By FRANK BRUNI
NY Times Published: November 12, 2011

SILVIO BERLUSCONI isn’t comfortable with English. Brett Ratner, I’m guessing, hasn’t mastered Italian. What a pity. They’d probably get along like a palazzo on fire.

They could thumb-wrestle for first dibs to hit on the cocktail waitress. Collaborate on an Italian-English dictionary of homophobic slurs. Maybe shoot a movie: “Rush Hour 4: Silvio Drives Italy Off a Cliff.” Can’t you just see him, taut face behind the wheel of a Lamborghini tumbling toward the Adriatic? Unless, that is, Ratner got a better product-placement deal from Toyota. Then Berlusconi would have to plummet in a Prius.

Neither man is riding so high right now, after a week in which Berlusconi agreed to let go of the Italian government and Ratner surrendered the Oscars, which he was supposed to help produce. And there’s undeniable satisfaction in that.

But a less pleasant, queasy feeling lingers. To ponder the Italian potentate and the Hollywood reprobate is to be reacquainted with how crudely, brashly or blindly many of the most successful and self-important people behave. And not all of them get much of a comeuppance, at least not for a good long while.

Shelley said that power “pollutes whate’er it touches.” Edmund Burke said that it rids its possessors of “every humane and gentle virtue.” Grandma Bruni said that big shots get big heads. I say that a stretch of good poll numbers have really swollen Herman Cain’s.

During the Republican debate on Wednesday, I found him more unsettling than Rick Perry, whose poignant search for syllables wasn’t entirely unlike my pathetic search for my keys. He should try looking between the couch cushions.

Cain had no problem finding syllables. True, most of them were nine, nine and nine, but he also spat out “Princess Nancy” without hesitation, hurling an insult at Nancy Pelosi that was childish and in poor taste.

How is it that he could be batting back charges of sexual harassment and yet gratuitously go after the highest-ranking woman in Congress — and choose sexist language to boot? As if following Berlusconi’s lead, Cain travels to the frontier where defiance meets delirium.

He sort-of kind-of apologized for the Pelosi dig, just as he sort-of kind-of apologized for that smoky Web ad in which his chief of staff pointed the way toward emphysema and lung cancer. There’s a pattern here, the pattern of a man so puffed up that he doesn’t pause to consider whom he might offend, and doesn’t seem to care. As the debate wound down, word went out: any additional women who stepped forward with accusations against Cain could expect fierce, Swift Boat reprisal. And the next day, he actually made an Anita Hill joke, wondering aloud if he’d get her endorsement.

Gall can be one of ambition’s greatest handmaidens. The man who never questions himself never doubts his due. Just a few lecterns away from Cain stood Newt Gingrich, whose every vocal inflection and facial expression dripped derision for the electoral process and its occasional insistence that he squeeze his vast intellect into a 30-second box. Health care in half a minute? How dare we.

Of course he has a point, but he also has nerve, this onetime Clinton condemner who did his own philandering, this Roman Catholic-come-lately who is on his third wife, the one with the bias for Tiffany’s blue. To condescend and cast judgment from a perch like that requires real hubris.

There’s been a lot of it going around lately, though not always in such ostentatious form. Sometimes it’s quieter. Almost always it encourages those in its grip to exempt themselves from the usual rules and responsibilities.

Does that explain Joe Paterno? Was his stature at Penn State so mythic and his mission so vaunted that he didn’t think he needed to bother himself with the possibility of child sexual abuse — the bureaucrats could surely deal with it — and didn’t worry that passing the buck might come back to haunt him? From what I can tell he doesn’t share Berulsconi’s boorishness or rival Gingrich’s talent for hypocrisy, but like them he has been living in his own rarefied world.

And we frequently contribute to that sort of isolation and delusion. Even now Paterno’s fans are rallying around him, loath to let the legend go.

We give our adulation too unreservedly. We thrill too readily to a larger-than-life character’s swagger, correctly understanding that outsize confidence can assist extraordinary accomplishment and then losing sight of the line between headstrong and head case. I think that’s what Cain’s dogged supporters have done.

Or we just ignore all the ugly stuff as long as someone is promising something useful. When Academy Awards officials turned to Ratner, they knew what they were getting. Throughout much of Hollywood he had a reputation as a crass operator overinvested in his macho, party-animal image. But his “Rush Hour” and “X-Men” movies had made gazillions. To the academy he represented the hope of reaching a younger, less stodgy audience.

Then he took that cherished image of his out for too public a spin. At a screening for his newest movie, “Tower Heist,” he said that as a director he didn’t put much stock in rehearsals, which were for homosexuals. Except he didn’t say homosexuals.

His virility clearly cresting, he segued into an appearance on Howard Stern’s radio show, where he bragged about the size of his testicles, the altitude of his sperm count and all the women he had been with, his language as misogynistic as it was puerile. Suddenly he was Oscars arsenic, though I’m sure there’s a lovely leotard awaiting him on “Dancing with the Stars.”

In my fantasies he does a tango with Berlusconi, who last year tried to make light of charges that he had been involved with a 17-year-old girl by saying, “It’s better to be passionate about beautiful women than to be gay.”

If only he had been half as passionate about the welfare of Italy. He used his many years as the country’s prime minister, which are at long last coming to an end, to do largely as he pleased, his power and wealth feeding each other and both bankrolling a hedonism he crowed and crowed about.

Italians put up with it longer than many other people would have. But we’d be lying and fooling ourselves if we denied our own indulgence of such shamelessness.

By WILLIAM DERESIEWICZ
NY Times Published: November 12, 2011

EVER since I moved three years ago to Portland, Ore., that hotbed of all things hipster, I’ve been trying to get a handle on today’s youth culture. The style is easy enough to describe — the skinny pants, the retro hats, the wall-to-wall tattoos. But style is superficial. The question is, what’s underneath? What idea of life? What stance with respect to the world?

Previous youth cultures — beatniks, hippies, punks, slackers — could be characterized by two related things: the emotion or affect they valorized and the social form they envisioned. For the hippies, the emotion was love: love-ins, free love, the Summer of Love, all you need is love. The social form was utopia, understood in collective terms: the commune, the music festival, the liberation movement.

The beatniks aimed at ecstasy, embodied as a social form in individual transcendence. Theirs was a culture of jazz, with its spontaneity; of marijuana, arresting time and flooding the soul with pleasure (this was before the substance became the background drug of every youth culture); of flight, on the road, to the West; of the quest for the perfect moment.

The punks were all about rage, their social program nihilistic anarchy. “Get pissed,” Johnny Rotten sang. “Destroy.” Hip-hop, punk’s younger brother, was all about rage and nihilism, too, at least until it turned to a vision of individual aggrandizement.

As for the slackers of the late ’80s and early ’90s (Generation X, grunge music, the fiction of David Foster Wallace), their affect ran to apathy and angst, a sense of aimlessness and pointlessness. Whatever. That they had no social vision was precisely what their social vision was: a defensive withdrawal from all commitment as inherently phony.

So what’s the affect of today’s youth culture? Not just the hipsters, but the Millennial Generation as a whole, people born between the late ’70s and the mid-’90s, more or less — of whom the hipsters are a lot more representative than most of them care to admit. The thing that strikes me most about them is how nice they are: polite, pleasant, moderate, earnest, friendly. Rock ’n’ rollers once were snarling rebels or chest-beating egomaniacs. Now the presentation is low-key, self-deprecating, post-ironic, eco-friendly. When Vampire Weekend appeared on “The Colbert Report” last year to plug their album “Contra,” the host asked them, in view of the title, what they were against. “Closed-mindedness,” they said.

According to one of my students at Yale, where I taught English in the last decade, a colleague of mine would tell his students that they belonged to a “post-emotional” generation. No anger, no edge, no ego.

What is this about? A rejection of culture-war strife? A principled desire to live more lightly on the planet? A matter of how they were raised — everybody’s special and everybody’s point of view is valid and everybody’s feelings should be taken care of?

Perhaps a bit of each, but mainly, I think, something else. The millennial affect is the affect of the salesman. Consider the other side of the equation, the Millennials’ characteristic social form. Here’s what I see around me, in the city and the culture: food carts, 20-somethings selling wallets made from recycled plastic bags, boutique pickle companies, techie start-ups, Kickstarter, urban-farming supply stores and bottled water that wants to save the planet.

Today’s ideal social form is not the commune or the movement or even the individual creator as such; it’s the small business. Every artistic or moral aspiration — music, food, good works, what have you — is expressed in those terms.

Call it Generation Sell.

Bands are still bands, but now they’re little businesses, as well: self-produced, self-published, self-managed. When I hear from young people who want to get off the careerist treadmill and do something meaningful, they talk, most often, about opening a restaurant. Nonprofits are still hip, but students don’t dream about joining one, they dream about starting one. In any case, what’s really hip is social entrepreneurship — companies that try to make money responsibly, then give it all away.

It’s striking. Forty years ago, even 20 years ago, a young person’s first thought, or even second or third thought, was certainly not to start a business. That was selling out — an idea that has rather tellingly disappeared from our vocabulary. Where did it come from, this change? Less Reaganism, as a former student suggested to me, than Clintonism — the heroic age of dot-com entrepreneurship that emerged during the Millennials’ childhood and youth. Add a distrust of large organizations, including government, as well as the sense, a legacy of the last decade, that it’s every man for himself.

Because this isn’t only them. The small business is the idealized social form of our time. Our culture hero is not the artist or reformer, not the saint or scientist, but the entrepreneur. (Think of Steve Jobs, our new deity.) Autonomy, adventure, imagination: entrepreneurship comprehends all this and more for us. The characteristic art form of our age may be the business plan.

AND that, I think, is the real meaning of the Millennial affect — which is, like the entrepreneurial ideal, essentially everyone’s now. Today’s polite, pleasant personality is, above all, a commercial personality. It is the salesman’s smile and hearty handshake, because the customer is always right and you should always keep the customer happy. If you want to get ahead, said Benjamin Franklin, the original business guru, make yourself pleasing to others.

I was contacted recently by a young man who plans to start a Web site to promote the need for reading and reflection to people of his generation. Not just promote it, though, of course, but market it. When he asked me for advice, I suggested he begin by pointing out the superficiality of so much social media. Well, he said, I agree with that idea, that’s a big premise of what I’m trying to do, but I wouldn’t want to come across as negative, because that turns people off. If they think you’re criticizing them, they won’t want to buy what you’re selling.

That kind of thinking is precisely what I’m talking about, what lies behind the bland, inoffensive, smile-and-a-shoeshine personality — the stay-positive, other-directed, I’ll-be-whoever-you-want-me-to-be personality — that everybody has today. Yes, we’re vicious, anonymously, on the comment threads of public Web sites, but when we speak in our own names, on Facebook and so forth, we’re strenuously cheerful, conciliatory, well-groomed. (In fact, one of the reasons we’re so vicious, I’m convinced, is to relieve the psychic pressure of all that affability.) They say that people in Hollywood are always nice to everyone they meet, in that famously fake Hollywood way, because they’re never certain whom they might be dealing with — it could be somebody who’s more important than they realize, or at least, somebody who might become important down the road.

Well, we’re all in showbiz now, walking on eggshells, relentlessly tending our customer base. We’re all selling something today, because even if we aren’t literally selling something (though thanks to the Internet as well as the entrepreneurial ideal, more and more of us are), we’re always selling ourselves. We use social media to create a product — to create a brand — and the product is us. We treat ourselves like little businesses, something to be managed and promoted.

The self today is an entrepreneurial self, a self that’s packaged to be sold.

In “Bobos in Paradise,” David Brooks articulated the phenomenon of the bourgeois bohemians, a class that merges respectable incomes with countercultural attitudes. Where, I wondered recently, do the real bohemians — the hipsters, in other words — fit into the scheme? Some are just bobos in training; others are destined to remain bohemians for life. But whatever their individual trajectories, hipsters possess a relationship to mainstream society that is radically different from that of their youth-culture forebears, and they have the bobos to thank. Indeed, they have them to thank for their very existence.

The rise of the bobos in the 1990s (when creativity became lucrative and money became cool) put a new kind of pressure on the true bohemians. Now they no longer stood in opposition to mainstream culture, as the beatniks did to the company men or the slackers did to the business boys. Now they looked exactly like it. Mainstream culture had come to them, and it drew them to itself. Et voilà, the hipster. Instead of having to get a haircut and a new wardrobe, not to mention a new set of friends, if you wanted to go over to the man, you just kept doing what you were doing, at gradually higher price points. Hence the hipster as Bobo-in-training, bohemia merging imperceptibly with the bourgeoisie.

Hipsters and bobos are symbiotic. I should know; I’m a bobo in a hipster-bobo neighborhood — which is pretty much what I was looking for when I moved to Portland in the first place. We’re all into organic food and progressive politics; we just have different relationships to the commodities through which those attitudes are expressed. Hipsters create bobo culture. They make or sell or serve, or simply pioneer, what bobos buy. Try to picture Allen Ginsberg having a chat with Don Draper, across the counter at the local coffeehouse, about the latest Lady Gaga video, and you’ll realize how far we’ve come.

All this is why, unlike those of previous youth cultures, the hipster ethos contains no element of rebellion, rejection or dissent — remarkably so, given that countercultural opposition would seem to be essential to the very idea of youth culture. That may in turn be why the hipster has proved to be so durable. The heyday of the hippies lasted for all of about two years. The punks and slackers held the stage for little more than half a decade each. That’s the nature of rebellion: it needs to keep on happening. The punks rejected the mainstream, but they also rejected the previous rejection, hippiedom itself — which, by the late ’70s, was something that old people (i.e. 28-year-olds) were into. But hipsters, who’ve been around for 15 years or so, appear to have become a durable part of our cultural configuration.

Or maybe not. These movements always have an economic substrate. The beatniks and hippies — love, ecstasy, transcendence, utopia — were products of the postwar boom. The punks and slackers and devotees of hip-hop — rage, angst, nihilism, withdrawal — arose within the long stagnation that lasted from the early ’70s to the early ’90s. The hipsters were born in the dot-com boom and flourished in the real estate bubble.

Affability is a commercial virtue, but it is also the affect of people who feel themselves to be living in a fundamentally agreeable society. Already, the makings of a new youth culture may be locking into place.

Invocation of my Demon Brother (1969)

November 13, 2011 through February 27, 2011

MOCA

Richard Perry/The New York Times

Discarded plastic bottles account for about 30 percent of the Grand Canyon park’s waste stream, according to the park service.

By FELICITY BARRINGER
NY Times Published: November 9, 2011

Weary of plastic litter, Grand Canyon National Park officials were in the final stages of imposing a ban on the sale of disposable water bottles in the Grand Canyon late last year when the nation’s parks chief abruptly blocked the plan after conversations with Coca-Cola, a major donor to the National Park Foundation.

Stephen P. Martin, the architect of the plan and the top parks official at the Grand Canyon, said his superiors told him two weeks before its Jan. 1 start date that Coca-Cola, which distributes water under the Dasani brand and has donated more than $13 million to the parks, had registered its concerns about the bottle ban through the foundation, and that the project was being tabled. His account was confirmed by park, foundation and company officials.

A spokesman for the National Park Service, David Barna, said it was Jon Jarvis, the top federal parks official, who made the “decision to put it on hold until we can get more information.” He added that “reducing and eliminating disposable plastic bottles is one element of our green plan. This is a process, and we are at the beginning of it.”

Mr. Martin, a 35-year veteran of the park service who had risen to the No. 2 post in 2003, was disheartened by the outcome. “That was upsetting news because of what I felt were ethical issues surrounding the idea of being influenced unduly by business,” Mr. Martin said in an interview. “It was even more of a concern because we had worked with all the people who would be truly affected in their sales and bottom line, and they accepted it.”

Neil J. Mulholland, president of the foundation, said that a representative of Coca-Cola had reached out to him late in the process to inquire about the reasons for the water bottle ban and how it would work.

“There was not an overt statement made to me that they objected to the ban,” Mr. Mulholland said, adding, “There was never anything inferred by Coke that if this ban happens, we’re losing their support.” The foundation president noted in the interview that Coca-Cola had recently donated $80,000 for a recycling program on the Mall in Washington.

A spokeswoman for Coca-Cola Refreshments USA, Susan Stribling, said the company would rather help address the plastic litter problem by increasing the availability of recycling programs. “Banning anything is never the right answer,” she said. “If you do that, you don’t necessarily address the problem.” She also characterized the bottle ban as limiting personal choice. “You’re not allowing people to decide what they want to eat and drink and consume,” she said.

In seeking the ban, the Grand Canyon park, under Mr. Martin’s direction from 2006 until his retirement last December, was following the example of Zion National Park, in Utah, which had instituted a similar program to great acclaim in 2008. The park service gave it an environmental achievement award in 2009 for eliminating 60,000 plastic bottles from the park in its first year.

Discarded plastic bottles account for about 30 percent of the park’s total waste stream, according to the park service. Mr. Martin said the bottles are “the single biggest source of trash” found inside the canyon.

Mr. Martin said he got approval to proceed with implementing the ban after he briefed his superiors in both the Denver regional office and Washington headquarters in the spring of 2010. Research showed that the park sold about $400,000 worth of bottled water in a given year. The planned ban at the Grand Canyon would have covered only smaller bottles and would not have applied to other beverages such as soda or juices.

In preparation, the park and its contracted concessionaires installed more water “filling stations” for reusable bottles at a cost of about $300,000, according to information provided by the park service to Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, an environmental group based in Washington that has worked to uncover the underlying reasons for the abrupt turn-around on the ban.

Senior park officials considered having Mr. Jarvis announce the ban to a meeting of the Society of Environmental Journalists in the fall of 2010. “From a media standpoint, we see this as good news, it fits perfectly into Jon’s sustainability goals,” Mr. Barna wrote in an internal park service e-mail. He concluded, “We are aware that others (Nestle, etc.) may not be thrilled at this decision but other than that, are there any downsides?”

In mid-December, Mr. Martin received a telephone call and an e-mail from his immediate boss, John Wessels, the Intermountain regional director for the park service, with news that the ban was being postponed indefinitely.

Mr. Jarvis said that he had not heard of the ban until Nov. 17, and felt that an action by Grand Canyon park would have more impact than Zion’s. He added: “My decision to hold off the ban was not influenced by Coke, but rather the service-wide implications to our concessions contracts, and frankly the concern for public safety in a desert park.”

The decision was laid out in an e-mail by Jo A. Pendry, then chief of commercial services for the park service, who explained that during a Dec. 13 meeting, Mr. Jarvis “reiterated his decision to have the Grand Canyon hold off on implementation” until “we have hosted a meeting with the major producers of bottled water.”

She also wrote that Mr. Jarvis expected that Mr. Wessels would “touch base with the N.P.F./Coke, and he asked that I get in touch with you to see where you are with making that contact.”

The N.P.F. refers to the acronym for the nonprofit foundation, which was chartered by Congress to generate individual and corporate private donations to the national parks.

The e-mails were provided to The New York Times by a current park service employee concerned about the handling of the bottle ban. The employee declined to be identified because he does not have permission to speak publicly on the subject.

PEER, the public employees’ group, filed a Freedom of Information Act request in August seeking documents that could shed light on the decision, but only two documents — letters between Mr. Martin and representatives of the park concessionaire Xanterra — were released, said Jeff Ruch, the group’s president, who is weighing a lawsuit.

Asked why Mr. Mulholland, the president of the foundation, had been involved in the decision to table the ban, Mr. Barna, the park service spokesman, said, “He’s a partner, and he represents a lot of people who do good things in the parks. He’s a way for people to get introductions within the park service.”

Mr. Barna quickly added that he did not mean that donors could buy access.

For his part, Mr. Mulholland said he had no qualms about entertaining Coca-Cola’s questions and concerns. “I don’t feel conflicted, because the park service does a very good job of policing themselves and adhering to their standards,” he said.

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Joe Frazier is directed to the ropes by referee Arthur Mercante after decking Muhammad Ali in a 1971 title fight. (AP Photo / March 8, 1971)

By Bill Dwyre, Los Angeles Times
November 8, 2011

Joe Frazier, the heavyweight boxing champion who in 1971 became the first fighter to defeat Muhammad Ali, then lost two epic rematches including a ferocious battle known as the “Thrilla in Manila,” died Monday night. He was 67.

Smokin’ Joe, as he was known, died in Philadelphia, said his manager, Leslie Wolff. He had liver cancer.

It was a golden age of heavyweight boxing in the 1970s, when fight fans filled massive arenas and boosted the sport’s television ratings to watch the likes of Ali and Frazier and George Foreman, Jerry Quarry and Ken Norton.

Photos: Joe Frazier through the years

In his 37 professional fights, Frazier won 32 times — 27 by knockout — and lost only four, with one draw. But he never really accepted his 1-2 record against Ali.

“I whupped him three times,” Frazier said many times over the years.

They met for the first time on March 8, 1971, in New York’s Madison Square Garden, with each fighter guaranteed $2.5 million. Ali, then 31-0, had been stripped of his heavyweight titles when, as Cassius Clay, he refused to be inducted into the military after being drafted for the Vietnam War. Frazier, at 26-0, had captured the title of undisputed heavyweight champion in 1970 with a technical knockout of Jimmy Ellis.

It was a brutal battle, rated by many as the “fight of the century” and considered the best boxing match of all time at any weight. When Frazier knocked Ali down in the 15th and final round and won on points, both received rave reviews for their performances. Both also went immediately to the hospital.

Before they could be paired again in the ring, Frazier defended his title four times, most notably on Jan. 22, 1973, against Foreman in Kingston, Jamaica.

Even the burly, fearsome-looking Foreman, who was 4 inches taller, admitted that the thought of getting into the ring with the brawling fireplug Frazier frightened him.

“Every time he swung at me,” Foreman said, “it scared five years out of my life.”

Nevertheless, in the second round, Foreman caught Frazier with a right uppercut that sent the fighter from Philadelphia to the canvas.

Sitting ringside for the boxing telecast was announcer Howard Cosell, by now internationally known for his boisterous and opinionated broadcast style. When Frazier, the champion, hit the deck, Cosell stole the moment and the show with his dramatic bellowing of the call:

“DOWN GOES FRAZIER! DOWN GOES FRAZIER! DOWN GOES FRAZIER!”

It was as if he was calling an airplane crash rather than a boxing match. It not only stuck with Frazier, who got to his feet too late to avoid being counted out, but it is a mocking call to this day among boxing fans for all such spectacular knockdowns.

After Foreman took Frazier’s title away, Frazier fought Ali twice more, losing in a more subdued battle in the Garden in 1974, when Ali kept Frazier away more effectively with holding and clinching, and a year later, after Ali had gotten his title back by beating Foreman in Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo).

It was for this third match, on Oct. 1, 1975, in Quezon City, the Philippines, that Ali predicted he would have an easy time with Frazier. In the pre-fight promotions for what was dubbed the “Thrilla in Manila,” Ali called Frazier an “Uncle Tom” and a “gorilla” and repeatedly ridiculed him. The fight was anything but easy, and Ali later likened it to being “the closest thing to dying.” By the 14th round, both having hit and been hit too many times to count, Frazier’s eyes were nearly swollen shut and he couldn’t see Ali’s punches, even though he had stood in and flailed away for several rounds right through his near-blindness.

Finally, after the 14th round, his veteran trainer, Eddie Futch, over loud protests from Frazier, threw in the towel to end the fight.

“Sit down, son,” Futch told Frazier. “It’s all over. Nobody will ever forget what you did here today.”

Frazier and Ali had fought 41 rounds and served up a boxing trilogy for the ages.

Frazier fought only two more times. In 1976, he lost to Foreman in a fifth-round knockout, announced his retirement, then finished for good in 1981 after a 10-round draw with Floyd Cummings.

Joseph William Frazier was born Jan. 12, 1944, in Beaufort, S.C. He was the youngest of 12 surviving children of Rubin and Dolly Frazier and lived his early life on a farm, where his parents worked as sharecroppers.

He was inspired to think about being a boxer when somebody told him he was built like a young Joe Louis, and when he was 15, he moved north to Philadelphia to stay with relatives and find work. One of his first jobs was in a slaughterhouse, where he would pummel the hanging slabs of beef for exercise. Years later, Sylvester Stallone borrowed from that scene for his “Rocky” movies.

Frazier worked his way through the ranks of local Golden Gloves competition in Philadelphia and lost only once as an amateur, to Buster Mathis, who beat him out of the heavyweight spot on the U.S. Olympic team for the 1964 Summer Games in Tokyo. But Mathis was injured before the Games, Frazier won the spot back and took home a gold medal.

After his boxing career ended, Frazier purchased a gym in Philadelphia, where he lived in his later years. Along the way, he sang with a group called the Knockouts and had a clothing brand, a restaurant and a limousine service. He dabbled in investments and real estate.

The tension between Ali and Frazier remained for decades. Frazier could not forget the taunts and the insults — Ali always said they were nothing more than fight promotion hype — and when Frazier was interviewed shortly after Ali, shaking and feeble from dementia and Parkinson’s disease, lighted the torch to begin the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta, he said he wished Ali had “fallen into the fire.”

But in an interview in Jet magazine later that year, and in some subsequent interviews, an aging Frazier said he no longer held a grudge.

“It’s like we were fighting the Vietnam War,” he said. “We should meet and hug.”

Frazier, who was divorced from his wife, Florence, is survived by 11 children. His son Marvis was a heavyweight contender in the 1980s, and daughter Jacqui Frazier-Lyde fought and lost to Ali’s daughter Laila in 2001.

Muhammad Ali after a left hook from Joe Frazier, above right, in the 15th round of their title fight in 1971 at Madison Square Garden, won by Frazier

By DAVE ANDERSON
NY Times Published: November 7, 2011

Some people mean more together than they do apart, whatever the stage. Churchill and Hitler. Bogart and Bacall. Ali and Frazier. And for all the deserved accolades for Muhammad Ali, I’ve always believed that each at his best, Joe Frazier, who died Monday night at age 67, was the better fighter. And the better man.

After both entered the Madison Square Garden ring undefeated in 1971 for what was called the Fight of the Century, Frazier flattened Ali with a left hook and earned a unanimous and unquestioned 15-round decision that Ali didn’t wait to hear. His jaw swollen, he hurried out of the ring on the way to a nearby hospital. He knew who had won.

The Thrilla in Manila in 1975 was awarded to Ali when Frazier’s trainer, Eddie Futch, wouldn’t let him answer the bell for the 15th round because “he couldn’t see the right hands coming” out of his closed left eye, but Frazier soon talked freely in the interview area. When an exhausted Ali finally arrived, he described their epic in brutality as “next to death.”

That evening, at a party in an old Filipino palace, Ali, his ribs battered, walked stiffly and sat stiffly, painfully offering a finger or two instead of shaking hands.

At his hotel, Frazier sang and danced. Seeing them both, if you didn’t know what had happened in the fight, you had to think Frazier was the winner.

Not long after that, Ali had a party for his autobiography at the Rainbow Room high in Rockefeller Center. Frazier was invited, but would he show up?

For years, Ali had insulted Frazier, calling him a “gorilla” and “stupid.” Frazier seethed; he once grappled with Ali briefly — and seriously — in a television studio before they were separated. But the night of the book party, he greeted Ali with a smile and “Hiya, champ” — the ultimate compliment from one boxer to another. Class.

To me, Joe Frazier won that night, too.

But the Joe Frazier I’ll always remember wasn’t in a boxing ring or at a book party. Soon after the Garden triumph, he was back home in Beaufort, S.C., where, one of 12 children, he had grown up picking vegetables for 15 cents a crate when not helping his father, a handyman who lost his left arm in an auto accident.

“I was his left arm,” he said.

Ten years earlier, Joe had left Beaufort with about $200 in his pocket on a Greyhound bus bound for New York and a better life. He soon settled in Philadelphia, where he sometimes worked in a meat locker, battering a side of beef as if it were a punching bag — the inspiration for a scene in the “Rocky” movie.

Now, as the undisputed heavyweight champion who had earned $2.5 million at the Garden, he had returned to Beaufort in a maroon Cadillac limousine. He was there to buy a new-home site for his 62-year-old mother. “Dolly Frazier, the mother of the champ,” she introduced herself. “How sweet it is.”

That day they drove over to a nearby farm: “Trask and Sons, Fancy Vegetables,” where Mrs. Frazier had picked radishes. “Four lots right here,” said the land owner, Harold Trask, known as Beanie. “At $1,500 a lot, that’s a good price. Or if you want twice as much property, from the corner down to that bend there, it’s $3,000 an acre. And I’ll sell you four acres for $9,000.”

Joe and his mother listened and thanked Trask for his offer. On their way back to her shingled home between drooping moss trees, she said: “It’s nice, high land. No swamps. And we owe him first choice for showing it to us.”

“You say give him first choice, Momma,” Joe said, his voice rising, “but he can’t be first choice if he don’t give the right price. He ain’t giving you nothin’. He’s selling it to you. He ain’t giving you nothin’ at all.”

Back in his mother’s home, Joe talked about how he had watched fights on their little television. “Sugar Ray, Hurricane Jackson, Floyd Patterson,” he said. “Joe Louis was my idol. Down in the South, the black goes for the black.” But soon he was talking about Trask’s land offer.

“He’s talking that white talk,” Joe said. “He was saying that he wouldn’t mind if I came over to his house for a cup of coffee. And tell me that I could come back down and live. I’ll forgive, but I’ll never forget.”

I never learned what happened with that land deal for his mother, but Joe Frazier sure won the conversation about it. The next day, South Carolina state troopers escorted him in a high-speed motorcade to Columbia, S.C., where he was the first black man to address the State Legislature since the Civil War. Joe won that day, too. Just as he won at the Garden and “won” in Manila. Won that book party, too.

The record shows that Joe Frazier lost four fights — two against Ali (a mostly forgotten 12-round decision in a nontitle fight between their two classics) and two knockouts by George Foreman. But to me, somehow he always won.

Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times

Part of the job for this officer, shown standing with a backpack, is looking for “lush workers.”

By MICHAEL WILSON
Published: November 4, 2011

In the world of crime statistics, there is a certain subsection of victim on the city subways: a reveler who, overserved during a night on the town, nods off on a train. He wakes with a flapping, precision-cut hole in his trousers and cool, thin air where his wallet used to be.

This victim shakes his head in self-disgust, joining the besotted ranks to fall prey to a brand of criminal as old and established below the streets as a twisted root.

The police, long ago, coined a name for this criminal. The lush worker.

“Do they still exist?” said Lt. Kevin Callaghan, a 20-year veteran of the New York Police Department. “Yes.”

The lush worker sounds like a monster in a bedtime story, a stooped creature with a razor blade in one stealthy hand. Don’t drink, children, or the Lush Worker will get you.

But he is actually a middle-aged or older man who has been doing this for a very long time. And he is a fading breed.

“It’s like a lost art,” the lieutenant said. “It’s all old-school guys who cut the pocket. They die off.” And they do not seem to be replacing themselves, he said. “It’s like the TV repairman.”

Lush workers date back at least to the beginning of the last century, their ilk cited in newspaper crime stories like one in The New York Times in 1922, describing “one who picks the pockets of the intoxicated. He is the old ‘drunk roller’ under a new name.” While the term technically applies to anyone who steals from a drunken person, most police officers reserve it for a special kind of thief who uses straight-edge razors found in any hardware store.

The Police Department does not have a rough estimate of how many lush workers are out working lushes.

It offers an exact number: 109.

That is far fewer than there once were. What do we know of these 109 criminals? All but two are men, and overwhelmingly middle-aged or older, some born in 1947, 1943, 1938 and even, in one case, 1931.

They have all been arrested for lush working, or “lushing,” since 2006. They are persistent. One suspect arrested last weekend had 37 previous arrests under his belt — where, by the way, these guys like to hide razors, or in their hat brims or shoes or wallets.

And they are busy. “It happens every weekend,” said Officer James Rudolph with the police transit bureau that covers Manhattan below 34th Street, where many a young man goes to celebrate the weekend to excess.

“They’ll nudge them and see how incoherent they really are,” Officer Rudolph said. Then out comes the tool of the trade. “It’s unbelievable they don’t cut the person’s leg wide open. They’re like surgeons with a razor blade, for God’s sake.”

His commanding officer, Capt. Paul Rasa, said there had been 15 arrests of lush workers in that downtown district this year, and 35 complaints, which represent 28 percent of all the downtown transit grand larcenies in 2011.

This does not count unreported thefts. Victims, after all, are perhaps understandably ashamed to come forward to report being drunk enough to not have noticed the filleting of their pants by a man born in 1931.

“I had a guy take a swing at me once,” Lieutenant Callaghan said, recalling waking a construction worker with newly ventilated jeans. “He thought I robbed him.”

The victim of the theft on Sunday was 23 years old and referred to in a criminal complaint only as “a sleeping male.” The suspect, with 37 previous arrests, Robert Bookard, 48, is accused of cutting the man’s pocket and taking cash in a subway at the Brooklyn Bridge station at 3:40 a.m. A plainclothes officer saw the act and arrested him, finding three razor blades.

And yet, as Lieutenant Callaghan put it, “the cutting is a trade that’s going extinct.” Why? Pick a theory. Today’s subway robber is of the snatch-an-iWhatever-and-run variety that has recently driven up transit crime rates. With victims displaying $500 iPads in plain view, or passed out with a phone in their hand, why bother with a razor and a wallet?

Maybe the cutting is just too difficult. Officer Rudolph believes the good ones practice at home with mannequins.

And maybe the old thieves just don’t have anyone to teach.

The police keep track of who among the 109 is in jail, and when they are released. Lieutenant Callaghan sounds almost pleased to notice a familiar face on the train.

“I say, ‘Oh, you’re back,’ ” he said. “ ‘Good to see you.’ ”

ugo la pietra

By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Times Published: November 6, 2011

For decades the story of technology has been dominated, in the popular mind and to a large extent in reality, by computing and the things you can do with it. Moore’s Law — in which the price of computing power falls roughly 50 percent every 18 months — has powered an ever-expanding range of applications, from faxes to Facebook.

Our mastery of the material world, on the other hand, has advanced much more slowly. The sources of energy, the way we move stuff around, are much the same as they were a generation ago.

But that may be about to change. We are, or at least we should be, on the cusp of an energy transformation, driven by the rapidly falling cost of solar power. That’s right, solar power.

If that surprises you, if you still think of solar power as some kind of hippie fantasy, blame our fossilized political system, in which fossil fuel producers have both powerful political allies and a powerful propaganda machine that denigrates alternatives.

Speaking of propaganda: Before I get to solar, let’s talk briefly about hydraulic fracturing, a k a fracking.

Fracking — injecting high-pressure fluid into rocks deep underground, inducing the release of fossil fuels — is an impressive technology. But it’s also a technology that imposes large costs on the public. We know that it produces toxic (and radioactive) wastewater that contaminates drinking water; there is reason to suspect, despite industry denials, that it also contaminates groundwater; and the heavy trucking required for fracking inflicts major damage on roads.

Economics 101 tells us that an industry imposing large costs on third parties should be required to “internalize” those costs — that is, to pay for the damage it inflicts, treating that damage as a cost of production. Fracking might still be worth doing given those costs. But no industry should be held harmless from its impacts on the environment and the nation’s infrastructure.

Yet what the industry and its defenders demand is, of course, precisely that it be let off the hook for the damage it causes. Why? Because we need that energy! For example, the industry-backed organization energyfromshale.org declares that “there are only two sides in the debate: those who want our oil and natural resources developed in a safe and responsible way; and those who don’t want our oil and natural gas resources developed at all.”

So it’s worth pointing out that special treatment for fracking makes a mockery of free-market principles. Pro-fracking politicians claim to be against subsidies, yet letting an industry impose costs without paying compensation is in effect a huge subsidy. They say they oppose having the government “pick winners,” yet they demand special treatment for this industry precisely because they claim it will be a winner.

And now for something completely different: the success story you haven’t heard about.

These days, mention solar power and you’ll probably hear cries of “Solyndra!” Republicans have tried to make the failed solar panel company both a symbol of government waste — although claims of a major scandal are nonsense — and a stick with which to beat renewable energy.

But Solyndra’s failure was actually caused by technological success: the price of solar panels is dropping fast, and Solyndra couldn’t keep up with the competition. In fact, progress in solar panels has been so dramatic and sustained that, as a blog post at Scientific American put it, “there’s now frequent talk of a ‘Moore’s law’ in solar energy,” with prices adjusted for inflation falling around 7 percent a year.

This has already led to rapid growth in solar installations, but even more change may be just around the corner. If the downward trend continues — and if anything it seems to be accelerating — we’re just a few years from the point at which electricity from solar panels becomes cheaper than electricity generated by burning coal.

And if we priced coal-fired power right, taking into account the huge health and other costs it imposes, it’s likely that we would already have passed that tipping point.

But will our political system delay the energy transformation now within reach?

Let’s face it: a large part of our political class, including essentially the entire G.O.P., is deeply invested in an energy sector dominated by fossil fuels, and actively hostile to alternatives. This political class will do everything it can to ensure subsidies for the extraction and use of fossil fuels, directly with taxpayers’ money and indirectly by letting the industry off the hook for environmental costs, while ridiculing technologies like solar.

So what you need to know is that nothing you hear from these people is true. Fracking is not a dream come true; solar is now cost-effective. Here comes the sun, if we’re willing to let it in.

Hand/Sculpture (Modular) 2011, Silver gelatin print, 24 x 20 inches

November 5 – December 22, 2011
Opening Reception: Saturday, November 5, 6-8pm

Michael Benevento

By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Times Published: November 3, 2011

Inequality is back in the news, largely thanks to Occupy Wall Street, but with an assist from the Congressional Budget Office. And you know what that means: It’s time to roll out the obfuscators!

Anyone who has tracked this issue over time knows what I mean. Whenever growing income disparities threaten to come into focus, a reliable set of defenders tries to bring back the blur. Think tanks put out reports claiming that inequality isn’t really rising, or that it doesn’t matter. Pundits try to put a more benign face on the phenomenon, claiming that it’s not really the wealthy few versus the rest, it’s the educated versus the less educated.

So what you need to know is that all of these claims are basically attempts to obscure the stark reality: We have a society in which money is increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few people, and in which that concentration of income and wealth threatens to make us a democracy in name only.

The budget office laid out some of that stark reality in a recent report, which documented a sharp decline in the share of total income going to lower- and middle-income Americans. We still like to think of ourselves as a middle-class country. But with the bottom 80 percent of households now receiving less than half of total income, that’s a vision increasingly at odds with reality.

In response, the usual suspects have rolled out some familiar arguments: the data are flawed (they aren’t); the rich are an ever-changing group (not so); and so on. The most popular argument right now seems, however, to be the claim that we may not be a middle-class society, but we’re still an upper-middle-class society, in which a broad class of highly educated workers, who have the skills to compete in the modern world, is doing very well.

It’s a nice story, and a lot less disturbing than the picture of a nation in which a much smaller group of rich people is becoming increasingly dominant. But it’s not true.

Workers with college degrees have indeed, on average, done better than workers without, and the gap has generally widened over time. But highly educated Americans have by no means been immune to income stagnation and growing economic insecurity. Wage gains for most college-educated workers have been unimpressive (and nonexistent since 2000), while even the well-educated can no longer count on getting jobs with good benefits. In particular, these days workers with a college degree but no further degrees are less likely to get workplace health coverage than workers with only a high school degree were in 1979.

So who is getting the big gains? A very small, wealthy minority.

The budget office report tells us that essentially all of the upward redistribution of income away from the bottom 80 percent has gone to the highest-income 1 percent of Americans. That is, the protesters who portray themselves as representing the interests of the 99 percent have it basically right, and the pundits solemnly assuring them that it’s really about education, not the gains of a small elite, have it completely wrong.

If anything, the protesters are setting the cutoff too low. The recent budget office report doesn’t look inside the top 1 percent, but an earlier report, which only went up to 2005, found that almost two-thirds of the rising share of the top percentile in income actually went to the top 0.1 percent — the richest thousandth of Americans, who saw their real incomes rise more than 400 percent over the period from 1979 to 2005.

Who’s in that top 0.1 percent? Are they heroic entrepreneurs creating jobs? No, for the most part, they’re corporate executives. Recent research shows that around 60 percent of the top 0.1 percent either are executives in nonfinancial companies or make their money in finance, i.e., Wall Street broadly defined. Add in lawyers and people in real estate, and we’re talking about more than 70 percent of the lucky one-thousandth.

But why does this growing concentration of income and wealth in a few hands matter? Part of the answer is that rising inequality has meant a nation in which most families don’t share fully in economic growth. Another part of the answer is that once you realize just how much richer the rich have become, the argument that higher taxes on high incomes should be part of any long-run budget deal becomes a lot more compelling.

The larger answer, however, is that extreme concentration of income is incompatible with real democracy. Can anyone seriously deny that our political system is being warped by the influence of big money, and that the warping is getting worse as the wealth of a few grows ever larger?

Some pundits are still trying to dismiss concerns about rising inequality as somehow foolish. But the truth is that the whole nature of our society is at stake.

Christopher McDougall demonstrates a lost running technique from the 1800s called the 100-Up.

By CHRISTOPHER McDOUGALL
Published: November 2, 2011

When you’re stalking barefoot runners, camouflage helps. “Some of them get kind of prancy when they notice you filming,” Peter Larson says. “They put on this notion of what they think barefoot running should be. It looks weird.” Larson, an evolutionary biologist at Saint Anselm College in New Hampshire who has been on the barefoot beat for two years now, is also a stickler about his timing. “You don’t want to catch them too early in a run, when they’re cold, or too late, when they’re tired.”

If everything comes together just right, you’ll be exactly where Larson was one Sunday morning in September: peeking out from behind a tree on Governors Island in New York Harbor, his digital video camera nearly invisible on an ankle-high tripod, as the Second Annual New York City Barefoot Run got under way about a quarter-mile up the road. Hundreds of runners — men and women, young and old, athletic and not so much so, natives from 11 different countries — came pattering down the asphalt straight toward his viewfinder.

About half of them were actually barefoot. The rest wore Vibram FiveFingers — a rubber foot glove with no heel cushion or arch support — or Spartacus-style sandals, or other superlight “minimalist” running shoes. Larson surreptitiously recorded them all, wondering how many (if any) had what he was looking for: the lost secret of perfect running.

It’s what Alberto Salazar, for a while the world’s dominant marathoner and now the coach of some of America’s top distance runners, describes in mythical-questing terms as the “one best way” — not the fastest, necessarily, but the best: an injury-proof, evolution-tested way to place one foot on the ground and pick it up before the other comes down. Left, right, repeat; that’s all running really is, a movement so natural that babies learn it the first time they rise to their feet. Yet sometime between childhood and adulthood — and between the dawn of our species and today — most of us lose the knack.

We were once the greatest endurance runners on earth. We didn’t have fangs, claws, strength or speed, but the springiness of our legs and our unrivaled ability to cool our bodies by sweating rather than panting enabled humans to chase prey until it dropped from heat exhaustion. Some speculate that collaboration on such hunts led to language, then shared technology. Running arguably made us the masters of the world.

So how did one of our greatest strengths become such a liability? “The data suggests up to 79 percent of all runners are injured every year,” says Stephen Messier, the director of the J. B. Snow Biomechanics Laboratory at Wake Forest University. “What’s more, those figures have been consistent since the 1970s.” Messier is currently 11 months into a study for the U.S. Army and estimates that 40 percent of his 200 subjects will be hurt within a year. “It’s become a serious public health crisis.”

Nothing seems able to check it: not cross-training, not stretching, not $400 custom-molded orthotics, not even softer surfaces. And those special running shoes everyone thinks he needs? In 40 years, no study has ever shown that they do anything to reduce injuries. On the contrary, the U.S. Army’s Public Health Command concluded in a report in 2010, drawing on three large-scale studies of thousands of military personnel, that using shoes tailored to individual foot shapes had “little influence on injuries.”

Two years ago, in my book, “Born to Run,” I suggested we don’t need smarter shoes; we need smarter feet. I’d gone into Mexico’s Copper Canyon to learn from the Tarahumara Indians, who tackle 100-mile races well into their geriatric years. I was a broken-down, middle-aged, ex-runner when I arrived. Nine months later, I was transformed. After getting rid of my cushioned shoes and adopting the Tarahumaras’ whisper-soft stride, I was able to join them for a 50-mile race through the canyons. I haven’t lost a day of running to injury since.

“Barefoot-style” shoes are now a $1.7 billion industry. But simply putting something different on your feet doesn’t make you a gliding Tarahumara. The “one best way” isn’t about footwear. It’s about form. Learn to run gently, and you can wear anything. Fail to do so, and no shoe — or lack of shoe — will make a difference.

That’s what Peter Larson discovered when he reviewed his footage after the New York City Barefoot Run. “It amazed me how many people in FiveFingers were still landing on their heels,” he says. They wanted to land lightly on their forefeet, or they wouldn’t be in FiveFingers, but there was a disconnect between their intentions and their actual movements. “Once we develop motor patterns, they’re very difficult to unlearn,” Larson explains. “Especially if you’re not sure what it’s supposed to feel like.”

The only way to halt the running-injury epidemic, it seems, is to find a simple, foolproof method to relearn what the Tarahumara never forgot. A one best way to the one best way.

Earlier this year, I may have found it. I was leafing through the back of an out-of-print book, a collection of runners’ biographies called “The Five Kings of Distance,” when I came across a three-page essay from 1908 titled “W. G. George’s Own Account From the 100-Up Exercise.” According to legend, this single drill turned a 16-year-old with almost no running experience into the foremost racer of his day.

I read George’s words: “By its constant practice and regular use alone, I have myself established many records on the running path and won more amateur track-championships than any other individual.” And it was safe, George said: the 100-Up is “incapable of harm when practiced discreetly.”

Could it be that simple? That day, I began experimenting on myself.

When I called Mark Cucuzzella to tell him about my find, he cut me off midsentence. “When can you get down here?” he demanded.

“Here” is Two River Treads, a “natural” shoe store sandwiched between Maria’s Taqueria and German Street Coffee & Candlery in Shepherdstown, W.Va., which, against all odds, Cucuzzella has turned into possibly the country’s top learning center for the reinvention of running.

“What if people found out running can be totally fun no matter what kind of injuries they’ve had?” Cucuzzella said when I visited him last summer. “What if they could see — ” he jerked a thumb back toward his chest — “Exhibit A?”

Cucuzzella is a physician, a professor at West Virginia University’s Department of Family Medicine and an Air Force Reserve flight surgeon. Despite the demands of family life and multiple jobs, he still managed enough early-morning miles in his early 30s to routinely run marathons at a 5:30-per-mile pace. But he constantly battled injuries; at age 34, severe degenerative arthritis led to foot surgery. If he continued to run, his surgeon warned, the arthritis and pain would return.

Cucuzzella was despondent, until he began to wonder if there was some kind of furtive, Ninja way to run, as if you were sneaking up on someone. Cucuzzella threw himself into research and came across the work of, among others, Nicholas Romanov, a sports scientist in the former Soviet Union who developed a running technique he called the Pose Method. Romanov essentially had three rules: no cushioned shoes, no pushing off from the toes and, most of all, no landing on the heel.

Once Cucuzzella got used to this new style, it felt suspiciously easy, more like playful bouncing than serious running. As a test, he entered the Marine Corps Marathon. Six months after being told he should never run again, he finished in 2:28, just four minutes off his personal best.

“It was the beginning of a new life,” Cucuzzella told me. “I couldn’t believe that after a medical education and 20 years of running, so much of what I’d been taught about the body was being turned on its head.” Two weeks before turning 40, he won the Air Force Marathon and has since completed five other marathons under 2:35. Shortly before his 45th birthday this past September, he beat men half his age to win the Air Force Marathon again. He was running more on less training than 10 years before, but “felt fantastic.”

When he tried to spread the word, however, he encountered resistance. At a Runner’s World forum I attended before the Boston Marathon in April 2010, he told the story of how he bounced back from a lifetime of injuries by learning to run barefoot and relying on his legs’ natural shock absorption. Martyn Shorten, the former director of the Nike Sports Research Lab who now conducts tests on shoes up for review in Runner’s World, followed him to the microphone. “A physician talking about biomechanics — I guess I should talk about how to perform an appendectomy,” Shorten said. He then challenged Cucuzzella’s belief that cushioned shoes do more harm than good.

No matter. Cucuzzella went home and began hosting his own conferences. Peter Larson traveled from New Hampshire for Cucuzzella’s first gathering on a snowy weekend this past January. “I was a bit curious about how many people might show up to such an event in rural West Virginia,” Larson says. “Were the panelists going to outnumber the audience?” In fact, more than 150 attendees crowded right up to the dais.

Since then, West Virginia has become a destination for a growing number of those who are serious about the grass-roots reinvention of running. Galahad Clark, a seventh-generation shoemaker who created the Vivobarefoot line, flew in from London with the British running coach Lee Saxby for a one-day meeting with Cucuzzella. International researchers like Craig Richards, from Australia, and Hiro Tanaka, chairman of Exercise Physiology at the University of Fukuoka, have also visited, as well as scientists from a dozen different American states.

“He has turned a small town in an obese state into a running-crazed bastion of health,” Larson says. “Mark’s effort in transforming Shepherdstown is a testament to what a single person can accomplish.”

Not that he has everything figured out. I was at one of Cucuzzella’s free barefoot running clinics in May when he confronted his big problem: how do you actually teach this stuff? He had about 60 of us practicing drills on a grassy playground. “Now to run,” he said, “just bend forward from the ankles.” We all looked down at our ankles.

“No, no,” Cucuzzella said. “Posture, remember? Keep your heads up.”

We lifted our heads, and most of us then forgot to lean from the ankles. At that moment, a young girl flashed past us on her way to the monkey bars. Her back was straight, her head was high and her bare feet skittered along right under her hips.

“You mean like — ” someone said, pointing after the girl.

“Right,” Cucuzzella said. “Just watch her.”

So what ruined running for the rest of us who aren’t Tarahumara or 10 years old?

Back in the ’60s, Americans “ran way more and way faster in the thinnest little shoes, and we never got hurt,” Amby Burfoot, a longtime Runner’s World editor and former Boston Marathon champion, said during a talk before the Lehigh Valley Half-Marathon I attended last year. “I never even remember talking about injuries back then,” Burfoot said. “So you’ve got to wonder what’s changed.”

Bob Anderson knows at least one thing changed, because he watched it happen. As a high-school senior in 1966, he started Distance Running News, a twice-yearly magazine whose growth was so great that Anderson dropped out of college four years later to publish it full time as Runner’s World. Around then, another fledgling operation called Blue Ribbon Sports was pioneering cushioned running shoes; it became Nike. Together, the magazine and its biggest advertiser rode the running boom — until Anderson decided to see whether the shoes really worked.

“Some consumer advocate needed to test this stuff,” Anderson told me. He hired Peter Cavanagh, of the Penn State University biomechanics lab, to stress-test new products mechanically. “We tore the shoes apart,” Anderson says. He then graded shoes on a scale from zero to five stars and listed them from worst to first.

When a few of Nike’s shoes didn’t fare so well in the 1981 reviews, the company pulled its $1 million advertising contract with Runner’s World. Nike already had started its own magazine, Running, which would publish shoe reviews and commission star writers like Ken Kesey and Hunter S. Thompson.

“Nike would never advertise with me again,” Anderson says. “That hurt us bad.” In 1985, Anderson sold Runner’s World to Rodale, which, he says, promptly abolished his grading system. Today, every shoe in Runner’s World is effectively “recommended” for one kind of runner or another. David Willey, the magazine’s current editor, says that it only tests shoes that “are worth our while.” After Nike closed its magazine, it took its advertising back to Runner’s World. (Megan Saalfeld, a Nike spokeswoman, says she was unable to find someone to comment about this episode.)

“It’s a grading system where you can only get an A,” says Anderson, who went on to become the founder and chief executive of Ujena Swimwear.

Just as the shoe reviews were changing, so were the shoes: fear, the greatest of marketing tools, entered the game. Instead of being sold as performance accessories, running shoes were rebranded as safety items, like bike helmets and smoke alarms. Consumers were told they’d get hurt, perhaps for life, if they didn’t buy the “right” shoes. It was an audacious move that flew in the face of several biological truths: humans had thrived as running animals for two million years without corrective shoes, and asphalt was no harder than the traditional hunting terrains of the African savanna.

In 1985, Benno Nigg, founder and currently co-director of the University of Calgary’s Human Performance Lab, floated the notion that impact and rear-foot motion (called pronation) were dangerous. His work helped spur an arms race of experimental technology to counter those risks with plush heels and wedged shoes. Running magazines spread the new gospel. To this day, Runner’s World tells beginners that their first workout should be opening their wallets: “Go to a specialty running store . . . you’ll leave with a comfortable pair of shoes that will have you running pain- and injury-free.”

Nigg now believes mistakes were made. “Initial results were often overinterpreted and were partly responsible for a few ‘blunders’ in sport-shoe construction,” he said in a speech to the International Society of Biomechanics in 2005. The belief in the need for cushioning and pronation control, he told me, was, in retrospect, “completely wrong thinking.” His stance was seconded in June 2010, when The British Journal of Sports Medicine reported that a study of 105 women enrolled in a 13-week half-marathon training program found that every single runner who was given motion-control shoes to control excess foot pronation was injured. “You don’t need any protection at all except for cold and, like, gravel,” Nigg now says.

Of course, the only way to know what shoes have done to runners would be to travel back to a time when no one ever wore them. So that’s what one anthropologist has effectively done. In 2009, Daniel Lieberman, chairman of Harvard’s human evolutionary biology department, located a school in Kenya where no one wore shoes. Lieberman noticed something unusual: while most runners in shoes come down hard on their heels, these barefoot Kenyans tended to land softly on the balls of their feet.

Back at the lab, Lieberman found that barefoot runners land with almost zero initial impact shock. Heel-strikers, by comparison, collide with the ground with a force equal to as much as three times their body weight. “Most people today think barefoot running is dangerous and hurts, but actually you can run barefoot on the world’s hardest surfaces without the slightest discomfort and pain.”

Lieberman, who is 47 and a six-time marathoner, was so impressed by the results of his research that he began running barefoot himself. So has Irene Davis, director of Harvard Medical School’s Spaulding National Running Center. “I didn’t run myself for 30 years because of injuries,” Davis says. “I used to prescribe orthotics. Now, honest to God, I run 20 miles a week, and I haven’t had an injury since I started going barefoot.”

Last fall, at the end of a local 10-mile trail race, I surprised myself by finishing five minutes faster than I had four years ago, when I was in much better shape. I figured the result was a fluke — until it happened again. No special prep, awful travel schedule and yet a personal best in a six-mile race.

“I don’t get it,” I told Cucuzzella this past June when we went for a run together through the Shepherd University campus in Shepherdstown. “I’m four years older. I’m pretty sure I’m heavier. I’m not doing real workouts, just whatever I feel like each day. The only difference is I’ve been 100-Upping.”

It was five months since I discovered W.S. George’s “100-Up,” and I’d been doing the exercise regularly. In George’s essay, he says he invented the 100-Up in 1874, when he was an 16-year-old chemist’s apprentice in England and could train only during his lunch hour. By Year 2 of his experiment, the overworked lab assistant was the fastest amateur miler in England. By Year 5, he held world records in everything from the half-mile to 10 miles.

So is it possible that a 19th-century teenager succeeded where 21st-century technology has failed?

“Absolutely, yes,” says Steve Magness, a sports scientist who works with top Olympic prospects at Nike’s elite “Oregon Project.” He was hired by Alberto Salazar to create, essentially, a squad of anti-Salazars. Despite his domination of the marathon in the ’80s, Salazar was plagued with knee and hamstring problems. He was also a heel-striker, which he has described as “having a tire with a nail in it.” Magness’s brief is to find ways to teach Nike runners to run barefoot-style and puncture-proof their legs.

“From what you’re telling me, it sounds promising,” Magness told me. “I’d love to see it in action.”

Mark Cucuzzella was just as eager. “All right,” he said in the middle of our run. “Let’s get a look at this.” I snapped a twig and dropped the halves on the ground about eight inches apart to form targets for my landings. The 100-Up consists of two parts. For the “Minor,” you stand with both feet on the targets and your arms cocked in running position. “Now raise one knee to the height of the hip,” George writes, “bring the foot back and down again to its original position, touching the line lightly with the ball of the foot, and repeat with the other leg.”

That’s all there is to it. But it’s not so easy to hit your marks 100 times in a row while maintaining balance and proper knee height. Once you can, it’s on to the Major: “The body must be balanced on the ball of the foot, the heels being clear of the ground and the head and body being tilted very slightly forward. . . . Now, spring from the toe, bringing the knee to the level of the hip. . . . Repeat with the other leg and continue raising and lowering the legs alternately. This action is exactly that of running.”

Cucuzzella didn’t like it as a teaching method — he loved it. “It makes so much physiological and anatomical sense,” he said. “The key to injury-free running is balance, elasticity, stability in midstance and cadence. You’ve got all four right there.”

Cucuzzella began trying it himself. As I watched, I recalled another lone inventor, a Czechoslovakian soldier who dreamed up a similar drill: he’d throw dirty clothes in the bathtub with soap and water, then jog on top. You can’t heel strike or overstride on slippery laundry. There’s only one way to run in a tub: the one best way.

At the 1952 Olympics, Emil Zatopek became the only runner ever to win gold medals in all three distance events: 5,000 meters, 10,000 meters and the marathon, the first he ever ran. Granted, “the Human Locomotive” wasn’t a pretty sight. During his final push to the finish line, his head would loll and his arms would grab at the air “as if he’d just been stabbed through the heart,” as one sportswriter put it.

But from the waist down, Zatopek was always quick, light and springy, like a kid swooping across a playground — or like this once-arthritic physician in front of me, laughing with excitement as he hopped up and down in his bare feet in a parking lot.

The author recalls growing up in California in the 1950s, and his father gardening, tending to rosebushes and dahlias.

By WALTER MOSLEY
NY Times Published: November 2, 2011

MY first memory and so, in some essential way, the beginning of my life starts with me on my knees in front of an old console television set. I was 3 years old and didn’t know where I was or even that the TV was there because my eyes were closed. There was a sense of excitement tingling in my shoulders and thrumming at the back of my head; an electricity that made me want to laugh out loud, but I didn’t laugh.

Opening my eyes the first thing I saw was the TV. It was off. There was dark blue carpeting beneath my knees and the room I was in, the living room, was bright because of daylight that came through the windows and also from the front door of the adjacent dining room. This door was open but the screen was closed.

There were sounds in the air. Cars, a far-off airplane, a chicken squawked somewhere. I knew the sound, could imagine the bird. But I didn’t yet remember who I was or where life had found me. Thinking back on this day many years ago I supposed I was like an artificial being brought to life fully equipped with memories that were dawning on me slowly, like the motes of dust dancing in the sunlight that flowed through that front door.

I stood up, still looking at the console TV. I didn’t consider turning it on. I suppose now that this scene was like a passive devotion performed by the young disciple of an inanimate god that he would worship forever.

I went to the screen door and looked out on the bright California day. The lawn, bisected by a nearly white concrete path, was impossibly green St. Augustine grass so powerful that you could almost hear the crunch of its growing.

A woman with white skin wearing a coral jumper and holding a floral printed hat against an imagined breeze was standing there, looking down on a black man. The man was on his knees as I had been. But instead of praying to the bug-eyed monster (as I knew he called the TV), he was using a hand spade on the soil around the pale violet dahlias crowding the wire fence that went across the front of the yard. This man was worshiping the earth and the woman was loving him for this devotion.

I clearly remember saying to myself, “These must be my parents.” This is not a faulty memory but an accurate sense of the world that was growing in me as I went from my knees to the front door. I was going over the lessons of experience, connecting language to animal knowledge, and exploring the world around me: a world I knew and that I was learning about at the same time.

“Hi, Mom and Dad!” I shouted, throwing open the screen door and running down the wood steps.

I was barefoot. The grass was moist and warm and spiky against my soles.

My mother nodded. My father said my name, an incantation. Neither touched me, but I had learned by then not to expect that.

There were rosebushes along the fence to my left; large orange and yellow flowers that looked delicious even though I knew you could not eat them. The chickens were across the street in Mr. Diego’s huge front yard. Dogs were always hanging around Mr. Diego’s high fence. They sat there contemplating the fowl and salivating.

“What you doin’?” I asked my father.

He said something about soil and flowers. I remembered that he had somehow invented this breed of dahlia; crossed different roots or something and came up with that color, the only one like it in the world.

I laughed and fell down on the grass, rolled around and then ran down the driveway on the east side of our small lot.

Down that path, toward the green Pontiac, I passed first a kumquat tree, a short line of small flowering plants that are less specific in my memory, and then a towering pomegranate tree. This skinny, exotic fruit sapling looked down on my father’s car. Beyond it was a lush but fraying banana tree that could grow but not produce fruit in the dry southern California climate.

This was my home: the couple so in love with each other, the chickens, the sun, trees and concrete.

The garage had once been a hangar for a small single-engine airplane when this neighborhood was less populous. Los Angeles in the 1950s was growing as fast as the front lawn.

To the left was another patch of grass and two trees: a dark apple (I never knew the variety) that also needed more water to be fruitful and a bright and bushy lemon that was always attended by dozens of yellowy honeybees.

I was afraid of the bees, though I had never been stung.

There were grasshoppers and butterflies leaping and fluttering between the dark shade of the apple and the intense sunlight where the lemon blossoms luxuriated.

And then there was the back house.

My father had transformed three-quarters of the one-time hangar into a small house. He had floored and plumbed it, wired and walled the empty space and now it was a home for someone, one day, maybe.

I went into the newly formed untenanted domicile because this too was my home. I believed that I lived everywhere that I could see or walk to.

It was shadowy and cool inside. You entered through a room that would one day be a kitchen. The living room was twice that size and the back bedrooms were small again. This layout was a kind of architectural poetry though I wouldn’t have been able to say so at the time.

I ignored the possibility of ghosts and climbed into the window of the left-most back bedroom. There I could see the strip of dirt, the small lane that bordered the very back of our property. Then there was a tall fence, shaded by an overgrown eucalyptus tree that hid whatever lay beyond.

One day, many months in the future, my father would kill a sickly kitten that had been rejected by its mother. In that barren strip the baby cat would be slaughtered and buried; I would harbor a yowling anger at my father and at the injustice of the mother cat.

But that day I just squinted at the eerie dark lane hidden from the otherwise bright day. There moths followed their zigzag paths going dangerously close to spiders’ webs and wood splinters from the foreboding back fence.

I went out the window and back through to the front door and came upon my mother standing there in her floral hat and jumper. On bright concrete, between the pomegranate-guarded Pontiac and the deep shading from the apple tree, she was waiting for me. This seemed proper, even expected.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

Questions like these meant very little to me. I was standing there, looking up at my mother who if she had a name I didn’t know it. I was looking up at the woman who rarely kissed or hugged me but who followed me back through the property colonized by bees and flowers and my father’s ingenuity.

I shrugged and hummed my ignorance.

“Come back up to the front with us,” she said.

I followed; there was nothing else to do. I wasn’t hungry or thirsty. I didn’t have to go to the toilet. Nothing hurt or worried me. Life was the sunlight cascading through kumquat and pomegranate leaves. We were headed for the front yard where my father was praying to the soil and laughing, probably. There were chickens and dogs, cars and airplanes, black people and brown people and my one white mother who followed at a certain distance.

This is my memory of home. The boundaries have become smaller as I have aged. The passions have receded and the sun shines less brightly. But none of that matters because the primitive heart that remembers is, in a way, eternal.

Walter Mosley’s 30th novel, “The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey,” was published in a paperback edition on Tuesday

John Altoon, Untitled (1965)

Through April 02, 2012

Norton Simon as part of Pacific Standard Time

Wooding from 1982 with father and sister

01 Magazine Issue 7
by Jabari Jordan-Walker

When I was approached about developing an interview that involved a theme loosely constructed around the concept of documentation, curator Andy Beach along with his weblogs Reference Library and Stork Bites Man immediately came to mind. As a unique case within an excessively large cloud of blogs out there, Andy Beach curates content that proclaims a sense of selflessness that is shown particularly well through the cataloging of his experiences in fatherhood.

By not only taking form through the context of a single theme, Beach is able to provide his readership with inspiring content that is refreshing, honest, and doesn’t beg you to perceive him as a personality bound to the Internet’s ever-useless popularity contest.

Jabari: A photo you’ve published simply titled Wooding from 1982 is a reflection on you with your sister and dad in the family tool crib. Can you talk a little about what life was like growing up a Beach?

Andy: Ha. There were a lot of jokes: “Sandy Beach”, “Son of a Beach”, etc. I had a good, small-town Michigan life; lots of bike riding, playing in the yard, throwing rocks and watching semi trucks go by. Freedom. I look back at that photograph that my Mom must have taken and my Dad is about the age I am now. And in that photo, my sister and I are the ages of my own daughters now. This is in the basement of the same house where my Dad and his friends built an addition to add two bedrooms for our growing family. He liked his workbench area and enjoyed his particular way of arranging and displaying his things. But he knew how to use those tools and often did. I don’t feel as grown-up as my parents seemed then. I still feel like I’m trying to figure things out.

When I was in the middle of second grade, we moved from this house on the outside of town to a house in the middle of our small town. In the new place, the three kids each had their own rooms and I remember we often switched rooms and re-arranged the furniture in our living room. It seemed like the whole family was trying to settle in and figure it out, but never did

Did you study any facet of design or art formally in school?

Barely.

I ended up attending five different colleges and switched my studies from engineering to graphic design, yet still graduated in only four and a half years. I ended up with a BFA but no real art education. I thought I knew exactly what I wanted and needed out of an education, so I did what I could do get through it quickly. I tried to learn without making any mistakes. I was wrong, of course. That way of working makes it very hard to be creative and expressive and honest. Learning from missteps and failures and then adjusting, not abandoning, when things go wrong is how you grow.

I remember being obsessed with The Zone System in photography classes; I kept trying to capture and reproduce what I saw with the naked eye. I wasn’t trying to make art or even trying to make a “good” photo, I just wanted the photograph to look like what I saw with my eyes. It is kind of pointless exercise, but it still fascinates and frustrates me — the way people take pictures of their goods for eBay and in the way architectural spaces are (mis)represented in magazines, it is a kind of documentation that drives me wild.

I catch a sense that your inspirations are centered on both utilitarianism and the playful moments within the everyday. Explain how these ideas influence your praxis and theories in art and design?

I don’t think I’ve ever been all that interested in the fantastic. I like projects with a purpose. Whatever process I have definitely comes from being a keen observer and wanting to find a solution to a problem, but never without humor. You’re right; I like to find the playful moments within something dry or even boring. I feel free to think and inspired when I’m driving long stretches of highway between Pennsylvania and Michigan. Focused on the road and the limited landscape is a perfect structure for finding or creating playful moments.

Stork Bites Man is quite unique in being a blog that features content that within its intimacy is the certainty that it will evolve over time. How did the blog come about and as your children grow older what would you like to see come out of its existence?

Absolutely. I started the blog to keep track of things, but Stork Bites Man quickly became more about experience and emotion. There are still a lot of objects, but often those are just a symbol of something else that’s on my mind. Or a reminder of something my daughters did or said. The blog has become a place to share experiences and ideas rather than things.

The idea of a reference library refers to a place where things are documented, archived, and researched on site. How is the concept of a reference library reflected within your blogging methodology?

Well that was the whole point at the very beginning. I started Reference Library because I was looking for a way to organize the thousands of images on my computer. It could have just as easily ended up as a flickr account or a well-organized iPhoto library. I liked the idea of tagging and making it somewhat public. A week later I had visitors and it became a Blog. I wanted it to be a tool; an archive of images I could go back to again and again for research. It naturally evolved into something else, and just like Stork Bites Man, Reference Library is more about experiences than objects. It may look like an image or object blog to most people; the tags are only rough chunks of meaning. For me these things are very personal and have significance beyond what it is shown on the blog. I can go back in the archive to certain weeks or individual posts and be reminded of something funny my daughter said, the house we almost bought, or the fire I almost started. It is still a tool, but for me it’s more about processing my own ideas than being an “inspiration” resource.

Before having the luxury to document your interests and memorable activities through various web-based narratives, how would you compile the artifacts that you felt needed to be revisited?

That’s why I had to start the blog. I was keeping three-ring binders but it was such a static archive. I couldn’t do anything with them. I wasn’t able to compile or archive anything in a satisfying way. I needed a structure. “To find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now.” Jason Fulford shared that quote with me and it’s a perfect fit for how the blog works and for what I need to do to make it keep working.

Do you try to maintain a physical reference library at home?

I try. But I am not as organized as you might expect. There are piles and piles. And stacks of books on top of the piles. My grandma was a hoarder. It’s in my blood.

eBay plays a big role in your hunt for objects and clothing, can you name a few of your most memorable finds?

Years before I started the blog, I was outbid on a chair (a “Domus” dining chair by Ilmari Tapiovaara). I contacted the high bidder hoping he might change his/her mind and let me have it. Turns out it was the artist Robert Gober. I always thought that was funny. I still know his eBay name and sometimes check out what he’s bidding on.

In May 2007, I came across a listing for a beautifully weird birdhouse made by Stan Bitters. I didn’t know anything about him or his work but I liked the object and wondered why it was five hundred dollars. Someone else got it and I ended up posting it on Reference Library. A reader from California saw it on my blog and loved it too. He contacted Stan Bitters and then started to carry the birdhouses in his shop, South Willard. So that’s how I met Ryan Conder, who became a fast friend. (We did the Shrimp Shop together at his shop in 2009.)

http://referencelibrary.blogspot.com/2007/05/stan-bitters-birdhouse.html

http://referencelibrary.blogspot.com/2009/11/announcing-shrimp-shop.html

One of the favorite things I actually won is a weird, folky painting of the Apollo 11 astronauts, the “Heroes of Technology”. The seller listed it as “prison art” but no one really knows where it came from. I put in a bid for what I was willing to pay and ended up winning it for much less, which is the way you hope that eBay will always work.

Can you explain your relationship to curating?

It’s an uneasy one. I want things to be a certain way; my way. It’s a selfish and arrogant belief that I can make something better. I always liked the slogan for the giant corporation BASF: “We don’t make a lot of the products you buy. We make a lot of the products you buy better.” I have been fortunate to be involved with projects where someone has let me try to do that. I’m more comfortable as an editor or gatherer, than a creator.

Do you feel the term curator can be adjusted in order to include the growing ideation of the “blogger”?

Unfortunately, yeah. Every blogger with a good eye is not a curator, no matter how many pop-up shops he’s done. The other day I was introduced to someone as “a curator” and it made me uneasy. I have worked with real curators, wickedly smart visual and performing arts curators, and I am not part of that club. I tend to explain things by saying: “I have a blog”.

I enjoyed the “Kinder” supplement you curated in Apartamento #04, what were some of your goals when it came to deciding what to feature in the section?

Thank you. I looked at it like a problem that needed a solution, not like a curatorial intervention. (I don’t make the kids section. I make the kids section better.) My goals were also selfish. I had talked to Geoff McFetridge a year or so earlier about some of the furniture and things he had made for his daughter. I thought it was a great idea for a book or something, so when “Kinder” came up it was a perfect opportunity to get Geoff to share some of those things. I really wanted Andy Rementer to make a coloring book. I loved Enzo Mari; can we talk to Enzo Mari? Yes. I loved the workshops and art-making parties Jordi Ferreiro had done, so I wanted to include him. It all came together very easily. I had the lineup in my head in about 30 seconds. I knew what would be good: things I couldn’t do myself. I think I kind of live vicariously through these “curatorial” projects.

Have you ever considered doing a print publication or book of your own?

All the time.

I found your mini-exhibition project with Kiosk also very interesting. Can you explain how the Reference Library shop developed?

Yes; it was my mailman’s fault. My wife had ordered some things from KIOSK for my birthday, but they got lost in the mail. When we stopped by the shop to pick up replacements, I met Alisa who owns/runs KIOSK and we started chatting. Almost every Reference Library project has started the same way: someone says “we should do something together sometime.” She was just starting her Mini-Exhibition series; a few months later I was on the schedule to open a shop on Black Friday (the traditionally brutal day-after-Thanksgiving shopping day).

What have you got planned for the future?

We’re expecting a new baby boy at the end of November! I plan to finish some projects this fall then take a long break from the Internet and being a blogger/curator/whatever.

Last words?

Too Blessed 2 Be Stressed!

Reference Library

Stork Bites Man

Nancy Campbell/IFC Films

Spalding Gray

By RON ROSENBAUM
NY Times Published: October 28, 2011

In “Swimming to Cambodia” — the monologue that made Spalding Gray (relatively) famous, about the time he spent in Thailand playing a small role in “The Killing Fields,” the film about the Cambodian genocide — Gray tells a strange, disconcerting story about the death of Thomas Merton. Merton, the Trappist monk celebrated for his devotion to an eloquently spiritualized silence, was “a hero of mine because he knew how to shut up,” Gray, the compulsive verbalizer, tells us.

As Gray describes Merton’s death, “the Trappists sent him to Southeast Asia to research Buddhism. He stepped out of a bathtub, touched an electric fan and died instantly.”

This account, as it happens, dramatizes the conflict found throughout Gray’s extensive journals: between his own relentless search for transcendence (“perfect moments” and the like) and the often shocking absurdity of worldly contingency of the sort that will, eventually, tragically, short-circuit him too.

Absurd contradictions were Gray’s métier. One of the offhand, heartbreaking epigrams to be found in these journals goes like this: “The worst fear is that I’ll learn to be happy at last and then get real sad when I see what I’ve missed.” Better to be miserable! No wonder he called one of his monologues “Terrors of Pleasure.”

It’s distressing to read, the way happiness generates sadness and terror in Gray’s psyche, because his work could be the source of so much pleasure to his audiences. Even offstage: one friend tells the editor Nell Casey — who has done an admirable job knitting together a selection of Gray’s journal entries with interviews and her own thoughtful take — that Gray was so seductive a storyteller that just sitting around a downtown loft, hearing him recount the mundane details of his day, could “torture you with pleasure.”

He made a career, invented a performance genre out of this narrative prowess. But the dark side, the journals reveal, was just how much Gray himself was tortured with, well, self-torture.

He’d make light of it in his monologues. One story line of the journals is the way he evolved the radical form of these performances. They were nurtured at first by Elizabeth LeCompte and the postmodern theater troupe that centered on the Performing Garage (later the Wooster Group) in SoHo, but they were, in many respects, premodern. Stripped to the minimum of voice and story, Homeric in that respect, Gray’s odysseys were performed on a bare stage with a bare wooden desk and chair, no props except a water pitcher and glass. Then Gray, this über-WASP figure who looked as if he’d stepped out of the L. L. Bean catalog with his plaid shirt and pale, ghostly New England transcendentalist mien, would sit down, open a notebook and begin talking.

“Get me out of here!” was my first thought when a friend dragged me to one of Gray’s pre-“Cambodia” monologues. But then, in a funny, charming, self-­deprecatory way he’d start telling rambling, digressive, but observant and intelligent stories that would bare his soul and crack you up, with a repertoire of subtle facial gestures, pauses, double takes and the like, a kabuki that said: “Yeah, I know I’m kind of a jerk, but the fact that I know it makes me a meta-jerk, and admit it, you’re laughing because you recognize yourself. I speak for the metaphysical jerk in all of us.”

Or that’s how I interpreted it. In some ways it was ancient, Gray as the Homer of small things. In some ways it spoke to the moment, with a light touch of philosophical and spiritual consciousness that disclosed itself now and then. It had that artful quality of seeming artless, but somehow he had found the sweet spot where remorse and laughter meet, and it was like attending a therapy session on laughing gas.

Looking backward, he spoke for a generation of people who had learned to doubt everything conventional but couldn’t find sure satisfaction in the unconventional, even as they (and Gray) turned to Eastern spirituality as an alternative to Western tradition.

And looking forward, he helped inspire (for better and worse) a generation of memoirists, most of whom lacked his self-deprecatory humor and, instead of finding the large in the small, found their smallness in the melodramatic, self-congratulatory accounts of their tribulations.

Then again, even Gray didn’t always pull it off. As he reports in his journals, his girlfriend Renée Shafransky (who later became his first wife and his collaborator) summed up this difficulty thus: “She said I was confessional but not honest.”

This is an important distinction, one Gray struggled with often as he sought to embody his persona onstage. He confessed to things in such a disarming way that you’d forgive him, but we learn in the journals he often couldn’t forgive himself.

One problem in assessing the ­confession-honesty divide in this book is that it has been distilled from what Casey estimates are 5,000 pages of writings and journals and that his family — especially his second wife, Kathleen Russo, who has custody of them — reserved the right to remove passages they felt would be hurtful or violate privacies. Understandable, but it leaves us not entirely sure in what ways this Spalding Gray is more or less “real” than the man onstage, or whether there’s a somewhat different creature behind both. He would probably relish the mystery, and not be able to solve it himself.

He certainly was aware of the ways confessing his infidelities, for instance, hurt others, without giving him the feeling of absolution he sought, though he doesn’t seem to have realized that compulsively recounting his affairs and longings for others to those he loved and betrayed wasn’t the best way of being honest. Or indeed to have considered whether honesty of this sort is the highest virtue.

But in some ways the journals help us understand Gray’s obsessive confessional impulse and his haphazard snatching at spiritual consolation. Religion played an inordinately important role in shaping this sensibility from the beginning.

We learn that his mother’s devout Christian Science — a faith that all one had to do was recognize the perfect love that pervaded existence (every moment a perfect moment) — did not prevent her nervous breakdowns and an eventual car-exhaust suicide when Spalding was away, acting, in Texas. All of which bequeathed him a lifelong sense of guilt for not being with her at the end.

And then he plunges into downtown avant-garde New York culture and partakes of what might be called salad-bar Buddhism, a little from here, a little from there, which doesn’t seem to supply much comfort. The confessional impulse is Catholic, the ineradicable guilt sounds Jewish, the stew he makes from them all his own.

Nonetheless he becomes one of America’s great talkers and theatrical raconteurs. Mark Twain, Oscar Levant, Jean Shepherd, Fran Lebowitz, Richard Pryor are his peers. He made holding an audience in the palm of his hand seem effortless, yet his journals reveal how much he rehearsed and revised, how dedicated to acting as much as spontaneity he was — to acting as if it were all spontaneous. The persona he created became beloved — almost too beloved, in a way that sometimes trivialized him into a Seinfeldian curmudgeon — and he jetted all over the world replicating it.

And just when he seemed to have transcended all that guilt and unhappiness over happiness, through family (particularly his love for his two sons and stepdaughter with Russo), one of those absurd contingencies struck the way it struck Merton.

Gray had spent years working on a novel called “Impossible Vacation,” largely about his inability to take a vacation. When he finally did, when he and his family were invited to enjoy the pleasures of a friend’s Irish estate, one night on a lonely road, a speeding veterinary van (of all things) smashed into their car.

He suffers a broken hip, leaving him with a permanent limp, but more awful, a serious head injury that drove skull fragments into his brain and seems to have, over time, exacerbated his lifelong ­depression.

The final sections of the journals are particularly painful to read as Gray struggles to maintain his life while undergoing endless rounds of antidepressive treatments including a week in a locked ward and electroshock, none of which had much effect. He can’t stop obsessing over his decision to move to a larger house isolated from the Sag Harbor Village home where he used to be able to stroll out the door into the streets and entertain his neighbors with stories.

Finally, on a wintry night in 2004, he disappeared. Two months later his body was found on a New York City shoreline, the assumption being that he had jumped to his death from the Staten Island Ferry.

These final pages radiate some of the unbearable sadness of the end of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” Gray comes across as a genuinely noble, striving, seeking soul, felled by a malignant fate. Again, prophetically it seems, toward the close of “Swimming to Cambodia,” he tells a story of Sri Rama Krishna, “the last great poor Indian guru”: one who “was seen as a holy man and not as a psychotic. At last a naked sadhu ran out of the jungle, stuck a sharp stone between Sri Rama’s eyes and he saw Nothing.”

The big question Spalding Gray left behind, I believe, is the one raised by “Swimming to Cambodia,” and revisited several times in the journals: Is there a way to engage with genocide in art? While there is a miniaturist’s perfectionism, a minimalist’s grace and modesty, about the other monologues, what are we to make of his applying the method he used to evoke the minor trials of a downtown performance artist, with this material — the murder of millions of Cambodians by their fellow Cambodians, by once peaceful Buddhists turned insane, bloodthirsty Maoists? Even at two removes — a monologue about a minor actor in a film about a major human cataclysm — is it somehow inappropriate for him to tiptoe tipsily (the hash, the Thai whores) around the edges of the abyss as he does, recognizing our divide from it? Or has he found, somehow, a perversely respectful way of approaching the horrific tragedy? Rather than attempting to gaze directly at it, he allows that black hole to cast its malignant shadow over every quotidian act, but conspicuously avoids all but the bare facts — perhaps a rare act of artistic humility that doesn’t diminish but redeems the meta-Conradian horror at its heart?

Having read, and written about, more than my share of Holocaust literature and assimilated the arguments about the perils of its representation, I think a case can be made that Gray did the right thing. He knows the genocide is there but pays about as much direct attention to it as we did as a nation when it happened — or afterward, when (as Gray points out) we temporarily allied ourselves with the Khmer Rouge genocidaires protecting Pol Pot in the jungles. Gray performs a service in recounting the bare facts for many who might otherwise be unaware.

In its own way his monologue is as full of awe and tact, and illuminating about the way we fear to face the full extent of the horror because any response is inadequate. As one of the few responses of art to one of the dismally unusual genocides of the bloody century — auto-genocide: a people who slaughtered their own, not another, people — at the very least it serves as a critique of our superficiality. Gray’s work deserves to last and perhaps in his final dive off the Staten Island Ferry, he was, in his own way, finally bridging that divide, swimming to Cambodia.

THE JOURNALS OF SPALDING GRAY

Edited by Nell Casey

Illustrated. 340 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $28.95.
Related

Harry Adams, Elementary School, 1958

Post War Los Angeles African-American Photography
Through December 10, 2011

Cal State Nothridge Gallery as part of Pacific Standard Time

Thanks to Jim Sweeters