Numbers, detail, 2007, Aluminum, 107 5/8 x 83 x 2 1/4 inches; 273 x 211 x 6 cm

Opens May 9, 2011

Mathew Marks

Inked on the chest of a Pico Rivera gang member was the detailed scene of a liquor store slaying that had stumped an L.A. County sheriff’s investigator for more than four years. It leads to a jailhouse confession from Anthony Garcia — and a first-degree murder conviction.

By Robert Faturechi
Los Angeles Times
April 22, 2011

The process was routine. L.A. County Sheriff’s homicide investigator Kevin Lloyd was flipping through snapshots of tattooed gang members.

Then one caught his attention.

Inked on the pudgy chest of a young Pico Rivera gangster who had been picked up and released on a minor offense was the scene of a 2004 liquor store slaying that had stumped Lloyd for more than four years.

Each key detail was right there: the Christmas lights that lined the roof of the liquor store where 23-year-old John Juarez was gunned down, the direction his body fell, the bowed street lamp across the way and the street sign — all under the chilling banner of RIVERA KILLS, a reference to the gang Rivera-13.

As if to seal the deal, below the collarbone of the gang member known by the alias “Chopper” was a miniature helicopter raining down bullets on the scene.

Lloyd’s discovery of the tattoo in 2008 launched a bizarre investigation that soon led to Anthony Garcia’s arrest for the shooting. Then sheriff’s detectives, posing as gang members, began talking to Garcia, 25, in his holding cell. They got a confession that this week led to a first-degree murder conviction in a killing investigators had once all but given up hope of solving.

For Lloyd, the image on the chest of the delicate, doe-eyed gang member brought back a rush of memories. The snapshot was taken inside the sheriff’s Pico Rivera station after Garcia was arrested in a routine traffic stop and booked on suspicion of driving with a suspended license.

Before they are released, suspected gang members typically are asked to remove their shirts and have their tattoos photographed by graffiti team deputies. Taggers often mark their own bodies with the same signatures they spray on buses and storefronts — and eyewitnesses to crimes sometimes help close cases by recalling distinctive tattoos.

Homicide Lt. Dave Dolson said gang members frequently get symbolic tattoos to bolster their street cred: three dots on the hand to signify “mi vida loca” (“my crazy life”), sketches of prisons where they’ve done time, gang insignia prominently stenciled on their heads and torsos.

But a tattoo laying out a detailed picture of a crime scene is something far outside the norm. “I haven’t seen it before, and I haven’t heard of anything like it either,” Dolson said.

Garcia’s tattoo shows a man with the body of a peanut being hit by bullets and falling back toward the liquor store. In gang slang, the word “peanut” is used to derisively describe a rival gang member.

Lloyd had been at the scene of the Pico Rivera killing as a station sergeant. After he recognized it in the tattoo, the 30-year veteran called up the cold case file. He pored over the crime scene photographs alongside the photos of Garcia’s chest. He also drove to the site of the slaying.

“I worked Pico Rivera a lot of years, so I’m pretty familiar with that area,” he said. “It was incredible.”

With the help of major crimes investigators, deputies found Garcia living with relatives in La Habra. They arrested him and began setting up a ruse to secure his conviction.

A detective posing as a Los Angeles gang member who’d been arrested on attempted murder charges was placed in Garcia’s Norwalk station jail cell. He soon got Garcia talking, sheriff’s investigators said. Garcia was proud, and he bragged about the shooting. He didn’t know the conversation was being recorded and that it would soon be played for a jury.

But perhaps it was all bound to end up this way, said Capt. Mike Parker.

“Think about it. He tattooed his confession on his chest. You have a degree of fate with this,” Parker said. “The detective who spotted it had been a Pico sergeant who went on to become a homicide sergeant. I never worked Pico station. I never would have recognized that Pico liquor store.”

Investigators don’t believe Garcia’s elaborate tattoo was a rash decision. Photos from several bookings over the years show the mural on his chest evolving as he added details to the tattooed murder scene — until one day Lloyd saw them as a whole and something clicked.

By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Times Published: April 21, 2011

Earlier this week, The Times reported on Congressional backlash against the Independent Payment Advisory Board, a key part of efforts to rein in health care costs. This backlash was predictable; it is also profoundly irresponsible, as I’ll explain in a minute.

But something else struck me as I looked at Republican arguments against the board, which hinge on the notion that what we really need to do, as the House budget proposal put it, is to “make government health care programs more responsive to consumer choice.”

Here’s my question: How did it become normal, or for that matter even acceptable, to refer to medical patients as “consumers”? The relationship between patient and doctor used to be considered something special, almost sacred. Now politicians and supposed reformers talk about the act of receiving care as if it were no different from a commercial transaction, like buying a car — and their only complaint is that it isn’t commercial enough.

What has gone wrong with us?

About that advisory board: We have to do something about health care costs, which means that we have to find a way to start saying no. In particular, given continuing medical innovation, we can’t maintain a system in which Medicare essentially pays for anything a doctor recommends. And that’s especially true when that blank-check approach is combined with a system that gives doctors and hospitals — who aren’t saints — a strong financial incentive to engage in excessive care.

Hence the advisory board, whose creation was mandated by last year’s health reform. The board, composed of health-care experts, would be given a target rate of growth in Medicare spending. To keep spending at or below this target, the board would submit “fast-track” recommendations for cost control that would go into effect automatically unless overruled by Congress.

Before you start yelling about “rationing” and “death panels,” bear in mind that we’re not talking about limits on what health care you’re allowed to buy with your own (or your insurance company’s) money. We’re talking only about what will be paid for with taxpayers’ money. And the last time I looked at it, the Declaration of Independence didn’t declare that we had the right to life, liberty, and the all-expenses-paid pursuit of happiness.

And the point is that choices must be made; one way or another, government spending on health care must be limited.

Now, what House Republicans propose is that the government simply push the problem of rising health care costs on to seniors; that is, that we replace Medicare with vouchers that can be applied to private insurance, and that we count on seniors and insurance companies to work it out somehow. This, they claim, would be superior to expert review because it would open health care to the wonders of “consumer choice.”

What’s wrong with this idea (aside from the grossly inadequate value of the proposed vouchers)? One answer is that it wouldn’t work. “Consumer-based” medicine has been a bust everywhere it has been tried. To take the most directly relevant example, Medicare Advantage, which was originally called Medicare + Choice, was supposed to save money; it ended up costing substantially more than traditional Medicare. America has the most “consumer-driven” health care system in the advanced world. It also has by far the highest costs yet provides a quality of care no better than far cheaper systems in other countries.

But the fact that Republicans are demanding that we literally stake our health, even our lives, on an already failed approach is only part of what’s wrong here. As I said earlier, there’s something terribly wrong with the whole notion of patients as “consumers” and health care as simply a financial transaction.

Medical care, after all, is an area in which crucial decisions — life and death decisions — must be made. Yet making such decisions intelligently requires a vast amount of specialized knowledge. Furthermore, those decisions often must be made under conditions in which the patient is incapacitated, under severe stress, or needs action immediately, with no time for discussion, let alone comparison shopping.

That’s why we have medical ethics. That’s why doctors have traditionally both been viewed as something special and been expected to behave according to higher standards than the average professional. There’s a reason we have TV series about heroic doctors, while we don’t have TV series about heroic middle managers.

The idea that all this can be reduced to money — that doctors are just “providers” selling services to health care “consumers” — is, well, sickening. And the prevalence of this kind of language is a sign that something has gone very wrong not just with this discussion, but with our society’s values.

Henry Cervantes, far right, and the crew of a B-17 that survived being rammed by an enemy plane in 1945.

In 1934, Hank Cervantes swiped a quarter to buy a pair of shoes. The remarkable life that followed is priceless.

By Steve Lopez
April 17, 2011
The Los Angeles Times

I get lots of mail from inmates proclaiming their innocence, but early last month I got a letter from an 88-year-old Marina del Rey man confessing to a crime.

A minor crime, to be sure. Petty theft. But it was a crime against my family, and it was committed roughly 77 years ago.

Henry “Hank” Cervantes saw in a column that I grew up in the little fishing and industrial town of Pittsburg, near San Francisco. So he wondered if, by chance, I was related to the people who ran the Lopez market on Black Diamond Street.

If so, Cervantes wanted me to know he’d stolen two bits from the store, in 1934, when he was 10 or 11 years old. He used the quarter to buy a pair of black and white wingtips from the Salvation Army.

“My memory of the crime has troubled me for these many years,” Cervantes wrote. “Therefore, if you are a member of that branch of the Lopez clan … my conscience would be relieved if you would accept restitution by means of a check, money order or coin of the realm.”

In addition to the letter, Cervantes sent me a copy of his book, “Piloto: Migrant Worker to Jet Pilot.” It’s the story of his rise from Depression-era poverty to the rank of lieutenant colonel in the United States Air Force, and flying 26 bombing missions over Germany during World War II.

The book, published in 2002, is an inspirational tale of this son of Mexican immigrants, a man determined to overcome racial discrimination, exceed expectations, serve his country and make his family proud.

I called my father to see if the name Hank Cervantes registered, and whether he thought we should charge interest on the quarter. My dad would have been just 6 in 1934, though, and he didn’t recall the Cervantes clan, which relocated to the delta area after two years in Pittsburg.

We met for lunch, Mr. Cervantes and I, at the Proud Bird near LAX. In 1934, he said, he had holes in his only pair of shoes. His family had moved to Pittsburg from Fresno so his dad could work at the local cannery, but the fish weren’t running, and the family was destitute.

Around that time, Cervantes noticed that my three uncles occasionally milled about in a vacant lot next to my grandparents’ market in the evening. Cervantes saw them hide something in a hole in the ground, and he later inspected and found a stash of coins. Their tips, perhaps, for food deliveries?

When they were gone, Cervantes plucked a quarter out of the hole and headed to the secondhand store. The shoes he bought were two sizes too big, but as he writes in his book:

“We stuffed newspaper in the tips, laced them tight, and I shuffled out into a rainstorm feeling like a real dandy.”

Cervantes, by then, had already thought about flying. His family chased crops from Madera to Mendota, Clovis to Firebaugh, living in a tent with a dirt floor. One day Hank and his big brother Gus came upon a crop duster in an alfalfa field and they climbed into the cockpit and pretended to be pilots.

The seed was planted, but could a Mexican American expect to become a pilot?

Cervantes got his answer in 1942, when he went to Oakland, hoping to be considered for Navy pilot school. A desk lieutenant blew cigar smoke at him and said the only jobs for “undesirables” were in the mess hall.

“I’d never been insulted so openly,” says Cervantes.

A year later, he was drafted into the Army, where he learned of a test for pilots, navigators and bombardiers. Always a smart kid, Cervantes aced the test, but other challenges were harder to overcome. He had entered a predominantly white world, and during his training in Arizona, he remembers signs on commercial establishments: “No Mexicans or Dogs Allowed.”

On and off the base, Cervantes felt that he was treated by some people with suspicion or contempt, and the stigma would be an enduring aspect of his career. He struggled to know who he was — American, Mexican American, or Mexican? Second-class citizen or saluted member of an elite corps?

At different times he was all of those things. There were great friendships along the way, too, as Cervantes made his mark as a test pilot after the war and as a co-pilot on those 26 bombing missions, one of which nearly killed him and his crew in 1945 when their B-17 was rammed by a German aircraft.

“The control columns were violently jerking back and forth, the No. 1 engine was streaming smoke,” he writes in the book of the collision that ripped apart much of the plane’s tail and horizontal stabilizer. But they completed the bombing mission and flew the wounded, trembling craft for hours, landing safely in England.

“Here is a migrant farmworker, who people would not have expected to become a member of the military service elite,” says Orange County Superior Court Judge Frederick Aguirre, whose nonprofit group — Latino Advocates for Education — honored Cervantes nearly 10 years ago as a role model and an American hero.

Cervantes offered to pay for our lunch at the Proud Bird as a way to settle his 25-cent debt to the Lopez family. But I picked up the tab and told him the debt was settled, and the pleasure was mine.

Jamie Isenstein
working title: Radunculous Audience Taste Vase 974
2011
Ceramic glasses, enamel, pedestal, glass, flowers
20 x 17 x 33 inches

Through May 1, 2011

Lisa Cooley

Reed Saxon/Associated Press

A study finds that each year, songs spread from one group of humpback whales to another, moving eastward from Australia to French Polynesia.

By NICHOLAS BAKALAR
NY Times Published: April 18, 2011

Humpback whales not only sing, they imitate the singing of other whales. And some of their tunes turn into worldwide hits, with whales all over the Pacific Ocean picking them up.

Several genetically different groups of humpbacks, separate populations with little interchange among them, live in the South Pacific. Researchers recorded 11 different song types in the region from 1998 to 2008.

Their study, published online Thursday in Current Biology, found that each year, songs spread from one group to another, moving east from Australia to French Polynesia. They believe that this is the first observation of a cultural change transmitted repeatedly on such a large geographic scale.

Why this happens is unclear, but the lead author, Ellen C. Garland, a doctoral student at the University of Queensland in Australia, said the reasons probably have to do with sex. Only male humpbacks sing, and each group of whales sings its own tune. “If you change your song, you stand out,” she said. “We could speculate that that could be more attractive to the females.”

The consistent eastward movement of the songs is another puzzle, but the scientists speculate that the larger population near eastern Australia might have greater influence.

Although sounds travel only a few miles, it is possible that some individuals get close enough to be heard. This minimal contact could be enough for males from another group to pick up the new melody.

The changes happen rapidly, Ms. Garland said, usually within two to three months, and the male humpbacks are enthusiastic singers. “When the new song types come in,” she said, “it’s a chance for them to really go for it.”

Through May 14, 2011

Regen Projects

In 1979, the mobster Carmine Galante, a cigar in his mouth, was killed on the patio of Joe & Mary restaurant in Brooklyn.

By WILLIAM K. RASHBAUM
NY Times Published: April 18, 2011

It is no surprise that prodigious helpings of murder, betrayal and honor — or, some might say, the lack thereof — have been on the menu, figuratively speaking, at a mob trial in federal court in Brooklyn. The trial, after all, marks the witness-stand debut of the first official boss of one of New York’s five Mafia families to testify for the government.

What has been a surprise to some, however, is that it can seem as though a real menu is required — just to keep track of all of the culinary allusions by the former boss, Joseph C. Massino of the Bonannos. References to food, meals, cooking and the restaurant and catering businesses, along with some choice gastronomic metaphors, have kept coming like so many courses on a tasting menu. They appeared at times to pile higher and higher, as if a groaning board had replaced the prosecution and defense tables in the well of the courtroom.

To those who follow the mob, the close connection between this ethnic underworld and the culinary arts practiced by Italian-Americans is not news. Indeed, momentous events in mob history have happened in and around restaurants: Carmine Galante, a cigar still in his mouth, was shot dead on the patio at Joe & Mary, a restaurant in Brooklyn; Joey Gallo was killed in a fusillade in Umberto’s Clam House as he bolted for the door, only to die on a Little Italy street; and Paul Castellano was gunned down at rush hour amid Christmas shoppers outside Sparks Steak House in Midtown Manhattan.

And some of the most memorable moments in film that for some have come to represent organized crime are similarly gastrocentric. There are the phrases “Leave the gun; take the cannoli” and “Try the veal, it’s the best in the city” in “The Godfather” movie. And there is Paul Sorvino, playing a mob capo in “Goodfellas,” wielding a razor blade to slice garlic for his sauce.

Of course, Mr. Massino has acknowledged cooking up quite a few misdeeds of his own. He is appearing as a witness against a subordinate, Vincent Basciano, a former acting boss known as Vinnie Gorgeous, who is on trial for the murder of a Bonanno associate, Randolph Pizzolo. Mr. Massino continued his appearance on the stand on Monday.

Still, while there has been a sense that the gun and the knife — as the Mafia’s tools are called during the secret society’s initiation rites — have been center stage, the knife and the fork have been fighting for equal billing, perhaps unsurprising given Mr. Massino’s girth, not to mention some of his job titles other than boss: restaurateur and sandwich truck operator.

For example, when he listed his past crimes last week, food came into play. The prosecutor, Taryn A. Merkl, asked about Mr. Massino’s corruption of a prison guard in the late 1980s when he was being held in a federal jail in Manhattan.

“What did you bribe the prison guard to do?” Ms. Merkl, an assistant United States attorney, asked.

“He was bringing in food for us, cold cuts, shrimp, scungilli,” he replied.

More than a decade later, food was again the focus during a conversation he secretly recorded in a different federal jail with Mr. Basciano, the subordinate against whom he was testifying. “I’m belching, I’ve got a lot of heartburn, a lot of agita,” Mr. Massino complained to Mr. Basciano. “I’ll tell you one thing, that sausage wasn’t bad, bo.”

“Yeah?” Mr. Basciano replied, “I left it in the room, I didn’t eat it.”

“It wasn’t bad, I swear to God,” Mr. Massino continued. “I put a little mustard — it wasn’t bad. I had no dinner last night. I had peanut butter, I couldn’t eat. Tonight, I won’t eat, it’s fish.”

The kitchen, in a way, also provided some protection. In the early 1990s, after he served nearly six years in federal prison for racketeering, Mr. Massino’s parole prohibited him from associating with other members of organized crime families or felons and required that he hold a steady job. So he worked as a consultant at a Long Island company called King Catering.

There, he said, he developed a unique way to hold meetings and talk mob business with his underboss Sal Vitale — his brother-in-law, who was also a consultant at the company — while still avoiding law enforcement scrutiny, including physical surveillance and bugs.

“Did you talk Bonanno family business at King Catering?” Ms. Merkl asked.

“If we had to, yes,” Mr. Massino replied.

“Where would you speak to him?” she asked, referring to Mr. Vitale, who preceded Mr. Massino into the ranks of mob turncoats.

“In the walk-in box,” he said.

“Why the refrigerator?”

“To avoid bugs,” he explained tersely.

Mr. Massino’s four days on the stand before Judge Nicholas C. Garaufis in United States District Court in Brooklyn also provided a survey of sorts of a few of the city’s eateries, but the focus was on criminals and crimes at the establishments, not their fare.

He mentioned Caffe on the Green in Bayside, Queens, the scene of a shooting involving Mr. Pizzolo; Napa & Sonoma, a steakhouse in Whitestone, Queens, where Mr. Pizzolo had an outburst of sorts; and Via Oreto on First Avenue in Manhattan, which Mr. Basciano said he successfully claimed as a Bonanno family protectorate, over the objections of the Genovese family.

In addition to his work as a criminal, Mr. Massino held a number of jobs and owned a number of businesses that revolved around food.

His first jobs, as a youngster in Queens, were working in what he called a “food store” without elaborating and in a butcher shop.

As a young man, he operated a sandwich truck, known by the less-than-appetizing name “roach coach,” which he would drive to factories and other businesses to sell coffee, cakes and sandwiches. Eventually, he operated a catering company that served other sandwich trucks.

At the time of his arrest, Mr. Massino owned a restaurant called Casablanca, in Maspeth, Queens, where he could often be found. Menus at the time of the 1996 grand opening, however, did not advertise his association with the establishment.

Instead, there was a front man.

“Your Host: Alfred,” the menu informed diners. Alfred, however, had a few sidelines himself, according to Mr. Massino, one of which was serving as a soldier in Mr. Massino’s crime family.

Untitled, 2009. Oil on canvas on fir, 24 × 20 in.

Through June 19, 2011

Whitney

By Matt Feeney
Posted Tuesday, April 12, 2011
Slate

It seems a telling sign of our technology-angst that we’re getting nostalgic for, of all things, boredom. I have memories of youthful boredom that are as vivid and unpleasant as the memories I harbor of my more serious sports injuries, and yet, when I read of some new research saying the brain needs boredom, or kids today aren’t bored enough, my first thought is: Ah, blessed boredom. (My second thought is: Check email.) And it’s not just me. A trickle of pro-boredom research has inspired a flood of pro-boredom sentiment.

On one hand, defending boredom seems stern and unsympathetic, like a Depression-born mom impatient with her complaining children. (Hi, Mom.) But the depression-era parent urged a kind of stoicism, bearing-up against fake or minor suffering as a moral lesson of childhood. For today’s middle-agers, relishing the image of a teenager thrown into fidgets by a dead cellphone, boredom is not merely fake suffering. It’s important in its own right, a state of latent fertility. It leads to creativity. The contemporary defender of boredom is not a stoic. She’s a graying humanist, the martinet as art teacher.

From this I would like to advance a claim that might come off as either loony or pedantic or just obvious: Our ready nostalgia for boredom shows how deeply our culture—both our actual cultural products and our default ideas about how they happen and what they’re for—remains rooted in the Romantic movement that spanned the late 18th and mid-19th centuries. Today’s technology-anxious and pro-boredom pathos grows from well-wrought Romantic conceptions of freedom, aesthetic experience, artistic creation, and, indeed, technology. The Romantics, seeing the encroaching haste of commerce and industrial production, and people living on a clock set by money and machines, envisioned modes of experience that might partake of a more humane slowness. From Kant’s Critique of Judgment (sometimes called the founding text of German Romanticism), which describes aesthetic pleasure as a “purposeless play of the faculties,” to Thoreau’s solitary puttering around Walden Pond, Romanticism saw people finding moments of freedom through withdrawal and retreat. In this process, we slow ourselves down to experience beauty, and, through this beauty, we might experience a deeper part of ourselves. Or vice versa.

And perhaps, spurred by some natural beauty we encounter in our retreat, we might create artistic beauty. The vague image in the back of the mind of our reflexive defender of boredom, whether or not this person has read a word of Wordsworth, is a guy sitting by himself in a field, surrounded by a host of golden daffodils, letting his mind wander lonely as a cloud, and then recollecting, in this moment of tranquility, the other host of golden daffodils he saw earlier that day, which he plans to write a poem about, or maybe paint a picture of. That, anyway, is the vague image in the back of my mind when I read about the neurological virtues of boredom. I’m something of a Romantic, by inclination and academic training. When I think of human flourishing, the freedom called “positive” by Isaiah Berlin, I tend to think of aesthetic experience and culture. I imagine people slowing down to enjoy high-quality television, turning inward to think, and maybe, depending on how noisy and hasty things have gotten in the real world, dropping out altogether, picking up and moving to, like, a pond.
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I own up to my Romantic leanings, and I’m prepared to defend the decadence and blasé politics they suggest. But if there’s anything that makes me regret or question this position, it’s the mournful late work of David Foster Wallace, especially the posthumous fictional writing compiled as The Pale King, which is basically a 538-page monument against Romanticism. Dropping out and turning inward and dawdling in lovely otherness do not arise as alternatives in The Pale King. What Wallace offers instead is a humbling challenge for us to give the fallen world, and the fallen people who live in it, a heroic measure of simple attention.

The Pale King feels heroic and humbling because (besides the light cast upon it by the author’s own life and death) Wallace actually shares the Romantics’ pessimism about the fate of humans stuck within inhuman systems. Indeed, he paints an even grimmer picture of this predicament than they do. Technology and commerce are more soul-killing in his fictional universe. They were an advancing threat for the Romantics. In The Pale King they have simply won, on every level. Their predominance has rendered itself banal. The book’s main setting is an IRS outpost in Peoria, Illinois, where humans process tax returns in the stunned and passive attitudes of feed-lot cattle, and where what counts as public art is a huge photorealist mosaic of a 1978 IRS Form 1040.

On top of this, Wallace retracts all the comforts and inspirations that helped the glum Romantic get out of bed in the morning, the promise of nourishing solitude and reflection, the idea of a pristine pastoral landscape. The Pale King begins in the farmland of central Illinois, where Wallace lived for most of his life, and for a moment, on its first page, you think you’re going to read of some kind of pastoral alternative to the “skylines of canted rust” and “blacktop graphs,” a truer nature further back, in that “place beyond the windbreak”—”the untilled fields.” But the faintly poetic botanical list that follows (“goldenrod,” “wild oats”) is mainly just a catalogue of the grasses, brown for much of the year, that grow in the median of a Midwestern interstate, and the fields comprising these grasses “shimmer shrilly,” and the poetic suggestions of that botanical list have departed well before it reaches its last item, which is “invaginate volunteer beans.”

A foundation of the pastoral vision of the Romantics was the rural town or village, where, as against the grinding and insecure life of cities, real human fellowship could be found. Here’s Wallace’s version of that pillar of pastoral authenticity:

The IGA’s lot abuts the downtown’s main drag, which is the in-town extension of SR 130 and ingeniously named. Directly across this Main Street from the IGA were the bubbletop pumps and saurian logo of Clete’s Sinclair, outside of which the best and brightest of Philo High used to gather on Friday nights to drink Pabst Blue Ribbon and search the adjacent lot’s weeds for frogs and mice to throw at Clete’s bug zapper, which he’d modified to hold 225 volts of charge.

This isn’t just snobbery against small towns. The Pale King portrays sociability in general as a series of misfires, misunderstandings, botched conversations. Indeed, to the extent that characters in The Pale King experience any sort of quasi-Romantic inwardness, any reflective solitude, it’s usually during a conversation, when it’s the other person’s turn to speak.

They do this not because they’re vicious or selfish, but because they’re anxious and self-conscious, and other people make them more anxious and more self-conscious. The tightening spiral of anxiety and self-consciousness is a kind of rebuke, or at least a cautionary counterexample, to the Romantic ideal of self-reflection. The anxious person confronts the possibility that he can heighten the anxiety just by thinking about it: What if she can see that I’m nervous? That’ll make me more nervous and she’ll see that somehow. Oh God I’m getting more nervous just thinking about being nervous. Help! Well, imagine a person whose anxiety manifests on the surface, immediately, in symptoms that both betray the inner weirdness and evoke (to be frank) justified disgust. There are many scenes of morbid self-reflection in The Pale King, but the signal ones involve a guy named Cusk who, when he so much as thinks about sweating, sweats in glistening sheets that melt down his face and neck and soak his clothes. So how does this guy not think about sweating? How does his inner-life not consist entirely of variations on the question “Am I sweating yet?” My point is that the ideal of self-reflection probably seems somewhat less redemptive to sweaty Cusk than it did to, say, Ralph Waldo Emerson.

If being bored spurs rumination, as people Romantically imagine, but rumination spurs morbid self-consumption, then we might have a pretty solid reason to recoil from boredom. But maybe self-reflection doesn’t just go awry or get stuck, turn morbid fears into real objects. Maybe the scary thing is already there, in which case we have an even better reason to avoid quiet contemplation and boredom. In a hilariously recursive “Author’s Forward” (which appears on page 66), the “author” writes: “Maybe dullness is associated with psychic pain” because it fails “to distract people from some deeper type of pain that’s always there.” He goes on to mention “Walkmen, iPods, Blackberries, cell phones that attach to your head. … I can’t think anyone really believes that today’s so-called ‘information society’ is just about information. Everyone knows it’s about something else, way down.”

But The Pale King takes boredom beyond the latently redemptive or secretly terrifying lack of stimulation. It imagines boredom as complete immersion in tedious experience. For the characters in The Pale King, boredom is something that comes at you, relentlessly, redundantly. It is inescapable. There is no layer of inspiration or freedom beyond or beneath it, which you might access through one of the Romantics’ escape hatches. In one galvanizing chapter, a mysterious lecturer in a class on tax accounting declares that, where heroism and bravery once consisted in acts of discovery that generated new facts and meanings, today there are no new facts. Today, heroism consists in attending to existing facts, so as to order them better, and bravery consists in bearing up against this task’s unbelievable tedium. Today’s existential heroes, in other words, are CPAs. (It is one of this book’s many profound jokes that a visiting lecturer of tax accounting is enlisted to restate the stoical hinge of Nietzsche’s thought: the embrace of finite existence and the doctrine of Eternal Return.)

This lesson takes a more human form—sad, breathtakingly rigorous and searching, ultimately hysterically funny—in a long chapter near the end of the book. An IRS examiner named Meredith Rand falls by accident into discussion with a co-worker named Drinion but dubbed by his colleagues Mr. X, where “X” stands, sarcastically, for “excitement.” Meredith Rand is so beautiful she can’t have decent conversations with anyone—men always trying to impress her through inane performances, women always resenting and distrusting her. Behind her back men describe her as “sexy but crazy and a serious bore.” Mr. X, for his part, is patently unattractive and odd, overwhelmingly bland, but Meredith finds herself divulging detail after painful detail of her life to him.

As their conversation progresses, it grows clear that Mr. X has some Wallace-version of Asperger’s syndrome. He’s keyed almost solely to the task of processing language, and is thus immune to the woman’s paralyzing beauty. He’s never had sexual feelings, he says, for anyone. But Meredith Rand is unspooling long and largely coherent strings of words, and this alone holds him completely rapt. And the fact that this strange and sexless man is listening to her and understanding her, and that he carries not a flicker of suppressed attraction, or self-consciousness, or self-importance, or, really inner self of any kind, frees her to speak coherently. Normal guys bring to Meredith Rand an irksome drama of romantic compulsion, channeled through stratagems intended either to mask it or imbue it with a dignity it cannot have. They can’t, in other words, get over themselves. (I think of the Gary Larson cartoon of a miniature man standing before a beautiful and much larger woman and telling himself: “Remember to act shy and vulnerable.”)

But Mr. X has no inner drama to mask. He’s not trying to fashion her a gift of his dignity. What Mr. X has to give the seriously boring Meredith Rand is his hearing ability, his uncompelled interest, his above-average comprehension of human speech, and the occasional innocent question for clearing up ambiguous meanings, because the only thing he wants is to understand what’s before him. Mr. Excitement’s gift to Meredith Rand is to let his own self dissolve across the spreading surface of her words. It helps that he doesn’t have to try very hard. His self was pretty flat to begin with.

In other words Mr. Excitement is exemplary because he pays attention. He gives the tedious world its due. He doesn’t waft into dreamy contemplation when the ocean of facts leaves him understimulated. He listens, closely enough to find these facts exquisite, and then, for some reason relating to the pleasure he finds in boredom, or to the bravery and heroism he embodies in his transcendent blandness, he levitates.

Slate

Thanks to Ryan Andolina

DeeDee Flores

The freediver William Trubridge held his breath for more than four minutes to set a record at Dean’s Blue Hole.

By TAMMY KENNON
NY Times Published: April 16, 2011

LONG ISLAND, Bahamas — Shouts of “Breathe! Breathe! Breathe!” pierced the tropical air and echoed off the limestone precipice around Dean’s Blue Hole, a vertical cavern plunging 660 feet, a cobalt blue pool of seawater surrounded by crystal-clear shallows and white sand.

Bathing-suit clad spectators stand in ankle-deep water, at the precipice of the deepest blue hole in the world and only 20 yards from the diving platform, where world-class freedivers are descending to the edge of credibility at Vertical Blue 2011, an annual invitational competition that ends Monday.

“Freediving might be considered extreme, because it takes place in an environment hostile to the human body, but at the same time, it is peaceful, natural and pure,” said William Trubridge, 30, a world-champion freediver and trainer from New Zealand.

This is one of many contradictions in the extreme sport of freediving, in which competitors see how deep they can go on a single breath without benefit of a breathing apparatus. Divers must resist the near overwhelming instinct to take in air, then, once they resurface, must often be prodded to start breathing again.

“Your body thinks you’re still diving and doesn’t breathe; you have to be reminded,” said Simon Bennett, 43, a freediver who wears bright purple Crocs and has broken the Chilean national record several times during competition, which is held over 10 days.

While breath holding is a skill that must be learned and practiced — there is even an iPhone app with training tables — dealing with the physical implications of water pressure creates a freediver’s most immediate challenges.

On the third day of competition, propelling himself with only a guide rope and his strength, Trubridge descended almost 400 feet into the abyss — the equivalent of a 40-story building. But that was only half the challenge. He then had to turn and hoist himself back to the surface.

He emerged after 4 minutes 13 seconds with a world record, measured in meters at 121.

The dangers and potential hazards from the extreme pressure of a deep dive are many. Breath holding fills the body with a toxic cocktail of gases that is compressed and then forced into the bloodstream and nervous system with increasing pressure as a freediver descends.

“At great depths, divers can experience severe narcosis,” said Eric Fattah, 36, who set a Canadian national record of 104 meters, or 341 feet, last week using a monofin: a single paddle on two feet. “The narcosis from oxygen and carbon dioxide can cause profound fear and panic.”

Nitrogen can affect a diver’s nervous system, making him feel and act as if he were drunk.

“It limits motor skills and has anesthetic effects,” said Dr. Chris Vonderheide, an anesthesiologist at Cape Canaveral Hospital in Florida and a spectator here. “It makes you loopy.”

Symptoms of narcosis make the ascent challenging, but other hazards await a diver.

“Ninety-nine percent of problems happen at or near the surface,” said Ben Weiss, 37, a software developer and safety diver for Vertical Blue 2011. “When the diver is resurfacing between 10 and 5 meters, the oxygen in the blood drops quickly. It is like standing up too fast.”

Way too fast. A diver can black out, which is grounds for disqualification in freediving events.

The organization responsible for recording the competition, the Association Internationale pour le Développement de l’Apnée, known as AIDA, employs extensive safety measures to protect the competitors.

The diver is tethered with a running lanyard to a guide rope, also used for measuring the dive, attached to a metal depth plate affixed to the end. Safety divers, who are also freedivers and do not use scuba equipment, dive to about 100 feet to monitor the athletes.

Should a diver need help beyond the reach of safety divers, a counter ballast system is activated, bringing the plate and diver to the surface. Although available for several years, it has never been deployed.

“We watch the diver for any flaw in their style,” said Charlie Beede, 57, a member of the Vertical Blue team and a safety diver for the competition. “We’re there so the divers can push themselves, push their limits, because they know we’ll save them.”

Safety divers had to rescue only one diver through Friday during Vertical Blue 2011. Natalia Molchanova of Russia, 48, was attempting a 103-meter (338-foot) world record on the first day of competition when she blacked out at about 50 feet and had to be brought to the surface. Although many other divers blacked out during competition, it was always at or near the surface, where they did not require rescue, only urgent reminders to breathe.

Sonar and cameras might take the mystery out of whether a diver successfully reached the depth, but the challenges and expectations at the surface electrify the atmosphere above water in the critical seconds after a diver resurfaces. The rules of the competition, called the surface protocol, require divers to take three seemingly inconsequential actions to claim their records: remove goggles and nose clip, give an O.K. sign and say, “I am O.K.” — all in the first 15 seconds of surfacing.

“Twenty meters, 10 meters, 5 meters, 2 meters,” the official on the platform calls out, marking the diver’s progress to the surface.

It is an electrifying moment, even more so on a world-record attempt, when a diver careens out of the water, clinging to the guide rope, clearly struggling to shake off narcosis and a lack of oxygen, sometimes gulping in air, sometimes not, fighting to retain consciousness, trying to gather the fortitude to complete the simple surface protocol — goggles, a hand signal and a three-word sentence — that stands between the diver and the record.

A diverse cast of characters has descended on Dean’s Blue Hole this year for Vertical Blue 2011. There is a 42-year-old Japanese diver and former account manager who had brain surgery only six months ago; a 48-year-old grandmother with five world records; a 30-year-old professional mermaid who owns her own silicone tail and serves as a diving judge; and a standup comedian and actress who is also a freediving underwater photographer. And that’s just the women.

“I’m nervous to be here with all the stars,” said Lena Jovanovic, 33, a former actress who set a Serbian record. “But people here are so supportive and happy for each other.”

That camaraderie is evident after a successful dive as several dozen revelers, including safety divers and fellow competitors, celebrate a record.

The physical challenge for freedivers is clear, but it is in large part a mental challenge: mind over body, overcoming panic, resisting the urge to breathe, combating narcosis and hallucinations. Freedivers say their most critical skill is emotional control, the ability to stay calm and relaxed.

“I try not to think,” Trubridge said of his technique, borrowed from yoga. “I concentrate on the spaces between the thoughts.”

At Vertical Blue 2011 divers have set — and sometimes broken again — nearly a dozen records, reaching ever greater extremes.

“There are no limits other than those we impose on ourselves,” Trubridge said. “There are no boundaries.”

String Chair, 1969
kitchen chair with back and seat cover with long strings pulled through holes

The Early Years
March 9 – April 16, 2011

L&M New York

Richard Aldrich
Untitled
2011
oil and wax on linen
213.4×147.3 cm

15 April – 21 May 2011

Richard Aldrich
Cheryl Donegan
Angiola Gatti
Jacqueline Humphries
Sergej Jensen
Raoul De Keyser
Michael Krebber
Albert Oehlen
Julian Schnabel
Peter Soriano
Richard Tuttle

modern art

By DAVID CARR
NY Times Published: April 15, 2011

YOU are at a party and the person in front of you is not really listening to you. Yes, she is murmuring occasional assent to your remarks, or nodding at appropriate junctures, but for the most part she is looking beyond you, scanning in search of something or someone more compelling.

Here’s the funny part: If she is looking over your shoulder at a room full of potentially more interesting people, she is ill-mannered. If, however, she is not looking over your shoulder, but into a smartphone in her hand, she is not only well within modern social norms, but is also a wired, well-put-together person.

Add one more achievement to the digital revolution: It has made it fashionable to be rude.

I thought about that a lot at South by Southwest Interactive, the annual campfire of the digitally interested held in Austin, Tex., the second week of March; inside, conference rooms brimmed with wireless connections, and the people on the dais competed with a screen in almost every seat: laptops, or even more commonly, tablets. In that context, the live presentation that the people in the audience had ostensibly come many miles to see was merely companion media.

But even more remarkably, once the badge-decorated horde spilled into the halls or went to the hundreds of parties that mark the ritual, almost everyone walked or talked with one eye, or both, on a little screen. We were adjacent but essentially alone, texting and talking our way through what should have been a great chance to engage flesh-and-blood human beings. The wait in line for panels, badges or food became one more chance to check in digitally instead of an opportunity to meet someone you didn’t know.

I moderated a panel there called “I’m So Productive, I Never Get Anything Done,” which was ostensibly about how answering e-mail and looking after various avatars on Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr left little time to do what we actually care about or get paid for. The biggest reaction in the session by far came when Anthony De Rosa, a product manager and programmer at Reuters and a big presence on Twitter and Tumblr, said that mobile connectedness has eroded fundamental human courtesies.

“When people are out and they’re among other people they need to just put everything down,” he said. “It’s fine when you’re at home or at work when you’re distracted by things, but we need to give that respect to each other back.”

His words brought sudden and tumultuous applause. It was sort of a moment, given that we were sitting amid some of the most digitally devoted people in the hemisphere. Perhaps somewhere on the way to the merger of the online and offline world, we had all stepped across a line without knowing it.

In an e-mail later, Mr. De Rosa wrote: “I’m fine with people stepping aside to check something, but when I’m standing in front of someone and in the middle of my conversation they whip out their phone, I’ll just stop talking to them and walk away. If they’re going to be rude, I’ll be rude right back.”

After the panel, one of the younger people in the audience came up to me to talk earnestly about the importance of actual connection, which was nice, except he was casting sidelong glances at his iPhone while we talked. I’m not even sure he knew he was doing it. It’s not just conferences full of inforati where this happens. In places all over America (theaters, sports arenas, apartments), people gather in groups only to disperse into lone pursuits between themselves and their phones.

Every meal out with friends or colleagues represents a negotiation between connectedness to the grid and interaction with those on hand. “Last year, for my friend’s birthday, my gift to her was to stay off my phone at her birthday dinner,” said Molly McAleer, who blogs and sends Twitter messages under the name Molls. “How embarrassing.”

If South by Southwest is, as its attendees claim, an indicator of what is to come, we won’t be seeing a lot of one another even if we happen to be in the same room. Anthony Breznican, a reporter for Entertainment Weekly, said all it takes is for one person at a dinner to excuse himself into his phone, and the race is on among everyone else.

“Instead of continuing with the conversation, we all take out our phones and check them in earnest,” he said. “For a few minutes everybody is typing away. A silence falls over the group and we all engage in a mass thumb-wrestling competition between man and little machine. Then the moment passes, the BlackBerrys and iPhones are reholstered, and we return to being humans again after a brief trance.”

In the instance of screen etiquette, sharing is not always caring, and sometimes, the bigger the screen, the larger the faux pas: On an elevator in the Austin Convention Center, some crazed social media promoter jammed his iPad under my nose and started demo-ing his hideously complicated social networking app that was going to change the world. I leaped to safety as soon as the door opened.

Still, many are finished apologizing for what has become a very natural mix of online and offline pursuits. In an essay on TechCrunch entitled “I Will Check My Phone at Dinner and You Will Deal With It,” MG Siegler wrote, “Forgive me, but it’s Dinner 2.0.”

He added: “This is the way the world works now. We’re always connected and always on call. And some of us prefer it that way.”

It scans as progress, but doesn’t always feel that way. There are a number of reasons why people at conferences and out in the world treat their phones like a Tamagotchi, the digital pet invented in Japan that died if it wasn’t constantly looked after and fed.

To begin with, phones glow. It is a very normal impulse to stare at something in your hand that is emitting light.

Beyond the gadget itself, the screen offers a data stream of many people, as opposed to the individual you happen to be near. Your e-mail, Twitter, Facebook and other online social groups all offer a data stream of many individuals, and you can choose the most interesting one, unlike the human rain delay you may be stuck with at a party.

Then there is also a specific kind of narcissism that the social Web engenders. By grooming and updating your various avatars, you are making sure you remain at the popular kid’s table. One of the more seductive data points in real-time media is what people think of you. The metrics of followers and retweets beget a kind of always-on day trading in the unstable currency of the self.

“My personal pet peeve is people who live-tweet every interaction,” said Roxanna Asgarian, a student at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism who attended South by Southwest this year. “I prefer to experience the thing itself over the experience of telling people I’m doing the thing.”

Still, for those of us who are afraid of missing something, having the grid at our fingertips offers reassurance that we are in the right spot or gives indicators of heat elsewhere.

But all is not vanity. For anybody with children, a job or a significant other, the expectation these days is that certain special people, usually beginning with our bosses, can reach us at any minute of any day. Every once in a while something truly important tumbles into our in-box that requires immediate attention.

Mobile devices do indeed make us more mobile, but that tether is also a leash, letting everyone know that they can get you at any second, most often to tell you they are late, but on their way. (Another bit of bad manners that the always-on world helps facilitate, by the way.)

At the conference, I saw people who waited 90 minutes to get into a party with a very tough door, peering into their phones the whole while, only to breach the door finally and resume staring into the same screen and only occasionally glancing up.

In that sense, the scenery never really changes when you are riding with your digital wingman. I saw people who were sitting on panels surfing or e-mailing during lulls, and then were taken by surprise when it was their turn to talk. (And it’s not just those children. I was hosting a discussion at another conference with Martha Stewart, no slouch when it comes to manners, and she kept us all waiting while she checked “one more thing” on her Twitter.)

I should sheepishly mention I was on highest alert for electronic offense because I switched out my smartphone before South by Southwest and was on a new Droid that I’m pretty sure could guide the next mission to Mars, but it was clunky when it came to sending texts and Twitter messages. Digital natives (read “young people”) will tell you that they can easily toggle between online and offline. My colleague Brian Stelter can almost pull it off, in part because he always seems to be creating media and consuming it.

And in Austin I saw Andy Carvin, NPR’s one-man signal tower of North African revolution on Twitter, sitting in front of a screen while the British band Yuck played a killer outdoor set at Stubb’s. He sent Twitter messages about the show, and about Bahrain as well.

William Powers, the author of “Hamlet’s BlackBerry,” a book about getting control of your digital life, appeared on a panel at South by Southwest and wrote that he came away thinking he had witnessed “a gigantic competition to see who can be more absent from the people and conversations happening right around them. Everyone in Austin was gazing into their little devices — a bit desperately, too, as if their lives depended on not missing the next tweet.”

In a phone conversation a few weeks afterward, Mr. Powers said that he is far from being a Luddite, but that he doesn’t “buy into the idea that digital natives can do both screen and eye contact.”

“They are not fully present because we are not built that way,” he said.

Where other people saw freedom — from the desktop, from social convention, from the boring guy in front of them — Mr. Powers saw “a kind of imprisonment.”

“There is a great deal of conformity under way, actually,” he added.

And therein lies the real problem. When someone you are trying to talk to ends up getting busy on a phone, the most natural response is not to scold, but to emulate. It’s mutually assured distraction.

Larry Bell, Ida Rose (1962)
Oil on canvas
65 x 65 in. (165.1 x 165.1 cm)

Through August 15, 2011

Larry Bell, Thomas Downing, Helen Frankenthaler, Stephen Greene, Kenneth Noland, Frank Stella and Jack Youngerman, Ellsworth Kelly, and Agnes Martin

Norton Simon

By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Times Published: April 14, 2011

Paul Ryan, the chairman of the House Budget Committee, sounds upset. And you can see why: President Obama, to the great relief of progressives, has called his bluff.

Last week, Mr. Ryan unveiled his budget proposal, and the initial reaction of much of the punditocracy was best summed up (sarcastically) by the blogger John Cole: “The plan is bold! It is serious! It took courage! It re-frames the debate! The ball is in Obama’s court! Very wonky! It is a game-changer! Did I mention it is serious?”

Then people who actually understand budget numbers went to work, and it became clear that the proposal wasn’t serious at all. In fact, it was a sick joke. The only real things in it were savage cuts in aid to the needy and the uninsured, huge tax cuts for corporations and the rich, and Medicare privatization. All the alleged cost savings were pure fantasy.

On Wednesday, as I said, the president called Mr. Ryan’s bluff: after offering a spirited (and reassuring) defense of social insurance, he declared, “There’s nothing serious about a plan that claims to reduce the deficit by spending a trillion dollars on tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires. And I don’t think there’s anything courageous about asking for sacrifice from those who can least afford it and don’t have any clout on Capitol Hill.” Actually, the Ryan plan calls for $2.9 trillion in tax cuts, but who’s counting?

And then Mr. Obama laid out a budget plan that really is serious.

The president’s proposal isn’t perfect, by a long shot. My own view is that while the spending controls on Medicare he proposed are exactly the right way to go, he’s probably expecting too much payoff in the near term. And over the longer run, I believe that we’ll need modestly higher taxes on the middle class as well as the rich to pay for the kind of society we want. But the vision was right, and the numbers were far more credible than anything in the Ryan sales pitch.

And the hissy fit — I mean, criticism — the Obama plan provoked from Mr. Ryan was deeply revealing, as the man who proposes using budget deficits as an excuse to cut taxes on the rich accused the president of being “partisan.” Mr. Ryan also accused the president of being “dramatically inaccurate” — this from someone whose plan included a $200 billion error in its calculation of interest costs and appears to have made an even bigger error on Medicaid costs. He didn’t say what the inaccuracies were.

And now for something completely wonkish: Can we talk, briefly, about politicians talking about drugs?

For the contrast between Mr. Ryan last week and Mr. Obama on Wednesday wasn’t just about visions of society. There was also a difference in visions of how the world works. And nowhere was that clearer than in the issue of how Medicare should pay for drugs.

Mr. Obama declared, “We will cut spending on prescription drugs by using Medicare’s purchasing power to drive greater efficiency.” Meanwhile, Mr. Ryan held up the existing Medicare drug benefit — a program run through private insurance companies, under legislation that specifically prohibits Medicare from using its bargaining power — as an example of the efficiencies that could be gained from privatizing the whole system.

Mr. Obama has it right. Medicare Part D has been less expensive than expected, at least so far, but that’s because overall prescription drug spending has fallen short of expectations, largely thanks to a dearth of new drugs and the growing use of generics. The right way to assess Part D is by comparing it with programs where the government is allowed to use its purchasing power. And such comparisons suggest that if there’s any magic in privatization, it’s the magical way it makes drug companies richer and taxpayers poorer. For example, the Department of Veterans Affairs pays about 40 percent less for drugs than the private plans in Part D.

Did I mention that Medicare Advantage, which closely resembles the privatized system that Republicans want to impose on all seniors, currently costs taxpayers 12 percent more per recipient than traditional Medicare?

But back to the president’s speech. His plan isn’t about to become law; neither is Mr. Ryan’s. And given the hysterical Republican reaction, it doesn’t look likely that we’ll see negotiations trying to narrow the difference. That’s a good thing because Mr. Obama’s plan already relies more on spending cuts than it should, and moving it significantly in the G.O.P.’s direction would produce something unworkable and unacceptable.

What happened over the past two weeks, then, was more about staking out positions than about enacting policies. On one side you had a combination of mean-spiritedness and fantasy; on the other you had a reaffirmation of American compassion and community, coupled with fairly realistic numbers. Which would you choose? 

Lesley Vance, Untitled (2011)

14 April – 14 May 2011

David Altmejd, Marcel Broodthaers, Andrew Dadson, Latifa Echakhch, Michel François, Nikolas Gambaroff, Vincent Geyskens, Jacob Kassay, Elad Lassry, Robert Mapplethorpe, Ron Nagle, David Noonan, Jack Pierson, Ryan Sullivan, Lesley Vance, Ned Vena

Xavier Hufkens

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
NY Times Published: April 13, 2011

President Obama in his speech on Wednesday confronted a topic that is harder to address seriously in public than sex or flatulence: America needs higher taxes.

That ugly truth looms over today’s budget battles, but politicians have mostly preferred to run from reality. Mr. Obama’s speech was excellent not only for its content but also because he didn’t insult our intelligence.

There is no single reason for today’s budget mess, but it’s worth remembering that the last time our budget was in the black was in the Clinton administration. That’s a broad hint that one sensible way to overcome our difficulties would be to revert to tax rates more or less as they were under President Clinton. That single step would solve three-quarters of the deficit for the next five years or so.

Paradoxically, nothing makes the need for a tax increase more clear than the Republican budget proposal crafted by Representative Paul Ryan. The Republicans propose slashing spending far more than the public would probably accept — even dismantling Medicare — and rely on economic assumptions that are not merely rosy, but preposterous.

Yet even so, the Republican plan shows continuing budget deficits until the 2030s. In short, we can’t plausibly slash our way back to solid fiscal ground. We need more revenue.

Kudos to Mr. Obama for boldly stating that truth in his speech — even if he did focus only on taxes for the very wealthiest. I also thought he was right to say that we need spending cuts — including in our defense budget. Mr. Obama didn’t say so, but the United States accounts for almost as much military spending as the entire rest of the world put together.

As I see it, there are three fallacies common in today’s budget discussions:

• Republicans are the party of responsible financial stewardship, struggling to put America on a sound footing.

In truth, both parties have been wildly irresponsible, but in cycles. Democrats were more irresponsible in the 1960s, the two parties both seemed care-free in the ’70s and ’80s, and since then the Republicans have been staggeringly reckless.

After the Clinton administration began paying down America’s debt, Republicans passed the Bush tax cuts, waded into a trillion-dollar war in Iraq, and approved an unfunded prescription medicine benefit — all by borrowing from China. Then-Vice President Dick Cheney scoffed that “deficits don’t matter.”

This borrow-and-spend Republican history makes it galling when Republicans now assert that deficits are the only thing that matter — and call for drastic spending cuts, two-thirds of which would harm low-income and moderate-income Americans, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. To pay for tax cuts heaped largely on the wealthiest Americans, Republicans in effect would gut Medicare and slash jobs programs, family planning and college scholarships. Instead of spreading opportunity, federal policy would cap it.

• Low tax rates are essential to create incentives for economic growth: a tax increase would stifle the economy.

It’s true that, in general, higher taxes tend to reduce incentives. But this seems a weak effect, often overwhelmed by other factors.

Were Americans really lazier in the 1950s, when marginal tax rates peaked at more than 90 percent? Are people in high-tax states like Massachusetts more lackadaisical than folks in a state like Florida that has no personal income tax at all?

Tax increases can also send a message of prudence that stimulates economic growth. The Clinton tax increase of 1993 was followed by a golden period of high growth, while the Bush tax cuts were followed by an anemic economy.

• We can’t afford Medicare.

It’s true that America faces a basic problem with rapidly rising health care costs. But the Republican plan does nothing serious to address health care spending, other than stop paying bills. Indeed, Medicare is cheaper to administer than private health insurance (2 percent to 6 percent administrative costs, depending on who does the math, compared with about 12 percent for private plans). So the Republican plan might add to health care spending rather than curb it.

The real challenge is to control health care inflation. Nobody is certain how to do that, but the Obama health care law is testing some plausible ideas. These include rigorous research on which procedures work and which don’t. Why pay for surgery on enlarged prostates if certain kinds of patients turn out to be better with no treatment at all?

Ever since Walter Mondale publicly committed hara-kiri in 1984 by telling voters that he would raise their taxes, politicians have run from fiscal reality. As baby boomers age and require Social Security and Medicare, escapism will no longer suffice. We need to have a frank national discussion of painful steps ahead, and since I’m not a politician, let me be perfectly clear: raise my taxes! 

Yukinori Maeda
Untitled No. 1 (LIGHT DEPOSIT) 2008
Lot 48

Silent Art Auction in Kiyosumi for East Northern Japan

Thanks to Rodney Hill

Sawhead, 1933. Bronze and painted iron. 18.5″x 11.8″ x 8.25″

Through July 24, 2011

LACMA