Day Circle Pink, 1962
Acrylic on canvas
96 x 84 inches

Through July 15, 2011

“James Graham & Sons”

By STEVEN RATTNER
NY Times Published: June 24, 2011

FEELING the need for an example of government policy run amok? Look no further than the box of cornflakes on your kitchen shelf. In its myriad corn-related interventions, Washington has managed simultaneously to help drive up food prices and add tens of billions of dollars to the deficit, while arguably increasing energy use and harming the environment.
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Even in a crowd of rising food and commodity costs, corn stands out, its price having doubled in less than a year to a record $7.87 per bushel in early June. Booming global demand has overtaken stagnant supply.

But rather than ameliorate the problem, the government has exacerbated it, reducing food supply to a hungry world. Thanks to Washington, 4 of every 10 ears of corn grown in America — the source of 40 percent of the world’s production — are shunted into ethanol, a gasoline substitute that imperceptibly nicks our energy problem. Larded onto that are $11 billion a year of government subsidies to the corn complex.

Corn is hardly some minor agricultural product for breakfast cereal. It’s America’s largest crop, dwarfing wheat and soybeans. A small portion of production goes for human consumption; about 40 percent feeds cows, pigs, turkeys and chickens. Diverting 40 percent to ethanol has disagreeable consequences for food. In just a year, the price of bacon has soared by 24 percent.

To some, the contours of the ethanol story may be familiar. Almost since Iowa — our biggest corn-producing state — grabbed the lead position in the presidential sweepstakes four decades ago, support for the biofuel has been nearly a prerequisite for politicians seeking the presidency.

Those hopefuls have seen no need for a foolish consistency. John McCain and John Kerry were against ethanol subsidies, then as candidates were for them. Having lost the presidency, Mr. McCain is now against them again. Al Gore was for ethanol before he was against it. This time, one hopeful is experimenting with counter-programming: as governor of corn-producing Minnesota, Tim Pawlenty pushed for subsidies before he embraced a “straight talk” strategy.

Eating up just a tenth of the corn crop as recently as 2004, ethanol was turbocharged by legislation in 2005 and 2007 that set specific requirements for its use in gasoline, mandating steep rises from year to year. Yet another government bureaucracy was born to enforce the quotas.

To ease the pain, Congress threw in a 45-cents-a-gallon subsidy ($6 billion a year); to add another layer of protection, it imposed a tariff on imported ethanol of 54 cents a gallon. That successfully shut off cheap imports, produced more efficiently from sugar cane, principally from Brazil.

Here is perhaps the most incredible part: Because of the subsidy, ethanol became cheaper than gasoline, and so we sent 397 million gallons of ethanol overseas last year. America is simultaneously importing costly foreign oil and subsidizing the export of its equivalent.

That’s not all. Ethanol packs less punch than gasoline and uses considerable energy in its production process. All told, each gallon of gasoline that is displaced costs the Treasury $1.78 in subsidies and lost tax revenue.

Nor does ethanol live up to its environmental promises. The Congressional Budget Office found that reducing carbon dioxide emissions by using ethanol costs at least $750 per ton of carbon dioxide, wildly more than other methods. What is more, making corn ethanol consumes vast quantities of water and increases smog.

Then there’s energy efficiency. Studies reach widely varying conclusions on that issue. While some show a small saving in fossil fuels, others calculate that ethanol consumes more energy than it produces.

Corn growers and other farmers have long exercised outsize influence, thanks in part to the Senate’s structural tilt toward rural states. The ethanol giveaway represents a 21st-century add-on to a dizzying patchwork of programs for farmers. Under one, corn growers receive “direct payments” — $1.75 billion in 2010 — whether they grow corn or not. Washington also subsidizes crop insurance, at a cost of another $1.75 billion last year. That may have made sense when low corn prices made farming a marginal business, but no longer.

At long last, the enormity of the nation’s budget deficit has added momentum to the forces of reason. While only a symbolic move, the Senate recently voted 73 to 27 to end ethanol subsidies. That alone helped push corn prices down to $7 per bushel. Incredibly, the White House criticized the action — could key farm states have been on the minds of the president’s advisers?

Even farm advocates like former Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman agree that the situation must be fixed. Reports filtering out of the budget talks currently under way suggest that agriculture subsidies sit prominently on the chopping block. The time is ripe.

Steven Rattner was formerly counselor to the secretary of the Treasury and lead auto adviser. He has spent nearly 30 years on Wall Street as an investor and investment banker and is a contributing writer to Op-Ed.

Teapot (Untitled), 1985
16″ x 16″ x 6″

Shop Exhibit #2
Peter Shire
“A Lamp, 2 Tables and a Teapot”
June 25 – July 24, 2011

In Love
2011
Oils and metallic oil on canvas
60 X 60 inches

Through July 1, 2011

Tracy Williams

Peter Falk as Lt. Frank Columbo.

By BRUCE WEBER
NY Times Published: June 24, 2011

Peter Falk, who marshaled actorly tics, prop room appurtenances and his own physical idiosyncrasies to personify Columbo, one of the most famous and beloved fictional detectives in television history, died on Thursday night at his home in Beverly Hills, Calif. He was 83.

His death was announced in a statement from Larry Larson, a longtime friend and the lawyer for Mr. Falk’s wife, Shera Danese. He had been treated for Alzheimer’s disease in recent years.

Mr. Falk had a wide-ranging career in comedy and drama, in the movies and onstage, before and during the three-and-a-half decades in which he portrayed the slovenly but canny lead on “Columbo.” He was nominated for two Oscars; appeared in original stage productions of works by Paddy Chayefsky, Neil Simon and Arthur Miller, worked with the directors Frank Capra, John Cassavetes, Blake Edwards and Mike Nichols, and co-starred with the likes of Frank Sinatra, Bette Davis and Jason Robards.

But like that of his contemporary Telly Savalas of “Kojak” fame, Mr. Falk’s primetime popularity was founded on a single role.

A lieutenant in the Los Angeles Police Department, Columbo was a comic variation on the traditional fictional detective. With the keen mind of Sherlock Holmes and Philip Marlowe, he was cast in the mold of neither — not a gentleman scholar, and not a tough guy. He was instead a mass of quirks and peculiarities, a seemingly distracted figure in a rumpled raincoat, perpetually patting his pockets for a light for his signature stogie.

He drove a battered Peugeot, was unfailingly polite, was sometimes accompanied by a basset hound named Dog, and was constantly referring to the wisdom of his wife (who was never seen on screen) and a variety of relatives and acquaintances who were identified in Homeric-epithet-like shorthand — an uncle who played the bagpipes with the Shriners, say, or a nephew majoring in dermatology at U.C.L.A. — and who were called to mind by the circumstances of the crime at hand.

It was a low-rent affect that was especially irksome to the high-society murderers he outwitted in episode after episode.

Mr. Falk had a glass eye, resulting from an operation to remove a cancerous tumor when he was 3 years old. The prosthesis gave all his characters a peculiar, almost quizzical squint. And he had a mild speech impediment that gave his L’s a breathy quality, a sound that emanated from the back of his throat and that seemed especially emphatic whenever, in character, he introduced himself as Lieutenant Columbo.

Such a deep well of eccentricity made Columbo amusing as well as incisive, not to mention a progenitor of later characters like Tony Shalhoub’s Monk. And it made him an especially suitable central figure for the detective story niche in which he lived, where whodunit was irrelevant and how-it-was-done paramount.

From 1968 to 2003, Mr. Falk played the character dozens of times, mostly in the format of a 90-minute or two-hour television movie. “What are you hanging around for?” Mr. Falk wrote, describing the appeal of the show in “Just One More Thing,” an anecdotal memoir (2006), whose title was a trademark line of Columbo’s, usually indicating the jig was up. “Just one thing. You want to know how he gets caught.”

When Columbo, the ordinary man as hero, brought low the greedy and murderous privileged of Beverly Hills, Malibu and Brentwood, they were implicit victories for the many over the few.

“This is, perhaps, the most thoroughgoing satisfaction ‘Columbo’ offers us,” Jeff Greenfield wrote in The New York Times in 1973, “the assurance that those who dwell in marble and satin, those whose clothes, food, cars and mates are the very best, do not deserve it.”

Peter Michael Falk was born on Sept. 16, 1927, in New York City, and grew up in Ossining, N.Y, where his father owned a clothing store and where, in spite of his missing eye, he was a high school athlete. In one story he liked to tell, after being called out at third base during a baseball game, he removed his eye and handed it to the umpire.

“You’ll do better with this,” he said.

After high school, Mr. Falk went briefly to Hamilton College, in upstate New York, before dropping out and joining the Merchant Marine as a cook. He later returned to New York City, where he earned a degree in political science from the New School for Social Research before attending Syracuse University, where he received a master’s degree in public administration.

He took a job in Hartford as an efficiency expert for the Connecticut budget bureau. It was in Connecticut that he began acting, joining an amateur troupe called the Mark Twain Masquers in Hartford and taking classes from Eva Le Gallienne at the White Barn Theater in Westport. He was 29 when he decided to move to New York again, this time to be an actor.

He made his professional debut in an Off Broadway production of Moliere’s “Don Juan” in 1956. In 1957 he was cast as the bartender in the famous Circle in the Square revival of “The Iceman Cometh,” directed by José Quintero and starring Jason Robards; he made his first splash on screen, as Abe (Kid Twist) Reles, a violent mob thug, in the 1960 film “Murder Inc.” That performance earned him an Oscar nomination for best supporting actor and a moment of high embarrassment at the awards ceremony. When the winner was announced — it was Peter Ustinov for “Spartacus” — Mr. Falk heard the first name and stood, only to have to sit back down again a moment later.

“When I hit the seat I turned to the press agent and said, ‘You’re fired!’ ” Mr. Falk wrote in his memoir. “I didn’t want him charging me for another day.”

The next year, newly married to a Syracuse classmate, Alyce Mayo — they would have two daughters and divorce in 1976 — Mr. Falk was again nominated for a supporting-actor Oscar, for playing a mobster, though this time with a more light-hearted stripe, in the final film to be directed by Frank Capra, “Pocketful of Miracles,” starring Bette Davis and Glenn Ford.

From then on, Mr. Falk, who was swarthy, squat (he was 5-foot-6) and handsome, had to fend off offers to play gangsters. He did take such a part in “Robin and the 7 Hoods”, alongside Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Bing Crosby and Sammy Davis Jr., but fearful of typecasting, he also took roles in comic japes like “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World” and “The Great Race.”

He returned to the stage as well, as Stalin, the title role, in Paddy Chayefsky’s “Passion of Joseph D,” which earned him solid reviews in spite of the show’s brief run (14 performances). Mr. Falk played Stalin “with brilliant unsmiling ferocity,” Howard Taubman wrote in his largely positive review in The Times.

His life was forever changed in 1967 when, reportedly after both Bing Crosby and Lee J. Cobb turned down the role, he was cast as Columbo in the television film “Prescription: Murder.” The film, about a psychiatrist who kills his wife with the help of one of his patients, was written by Richard Levinson and William Link; they had adapted it from their stage play, which opened in San Francisco and Boston in 1964, and which itself was an adaptation. Levinson and Link first wrote the story in 1960 for a series called “The Chevy Mystery Show.” It was in that show — the episode was titled “Enough Rope” — that Columbo made his debut as a character, played by Bert Freed.

But it was Mr. Falk who made him a legend. During the filming it was he who rejected the fashionable attire the costume shop had laid out for him; it was he who chose the raincoat — one of his own — and who matched the rest of the detective’s clothes to its shabbiness. It was he who picked out the Peugeot from the studio motor pool, a convertible with a flat tire and needing a paint job that, he reflected years afterwards, “even matched the raincoat.”

And as the character grew, the line between the actor and the character grew hazier. They shared a general disregard for nattiness, an informal mode of speech, an obsession with detail, an irrepressible absent-mindedness. Even Columbo’s favorite song, “This Old Man,” which seemed to run through his mind (and the series) like a broken record, was one that Mr. Falk had loved from childhood and that ended up in the show because he was standing around humming it one day, in character, when Columbo was waiting for someone to come to the phone.

Three years passed between the first “Columbo” movie and the second, “Ransom for a Dead Man,” which became the pilot that launched the show as a regular network offering. It was part of a revolving wheel of Sunday night mysteries with recurring characters that appeared under the rubric “NBC Mystery Theater.” The first set included “McCloud,” with Dennis Weaver, and “McMillan and Wife,” with Rock Hudson and Susan St James.

In between, Mr. Falk made “Husbands,” the first of his collaborations with his friend, Mr. Cassavetes. The others were “A Woman Under the Influence” in 1974, a brutally realistic portrayal of a marriage undermined by mental illness, directed by Mr. Cassavetes, for which Mr. Falk’s co-star and Mr. Cassavetes’s wife, Gena Rowlands, was nominated for the Academy Award; and “Mikey and Nicky” in 1976, a dark buddy comedy directed by Elaine May in which the two men played the title roles.

In 1971 he once again returned to Broadway, in Neil Simon’s angry comedy “The Prisoner of Second Avenue.”

In later years, Mr. Falk starred in several notable films — “Murder by Death” (1976), “The In-Laws” (1979), “The Princess Bride” (1987) and “Tune In Tomorrow” (1990) among them — and in 1998 he opened Off Broadway in the title role of Arthur Miller’s play “Mr. Peters’ Connections,” a portrait of an older man trying to make sense out his life as it comes to an end.

By that time, however, Mr. Falk and Columbo had become more or less interchangeable as cultural references. Mr. Peters, Ben Brantley wrote in his review of the play in The Times, “is as genuinely perplexed as Columbo, his aggressively rumpled television detective, only pretends to be.”

Mr. Falk is survived by Ms. Danese, his second wife, and two daughters, Jackie and Catherine.

Pre-Flight In the Philippines with his mother, who was supposed to follow him to the United States but never did.

By JOSE ANTONIO VARGAS
NY Times Published: June 22, 2011

One August morning nearly two decades ago, my mother woke me and put me in a cab. She handed me a jacket. “Baka malamig doon” were among the few words she said. (“It might be cold there.”) When I arrived at the Philippines’ Ninoy Aquino International Airport with her, my aunt and a family friend, I was introduced to a man I’d never seen. They told me he was my uncle. He held my hand as I boarded an airplane for the first time. It was 1993, and I was 12.

My mother wanted to give me a better life, so she sent me thousands of miles away to live with her parents in America — my grandfather (Lolo in Tagalog) and grandmother (Lola). After I arrived in Mountain View, Calif., in the San Francisco Bay Area, I entered sixth grade and quickly grew to love my new home, family and culture. I discovered a passion for language, though it was hard to learn the difference between formal English and American slang. One of my early memories is of a freckled kid in middle school asking me, “What’s up?” I replied, “The sky,” and he and a couple of other kids laughed. I won the eighth-grade spelling bee by memorizing words I couldn’t properly pronounce. (The winning word was “indefatigable.”)

One day when I was 16, I rode my bike to the nearby D.M.V. office to get my driver’s permit. Some of my friends already had their licenses, so I figured it was time. But when I handed the clerk my green card as proof of U.S. residency, she flipped it around, examining it. “This is fake,” she whispered. “Don’t come back here again.”

Confused and scared, I pedaled home and confronted Lolo. I remember him sitting in the garage, cutting coupons. I dropped my bike and ran over to him, showing him the green card. “Peke ba ito?” I asked in Tagalog. (“Is this fake?”) My grandparents were naturalized American citizens — he worked as a security guard, she as a food server — and they had begun supporting my mother and me financially when I was 3, after my father’s wandering eye and inability to properly provide for us led to my parents’ separation. Lolo was a proud man, and I saw the shame on his face as he told me he purchased the card, along with other fake documents, for me. “Don’t show it to other people,” he warned.

I decided then that I could never give anyone reason to doubt I was an American. I convinced myself that if I worked enough, if I achieved enough, I would be rewarded with citizenship. I felt I could earn it.

I’ve tried. Over the past 14 years, I’ve graduated from high school and college and built a career as a journalist, interviewing some of the most famous people in the country. On the surface, I’ve created a good life. I’ve lived the American dream.

But I am still an undocumented immigrant. And that means living a different kind of reality. It means going about my day in fear of being found out. It means rarely trusting people, even those closest to me, with who I really am. It means keeping my family photos in a shoebox rather than displaying them on shelves in my home, so friends don’t ask about them. It means reluctantly, even painfully, doing things I know are wrong and unlawful. And it has meant relying on a sort of 21st-century underground railroad of supporters, people who took an interest in my future and took risks for me.

Last year I read about four students who walked from Miami to Washington to lobby for the Dream Act, a nearly decade-old immigration bill that would provide a path to legal permanent residency for young people who have been educated in this country. At the risk of deportation — the Obama administration has deported almost 800,000 people in the last two years — they are speaking out. Their courage has inspired me.

There are believed to be 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United States. We’re not always who you think we are. Some pick your strawberries or care for your children. Some are in high school or college. And some, it turns out, write news articles you might read. I grew up here. This is my home. Yet even though I think of myself as an American and consider America my country, my country doesn’t think of me as one of its own.

My first challenge was the language. Though I learned English in the Philippines, I wanted to lose my accent. During high school, I spent hours at a time watching television (especially “Frasier,” “Home Improvement” and reruns of “The Golden Girls”) and movies (from “Goodfellas” to “Anne of Green Gables”), pausing the VHS to try to copy how various characters enunciated their words. At the local library, I read magazines, books and newspapers — anything to learn how to write better. Kathy Dewar, my high-school English teacher, introduced me to journalism. From the moment I wrote my first article for the student paper, I convinced myself that having my name in print — writing in English, interviewing Americans — validated my presence here.

The debates over “illegal aliens” intensified my anxieties. In 1994, only a year after my flight from the Philippines, Gov. Pete Wilson was re-elected in part because of his support for Proposition 187, which prohibited undocumented immigrants from attending public school and accessing other services. (A federal court later found the law unconstitutional.) After my encounter at the D.M.V. in 1997, I grew more aware of anti-immigrant sentiments and stereotypes: they don’t want to assimilate, they are a drain on society. They’re not talking about me, I would tell myself. I have something to contribute.

To do that, I had to work — and for that, I needed a Social Security number. Fortunately, my grandfather had already managed to get one for me. Lolo had always taken care of everyone in the family. He and my grandmother emigrated legally in 1984 from Zambales, a province in the Philippines of rice fields and bamboo houses­, following Lolo’s sister, who married a Filipino-American serving in the American military. She petitioned for her brother and his wife to join her. When they got here, Lolo petitioned for his two children — my mother and her younger brother — to follow them. But instead of mentioning that my mother was a married woman, he listed her as single. Legal residents can’t petition for their married children. Besides, Lolo didn’t care for my father. He didn’t want him coming here too.

But soon Lolo grew nervous that the immigration authorities reviewing the petition would discover my mother was married, thus derailing not only her chances of coming here but those of my uncle as well. So he withdrew her petition. After my uncle came to America legally in 1991, Lolo tried to get my mother here through a tourist visa, but she wasn’t able to obtain one. That’s when she decided to send me. My mother told me later that she figured she would follow me soon. She never did.

The “uncle” who brought me here turned out to be a coyote, not a relative, my grandfather later explained. Lolo scraped together enough money — I eventually learned it was $4,500, a huge sum for him — to pay him to smuggle me here under a fake name and fake passport. (I never saw the passport again after the flight and have always assumed that the coyote kept it.) After I arrived in America, Lolo obtained a new fake Filipino passport, in my real name this time, adorned with a fake student visa, in addition to the fraudulent green card.

Using the fake passport, we went to the local Social Security Administration office and applied for a Social Security number and card. It was, I remember, a quick visit. When the card came in the mail, it had my full, real name, but it also clearly stated: “Valid for work only with I.N.S. authorization.”

When I began looking for work, a short time after the D.M.V. incident, my grandfather and I took the Social Security card to Kinko’s, where he covered the “I.N.S. authorization” text with a sliver of white tape. We then made photocopies of the card. At a glance, at least, the copies would look like copies of a regular, unrestricted Social Security card.

Lolo always imagined I would work the kind of low-paying jobs that undocumented people often take. (Once I married an American, he said, I would get my real papers, and everything would be fine.) But even menial jobs require documents, so he and I hoped the doctored card would work for now. The more documents I had, he said, the better.

While in high school, I worked part time at Subway, then at the front desk of the local Y.M.C.A., then at a tennis club, until I landed an unpaid internship at The Mountain View Voice, my hometown newspaper. First I brought coffee and helped around the office; eventually I began covering city-hall meetings and other assignments for pay.

For more than a decade of getting part-time and full-time jobs, employers have rarely asked to check my original Social Security card. When they did, I showed the photocopied version, which they accepted. Over time, I also began checking the citizenship box on my federal I-9 employment eligibility forms. (Claiming full citizenship was actually easier than declaring permanent resident “green card” status, which would have required me to provide an alien registration number.)

This deceit never got easier. The more I did it, the more I felt like an impostor, the more guilt I carried — and the more I worried that I would get caught. But I kept doing it. I needed to live and survive on my own, and I decided this was the way.

Mountain View High School became my second home. I was elected to represent my school at school-board meetings, which gave me the chance to meet and befriend Rich Fischer, the superintendent for our school district. I joined the speech and debate team, acted in school plays and eventually became co-editor of The Oracle, the student newspaper. That drew the attention of my principal, Pat Hyland. “You’re at school just as much as I am,” she told me. Pat and Rich would soon become mentors, and over time, almost surrogate parents for me.

After a choir rehearsal during my junior year, Jill Denny, the choir director, told me she was considering a Japan trip for our singing group. I told her I couldn’t afford it, but she said we’d figure out a way. I hesitated, and then decided to tell her the truth. “It’s not really the money,” I remember saying. “I don’t have the right passport.” When she assured me we’d get the proper documents, I finally told her. “I can’t get the right passport,” I said. “I’m not supposed to be here.”

She understood. So the choir toured Hawaii instead, with me in tow. (Mrs. Denny and I spoke a couple of months ago, and she told me she hadn’t wanted to leave any student behind.)

Later that school year, my history class watched a documentary on Harvey Milk, the openly gay San Francisco city official who was assassinated. This was 1999, just six months after Matthew Shepard’s body was found tied to a fence in Wyoming. During the discussion, I raised my hand and said something like: “I’m sorry Harvey Milk got killed for being gay. . . . I’ve been meaning to say this. . . . I’m gay.”

I hadn’t planned on coming out that morning, though I had known that I was gay for several years. With that announcement, I became the only openly gay student at school, and it caused turmoil with my grandparents. Lolo kicked me out of the house for a few weeks. Though we eventually reconciled, I had disappointed him on two fronts. First, as a Catholic, he considered homosexuality a sin and was embarrassed about having “ang apo na bakla” (“a grandson who is gay”). Even worse, I was making matters more difficult for myself, he said. I needed to marry an American woman in order to gain a green card.

Tough as it was, coming out about being gay seemed less daunting than coming out about my legal status. I kept my other secret mostly hidden.

While my classmates awaited their college acceptance letters, I hoped to get a full-time job at The Mountain View Voice after graduation. It’s not that I didn’t want to go to college, but I couldn’t apply for state and federal financial aid. Without that, my family couldn’t afford to send me.

But when I finally told Pat and Rich about my immigration “problem” — as we called it from then on — they helped me look for a solution. At first, they even wondered if one of them could adopt me and fix the situation that way, but a lawyer Rich consulted told him it wouldn’t change my legal status because I was too old. Eventually they connected me to a new scholarship fund for high-potential students who were usually the first in their families to attend college. Most important, the fund was not concerned with immigration status. I was among the first recipients, with the scholarship covering tuition, lodging, books and other expenses for my studies at San Francisco State University.

As a college freshman, I found a job working part time at The San Francisco Chronicle, where I sorted mail and wrote some freelance articles. My ambition was to get a reporting job, so I embarked on a series of internships. First I landed at The Philadelphia Daily News, in the summer of 2001, where I covered a drive-by shooting and the wedding of the 76ers star Allen Iverson. Using those articles, I applied to The Seattle Times and got an internship for the following summer.

But then my lack of proper documents became a problem again. The Times’s recruiter, Pat Foote, asked all incoming interns to bring certain paperwork on their first day: a birth certificate, or a passport, or a driver’s license plus an original Social Security card. I panicked, thinking my documents wouldn’t pass muster. So before starting the job, I called Pat and told her about my legal status. After consulting with management, she called me back with the answer I feared: I couldn’t do the internship.

This was devastating. What good was college if I couldn’t then pursue the career I wanted? I decided then that if I was to succeed in a profession that is all about truth-telling, I couldn’t tell the truth about myself.

After this episode, Jim Strand, the venture capitalist who sponsored my scholarship, offered to pay for an immigration lawyer. Rich and I went to meet her in San Francisco’s financial district.

I was hopeful. This was in early 2002, shortly after Senators Orrin Hatch, the Utah Republican, and Dick Durbin, the Illinois Democrat, introduced the Dream Act — Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors. It seemed like the legislative version of what I’d told myself: If I work hard and contribute, things will work out.

But the meeting left me crushed. My only solution, the lawyer said, was to go back to the Philippines and accept a 10-year ban before I could apply to return legally.

If Rich was discouraged, he hid it well. “Put this problem on a shelf,” he told me. “Compartmentalize it. Keep going.”

And I did. For the summer of 2003, I applied for internships across the country. Several newspapers, including The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe and The Chicago Tribune, expressed interest. But when The Washington Post offered me a spot, I knew where I would go. And this time, I had no intention of acknowledging my “problem.”

The Post internship posed a tricky obstacle: It required a driver’s license. (After my close call at the California D.M.V., I’d never gotten one.) So I spent an afternoon at The Mountain View Public Library, studying various states’ requirements. Oregon was among the most welcoming — and it was just a few hours’ drive north.

Again, my support network came through. A friend’s father lived in Portland, and he allowed me to use his address as proof of residency. Pat, Rich and Rich’s longtime assistant, Mary Moore, sent letters to me at that address. Rich taught me how to do three-point turns in a parking lot, and a friend accompanied me to Portland.

The license meant everything to me — it would let me drive, fly and work. But my grandparents worried about the Portland trip and the Washington internship. While Lola offered daily prayers so that I would not get caught, Lolo told me that I was dreaming too big, risking too much.

I was determined to pursue my ambitions. I was 22, I told them, responsible for my own actions. But this was different from Lolo’s driving a confused teenager to Kinko’s. I knew what I was doing now, and I knew it wasn’t right. But what was I supposed to do?

I was paying state and federal taxes, but I was using an invalid Social Security card and writing false information on my employment forms. But that seemed better than depending on my grandparents or on Pat, Rich and Jim — or returning to a country I barely remembered. I convinced myself all would be O.K. if I lived up to the qualities of a “citizen”: hard work, self-reliance, love of my country.

At the D.M.V. in Portland, I arrived with my photocopied Social Security card, my college I.D., a pay stub from The San Francisco Chronicle and my proof of state residence — the letters to the Portland address that my support network had sent. It worked. My license, issued in 2003, was set to expire eight years later, on my 30th birthday, on Feb. 3, 2011. I had eight years to succeed professionally, and to hope that some sort of immigration reform would pass in the meantime and allow me to stay.

It seemed like all the time in the world.

My summer in Washington was exhilarating. I was intimidated to be in a major newsroom but was assigned a mentor — Peter Perl, a veteran magazine writer — to help me navigate it. A few weeks into the internship, he printed out one of my articles, about a guy who recovered a long-lost wallet, circled the first two paragraphs and left it on my desk. “Great eye for details — awesome!” he wrote. Though I didn’t know it then, Peter would become one more member of my network.

At the end of the summer, I returned to The San Francisco Chronicle. My plan was to finish school — I was now a senior — while I worked for The Chronicle as a reporter for the city desk. But when The Post beckoned again, offering me a full-time, two-year paid internship that I could start when I graduated in June 2004, it was too tempting to pass up. I moved back to Washington.

About four months into my job as a reporter for The Post, I began feeling increasingly paranoid, as if I had “illegal immigrant” tattooed on my forehead — and in Washington, of all places, where the debates over immigration seemed never-ending. I was so eager to prove myself that I feared I was annoying some colleagues and editors — and worried that any one of these professional journalists could discover my secret. The anxiety was nearly paralyzing. I decided I had to tell one of the higher-ups about my situation. I turned to Peter.

By this time, Peter, who still works at The Post, had become part of management as the paper’s director of newsroom training and professional development. One afternoon in late October, we walked a couple of blocks to Lafayette Square, across from the White House. Over some 20 minutes, sitting on a bench, I told him everything: the Social Security card, the driver’s license, Pat and Rich, my family.

Peter was shocked. “I understand you 100 times better now,” he said. He told me that I had done the right thing by telling him, and that it was now our shared problem. He said he didn’t want to do anything about it just yet. I had just been hired, he said, and I needed to prove myself. “When you’ve done enough,” he said, “we’ll tell Don and Len together.” (Don Graham is the chairman of The Washington Post Company; Leonard Downie Jr. was then the paper’s executive editor.) A month later, I spent my first Thanksgiving in Washington with Peter and his family.

In the five years that followed, I did my best to “do enough.” I was promoted to staff writer, reported on video-game culture, wrote a series on Washington’s H.I.V./AIDS epidemic and covered the role of technology and social media in the 2008 presidential race. I visited the White House, where I interviewed senior aides and covered a state dinner — and gave the Secret Service the Social Security number I obtained with false documents.

I did my best to steer clear of reporting on immigration policy but couldn’t always avoid it. On two occasions, I wrote about Hillary Clinton’s position on driver’s licenses for undocumented immigrants. I also wrote an article about Senator Mel Martinez of Florida, then the chairman of the Republican National Committee, who was defending his party’s stance toward Latinos after only one Republican presidential candidate — John McCain, the co-author of a failed immigration bill — agreed to participate in a debate sponsored by Univision, the Spanish-language network.

It was an odd sort of dance: I was trying to stand out in a highly competitive newsroom, yet I was terrified that if I stood out too much, I’d invite unwanted scrutiny. I tried to compartmentalize my fears, distract myself by reporting on the lives of other people, but there was no escaping the central conflict in my life. Maintaining a deception for so long distorts your sense of self. You start wondering who you’ve become, and why.

In April 2008, I was part of a Post team that won a Pulitzer Prize for the paper’s coverage of the Virginia Tech shootings a year earlier. Lolo died a year earlier, so it was Lola who called me the day of the announcement. The first thing she said was, “Anong mangyayari kung malaman ng mga tao?”

What will happen if people find out?

I couldn’t say anything. After we got off the phone, I rushed to the bathroom on the fourth floor of the newsroom, sat down on the toilet and cried.

In the summer of 2009, without ever having had that follow-up talk with top Post management, I left the paper and moved to New York to join The Huffington Post. I met Arianna Huffington at a Washington Press Club Foundation dinner I was covering for The Post two years earlier, and she later recruited me to join her news site. I wanted to learn more about Web publishing, and I thought the new job would provide a useful education.

Still, I was apprehensive about the move: many companies were already using E-Verify, a program set up by the Department of Homeland Security that checks if prospective employees are eligible to work, and I didn’t know if my new employer was among them. But I’d been able to get jobs in other newsrooms, I figured, so I filled out the paperwork as usual and succeeded in landing on the payroll.

While I worked at The Huffington Post, other opportunities emerged. My H.I.V./AIDS series became a documentary film called “The Other City,” which opened at the Tribeca Film Festival last year and was broadcast on Showtime. I began writing for magazines and landed a dream assignment: profiling Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg for The New Yorker.

The more I achieved, the more scared and depressed I became. I was proud of my work, but there was always a cloud hanging over it, over me. My old eight-year deadline — the expiration of my Oregon driver’s license — was approaching.

After slightly less than a year, I decided to leave The Huffington Post. In part, this was because I wanted to promote the documentary and write a book about online culture — or so I told my friends. But the real reason was, after so many years of trying to be a part of the system, of focusing all my energy on my professional life, I learned that no amount of professional success would solve my problem or ease the sense of loss and displacement I felt. I lied to a friend about why I couldn’t take a weekend trip to Mexico. Another time I concocted an excuse for why I couldn’t go on an all-expenses-paid trip to Switzerland. I have been unwilling, for years, to be in a long-term relationship because I never wanted anyone to get too close and ask too many questions. All the while, Lola’s question was stuck in my head: What will happen if people find out?

Early this year, just two weeks before my 30th birthday, I won a small reprieve: I obtained a driver’s license in the state of Washington. The license is valid until 2016. This offered me five more years of acceptable identification — but also five more years of fear, of lying to people I respect and institutions that trusted me, of running away from who I am.

I’m done running. I’m exhausted. I don’t want that life anymore.

So I’ve decided to come forward, own up to what I’ve done, and tell my story to the best of my recollection. I’ve reached out to former bosses­ and employers and apologized for misleading them — a mix of humiliation and liberation coming with each disclosure. All the people mentioned in this article gave me permission to use their names. I’ve also talked to family and friends about my situation and am working with legal counsel to review my options. I don’t know what the consequences will be of telling my story.

I do know that I am grateful to my grandparents, my Lolo and Lola, for giving me the chance for a better life. I’m also grateful to my other family — the support network I found here in America — for encouraging me to pursue my dreams.

It’s been almost 18 years since I’ve seen my mother. Early on, I was mad at her for putting me in this position, and then mad at myself for being angry and ungrateful. By the time I got to college, we rarely spoke by phone. It became too painful; after a while it was easier to just send money to help support her and my two half-siblings. My sister, almost 2 years old when I left, is almost 20 now. I’ve never met my 14-year-old brother. I would love to see them.

Not long ago, I called my mother. I wanted to fill the gaps in my memory about that August morning so many years ago. We had never discussed it. Part of me wanted to shove the memory aside, but to write this article and face the facts of my life, I needed more details. Did I cry? Did she? Did we kiss goodbye?

My mother told me I was excited about meeting a stewardess, about getting on a plane. She also reminded me of the one piece of advice she gave me for blending in: If anyone asked why I was coming to America, I should say I was going to Disneyland.

Jose Antonio Vargas is a former reporter for The Washington Post and shared a Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the Virginia Tech shootings. He founded Define American, which seeks to change the conversation on immigration reform. Editor: Chris Suellentrop (C.Suellentrop-MagGroup@nytimes.com)

Nicholas D. Kristof/The New York Times

Gayshita Abdullah, the mother of a Tuareg family in Niger, does nurse her baby. But, like many others, she says it’s important to give even the smallest babies water on a hot day, a potentially dangerous belief.

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
NY Times Published: June 22, 2011

What if nutritionists came up with a miracle cure for childhood malnutrition? A protein-rich substance that doesn’t require refrigeration? One that is free and is available even in remote towns like this one in Niger where babies routinely die of hunger-related causes?

Impossible, you say? Actually, this miracle cure already exists. It’s breast milk.

When we think of global poverty, we sometimes assume that the challenges are so vast that any solutions must be extraordinarily complex and expensive. Well, some are. But almost nothing would do as much to fight starvation around the world as the ultimate low-tech solution: exclusive breast-feeding for the first six months of life. That’s the strong recommendation of the World Health Organization.

The paradox is that while this seems so cheap and obvious — virtually instinctive — it’s also rare. Here in Niger, only 9 percent of babies get nothing but breast milk for the first six months of life, according to a 2007 national nutrition survey. At least that’s up from just 1 percent in 1998.

(In the United States, about 13 percent of babies are exclusively breast-fed for six months, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Then again, most of the rest get formula, which is pretty safe in America.)

Next door to Niger in Burkina Faso, fewer than 7 percent of children get breast milk exclusively for six months. In Senegal it’s 14 percent; in Mauritania, 3 percent.

These are some of the countries we’re passing through on my annual win-a-trip journey, this year with a medical student from Atlanta, Saumya Dave, and a teacher from Newark, Noreen Connolly. It’s heartbreaking to see severely malnourished children and to meet mother after mother who has buried children when such a simple life-saving solution is not applied.

The biggest problem is that many mothers believe that breast milk isn’t enough, and that, on a hot day, a child needs water as well.

On a rural road near the remote town of Dogon Doutchi, in southern Niger, we ran into a family of Tuareg nomads traveling north.

“On a hot day, babies need water,” Gayshita Abdullah, the mother, told me. She said she tries to get water from a well, but if there is no well nearby she gets it from a mud puddle.

In fact, most nutritionists are adamant that babies are best off with nothing but breast milk for the first six months of life (they used to recommend four months, but now say six months). And water in poor countries is often contaminated and dangerous for a baby.

Even when the mother is herself malnourished, her body will normally provide enough milk for a baby, nutritionists say.

A 2008 report in The Lancet, the British medical journal, found that a baby that is partially breast-fed is 2.8 times as likely to die as a baby that is exclusively breast-fed for at least five months. A child that is not breast-fed at all is 14.4 times as likely to die.

Over all, The Lancet said, 1.4 million child deaths could be averted each year if babies were breast-fed properly. That’s one child dying unnecessarily every 22 seconds.

“As far as nutritional interventions that have been studied, we have crushing evidence of breast-feeding’s efficacy in reducing child mortality,” said Shawn Baker, a nutrition specialist with Helen Keller International, an aid organization that works on these issues.

“It’s the oldest nutritional intervention known to our species, and it’s available to everybody,” Baker added. “But for a development community too focused on technological fixes, it hasn’t gained the traction it should.”

The challenges with breast-feeding in poor countries are not the kinds that Western women face, and many women in the developing world continue nursing their babies for two years. The biggest problem is giving water or animal milk to babies, especially on hot days. Another is that mothers often doubt the value of colostrum, the first milk after childbirth (which is thick and yellowish and doesn’t look much like milk), and delay nursing for a day or two.

One mother near the town of Dosso, Fati Halidou, who has lost four of her seven children, told me that after childbirth, it is best to give a baby sugar water or Koranic water. This is water made by writing a verse of the Koran on a board and then washing it off; the inky water is thought to protect the child.

It’s not clear why a human instinct to nurse went awry. Does it have something to do with the sexualization of breasts? Or with infant formula manufacturers, who irresponsibly peddled their products in the past but are more restrained now? Or is it just that moms worry that their babies need water on hot days? Nobody really knows.

But what is clear is that there’s a marvelous low-tech solution to infant malnutrition all around us.

Gio Ponti’s iconic 1948 espresso machine La Cornuta.

By ALICE RAWSTHORN
NY Times Published: June 19, 2011

MILAN — It was quite a career. As a designer, Gio Ponti worked for 120 companies. As an architect, he built in 13 countries. As a magazine editor, he produced 560 issues and wrote at least one article for each one. As an academic, he lectured in 24 countries. He also found time to dictate some 2,500 letters and draw 2,000 illustrated letters, as well as for painting and poetry.

Ponti, who died in 1979 at the age of 87, emerged as one of the most influential Italian architects and designers of the 20th century, whose Pirelli Tower still soars above his native Milan. Summing him up has always been tricky. Not only was he extraordinarily prolific, his work was unusually eclectic, reflecting the diverse, often conflicting, styles and ideologies with which he experimented over the years.

Germano Celant, the curator of “Expressions of Gio Ponti,” a retrospective running through July 24 at the Triennale museum in Milan (www.triennale.org), begins his essay in the catalog by admitting that it is “impossible to condense” Ponti’s achievements into a single show. Curators often make similar statements, which usually sound suspiciously like excuses, but with Ponti it is true.

Rather than trying to present a potted history of his career, Mr. Celant has chosen some 250 of Ponti’s tens of thousands of works to tell his story as a series of vignettes. Sadly, he is hindered rather than helped by the exhibition design. Built as an art museum in the Mussolini era, the lugubrious Triennale often overwhelms its shows, including this one, which has the bleak air of a trade fair. “Expressions” also had a difficult birth. Originally intended as the debut exhibition of La Triennale’s satellite museum in New York, which was due to open last fall, it ended up in Milan after the New York project was suspended.

What a treat it has turned out to be. The exhibits are so luscious that, despite the drab design and checkered history, the show shines with Ponti’s joyful spirit, and the subtlety, sensuality and intelligence of his best work.

Like so many of the maestri, or masters, who established Italy as a global design center in the mid-20th century, Ponti originally trained as an architect and entered industrial design by developing products for an Italian company. His employer was Richard Ginori, an 18th-century ceramics manufacturer based near Florence. During the 1920s and ’30s, Ponti collaborated with its artisans to develop intricate, beautifully crafted ceramics, sumptuously decorated, often in the neoclassical style.

Stunning though those pieces were, they look archaic compared to the ascetic “modern” style then being embraced by Ponti’s peers. Designers today are encouraged to be expressive, but not then. Self-expression was seen as an unnecessary distraction to the serious business of functionalism. Ponti’s early experience at Richard Ginori fostered his love of rich colors, exuberant shapes and fine craftsmanship, all of which were deeply unfashionable for most of his career, but remained important to him, even though his work became less flamboyant over the years.

Some of the pieces at La Triennale, including Christofle silverware and Venini crystal, as well as the Richard Ginori ceramics, are dazzling examples of craftsmanship, as are the beautiful embroidered 1930s silk fabrics for Vittorio Ferrari and sumptuous 1935 cabinets made from briar roots.

Even Ponti’s most successful examples of industrial design have an idiosyncratic air. Take the voluptuous curves of La Cornuta, his 1948 espresso machine for La Pavoni, which became a symbol of “La Dolce Vita” Italy; or the artisanal woven seat of the 1957 Superleggera (literally “super-light”) chair he designed for Cassina. The chair was so light that the promotional photographs featured a boy lifting it on the tip of a finger.

As an architect, Ponti’s repertory ranged from the classical style of his earliest projects in the 1920s, mostly houses, which were heavily influenced by Andrea Palladio’s 16th-century villas, to the modernist restraint of his postwar work, including the 1956 Pirelli Tower. But his finest buildings, such as the 1955 Villa Planchart in Caracas and the 1960 Villa Nemazee in Tehran, are the ones that reflect his vivacity by creating dazzling contrasts of color, light and texture.

Important though Ponti was as a practicing designer and architect, he was equally if not more so as a cultural catalyst who celebrated other designers’ work and defined the terms of the design debate as an editor, writer and teacher.

He was the chief chronicler of the evolution of modern design in Italy as editor of Domus magazine from 1928 to 1941 and 1948 to 1979, and Stile magazine from 1942 to 1947. Ponti used those roles to champion designers and artists whom he admired, including Carlo Mollino, Piero Fornasetti and Lucio Fontana, and to contextualize Italian design within contemporary culture. By doing so, he gave it an intellectual weight, which saved design from being dismissed as a purely commercial discipline in Italy, as it was in the United States.

One of Ponti’s greatest strengths as an editor and designer was his generosity. Intensely curious, he was unusually open-minded and eager to explore new ideas. He forged firm friendships with colleagues all over the world, who often visited him at home in Milan or in his studio. Once a garage, the studio was so huge that Ponti’s assistants literally rode up to their desks on scooters. His friends still tell stories of his charm, and his kindness toward them.

Even though Ponti’s own work became more conventionally modernist in the second half of his career, he still enjoyed encouraging younger designers, including those whose thinking challenged his own. Among them were Alessandro Mendini and Ettore Sottsass, who were at the forefront of the 1970s post-modernist movement, which was emerging as an alternative to modernism.

By then, Ponti was in his 80s, still working, but forbidden from driving his beloved Citroën DS around Milan. He replaced it with a sedate Fiat people carrier. Typically, he chose one with 12 seats, hoping to fill them with friends to whom he could chat while they were on the road.

Ng Han Guan/Associated Press

Ai Weiwei after being released from detention on Wednesday after nearly three months of detention.

By EDWARD WONG
NY Times Published: June 22, 2011

BEIJING — Chinese legal authorities released the dissident artist Ai Weiwei on Wednesday after a three-month detention, apparently ending a prosecution that had become a focal point of criticism of China’s eroding human rights record.

“I’m released, I’m home, I’m fine,” Mr. Ai said in English after being reached on his cellphone shortly before 12:30 a.m. Thursday. “In legal terms, I’m — how do you say? — on bail. So I cannot give any interviews. But I’m fine.”

Photographs of Mr. Ai taken as he arrived after 11 p.m. Wednesday at his vast studio in the Caochangdi arts district of northeast Beijing showed him smiling in a blue T-shirt, his trademark bushy beard streaked with gray. The shirt hung loose on him, his girth reduced during his time in custody.

The release of Mr. Ai, 54, who is widely known and admired outside China, appeared to be a rare example in recent years of China’s bowing to international pressure on human rights. Mr. Ai was the most prominent of hundreds of people detained since China intensified a broad crackdown on critics of the government in February, when anonymous calls for mass protests modeled after the revolutions in the Middle East percolated on the Chinese Internet.

China’s move to douse any flicker of dissent was the harshest in many years outside restive ethnic regions in the far west, and the vast majority of those detained in the crackdown were, like Mr. Ai, held in secret locations for weeks with no legal justification.

Chinese officials announced in May that the authorities were investigating Mr. Ai on suspicion of tax evasion, after police officers took him from the main Beijing airport on April 3 as Mr. Ai prepared to board a flight to Hong Kong. Supporters of Mr. Ai said the tax inquiry was a pretext to silence one of the most vocal critics of the Chinese Communist Party.

Mr. Ai is presumed to be well connected because he is the son of Ai Qing, one of the most beloved poets of modern China. His detention was nearly certain to have been approved by top Chinese leaders, and it is unclear what kinds of discussions took place within elite political circles that ultimately led to his release.

But China came under unusually heavy pressure from all corners of the globe, not only from standard diplomatic channels but also from prominent people like Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg in New York, who harangued China in May at a Manhattan opening of an outdoor sculpture exhibition by Mr. Ai, and Anish Kapoor, a leading sculptor based in Britain who this month canceled a show planned for the National Museum of China in Beijing. Prime Minister Wen Jiabao of China was scheduled to visit Britain and Germany starting on Saturday, and he almost certainly would have encountered protests and condemnation, whether on the streets or in private meetings.

“Without the wave of international support for Ai and the popular expressions of dismay and disgust about the circumstances of his disappearance and detention, it’s highly unlikely the Chinese government would have released him,” Phelim Kine, an Asia researcher for Human Rights Watch, said in an e-mail. “The public announcement of his release signals that the Chinese government has had to respond to this pressure and that the cost-benefit ratio of continuing to detain him was no longer tenable.”

Mr. Kine noted that less visible Chinese remain missing and “at high risk” of torture. Among them are Wen Tao, a former journalist and aide to Mr. Ai, and other associates of Mr. Ai — Hu Mingfen, Liu Zhenggang and Zhang Jinsong.

Gao Ge, Mr. Ai’s sister, said in a telephone interview that Mr. Ai’s wife, Lu Qing, got a call on Wednesday and was told to go to a police station in Beijing. “She didn’t know what would happen, and then the police said that Weiwei was free to go with her back home,” Ms. Gao said. Mr. Ai got home before midnight, and his mother went to meet him.

“All I care about is that he’s home now,” Ms. Gao said.

Word of Mr. Ai’s release first emerged in a report posted online Wednesday night by Xinhua, the state news agency. It said in English that the Beijing police department had released Mr. Ai on bail “because of his good attitude in confessing his crimes as well as a chronic disease he suffers from.”

Xinhua also quoted the police as saying that Mr. Ai had repeatedly said he was willing to pay the taxes he had evaded. The authorities said Beijing Fake Cultural Development Ltd., a company controlled by Mr. Ai, evaded “a huge amount of taxes and intentionally destroyed accounting documents,” Xinhua reported.

“Bail” is the shorthand commonly used as an English translation of the Chinese term “qubao houshen,” which means obtaining a guarantee pending trial. It generally means that prosecutors have decided to drop charges against a suspect on certain conditions, including good behavior, and subject him to monitoring over a period of time during which charges could be reintroduced.

“This is a technique that the public security authorities sometimes use as a face-saving device to end controversial cases that are unwise or unnecessary for them to prosecute,” Jerome A. Cohen, a scholar of the Chinese legal system, said in an e-mail. “Often in such cases, a compromise has been reached in negotiation with the suspect, as apparently it has been here.”

Mr. Cohen said Mr. Ai’s release “is very good news and perhaps the very best outcome that could have been expected in the circumstances of this difficult case.”

Liu Xiaoyuan, Mr. Ai’s lawyer, said in a Twitter post that as long as the taxes were paid, Mr. Ai would probably remain free.

Mr. Ai’s family members have insisted that he is innocent of the accusations against him. Ms. Gao said in May that Mr. Ai was neither the legal representative nor chief executive of the company accused of evading taxes, and so should be freed. During his detention, the family also said Mr. Ai had been suffering from high blood pressure and diabetes, which required medication.

After Mr. Ai was detained on April 3, the authorities did not immediately detail any charges against him, and his incarceration was widely viewed as an attempt to silence a prominent critic while buying the authorities time to decide on the legal grounds for prosecuting him.

He was held in an undisclosed location. On May 15, police officers took Mr. Ai’s wife, Ms. Lu, to see him. Ms. Gao said afterward that Ms. Lu had reported that Mr. Ai seemed healthy and was being given access to medication. On May 20, Xinhua reported that the police had concluded that Mr. Ai had evaded taxes and destroyed financial documents.

The police can legally continue to pursue the case for up to one year after “qubao houshen” releases. During that time, the suspect is allowed freedom of movement, but the police generally hold onto his travel documents.

Few dissidents who have been detained in recent years have been shown leniency. International pressure so far has not helped Liu Xiaobo, a writer who was given a 11-year prison sentence in 2009 on subversion charges. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize last October, which he was not allowed to collect.

June 25, 2011 — August 13, 2011
Opening Reception June 25, 6-9PM

David Kordansky

Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York Times

“We know all the gossip here, but about this we know nothing,” the Rev. Yvan González, who celebrated the Mass above, said about a colony in Xul.

By ELISABETH MALKIN
NY Times Published: June 19, 2011

XUL, Mexico — In Mayan, the name of this speck of a village means “the end.” A long time ago, it was just the end of the road. Those who tell tall tales, though, say the strangers who settled here four years ago have come to await the end of the world.

Down a country lane bordered by scrubland and parched fields, the newcomers have built their own colony of thick-walled houses at the end of a dirt drive a couple of miles outside the village.

Only this much is known for sure: The pioneers are Italian, and they raise cattle, produce cheese and tend fruit trees on a 250-acre ranch surrounding their homes. A concrete sign by the roadside announces the name of their redoubt, Las Aguilas (“The Eagles”), in white letters. A four-foot golden statue of an eagle is perched atop the first letter “L.”

Why the newcomers came here and what they believe has fed apocalyptic speculation across this torpid patch of the Yucatán Peninsula.

“We know all the gossip here, but about this we know nothing,” said the Rev. Yvan González, a Roman Catholic priest who celebrates a weekly Mass on Wednesday evenings at an old stone church, where a tin roof long ago replaced the Mayan thatched covering.

“It is a secret group,” Father González said with a chuckle. “People say they are here because the world will end. They have a lot of money to spend to wait for the end of the world.”

This place, after all, is just miles from where the world nearly ended last time, when the Chicxulub asteroid fell about 65 million years ago, a disaster that scientists theorize was the cause of the mass extinction of the dinosaurs.

Xul is also in what was the heartland for the ancient Maya, whom some New Age prophets credit with predicting a doomsday date: the winter solstice of 2012. Scholars agree, though, that the Maya believed nothing of the sort. The date is the final one in their so-called Long Count calendar, the end of a historical cycle of 5,125 years — give or take. A new cycle begins the following day.

Efraín Cámara, swinging on a hammock at the Xul (pronounced SHOOL) farming co-op office, was confused about the supposed predictions of his forebears. “According to the scientists, the Maya world will end,” he shrugged, his Spanish hesitant with the aspirated consonants of his native Mayan language. “We don’t know. Only God knows what will happen in those days.”

Rosalía Pacab, 78, bending over her embroidery, does not take her ancestors’ astronomical calculations as the authority on the eventual end of days.

“Well, isn’t that what the Bible says?” she said.

The Italians went about their business quietly at first. They hired the local villagers to clear the land, plant orange trees and start construction.

The Maya, who either try to coax corn out of the limestone bedrock or migrate to California to earn a living, welcomed the new jobs.

“The good thing is that for the boys, they give them work, because there is no work here,” Adi Beltrán, the mother of four young children, said of the strangers.

Then, last year, a newspaper in Mérida, the capital of Yucatán State, decided it had a scoop. Front-page articles declared that the Italians had come to Xul to guard against the end of the world in 2012. The reporters interviewed workers who claimed that the houses were linked by underground tunnels. There were interviews with one of the Mexican architects, who said the colony’s imposing walls were intended to withstand floods and other natural disasters.

The official response was electric. Soldiers rumbled down the gravel path to look for any evidence of drugs; immigration officials checked papers; welfare officials combed the grounds. Newspapers hired helicopters to fly overhead as photographers snapped away.

Angel Ruíz, the municipal secretary at the county seat in Oxkutzcab, about a 30-minute drive north of Xul, said the walls were about two and a half feet thick and “filled with tires.”

The Italians, he said as he spread out the settlement’s construction plans, are members of a sect that recruited wealthy retirees. A carpenter friend told him the houses were fortified, their doors constructed of three layers: steel, a metal grille and then wood. “They have cisterns with thousands and thousands of liters of water,” Mr. Ruíz said. “Supposedly they have come here to live to protect themselves from whatever might happen.”

After last year’s onslaught of attention, the Italians locked their gates and plastered them with “private property” signs, declaring the area an ecological reserve.

But they have talked to some of their neighbors. Just next door to Las Aguilas is the 4,000-acre Helen Moyers Biocultural Reserve, which is managed by a nonprofit group called Kaxil Kiuic and partially supported by Millsaps College in Jackson, Miss. American and Mexican scientists at the reserve are studying the region’s dry tropical forest, and archaeologists are excavating Kiuic, a Mayan site.

“They are peaceful people, hard-working people,” said the reserve’s director, James Callaghan, adding that the Italians had sought advice on conservation and organic farming. “Our interaction has been very friendly and open.”

Mr. Callaghan does not believe the stories. “Tabloid-type journalism needs things to keep it going,” he said, musing that the Italians may have inadvertently stirred up Yucatán nationalism. “Yucatán prizes itself as a world apart because of its history and separation.”

Most of the workers on the Italians’ compound were reluctant to talk as they arrived for work early one morning this month. But a couple of them, when prodded, repeated the sensational details.

“I have seen one of the tunnels,” said Jaime Xol, who said he was building drinking troughs for the ranch’s cattle. “You can walk upright,” he said, adding that they were about 10 feet underground.

Not true, fumed one of the Italians. He refused to talk as he drove out of the gate. But later, his suspicions eased, he began to answer questions in fluent Spanish as he came out of the Xul general store.

The compound’s residents built the thick walls of their houses to keep them cool, like traditional Mayan huts, he said. To dig wells, they had to bring in heavy machinery. How could they ever build tunnels, he asked?

The group came to Xul, he said, not because it means “the end,” but because the land was cheap.

Out spilled more details, except for his name. He said, “Call me Juan Sinmiedo” — Juan Fearless. The community is a retreat, he said, made up mostly of retired people. Breaking the rules of the community means expulsion. A Mexican psychologist named Carolina offers spiritual guidance.

No, Juan said, he did not expect the world to end in 2012. “But scientists expect some kind of shift in the Earth’s magnetic field next year,” he added.

And even if something did happen, he said, maybe not entirely in jest, the odds were very good that Yucatán would be spared. “We already had a cataclysm here,” he said, “with the asteroid.”

Casa Materka
Puebla, Mexico

T Tres Arc

via

Untitled (Reach),
2010
C-Print
40 x 53 inches

July 9 – August 20, 2011
Opening Reception: Saturday, July 9th, 6:00 – 8:00 pm

Marc Selwyn

Bill Haast in 1996 at his serpentarium in Punta Gorda, Fla., with a Chinese cobra. His first serious bite came at age 12.

By DOUGLAS MARTIN
NY Times Published: June 17, 2011

An eastern diamondback rattlesnake left one hand looking like a claw. A Malayan pit viper mangled an index finger. A cottonmouth bit a finger, which instantly turned black, prompting his wife to snip off the fingertip with garden clippers.

Mr. Haast was bitten at least 173 times by poisonous snakes, about 20 times almost fatally. It was all in a day’s work for probably the best-known snake handler in the country, a scientist-cum-showman who made enough money from milking toxic goo from slithery serpents to buy a cherry-red Rolls-Royce convertible.

A secret of his success was the immunity he had built up by injecting himself every day for more than 60 years with a mix of venoms from 32 snake species. He suspected the inoculations might have explained his extraordinarily good health, but he was reluctant to make that claim, he said, until he reached 100.

Mr. Haast, who was director of the Miami Serpentarium Laboratories, a snake-venom producer near Punta Gorda, Fla., died of natural causes on Wednesday at his home in southwest Florida, his wife, Nancy, said. He was 100.

Mr. Haast’s story was good enough in its day to land him in Walter Winchell’s syndicated column, on “The Tonight Show” and, hardly surprising, in Ripley’s Believe It or Not attractions. His original Miami Serpentarium, south of Miami on South Dixie Highway, attracted 50,000 tourists a year for four decades.

Outside was a 35-foot-high concrete statue of a giant cobra, forked tongue flicking menacingly. Inside, Mr. Haast, the self-proclaimed “Snakeman,” entertained paying customers by using his hands to grab snakes below their heads and force their teeth into soft plastic. Venom would then drain into test tubes fastened to the plastic. He did this 100 or so times a day.

The serpentarium was more than just another roadside attraction. The price of a gram of freeze-dried venom from exotic snakes, requiring 100 or more extractions to accumulate, could exceed $5,000. The substance is an essential ingredient in making a serum to treat snakebite victims. It has also shown promise as a medicinal ingredient.

Mr. Haast and a Miami doctor treated more than 6,000 people with a snake-venom serum that they and their patients contended was effective against multiple sclerosis and arthritis. After the CBS News program “60 Minutes” did a report on the subject in December 1979, interest in the serum surged. But in 1980 the Food and Drug Administration banned the product as useless after saying that numerous deficiencies had been found in Mr. Haast’s manufacturing process. Nevertheless, researchers have continued to work on drugs made from venom in the hope of using it to treat cancer, Alzheimer’s and other diseases.

Mr. Haast himself indisputably saved lives. He flew around the world to donate his antibody-rich blood to 21 different snakebite victims. Venezuela made him an honorary citizen after he went deep into the jungle to give a boy a pint of blood.

The favor was returned in 1989 when, according to The Associated Press, the White House used secret connections to spirit a rare serum out of Iran to treat Mr. Haast as he fought to recover from a bite by a Pakistani pit viper. (Different venoms require different antidotes.)

William E. Haast was born on Dec. 30, 1910, in Paterson, N.J. He caught his first garter snake at 7 at a nearby canal. His first serious snake bite came at age 12, when he was bitten by a timber rattlesnake at Boy Scout camp. The same year, a copperhead’s bite put him in the hospital for a week. When young Bill brought his first poisonous snake home to the family apartment, his mother left home for three days, he said. She finally agreed to let him keep a snake or two in cages.

“The snake would bite the mouse,” he said in an interview with The Miami Herald in 1984. “The mouse would die. I found it intriguing.”

He bought his first exotic snake, a diamondback rattler, from a catalog. Noticing that it had come from Florida, he knew then, he said, that Florida was his destiny. After dropping out of school at 16, he joined a roadside snake show that made its way to Florida in the late 1920s.

The snake attraction soon failed during the Depression, so Mr. Haast went to work for a bootlegger in the Everglades, where he was pleased to find plenty of snakes. The bootlegger was arrested, and Mr. Haast found his way to an airline mechanics school.

Finding a job as a flight engineer with Pan American World Airways, he began traveling around the world. That gave him a chance to use his toolbox to smuggle snakes, including his first cobra.

Mr. Haast’s dream of a first-class snake farm came true when he opened his Miami serpentarium in 1947. His near-fatal snakebites became legend in the news media, particularly after the total passed 100 in the mid-1960s.

His first wife, Ann, divorced him over his snake obsession. His second, Clarita, and third, Nancy, pitched in enthusiastically.

Besides his wife, the former Nancy Harrell, he is survived by two daughters, three grandchildren, two great-grandchildren and two great-great-grandchildren.

Mr. Haast closed the serpentarium in 1984 after a 6-year-old boy fell into his crocodile pit and was fatally mauled. He moved his venom-gathering operation to Utah. Six years later, he returned to Florida and opened the facility in Punta Gorda, where he raised and milked snakes but did not resume his snake show.

For all the time he spent with snakes, Mr. Haast harbored no illusions that they liked him.

“You could have a snake for 30 years and the second you leave his cage door cracked, he’s gone,” he told Outside magazine in 1997. “And they’ll never come to you unless you’re holding a mouse in your teeth.”

By DAVID BROOKS
NY Times Published: June 16, 2011

Most political scandals involve people who are not really enmeshed in the Washington establishment — people like Representative Anthony Weiner or Representative William Jefferson. Most scandals involve spectacularly bad behavior — like posting pictures of your private parts on the Web or hiding $90,000 in cash in your freezer.

But the most devastating scandal in recent history involved dozens of the most respected members of the Washington establishment. Their behavior was not out of the ordinary by any means.

For that reason, the Fannie Mae scandal is the most important political scandal since Watergate. It helped sink the American economy. It has cost taxpayers about $153 billion, so far. It indicts patterns of behavior that are considered normal and respectable in Washington.

The Fannie Mae scandal has gotten relatively little media attention because many of the participants are still powerful, admired and well connected. But Gretchen Morgenson, a Times colleague, and the financial analyst Joshua Rosner have rectified that, writing “Reckless Endangerment,” a brave book that exposes the affair in clear and gripping form.

The story centers around James Johnson, a Democratic sage with a raft of prestigious connections. Appointed as chief executive of Fannie Mae in 1991, Johnson started an aggressive effort to expand homeownership.

Back then, Fannie Mae could raise money at low interest rates because the federal government implicitly guaranteed its debt. In 1995, according to the Congressional Budget Office, this implied guarantee netted the agency $7 billion. Instead of using that money to help buyers, Johnson and other executives kept $2.1 billion for themselves and their shareholders. They used it to further the cause — expanding their clout, their salaries and their bonuses. They did the things that every special-interest group does to advance its interests.

Fannie Mae co-opted relevant activist groups, handing out money to Acorn, the Congressional Black Caucus, the Congressional Hispanic Caucus and other groups that it might need on its side.

Fannie ginned up Astroturf lobbying campaigns. In 2000, for example, a bill was introduced that threatened Fannie’s special status. The Coalition for Homeownership was formed and letters poured into Congressional offices opposing the bill. Many signatories of the letter had no idea their names had been used.

Fannie lavished campaign contributions on members of Congress. Time and again experts would go before some Congressional committee to warn that Fannie was lowering borrowing standards and posing an enormous risk to taxpayers. Phalanxes of congressmen would be mobilized to bludgeon the experts and kill unfriendly legislation.

Fannie executives ginned up academic studies. They created a foundation that spent tens of millions in advertising. They spent enormous amounts of time and money capturing the regulators who were supposed to police them.

Morgenson and Rosner write with barely suppressed rage, as if great crimes are being committed. But there are no crimes. This is how Washington works. Only two of the characters in this tale come off as egregiously immoral. Johnson made $100 million while supposedly helping the poor. Representative Barney Frank, whose partner at the time worked for Fannie, was arrogantly dismissive when anybody raised doubts about the stability of the whole arrangement.

Most of the people were simply doing what reputable figures do in service to a supposedly good cause. Johnson roped in some of the most respected establishment names: Bill Daley, Tom Donilon, Joseph Stiglitz, Dianne Feinstein, Kit Bond, Franklin Raines, Larry Summers, Robert Zoellick, Ken Starr and so on.

Of course, it all came undone. Underneath, Fannie was a cancer that helped spread risky behavior and low standards across the housing industry. We all know what happened next.

The scandal has sent the message that the leadership class is fundamentally self-dealing. Leaders on the center-right and center-left are always trying to create public-private partnerships to spark socially productive activity. But the biggest public-private partnership to date led to shameless self-enrichment and disastrous results.

It has sent the message that we have hit the moment of demosclerosis. Washington is home to a vertiginous tangle of industry associations, activist groups, think tanks and communications shops. These forces have overwhelmed the government that was originally conceived by the founders.

The final message is that members of the leadership class have done nothing to police themselves. The Wall Street-Industry-Regulator-Lobbyist tangle is even more deeply enmeshed.

People may not like Michele Bachmann, but when they finish “Reckless Endangerment” they will understand why there is a market for politicians like her. They’ll realize that if the existing leadership class doesn’t redefine “normal” behavior, some pungent and colorful movement will sweep in and do it for them.

By PATRICIA COHEN
NY Times Published: June 15, 2011

When the Harvard psychologist and psychedelic explorer Timothy Leary first met the Beat poet Allen Ginsberg in 1960, he welcomed Ginsberg’s participation in the drug experiments he was conducting at the university.

“The first time I took psilocybin — 10 pills — was in the fireside social setting in Cambridge,” Ginsberg wrote in a blow-by-blow description of his experience taking synthesized hallucinogenic mushrooms at Leary’s stately home. At one point Ginsberg, naked and nauseated, began to feel scared, but then “Professor Leary came into my room, looked in my eyes and said I was a great man.”

Ginsberg’s “session record,” composed for Leary’s research, was in one of the 335 boxes of papers, videotapes, photographs and more that the New York Public Library is planning to announce that it has purchased from the Leary estate. The material documents the evolution of the tweedy middle-aged academic into a drug guru, international outlaw, gubernatorial candidate, computer software designer and progenitor of the Me Decade’s self-absorbed interest in self-help.

The archive will not be available to the public or scholars for 18 to 24 months, as the library organizes the papers. A preview of the collection, however, reveals a rich record not only of Leary’s tumultuous life but also of the lives of many significant cultural figures in the ’60, ’70s and ’80s.

Robert Greenfield, who combed through the archive when it was kept in California, for his 2007 biography of Leary, said: “It is a unique firsthand archive of the 1960s. Leary was at the epicenter of what was going on back then, and some of the stuff in there is extraordinary.”

Leary, who died in 1996, coined the phrase “Turn on, tune in, drop out” and was labeled by Richard M. Nixon as “the most dangerous man in America.” He was present in Zelig-like fashion at some of the era’s epochal events. Thousands of letters and papers from Ginsberg, Aldous Huxley, William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Ken Kesey, Charles Mingus, Maynard Ferguson, Arthur Koestler, G. Gordon Liddy and even Cary Grant — an enthusiastic LSD user — are in the boxes.

“How about contributing to my next prose masterpiece by sending me (as you sent Burroughs) a bottle of SM pills,” Kerouac wrote Leary, referring to psilocybin. “Allen said I could knock off a daily chapter with 2 SMs and be done with a whole novel in a month.”

Denis Berry, a trustee of the Leary estate, said that the library paid $900,000 for the collection, some of which is being donated back to finance the processing of the material. The rest will pay the estate’s caretakers and then be divided among Leary’s surviving children and grandchildren. Ms. Berry said the estate had been looking for a buyer for the archive for years.

William Stingone, curator of manuscripts at the library, predicted that the collection would help researchers get beyond the “myth making” around ’60s figures. “Hopefully we’ll be able to get to some of the truth of it here,” he said.

The complete documentation of Leary’s early experiments with psychotropic drugs, for example, can allow scholars to assess the importance of that work in light of current clinical research on LSD, Mr. Stingone said. Ms. Berry called the Harvard data “the missing link.”

The meeting between Ginsberg and Leary marked an anchor point in the history of the 1960s drug-soaked counterculture. Leary, the credentialed purveyor of hallucinatory drugs, was suddenly invited into the center of the artistic, social and sexual avant-garde. It was Ginsberg who helped convince Leary that he should bring the psychedelic revolution to the masses, rather than keep it among an elite group. Filling out one of Leary’s research questionnaires in May 1962 the poet Charles Olson wrote that psilocybin “creates the love feast,” and “should be available to anyone.”

Thomas Lannon, the library’s assistant curator for manuscripts and archives, explained that at the time these substances were not regulated by the government, and that Leary and his group did not consider them drugs but aids to reaching self-awareness.

Leary kept meticulous records at many points during his life. There are comprehensive research files, legal briefs, and budgets and memos about the many institutes and organizations he founded, but there are also notes and documents from when he was on the run after escaping from a California prison with help from the Weather Underground. A folder labeled as notes from his “C.I.A. kidnapping” in 1973 is full of cryptic jottings recounting the details of his arrest in Afghanistan, at an airport in Kabul, after he fled the United States.

Among the papers are daily schedules and budgets from the estate in Millbrook, in Dutchess County, where Leary, his colleague Richard Alpert (who later changed his name to Ram Dass) and their followers stayed after Leary was fired by Harvard in 1963. They worked on keeping “people’s consciousness in ecstatic regions.”

Everyone kept a log of his “mood” and “collaboration.” One weekly tally showed Mr. Alpert consistently in the upper regions of the scale, and Leary’s moods swinging from “anguished” to “ecstatic,” and his collaborations from “hung-up” to “Buddha.”

In 1969 Leary joined John Lennon and Yoko Ono in Montreal for their weeklong Bed-In for Peace, where Lennon wrote a version of “Come Together” for Leary’s campaign for California governor against Ronald Reagan. Leary wrote poems and songs on a stack of yellow legal notepaper that included:

We all started singing
Give Peace a Chance
John said can we help your campaign
And then he hummed a sweet refrain
Come together, come together right now.

On another sheet he wrote that the summer of ’69 “was the sexiest season in the long annals of the human race.”

In his later years Leary became a proponent of cybernetics and designed software. “He was always about 10 years ahead of his time,” Ms. Berry said. Among the videotapes is one from the early ’90s of him talking about how everyone is going to have a computer at home, she said.

Leary introduced many of his contemporaries to the psychedelic experience, but not everyone was as enamored as he was. After trying Leary’s magical pink pills Arthur Koestler told his host the next day that they were not for him: “I solved the secret of the universe last night, but this morning I forgot what it was.”

Annette Michelson’s Bookshelves, 1976

New Blind Spot ( Issue 43)

In 1982, Mr. Petit helped open dedication ceremonies at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. Mr. Petit has been artist-in-residence at the church and keeps a small office there above the nave.

By MELENA RYZIK
NY Times Published: June 14, 2011

“I am a madman!” Philippe Petit announced, and who’s to disagree?

For more than 40 years, Mr. Petit, the French-born high-wire artist and street performer, has been defying credulity, most famously in 1974 when, just shy of his 25th birthday, he spent 45 minutes suspended in the air between the World Trade Center towers, a feat chronicled in the 2008 Oscar-winning documentary “Man on Wire.”

For his next act, Mr. Petit, 61, is making his tightrope disappear, at least briefly. In “Wireless!,” a new one-man show that will run from Thursday through Saturday at the Abrons Arts Center, he will spend 90 minutes with his feet mostly on the ground, discussing and showcasing his other identities: juggler, magician, pickpocket, bullfighter, lock picker, motivational author.

It’s not an easy show to describe, he said, nor should it be. “I would love to conquer the world with it,” he added with characteristic overstatement. (The exclamation mark in the title was his idea.)

“Wireless!” was born out of lectures Mr. Petit gives periodically and was conceived by his partner, Kathy O’Donnell, as a work-in-progress enticement for bigger stages and a longer run. They are aiming for Broadway or a tour. Because Mr. Petit improvises much of the material — in his accented English or his precisely calibrated motions — it will never be the same show twice, Ms. O’Donnell noted.

Last week, during an afternoon visit to his studio, adjacent to his home in the Catskills, Mr. Petit offered a peek at the opening scene. Like the rest of the script, it is rendered in annotated pictograms. There were drawings of his head poking from behind a curtain, an explanation of “body language” that somehow involved sitting behind a desk, and a sketch of nunchucks that segued into stories from his childhood.

“He comes out of that really wonderful European tradition of street performance — it blends a boundary of what’s art and what’s life,” said Jay Wegman, the director of the Abrons Arts Center, who offered Mr. Petit the three-night run. “He’s also kind of mischievous, not in a threatening or evil way, but in a child’s way of teasing and having fun.”

They have known each other for 20 years, since Mr. Wegman was a priest at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, where Mr. Petit has long been artist in residence. He keeps a small office there, above the nave, and a practice tightrope, which he might be inspired to use when the church organ plays — he likes to walk the wire with a soundtrack. In 1984 he staged a small walk in the marble staircase of the Paris Opera, accompanied by a mezzo-soprano who improvised a score. It was one of his favorite performances, he said, up there with the World Trade Center.

Spending a few hours in Mr. Petit’s presence does make the extraordinary seem within reach. At his studio, a barn that he hand-built according to 18th-century methods, complete with a stage that he calls “the smallest theater in the world,” Mr. Petit juggled, spun a top hat on his finger and balanced a long-handled spoon that he filched from a Las Vegas hotel on his nose. (He can do a broomstick easily; the spoon is hard.)

Asked whether he still has the pickpocketing urge, Mr. Petit said bien sûr.

“It’s a déformation professionnel,” he said. “It’s in me; I have done so much pickpocketing — I’m very good at it — that when I meet someone, the mayor of a city, I look at their watch. I see the little bulge in his jacket: ‘Oh, he has a thick wallet!’ ” Mr. Petit has even palmed things off friends (fair warning to audience members who want to shake his hand after the show).

Even in repose, wearing loose black pants and a black T-shirt from the Magic Castle, the members-only magicians club in Hollywood, with his tiny slippered feet resting on the rungs of a wooden stool in his studio, Mr. Petit seems kinetic, more at home in movement. His toes are pointed. He spends three hours a day practicing juggling and walking the tightrope, using a wire strung 15 feet off the ground in his yard.

“The first time I met him was years ago when I was going to Juilliard and doing mime in front of the Met museum,” his friend Robin Williams explained by telephone. “He used to come in on a unicycle and rig a cargo rope to one of the columns on the top of the stairs and do a slackwalk for five minutes until the police would come.”

Mr. Petit would steal all of Mr. Williams’s audiences and then disappear, Mr. Williams said, still sounding awed: “He could be in and out and de-rig and gone. It’s like ninja performance.”

In his lengthy career Mr. Petit has traveled with the circus and done a bit of theater in France, but he has never pursued anything with the regular eight-shows-a-week rigor of a run on Broadway. Mr. Williams, currently there in “Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo,” said Mr. Petit could handle it and then some.

“It’d be like an evening with da Vinci,” he said. And if, in a larger space, he decided to do some wire walking, it would be a showstopper: “Imagine ‘Spider-Man’ without rigging!”

But Mr. Petit said he hates being called a daredevil or a stuntman. “On the wire I want to inspire people, not prove to them that I am stronger or more courageous than them,” he said.

Fear was never part of his motivation as a performer. “What was part of the equation,” he said, “was impatience; joy; elation when I did some victory; total defeat if I could not do something; perseverance; tenacity; passion, passion, passion.”

He believes his outlook, if not always his acrobatic skills, can be taught, he said; at one point in the show he invites the audience to choose a subject from a hat — they include ideas like “concentration” and “play” — for him to riff on. He longs to teach college courses in daydreaming and mistakes.

For all his whimsy, Mr. Petit is not soft-minded. Sometimes after one of his high-wire walks, he said, he will think: “This is totally insane! I did that?” Mostly, though, he’s afraid of stasis.

“The word vacation has no meaning to me,” he said. Aside from “Wireless!,” he is working on a feature film adaptation of his book “To Reach the Clouds,” also the basis for “Man on Wire,” with the director Robert Zemeckis; with some technological assistance, Mr. Petit expects to play himself. Among the challenges for an artist accustomed to pursuing his own singular vision is working with collaborators; for “Wireless!” they include the composer J. Ralph, who did some music for “Man on Wire,” and John Kahn, a sculptor who lives on Easter Island, as the set designer. Together they must navigate Mr. Petit’s unusual ability to link the precise with the outlandish.

By his own account, he is a fierce perfectionist, as is evident in his journals, where he painstakingly annotates each juggling and wire-walking practice, starting with the weather. New moves are highlighted in orange, and those he particularly likes get stars. He opened his latest juggling journal to a recent page. It was filled with orange marks.

“Sometimes the discovery is a tiny little thing that nobody on earth will think is so consequential,” he said. “For me it’s the end of the world; for me it’s the World Trade Center walk.”

Excited, he got up to demonstrate a new favorite move: in a kneeling curtsy, he used his hand to present, with a flourish, his pointed foot. “I gave myself four stars,” he said.

By MARK BITTMAN
NY Times Published June 14, 2011

Mass-produced tomatoes have become redder, more tender and slightly more flavorful than the crunchy orange “cello-wrapped” specimens of a couple of decades ago, but the lives of the workers who grow and pick them haven’t improved much since Edward R. Murrow’s revealing and deservedly famous Harvest of Shame report of 1960, which contained the infamous quote, “We used to own our slaves; now we just rent them.”

But bit by bit things have improved some, a story that’s told in detail and with insight and compassion by Barry Estabrook in his new book, “Tomatoland.” We can actually help them improve further.

A third of our tomatoes are grown in Florida, and much of that production is concentrated around Immokalee (rhymes with “broccoli”), a town that sits near the edge of the great “river of grass,” or the Everglades, the draining of which began in the late 19th century, thus setting the stage for industrial agriculture. Immokalee is a poor (average annual per-capita income: $8,576), immigrant (70 percent of the population is Latino, mostly Mexican) working town, to the outsider at least a depressing community with few signs of hope.

The tomato fields of Immokalee are vast and surreal. An unplanted field looks like a lousy beach: the “soil,” which is white sand, contains little in the way of nutrients and won’t hold any water. To grow tomatoes there requires mind-boggling amounts of fertilizers, fungicides and pesticides (on roughly the same acreage of tomatoes, Florida uses about eight times as many chemicals as California). The tomatoes are, in effect, grown hydroponically, and the sand seems useful mostly as a medium for holding stakes in place.

Most of the big purchasers, like Wal-Mart and McDonald’s, want firm, “slicing” tomatoes, because their destination is a burger or a sandwich, so the tomatoes are picked at what is called “mature green,” which isn’t mature at all but bordering on it. Tomatoes with any color other than green are too ripe to ship, and left to rot; I’ve posted a couple of pictures I took of those on my blog. The green tomatoes are gassed — “de-greened” is the chosen euphemism — to “ripen” them; the plants themselves are often killed with an herbicide to hasten their demise and get ready for the next crop.

The process, not to put too fine a point on it, is awful, but the demand is there — Florida ships about a billion pounds of tomatoes a year — and the main question has not been quality but fairness to the workers. (Estabrook profiles a successful Florida tomato farmer who’s gone organic, but since it’s inarguable that this is a locale and climate that’s hostile to tomatoes in the first place, that can’t be easy. Here’s the reality: you’re not going to get a billion pounds of good tomatoes out of Florida. Ever.)

Unlike corn and soy, tomatoes’ harvest cannot be automated; it takes workers to pick that fruit. And not only have workers been enslaved, they have been routinely beaten, subject to sexual harassment, exposed to toxic chemicals (Estabrook mercilessly describes the tragic results of this) and forced to wait for hours to find out whether they have work on a given day. Oh, and they’re underpaid.

One of the bright spots, discussed in Estabrook’s book is the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), founded in 1993. The CIW has two major goals: the first is to put the last nail in the coffin of slavery, a condition that sadly still exists not only among farmworkers but others. “And this,” Laura Germino, who has worked on the campaign since its inception, said to me when I visited last month, “is not ‘slavery-like,’ or ‘exploitation’ — it’s actual slavery, as defined by federal law.” (There are super links around this issue on the anti-slavery campaign’s Web site, and reading them is eye-popping.)

You’ve probably heard of the other goal, which is the CIW’s Campaign for Fair Food; it’s garnered as much attention as any labor struggle in the country in recent years, and more on the farmworker front than anything since the early work of Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers.

These outrages have been the CIW’s focus, and the agreement they signed last November with the Florida Tomato Growers Exchange begins to address them: through the core “penny-a-pound” increase in the price wholesale purchasers pay, workers’ incomes could go up thousands of dollars per year. The agreement also provides for a time-clock system in the fields, which has led to a shorter workday and less (unpaid) waiting time; portable shade tents for breaks (unbelievable that this didn’t exist previously — I spent a half-hour in the open fields and began to melt); reduced exposure to pesticides; worker-to-worker education on rights; a new code of conduct for growers with real market consequences if workers’ rights are violated; and more.

The breakthrough for the CIW came in 2005, when after enormous consumer pressure Yum! Brands, which controls Taco Bell, Pizza Hut and KFC, signed the agreement. (And you know what? Good for them.) Since then, Subway, McDonald’s, Burger King, the country’s largest food service operators (Sodexo, Aramark and Compass Group) and Whole Foods have signed as well.

Progress, clearly. What’s missing are traditional supermarket chains, and the CIW has targeted — largely for geographical reasons — Ahold (the parent company of Stop & Shop and Giant); Publix (the dominant chain in Florida); Kroger (next to Wal-Mart the biggest food retailer in the country); and Trader Joe’s, which, in an attempt at “transparency” (odd for a chain known for its secrecy), published a letter explaining why it was refusing to sign the agreement. Really, guys? If McDonald’s and Burger King can sign a labor agreement, it can’t be that onerous; you should do it just for karma’s sake. (The CIW’s response is here.)

Most of us eat or buy industrially produced tomatoes, and it doesn’t seem too much to ask that the people who pick them for us be treated a little more fairly. Speak to your supermarket manager or write to the head of the chain you patronize (the easiest way to do this is to visit this page on the CIW site). Supermarkets, I expect, are as susceptible to public pressure as fast-food chains.

There are few places in the country where migrant and immigrant farmworkers are treated well; in Immokalee, at least, they’re being treated better. Bit by bit.

Nabua from the project Primitive, 2009. Video, color, sound, 9 min.

Through July 3, 2011

New Museum