Thanks to Danielle Kays

Not Now, 2011, Oil on canvas, 84 x 60 inches inches (213.4 x 152.4 cm)

Through July 30, 2011

“Six Pack” at Richard Telles

Just shy of 80, Ronnie Nelsen has been a Dodgers vendor for 53 years, focusing mainly on peanuts. An inspiration to teammates and fans, he hasn’t missed a home game in nine years.
“I look at life this way,” Ronnie Nelsen says. “I’m doing this for my health, I’m burning weight off and I’m seeing people and enjoying life.” (Gina Ferazzi, Los Angeles Times / July 7, 2011)

By Steve Lopez
Los Angeles Times Published: July 13, 2011

In an otherwise horrible season for the Dodgers, Ronnie Nelsen is having a pretty good year.

He can throw either right-handed or left-handed with equally good arm strength, and he’s an inspiration to teammates and fans. Just shy of 80, Nelsen has been a Dodgers vendor for 53 years, focusing mainly on peanuts. And he hasn’t missed a home game in nine years.

Kathy Paris, a fan in Section 39, was Nelsen’s first sale of the night at a Dodgers-Mets game last week. She and her friend Brenda Barnett said it’s an inspiration to see a guy his age working such a physically tough job. Nearby, a fan named Anita Morland had this to say:

“God bless him. He goes up and down the stairs like he’s a young man.”

A slight exaggeration, perhaps. Sure, Nelsen charges around like a bull, even during blazing hot day games, when a band of sweat forms along the shoulder strap of a vending sack filled with as many as 25 bags of peanuts.

But there’s enough of a lurch to his step as he descends the concrete stairs, slightly hunched, that you pray he won’t take a tumble. There’s determination in his ice blue eyes, though.

“I look at life this way,” said Nelsen. “I’m doing this for my health, I’m burning weight off and I’m seeing people and enjoying life.”

Nelsen, who lives alone in Valley Village, grew up in Washington state. He said he had seizures as a kid, later suffered a head injury in a fall and moved to Los Angeles in his 20s for an adult education program. He pumped gas at a filling station and also worked as a security guard and restaurant busboy.

Then came his big break.

“I went to a meeting at the union office in December of 1957,” said Nelsen, who was a member of the restaurant and hotel workers union. “They said a baseball team was coming to Los Angeles from Brooklyn, if anybody wanted to be a vendor.”

He raised his hand, and for as long as Vin Scully has been calling games in the announcer’s booth, Nelsen has been serving Dodger fans. Today, Nelsen is one of four vendors who started in 1958 when the Dodgers played at the Coliseum. The others are Roger Owens, Leo Ramsey and Mort Rose, all of whom made the move to Dodger Stadium with Nelsen in 1962.

Nelsen hasn’t had the same exposure as Owens, who’s known for his acrobatic peanut tosses and has been on the “The Tonight Show.” But as Owens said at the Mets game, Nelsen is an original, and he’s known by fellow vendors as “Ronnie Baby” and “Ronnie Hollywood.”

“Baby” because he acts like he’ll live forever, and “Hollywood” because of his knack for accidentally getting his picture in the sports pages.

“You see this?” Nelsen said, pulling a framed clipping out of a bag he brought from home for his interview with me. In the photo, torn from the L.A. Times, two Dodgers are at home plate, celebrating a run, and the handsome young vendor looking on from the stands is Ronnie Hollywood.

Before each game, the vendors, employed by Levy Restaurants under a contract with the Dodgers, assemble in the upper reaches of the stadium for what they call the lineup. In order of seniority, they choose what they want to sell — peanuts, ice cream, soda, etc. — and what part of the stadium they want to work in. Nelsen usually picks peanuts, which are light and popular, and he favors the nut-buying acres between home plate and left field.

After choosing his usual assignment on the night I visited last week, Nelsen descended five flights of stairs like he was running to fight a fire. The faster you get your peanuts from the storage bins, the faster you can start selling them. Nelsen, who sells between three and seven boxes each game, said this has been a challenging year because of the well-documented woes of the Dodgers’ owners and the drop-off in attendance.

But he stacked six boxes on a cart, stashed all but one of them in a locked service area, and charged into the crowd yelling, “Peanuts!”

Nelsen made the first sale in less than two minutes, and had peddled 10 bags by the time the game began. The vendors really hustle because they’re paid based on sales. Nelsen generally makes about $100 a game, which is nice to have in his pocket on top of a Social Security check.

For many years, Nelsen worked night games, then went straight to a graveyard shift somewhere as a security guard or gas station attendant. Now it’s just the vending job, and when there’s no ballgame, Nelsen likes to cruise the Valley in his Mazda, listening to his Johnnie Ray CDs, or maybe the Ames Brothers or Tommy Dorsey.

If he’s up for a treat, he’ll pull into Denny’s or Norms for ice cream or a piece of pie. He and another vendor, Dave Rafel, enjoy “2 For Tuesdays” at Lancers in Burbank, where two people can eat for the price of a single $14.99 dinner.

“You can pick barbecued ribs, liver and onions, meatloaf or red snapper,” said Nelsen.

On game days, Ronnie Baby can’t wait to get to work, and he sneaks glimpses of the game when he can. Nelsen says Dodgers greats Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale treated him well, autographing baseballs for him. And he likes it when fans tell him he looks young for 80, or that they remember seeing him at ballgames back when they were kids.

“If I can,” said Nelsen, “I’ll keep doing this till I’m 90.”

Through August 12, 2011

Andrea Rosen

By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Times Published: July 10, 2011

If you were shocked by Friday’s job report, if you thought we were doing well and were taken aback by the bad news, you haven’t been paying attention. The fact is, the United States economy has been stuck in a rut for a year and a half.

Yet a destructive passivity has overtaken our discourse. Turn on your TV and you’ll see some self-satisfied pundit declaring that nothing much can be done about the economy’s short-run problems (reminder: this “short run” is now in its fourth year), that we should focus on the long run instead.

This gets things exactly wrong. The truth is that creating jobs in a depressed economy is something government could and should be doing. Yes, there are huge political obstacles to action — notably, the fact that the House is controlled by a party that benefits from the economy’s weakness. But political gridlock should not be conflated with economic reality.

Our failure to create jobs is a choice, not a necessity — a choice rationalized by an ever-shifting set of excuses.

Excuse No. 1: Just around the corner, there’s a rainbow in the sky.

Remember “green shoots”? Remember the “summer of recovery”? Policy makers keep declaring that the economy is on the mend — and Lucy keeps snatching the football away. Yet these delusions of recovery have been an excuse for doing nothing as the jobs crisis festers.

Excuse No. 2: Fear the bond market.

Two years ago The Wall Street Journal declared that interest rates on United States debt would soon soar unless Washington stopped trying to fight the economic slump. Ever since, warnings about the imminent attack of the “bond vigilantes” have been used to attack any spending on job creation.

But basic economics said that rates would stay low as long as the economy was depressed — and basic economics was right. The interest rate on 10-year bonds was 3.7 percent when The Wall Street Journal issued that warning; at the end of last week it was 3.03 percent.

How have the usual suspects responded? By inventing their own reality. Last week, Representative Paul Ryan, the man behind the G.O.P. plan to dismantle Medicare, declared that we must slash government spending to “take pressure off the interest rates” — the same pressure, I suppose, that has pushed those rates to near-record lows.

Excuse No. 3: It’s the workers’ fault.

Unemployment soared during the financial crisis and its aftermath. So it seems bizarre to argue that the real problem lies with the workers — that the millions of Americans who were working four years ago but aren’t working now somehow lack the skills the economy needs.

Yet that’s what you hear from many pundits these days: high unemployment is “structural,” they say, and requires long-term solutions (which means, in practice, doing nothing).

Well, if there really was a mismatch between the workers we have and the workers we need, workers who do have the right skills, and are therefore able to find jobs, should be getting big wage increases. They aren’t. In fact, average wages actually fell last month.

Excuse No. 4: We tried to stimulate the economy, and it didn’t work.

Everybody knows that President Obama tried to stimulate the economy with a huge increase in government spending, and that it didn’t work. But what everyone knows is wrong.

Think about it: Where are the big public works projects? Where are the armies of government workers? There are actually half a million fewer government employees now than there were when Mr. Obama took office.

So what happened to the stimulus? Much of it consisted of tax cuts, not spending. Most of the rest consisted either of aid to distressed families or aid to hard-pressed state and local governments. This aid may have mitigated the slump, but it wasn’t the kind of job-creation program we could and should have had. This isn’t 20-20 hindsight: some of us warned from the beginning that tax cuts would be ineffective and that the proposed spending was woefully inadequate. And so it proved.

It’s also worth noting that in another area where government could make a big difference — help for troubled homeowners — almost nothing has been done. The Obama administration’s program of mortgage relief has gone nowhere: of $46 billion allotted to help families stay in their homes, less than $2 billion has actually been spent.

So let’s summarize: The economy isn’t fixing itself. Nor are there real obstacles to government action: both the bond vigilantes and structural unemployment exist only in the imaginations of pundits. And if stimulus seems to have failed, it’s because it was never actually tried.

Listening to what supposedly serious people say about the economy, you’d think the problem was “no, we can’t.” But the reality is “no, we won’t.” And every pundit who reinforces that destructive passivity is part of the problem.

From Head to Toe
2011
Wood, acrylic, gouache on paper-mâché, chicken wire, Styrofoam, spray paint, hardware, canvas
144 x 144 inches, height variable

July 9 – August 13, 2011

Group Show at Cherry and Martin

Hannah Wilke, Ray Gun in Homage to Claes Oldenburg (1978)

Through July 22, 2011

Alex Zachary

Barack Obama at Sandy Beach

By LAWRENCE DOWNES
NY Times Published: July 7, 2011

Forget, for a moment, what you know about surfing: the professional sport, the multipurpose verb and online metaphor. Put aside the Beach Boys, the baggies, the huarache sandals, too. Surfing’s all that. But those bushy bushy blond hairdos have dark brown roots.

Two new books and a documentary film, all out this year, are reclaiming the story of surfing as Hawaiians once knew it. They are telling the neglected tale of one little world, on eight little islands — surfing before outsiders took it to California and far beyond.

“Hawaiian Surfing: Traditions From the Past” is the most startling of the three. John Clark, a surfer who was once deputy chief of the Honolulu Fire Department, draws deeply from Hawaiian-language newspapers from the 1800s, after Europeans arrived but before the stark eclipse of Hawaii’s population, tradition and culture, a loss that native descendants have been striving for generations to reverse.

Tracing every reference he can find to surfing, beaches and waves in the Hawaiian language, Mr. Clark shows surfing as a social sport played on a scale unimaginable anywhere today. In old Hawaii, everyone surfed, children to grandparents. They surfed with long boards and short boards and no boards. They surfed big winter waves and lazy shore breaks. They surfed the mouths of rivers. They surfed the beach, skimming on sheets of water left by receding foam. They surfed with banana stalks. After hotels came to Waikiki, they surfed with wet pillowcases: they’d fill them with air, run, flop and fly.

“When the surf was good, the whole village got up and moved to the beach and everybody jumped in the water,” Mr. Clark said in a phone interview from Honolulu.

This amazed the Europeans, who watched children play in the zone that to them meant shipwrecks and broken necks. “None but natives ever master the art of surf-bathing,” Mark Twain wrote in 1866, after wiping out.

Surfing required not just grace but strength, since the old boards were heavy, finless slabs of wood. You couldn’t paddle out while lying on one; you’d have to swim behind, pushing like a tugboat. Rides were tricky.

But then, as now, they were exhilarating. In the old stories and news accounts, Mr. Clark finds frequent comparisons of surfers to ocean birds, and references to surfing as a sexual dance. Soon enough, though, the missionaries made everyone put on pants and muumuus. They discouraged idling and sensuous pastimes like surfing and hula. The young Princess Kaiulani kept surfing in Waikiki, a pointed act of rebellion. But surfing declined steeply in the early 20th century. Hawaiians kept at it, though, as surfing evolved into an individual sport, with athletes like Duke Kahanamoku, the Waikiki beach boy and Olympic star.

Kahanamoku and other legends, like Buffalo Keaulana and Wally Froiseth, appear in “A Deeper Shade of Blue,” a documentary by Jack McCoy, which uses stunning footage to show that Hawaiians remain great innovators and keepers of the soul of surfing.

And in “Waves of Resistance: Surfing and History in Twentieth-Century Hawaii,” Isaiah Helekunihi Walker, a history professor at Brigham Young University-Hawaii, takes the story to the present day. He argues that the surf zone is one place where native Hawaiians have successfully resisted the encroachments of outsiders. Hawaiians lost their kingdom in 1893, but surfers, he said, have been leaders in a struggle for environmental and cultural renewal. They may have been pushed off the land, but have not yet lost the waves.

Through August 27th 2011

Daniel Buchholz

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
NY Times Published: July 6, 2011

The House speaker, John Boehner, suggests that the Republican threat of letting the United States default on its debts is driven by concern for jobs for ordinary Americans.

“We cannot miss this opportunity,” he told Fox News. “If we want jobs to come to America, we’ve got to give American businesspeople the confidence to invest in our economy.”

So take a look at one of the tax loopholes that Congressional Republicans are refusing to close — even if the cost is that America’s credit rating blows up. This loophole has nothing to do with creating jobs and everything to do with protecting some of America’s wealthiest financiers.

If there were an award for Most Unconscionable Tax Loophole, this one would win grand prize.

Wait, wake up! I know that “tax policy” makes one’s eyes glaze over, but that’s how financiers have gotten away with paying a lower tax rate than their chauffeurs or personal trainers. Tycoons have bet for years that the public is too stupid or distracted to note that in many cases they’re paying just a 15 percent tax rate.

What’s at stake is the “carried interest” loophole, and President Obama is pushing to close it. The White House estimates that this would raise $20 billion over a decade. But Congressional Republicans walked out of budget talks rather than discuss raising revenues from measures such as this one.

The biggest threat to the United States this summer probably doesn’t come from Iran or Libya but from the home-grown risk that the nation will default on its debts. We don’t know the economic consequences for America or the world, and some of the hand-wringing may be overblown — or maybe not — but it’s reckless of Republicans even to toy with such a threat.

This carried interest loophole benefits managers of financial partnerships such as hedge funds, private equity funds, venture capital funds and real estate funds — who are among the highest-paid people in the world. John Paulson, a hedge fund manager in New York City, made $4.9 billion last year, top of the chart for hedge fund managers, according to AR Magazine, which follows hedge funds. That’s equivalent to the average per capita income of 184,000 Americans, according to my back-of-envelope calculations based on Census Bureau figures.

Mr. Paulson declined to comment on this tax break, but here’s how it works. These fund managers are compensated mostly with a performance bonus of 20 percent or more of the profits they make. Under this carried interest loophole, that 20 percent is eligible to be taxed at the long-term capital gains rate (if the fund’s underlying assets are held long enough) of just 15 percent rather than the regular personal income rate of 35 percent.

This tax loophole is also intellectually vacuous. The performance fee is a return on the manager’s labor, not his or her capital, so there’s no reason to give it preferential capital gains treatment.

“The carried interest loophole represents everyone’s worst fear about the tax system — that the rich and powerful get away with murder,” says Victor Fleischer, a law professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder, who has written about the issue. “Closing the loophole won’t fix the budget by itself, but it gets us one step closer to justice.”

At a time when the richest 1 percent of Americans have a greater collective net worth than the entire bottom 90 percent, there are other ways we could raise money while also making tax policy more equitable. The White House is backing some of them in its negotiations with Congress, but others aren’t even in play.

One important proposal has to do with founder’s stock, the shares people own in companies they found. Professor Fleischer has written an interesting paper persuasively arguing that founder’s stock is hugely undertaxed. It, too, is essentially a return on labor, not capital, and shouldn’t benefit from the low capital gains rate.

Likewise, Europe is moving toward a financial transactions tax on trades made in financial markets. That is something long championed by some economists — especially James Tobin, who won a Nobel Prize for his work — and it would also raise tens of billions of dollars at a time when it is desperately needed. It makes sense.

The larger question is this: Do we try to balance budget deficits just by cutting antipoverty initiatives, college scholarships and other investments in young people and our future? Or do we also seek tax increases from those best able to afford them?

And when Congressional Republicans claim that the reason for their recalcitrance in budget negotiations is concern for the welfare of ordinary Americans, look more closely. Do we really want to close down the American government and risk another global financial crisis to protect the tax bills of billionaires?

EKSIZ
2011
Type C print. 63 x 42 in. (160 x 106.7 cm)

July 16, 2011 – October 9, 2011

Hammer

LAXART

Los Angeles-based artist Shannon Ebner’s work investigates the correlations between photography and language. Informed by various modes of writing—including poetry, experimental writing, and political speech—Ebner constructs images in the studio and the landscape. She builds letters and phrases out of vernacular materials such as cardboard, wood, and cinder blocks, calling attention to the ways language and imagery are constructed. For her Hammer Project, she will exhibit a portion of an on-going project called “The Electric Comma,” which began as a poem she wrote of the same name about various conditions of the photographic, such as its alleged static nature and its vocation of describing events of the past. The poem, or as Ebner refers to it, “the photographic sentence,” seeks to enliven the image by subjecting it to various challenges that ask the photograph to perform outside its usual function of reporting or depicting events, people, places, and things of our time.

In addition to the presentation at the Hammer, works from “The Electric Comma” are simultaneously on display at LAXART in Culver City and in Venice, Italy as part of the 54th Venice Biennale. Portions of “The Electric Comma” have been made into works that are exhibited in all three locations. At the Hammer, Ebner will present two multi-panel large photographic works in Gallery 6 on the courtyard level, and the project will continue outside the gallery with a new piece made specifically for the light boxes leading to the Billy Wilder Theater. The light box work will spell out the word “asterisk,” an element of language and design that has long been featured in the artist’s work, and the boxes will be on a timed lighting sequence so that particular letters and groupings of letters will continuously flash, suggestive of a signal or mechanism for sending and receiving information. In addition to photographs and a video on view at LAXART, Ebner will present an outdoor sculpture in an empty lot in Culver City. An 8-foot tall plywood ampersand titled ‘and, per se and,’ Ebner considers the form and meaning of the ampersand to signify the continual construction and/or incompleteness of meaning between the various aspects of the project and their diverse locations. The Hammer’s presentation is organized by Anne Ellegood, Hammer senior curator.

An eleven mile stretch of Interstate 405 will be closed down for 53 hours in July in Los Angeles.

By ADAM NAGOURNEY
NY Times Published: July 6, 2011

LOS ANGELES — You would think that Los Angeles, of all places, would know how to handle a catastrophe.

But in just over a week, 11 miles of Interstate 405 — the north-south spine of the West Side of Los Angeles, which carries 500,000 cars every weekend over the Sepulveda Pass into the San Fernando Valley — is going to shut down for 53 hours, from late Friday night to early Monday morning. No cars, trucks or motorcycles will be allowed, to make way for the latest phase in a $1 billion widening project for a highway that serves as an unhappy second home for commuters during rush hours.

And they are calling it Carmageddon.

City officials are warning of a traffic nightmare, urging people to stay home or get out of town with pronouncements that have taken on an increasingly alarming tone. “EXPECT BIG DELAY” reads the warning on electronic billboards on highways and streets from Bakersfield to San Diego. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority has an official “Countdown to the Closure” clock on its Web site, ticking down to the weekend of July 16 and 17.

The Los Angeles Police Department, leaving no electronic stone unturned, asked Lady Gaga to post a warning on her Twitter feed, which has 11.4 million followers and is usually more concerned with promoting “Born This Way” than a highway. There is a Carmageddon Facebook page and an all-things Carmageddon Web site, with maps, videos, a Twitter feed and local businesses offering deals to people who stay home. (The tagline: “The Price You Pay to Live in L.A.”) And there is an ever-growing list of hashtags to help Twitter account users track the impending crisis.

Kajon Cermak, the traffic reporter for KCRW in Santa Monica, said she was considering doing what any rational person would do on that weekend: leaving. “I was talking to my husband, and he said we should get out of here and go to Portland,” Ms. Cermak said. “The traffic is going to be bumper to bumper. Everybody is talking about it.”

Which is hardly a surprise considering how terrifying the warnings have sounded.

“If you think the 405 is gridlocked during the week, you haven’t seen anything yet,” Mayor Antonio R. Villaraigosa said by telephone last week. “My message is to stay home. Or go on vacation. Walk. Go on a bike. But do not get in your car and go anywhere near the West Side. It’s going to be a mess.”

Bill Rosendahl, a City Council member from the area, said, “This is truly a potential paralysis moment.”

Of course, the big question is whether all this could end up being the Los Angeles equivalent of the Y2K crisis-that-never-came. There are plenty of people here who recall what took place after similarly alarming traffic warnings before the 1984 Summer Olympics.

“The message got out, and the freeway was never better,” said Leon Borja, the deputy mayor for transportation. “The traffic flow was incredible.”

But there are many more cars on the road here than 25 years ago. Ms. Cermak said she was struck by Interstate 405’s routine gridlock on weekends.

Preparations for this potential traffic catastrophe have been plentiful. Hospitals are lining up hotel and dormitory rooms for employees. The Los Angeles Emergency Operations Center, a high-tech command post built to manage during a natural disaster, will be in full operation, the mayor said.

The Getty Center — perched on a hillside overlooking the highway, and a top draw for tourists — is closing for the weekend, the first time it has done so since opening in 1997, said Ron Hartwig, its spokesman. Santa Monica is permitting farmers who come down for the Saturday farmers’ market to leave their trucks in parking lots through the weekend and is asking homeowners who have space to “host a farmer” through the closing.

One enterprising helicopter company is advertising trips from the Valley to the West Side — “Enjoy the ride over the Sepulveda Pass” — for $150 a person. Movie theaters near the roadway are promising free popcorn to draw nervous patrons through the door.

Los Angeles officials say they are only doing the responsible thing in issuing the ever-more-apocalyptic warnings of what lies in store. Local businesses are not so sure, worried that all this will do is drive away customers on what should be a busy summer weekend, while making it tougher for employees to get to work.

“We have elected officials standing up at the podium saying, ‘Get out of town, get away, don’t come here!’ ” said Jay Handal II, the manager of San Gennaro Cafe in Brentwood. “That’s probably the most business-unfriendly thing for them to be telling people. They should be promoting the local neighborhood, instead of telling people to get the hell away.”

The real fear is that come Monday morning, when the real crush of regular weekday traffic comes, the contractors will not be finished with the work. Though, perhaps fear is not the right word. “Oh, if that happens, it’s like, oh, L.A., we get our first snow day!” Ms. Cermak said.

Cy Twombly with his painting “1994 Untitled (Say Goodbye Catullus, to the Shores of Asia Minor),” at the Menil Collection in Houston in 2005.

By RANDY KENNEDY
NY Times Published: July 5, 2011

Cy Twombly, whose spare, childlike scribbles and poetic engagement with antiquity left him stubbornly out of step with the movements of postwar American art even as he became one of the era’s most important painters, died on Tuesday in Rome. He was 83.

His death was announced by the Gagosian Gallery, which represents his work. Mr. Twombly had battled cancer for several years.

In a career that slyly subverted Abstract Expressionism, toyed briefly with Minimalism, seemed barely to acknowledge Pop art and anticipated some of the concerns of Conceptualism, Mr. Twombly was a divisive artist almost from the start. The curator Kirk Varnedoe, on the occasion of a 1994 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, wrote that his work was “influential among artists, discomfiting to many critics and truculently difficult not just for a broad public, but for sophisticated initiates of postwar art as well.”

The critic Robert Hughes called him “the Third Man, a shadowy figure, beside that vivid duumvirate of his friends Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg.”

Mr. Twombly’s decision to settle permanently in southern Italy in 1957 as the art world shifted decisively in the other direction, from Europe to New York, was only the most symbolic of his idiosyncrasies. He avoided publicity throughout his life and mostly ignored his critics, who questioned constantly whether his work deserved a place at the forefront of 20th century abstraction, though he lived long enough to see it arrive there. It didn’t help that his paintings, because of their surface complexity and whirlwinds of tiny detail — scratches, erasures, drips, penciled fragments of Italian and classical verse amid scrawled phalluses and buttocks — lost much of their power in reproduction.

But Mr. Twombly, a tall, rangy Virginian who once practiced drawing in the dark to make his lines less purposeful, steadfastly followed his own program and looked to his own muses — often literary ones, like Catullus, Rumi, Pound and Rilke. He seemed to welcome the privacy that came with unpopularity.

“I had my freedom and that was nice,” he said in a rare interview, with Nicholas Serota, the director of the Tate, before a 2008 survey of his career at the Tate Modern.

The critical low point probably came after a widely panned 1964 exhibition at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York. The artist and writer Donald Judd, who was hostile toward painting in general, was especially damning, calling the show a fiasco. “There are a few drips and splatters and an occasional pencil line,” he wrote in a review. “There isn’t anything to these paintings.”

But by the 1980s, with the rise of neo-Expressionism, a generation of younger artists like Jean-Michel Basquiat found inspiration in Mr. Twombly’s skittery bathroom-graffiti scrawl. Coupled with rising interest in European artists whose work shared unexpected ground with Twombly’s, like Joseph Beuys, the newfound attention brought him a kind of critical favor he had never enjoyed before. And by the next decade, he was highly sought after not only by European museums and collectors, who had discovered his work early on, but also by those back in his homeland who had not known what to make of him two decades before.

In 1989, the Philadelphia Museum of Art opened permanent rooms dedicated to his monumental 10-painting cycle, “Fifty Days at Iliam,” based on Alexander Pope’s translation of “The Iliad.” (Mr. Twombly said that he purposely misspelled Ilium, a Latin name for Troy, with an “a,” to refer to Achilles.) That same year, Mr. Twombly’s work passed the million dollar mark at auction. In 1995, the Menil Collection in Houston opened a new gallery dedicated to his work, designed by Renzo Piano after a plan by Mr. Twombly himself. Despite this growing acceptance, Mr. Varnedoe still felt it necessary to include an essay in the Modern’s newsletter at the time of the retrospective, titled “Your Kid Could Not Do This, and Other Reflections on Cy Twombly.”

‘It Does Not Illustrate’

In the only written statement Mr. Twombly ever made about his work, a short essay in an Italian art journal in 1957, he tried to make clear that his intentions were not subversive but elementally human. Each line he made, he said, was “the actual experience” of making the line, adding: “It does not illustrate. It is the sensation of its own realization.” Years later, he described this more plainly. “It’s more like I’m having an experience than making a picture,” he said. The process stood in stark contrast to the detached, effete image that often clung to Mr. Twombly. After completing a work, in a kind of ecstatic state, it was as if the painting existed but he himself barely did anymore: “I usually have to go to bed for a couple of days,” he said.

Edwin Parker Twombly Jr., was born in Lexington, Va., on April 25, 1928, to parents who had moved to the South from New England. His father, a talented athlete who pitched a summer for the Chicago White Sox and went on to become a revered college swimming coach, was nicknamed Cy, after Cy Young, the Hall of Fame pitcher. The younger Mr. Twombly (pronounced TWAHM-blee) inherited the name, though he was much more bookish than athletic as a child, with stooped shoulders and a high ponderous forehead. He read avidly and, discovering his calling early, he worked from art kits he ordered from the Sears Roebuck catalog. As a teenager, he studied with the Spanish painter Pierre Daura, who had left Europe after the Spanish Civil War and settled in Lexington. Daura’s wife, Louise Blair, studied cave paintings and may have sparked Mr. Twombly’s early interest in Paleolithic art.

In 1947 he attended the Boston Museum School, where German Expressionism was the rage, but Mr. Twombly gravitated to his own interests, like Dada and Kurt Schwitters and particularly to Jean Dubuffet and Alberto Giacometti, two important early influences. He moved back to Lexington in 1949 and studied art at Washington and Lee University, where his talent impressed teachers. By 1950, he was in New York, the recipient of a scholarship to the Art Students League. Later in his life, he cited visiting Willem de Kooning’s studio and seeing an Arshile Gorky retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art as important moments in his young painting life. But he also came to New York at the heyday of the New York School and was exposed to the work of almost all its giants in the city’s galleries. He turned down an offer for a solo show of his paintings at the Art Students League in 1950, saying that he felt it was too early for him.

He met Rauschenberg, a fellow student at the league, during his second semester, and Rauschenberg later persuaded Mr. Twombly to enroll at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, which had become a crucible for the American avant-garde, with John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Ray Johnson, Dorothea Rockburne and John Chamberlain among its faculty and students. Mr. Twombly, who studied with Ben Shahn, stayed at the college only briefly and was a bit of an outsider even then. As he told Mr. Serota: “I was always doing my own thing. I always wondered why there are books with photographs of all the artists of that period and I was only in one! I thought: ‘Where was I?’ ”

In the summer of 1952, after receiving a grant from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Mr. Twombly traveled to Europe for the first time and met up with Rauschenberg. The two wandered through Italy, North Africa and Spain, an experience that later yielded some of the first paintings to be considered a part of Mr. Twombly’s mature work. “Tiznit,” made with white enamel house paint and pencil and crayon, with gouges and scratches in the surface, was named for a town in Morocco that he had visited, and the painting’s primitivist shapes were inspired by tribal pieces he saw at the ethnographic museum in Rome, as well as by artists like Dubuffet, de Kooning and Franz Kline.

The painting, along with another based on tribal motifs, was exhibited in 1953 at Eleanor Ward’s Stable Gallery on West 58th Street along with monochromatic paintings by Rauschenberg. The show was generally savaged. (Early this year, the Museum of Modern Art acquired “Tiznit,” along with another early work, which Mr. Twombly had kept in his personal collection.)

Mr. Twombly was drafted and spent more than a year in the Army, where he was assigned to cryptography work in Washington. On weekends and leaves, he continued to paint and draw, sometimes at night with the lights out to try to lose techniques he had learned in art classes and to express himself more instinctively. After receiving a medical discharge and teaching for a time in Virginia, Mr. Twombly returned to New York and worked in a studio on William Street, near both Rauschenberg and Johns, who helped choose titles for his paintings during this period.

Mr. Twombly tried without success for several months to get a grant to go back to Europe and in 1957, with Ward’s help, he spent several months in Italy, where he met Tatiana Franchetti, a portrait painter and member of a storied family of Italian art patrons. They were married in 1959 at City Hall in New York and their son, Cyrus Alessandro, was born that year. She died in 2010. Mr. Twombly is survived by his son; two grandchildren, and by Nicola Del Roscio, his longtime companion.

In Love With Italy

Mr. Twombly fell in love with Italy, which reminded him of the faded grandeur of Lexington. (“Virginia is a good start for Italy,” he once said.) He rented an apartment facing the Coliseum in Rome and began to work on larger scale paintings, which were increasingly spare, incorporating scrawled words and doodle-like shapes on a smudged off-white background, establishing a lifelong reputation as a high-art graffitist that generally irked him. He told Mr. Serota that while early paintings made visual reference to ancient graffiti, his intentions were “more lyrical” and his inclusion of phalluses and female body parts were often just ways to evoke male and female presences in the work. If his aspirations were toward any period, he later said, it was an early neo-Classicism, like that of Poussin, whom he said he would have liked to have been. (In his final days, he at least communed with his hero’s spirit; the Dulwich Picture Gallery in London opened a show on June 29 pairing his works with Poussin’s.)

In 1958, Mr. Twombly left Ward’s Stable Gallery and began to show at Leo Castelli, which represented Rauschenberg and Johns and was establishing them as presences in the New York art world. Mr. Twombly continued to live and work in and around Rome, but he traveled extensively, to the Sahara, Greece, Egypt and Turkey. In 1964 his work was included in one of the first exhibitions to explore the ideas of Minimalism, “Black, White and Grey,” at the Wadsworth Athenaeum in Hartford, with a roster of rising stars like Agnes Martin, Frank Stella and Andy Warhol.

But the same year, Mr. Twombly’s “Nine Discourses on Commodus,” an ambitious painting cycle he made after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, based on the life and death of the Roman emperor, received scathing reviews in a show at the Castelli gallery. In addition to Judd’s condemnation, other critics dismissed the work as nostalgically backward-looking or barely there; one described paintings of “indecisive pinkish scrawled areas floating across each other at the edges.” According to the catalog for the Tate Modern show, the criticism damaged Mr. Twombly’s career and caused him to paint less for several years. His aversion to the press might also have been cemented at this point; not long after the Castelli show, Vogue magazine ran a piece about Mr. Twombly, lavishly illustrated with pictures by Horst P. Horst of his elegant Roman apartment. The article noted archly that his wealth and comfort had led to “Twombly being suspected of having fallen for ‘grandeur’ ” and to a view among American critics that he had “somehow betrayed the cause.”

In the 1960’s, he began to work for periods of time back in Lexington and in New York, where he used the collector and curator David Whitney’s loft and then rented space on the Bowery. In 1972, he began working on one of the largest canvases of his career, a painting inspired by Burton’s “Anatomy of Melancholy,” which would take him 22 years to complete and is now installed in the Twombly gallery at the Menil Collection.

With the opening of that gallery Mr. Twombly fully entered what might be called the Old Master stage of a career that had taken a long time to arrive there, though his presence is still muted in the narrative of postwar art told by many American museum collections.

In 2010, the Louvre unveiled a ceiling painting it commissioned by Mr. Twombly, a 3,750-square-foot work in the museum’s Salle des Bronzes, next door to a ceiling triptych created more than half a century before by Georges Braque. The work is as calm and classical as his many of his early paintings were stormy and scatological: a listing of Hellenic sculptors against a deep blue background with planet-like discs. Characteristically, Mr. Twombly said little about the work.

Just before the retrospective at the Modern opened in 1994, he submitted reluctantly to an interview with The New York Times, sounding more agitated by the attention the show directed his way than vindicated by the recognition.

“I have my pace and way of living,” he said, in his hillside house in Gaeta, south of Rome, “and I’m not looking for something.” Of reputation and artistic acclaim, he added: “It’s something I don’t think about. If it happens, it happens, but don’t bother me with it. I couldn’t care less.”

It’s true: Western money and advice really did help fuel the explosion of sex selection in Asia.

BY MARA HVISTENDAHL | JUNE 27, 2011
Foreign Policy Magazine

How did more than 160 million women go missing from Asia? The simple answer is sex selection — typically, an ultrasound scan followed by an abortion if the fetus turns out to be female — but beyond that, the reasons for a gap half the size of the U.S. population are not widely understood. And when I started researching a book on the topic, I didn’t understand them myself.

I thought I would focus on how gender discrimination has persisted as countries develop. The reasons couples gave for wanting boys varies: Sons stayed in the family and took care of their parents in old age, or they performed ancestor and funeral rites important in some cultures. Or it was that daughters were a burden, made expensive by skyrocketing dowries.

But that didn’t account for why sex selection was spreading across cultural and religious lines. Once found only in East and South Asia, imbalanced sex ratios at birth have recently reached countries as varied as Vietnam, Albania, and Azerbaijan. The problem has fanned out across these countries, moreover, at a time when women are driving many developing economies. In India, where women have achieved political firsts still not reached in the United States, sex selection has become so intense that by 2020 an estimated 15 to 20 percent of men in northwest India will lack female counterparts. I could only explain that epidemic as the cruel sum of technological advances and lingering sexism. I did not think the story of sex selection’s spread would lead, in part, to the United States.

Then I looked into it, and discovered that what I thought were right-wing conspiracy theories about the nexus of Western feminism and population control actually had some, if very distant and entirely historical, basis in truth. As it turns out, Western advisors and researchers, and Western money, were among the forces that contributed to a serious reduction in the number of women and girls in the developing world. And today feminist and reproductive-rights groups are still reeling from that legacy.

The story begins in the mid-20th century, when several factors converged to make Western demographers worried about global population growth. Thanks to advances in public health, people were living longer than ever before. Projections released by the U.N. Population Division in 1951 suggested what the sum of all those extra years of life could be: Rapid population growth was on the horizon, particularly in the developing world. As pundits forecast a global “population explosion,” anxiety mounted in policy circles, and the population control movement that coalesced brought together everyone from environmentalists to McCarthyites. Viewed through a 1960s Beltway lens, mounting numbers of people meant higher rates of poverty, which in turn made countries more vulnerable to communism.

The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the World Bank, and the Rockefeller Foundation were among the organizations that poured money into stanching the birth rate abroad, while the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) and the Population Council helped coordinate efforts on the ground. As these organizations backed research into barriers to couples accepting contraception, one of the obstacles quickly identified was that in most parts of the world, but particularly in fast-growing Asia, people continued to have children until they got a boy. As demographer S.N. Agarwala explained in a paper on India he presented at a 1963 IPPF conference in Singapore: “[S]ome religious rites, especially those connected with the death of the parents, can be performed only by the male child…. [T]hose who have only daughters try their best to have at least one male child.” Even in the United States, surveys suggested a preference for sons.

That raised the question: What if couples could be guaranteed a son from the start? Elsewhere, scientists were working to perfect fetal sex determination tests for women carrying sex-linked disorders like hemophilia, which only manifests itself in males. (The first sex-selective abortions, performed in 1955 by Danish doctors in Copenhagen, were actually done on women carrying male fetuses.) But the technology was still incipient and required a late-term abortion. Proponents of population control began talking about nudging sex selection along. In 1967, for example, when Planned Parenthood Federation of America President Alan Guttmacher received a proposal from an Indian scientist interested in finding a way to “control SEX in human reproduction,” he scrawled a note across the top in hasty red pencil, asking the organization’s medical director to consider whether the research was in fact “worth encouraging.”

Planned Parenthood didn’t fund the research in the end, but on the technicality that the U.S. government had recently cut funding for fellowships to foreigners. Six months later Steven Polgar, the organization’s head of research, went public with the notion that sex selection was an effective population control method. Taking the podium before an audience of scholars and policymakers at a conference sponsored by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), Polgar “urged,” according to the meeting’s minutes, “that sociologists stimulate biologists to find a method of sex determination, since some parents have additional children in order to get one of specified sex.”

At first the language was gender-neutral. But before long the descriptions grew more blunt, and some proponents talked frankly about selecting for sons. In the years that followed, Population Council President Bernard Berelson endorsed sex selection in the pages of Science, while Paul Ehrlich advocated giving couples the sons they desired in his blockbuster The Population Bomb. “[I]f a simple method could be found to guarantee that first-born children were males,” he wrote, “then population control problems in many areas would be somewhat eased.” In many countries, he wrote, “couples with only female children ‘keep trying’ in hope of a son.” A wide range of population control strategies were on the table at the time, but by the end of the decade, when the NICHD held another workshop on reducing birth rates, sex selection had emerged as an approach that participants deemed “particularly desirable.”

Other spokesmen — for they were mostly men — included Arno G. Motulsky, a geneticist at the University of Washington-Seattle, William D. McElroy, then head of the biology department at Johns Hopkins University, and British microbiologist John Postgate. Postgate was particularly resolute. He extolled sex selection in an article for the New Scientist, explaining that population growth was so great a threat that the drawbacks of a skewed sex ratio would have to be tolerated, grim as they were. “A form of purdah” might be necessary, he predicted, while “Women’s right to work, even to travel alone freely, would probably be forgotten transiently.” A handful of women got on board as well. In 1978, former ambassador and former U.S. Congresswoman Clare Boothe Luce wrote an article for the Washington Star in which she clamored for the development of a “manchild pill” — a drug a woman could take before sex to ensure any children that resulted would be male.

Before long, sex selection emerged as a favored solution. In the context of ’60s and ’70s population politics, it had the appeal of being a voluntary strategy that played to individual behavior. In his paper for Science, Berelson ranked sex selection’s ethical value as “high.” Postgate pointed out, “Countless millions of people would leap at the opportunity to breed male.” And other strategies being tried in Asia at the time entailed coercion, not choice.

In South Korea, Western money enabled the creation of a fleet of mobile clinics — reconditioned U.S. Army ambulances donated by USAID and staffed by poorly trained workers and volunteers. Fieldworkers employed by the health ministry’s Bureau of Public Health were paid based on how many people they brought in for sterilizations and intrauterine device insertions, and some allege Korea’s mobile clinics later became the site of abortions as well. By the 1970s, recalls gynecologist Cho Young-youl, who was a medical student at the time, “there were agents going around the countryside to small towns and bringing women into the [mobile] clinics. That counted toward their pay. They brought the women regardless of whether they were pregnant.” Non-pregnant women were sterilized. A pregnant woman met a worse fate, Cho says: “The agent would have her abort and then undergo tubal ligation.” As Korea’s abortion rate skyrocketed, Sung-bong Hong and Christopher Tietze detailed its rise in the Population Council journal Studies in Family Planning. By 1977, they determined, doctors in Seoul were performing 2.75 abortions for every birth — the highest documented abortion rate in human history. Were it not for this history, Korean sociologist Heeran Chun recently told me, “I don’t think sex-selective abortion would have become so popular.”

In India, meanwhile, advisors from the World Bank and other organizations pressured the government into adopting a paradigm, as public-health activist Sabu George put it to me, “where the entire problem was population.” The Rockefeller Foundation granted $1.5 million to the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), the country’s top medical school, and the Ford Foundation chipped in $63,563 for “research into reproductive biology.” And sometime in the mid-1960s, Population Council medical director Sheldon Segal showed the institute’s doctors how to test human cells for the sex chromatins that indicated a person was female — a method that was the precursor to fetal sex determination.

Soon after, the technology matured, and second-trimester fetal sex determination became possible using amniocentesis. In 1975, AIIMS doctors inaugurated sex-selective abortion trials at a government hospital, offering amniocentesis to poor women free of charge and then helping them, should they so choose, to abort on the basis of sex. An estimated 1,000 women carrying female fetuses underwent abortions. The doctors touted the study as a population control experiment, and sex-selective abortion spread throughout India. In his autobiography, Segal professed to being shocked to learn that doctors at AIIMS were using a variation on his instructions to perform sex-selective abortions. But he neglected to mention that shortly after his stay in India he stood before an audience at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and described sex selection as a method of population control. (The minutes from the meeting describe “sex determination at conception” — now finally available today through advances in assisted reproductive technology — but in-utero sex determination was the form of sex selection furthest along at that point.)

Sex selection hit China the same year the AIIMS experiments began. The country accepted Western aid belatedly, in 1979. But after years of being kept out of the Middle Kingdom, the U.N. Population Fund (UNFPA) and IPPF jumped at the opportunity to play a role in the world’s most populous country, with UNFPA chipping in $50 million for computers, training, and publicity on the eve of the one-child policy’s unveiling. Publicly, officers at both UNFPA and IPPF claimed China’s new policy relied on the Chinese people’s exceptional knack for communalism. But, according to Columbia University historian Matthew Connelly’s account of the population control movement, Fatal Misconception, in January 1980 IPPF information officer Penny Kane privately fretted about local officials’ evident interest in meeting the new birth quotas through forced abortions. Accounts of those eventually leaked out, as did reports of sex-selective abortions. In 1982, Associated Press correspondent Victoria Graham warned that those augured a spreading trend. “These are not isolated cases,” she wrote, adding: “Demographers are warning that if the balance between the sexes is altered by abortion and infanticide, it could have dire consequences.”

Today, some of those dire consequences have become alarmingly apparent. Part of that is the extent to which organizations like UNFPA have found themselves unable to perform legitimate services in the developing world because of their historic connection to population control. For it was news of sex-selective and forced abortions that helped fuel a budding anti-abortion movement in the United States. Protesters showed up at the 1984 World Population Conference in Mexico City, wielding evidence of abuses in China. The next year, President Ronald Reagan unveiled what would become known as the “global gag rule,” cutting off $46 million in funds to UNFPA — money that might have gone toward maternal and child health as well as population control. The struggle to fund reproductive health continued over the next two decades, with subsequent U.S. presidents withdrawing or reinstating the gag rule along partisan lines.

Nowadays, of course, UNFPA and Planned Parenthood are led by a new wave of feminist bureaucrats who are keen on ensuring reproductive rights, and they no longer finance global population control. Thanks to a thriving anti-abortion movement, Planned Parenthood can barely make contraceptives and safe abortion available to the American women who actually want them. But contentious American politics has these and other groups on the left stuck in what Joseph Chamie, former head of the U.N. Population Division, calls “the abortion bind.” The United Nations issued an interagency statement condemning sex selection and outlining recommendations for action last week, and UNFPA was among the agencies that helped draft it. The organization has also funded research on sex selection and sex ratio imbalance at the local level. But its legacy in the developing world continues to haunt its leaders, to the detriment of women worldwide. Lingering anxiety over taking on issues involving abortion, activists and demographers have told me, now has UNFPA reluctant to address sex selection head-on at the international level — a reluctance that has left the organization’s enemies to twist the issue to fit their own agenda. (Anti-abortion groups and pundits have proven all too eager to to take on the issue, though they seem far more interested in driving home restrictions on abortion than they do in increasing the number of women in the world and protecting the rights of women at risk.)

Meanwhile, as American politicians argue over whether to cut Planned Parenthood’s U.S. funding and the Christian right drives through bans on sex-selective abortion at the state level, the effects of three decades of sex selection elsewhere in the world are becoming alarmingly apparent. In China, India, Korea, and Taiwan, the first generation shaped by sex selection has grown up, and men are scrambling to find women, yielding the ugly sideblows of increased sex trafficking and bride buying. In a Chinese boomtown, I watched soap operas with a slight, defeated woman from the poor mountains of the west who had been brought east by a trafficker and sold into marriage. (Her favorite show: Women Don’t Cry.) In the Mekong Delta, I visited an island commune where local women are hawked by their parents for a few thousand dollars to “surplus” Taiwanese men. While the purdah forecasted by John Postgate has not yet come to pass, feminists in Asia worry that as women become scarce, they will be pressured into taking on domestic roles and becoming housewives and mothers rather than scientists and entrepreneurs.

But what happens to women is only part of the story. Demographically speaking, women matter less and less. By 2013, an estimated one in 10 men in China will lack a female counterpart. By the late 2020s, that figure could jump to one in five. There are many possible scenarios for how these men will cope without women — and not all, of course, want women — but several of them involve rising rates of unrest. Already Columbia University economist Lena Edlund and colleagues at Chinese University of Hong Kong have found a link between a large share of males in the young adult population and an increase in crime in China. Doomsday analysts need look no further than America’s history: Murder rates soared in the male-dominated Wild West.

Four decades ago, Western advocacy of sex selection yielded tragic results. But if we continue to ignore that legacy and remain paralyzed by heated U.S. abortion politics, we’re compounding that mistake. Indian public health activist George, indeed, says waiting to act is no longer an option: If the world does “not see ten years ahead to where we’re headed, we’re lost.”

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By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Times Published: July 3, 2011

Watching the evolution of economic discussion in Washington over the past couple of years has been a disheartening experience. Month by month, the discourse has gotten more primitive; with stunning speed, the lessons of the 2008 financial crisis have been forgotten, and the very ideas that got us into the crisis — regulation is always bad, what’s good for the bankers is good for America, tax cuts are the universal elixir — have regained their hold.

And now trickle-down economics — specifically, the idea that anything that increases corporate profits is good for the economy — is making a comeback.

On the face of it, this seems bizarre. Over the last two years profits have soared while employment has remained disastrously high. Why should anyone believe that handing even more money to corporations, no strings attached, would lead to faster job creation?

Nonetheless, trickle-down is clearly on the ascendant — and even some Democrats are buying into it. What am I talking about? Consider first the arguments Republicans are using to defend outrageous tax loopholes. How can people simultaneously demand savage cuts in Medicare and Medicaid and defend special tax breaks favoring hedge fund managers and owners of corporate jets?

Well, here’s what a spokesman for Eric Cantor, the House majority leader, told Greg Sargent of The Washington Post: “You can’t help the wage earner by taxing the wage payer offering a job.” He went on to imply, disingenuously, that the tax breaks at issue mainly help small businesses (they’re actually mainly for big corporations). But the basic argument was that anything that leaves more money in the hands of corporations will mean more jobs. That is, it’s pure trickle-down.

And then there’s the repatriation issue.

U.S. corporations are supposed to pay taxes on the profits of their overseas subsidiaries — but only when those profits are transferred back to the parent company. Now there’s a move afoot — driven, of course, by a major lobbying campaign — to offer an amnesty under which companies could move funds back while paying hardly any taxes. And even some Democrats are supporting this idea, claiming that it would create jobs.

As opponents of this plan point out, we’ve already seen this movie: A similar tax holiday was offered in 2004, with a similar sales pitch. And it was a total failure. Companies did indeed take advantage of the amnesty to move a lot of money back to the United States. But they used that money to pay dividends, pay down debt, buy up other companies, buy back their own stock — pretty much everything except increasing investment and creating jobs. Indeed, there’s no evidence that the 2004 tax holiday did anything at all to stimulate the economy.

What the tax holiday did do, however, was give big corporations a chance to avoid paying taxes, because they would eventually have repatriated, and paid taxes on, much of the money they brought in under the amnesty. And it also gave these companies an incentive to move even more jobs overseas, since they now know that there’s a good chance that they’ll be able to bring overseas profits home nearly tax-free under future amnesties.

Yet as I said, there’s a push for a repeat of this disastrous performance. And this time around the circumstances are even worse. Think about it: How can anyone imagine that lack of corporate cash is what’s holding back recovery in America right now? After all, it’s widely understood that corporations are already sitting on large amounts of cash that they aren’t investing in their own businesses.

In fact, that idle cash has become a major conservative talking point, with right-wingers claiming that businesses are failing to invest because of political uncertainty. That’s almost surely false: the evidence strongly says that the real reason businesses are sitting on cash is lack of consumer demand. In any case, if corporations already have plenty of cash they’re not using, why would giving them a tax break that adds to this pile of cash do anything to accelerate recovery?

It wouldn’t, of course; claims that a corporate tax holiday would create jobs, or that ending the tax break for corporate jets would destroy jobs, are nonsense.

So here’s what you should answer to anyone defending big giveaways to corporations: Lack of corporate cash is not the problem facing America. Big business already has the money it needs to expand; what it lacks is a reason to expand with consumers still on the ropes and the government slashing spending.

What our economy needs is direct job creation by the government and mortgage-debt relief for stressed consumers. What it very much does not need is a transfer of billions of dollars to corporations that have no intention of hiring anyone except more lobbyists.

Sammlung-Haubrok

Thanks to Matt Connors

A sketch, right, of an index page in a book of maps, drawn from memory by the 7-year-old Lars Sonne, who has autism, showed a talent for visual reproduction.

By DAVID BORNSTEIN
NY Times Published: June 30, 2011

Steen B. Iversen tests mobile phones for the Danish telecommunications firm TDC. Before landing his job two and a half years ago, Iversen, 50, who has been diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome, spent more than 12 years looking for work. “It’s always been somewhat traumatizing,” he said. “I have had jobs, but I always got fired. People would laugh about me behind my back and laugh at me to my face. Those problems have more or less been a problem for me from childhood.”

In the working world, Iversen said, his biggest problem was communication. “Most of the time it simply was that people didn’t understand me and I didn’t understand them,” he said.

Iversen works for a remarkable Danish company, Specialisterne (“The Specialists”), that is improving the futures of many families by opening up job opportunities for people with Asperger’s Syndrome and high-functioning autism who have historically found themselves excluded from employment, largely because they don’t fit in with workplace norms.

Specialisterne was founded by Thorkil Sonne. Eleven years ago, Sonne was a successful executive at TDC when his youngest child, Lars, then 3, was diagnosed with autism. “I had the perfect career and the perfect family,” he recalled. “It was so shocking to realize that one of our family members had a lifelong disability. As parents we wanted to make the best possible future for all of our children, not just the two who were non-disabled. So we had to come up with a new plan for our family’s future.”

Sonne and his wife thought about what would be best for their son. “What will make Lars a happy man when we are not there anymore?” they asked themselves. “We thought,” Sonne said, “If others could appreciate his skills and respect his special personality in a meaningful and productive job, then we could go to the grave with a good conscience.”

With Specialisterne, Sonne has created something that has gone beyond giving a helping hand to his son. To date, the company has hired 35 people with autism to work as consultants for other companies, and is now training 46 others. Perhaps more important, its model is gaining momentum. Sonne has been contacted by people from 60 countries who want to adapt the work locally. He has expanded to Iceland and Scotland and is planning to spread to a half dozen additional countries within the next few years, including Poland, Germany, Ireland and the United States. Specialisterne has also inspired a similar Chicago-based non-profit called Aspiritech.

The idea for Specialisterne came to Sonne after he got involved with an autism support organization and met scores of people with Autism Spectrum Disorders (A.S.D.). There are large variations within this spectrum: it includes people who are significantly challenged as well as some who, on the surface, seem perfectly average and are often very intelligent. People with A.S.D. have problems imagining other people’s feelings and grasping social contexts; they struggle or may be unable to read social cues like facial expressions or sarcasm. They usually have narrowly defined interests, engage in repetitive behaviors, and are resistant to changes in routine. And they are highly sensitive to stress and vulnerable to depression.

Thorkil Sonne young son at the age of 7 drew from memory the index page he had seen on the European book of maps. This sketch, right, reinforced Sonne’s conviction that people with autism have skills that deserve to be made visible and accessible to society.

Nobody knows what causes autism, or how prevalent it is. About one percent of children in the United States are diagnosed with A.S.D. Only a small percentage of adults with autism are employed full-time in either the United States or Europe. This is a problem that extends to people with many other disabilities, as well. In the United States in 2010, of 14.7 million people between the ages of 16 and 64 with a disability, only 4.2 million — less than one in three — were employed.

As Sonne got to know numerous youths and adults with A.S.D., he discovered how unhappy many were. They shared painful stories about being rejected for jobs or fired. They spoke of being overwhelmed by anxiety at work and having to quit. Many had given up hope of finding work where they would feel comfortable and accepted. “One man had a good IT education and had applied for hundreds of jobs and been to a handful of job interviews,” Sonne recalled. “But a job interview is about chemistry and people like him flunk within the first few minutes — so they never get to tell what they’re good at.”

Part of the problem is that people rarely think about disability unless they are directly affected by it. And while many business people worry about the costs of accommodating employees with disabilities, few consider the potential contributions of people who are not “normal” or “neurotypical,” as they say in the autism community.

“I think that everyone has resources that society can benefit from under the right circumstances,” explains Sonne. However, among those with high-functioning autism, he notes, it is easier to make this case. Sonne saw that Lars, at age 7, had an unusual aptitude for copying details from books by memory. Having spent years working in the field of information technology, he knew that the strengths that often come with A.S.D. — such as a talent for intense focus and concentration, an ability to recognize patterns, spot minute deviances and recall details, and a perseverance for repetitive tasks — could be advantages in jobs where consistency and accuracy are paramount. Software testing and data conversion and management were obvious examples.

When Sonne set up Specialisterne, he took an unusual tack: he decided that, rather than pursue business by appealing primarily to corporate responsibility, or by offering low-cost labor, he would position his consultants as superior workers and charge premium rates for their services. This approach, which is clearly limited to a subset of people with autism, seems to be working.

Sonne calls it the “dandelion philosophy.” Depending on your point of view, a dandelion is either a valuable herb — a source of iron and vitamin A, with many medicinal qualities — or a weed that invades your garden. “A weed is a beautiful plant in an unwanted place,” he says. “An herb is the same plant where it is wanted. Who decides if something is a weed or an herb? Society does.”

Since Sonne wanted companies to see people with autism as herbs, not weeds, he created a five-month program to carefully evaluate candidates’ learning and behavior profiles, build their confidence, and prepare them for success. (Danish municipalities subsidize this training program, a wise policy. In the U.S., it’s estimated that for every dollar the government spends on vocational rehabilitation for people with disabilities the Social Security Administration saves $7.)

Sonne knew that many people with A.S.D. love working with Lego. So he approached the Danish company to develop an assessment program using Lego’s Mindstorm Robot technology. Employees are asked to build and program robots, a process that reveals things like how well they process instructions, whether they will ask a question if they don’t understand something, and how they react when asked to work with a colleague. “We found that people could show us who they were much better than they could tell us about themselves,” he said. (Specialistern’s approach is in keeping with the model of “Customized Employment,” advocated by the U.S. Office of Disabilities Employment Policy.)

All the candidates who go through the training and assessment gain valuable knowledge about themselves and what is necessary for them to excel in the workplace. But only some are a good match for the work Specialisterne offers. Sonne says his biggest challenge is balancing business and social goals. This year, the company will hire a quarter of its trainees as consultants. The typical workload is 20 to 25 hours a week. Most consultants are placed in the offices of Specialisterne’s corporate clients, but some are uncomfortable being sent offsite. Specialisterne has a staff of 20 who provide ongoing management support to corporate clients, which include Microsoft, Oracle, Deloitte and Nokia. Last year, the company earned a small profit on $3 million in revenues. Sonne says they’re on track to grow revenues this year by 40 percent. (Sonne sold the company for one Danish crown to the Specialisterne Foundation, a nonprofit organization he created to spread the model globally.)

After two and a half years working with Specialisterne, Iversen says he feels a greater sense of security — largely because he feels understood. His manager at TDC, Johnni Jensen, is pleased with his work.

Specialisterne’s consultants are meticulous, Jensen said. “You know if you have to run 85 tests, they have done the 85 tests,” he explained. “They haven’t done 80 tests and taken a short cut.” This can translate to big savings. A bug found in the production phase of a software product can cost 50 to 100 times more to fix than one caught in the design or testing phase. As a manager, the relationship has brought Jensen new challenges. He had to learn to communicate precisely and clearly, to be mindful of his tone of voice, and to pay attention to his consultant’s individual needs. “One is afraid of not doing things well enough for us,” he told me. “Another can’t say no; he won’t stop himself and will stay very late. I have to manage their workloads carefully.”

He has also discovered that a person with autism may not be very social, but still like to socialize. “One of our consultants doesn’t say hello in the morning or goodbye in the evening,” he explained. “But every Friday morning we eat breakfast together at work, and he likes to join in and laugh with us.”

Because of the experience, he says he has become more open to people with disabilities. “I didn’t have anything against them before, but I now see you have to look for special things in people,” he said. “It’s easier to accept people’s differences if you can see them more fully.”

Lars, now 14, hopes to work as a Lego Mindstorm trainer in Specialisterne for three years after he graduates from school. Sonne believes that by the time Lars is ready to start his career, more companies in Denmark will be willing to consider his abilities and not just his disabilities.

On Wednesday, I’ll respond to comments and provide examples of some American companies that are opening their workplaces to people with disabilities. I’ll also explain why companies that learn to accommodate differences may be better poised to meet the challenges of the 21st century.

By MARK BITTMAN
NY Times Published: July 1, 2011

Is there enough food? How do we get it to people? What is its quality? These common questions all concern supply; people spend a lifetime addressing them, and if you closely examine any one, you’re ensnared in a complex web.

Yet we don’t spend enough time discussing what happens to food once it’s in the home. Or what doesn’t happen. Which is cooking. And that part is pretty simple.

Not long ago, cooking was a common topic. Weekly food sections of newspapers were filled with it. Churches self-published cookbooks by the pile. There were even real cooking shows and cookbooks.

Now, if it weren’t for the vibrant but dwindling community of bloggers, we’d hardly see actual cooking discussed at all. There are but a fraction of the food pages there once were in newspapers, and most cookbooks are offshoots of TV “cooking” shows, almost all of which are game shows, reality television shows or shows about celebrities.

Like many professional urbanites with grown children, I often succumb to the temptation to work late and eat out with friends. That experience, effortless and pleasurable in anticipation, is usually expensive — even when it’s at a theoretically inexpensive restaurant — and frustrating; more often than not it’s unsatisfying. (Note that this means it’s also sometimes satisfying, which is why I keep doing it; it’s a gamble.)

When I cook, though, everything seems to go right. I shop an average of every two weeks in a supermarket, and make a couple of trips a week to smaller stores. I’m aware that my choices are mostly imperfect, but I rarely conclude that I should make a burger and fries for dinner or provide a pound per person of prison-raised pork served with fruit from 10,000 miles away, followed by a cake full of sugar and artificial ingredients. Yet, for the most part, that describes restaurant food.

This time of year, I’ll buy local greens and local fish and wind up eating half or less of the food I would have if I had eaten out. Dessert only happens if someone else buys or makes it because I won’t do either; I might schlep home a piece of watermelon. The starter, if there is one, might range from bread with butter or oil to homemade hummus or other bean dip to home-roasted or fried nuts, or some salami or ham, hunks of which remain in the fridge for weeks.

That’s pretty much it. The investment is minimal: A quick shopping trip takes me a half-hour, including the walk or drive. It takes me about half or three-quarters of an hour to cook, not including the time that it took to make that bean dip or bread, both of which last for days. The time spent eating is relaxing and uninterrupted by the insipid ritual: “Is everything tasting to your liking?” or “You guys O.K.?” It takes 10 minutes to clean up.

Compared with a restaurant, the frustrations and annoyances are minimal, the food is as good or better-tasting, unquestionably healthier and more environmentally friendly, and much less expensive. Saturday night, for example, I fed four people a dinner of nuts, a small frittata, fish, salad and watermelon for far less than two of us would have spent at Applebee’s.

It’s not that I’m unconcerned about the supply side. I can’t help bugging myself with questions about whether the food I buy is “good” enough: pesticides? fertilizer? endangered fish? carbon footprint? fair pay for farmworkers?

But these are shopping questions, not cooking and eating questions. Shopping is the time to be critical. (Eating is the time to enjoy.) Buy things that you feel answer to your standards, and you’ll be a cut above most restaurant food in every category. You’ll know exactly what you’re putting in your mouth and how much of it. (Who buys 20-ounce steaks for one person at home?) You’ll move in the right direction, cooking and eating less meat and junk and more plants.

In most restaurants, the questions are pointless because you relinquish all control. At McDonald’s, the main goals seem to involve making the food safe and consistent, not producing it ethically. (They would surely argue with this, and, perhaps, they’ve made some progress. But really?) In pricier restaurants, the goal seems to be to impress you with presentation, originality and glamour.

I recognize that I’m privileged, though, in fact, I have friends who are better cooks than I am, who have access to better food and who have more leisure. I recognize, too, that there are many people for whom time and money and skills and even access are challenges. The thing, though, is not to discount this argument simply because not everyone is in a position to benefit from it, but rather to use it to benefit those it can, and to create the same possibilities for everyone.

Monica Almeida/The New York Times

Inmates at the California Rehabilitation Center in Norco improvising scenes from the play “Tartuffe” in an acting workshop by the Actors’ Gang.

By ADAM NAGOURNEY
NY Times Published: June 30, 2011

NORCO, Calif. — Fifteen men darted across the room, their faces slathered in greasepaint, reciting lines from “Tartuffe.” The stage, such as it was, was a low-ceilinged recreation room, and the cast was a troupe of felons who had just stepped in from the dusty yard of the California Rehabilitation Center.

For four hours, they conducted workshops under the direction of the Actors’ Gang, an ensemble from Los Angeles, which goaded them into acting out emotions that could be put to use in the 17th-century Molière farce about, appropriately enough, a con man working a swindle.

“Why are you angry?” Sabra Williams, the prison project director, demanded of the jostling lineup of actor-prisoners.

“They gave me too much time!” shouted one of the inmates, Ron Reiber, his face red and veins bulging.

“Now go to happy!” she said.

The room burst into giddy smiles and rubbery limbs from men in prison jumpsuits.

Two years ago, arts in corrections programs were a mainstay of prisons across the country, embraced by administrators as a way to channel aggression, break down racial barriers, teach social skills and prepare inmates for the outside world. There was an arts coordinator in each of the 33 California state prisons, overseeing a rich variety of theater, painting and dance.

But these programs have become a fading memory, casualties of the budget crises that have overwhelmed state and local governments nationwide. Nowhere is that truer than here, where prisons are so overcrowded that the Supreme Court in May ordered the state to start releasing inmates.

“The artist facilitator — that position was eliminated,” said Violette Peters, who filled the role for four years at this medium-security prison in the desert, which, with 4,410 inmates, is at double its capacity. “So now I’m a corrections case analyst. I work in the records department, which has nothing to do with the arts programs.”

Only two prison arts programs are left in California, and both rely on volunteers and private contributions. The one here is run by the Actors’ Gang, whose artistic director is the actor Tim Robbins. Mr. Robbins has become nearly as familiar a figure at the prison as the warden himself. (The actor, walking through the prison yards, sets off a rustle of recognition among inmates who recall his movie role as a prisoner in “The Shawshank Redemption.”)

Laurie Brooks, the executive director of the William James Association, which runs an acting workshop in San Quentin State Prison, said these programs were first championed in 1979 by Jerry Brown during an earlier term as governor. “We enjoyed this real lush period when there was this boom in prison growth,” Ms. Brooks said. “There really isn’t any state-funded support for arts programs anymore.”

The Actors’ Gang presumably has the fund-raising advantage of its association with Mr. Robbins and its following in Los Angeles, where it staged its own version of “Tartuffe” in the spring. But even it has struggled to raise money. During a break one scorching morning, Ms. Williams asked that this article note that the Actors’ Gang had received a $500 donation in makeup supplies from Mehron Makeup, an act of kindness, she said, that deserved notice.

“People don’t give money because they don’t see us,” she said.

Advocates say these programs have reduced recidivism rates, though there is no conclusive research on that. But prison officials and inmates suggest that the workshops — by forcing inmates to confront emotions and to deal with other inmates they might ignore or fight with outside — can produce fundamental changes in behavior and character.

“No. 1, it breaks down racial barriers,” said Ms. Peters, the former arts facilitator. “It breaks down gang barriers. It’s a safe place for them to come and get away from institutional stresses. And they tend to remain disciplinary-free: If you are busy writing a poem, you can’t be doing drugs.”

Lt. Brian Davis, the public information officer at the Norco prison, who sat in on the sessions, said: “They build self-confidence. I see the inmates starting to work together, and somewhere along the line the fear goes away.”

One inmate, Robert Paxton, 23, said the program “gives me a place to be silly — be myself.”

“You know, this whole prison situation, where you have to act macho and put up these mental barriers, this really allowed like a mental vacation,” Mr. Paxton said. “It makes doing time that much more easier.”

The workshops and rehearsals are antic and oddly entertaining: guards can be spotted peering through a window (even when Mr. Robbins is not on hand). The inmates are animated, campy, energized, liberated and fearlessly engaged, comfortable even playing women in this sea of gang tattoos and muscles.

And there is no attempt to pretend that this is not taking place where it is taking place. The real actors are issued panic buttons to attach to their belts, in case they are cornered. And Mr. Robbins draws heavily on the inmates’ lives in training them in the commedia dell’arte style that is the heart of the Actors’ Gang method, with its ornate costumes and makeup, exaggerated expressions and comedic movements, focusing on four basic emotional states: anger, fear, happiness and sadness.

So it was that Mr. Robbins also asked the actors what made them angry. “This place turned me into a dope addict!” one shouted. Mr. Reiber followed with a cut-the-tension answer: “Prison food.”

Mr. Robbins instructed the inmates to feel fear, again by connecting it to their own experiences. “What is Tartuffe afraid of?” he said, wearing a wool skullcap and dressed in black. “Being discovered. Because that would mean jail for him.”

“Something is coming after you!” he said urgently to the inmates as they scampered around. “What is it?”

“Cops!” one inmate yelled.

“Cops!” Mr. Robbins responded, clapping his hands in delight. “Then run!”

No one seemed more surprised at the experience than the inmates, as they said during the concluding sessions of two workshops conducted over the course of the past few months, one for the general prison population and one for a segregated population of former gang members and sex offenders. Prison officials asked that the last names of the segregated inmates not be used, saying that they could be put in danger.

“I know this,” said one of those inmates as he sat on the floor in a circle with Mr. Robbins, Ms. Williams and the other inmates. He and his fellow prisoners had just performed scenes from “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” “I’m thinking about Shakespeare in the shower. I don’t think I ever did that before.”

By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Times Published: June 30, 2011

In about a month, if nothing is done, the federal government will hit its legal debt limit. There will be dire consequences if this limit isn’t raised. At best, we’ll suffer an economic slowdown; at worst we’ll plunge back into the depths of the 2008-9 financial crisis.

So is a failure to raise the debt ceiling unthinkable? Not at all.

Many commentators remain complacent about the debt ceiling; the very gravity of the consequences if the ceiling isn’t raised, they say, ensures that in the end politicians will do what must be done. But this complacency misses two important facts about the situation: the extremism of the modern G.O.P., and the urgent need for President Obama to draw a line in the sand against further extortion.

Let’s talk about how we got here.

The federal debt limit is a strange quirk of U.S. budget law: since debt is the consequence of decisions about taxing and spending, and Congress already makes those taxing and spending decisions, why require an additional vote on debt? And traditionally the debt limit has been treated as a minor detail. During the administration of former President George W. Bush — who added more than $4 trillion to the national debt — Congress, with little fanfare, voted to raise the debt ceiling no less than seven times.

So the use of the debt ceiling to extort political concessions is something new in American politics. And it seems to have come as a complete surprise to Mr. Obama.

Last December, after Mr. Obama agreed to extend the Bush tax cuts — a move that many people, myself included, viewed as in effect a concession to Republican blackmail — Marc Ambinder of The Atlantic asked why the deal hadn’t included a rise in the debt limit, so as to forestall another hostage situation (my words, not Mr. Ambinder’s).

The president’s response seemed clueless even then. He asserted that “nobody, Democrat or Republican, is willing to see the full faith and credit of the United States government collapse,” and that he was sure that John Boehner, as speaker of the House, would accept his “responsibilities to govern.”

Well, we’ve seen how that worked out.

Now, Mr. Obama was right about the dangers of failing to raise the debt limit. In fact, he understated the case, by focusing only on financial confidence.

Not that the confidence issue is trivial. Failure to raise the debt limit — which would, among other things, disrupt payments on existing debt — could convince investors that the United States is no longer a serious, responsible country, with nasty consequences. Furthermore, nobody knows what a U.S. default would do to the world financial system, which is built on the presumption that U.S. government debt is the ultimate safe asset.

But confidence isn’t the only thing at stake. Failure to raise the debt limit would also force the U.S. government to make drastic, immediate spending cuts, on a scale that would dwarf the austerity currently being imposed on Greece. And don’t believe the nonsense about the benefits of spending cuts that has taken over much of our public discourse: slashing spending at a time when the economy is deeply depressed would destroy hundreds of thousands and quite possibly millions of jobs.

So failure to reach a debt deal would have very bad consequences. But here’s the thing: Mr. Obama must be prepared to face those consequences if he wants his presidency to survive.

Bear in mind that G.O.P. leaders don’t actually care about the level of debt. Instead, they’re using the threat of a debt crisis to impose an ideological agenda. If you had any doubt about that, last week’s tantrum should have convinced you. Democrats engaged in debt negotiations argued that since we’re supposedly in dire fiscal straits, we should talk about limiting tax breaks for corporate jets and hedge-fund managers as well as slashing aid to the poor and unlucky. And Republicans, in response, walked out of the talks.

So what’s really going on is extortion pure and simple. As Mike Konczal of the Roosevelt Institute puts it, the G.O.P. has, in effect, come around with baseball bats and declared, “Nice economy you have here. A real shame if something happened to it.”

And the reason Republicans are doing this is because they must believe that it will work: Mr. Obama caved in over tax cuts, and they expect him to cave again. They believe that they have the upper hand, because the public will blame the president for the economic crisis they’re threatening to create. In fact, it’s hard to avoid the suspicion that G.O.P. leaders actually want the economy to perform badly.

Republicans believe, in short, that they’ve got Mr. Obama’s number, that he may still live in the White House but that for practical purposes his presidency is already over. It’s time — indeed, long past time — for him to prove them wrong.