by Stanley Tucci, but for the most part the viewer hears from the participants back when they were still Pranksters more or less and not nostalgic senior citizens.

“We planned to do it the other way,” Mr. Gibney said. “We were going to interview the survivors and intercut those scenes with the original footage. But we found that to be dull, in part because the Pranksters had practiced their stories so many times that to some extent they had ceased to be interested in what the real stories were.”

Ms. Ellwood said, “We thought that if we did it in the traditional way, it would take you off the bus, and we wanted to stay on the bus.”

As edited to under two hours by Mr. Gibney and Ms. Ellwood, the Kesey footage has several memorable scenes, including one in which the novelist Larry McMurtry, whose middle-class house in Houston has just been invaded by Kesey’s band, finds it necessary to call the police and explain that a Prankster, apparently suffering from a drug-induced breakdown, has gone missing and that in keeping with her nickname, Stark Naked, she’s not wearing any clothes.

But there are also long, aimless sequences that seem to take place in druggy slo-mo: Pranksters covering themselves with pond scum; staring raptly at the random designs made by paint swirling in water; tootling interminably on instruments, apparently under the delusion that they sound like John Coltrane. These people are clearly zonked out of their gourds, and so is whoever is holding the camera.

“If you had to watch all 40 hours, it would be like something out of ‘Clockwork Orange,’ ” Mr. Gibney admitted. “They’d have to prop your eyelids open.” He added: “Kesey had an innate distrust of experts: stay away from the experts. In this case that meant stay away from a cameraman. Imagine how great it would have been if they had a real cameraman. But instead you get all the bonehead mistakes of the amateur. There are no establishing shots, the camera is always jiggling, and none of them had a particularly good eye.”

The surprising thing about “Magic Trip” is how sweetly innocent it all seems. The Pranksters are not longhairs. They’re cleanshaven, wear red-white-and-blue outfits and could almost be a patriotic revival group. Most of them too young to be beatniks and too old to be hippies, they have one foot in the ’50s and one in the ’60s.

Kesey, a former college athlete, is blond and muscular and movie-star handsome. He could be Paul Newman’s stand-in. But it’s Cassady, the real-life model for Jack Kerouac’s Dean Moriarty in “On the Road,” who steals the film. He too is buff and magnetically good looking, and while driving he keeps up a nonstop, amphetamine-fueled monologue. Listening to him is so exhausting that the Pranksters have to take turns sitting next to him.

Who in his right mind would travel with such a person at the wheel? And yet blessed by a guardian angel and a mystical GPS in Cassady’s head, the bus navigated flawlessly while Pranksters leaned out from a turret cut in the top or cavorted half-naked on a platform welded to the back.

“They got stopped jillions of times by the police and never got a ticket,” Ms. Ellwood said. “I don’t think Cassady even had a valid driver’s license.

Pear on a Mirror, 2011
C print
33″ x 44″

Through August 27, 2011

Group Show at Shane Cambell

Editorial
NY Times: Published: July 31, 2011

There is little to like about the tentative agreement between Congressional leaders and the White House except that it happened at all. The deal would avert a catastrophic government default, immediately and probably through the end of 2012. The rest of it is a nearly complete capitulation to the hostage-taking demands of Republican extremists. It will hurt programs for the middle class and poor, and hinder an economic recovery.

It is not yet set in stone, and there may still be time to make it better. But in the end, most Democrats will have no choice but to swallow their fury, accept the deal and, we hope, fight harder the next time.

For weeks, ever since House Republicans said they would not raise the nation’s debt ceiling without huge spending cuts, Democrats have held out for a few basic principles. There must be new tax revenues in the mix so that the wealthy bear a share of the burden and Medicare cannot be affected.

Those principles were discarded to get a deal that cuts about $2.5 trillion from the deficit over a decade. The first $900 billion to a trillion will come directly from domestic discretionary programs (about a third of it from the Pentagon) and will include no new revenues. The next $1.5 trillion will be determined by a “supercommittee” of 12 lawmakers that could recommend revenues, but is unlikely to do so since half its members will be Republicans.

If the committee is deadlocked, or its recommendations are rejected by either house of Congress, then a dreaded guillotine of cuts would come down: $1.2 trillion in across-the-board spending reductions that would begin to go into effect by early 2013.

Negotiators have tried to make this penalty mechanism as unpalatable as possible to provide an incentive for the supercommittee and Congress to avert it. For Democrats, the penalty would include cuts to Medicare providers. The penalty for Republicans should have been new tax revenues, but of course they refused to consider that and got their way. Instead, their incentive will be trying to avoid large cuts in the military budget.

Democrats won a provision drawn from automatic-cut mechanisms in previous decades that exempts low-income entitlement programs. There is no requirement that a balanced-budget amendment pass Congress. There will be no second hostage-taking on the debt ceiling in a few months, as Speaker John Boehner and his band of radicals originally demanded. Democratic negotiators decided that the automatic cut system, as bad as it is, was less of a threat to the economy than another default crisis, and many are counting on future Congresses to undo its arbitrary butchering.

Sadly, in a political environment laced with lunacy, that calculation is probably correct. Some Republicans in the House were inviting a default, hoping that an economic earthquake would shake Washington and the Obama administration beyond recognition. Democrats were right to fear the effects of a default and the impact of a new recession on all Americans.

President Obama could have been more adamant in dealing with Republicans, perhaps threatening to use constitutional powers to ignore the debt ceiling if Congress abrogated its responsibility to raise it. But this episode demonstrates the effectiveness of extortion. Reasonable people are forced to give in to those willing to endanger the national interest.

Democrats can look forward to the expiration of the Bush tax cuts next year, and will have to make the case in the 2012 elections for new lawmakers who w

By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Times Published: July 31, 2011

A deal to raise the federal debt ceiling is in the works. If it goes through, many commentators will declare that disaster was avoided. But they will be wrong.

For the deal itself, given the available information, is a disaster, and not just for President Obama and his party. It will damage an already depressed economy; it will probably make America’s long-run deficit problem worse, not better; and most important, by demonstrating that raw extortion works and carries no political cost, it will take America a long way down the road to banana-republic status.

Start with the economics. We currently have a deeply depressed economy. We will almost certainly continue to have a depressed economy all through next year. And we will probably have a depressed economy through 2013 as well, if not beyond.

The worst thing you can do in these circumstances is slash government spending, since that will depress the economy even further. Pay no attention to those who invoke the confidence fairy, claiming that tough action on the budget will reassure businesses and consumers, leading them to spend more. It doesn’t work that way, a fact confirmed by many studies of the historical record.

Indeed, slashing spending while the economy is depressed won’t even help the budget situation much, and might well make it worse. On one side, interest rates on federal borrowing are currently very low, so spending cuts now will do little to reduce future interest costs. On the other side, making the economy weaker now will also hurt its long-run prospects, which will in turn reduce future revenue. So those demanding spending cuts now are like medieval doctors who treated the sick by bleeding them, and thereby made them even sicker.

And then there are the reported terms of the deal, which amount to an abject surrender on the part of the president. First, there will be big spending cuts, with no increase in revenue. Then a panel will make recommendations for further deficit reduction — and if these recommendations aren’t accepted, there will be more spending cuts.

Republicans will supposedly have an incentive to make concessions the next time around, because defense spending will be among the areas cut. But the G.O.P. has just demonstrated its willingness to risk financial collapse unless it gets everything its most extreme members want. Why expect it to be more reasonable in the next round?

In fact, Republicans will surely be emboldened by the way Mr. Obama keeps folding in the face of their threats. He surrendered last December, extending all the Bush tax cuts; he surrendered in the spring when they threatened to shut down the government; and he has now surrendered on a grand scale to raw extortion over the debt ceiling. Maybe it’s just me, but I see a pattern here.

Did the president have any alternative this time around? Yes.

First of all, he could and should have demanded an increase in the debt ceiling back in December. When asked why he didn’t, he replied that he was sure that Republicans would act responsibly. Great call.

And even now, the Obama administration could have resorted to legal maneuvering to sidestep the debt ceiling, using any of several options. In ordinary circumstances, this might have been an extreme step. But faced with the reality of what is happening, namely raw extortion on the part of a party that, after all, only controls one house of Congress, it would have been totally justifiable.

At the very least, Mr. Obama could have used the possibility of a legal end run to strengthen his bargaining position. Instead, however, he ruled all such options out from the beginning.

But wouldn’t taking a tough stance have worried markets? Probably not. In fact, if I were an investor I would be reassured, not dismayed, by a demonstration that the president is willing and able to stand up to blackmail on the part of right-wing extremists. Instead, he has chosen to demonstrate the opposite.

Make no mistake about it, what we’re witnessing here is a catastrophe on multiple levels.

It is, of course, a political catastrophe for Democrats, who just a few weeks ago seemed to have Republicans on the run over their plan to dismantle Medicare; now Mr. Obama has thrown all that away. And the damage isn’t over: there will be more choke points where Republicans can threaten to create a crisis unless the president surrenders, and they can now act with the confident expectation that he will.

In the long run, however, Democrats won’t be the only losers. What Republicans have just gotten away with calls our whole system of government into question. After all, how can American democracy work if whichever party is most prepared to be ruthless, to threaten the nation’s economic security, gets to dictate policy? And the answer is, maybe it can’t.

By KASSI UNDERWOOD
NY Times Published: July 28, 2011

ON the third anniversary of my abortion, I found out via MySpace that my ex-boyfriend was having a baby with another woman. It was none of my business, except I somehow convinced myself that his new baby was a replica of ours, and as such I felt a sense of ownership, of responsibility for the child’s well-being.

My college roommate in Vermont had introduced us. He was road-weary that first night, having just driven up from a concert in Kentucky, my home state. He was 20, a ski-lift operator, a community college student. I was a blond Episcopal-bred 19-year-old studying literature and costume design.

Early on, he told me he was on probation for drug-related offenses, which was forcing him to remain clean and sober. It was easy for me to accept his blemished past because I had my own struggles with drugs and alcohol, making me feel like Nancy to his Sid.

He and I talked textbooks and compared rap sheets. In his ramshackle apartment, we belted out Bob Dylan songs as he twirled me across the sloping floorboards. He gave me piggyback rides up my dormitory steps and carted me around town on the handlebars of a bicycle.

Two months after we met, his probation ended. Without supervision, he began crushing up OxyContin and sucking the powder into his nose through a rolled-up dollar bill.

On St. Patrick’s Day I stayed after theater class, sewing a corset. Clad in a threadbare flannel shirt, he stopped in to help me clip the bones. I hoped nobody could see the dope in his pinned eyes or the pregnancy in mine. My period was two weeks late.

“If it hasn’t come by April, we’ll take a test,” he whispered.

Several weeks later, after a university doctor delivered the news, he and I lay side-by-side on his bare twin mattress. “I’m not ready to be a father,” he said.

I nodded, planting my head on his chest. I stared at the water-stained ceiling and prayed he would score a lucrative job instead of more OxyContin. I let myself imagine that I could clean up my own act and finish school and we could hire an au pair, and everything would be fine. But I knew it wouldn’t happen that way.

I had promised myself not to tell my parents, but when I called my mother in Kentucky, I burst into tears as soon as she answered the phone. In the background, my father said, “She’s pregnant, isn’t she?” It had been our collective worst nightmare. “Come on home,” my mother sobbed. “We’ll rear the child here.”

I told her I just couldn’t.

The truth is, I had ambitions. While I adored children and romanticized the idea of one day raising a small brood dressed in elaborate get-ups of my own design, I wanted a family on my terms: happily married with enough money to live well. After college, after graduate school, after I had started a career. There was no fantasy in raising a child alone. In deciding against adoption, I blamed alcohol: the chance that I had already harmed the baby with my drinking.

But my ambivalence remained, and when I quit drinking, again thinking of the baby, my boyfriend was lucid enough to notice. We lay entwined on his secondhand couch one night when he muted the TV.

“You want to have this baby, don’t you?” he said.

“We could call her Jade,” I said. All 11 of my grandmother’s siblings had names starting with J. Mick Jagger had a daughter named Jade. Naming her Jade would be a no-brainer.

“Jade’s pretty,” he said.

“But we can’t go through with it,” I reassured him, reminding myself that we didn’t have the emotional equipment. “It’s better this way.”

In late April, heading to the clinic, he slept in the passenger seat as I fiddled with the radio. Most offices do not allow partners in the room during the procedure, but when I pressed my feet to the stirrups, he was there to knead my shoulders. I dug my fingernails into the nurse’s hand. He and I watched each other instead of the ultrasound machine.

“I’m hot,” I said. “I’m blacking out. Please take off my socks.”

“You’ve got to breathe, honey,” the nurse said.

“Take off her socks!” he hollered.

His support and innate if untraditional sense of duty almost made me think twice about ending the pregnancy. I thought he might have been a nurturing father after all.

I emerged from the appointment emotionally unscathed, or so I thought. The five-minute procedure had ended my insufferable mélange of nausea, exhaustion and shame. I briefly saw a therapist, troubled that I did not feel guilty.

Soon I started drinking again, was arrested for drunken driving and was fired from three jobs for coming in slurring my words or for showing up late or not at all, while my boyfriend eventually disappeared into heroin. I waited for the countless rehabs to work their institutional magic on him, but they didn’t. Our relationship ended on good but sorrowful terms.

Not long after we broke up, he met a girl at a music festival, and a couple of years later she gave birth to their child, whom they named Jade, of all things. They managed to stay together during his stints in jail. By now I was following them on Facebook, where they had migrated like just about everyone else.

Meanwhile, I went into treatment, quit drinking and moved to Austin, Tex., for a job. With sobriety and a salary, I couldn’t stop thinking about the baby that wasn’t, a loss somehow made more painful by his baby that was. I spent my workdays browsing photos of his little girl, believing in some twisted respect that I was glimpsing the face of the child I could have had. On lunch breaks, I went home to cry in bed, longing for a paranormal miracle.

By the time I called him, his daughter was about to celebrate her first birthday. He was living at a halfway house in Boston, where my company was flying me for a conference. I harbored a secret motive to find out if he dwelled on the loss as much as I did, so I asked him if he would meet me.

I figured I would bawl in his track-mark-scarred arms. We would plant a tree in remembrance. Then we would raise his (our?) child in my studio apartment.

He came ambling up to the corner on Newbury Street. I waited in a business suit, disappointed that he was not pushing a stroller. Gone was his shaggy brown hair, mischievous smile and weatherworn Grateful Dead jacket. He had turned hip-hop, from his puffy white Adidas to his crooked white cap. His teeth had browned from the drugs.

We sat down for cappuccinos in a fancy cafe where we could afford nothing else. He told me that his ex-girlfriend had recently drained his meager bank account and vanished, leaving her infant behind. He confessed that paramedics had recently resuscitated him after he overdosed in a restaurant bathroom. Rehab followed. Now he scrimped by on construction work. He aspired to save for a deposit on a roomy apartment for him and his child, who was living with his parents.

I felt an urge to run to his parents’ home and cradle his baby in my arms, as if she were the responsibility I had shirked.

“I think a lot about what happened,” he said.

“Me, too.”

He stared ruefully into his steaming mug.

“But,” I continued, “if I had had that baby, you wouldn’t have Jade.”

Could her name be a coincidence? Maybe when they picked her name, he didn’t realize he was remembering.

“Oh, yeah,” he said, flashing a relieved smile; something was lost, and he got to keep it.

I drew my lips to match his cheery expression even though I felt shorted. I had graduated with honors, seen the first book I edited published with my name in microscopic print, and been accepted to an Ivy League graduate program. I kept trying to secure the next accomplishment that would make my decision worthwhile.

Meanwhile, he got Jade, yet he couldn’t take care of her. An overdosing jailbird father stared back at me, buttering crackers with a silver coffee spoon.

THE heat of summer hung down on our shoulders when we hugged on the bustling street corner. As we parted, I walked up Gloucester Street toward the conference center; he headed toward the pickup truck he’d borrowed from a friend at the halfway house.

In the three years since, he has spent much of his time incarcerated for drug-related offenses. I wish I could share my sobriety, my degree and my career to rent that apartment for his little girl, but reality has finally sunk in: the abortion is mine alone, just like Jade is his.

Allen J. Schaben, Los Angeles Times

Nudists at San Onofre State Beach say park rangers have followed them onto the U.S. property from the adjacent state beach in a bid to cite them for violating California’s coverup laws. A parks official denies the allegation.

By Tony Perry, Los Angeles Times
July 29, 2011

Reporting from San Diego — Gold Beach, where generations of Marines have trained for amphibious assaults, is now the scene of another kind of battle.

The strip of sand on Camp Pendleton is the latest flash point between nudists and state park rangers — with Marines caught in the crossfire.

The nudists say zealous state park rangers have followed them onto the federal property in an effort to cite them for violating the state’s coverup laws.

A spokesman for the state park system denies the allegation and says the nudists do protest far too much.

Gold Beach is directly south of San Onofre State Beach, which for several years was the object of legal skirmishing between nudists and officialdom. Two years ago a court ruled that the state had the authority to ban nudity at so-called Trail 6, long a spot favored by nudists.

The problem is proximity. Trail 6 is only a short walk from Gold Beach.

The Marine Corps says it does not want any civilians — naked or clothed — on its beach. Signs warn sunbathers to stay away.

But in an effort to avoid park rangers at San Onofre State Beach, nudists have ventured south. An apparent confrontation a week ago, details of which are in dispute, between a nudist, rangers and military police has brought the issue to a head.

John Squicciarini of San Clemente says a friend of his, Andy Pollock, had his camera grabbed by a Marine who was apparently working in tandem with park rangers. The Marine Corps says it has no record of such an occurrence.

Squicciarini says park rangers have been provoking the nudists by hiding behind bushes and up on the bluff, spying on them with binoculars and cameras.

“The state park rangers are creating their own problem,” he said. “It’s very childish.”

Roy Stearns, a spokesman for the California Department of Parks and Recreation, disputes this version of events.

“I’m told that we are not harassing them or chasing them,” Stearns said. “I think they’re exaggerating their plight.”

Both sides invoke the specter of the state’s financial distress, which has led to the planned closure of 70 state parks.

The nudists wonder why a cash-strapped parks system can afford to spend time and money on enforcing a prohibition on what they see as the victimless crime of going au naturel. The Trail 6 beach, Squicciarini said, is kept tidy and self-policed by hundreds of people who prefer their recreation, including use of a volleyball court, in the buff.

“We’ve gone to great efforts to keep the beach pristine,” he said.

Stearns said if the nudists are that dedicated to their recreation style, they should consider renting one of the closed parks.

All the beach property in question is owned by the Marine Corps, which leases the property that is San Onofre State Beach to the state.

A Marine spokesman said state park rangers are allowed to cross onto Gold Beach to tell beachgoers they are trespassing. The Marine Corps also does periodic patrols, said 2nd Lt. Ryan K. Welsh.

“Civilians without Department of Defense authorization may not cross onto the Camp Pendleton side of the beach, regardless of their beach use intention,” Welsh said.

The issue of nudity at San Onofre State Beach, as it has in the past, appears destined for court.

A handful of misdemeanor citations are pending in San Diego County Superior Court.

One of the lawyers is Allen Baylis of Huntington Beach. He fought the losing fight to keep Trail 6 clothing optional. He represents nudists facing charges; one tactic is to request jury trials in hopes prosecutors will decide it is too costly and time-consuming for such a minor matter to go to trial.

Baylis said his group, the Naturist Action Committee, does not recommend that nudists trespass onto Gold Beach. But he said he understands the impulse to defy authority. The group’s promise to nudists: “We’ve got your back.”

Baylis likens the nudists of Gold Beach to other Americans who have engaged in civil disobedience to protect their rights: blacks, women, gays.

“When the government does something we don’t like, we have a duty to push back,” he said, “and we have.”

Lesley Vance, untitled, 2011, oil on linen, 14 x 12”.

ArtForum
July/August Picks

There’s an internal logic to the thirteen small, untitled paintings in Lesley Vance’s latest solo show. Which is to say, there’s no need to muscle reason in here, even if it seems like the canvases could eventually transmit some secret code or ancient knowledge. Vance is known for her smeared and stroked wet-on-wet abstractions of natures mortes (collections of leaves, shells, wood, and rocks), and if her approach remains constant in this exhibition, don’t expect to find more of the same. There is a greater focus on aspects of movement and light in her latest works. In some, luster seeps through hairline cracks; others seem to channel the source of their illumination from a hidden presence behind the wall, in a way that evokes Dan Flavin’s fluorescent tubes.

Like those pivotal works, Vance’s canvases, as well as the eight new unearthly watercolors on view, pull the world in, absorbing everything around them. But Vance does not aspire to Flavin’s simplicity (or, for that matter, the clarity trumpeted by Barnett Newman). Instead, her process of veiling––from the translation of spotlit tableaux into individual marks on a canvas, to the ways in which she complicates the objectness of her works through the numerous, nearly sculptural layers of paint––provides something novel. Perhaps it is a different kind of clarity. In this show, colors migrate, forms mutate, and painting is a vehicle for more than mere contemplation, and something greater than a state of mind.
— Lauren O’Neill-Butler

Through August 13

David Kordansky

By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Times Published: July 28, 2011

The facts of the crisis over the debt ceiling aren’t complicated. Republicans have, in effect, taken America hostage, threatening to undermine the economy and disrupt the essential business of government unless they get policy concessions they would never have been able to enact through legislation. And Democrats — who would have been justified in rejecting this extortion altogether — have, in fact, gone a long way toward meeting those Republican demands.

As I said, it’s not complicated. Yet many people in the news media apparently can’t bring themselves to acknowledge this simple reality. News reports portray the parties as equally intransigent; pundits fantasize about some kind of “centrist” uprising, as if the problem was too much partisanship on both sides.

Some of us have long complained about the cult of “balance,” the insistence on portraying both parties as equally wrong and equally at fault on any issue, never mind the facts. I joked long ago that if one party declared that the earth was flat, the headlines would read “Views Differ on Shape of Planet.” But would that cult still rule in a situation as stark as the one we now face, in which one party is clearly engaged in blackmail and the other is dickering over the size of the ransom?

The answer, it turns out, is yes. And this is no laughing matter: The cult of balance has played an important role in bringing us to the edge of disaster. For when reporting on political disputes always implies that both sides are to blame, there is no penalty for extremism. Voters won’t punish you for outrageous behavior if all they ever hear is that both sides are at fault.

Let me give you an example of what I’m talking about. As you may know, President Obama initially tried to strike a “Grand Bargain” with Republicans over taxes and spending. To do so, he not only chose not to make an issue of G.O.P. extortion, he offered extraordinary concessions on Democratic priorities: an increase in the age of Medicare eligibility, sharp spending cuts and only small revenue increases. As The Times’s Nate Silver pointed out, Mr. Obama effectively staked out a position that was not only far to the right of the average voter’s preferences, it was if anything a bit to the right of the average Republican voter’s preferences.

But Republicans rejected the deal. So what was the headline on an Associated Press analysis of that breakdown in negotiations? “Obama, Republicans Trapped by Inflexible Rhetoric.” A Democratic president who bends over backward to accommodate the other side — or, if you prefer, who leans so far to the right that he’s in danger of falling over — is treated as being just the same as his utterly intransigent opponents. Balance!

Which brings me to those “centrist” fantasies.

Many pundits view taking a position in the middle of the political spectrum as a virtue in itself. I don’t. Wisdom doesn’t necessarily reside in the middle of the road, and I want leaders who do the right thing, not the centrist thing.

But for those who insist that the center is always the place to be, I have an important piece of information: We already have a centrist president. Indeed, Bruce Bartlett, who served as a policy analyst in the Reagan administration, argues that Mr. Obama is in practice a moderate conservative.

Mr. Bartlett has a point. The president, as we’ve seen, was willing, even eager, to strike a budget deal that strongly favored conservative priorities. His health reform was very similar to the reform Mitt Romney installed in Massachusetts. Romneycare, in turn, closely followed the outlines of a plan originally proposed by the right-wing Heritage Foundation. And returning tax rates on high-income Americans to their level during the Roaring Nineties is hardly a socialist proposal.

True, Republicans insist that Mr. Obama is a leftist seeking a government takeover of the economy, but they would, wouldn’t they? The facts, should anyone choose to report them, say otherwise.

So what’s with the buzz about a centrist uprising? As I see it, it’s coming from people who recognize the dysfunctional nature of modern American politics, but refuse, for whatever reason, to acknowledge the one-sided role of Republican extremists in making our system dysfunctional. And it’s not hard to guess at their motivation. After all, pointing out the obvious truth gets you labeled as a shrill partisan, not just from the right, but from the ranks of self-proclaimed centrists.

But making nebulous calls for centrism, like writing news reports that always place equal blame on both parties, is a big cop-out — a cop-out that only encourages more bad behavior. The problem with American politics right now is Republican extremism, and if you’re not willing to say that, you’re helping make that problem worse.

NY Times Published July 27, 2011
By ALINA SIMONE

The Ghost Hunter has Louis Vuitton floor mats, and this I did not expect. He arrives at my building in a customized white Mitsubishi Eclipse with a sound system that’s Madison-Square-Garden-loud and a TV hidden in the dash. It’s less Ghostmobile, more getaway car. I’d forgotten that, esoteric hobbies aside, the Ghost Hunter was born and raised in Brooklyn. And like a lot of guys from Bergen Beach, he loves his car.

It is 10:07 p.m. and we are barreling across the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge to Staten Island. The sky above is as black as devil’s food cake. It’s also the Fourth of July, which says a lot about our respective social lives, the Ghost Hunter’s and mine.

His name is John Lattanzio and he works as a guard at a cemetery not far from where I live. I like to go walking there and often stop at the gate to exchange pleasantries. One day I asked John how his weekend had gone and he told me, with a tired crack of the neck, that he’d had a late night. Ghost hunting.

He dropped this piece of information like it was no big thing, the same way another New Yorker might say he’d spent the night drinking, or at a Fassbinder film retrospective, or sleeping on the sidewalk outside H&M for a shot at the new Lanvin collection. That’s because, I came to learn, John is not a ghost hunter in air quotes. He does not broadcast his exploits by way of blogs or customized license plates. There are no ghost heads stuffed and mounted to his Facebook wall. He is dead serious.

Only animals and babies can naturally detect ghosts, John explains. If you’re an adult of our species, ghost hunting is a highly technical affair.

For the past two and a half years, John told me, he has kept a detailed log book of his ghost hunting activities. Though he does monitor paranormal message boards online for news about prime ghost hunting locales, he’s not much of a joiner, preferring instead to go alone or with close friends. When he offered to take me along sometime, I felt as if I’d been invited to join a secret society, and immediately said yes. Most of these forays take place on the fringes of the city and farther afield — Canarsie, Richmond County, Bensonhurst, the Bell Parkway, Tom’s River, Seaside Heights, Atlantic City …

“Atlantic City?” I interrupted.

“Notice how the windows in casino hotels are always screwed shut?” he asked cryptically. “Suicides.”

Working at the graveyard at night, he said he’s seen orbs, shadow spirits and residuals (apparitions that repeat a certain ritual, say, always playing hacky sack on the same path). Sometimes, he hears children playing in the mausoleums. It was his job that first got him interested in ghost hunting, but there is also a genetic component; his grandmother had a sixth sense, a gift John believes he has inherited.

“I pick up vibes from people,” John tells me as we drive over the bridge. “I can sense if people are hiding something, if people are lying to me.” But tonight I notice John’s Spidey sense is taking the backseat to a whole lot of gear — a single lens reflex camera with flash, an electronic thermometer, a digital recorder, an electromagnetic field reader and a thermal imaging camera, which translates the heat emitted by objects into visible colors. Only animals and babies can naturally detect ghosts, John explains. If you’re an adult of our species, ghost hunting is a highly technical affair.

Tonight’s destination is Wolfe’s Pond Park. Before leaving, I’d looked it up on Wikipedia, just to get a bead on where we were going. “Like much of Staten Island,” the passage casually states, “the park is rumored to be haunted.” According to urban legend, two teenagers died there in the 1970s after crashing their car.

“They walk the paths of the park at night,” John tells me, “calling out for their parents. “Usually around 2 a.m., but some people have seen them earlier.”

I have never been ghost hunting before. I have also never been to Staten Island. Now a silent battle rages within me as to which of these firsts is more exciting.

“When do we get to Staten Island?” I finally ask.

“What?” John says. “We’ve been here for a while.”

I stare out the window at the strip malls and polite-looking houses streaming by on Hylan Boulevard. What was I expecting? Palm trees?

John and I pass a sign for Great Kills Harbor. “Don’t you ever get scared ghost hunting?” I ask him.

“No.”

“Even out at some remote location?”

“No.”

“Where horrible things have supposedly happened to people?”

“No,” he says. “Believe it or not I have a lot of fun. I really do. Besides,” he adds, “working at a graveyard, you see a lot of stuff.” Before I can ask what kind of stuff, we have reached the park and John is stopping the car. Almost immediately, a police officer pulls up alongside us.

“Any problems here?”

“Not at all officer. Just going for a walk,” John chirps. Meanwhile I sit there, nervously, doing my best impression of someone who regularly hangs out at haunted parks in the middle of the night. To my relief, the officer, satisfied, nods and drives away. “Don’t worry, he just thinks we came out here to smoke pot,” John says. “Hey, are you O.K.?” he adds, noticing my worried look.

I assure him that I am. We get out of the car. John hits the auto lock on his key chain. The car beeps. I scream. And with that, we stride forth, firmer in our knowledge of where we both stand.
Angie Wang

I can’t shake my uneasiness as I follow John past the safe perimeter of the last street lamp and into the dark woods. Why can’t I just relax, I chide myself. Maybe it’s because — although I never could find any proof of the mysterious 1970s car crash — bodies have turned up at Wolfe’s Pond Park from time to time, one as recently as last year. The foliage around us is dense and still, and I have to admit: I kind of hope tonight turns out to be the Night of the Dead Dead.

We walk toward the sound of the cold slap of the waves and the distant cannon fire of fireworks booming out across the water. Suddenly, I sense we are not alone. A firecracker goes off and my heart jumps so high, I swear it hits my brainpan. Down by the water are three muscle-shirted guys.

“No bonfires,” one says, scanning the deserted strip of sand. “Nothing’s going on.”

“It’s like the whole holiday just died,” another intones morosely.

“Let’s go to Jersey.”

“If we go to Jersey,” the third says, “it has to be worth it ’cause I have work at seven in the morning.”

John, too busy juggling camera, thermal imaging cellphone and digital recorder to notice, goes right on taking pictures of the dark air around us.

The last time he was here, John tells me, he saw some great orbs. This time, as he points his lens toward a thicket of trees, he says he fears he may be immortalizing a man peeing in the woods. It wouldn’t be the first time; he’s already surprised people playing paintball and having sex.

“O.K. I’m getting a really weird feeling now,” John says, perking up. “Like, that feeling.”

“Did you hear something?” As I am neither an animal nor a baby, the woods remain impenetrable to me.
“No. No E.V.P.s yet.”

“Easy peas?”

“Eee vee pees,” John frowns down at his recorder. “Electronic voice phenomena.”

If it’s weird to apply hard science to something as ephemeral and, O.K., possibly imaginary, as a ghost, then we’ve been living with that incongruity for almost 100 years. Harry Price, who opened the National Laboratory of Psychical Research in 1926 and is widely acknowledged as the father of ghost hunting, was also its first major gearhead. Employing machines as diverse as thermographs, X-rays and “Noctovision” (a kind of infrared television used to see through fog), Mr. Price studied all manner of supernatural peculiarity. But he also used more analog means to test paranormal phenomena, once faithfully enacting a spell on a mountaintop that involved dousing a goat in honey, blood and the scrapings of church bells. The spell, he proved, failed to transform the goat into a boy.

Later I ask John, if ghost hunting doesn’t scare him, then what does?

“Losing people,” he replies. “Losing my friends. Losing my family.” And I wonder if all that elaborate technology, the air ion counters and motion detectors, isn’t just a way to gain the upper hand over that which we can’t control. The knowledge that we are powerless to protect ourselves and those we love from freak accidents and man-made terrors haunts us. Maybe ghost hunting is just a way of reversing the status quo for a few short hours. Surely, the rest of the time, it is the ghosts hunting us.

What scares me, on the other hand, is dying while engaging in needless, thrill-seeking activity. And since these dodgy places are, at the very least, haunted by the kinds of things that create restless spirits — ditches, serial killers, encounters with other ghosts — I am relieved when we head back to the car.

Our next destination is Historic Richmond Town, a “living history village” with buildings dating from the 17th and 18th centuries. If you believe the reports of ghost sightings, Richmond Town is more or less the Mall of America of the spirit realm. There is the ghost of a jilted young woman wandering around the graveyard, accosting potential suitors, and another specter haunting the upstairs window of a house with a green cellar door. The schoolhouse, P.S. 28, is lousy with ghosts, and supposedly so is the old county clerk’s office.

But while Wolfe’s Pond was forbidding at night, Richmond Town totally fails to thrill me. I grew up in the Colonial town of Lexington, Mass., and when your friends’ dads regularly get together to don breeches and shoot at one another with fake muskets, our country’s revolutionary past becomes a lot less ominous.

On the way back to Brooklyn, talk turns to the Syfy channel reality show, Ghost Hunters.

“There’s nothing real about it,” John insists. “They’re all like, ‘Whoa! Did you see that?’ But what do you see? You don’t see nothing!” he continues. “It’s just a buncha Brooklyn guys goin’, ‘Whoa!’”

Still, if he got the call, he would gladly join the cast. “I’d do the ‘Whoa,’” he admits.

After he drops me off, I get online to try to verify the Richmond Town and Wolfe’s Park sightings. Sources discussing ghosts are abundant, but it’s hard to know whom to trust. StrangeUSA.com? Paranormalknowledge.com? UnsolvedMysteries.com? The question of how to fact check a ghost remains a metaphysical one.

A few days later, John arrives at my apartment with his flash drive. It turns out he took more than 200 photos that night in Staten Island. As he loads up the first one and begins to manipulate the exposure settings, I notice that it’s a picture of a Porta-Potty in the Wolfe’s Pond parking lot.

He scrolls through the images, reducing them to skeletal X-rays by maximizing the contrast, then scrutinizing each one for suspicious blurs or other incongruities. An hour later, John finally spots a ghost; the upper half of what appears to be a man’s face in the window of the old tin shop in Historic Richmond Town. In a similar photo, taken a minute later, the mysterious figure is gone.

“How about that?” John says, excitedly toggling back and forth between the two images. I nod, hoping he’s not picking up a vibe from me. If I said I believed this was a ghost, John’s sixth sense would tell him I was lying. But I don’t completely not believe it, either. That small part of me is grateful that the hunt has migrated to the digital realm. I can deal with a smudge in a photograph. A confused goat, covered in honey, blood and the scrapings of church bells? Now that’s scary.