G. Paul Burnett/Associated Press

Tyson at 19, preparing for a fight with Mitch (Blood) Green in 1986.

By DAPHNE MERKIN
NY Times Published: March 15, 2011

The gold caps on his teeth are gone, as are the frenzied trappings of celebrity: the nonstop partying, the cars, the jewelry, the pet tiger, the liters of Cristal. Mike Tyson — who was once addicted, by his own account, “to everything” — now lives in what might be described as a controlled environment of his own making, a clean, well-lighted but very clearly demarcated place. The 44-year-old ex-heavyweight champion is in bed by 8 and often up as early as 2 in the morning, at which point he takes a solitary walk around the gated compound in the Las Vegas suburb where he lives while listening to R&B on his iPod. Tyson then occupies himself with reading (he’s an avid student of history, philosophy and psychology), watching karate movies or taking care of his homing pigeons, who live in a coop in the garage, until 6, when his wife, Lakiha (known as Kiki), gets up. The two of them go to a spa nearby where they work out and often get a massage before settling into the daily routine of caring for a 2-year-old daughter, Milan, and a newborn son, Morocco; they also run Tyrannic, a production company they own. It is a willfully low-key life, one in which Tyson’s wilder impulses are held in check by his inner solid citizen.

The astonishing discipline and drive Tyson once put into “the stern business of pugilism,” to quote the boxer Jack Johnson, is now being channeled into the business of leading an ordinary, even humdrum existence. It is impossible not to wonder whether this effort can be sustained indefinitely, whether you can reshape the contours of a personality by a sheer act of will, but there is no doubt that Tyson has committed himself to a wholesale renovation. He spends some of his time involved in domestic activities, accompanying Kiki and Milan to classes at Gymboree and doctors’ appointments or running errands, and some of his time furthering his post-boxing career, doing autograph signings, conferring with his agent and publicist about new opportunities. Although he no longer gets lucrative endorsement deals, Tyson earns fees for personal appearances in America and “meet and greet” dinner tours in Europe. He made a brief but memorable cameo in the blockbuster film “The Hangover” and will play a bit part in “The Hangover Part II.” He’s hoping to nab more acting roles — genuine ones, in which he gets to play someone other than himself. “I want to entertain people,” he tells me, smiling broadly. “I want a Tony award.”

As part of his cleaning-up campaign, he has been adhering to a strict vegan diet for nearly two years, explaining that he doesn’t want anything in him “that’s going to enrage me — no processed food, no meat.” He says that he can no longer abide the smell of meat even on someone’s breath and has dropped 150 pounds since he weighed in at 330 in 2009. “I’ve learned to live a boring life and love it,” he declares, sounding more determined than certain. “I let too much in, and look what happened. . . . I used to have a bunch of girls and some drugs on the table. A bunch of people running around doing whatever.”

The life that he has created almost from scratch over the last two years has been defined at least as much by what Tyson wants to avoid — old haunts, old habits, old temptations and old hangers-on — as by what he wants to embrace. One of the few links between his tumultuous past and his more tranquil present are his homing pigeons. He has been raising them since he was a picked-on fat little kid with glasses growing up in some of Brooklyn’s poorest neighborhoods — first Bedford Stuyvesant, then Brownsville — with an alcoholic, promiscuous mother given to violent outbursts, which included scalding a boyfriend with boiling water. (“He had a tough mother,” recalls David Malone, a childhood friend. “We knew to stay away from her.”) Although he has turned down requests to do a reality show, Tyson agreed to participate in a six-part docudrama about his pigeons called “Taking On Tyson,” that started being shown on Animal Planet on March 6.

The young Tyson turned to birds as both a hobby and as an escape; it was in defense of his pigeons that the timid kid who was called “sissy” and “faggy boy” got into his first fist-fight. When he was released from prison in 1995 after serving three years for the rape of Desiree Washington, he went to visit his coops in the Catskills. “The birds were there before boxing,” says Mario Costa, who owns the Ringside Gym in Jersey City and has known Tyson since the early ’80s. “He feels peaceful around them.” Tyson keeps coops in Las Vegas, Jersey City and Bushwick, and to this day he seeks out the birds when one of his “bad spells,” as Kiki calls them, strikes and his mood turns dark and agitated. “The first thing I ever loved in my life was a pigeon,” Tyson says. “It’s a constant with my sanity in a weird way.”

I have never been particularly drawn to boxing, but there was something about the younger Mike Tyson — his way of seeming larger than the sport itself, of playing out impulses that seemed all the more authentic for being so unmediated, whether it was his desperate bid for Robin Givens’s heart or his desperate biting of Evander Holyfield’s ear — that caught my attention. He seemed like a man in huge conflict with himself as well as with the forces around him — the media, the celebrity machine with its perks and dangers — in a way that suggested that he was both vulnerable to manipulation and leery of being manipulated.

In preparation for my visit to Las Vegas at the beginning of March, I communicated through e-mail with Kiki, who manages Tyson’s affairs, and the plan was kept loose: we were to meet at his house for several days of conversation, with no definite times fixed. I called the film director James Toback, who made an acclaimed 2009 documentary about Tyson and has known him since they met on the set of Toback’s “Pick-Up Artist” in 1986, to find out what I could about a man who came across in the film as both very present and elusive, weepy one minute and matter-of-fact the next, capable of self-insight but also hidden to himself. Toback told me that Tyson was unpredictable, given to sudden psychological disconnections that Toback referred to as “click-outs.” It was entirely possible, Toback said, that Tyson would back out of the interviews altogether. “Everything is contingent on the state of mind he’s in at the moment,” the director observed. According to Toback, he and Tyson shared experiences of temporary insanity — of “losing the I” — and “people who don’t understand madness can’t understand him. He’s quicker, smarter, sharper than almost anyone he’s talking to.”

He went on to say that making the movie had been an “exhilarating” experience for both of them and that he senses that Tyson is happier now, that he doesn’t have “the same degree of doom” he had before he met Kiki. Toback recalled their “late-night conversations about sex, love, madness and death” and then, lest I think I might intuit something about the ex-fighter that had escaped others, Toback suddenly issued a pronouncement: “No one gets him. You can’t get him if you haven’t been where he’s been.”

The first object that caught my eye in Tyson’s double-storied, sparely furnished living room was a plush, purple Disney child’s car seat, perched on a chair near the screen doors that led out to a swimming pool. There was also a child-size table and chairs, and a cluster of Mylar balloons tied to a bar stool in celebration of the birth of the Tysons’ week-old son, Morocco, who had a touch of jaundice as well as his father’s narrow eyes. The white stucco house is located in a gated community called Seven Hills, which has the hushed, slightly vacant aura of gated communities everywhere. The entanceway features a koi pond under Plexiglas, and the expansive, open interior is decorated in a style that could be described as utilitarian (the color scheme is plum, beige and brown) with rococo touches — there is a huge contemporary chandelier as well as two gilded brass mirrors over a glassed-in fireplace that match the ironwork frieze on the front doors.

Tyson bought the place from a friend, the N.B.A. player Jalen Rose, in the down market of early 2007. (The property was originally valued at $3 million; Tyson paid around $1.7 million for it.) It was built, he says, as a party house, but he and Kiki have been pushing it in the direction of a more traditional family home, with clearly defined living areas and childproofed touches, like the Plexiglas panels on the stair railing. Tyson mentioned that he bought the house because it reminded him of a New York loft, despite the fact that he says there’s little he misses about his hometown aside from the pigeon competitions and seeing people from his old stomping grounds. “I have a big affinity with the guys in my neighborhood . . . the guys with the broken English and stuff . . . and then the pigeon world, it’s not like there’s a glass ceiling, the pigeon world keeps evolving with time. There are new diseases, there have to be serums for the new diseases,” he said, sounding momentarily like a biochemist, albeit one with an endearing lisp. “Antibodies.”

Tyson and I sat diagonally across from each other on black leather couches; in front of us was a glass coffee table on a Persian rug. He sipped from a cup of tea with honey and snacked on a banana. Kiki and her mother, who lives down the street and does a lot of baby-sitting, were upstairs with the children. Tyson’s assistant, Farid (also known as David), had picked me up at my hotel and had taken me to the house in a maroon Cadillac Escalade S.U.V.; Farid is a genial former I.T. consultant whom Tyson met in jail, although Tyson is at pains to point out that Farid was never a criminal type, just a geek trying to make some extra money on the sly. In person, Tyson’s voice is deeper and raspier than it sounds in TV interviews, and he cuts a much slighter, trimmer figure than you would expect. He wore a T-shirt that said TYSON on the back and very white running shoes. His head was shaved, and the left side of his face bears the dramatic tattoo of the New Zealand Maori warrior that he got in the beginning of 2003, but he seemed more shy than ferocious, more of an introvert than someone out to create a stir.

As the hours passed, Tyson grew less wary and more at ease about saying what was on his mind. An autodidact, he likes to discuss characters he’s read about, ranging from Alexander the Great to Constantine to Tom Sawyer, and he harbors a special fondness for Machiavelli. He knows the history of boxing inside out, watches films of Muhammad Ali and other boxers (including himself) most every evening, returning again and again to “Raging Bull.” He’s also something of a homegrown philosopher, peppering our conversation with hard-knock truths: “The biggest tough guy wants to be likable,” he observed. But there are also whole areas of his life he keeps firmly cordoned off, especially the raging Kid Dynamite days: “I think I was insane for a great period of my life. I think I was really insane. . . . It was just too quick. I didn’t understand the dynamics then. I just knew how to get on top, I didn’t know what to do once I got there.” He seemed to be edging closer to a deeper revelation, so I asked him if he had any regrets. He answered with rare snappishness: “I’m too young for regrets. I’m not in the grave yet.”

The first big change in Tyson’s convulsive life came when he went from being a ghetto kid whose world consisted of “a reformatory and welfare and rats and roaches” to being a rising boxing star living in a 14-room, antiques-filled Victorian mansion on 15 acres in the Catskills as one of the charges of Cus D’Amato, the legendary boxing trainer cum life coach. D’Amato, who was 70 then, was known for his stern credo of excellence, his ability to mold young talent and his eccentric, somewhat paranoid views; his protégés included Floyd Patterson and José Torres. The adolescent Tyson was introduced to “this old white guy” who didn’t know him “from a can of paint” by Bobby Stewart, a counselor at the Tryon School for Boys, the juvenile detention center where Tyson was sent after racking up a police record of street crimes. D’Amato saw Olympic potential in the surly, antisocial boy who could barely read or write. “He said, ‘Can you handle the job that’s at hand?’ And I say, ‘Sure, I can, I can do it,’ ” Tyson recalled. “But I really didn’t know if I could do anything.”

The young Tyson began training with D’Amato and his staff at the Catskill Boxing Club on passes from Tryon; in 1980, while still a ward of the state, he moved into what was a kind of boarding house run by D’Amato and his companion, Camille Ewald. Camille served as materfamilias to the group of troubled boys — there were no more than 4 to 6 fighters in residence at any one time — teaching them manners and how to do laundry. (Tyson remained in touch with Ewald, helping to support her and sending her flowers on her birthday, until her death in 2001.)

D’Amato, meanwhile, devised a master plan whereby Tyson would be reprogrammed from street thug to warrior in the ring. “Cus was an amazing influence,” says Tom Patti, another D’Amato protégé, who lived with Tyson at the boarding house and played the role of big brother in his life. “He engineered his fighters and their success.” To hone Tyson’s physical skills, D’Amato taught him the two boxing techniques that he himself had developed and that were now his signatures — holding the gloves in a tight defensive position at ear level, and maintaining a consistent head motion before and after punching. As for psychological conditioning, Tyson’s ego was inflated nonstop: “They were telling me how great I am, telling me how I can do this if I really try,” Tyson explained, sounding decidedly of mixed minds when looking back on this approach. “They kept it in my head. It had me form a different psychological opinion of myself. No one could say anything negative about me. I always had to have the supreme confidence that I’m a god and superior to everybody else, which is just sick and crazy. But it had its uses.” After Tyson’s mother, Lorna, died of cancer in the fall of 1982, D’Amato became his legal guardian and continued to oversee Tyson’s training until his death in 1985. On Nov. 22, 1986, D’Amato’s tireless mentoring paid off big-time when Mike Tyson defeated Trevor Berbick and became the new world heavyweight champion (and, at age 20, the youngest in history), exactly as D’Amato had predicted he would.

Tyson lives less than half an hour from the raucous, 24-hour universe of the Las Vegas Strip, but it was preternaturally quiet in his house. The phone didn’t ring, and the silence during conversational pauses was broken only by an occasional crying bout of Morocco’s or some chatter of Milan’s that trickled down from the second floor. “It’s like a funeral home here,” Tyson said softly, as if he were thinking aloud. It was one of the few times he alluded to what appears to be the deliberate curtailment of his life, the lengths he and Kiki have gone to in order to keep his habitat free of too much stimuli or pressure, the better to preserve his somewhat fragile equanimity. At one point, Milan came into the living room and reached for a tiny handful of pretzels from a bowl. He picked up the toddler and hugged her tightly, then put his face in her hair. When he put her down, she stood against the couch across from him, and he kept his eye on her as she ate her pretzels. “Chew,” he said gently. “Milan, you’ve got to chew.”

Tyson has six biological children, who range in age from newborn to 20, born of three different women. A seventh child, a daughter named Exodus, died at age 4 in May 2009 at her mother’s home in Phoenix; she was strangled when her neck was caught in a cord hanging from a treadmill. Tyson caught a plane immediately upon receiving a call from Sol Xochitl, Exodus’s mother, about the accident, but by the time he arrived at the hospital, the little girl was already brain-dead. The loss of his daughter critically altered his once-tentative grasp on his own accountability. To this day, he blames himself for not being there. “It made me feel very irresponsible,” he says simply. “I wish she were here to hang out with Milan.” The effects of the tragedy reverberated throughout Tyson’s extended family: “The kids were very close to Exodus, and when she died we were all devastated,” says Monica Turner, his second wife. “I think that changed Mike forever.” Tyson refers to Exodus repeatedly during our conversations with evident sadness and insists on keeping her memory alive by counting her among his living children.

Tyson has been married three times; the first was to the TV actress Robin Givens when he was 21, after a fevered courtship. The yearlong marriage proved disastrous, culminating in an infamous 1988 interview with Barbara Walters, in which Givens described the marriage as “pure hell” — while he sat passively beside her, drugged on manic-depression medication. (“I’m tripolar,” he tells me laughingly when I ask him how he’d diagnose his condition today.) He went on to have two children with Turner; he also considers himself a father to Turner’s daughter Gena. Turner, who is on friendly terms with Tyson, filed for divorce in 2002, citing adultery. Along the way, Tyson, a notorious womanizer, sired two more children — 8-year-old Miguel and Exodus — with Xochitl. Tyson keeps in touch with all of his brood, speaking especially proudly of his oldest son, 13-year-old Amir, who is six feet tall. “He’s just nervous and afraid of life,” he says, sounding an apprehensive note. “But he’s doing so well. . . . There are no bad influences. I have so many hopes for him.”

Tyson knows from bad influences, if only because he has been susceptible to so many of them since the death of his mentor and his own emergence as a sports superstar. Following a brief glory period in the late ’80s, when he was arguably the most popular athlete in the world, asked to do endorsements for Pepsi, Nintendo and Kodak, and hired by the New York City Police Department to boost recruitment as well as by the F.B.I. to do public service announcements to keep kids off drugs, Tyson began spiraling out of control. His self-destructive patterns, which had been refocused by D’Amato, came to the surface once again, aided and abetted by the boxing promoter Don King, who successfully wooed Tyson in the wake of his split from Robin Givens. (Tyson filed a lawsuit against King in 1998, claiming that the promoter stole millions from him.) Once a money-making machine worth $400 million at his height, Tyson was reduced to filing for personal bankruptcy in 2003; he was $27 million in debt.

In late December 2006 he was arrested in Arizona on charges of drug possession and drunken driving, and in February 2007 he checked himself into the Wonderland Center, a rehab facility in the Hollywood Hills, for the treatment of various addictions. Carole Raymond, a warm-sounding woman with a thick Yorkshire accent who worked as a staff member at Wonderland during Tyson’s stay, remembers that he had trouble finding a facility that would take him and that he came to them a “beaten down” man. Still, she remembers him as funny, “very humble” and eager to embrace the program’s ethos. “People who come from fame or money have a hard time grasping the idea of recovery. He wanted to be emotionally better than the Mike Tyson who was always boxing.” Tyson, in turn, credits the “life skills” he learned in rehab with coming to his rescue when a crisis hits: “You don’t know where they came from, but you’re on the top of your game. You’re suited up and ready to work.” When I asked him why he stayed at Wonderland for as long as he did — more than a year — he leaned over as if to emphasize what he was about to say. “I felt safe.”

As befits someone who has been alternately idolized and demonized by the press, Tyson is leery of the public’s continuing interest in his saga. He says he believes that celebrity made him “delusional” and that it has taken nothing less than a “paradigm shift” for him to come down to earth: “We have to stick to what we are. I always stay in my slot. I know my place.” He asked me outright, “Why do you want to know about me as a person?” and at one point, anxious that he might be boring me, he got up to show me photographs from the glory days in which he is posing with other boxers (Ali, Rocky Graziano, Jake LaMotta) and with big names like Frank Sinatra, Tom Cruise and Barbra Streisand. Underneath his deliberate calmness and considerable charm, there is something bewildered and lost-seeming about Tyson. Indeed, he refers to himself as a “little boy” who “never had a chance to develop,” and it is in part this conception of himself as missing out on a crucial period of maturation that fuels his present focus. “This is what the deal is,” he said. “People just wait for you to grow up and do the right thing. They’re just waiting for you to participate in the improvement of your life as a human being. When are you going to do it?”

The most important and sustaining influence in Tyson’s current incarnation as an introspective mensch rather than the Baddest Man on the Planet is the presence of his wife, Kiki, whom he has known since she was about 16 (they met through her father, who did some boxing promotions); they exchanged their first kiss when she was 19 and had an on-and-off romance for more than a decade. They tried living together in Kiki’s apartment in Manhattan in 2002 after Tyson’s defeat at the hands of Lennox Lewis, but it was, she says, “a disaster.” “He was used to juggling a lot of women.” They remained friends even though the relationship didn’t work out, had another fling in 2004, lost touch again when Tyson was in rehab and then reconnected when Tyson called her after he got out. Their daughter, Milan, was born on Christmas 2008, and they married on June 6, 2009. “We know all of each other’s secret stuff,” she says. “He told me everything, and I told him everything. We fight hard, but I’m very much in love with him.”

Kiki, who is 34, is a well-spoken, down-to-earth woman who seems pleasantly oblivious to her own exotically good looks and celebrity status by virtue of being Mike Tyson’s wife. Making a viable life with the complicated, demon-haunted man she has married requires patience. “It’s a struggle,” she says, speaking about his relapses post-rehab. “You’re always an addict and have to work at it. It’s easy for him to fall back in his own life. He surrounds himself with people who are sober and doesn’t go out to clubs. If his pattern shifts, you know something’s wrong.” Perhaps because she has known Tyson for so long, she’s clear-eyed about his failings. “He slept with every kind of woman you can think of,” she says. “Now he wants someone who knows him and can be good to him. We’re rebuilding our lives together on a positive note.” Tyson, meanwhile, seems continually struck by his good fortune in having Kiki, whom he addresses as “my love,” by his side. “I never thought we’d be together,” he told me. “I thought we’d be sex partners. I told her not marry me.” A few seconds later he adds: “I want to die with her.”

Despite their cushy lifestyle, there isn’t money to throw around as there once was. But Kiki, for one, seems indifferent to the sort of lavish expenditures that Tyson’s former fortune once enabled him to make: “Mike always says he’s broke, but it’s relative. That type of stuff isn’t important to us. We want to build a nest egg for our kids’ accounts. I’m not impressed with money like that.” Meanwhile, although Tyson still owes a substantial amount —“a few million” is how Kiki puts it — in back taxes, he is adhering to a payment plan. He has a financial planner who negotiated a deal with the I.R.S. regarding the purchase of his house, which was paid for in full. If Tyson misses his high-rolling days, he isn’t letting on: “If you make a lot of money, you end up being around people you don’t want to be around,” he says. “Guys on allowance. It takes years to gather the audacity to get rid of them.”

On the Saturday before the premiere of “Taking On Tyson,” Mike Tyson was in New York with Kiki and their two children, doing publicity for the show. I met him in Bushwick, in front of the rundown row house where he had gone to see his birds. Kiki had taken Milan to the American Girl store to meet a friend. Tyson was with Farid and his friend Dave Malone, who tends to the Brooklyn coops. On the drive back to the Ritz-Carlton in Battery Park, where he was staying, I found Tyson to be in a contemplative mood. Or maybe he was feeling remorseful; he had just come through one of his bad spells — what Toback alluded to as his “click-outs” — in which he feels alternately so low that he wants to jump out the window and so angry that he wants to crack someone’s head open with a pipe. “They come on you,” he told me, “out of the blue.” The birds helped him regain his footing, as they always do, but these bouts must take a toll on him (not to mention Kiki), opening up the floodgates of the past. Driving through Brooklyn, we passed a bunch of kids playing handball, and he reminisced: “When I was poor, I used to play handball. That’s how we all start.” He called Kiki to check how the play date was going, sounding sweetly affectionate, and then on the way into the hotel posed patiently for a photographer with an excited bride and groom who spotted him coming in.

In his hotel suite, Tyson was excited to tell me about a book he was reading — “A Natural History of Human Emotions,” by Stuart Walton — and asked me to read aloud a chapter on jealousy. We discussed the difference between jealousy and envy, and when I asked whether he ever envies his children getting the sort of parental love he never had, he said, “How did you know that?” I asked him whether he misses the glamour of his old life, and he answered, “That’s not who I am anymore.” Around 5:30, Kiki returned with Milan, who triumphantly marched in, carrying a new American Girl doll aloft. Tyson and his wife kissed each other, and he said, “I’m sorry if I upset you.” She answered serenely, “That’s O.K., honey,” as she went to get ready for their night out.

A cynic might wonder whether the kinder, gentler Tyson is merely another act, a construction every bit as deliberate as he claims his invincible Iron Mike persona was — “a vicious tiger,” as he describes it, “out there to kill somebody.” And there is indeed, something of the actor about Tyson, warming to his new role as a humbled rogue, a gentle giant with his delicate birds. But there is also a kind of heroism in his effort to construct a more accountable self, a reaching across the decades of excess back to the more disciplined days in the Catskills with Cus D’Amato. Now, however, the focus is not on invincibility or greatness, but on the perhaps more elusive goal of keeping his furies at bay and trying to master his unrulier impulses rather than letting them control him. It’s sure to be one hell of a match.

Untitled (2011)
powder coated aluminium, cables, air compressor, electric control unit, balloons

Opening reception: March 19, 6 – 9 pm
March 22 through April 23, 2011

Johann Konig

Chris Rubino

By MICHAEL WALKER
NY Times Published: March 18, 2011

Los Angeles

NOW that the 1960s are commodified forever as “The Sixties,” it is apparently compulsory that their legacy be rendered as purple-hazy hagiography. But that ignores an inconvenient counterintuitive truth: Relatively clear-thinking entrepreneurs created some of the most enduring tropes of the era — not out of whole paisley cloth but from their astute feel for the culture and the marketplace. And no one was better at it than Augustus Owsley Stanley III.

Entrepreneur? Mr. Stanley, who was killed in a car accident last Sunday in Australia at the age of 76, is remembered chiefly as a world-class eccentric — his C.V. lists Air Force electronics specialist and ballet dancer — who after ingesting his first dose of LSD in Berkeley in 1964 taught himself how to make his own. In short order, “Owsley acid” became the gold standard of psychedelics.

But Mr. Stanley didn’t stop there. He started cranking out his superlative LSD at a rate that by 1967 topped one million doses. By mass-manufacturing a hallucinogen that the authorities hadn’t gotten around to criminalizing, Mr. Stanley singlehandedly created a market where none had existed, and with it a large part of what would become the “counterculture.”

At the time Madison Avenue was at sea about how to reach the so-called youth market. “House hippies” were deputized as cultural ambassadors but didn’t prevent travesties like Columbia Records’ infamously clueless “The Man Can’t Bust Our Music” ad campaign. Which made Mr. Stanley’s effortless grasp of his peer group and its appetites — he was, after all, an enthusiastic consumer of his own product — seem all the more prescient. When his lab in Orinda, Calif., was raided in 1967 — thanks to him, LSD had been declared illegal the year before — the headline in The San Francisco Chronicle anointed him the “LSD Millionaire.”

Mr. Stanley shared several qualities with another entrepreneur who, a decade later, would imbue his company with a hand-sewn ‘60s ethic that persists today. To compare Mr. Stanley to Steve Jobs, the co-founder and chief executive of Apple, purely on the basis of their operating philosophies is not as big a leap as it might seem.

Like Mr. Jobs, Mr. Stanley was fanatical about quality control. He refused to put his LSD on pieces of paper — so-called blotter acid — because, Mr. Stanley maintained, it degraded the potency. “I abhor the practice,” he declared.

Whereas the formulation and provenance of most street drugs was unknowable, Owsley LSD was curated like a varietal wine and branded as evocatively as an iPod — “Monterey Purple” for a batch made expressly for the 1967 Monterey Pop festival, which may have factored into Jimi Hendrix’s chaotic, guitar-burning finale. (Relentlessly protective of his brand, Mr. Stanley seemed insulted that many believed the Hendrix song “Purple Haze” was about the Monterey LSD — far from inducing haze, he sniffed, the quality of his acid would confer upon the user preternatural clarity.)

And like Mr. Jobs’s mandate for creating products he deems “insanely great,” Mr. Stanley’s perfectionism had the effect of raising standards across an industry — or in this case, a culture. He became a patron of the Grateful Dead and helped transform them from inchoate noodlers into the house band for a generation. Noting the dreadful acoustics at their performances, Mr. Stanley drew on his electronics background and designed one of the first dedicated rock sound reinforcement systems, thus making plausible that highly lucrative staple of the 1960s and beyond, the rock concert. (Ever the perfectionist, he later designed an upgraded version, the legendary Wall of Sound, that towered over the band like a monolith and prefigured the immense sound systems at stadium shows today.)

It is said we are living through times not unlike the 1960s, the catalyst being not rock ‘n’ roll and its accompaniments, sex and drugs, but the communications and information revolution made possible by the Web. Among the movement’s many avenging nerds, Mr. Jobs alone epitomizes Mr. Stanley’s unhinged originality and anarchical spirit — before founding Apple, Mr. Jobs and his partner, Steve Wozniak, sold illegal “blue boxes” that allowed free long-distance calls and later proselytized so persuasively about the latest Apple gizmo that he was said to project a “reality distortion field.”

Augustus Owsley Stanley III knew a thing or two about that.

Michael Walker is the author of “Laurel Canyon: The Inside Story of Rock ‘n’ Roll’s Legendary Neighborhood.”

Matthew Ronay
Advance/Deteriorate, 2011
Leather, poplar, walnut, basswood, paper mache, cotton thread, duvetyn, foam, shellac based primer, cinefoil, steel, plastic, light bulbs, electric wire

March 19 trough April 23, 2011
Opens Saturday March 19, 6-8

CHRISTOPHER CHIAPPA, BROCK ENRIGHT, RACHEL FOULLON, YURI MASNYJ, ARTHUR OU, RYAN REGGIANI, MATTHEW RONAY, HEATHER ROWE, and MOLLY SMITH

Kate Werble Gallery

By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Times Published: March 17, 2011

More than three years after we entered the worst economic slump since the 1930s, a strange and disturbing thing has happened to our political discourse: Washington has lost interest in the unemployed.

Jobs do get mentioned now and then — and a few political figures, notably Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic leader in the House, are still trying to get some kind of action. But no jobs bills have been introduced in Congress, no job-creation plans have been advanced by the White House and all the policy focus seems to be on spending cuts.

So one-sixth of America’s workers — all those who can’t find any job or are stuck with part-time work when they want a full-time job — have, in effect, been abandoned.

It might not be so bad if the jobless could expect to find new employment fairly soon. But unemployment has become a trap, one that’s very difficult to escape. There are almost five times as many unemployed workers as there are job openings; the average unemployed worker has been jobless for 37 weeks, a post-World War II record.

In short, we’re well on the way to creating a permanent underclass of the jobless. Why doesn’t Washington care?

Part of the answer may be that while those who are unemployed tend to stay unemployed, those who still have jobs are feeling more secure than they did a couple of years ago. Layoffs and discharges spiked during the crisis of 2008-2009 but have fallen sharply since then, perhaps reducing the sense of urgency. Put it this way: At this point, the U.S. economy is suffering from low hiring, not high firing, so things don’t look so bad — as long as you’re willing to write off the unemployed.

Yet polls indicate that voters still care much more about jobs than they do about the budget deficit. So it’s quite remarkable that inside the Beltway, it’s just the opposite.

What makes this even more remarkable is the fact that the economic arguments used to justify the D.C. deficit obsession have been repeatedly refuted by experience.

On one side, we’ve been warned, over and over again, that “bond vigilantes” will turn on the U.S. government unless we slash spending immediately. Yet interest rates remain low by historical standards; indeed, they’re lower now than they were in the spring of 2009, when those dire warnings began.

On the other side, we’ve been assured that spending cuts would do wonders for business confidence. But that hasn’t happened in any of the countries currently pursuing harsh austerity programs. Notably, when the Cameron government in Britain announced austerity measures last May, it received fawning praise from U.S. deficit hawks. But British business confidence plunged, and it has not recovered.

Yet the obsession with spending cuts flourishes all the same — unchallenged, it must be said, by the White House.

I still don’t know why the Obama administration was so quick to accept defeat in the war of ideas, but the fact is that it surrendered very early in the game. In early 2009, John Boehner, now the speaker of the House, was widely and rightly mocked for declaring that since families were suffering, the government should tighten its own belt. That’s Herbert Hoover economics, and it’s as wrong now as it was in the 1930s. But, in the 2010 State of the Union address, President Obama adopted exactly the same metaphor and began using it incessantly.

And earlier this week, the White House budget director declared: “There is an agreement that we should be reducing spending,” suggesting that his only quarrel with Republicans is over whether we should be cutting taxes, too. No wonder, then, that according to a new Pew Research Center poll, a majority of Americans see “not much difference” between Mr. Obama’s approach to the deficit and that of Republicans.

So who pays the price for this unfortunate bipartisanship? The increasingly hopeless unemployed, of course. And the worst hit will be young workers — a point made in 2009 by Peter Orszag, then the White House budget director. As he noted, young Americans who graduated during the severe recession of the early 1980s suffered permanent damage to their earnings. And if the average duration of unemployment is any indication, it’s even harder for new graduates to find decent jobs now than it was in 1982 or 1983.

So the next time you hear some Republican declaring that he’s concerned about deficits because he cares about his children — or, for that matter, the next time you hear Mr. Obama talk about winning the future — you should remember that the clear and present danger to the prospects of young Americans isn’t the deficit. It’s the absence of jobs.

But, as I said, these days Washington doesn’t seem to care about any of that. And you have to wonder what it will take to get politicians caring again about America’s forgotten millions. 

Unique C-Print on metallic paper
105 1/4 x 61 1/4 inches
2011

Through March 26, 2011

Museum 52

Ivan Morley, From Don, George, and Diane, 2010, Oil, wax, and KY Jelly on polyester over wood, 33 x 27 inches (83.8 x 68.6 cm)

Closes Saturday March 19, 2011

Richard Telles

In-Sight (1958)

Opens March 17 through April 30, 2011

Mitchell-Innes and Nash

By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Times Published: March 13, 2011

Count me among those who were glad to see the documentary “Inside Job” win an Oscar. The film reminded us that the financial crisis of 2008, whose aftereffects are still blighting the lives of millions of Americans, didn’t just happen — it was made possible by bad behavior on the part of bankers, regulators and, yes, economists.

What the film didn’t point out, however, is that the crisis has spawned a whole new set of abuses, many of them illegal as well as immoral. And leading political figures are, at long last, showing some outrage. Unfortunately, this outrage is directed, not at banking abuses, but at those trying to hold banks accountable for these abuses.

The immediate flashpoint is a proposed settlement between state attorneys general and the mortgage servicing industry. That settlement is a “shakedown,” says Senator Richard Shelby of Alabama. The money banks would be required to allot to mortgage modification would be “extorted,” declares The Wall Street Journal. And the bankers themselves warn that any action against them would place economic recovery at risk.

All of which goes to confirm that the rich are different from you and me: when they break the law, it’s the prosecutors who find themselves on trial.

To get an idea of what we’re talking about here, look at the complaint filed by Nevada’s attorney general against Bank of America. The complaint charges the bank with luring families into its loan-modification program — supposedly to help them keep their homes — under false pretenses; with giving false information about the program’s requirements (for example, telling them that they had to default on their mortgages before receiving a modification); with stringing families along with promises of action, then “sending foreclosure notices, scheduling auction dates, and even selling consumers’ homes while they waited for decisions”; and, in general, with exploiting the program to enrich itself at those families’ expense.

The end result, the complaint charges, was that “many Nevada consumers continued to make mortgage payments they could not afford, running through their savings, their retirement funds, or their children’s education funds. Additionally, due to Bank of America’s misleading assurances, consumers deferred short-sales and passed on other attempts to mitigate their losses. And they waited anxiously, month after month, calling Bank of America and submitting their paperwork again and again, not knowing whether or when they would lose their homes.”

Still, things like this only happen to losers who can’t keep up their mortgage payments, right? Wrong. Recently Dana Milbank, the Washington Post columnist, wrote about his own experience: a routine mortgage refinance with Citibank somehow turned into a nightmare of misquoted rates, improper interest charges, and frozen bank accounts. And all the evidence suggests that Mr. Milbank’s experience wasn’t unusual.

Notice, by the way, that we’re not talking about the business practices of fly-by-night operators; we’re talking about two of our three largest financial companies, with roughly $2 trillion each in assets. Yet politicians would have you believe that any attempt to get these abusive banking giants to make modest restitution is a “shakedown.” The only real question is whether the proposed settlement lets them off far too lightly.

What about the argument that placing any demand on the banks would endanger the recovery? There’s a lot to be said about that argument, none of it good. But let me emphasize two points.

First, the proposed settlement only calls for loan modifications that would produce a greater “net present value” than foreclosure — that is, for offering deals that are in the interest of both homeowners and investors. The outrageous truth is that in many cases banks are blocking such mutually beneficial deals, so that they can continue to extract fees. How could ending this highway robbery be bad for the economy?

Second, the biggest obstacle to recovery isn’t the financial condition of major banks, which were bailed out once and are now profiting from the widespread perception that they’ll be bailed out again if anything goes wrong. It is, instead, the overhang of household debt combined with paralysis in the housing market. Getting banks to clear up mortgage debts — instead of stringing families along to extract a few more dollars — would help, not hurt, the economy.

In the days and weeks ahead, we’ll see pro-banker politicians denounce the proposed settlement, asserting that it’s all about defending the rule of law. But what they’re actually defending is the exact opposite — a system in which only the little people have to obey the law, while the rich, and bankers especially, can cheat and defraud without consequences.

Nancy De Holl
Lunacy Knot, oil on canvas, 30″ x 24,” 2011

Nancy de Holl & Esther Kläs
Through March 27 2011

Bureau

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
NY Times Published: March 12, 2011

From the debates in Wisconsin and elsewhere about public sector unions, you might get the impression that we’re going bust because teachers are overpaid.

That’s a pernicious fallacy. A basic educational challenge is not that teachers are raking it in, but that they are underpaid. If we want to compete with other countries, and chip away at poverty across America, then we need to pay teachers more so as to attract better people into the profession.

Until a few decades ago, employment discrimination perversely strengthened our teaching force. Brilliant women became elementary school teachers, because better jobs weren’t open to them. It was profoundly unfair, but the discrimination did benefit America’s children.

These days, brilliant women become surgeons and investment bankers — and 47 percent of America’s kindergarten through 12th-grade teachers come from the bottom one-third of their college classes (as measured by SAT scores). The figure is from a study by McKinsey & Company, “Closing the Talent Gap.”

Changes in relative pay have reinforced the problem. In 1970, in New York City, a newly minted teacher at a public school earned about $2,000 less in salary than a starting lawyer at a prominent law firm. These days the lawyer takes home, including bonus, $115,000 more than the teacher, the McKinsey study found.

We all understand intuitively the difference a great teacher makes. I think of Juanita Trantina, who left my fifth-grade class intoxicated with excitement for learning and fascinated by the current events she spoke about. You probably have a Miss Trantina in your own past.

One Los Angeles study found that having a teacher from the 25 percent most effective group of teachers for four years in a row would be enough to eliminate the black-white achievement gap.

Recent scholarship suggests that good teachers, even kindergarten teachers, increase their students’ earnings many years later. Eric A. Hanushek of Stanford University found that an excellent teacher (one a standard deviation better than average, or better than 84 percent of teachers) raises each student’s lifetime earnings by $20,000. If there are 20 students in the class, that is an extra $400,000 generated, compared with a teacher who is merely average.

A teacher better than 93 percent of other teachers would add $640,000 to lifetime pay of a class of 20, the study found.

Look, I’m not a fan of teachers’ unions. They used their clout to gain job security more than pay, thus making the field safe for low achievers. Teaching work rules are often inflexible, benefits are generous relative to salaries, and it is difficult or impossible to dismiss teachers who are ineffective.

But none of this means that teachers are overpaid. And if governments nibble away at pensions and reduce job security, then they must pay more in wages to stay even.

Moreover, part of compensation is public esteem. When governors mock teachers as lazy, avaricious incompetents, they demean the profession and make it harder to attract the best and brightest. We should be elevating teachers, not throwing darts at them.

Consider three other countries renowned for their educational performance: Singapore, South Korea and Finland. In each country, teachers are drawn from the top third of their cohort, are hugely respected and are paid well (although that’s less true in Finland). In South Korea and Singapore, teachers on average earn more than lawyers and engineers, the McKinsey study found.

“We’re not going to get better teachers unless we pay them more,” notes Amy Wilkins of the Education Trust, an education reform organization. Likewise, Jeanne Allen of the Center for Education Reform says, “We’re the first people to say, throw them $100,000, throw them whatever it takes.”

Both Ms. Wilkins and Ms. Allen add in the next breath that pay should be for performance, with more rigorous evaluation. That makes sense to me.

Starting teacher pay, which now averages $39,000, would have to rise to $65,000 to fill most new teaching positions in high-needs schools with graduates from the top third of their classes, the McKinsey study found. That would be a bargain.

Indeed, it makes sense to cut corners elsewhere to boost teacher salaries. Research suggests that students would benefit from a tradeoff of better teachers but worse teacher-student ratios. Thus there are growing calls for a Japanese model of larger classes, but with outstanding, respected, well-paid teachers.

Teaching is unusual among the professions in that it pays poorly but has strong union protections and lockstep wage increases. It’s a factory model of compensation, and critics are right to fault it. But the bottom line is that we should pay teachers more, not less — and that politicians who falsely lambaste teachers as greedy are simply making it more difficult to attract the kind of above-average teachers our above-average children deserve.

Spring 2011 Wall (Andrea’s Hand Under the Table) / Spring 2011 Wall (Mirror Relecting Black Flat, Joel and Phil Loading the Truck, 4 x 8′ White Flat)
2011
Archival inkjet prints, frames, plexi stained lumber 74 x 75 x 4.5 inches 187.96 x 190.5 x 11.43 cm / Archival inkjet prints, frames, plexi, stanied lumber, painted drywall 96 x 74 x 4.5 inches 243.84 x 187.96 x 11.43 cm

Through April 3

Unt/tled Gallery

A 1995 video demonstrating Joe Connolly’s methods of graffiti abatement in Los Angeles. He has some interesting, but questionable, theories.

Joe Connolly did the (many) buffs/tags on Washington Blvd. rooftops in the 1990s:
“GRAFFITI NO LONGER ACCEPTED HERE. PLEASE FIND A DAY JOB. THANK YOU.”

via

Michael Rashkow, Washed Tafetta Purple Silk (2010)

Curated by Ruby Neri and Julia Leonard

Opening Reception: 3/12: 6pm till ?,w/ special musical guests:TOMMY GUERRERO, HOLY SHIT, DOMINANT LEGS, & CHRISTOPHER OWENS

Through April 16, 2011

ERIK BLUHM, KYLE FIELD, ASHLEY GALLAGHER, PAUL GELLMAN, CHRIS LIPOMI, JOSH LAZCANO, JULIA LEONARD, CHRIS LUX, ALICIA McCARTHY, LAUREN McKEON, RUBY NERI, MICHAEL RASHKOW, WILL ROGAN, TORBJORN VEJVI, NICHOLAS PITTMAN

luggagestoregallery

Julian Faulhaber for The New York Times

The entrance of Bruder Klaus. Zumthor calls it “a small space to be quiet.”

By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN
NY Times Published: March 11, 2011

Over lunch in Los Angeles some months ago, with the actor Tobey Maguire and his wife, Jennifer Meyer, Peter Zumthor was imperious, charming and a little reserved, as usual. The Swiss architect was in town to discuss a new design for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and Maguire and Meyer had invited him out to persuade him to build a house for them. Having long avoided commissions for houses for the rich and famous, Zumthor, now 67, lately concluded that it might be nice to put aside a little nest egg. Besides, he could imagine leaving a mark on a city where plenty of other great architects had worked. So when coffee arrived, he promised to take a look at the property but asked that Maguire and Meyer make a tour of his work in Europe and afterward visit him at his studio in Haldenstein to talk about what they saw. Then he would decide if he could design their house — whether, in effect, they could be his clients.

“We’ll leave right now,” Maguire volunteered, half rising from the banquette as if prepared to drive at that moment to the airport and hop the first flight for Zurich.

Zumthor can inspire that sort of reaction. A couple of years ago, when he won the Pritzker Prize, architecture’s Nobel, the press declared him a “prophet.” “Skyscrapers are being shortened or stopped entirely due to lack of money, and luxury construction sites from Dubai and Abu Dhabi to Moscow and Peking are lying fallow,” a writer in Die Welt noted. Zumthor represented a changed ethos. Zumthor himself, a little wishfully, perhaps, told me not long ago that he regarded the prize as reflecting “a new orientation, back to the earth, back to the real thing, architecture in the traditional sense of making things. I think this awareness is coming back.”

Maybe. In any case, as the designer of some of the subtlest and most admired buildings of the last quarter-century, Zumthor has hardly been toiling in obscurity. But he has eschewed the flamboyant, billboard-on-the-skyline, globe-trotting celebrity persona, setting himself apart from, and in his own mind clearly somewhat above, some of his more famous colleagues. His works, even from the most superficial perspective, differ from Frank Gehry’s or Zaha Hadid’s or Jean Nouvel’s or Norman Foster’s, for starters, because they are not flashy: they often don’t grab you at all at first glance, being conceived from the inside out, usually over many painstaking years. Moreover, because Zumthor runs a small office and doesn’t often delegate even the choice of a door handle, he hasn’t taken on many projects, and most of the ones he has completed aren’t very big.

As Peter Rüedi, a Swiss critic, wrote recently in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, what results might lead people to mistake Zumthor at first for “an ascetic.” But “he is the opposite,” Rüedi rightly noted. He is “an essentialist of the sensual.”

When we met at his studio, Zumthor materialized half an hour late, clearly a little skeptical, as if he wanted me to know that he had little interest in being written about, or at least wanted to appear as if he did. He cuts a striking figure, with a strong nose, close-cropped gray hair and beard, bushy eyebrows and gray blue eyes, and a hawkish gaze he exploits to intimidate or seduce, depending on his audience. “Normally architects render a service,” he began, skipping the usual pleasantries. “They implement what other people want. This is not what I do. I like to develop the use of the building together with the client, in a process, so that as we go along we become more intelligent.”

Not just Maguire and Meyer have been asked to make the pilgrimage to Haldenstein, a speck on the Swiss map. It is sometimes said that Zumthor lives and works there because he’s a recluse. But he lives and works there because he can. His studio is split between a pair of buildings, one wood, the other a quasi-monastic glass-and-concrete retreat, on a low terrace above the Rhine at the base of a huge slope, facing pretty snowcapped mountains. It’s an anomaly among the quaintly gabled houses with children’s plastic slides and bird feeders cluttering the backyards. Associates toil in rapt, somewhat doleful silence, Zumthor brooding on the opposite side of an interior garden, from which occasionally drifts music by Sonny Rollins or Iannis Xenakis. Downstairs and in the other building, architects slave over models for his often-eccentric projects, among them a memorial devoted to witches in the northernmost part of Norway and a 48-room hotel in the high desert in Chile, 1.5 miles above sea level, miles from any human habitation. Zumthor’s plan for the hotel resembles a squashed doughnut, which I would recall one evening when he remarked over drinks that while his work “is close to Le Corbusier because we share the same culture,” he wished to “make a design on the scale of Oscar Niemeyer.”

We all dream about our opposites, but on second thought, Zumthor and Niemeyer, the great Brazilian Modernist of fantastical, futuristic extravagance, maybe aren’t all that far apart. They share a separatist’s mentality and a profound debt to local culture, sticking mainly to their own necks of the woods, and a deep sensual sensibility. They also have in common an aesthetic faith in engineering. Annika Staudt, who leads Zumthor’s model-making crew, recalled, as we drove one afternoon from Austria to the studio, Zumthor’s pavilion for Switzerland at Expo 2000 in Hannover, Germany, which she encountered as a teenager. “I went with my school, and everything else there looked fake, but in his pavilion you could actually feel the wood, you could smell it, and you could see the steel in between, and it was all very mysterious but real,” she said. “So after that I read what he had written. And the way he described things seemed totally familiar, as if I had known what he was saying but never said it myself — about the noises things make, the experience of touching things, walking through them.”

A good place to sense what Staudt means is Zumthor’s Bruder Klaus chapel, in western Germany. It rises from a modest ridge above the farming village of Wachendorf. In winter, a few deer gambol through crunching snow from the surrounding forest, sniff then retreat. The uphill trek from the nearest road, across an empty field, acts like a natural decompression chamber before the first glimpse of the building: an abrupt concrete block with an odd triangular door on one end.

Inside, pitched walls lead to a sort of cave or teepee with a high, teardrop oculus, open to the sky. A handful of people fit comfortably in the space, but ideally it’s made for one or two. Bruder Klaus was a hermit. There are no windows; there is no electricity or running water. Where a central altar might be, there’s a shallow pool of water, formed of rain and snow falling through the oculus. Small bottle-glass portholes add points of light, and undulating walls bear the imprints of 112 spruce trees, chopped down from Zumthor’s clients’ farm, then slowly burned, leaving blackened traces in the thick concrete.

“A small space to be quiet” is how Zumthor described the chapel to me. For the few solitary minutes I spent inside it, it seemed like the most peaceful and secret spot on earth.

The story goes that a family of devout farmers wrote to Zumthor, out of the blue, having hardly a clue of who he was, knowing only that the archbishop in nearby Cologne had hired him to plan a museum, and they asked him to build a field chapel for them — and Zumthor agreed, as long as they could wait a decade. I visited the family at their home. They turned out not to be yokels but prosperous and sophisticated, and they were perfectly aware of who he was. Zumthor, who waived his fee because he found the project intriguing, and who devoted years, as it turned out, to devising the chapel with a construction method that would allow villagers to build it themselves, house-raising-style, now grumbles about how much the chapel ultimately cost him, and how his clients kept trying to cut corners, although he said they ultimately acceded to everything.

Still, the original story has a kernel of truth, because with Zumthor a client is entering, firstly, into a relationship that entails Talmudic discussions and Job-like patience. Ask for an appointment with him, and you may get no response for days or weeks. He employs no publicist, dedicates no aide to media relations. Zumthor has long done what he wants and only what he wants. This has been his virtue and burden, inviting comparison with the late American genius Louis Kahn, another proud perfectionist who built just a few buildings, making the most of a coterie of committed clients to leave behind a handful of masterpieces.

Zumthor has often said that the biggest disappointment of his professional career — an even bigger loss for Berlin, as it turned out — was the abandonment several years ago of his plan for a museum on the site of the former Gestapo headquarters. Battling for more than a decade with a shifting, indifferent roster of midlevel government bureaucrats, he found he “had no partner,” as he put it. Building finally stalled when German political will faded after the opening of a Jewish museum and Holocaust memorial in the city made the project seem less pressing.

“In the end it helped me, because people said I didn’t compromise,” Zumthor rationalized. “But it was an emotional catastrophe at the time.”

Assuming Zumthor does find a sympathetic partner, though, what gets built will have invariably emerged from a long and complicated gestation process. In Bregenz, Austria, Rudolf Sagmeister, the curator of Zumthor’s celebrated Kunsthaus there, which opened in 1997, described how Zumthor parried with locals for ages to get what he wanted.

“It is the dream of architects, especially the ones who hate their lives, to do just a few things but perfectly, each thing a milestone, so architects envy him,” Sagmeister said. We were seated in a cafe beside the museum, facing a small square, which Zumthor also designed, where a pair of toddlers played in a patch of cold winter sunlight.

Sagmeister went on: “He’s the symbol of what architecture can still be, that is, a labor of love, and of how to work, with a dozen or so assistants from around the world, not huge teams of people, but associates who stay for years and work in a quiet office built around a garden — an idyll, where you talk about art, architecture and living. He listens to what you want. He poses clever questions and asks a lot. He wants to know about the surrounding area, he wants to know whether the clients have time, whether they’re willing to wait, to go through a process of discovery. Investors aren’t interested in this sort of thing. They need a schedule. They’re buying a kind of product. That’s not what they get with Peter. And it’s not what he wants in a client.”

Sagmeister recalled how Zumthor resisted calls for a big lakeside window and a restaurant at the top of the Kunsthaus, then stood up to contractors who insisted it would be impossible to achieve the quality of concrete he demanded. “Some people questioned the glass facade and said that the terrazzo floors would crack. But Peter knew he was right, because he had tested everything himself. So he persisted, and now people here are very proud and we have had no problems and even all these years later, thousands of people come to Bregenz just to see the building.”

Not long ago, Zumthor and I set out from Haldenstein to see his most celebrated work, a town-owned spa connected to a hotel in the mountain village of Vals. Gradually, warily, as we drove, he warmed and gave me a little of his life story. Born into a large Catholic family outside Basel, he was brought up to follow in his father’s footsteps as a master cabinetmaker. He remembered his father, not altogether unfondly, as a martinet who taught him “how to be exacting and uncompromising,” as he put it, and how to work with his hands. Zumthor attended a Swiss school for applied arts, modeled after the Bauhaus, with teachers from the Bauhaus, from whom he learned “all the basics of design, the craftsmanship of drawing and looking, of mixing colors, white space and negative space — form, line and surface.” He then studied industrial design in New York at Pratt, but never earned an architecture degree, which now seems to be a point of pride. He loves to complain that young architects, having come to rely on computers, “don’t know how things are constructed” and have “lost a sense of scale.” His studio is famous for producing the most extravagant models in wax, lead, aluminum and clay, sometimes even full-scale ones, installed so clients can walk through them and so that Zumthor can see how a design holds up after months or years. “It’s all talk these days,” he complained in the car. “Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier came from a tradition in which architects still knew how things were made, how to make things well. We should force universities to train carpenters and woodworkers and leather workers. Architects all want to be philosophers or artists now. I’m lucky to have had my education, because in the States, especially, you’ve lost contact with the real business of building.”

I’ve heard Zumthor’s detractors respond to this sort of argument by saying he’s a Swiss clockmaker. They stress that he thrives in a small pond but that the rough-and-tumble of global-scaled 21st-century projects demands a more flexible and grander vision. It is true that his projects are not enormous; there is an intimacy to his work. At places like Bregenz or the Bruder Klaus chapel, visitors respond not just to how his buildings look but also to their sounds, smells, to the light as it changes around them, even to the feel of the walls and floors — to what Zumthor has described as the “beautiful silence that I associate with attributes such as composure, self-evidence, durability, presence and integrity, and with warmth and sensuousness as well.”

As we drove, I came to realize we were going through something of an accelerated version of the process he goes through with clients. The farmers in Wachendorf had told me: “He causes people to want to give their best. People see it in Zumthor, and see it is a unique situation working with him, a rare opportunity in life.” I asked about influences on him, and he talked about artists he first encountered in the ’60s and ’70s — Americans like Richard Serra, Walter De Maria and Michael Heizer, sculptors who adapted Minimalism toward massive projects that extended into the landscape. He also extolled the mercurial German artist Joseph Beuys, the Luftwaffe pilot turned artist-shaman, who endowed eccentric materials, including wax and felt, with all sorts of private and historical allusions, and whose life itself became a kind of performance. “With Beuys,” Zumthor explained, “my interest has had to do with the mythology and sensuousness of his materials, the importance of his personal life in his art. He was looking at objects with history, with a past.”

Zumthor was at that moment steering through spectacular landscape. “My first real job,” he pointed out, “was in this canton, surveying traditional building types and settlements, cataloguing the ancient economic systems, the system of the farmstead, studying every old house, inside and out. I tried to find out why things here look the way they do, what makes them beautiful, aesthetic. For me as an architect it turned out to be about overcoming architectural Modernism, in which everything had to be new and nothing was supposed to have history. The Bauhaus seems to me now very limited in that respect, and this survey work helped me overcome that limitation.”

We arrived at the Vals spa, where his wife, Annalisa, met us in the hotel bar. An attractive, poised woman, she seemed a forbearing partner for a man whom associates describe, not altogether unsympathetically, as demanding and self-critical. The hotel was a sleek but nondescript Modernist box, which Zumthor distilled to its ’60s essence, and to which he added his spa, like the Baths of Caracalla to a Days Inn. Built into the mountainside as a maze of lofty, exquisitely proportioned volumes, with heavy, bespoke walls made of finely cut slabs of local stone fitted together like a jigsaw puzzle, the spa invests ordinary leisure-time bathing with a sacramental gravity. It lends existential weight to even the simplest, most banal rituals — walking from room to room, looking out a window, reclining on a bench, gazing up at the sky or hearing the splash of water and the echo of footsteps. Bathers move like supplicants through wet stone chapels.

“Vals is not about an outside object,” Zumthor wanted to make clear. “It’s not about lap pools and slides and gadgets. It is about what happens inside, the bathing, oriented toward the ritual, as if in the Orient. It’s about water and stone and light and sound and shadow. People in Vals said it was elitist, that our plan would fail. The old hotel manager even quit, and the marketing expert the village hired said we were doomed, that the town would be crazy to follow an architect. But some local guys said, no, we’ll try this. They had become so excited by developing the plan that their conviction was genuine. They had started to feel part of what we were doing, and convinced other people, and finally the rest of the community. We took people seriously, and so the whole process was transparent.”

A local businessman was sipping a beer, listening. “Now it’s our Matterhorn,” he volunteered.

When I tried out the spa myself early the next morning, a few bathers were already soaking in deep contemplation. The baths, all of them different, each came as a surprise, appearing around a corner, or down some steps. Zumthor had talked about the “longing” of spaces to be discovered. In Cologne, the new structure he built for the Kolumba museum, which houses the archdiocese’s art collection, shares its site with the ruins of a Gothic church bombed during World War II and with a chapel, a 1950s period piece by Gottfried Böhm. Zumthor embraced the ruins and the chapel, wrapping a perforated brick facade like a cloak around both, and also around the museum, the discreet entrance to which opens onto galleries that, as with the baths, are all distinct but feel custom-made for the art, just as the art, uplifted by the most sensitive architecture, feels as if it were made for the rooms.

“I think the chance of finding beauty is higher if you don’t work on it directly,” Zumthor has said in describing his philosophy. “Beauty in architecture is driven by practicality. This is what you learn from studying the old townscapes of the Swiss farmers. If you do what you should, then at the end there is something, which you can’t explain maybe, but if you are lucky, it has to do with life.”

Later that morning, we drove to a pair of small wooden houses he recently completed for himself and Annalisa near a peak above Vals. She grew up at these heights. A wood house was her dream. For his part, Zumthor welcomed an excuse to rethink the local log-cabin design. He stuck with classic wood-beam construction, but in place of the old four-walled box structures that produced small, dark rooms, he essentially turned the boxes into towers spanned by broad sheets of glass that allowed for wide-open spaces framing spectacular views.

Working with the traditional wood beams was crucial, he said. “Solid wood has almost disappeared as too expensive, complicated and old-fashioned,” he explained. “I reintroduced it as a construction method here because it feels good to be with, to be in. You feel a certain way in a glass or concrete or limestone building. It has an effect on your skin — the same with plywood or veneer, or solid timber. Wood doesn’t steal energy from your body the way glass and concrete steal heat. When it’s hot, a wood house feels cooler than a concrete one, and when it’s cold, the other way around. So I preserved the wood-beam construction because of what it can do for your body.”

You can feel exactly what he means if you travel an hour or so away to Sumvitg to see another chapel he designed, nearly a quarter of a century ago. An avalanche during the mid-1980s destroyed the Baroque chapel there. The village priest held a competition for its replacement. Zumthor’s plan called for a pointed wedge of dark shingled wood clinging to a mountainside, like the mysteriously stranded bow of an ancient ship, with clerestory windows, a modest single door atop simple concrete steps and two bells perched on a slender tower. The interior, light-bathed and exalting, suggests the ship’s galley: a wooden jewel box with a creaky wood floor.

“That was on purpose,” Zumthor told me. “I put a slight warp in the floor to make the creak, which would exist just below your level of consciousness. Call it romantic, I guess. All music needs some kind of container, and this container must be designed. That’s what architecture can do. I always think, ‘What should be the acoustic in a museum, a chapel, your bathroom?’ Architects may not ask clients this question, but people can always tell you what they want.”

He looked around. “It’s so touching to see after all these years,” he decided. “I told the priest, ‘What I can offer you is the memory of the church I had as a boy.’ ” At that moment, he caught sight of a cheap wood cabinet, crammed near the front door, installed without his approval, he said. “But it is O.K.,” he told himself. Then he opened the front door, listening for the satisfying clunk of the door handle, squinted into the winter sun and crunched back through the snow toward the car.

Months later, Zumthor told me that he agreed to take on the house for Maguire and Meyer. Maguire had requested a basketball court, Zumthor said. Zumthor imagined gardens instead, an Alhambra in Hollywood. I said nothing, already knowing who would win that argument.

That this very Swiss architect should be building not just a movie star’s house but also rethinking a major public space for this quintessentially American city might seem odd. Zumthor spent time in Los Angeles years ago, it turns out, and like so many Europeans fell for its foreignness. But more than that, Los Angeles, like Zumthor, has cultivated its own idiosyncratic take on Modernism, steeped in locale: in landscape, climate, sunlight, space. Zumthor is, in fact, strangely at home there.

That’s certainly how he looked, in white band-collar shirt, loose brown linen jacket and black baggy slacks, arriving at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art one morning, to brainstorm. With a big, open sketch pad, pencil in hand, Zumthor stood in a conference room before a handful of staff members, including Michael Govan, the museum’s director. “You’re invited to say I’m crazy or whatever,” he began, doodling absently in the pad. “I start with the collection, which is the basis of the museum. I think of separate collections, putting them on different floors, and then I have this terrible feeling, like I am in a department store, with shoes and shirts. So then I draw a forest. And in the forest I find jewels. I have to go here, there, to get them. I think of these jewels as parts of the collection, with their own pavilions, and this gives me a new feeling.”

Imagine the pavilions as metaphorical trees, he went on, “their volumes up in the branches, up in the air. So then I need a system of ramps. Maybe there is a catwalk system.” He sketched more quickly. “Now we have the opposite feeling from a department store. But I am getting confused, weak. I want the sense of informal freedom. I want to feel I am outside. I want a village, but with an upper level, a lower level.” He was sketching, sketching. “But it must give a feeling of peace. Now I feel it will be right only if the collections have real homes.”

Zumthor was testing his audience. John Bowsher, the museum’s point man for special installations, rose to the bait. Time, he said, unfolds differently in Los Angeles than it does in, say, New York or Switzerland. There is “the evenness of life here, the pace of life lived in cars,” he said. “And so if you give people the same evenness in the museum, then it’s nothing special.”

Zumthor paused. “To say, ‘Let’s build something flexible,’ this doesn’t produce good results,” he said. “I have to give these alienated works of art some energy, something so that people don’t just pass by them and say, ‘Did you see African art?’ ‘I don’t know.’ So now I no longer see a village but a park. I hate a didactical museum. The goal is a highly emotional place, to put someone in a mood to listen or read or feel.”

Govan spoke up. He said the museum had certain treasures, which needed special treatment. How might the collections be reorganized around them? he asked. Might a new layout lead to new ways of telling art history? The conversation slowly devolved into issues of zoning, parking and gas lines and away from time, trees and treasures. After the meeting ended, Zumthor instantly started fretting. He was hired to reconsider just the eastern part of the campus. The western end was a hodgepodge of buildings and parkland, he said, with a half-baked attempt at classical order. “I don’t understand this axis idea, like for the French king,” he said. “I’m too late.” He consoled himself with the prospect of devising paths and vistas around the campus for outdoor works of art by Heizer, Jeff Koons and Robert Irwin.

The next day he repeated more or less the same spiel before Terry Semel, co-chairman of the board of trustees and a former chairman of Warner Brothers and Yahoo. Semel wanted to hear about attracting more families to the museum and linking it to the La Brea tar pits next door. He recalled his own experiences running a theme park, opening new attractions from time to time to keep the public coming back. Staggering the opening of new pavilions might do the same for the museum, he suggested. “Why not make a place the whole family wants to come to a couple of times a year, more, not just once?”

“The museum needs to be in close relation to the park,” is how Zumthor chose to respond. “I also have a vision of kids running around, asking, ‘What’s that golden building back there?’ ”

A golden building? Semel inquired, but Zumthor brushed aside talk of what the buildings would look like. That evening, he told me: “Museum officials always claim they have the greatest collection of this or that, and of course they are always right. And their question for me is: ‘What will it look like?’ Then I have to go back and talk content, function, how a place works, and I tell them I need time before I get to their question.”

On reflection, he decided that the meetings had gone all right and were the start of a long and complicated project, which was the pleasure of architecture for him. His mind turned back to the idea of galleries in treetops. “I believe in the spiritual value of art, as long as it’s not exclusive,” he said. “It is the same with architecture.”

“It’s about elevation,” he added. “Everybody can go up, after all.”

By DAVID BROOKS
NY Times Published: March 10, 2011

We’re an overconfident species. Ninety-four percent of college professors believe they have above-average teaching skills. A survey of high school students found that 70 percent of them have above-average leadership skills and only 2 percent are below average.

Men tend to be especially blessed with self-esteem. Men are the victims of unintentional drowning more than twice as often as women. That’s because men have tremendous faith in their own swimming ability, especially after they’ve been drinking.

Americans are similarly endowed with self-esteem. When pollsters ask people around the world to rate themselves on a variety of traits, they find that people in Serbia, Chile, Israel and the United States generally supply the most positive views of themselves. People in South Korea, Switzerland, Japan, Taiwan and Morocco are on the humble side of the rankings.

Yet even from this high base, there is some evidence to suggest that Americans have taken self-approval up a notch over the past few decades. Start with the anecdotal evidence. It would have been unthinkable for a baseball player to celebrate himself in the batter’s box after a home-run swing. Now it’s not unusual. A few decades ago, pop singers didn’t compose anthems to their own prowess; now those songs dominate the charts.

American students no longer perform particularly well in global math tests. But Americans are among the world leaders when it comes to thinking that we are really good at math.

Students in the Middle East, Africa and the United States have the greatest faith in their math skills. Students in Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong and Taiwan have much less self-confidence, though they actually do better on the tests.

In a variety of books and articles, Jean M. Twenge of San Diego State University and W. Keith Campbell of the University of Georgia have collected data suggesting that American self-confidence has risen of late. College students today are much more likely to agree with statements such as “I am easy to like” than college students 30 years ago. In the 1950s, 12 percent of high school seniors said they were a “very important person.” By the ’90s, 80 percent said they believed that they were.

In short, there’s abundant evidence to suggest that we have shifted a bit from a culture that emphasized self-effacement — I’m no better than anybody else, but nobody is better than me — to a culture that emphasizes self-expansion.

Writers like Twenge point out that young people are bathed in messages telling them how special they are. Often these messages are untethered to evidence of actual merit. Over the past few decades, for example, the number of hours college students spend studying has steadily declined. Meanwhile, the average G.P.A. has steadily risen.

Some argue that today’s child-rearing and educational techniques have produced praise addicts. Roni Caryn Rabin of The Times recently reported on some research that found that college students would rather receive a compliment than eat their favorite food or have sex.

If Americans do, indeed, have a different and larger conception of the self than they did a few decades ago, I wonder if this is connected to some of the social and political problems we have observed over the past few years.

I wonder if the rise of consumption and debt is in part influenced by people’s desire to adorn their lives with the things they feel befit their station. I wonder if the rise in partisanship is influenced in part by a narcissistic sense that, “I know how the country should be run and anybody who disagrees with me is just in the way.”

Most pervasively, I wonder if there is a link between a possible magnification of self and a declining saliency of the virtues associated with citizenship.

Citizenship, after all, is built on an awareness that we are not all that special but are, instead, enmeshed in a common enterprise. Our lives are given meaning by the service we supply to the nation. I wonder if Americans are unwilling to support the sacrifices that will be required to avert fiscal catastrophe in part because they are less conscious of themselves as components of a national project.

Perhaps the enlargement of the self has also attenuated the links between the generations. Every generation has an incentive to push costs of current spending onto future generations. But no generation has done it as freely as this one. Maybe people in the past had a visceral sense of themselves as a small piece of a larger chain across the centuries. As a result, it felt viscerally wrong to privilege the current generation over the future ones, in a way it no longer does.

It’s possible, in other words, that some of the current political problems are influenced by fundamental shifts in culture, involving things as fundamental as how we appraise ourselves. Addressing them would require a more comprehensive shift in values.

Al Taylor
Odd Vows (Bern)
1992
Wood, paint, and metal rods
59 x 135 x 108 inches (149.9 x 342.9 x 274.3 cm)

March 11 through April 30, 2011

David Zwirner

By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Times Published: March 10, 2011

Like anyone who writes regularly about what passes for economic and fiscal debate in American politics, I’ve developed a strong tolerance for nonsense. After all, if I got upset every time powerful people were illogical and/or dishonest, I’d spend every waking hour in a state of raging despair.

Yet there are still moments when I find myself saying, “They can’t really be that stupid,” or maybe, “They can’t really think the rest of us are that stupid.” And I had one of those moments reading about a recent conference on national health policy, which featured a bipartisan dialogue among Congressional staffers.

According to a column in Kaiser Health News, Republican staffers jeered at any and all proposals to use Medicare and Medicaid funds better. Spending money on prevention was no more than a “slush fund.” Research on innovation was “an oxymoron.” And there was no reason to pay for “so-called effectiveness research.”

To put this in context, you have to realize two things about the fiscal state of America. First, the nation is not, in fact, “broke.” The federal government is having no trouble raising money, and the price of that money — the interest rate on federal borrowing — is very low by historical standards. So there’s no need to scramble to slash spending now now now; we can and should be willing to spend now if it will produce savings in the long run.

Second, while the government does have a long-run fiscal problem, that problem is overwhelmingly driven by rising health care costs. The Congressional Budget Office expects Social Security outlays as a percentage of G.D.P. to rise 30 percent over the next quarter-century, as the population ages, but it expects a near doubling of the share of G.D.P. spent on Medicare and Medicaid.

So if you’re serious about deficits, you shouldn’t be pinching pennies now; you should be looking for ways to rein in health spending over the long term. And that means taking exactly the steps that had those G.O.P. staffers sneering.

Think of it this way: Congress could, with a stroke of a pen, cut Social Security benefits in half. But it couldn’t do the same with health spending: Medicare can’t suddenly start paying to replace only half a heart valve or mandate that bypass operations stop halfway through.

Limiting health costs, therefore, requires a smarter approach. We need to work harder on prevention, which can be much cheaper than a cure. We need to find innovative ways of managing health care. And, above all, we need to know what works and what doesn’t so that Medicare and Medicaid can say no to expensive procedures with little or no medical benefit. “So-called comparative effectiveness research” is central to any rational attempt to deal with America’s fiscal problems.

But today’s Republicans just aren’t into rationality. They claim to care deeply about deficits — but they’ve spent the past two years putting cynical, demagogic attacks on any attempt to actually deal with long-run deficits at the heart of their campaign strategy.

Here’s a recent example. In his new book, Mike Huckabee — the current leader in polls asking Republicans whom they want to nominate in 2012 — attacks the Obama stimulus because it included funds for, yes, comparative effectiveness research: “The stimulus didn’t just waste your money; it planted the seeds from which the poisonous tree of death panels will grow.” Will others in the G.O.P. stand up and say that Mr. Huckabee is wrong, that Medicare needs to know which medical procedures actually work? Don’t hold your breath.

Of course, Republicans aren’t the only cynics. As the national debate over fiscal policy descends ever deeper into penny-pinching, future-killing absurdity, one voice is curiously muted — that of President Obama.

The president and his aides know that the G.O.P. approach to the budget is wrongheaded and destructive. But they’ve stopped making the case for an alternative approach; instead, they’ve positioned themselves as know-nothings lite, accepting the notion that spending must be slashed immediately — just not as much as Republicans want.

Mr. Obama’s political advisers clearly believe that this strategy of protective camouflage offers the president his best chance at re-election — and they may be right. But that doesn’t change the fact that the White House is aiding and abetting the dumbing down of our deficit debate.

And this dumbing down bodes ill for the nation’s future. Health care is only one of the large and difficult problems America needs to deal with, ranging from infrastructure to climate change, all of which demand that we engage in a lot of hard thinking. Yet what we have instead is a political culture in which one side sneers at knowledge and exalts ignorance, while the other side hunkers down and pretends to halfway agree

Sandy Huffaker for The New York Times

Javier Plascencia wants to revitalize Tijuana’s dining and the city itself.

By JOSH KUN
Published: March 8, 2011

TIJUANA, Mexico

NO matter where you sit in Mision 19, it’s impossible to forget where you are. The restaurant, perched on the second floor of a sleek office building, is a handsome study in concrete, wood and glass, wrapped in floor-to-ceiling windows. Tijuana confronts you from all sides.

“I am proud of being from Tijuana,” said Javier Plascencia, the restaurant’s chef and one of its owners, sitting behind a wall of wine bottles at his private chef’s table. Nearby, waiters in dark coats and ties gracefully maneuvered among tables of women in suits and men with sweaters tied over their shoulders. Hints of cologne mixed with musky wafts of mesquite and charcoal.

“I want there to be no mistake,” he continued. “This is a Tijuana restaurant. This is what Tijuana can be.”

Mr. Plascencia is determined to use Mision 19, which he opened in the heart of this city’s Zona Río business district in January, to help revitalize not only Tijuana’s food scene, but also the city itself. Scarred in recent years from waves of drug violence, Tijuana, just south of the United States border, has gone from being one of Mexico’s most visited cities to one of its most feared, a significant blow to an economy that depends on tourism.

The kidnappings and killings that scared away visitors also encouraged many well-heeled Tijuana locals to flee north. For a time, Mr. Plascencia, 43, was one of them. In 2006, his family opened Romesco in Bonita, Calif., in part to give the community of Tijuana exiles living there a taste of home.

“In the ’90s, we all knew who the drug dealers were,” he said. “They came to our restaurants, we cooked at their baptism parties, but they didn’t mess with anyone. They respected who we were. But then that started to change, and you didn’t know who people were and how they would react. Suddenly there were no rules anymore.”

There was even a period when he took a bodyguard with him to work after his brother was threatened by kidnappers, he said.

Rafa Saavedra, a local writer and cultural critic, said that while “the general perception of Tijuana is that it’s a violent and dangerous city,” he believes that the city is undergoing a “new creative boom” led by young entrepreneurs like Mr. Plascencia.

“They are not just looking to make money,” Mr. Saavedra said. “They are looking to invest in the future of the city and its people.”

As a culinary destination, Tijuana is perhaps best known for its street food, especially mariscos, birria and tacos of all stripes. But it also has a long tradition of fine dining, and Mr. Plascencia’s family has been at the center of it for nearly three decades. Their Grupo Plascencia consortium, headed by his father, Juan José Plascencia, is now responsible for 10 restaurants scattered across Tijuana, including Casa Plascencia, a Spanish-themed meat emporium, and Villa Saverios, the Roman-columned marble flagship. Situated in the heart of Tijuana’s Zona Gastronómica, or restaurant row, Villa Saverios is the go-to venue for birthdays and wedding showers among Tijuana’s middle and upper classes.

“Their restaurants have been so important for the region for so long,” said Tru Miller, an owner of the Adobe Guadalupe winery in the nearby Guadalupe Valley. “Javier has the ability to bring Baja cuisine to an international audience in ways that nobody has really done before.”

Mr. Plascencia, who was born and raised in Tijuana but attended high school and culinary school in San Diego, refers to his cooking as Baja Mediterranean: traditional Mexican cuisine combined with ingredients and flavors that flourish in Baja California’s coastal Mediterranean-like climate, including olive oil, abalone and arugula. It’s a style espoused by other Tijuana chefs, like Miguel Angel Guerrero, of La Querencia; Jair Tellez, at Laja; and Martín San Román, of Rincón San Román. But Mr. Plascencia brings a flair for dramatic presentation, an appreciation for Tijuana street food’s deep flavors and a binational approach to farm-to-table cooking.

At Mision 19, everything he cooks and all the wine he serves come from within a 120-mile radius, which means not only Tijuana markets and local Baja farms and vineyards in the Guadalupe Valley, but also farmer’s markets in San Diego.

“When you say local in Tijuana, you are talking about Tecate, Ensenada, Rosarito and parts of San Diego,” he said. “It’s a very big local.”

The menu is loaded with showstoppers. There’s the duck skewered with licorice and sprinkled with guava dust. There’s the risotto topped with salt-cured nopalitos (prickly pear cactus) and charred octopus. Or there’s the dish that’s already something of a signature: slow-cooked short ribs bathed in a mission fig syrup on top of a black mole sauce. After he cooked it at the Test Kitchen, a Los Angeles restaurant with a rotating cast of guest chefs, Jonathan Gold, a food critic for LA Weekly, named it one of his top 10 dishes of 2010.

Bill Esparza, who runs the Los Angeles food blog Street Gourmet LA and frequently invites local foodies down to Tijuana for tastings with Mr. Plascencia, praised the chef. “There is nobody like him in Mexican cooking right now,” he said. “He travels throughout Mexico, to L.A., to San Francisco, looking to learn and be inspired. He watches everything that’s going on in the food world, and he’s like this incredible sponge. He’s creating a whole new vocabulary of Baja cooking.”

The Plascencia food empire had a humble start. In 1969, Mr. Plascencia’s father quit his job in a Tijuana factory to open Giuseppi’s, a small pizzeria. He stored the pizza boxes, cheese and cans of tomato sauce based on his mother’s recipe in the family garage. There were soon 13 pizzerias across the city. The Giuseppi’s name lives on in a handful of full-scale Italian restaurants, Tijuana institutions since the 1980s.

“I compare my father to Sirio Maccioni of Le Cirque,” said Mr. Plascencia, who grew up washing dishes at Giuseppi’s on weekends and learning the details of customer service from his father. “He is always at the door. He knows all of his clients by name.”

Three years ago, the family bought Caesar’s, the classic tourist mecca and watering hole for visiting Hollywood stars that opened its doors in the 1920s. Best remembered for its claim to being the birthplace of the Caesar salad, the restaurant holds particular significance for Mr. Plascencia because his grandfather worked there as a bartender.

After a painstaking renovation, Caesar’s — with its elaborate tableside preparations of the famous salad, its walls covered with vintage photographs and menus and its original bar meticulously restored — is now an elegant trip back to Tijuana’s past.

“Tijuana is not very good at preserving its history,” Mr. Plascencia said. “Ceasar’s is so important to the story of this city. When we heard it was for sale, there was no way we were going to let that legacy be lost.”

Caesar’s, Mision 19 and other high-end restaurants here rely on the city’s wealthy elite and a small cadre of middle-class bohemians who can afford $25 main courses. They have also come to depend on two classes of tourist far removed from the party-seeking Marines and college students from north of the border who were once a key source of the city’s income.

The first group could be called medical tourists, Americans who go to Tijuana for cancer treatments, dental work or plastic surgery. Then there are the maquiladora tourists, executives from the thousands of internationally owned factories, or maquiladoras. “They might be from Japan or Korea and are here to work on a project or open a new plant,” Mr. Plascencia said. “They are not coming to get drunk at a bar. They are looking for a nice meal.”

He insists that things in Tijuana are getting better. According to recent news reports, officials in the state of Baja California estimate that, over the last two years, crime in the region has dropped nearly 40 percent. Most agree that the city is safer and calmer now than in 2008, when the death toll reached an all-time high. Many locals who once fled the city are now moving back. In the downtown tourist zone, there are new trendy bars, diners and fashion boutiques, along with a bilingual tourist police unit designed to make visiting Americans feel more comfortable.

Last week, Tijuana’s mayor joined the mayors of four other Baja cities in announcing a new pro-tourism initiative. A large mural on busy Calle Sexta reads, “In spite of everything, Tijuana is moving forward.”

To reassure customers from the States, Mr. Plascencia often calls with personal invitations. For big food events or tastings, he’s driven people across the border himself, all part of his mission to use his restaurants to both sustain and reimagine the city that he loves.

Last fall, hundreds of people, including Al Gore and Jimmy Wales, a founder of Wikipedia, arrived for Tijuana Innovadora, a $5 million two-week conference designed to showcase Tijuana as a center of finance, arts, ideas and innovation. Mr. Plascencia cooked for many of the conference’s events, including a dinner for Mexico’s president, Felipe Calderón, who began the event with a speech praising Tijuana’s improved security.

The attempted makeover came with a brutal reality check. In the middle of the conference, two decapitated bodies were found hanging from a local bridge.

“It was a reminder of the challenges we face here,” Mr. Plascencia said. “But I am not worried. Things will get better, and I will be right here cooking.”

Untitled (1972)

March 18–June 5, 2011

Cooper-Hewitt