nancy de holl

also a very nice painting in a group show at parker jones

By MAUREEN DOWD
NY Times Published: August 1, 2009

WASHINGTON

Nora Ephron has been in the city that gave her heartburn twice recently: for a screening of her new movie, “Julie & Julia,” at the White House, and for an unveiling of Julia Child’s copper pots and cast-iron pans at the Smithsonian.

Over a dinner of steak and banana split Tuesday, I gave Ephron a crazy salad of food questions. She e-scribbled back the answers.

Q: Do you consider any food a romantic deal-breaker?

A: I respect vegetarians, but I could never fall in love with one.

Q: Is there any dish you really hate, the way I hate brussels sprouts?

A: Filet mignon. Absolutely hate it.

Q: Do couples that cook together stay together?

A: No. I have cooked with men I am no longer married to.

Q: You told me that when you and Tom Wolfe were young magazine writers in New York, you had a difference of opinion about eating on the street.

A: I remember that about 40 years ago he wrote something vicious about seeing a New York woman on the street with cruller crumbs on her face, and the moment I read it, I knew that that woman was me (although I have never eaten a cruller to the best of my knowledge) and that I could never eat on the street again. And I haven’t, except for an occasional ice cream cone. By the way — and speaking of eating on the street — there are far too many people walking around carrying cups of coffee.

Q: Is eating while driving more dangerous than tweeting or texting?

A: It’s way more dangerous if a knife and fork are involved.

Q: Is it bad to eat while you’re on the phone?

A: I’m afraid it is. But sometimes you just can’t help yourself, especially when it comes to nuts.

Q: Is noshing in bed always wrong?

A: Not if it’s ice cream.

Q: Is there anyplace you should never eat — elevator, bathroom, hair salon?

A: All of the above.

Q: You told Ariel Levy of The New Yorker that your husband, the writer Nick Pileggi, has “some insane position about not eating standing up.” What’s that about?

A: He has nice ties.

Q: Aside from your own films, what’s your favorite eating scene in movies?

A: The dinner in “Big Night” where the timballo was served.

Q: You brought some red thing in a bottle to a restaurant where we ate once. When should you bring your own refreshments to restaurants?

A: I don’t drink that red thing anymore and I’ve managed to forget its name. Now I take Coke Zero to restaurants.

Q: What’s your favorite cooking tool?

A: I love the microwave oven. It’s great, for example, for melting chocolate, and because you do it in a Pyrex dish, there’s no horrible pot to clean.

Q: Carol Smith of Elle says she doesn’t hire anyone without taking them out to a meal first because it’s “like a little microcosm of life. How they order, what they order. How are they going to give instructions to a waiter? Are they sending back the meal eight times?”

A: When I was trying desperately to get a studio to let me direct my first movie, I went to lunch at the Russian Tea Room with Joe Roth, who was running 20th Century Fox at the time. I told him exactly what to order (the cabbage borscht, which was delicious), and he always says that’s why he let me make the movie.

Q: How about the case of the South Carolina mother who got arrested for criminal neglect because her 14-year-old son weighed 555 pounds?

A: There is far too much arresting of people going on. Not just Skip Gates — a couple of weeks ago, some poor woman in Montauk was arrested in her bathing suit, marched off the beach and charged with a felony for forging a beach parking sticker.

Q: What do you think of the current generation of celebrity chefs?

A: I love cooking shows like Ina Garten’s and Nigella Lawson’s, but the restaurant chefs on television are so unconnected to home cooking that even people like me, who are competent cooks, feel daunted by them. What Julia Child did was to make people think that if she could cook, they could, too. These chefs do the exact opposite. And all this stacking up of food — what is this about? I don’t want my string beans leaking into my chicken, much less sitting underneath it.

Q: Who is the next Julia Child?

A: There will never be anyone like Julia Child.

Q: The New Yorker described you as someone who eats “slowly” in “small, tidy bites.” What should we infer from that?

A: That I want my meals to last forever.

Q: What would your last meal be, if you got executed for killing a moody actor?

A: A hot dog from Nate ’n Al’s delicatessen in Beverly Hills.

The former cult leader and and convicted murderer has asked fellow inmate Spector to collaborate on some songs

Convicted cult leader Charles Manson is reported to have reached out to convicted music producer Phil Spector, suggesting that the two jailbirds collaborate on pop songs. Both men are serving life sentences in institutions in the central California city of Corcoran.

According to the New York Post, Manson, who is in Corcoran State Prison, is said to have contacted Spector shortly after the producer arrived last month at the California Substance Abuse Treatment Facility and State Prison in Corcoran, dispatching a guard with a note. “[Manson] said he wanted him to come over to his [cell],” Spector’s wife, Rachelle, told the New York Post – an assertion later disputed by California’s department of corrections. “He said he considers Philip the greatest producer who ever lived.”

Certainly Manson has a right to an opinion. Though his clan, the Manson Family, are known as killers, they were also conceived as a music group. Before launching the murder conspiracy that killed Sharon Tate, Manson and his followers recorded songs with the Beach Boys’ Dennis Wilson. Terry Melcher, who produced the Byrds’ Turn, Turn, Turn, was another acquaintance – and a target – of the group.

Spector managed to avoid the Manson Family, mixing instead with the Supremes, Ike and Tina Turner, and Manson’s beloved Beatles.

“I think Manson wants to glean some musical advice from Phil, who was a 60s music god with his ‘Wall of Sound,’” Spector’s publicist Hal Lifson told the New York Post. “Phil’s like, ‘I used to pick up the phone and it was John Lennon or Celine Dion or Tina Turner, and now Charles Manson is trying to get a hold of me!’”

And even though Spector must serve at least 19 more years for the murder of Lana Clarkson, he is still not interested in a Manson team-up. “It was creepy,” Rachelle Spector said. “Philip didn’t respond.”

• This article was amended on 31 July 2009. The original said that Manson and Spector were in the same prison. This has been corrected, and the article updated to include a denial by the prison department.

thanks to rs

May 31-Sept 20

Benny Chan

Pasadena Museum of California Art

Benny Chan has worked diligently over the past few years to photograph overhead views of Los Angeles freeways during the height of rush hour. Using a camera designed and manufactured exclusively for this project, Chan has taken pictures from high in the sky from a helicopter and has rendered monumental sized prints. With his almost omniscient perspective, Mr. Chan explores and sheds light on the conundrum of traffic as a symptom of a society being unable to keep pace with its own expansion, while at the same time rendering a serene beauty from the chaotic scene.

PMCA

By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Times Published: July 30, 2009

At a recent town hall meeting, a man stood up and told Representative Bob Inglis to “keep your government hands off my Medicare.” The congressman, a Republican from South Carolina, tried to explain that Medicare is already a government program — but the voter, Mr. Inglis said, “wasn’t having any of it.”

It’s a funny story — but it illustrates the extent to which health reform must climb a wall of misinformation. It’s not just that many Americans don’t understand what President Obama is proposing; many people don’t understand the way American health care works right now. They don’t understand, in particular, that getting the government involved in health care wouldn’t be a radical step: the government is already deeply involved, even in private insurance.

And that government involvement is the only reason our system works at all.

The key thing you need to know about health care is that it depends crucially on insurance. You don’t know when or whether you’ll need treatment — but if you do, treatment can be extremely expensive, well beyond what most people can pay out of pocket. Triple coronary bypasses, not routine doctor’s visits, are where the real money is, so insurance is essential.

Yet private markets for health insurance, left to their own devices, work very badly: insurers deny as many claims as possible, and they also try to avoid covering people who are likely to need care. Horror stories are legion: the insurance company that refused to pay for urgently needed cancer surgery because of questions about the patient’s acne treatment; the healthy young woman denied coverage because she briefly saw a psychologist after breaking up with her boyfriend.

And in their efforts to avoid “medical losses,” the industry term for paying medical bills, insurers spend much of the money taken in through premiums not on medical treatment, but on “underwriting” — screening out people likely to make insurance claims. In the individual insurance market, where people buy insurance directly rather than getting it through their employers, so much money goes into underwriting and other expenses that only around 70 cents of each premium dollar actually goes to care.

Still, most Americans do have health insurance, and are reasonably satisfied with it. How is that possible, when insurance markets work so badly? The answer is government intervention.

Most obviously, the government directly provides insurance via Medicare and other programs. Before Medicare was established, more than 40 percent of elderly Americans lacked any kind of health insurance. Today, Medicare — which is, by the way, one of those “single payer” systems conservatives love to demonize — covers everyone 65 and older. And surveys show that Medicare recipients are much more satisfied with their coverage than Americans with private insurance.

Still, most Americans under 65 do have some form of private insurance. The vast majority, however, don’t buy it directly: they get it through their employers. There’s a big tax advantage to doing it that way, since employer contributions to health care aren’t considered taxable income. But to get that tax advantage employers have to follow a number of rules; roughly speaking, they can’t discriminate based on pre-existing medical conditions or restrict benefits to highly paid employees.

And it’s thanks to these rules that employment-based insurance more or less works, at least in the sense that horror stories are a lot less common than they are in the individual insurance market.

So here’s the bottom line: if you currently have decent health insurance, thank the government. It’s true that if you’re young and healthy, with nothing in your medical history that could possibly have raised red flags with corporate accountants, you might have been able to get insurance without government intervention. But time and chance happen to us all, and the only reason you have a reasonable prospect of still having insurance coverage when you need it is the large role the government already plays.

Which brings us to the current debate over reform.

Right-wing opponents of reform would have you believe that President Obama is a wild-eyed socialist, attacking the free market. But unregulated markets don’t work for health care — never have, never will. To the extent we have a working health care system at all right now it’s only because the government covers the elderly, while a combination of regulation and tax subsidies makes it possible for many, but not all, nonelderly Americans to get decent private coverage.

Now Mr. Obama basically proposes using additional regulation and subsidies to make decent insurance available to all of us. That’s not radical; it’s as American as, well, Medicare.

One sleep expert said naps “should have the status of daily exercise.”

By SAM ROBERTS
NY Times Published: July 29, 2009

Wake up, America! Fully one in three adults admit that on any typical day they take a nap, according to a national survey released Wednesday.

The proportion of self-proclaimed nappers was even higher among adults who had trouble sleeping the night before and who had exercised within the past 24 hours. It was also disproportionately higher among people who are poorer, black, men older than 50, men and women over 80 and among people who are not happy.

The Pew Research Center Social and Demographic Trends survey of daily activities found that people who were unemployed were more likely to nap during the week than on weekends and that those with jobs were only slightly more likely to nap on weekends.

The survey also asked whether people had trouble sleeping, presumably at night. Women were more likely to, as were people who make less than $20,000 a year and those who, regardless of their income, were dissatisfied with their personal financial situation.

The survey did not precisely define what constitutes a nap. Some people claim they are just resting their eyes when they are really snoozing. Others may doze momentarily when reading articles about demographic trends. Still others are driven to nod off briefly by the swaying of their bus or commuter train.

“Are we accurate reporters of our own habits?” said Paul Taylor, the Pew center’s director. “If you asked my grown children whether I nap, their answer is yes. Their defining image of me is in an easy chair with a newspaper in my lap, dozing off. If you ask me, my answer is no. That’s my story, and I’m sticking with it.”

Napping is still often stigmatized, for example by being associated with illness or a lack of ambition.

But many people, and experts, praise the benefits of a siesta or a power snooze. Confessed nappers include Albert Einstein, Winston Churchill, Thomas Edison and Presidents Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton.

Napping, writes James B. Maas, a Cornell University sleep expert, “should have the status of daily exercise.”

Mammals that divide their day between two distinct periods — sleep and wakefulness — are in the minority, according to the National Sleep Foundation, which pointed out on its Web site: “While naps do not necessarily make up for inadequate or poor quality nighttime sleep, a short nap of 20-30 minutes can help to improve mood, alertness and performance.”

A white roof has helped cool Jon Waldrep’s Sacramento home.

By FELICITY BARRINGER
NY Times Published: July 29, 2009

SAN FRANCISCO — Returning to their ranch-style house in Sacramento after a long summer workday, Jon and Kim Waldrep were routinely met by a wall of heat.

“We’d come home in the summer, and the house would be 115 degrees, stifling,” said Mr. Waldrep, a regional manager for a national company.

He or his wife would race to the thermostat and turn on the air-conditioning as their four small children, just picked up from day care, awaited relief.

All that changed last month. “Now we come home on days when it’s over 100 degrees outside, and the house is at 80 degrees,” Mr. Waldrep said.

Their solution was a new roof: a shiny plasticized white covering that experts say is not only an energy saver but also a way to help cool the planet.

Relying on the centuries-old principle that white objects absorb less heat than dark ones, homeowners like the Waldreps are in the vanguard of a movement embracing “cool roofs” as one of the most affordable weapons against climate change.

Studies show that white roofs reduce air-conditioning costs by 20 percent or more in hot, sunny weather. Lower energy consumption also means fewer of the carbon dioxide emissions that contribute to global warming.

What is more, a white roof can cost as little as 15 percent more than its dark counterpart, depending on the materials used, while slashing electricity bills.

Energy Secretary Steven Chu, a Nobel laureate in physics, has proselytized for cool roofs at home and abroad. “Make it white,” he advised a television audience on Comedy Central’s “Daily Show” last week.

The scientist Mr. Chu calls his hero, Art Rosenfeld, a member of the California Energy Commission who has been campaigning for cool roofs since the 1980s, argues that turning all of the world’s roofs “light” over the next 20 years could save the equivalent of 24 billion metric tons in carbon dioxide emissions.

“That is what the whole world emitted last year,” Mr. Rosenfeld said. “So, in a sense, it’s like turning off the world for a year.”

This month the Waldreps’ three-bedroom house is consuming 10 percent less electricity than it did a year ago. (The savings would be greater if the family ran its central air during the workday.)

From Dubai to New Delhi to Osaka, Japan, reflective roofs have been embraced by local officials seeking to rein in energy costs. In the United States, they have been standard equipment for a decade at new Wal-Mart stores. More than 75 percent of the chain’s 4,268 outlets in the United States have them.

California, Florida and Georgia have adopted building codes that encourage white-roof installations for commercial buildings.

Drawing on federal stimulus dollars earmarked for energy-efficiency projects, state energy offices and local utilities often offer financing for cool roofs. The roofs can qualify for tax credits if the roofing materials pass muster with the Environmental Protection Agency’s Energy Star program.

Still, the ardor of the cool-roof advocates has prompted a bit of a backlash.

Some roofing specialists and architects argue that supporters fail to account for climate differences or the complexities of roof construction. In cooler climates, they say, reflective roofs can mean higher heating bills.

Scientists acknowledge that the extra heating costs may outweigh the air-conditioning savings in cities like Detroit or Minneapolis.

But for most types of construction, they say, light roofs yield significant net benefits as far north as New York or Chicago. Although those cities have cold winters, they are heat islands in the summer, with hundreds of thousands of square feet of roof surface absorbing energy.

The physics behind cool roofs is simple. Solar energy delivers both light and heat, and the heat from sunlight is readily absorbed by dark colors. (An asphalt roof in New York can rise to 180 degrees on a hot summer day.) Lighter colors, however, reflect back a sizable fraction of the radiation, helping to keep a building — and, more broadly, the city and Earth — cooler. They also re-emit some of the heat they absorb.

Unlike high-technology solutions to reducing energy use, like light-emitting diodes in lamp fixtures, white roofs have a long and humble history. Houses in hot climates have been whitewashed for centuries.

Before the advent of central air-conditioning in the mid-20th-century, white- and cream-colored houses with reflective tin roofs were the norm in South Florida, for example. Then central air-conditioning arrived, along with dark roofs whose basic ingredients were often asphalt, tar and bitumen, or asphalt-based shingles. These materials absorb as much as 90 percent of the sun’s heat energy — often useful in New England, but less so in Texas. By contrast, a white roof can absorb as little as 10 percent or 15 percent.

“Relative newcomers to the West and South brought a lot of habits and products from the Northeast,” said Joe Reilly, the president of American Rooftile Coatings, a supplier. “What you see happening now is common sense.”

Around the country, roof makers are racing to develop products in the hope of profiting as the movement spreads from the flat roofs of the country’s malls to the sloped roofs of its suburbs.

Years of detailed work by scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory have provided the roof makers with a rainbow of colors — the equivalent of a table of the elements — showing the amount of light that each hue reflects and the amount of heat it re-emits.

White is not always a buyer’s first choice of color. So suppliers like American Rooftile Coatings have used federal color charts to create “cool” but traditional colors, like cream, sienna and gray, that yield savings, though less than dazzling white roofs do.

In an experiment, the National Laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tenn., had two kinds of terra-cotta-colored cement tiles from American Rooftile installed on four new homes at the Fort Irwin Army base in California. One kind was covered with a special paint and reflected 45 percent of the sun’s rays — nearly twice as much as the other kind. The two homes with roofs of highly reflective paint used 35 percent less electricity last summer than the two with less reflective paint.

Still, William Miller of the Oak Ridge laboratory, who organized the experiment, says he distrusts the margin of difference; he wants to figure out whether some of it resulted from different family habits.

Hashem Akbari, Dr. Rosenfeld’s colleague at the Lawrence Berkeley laboratory, says he is unsure how long it will take cool roofs to truly catch on. But he points out that most roofs, whether tile or asphalt-shingle, have a life span of 20 to 25 years.

If the roughly 5 percent of all roofs that are replaced each year were given cool colors, he said, the country’s transformation would be complete in two decades.

Institute of Contemporary Art Philadelphia
April 24 – August 2, 2009

Jazz pioneer, bandleader, mystic, philosopher, and consummate Afro-Futurist, Sun Ra, (born Herman Poole Blount 1914, Birmingham, Alabama, died 1993) and his personal mythology have grown increasingly relevant to a broad range of artists and communities. “Pathways to Unknown Worlds: Sun Ra, El Saturn & Chicago’s Afro-Futurist Underground, 1954-1968″ presents a collection of paintings, drawings, prints, manuscripts, ephemera, and video produced by and about Ra and his associates—much of it previously unseen. This exhibition examines how Ra and his dynamic, continually-evolving ensemble, the Philadelphia-based Arkestra, crafted both their otherworldly image and fiercely independent approach to self-production.

Highlights of the exhibition include original drawings for their 1960′s albums Art Forms of Dimensions Tomorrow and Other Planes of There, and five newly discovered typed and annotated broadsheets. Until recently, only one such broadsheet was known to exist—the one that Ra gave saxophonist John Coltrane in 1956. The show will also include the unpublished manuscript, The Magic Lie, a book of Ra’s poetry, which has become influential in the nascent Black Islamic movement. In addition to these documents, the film Spaceways, by Edward English, will be on view. The film documents Ra and his Arkestra (a deliberate re-spelling of “orchestra”), in 1968, as they prepare to perform at Carnegie Hall.

Early in his career, Sun Ra spent virtually all of his time and energy on Chicago’s south side, identifying with broader struggles for black power and identity, and saw his music as a key element in that struggle. As well as Sun Ra’s connection to the incipient grass-roots Afro-Futurist movement in Chicago, he also has a connection to Philadelphia. In 1968, Sun Ra brought the Arkestra to Philadelphia, where his band mate Marshall Allen inherited a house on Morton Street in Germantown. The house served as band headquarters until Sun Ra’s death in 1993. The Arkestra continues to perform under the leadership of Marshall Allen, who still resides at the Germantown house.

Institute of Contemporary Art Philadelphia

By RUTH LA FERLA
NY Times Published: July 29, 2009

MARTIN GREENFIELD roamed the rough planked floor of his clothing plant in Brooklyn recently, enjoying the familiar whir of a dozen machines. He paused abruptly to inspect the details of a custom tailored coat spread across a table, fingering a buttonhole. The hand stitching “is a signature for us, one that reads like a thank-you note,” he said.

Just the way he likes it. “I don’t even like to read a thank-you note unless it’s written out by hand,” he added.

In a career spanning more than three decades, Mr. Greenfield (photo at top) has overseen the stitching and the placement of pockets and seams in tens of thousands of garments, making his name as a tailors’ tailor. His plant in Bushwick engineers and produces 40,000 suits a year for some of the nation’s leading clothiers and for an impressive roster of private clients.

For years he labored behind the scenes to perfect the set of a sleeve or slant of a pocket for the likes of Bill Clinton, Paul Newman and Michael Bloomberg, whose photos line his office walls. Among his more clandestine assignments was to whip up a suit for Michael Jackson. Mr. Jackson, he recalled, never appeared for a fitting. “It was a kind of undercover operation,” he said. The suit, he added, fit perfectly.

As early as the 1960s, the Czechoslovakian-born Mr. Greenfield was cultivating a reputation as “tailor to the designers,” as he likes to say. Isaac Mizrahi and Donna Karan are among those who sought out his expertise. Ms. Karan, who had approached him in the ’80s to help her with men’s suits, recalled at the time that Mr. Greenfield taught her “discipline — how a quarter-inch adjustment can alter everything about the way a suit fits and feels.”

Today his cutters, sewers and patternmakers piece together blazers and tailored hoodies for adventurous labels like Band of Outsiders.

Mr. Greenfield could probably have reeled off the names of famous clients all afternoon. But more pressing things distracted him. “Look at this,” he said, pausing to watch as a worker bent over a buttonhole. “Each stitch has its own knot,” he explained, with mounting satisfaction. “Her job is to pull each knot exactly as tight as the last.” He would have it no other way.

Sterling Ruby
Fed Mortar (Rainbow) 2009

By: Melissa E. Feldman
Frieze, August 2009

Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, USA

Sipping my tea, it has never occurred to me that beneath the cup’s silky surface and pretty decoration lies hardened mud. Clay’s potential for paradox and subtext is the crux of co-curators Ingrid Schaffner and Jenelle Porter’s show, ‘Dirt on Delight: Impulses That Form Clay’, a gallop across contemporary ceramics with relevant historical figures lassoed in. Today’s hipsters (such as Sterling Ruby) mingled with yesterday’s hippies (Peter Voulkos) and kingpins of the European avant-garde (Lucio Fontana). All three, as it happens, share an affinity for gestural abstraction. That clay can feel at home in all kinds of environments explains its appeal to artists of many stripes.

Clay seems to be the last of the ‘secondary’ disciplines – coming after photography, crafts and, most recently, outsider art – to break into fine art circles. This broad cross-section of 22 artists spanning four generations is the first show I know of to survey clay’s prevalence as a primary material within a thematic and historical framework. The only prerequisite here was that clay be central to the artists’ core practices.

The levelling began with the installation. Most of the works were displayed on three white platforms the size of lap pools that put everyone on equal footing. Radiating like the prongs of a peace sign from the centre of the ICA’s hangar-like main gallery, the immediate impression of the show was impressive. Ample floor space accommodated larger freestanding works and those with custom bases.

All of the works included seemed to be animated or in a state of flux. From Beverly Semmes’ fluorescent red-orange, thigh-high ‘Shinnecock Pots’ (nos. 7, 9, 14, and 15, 2002) that are so thumb-printed they seem to shimmy, to Eugene lon Bruenchenhein’s open-work crowns and ewers (Sensor Pot, from c. 1950–80, and untitled (ewer), c. 1960), wrought from leaf-shaped wafers attached end to end, the works come into being one piece, or pinch, at a time. The generative impulse easily gets out of hand, as in Jessica Jackson Hutchins’ fanciful installation, Convivium (2008), which comprises a kitchen table sprouting a Flintstone-esque monorail in floral papier mâché upon which clunky earthenware dishes are perched.

Like an assemblage-ist’s sundae, Adrian Saxe’s exotica morph from their fecal or fungal bases into a fancy, high-fire, mid-section (such as a genie lamp in Hi-Fibre Gyno-Monocle Magic Lamp from 1997) with a quartz finial or, perhaps, a dangling dried botanical specimen on top. The piecemeal also appears where you would least expect it. In Ann Agee’s tabletop display of rococo-style figurines, Agee Manufacturing Co. (Winter Catalogue) (2008), Pippi Longstocking look-alikes breastfeed five year olds and burn their bras. Look closely to discover cake decorator’s squiggles and craft project cutouts holding the whole ruse together in shiny white porcelain.

From pot shards and amphoras to fine china and toilets, ‘Dirt on Delight’ explored how clay carries culture and history. Porcelain’s royal ancestry is the target of Jane Irish’s Sevres-inspired vases in marzipan greens and pinks, such as Vase, Poverty (2008), whose gilded cartouches feature not the traditional idylls but social realist-style paintings of cleaning ladies at work. Viola Frey’s cast and painted accumulations of kitsch collectibles contributed to Pop-era debates about high and low, while her contemporaries Betty Woodman and Robert Arneson were insisting on ceramics as a medium for painting and sculpture. Ancient history is another natural reference point for artists in the show. One example is Jeffrey Mitchell’s Asian-influenced ceramic compounds of Fu dogs, monkeys and other fauna in the midst of fruiting Bonsai trees. However, it is George Ohr’s and Rudolf Staffel’s modest cups and bowls that most simply embody the argument between baseness and beauty in play throughout the show. The former’s early experiments denting and deforming his wheel-thrown tableware are well known, but few will be familiar with Staffel’s otherworldly ‘Light Gatherers’ (c. 1967–96). In one, feathery strips and toothy bits of white porcelain coalesce – with what appears to be as little handling as possible – to form the flayed body of a small light-filled footed bowl. At once crude and confectionary, Staffel’s works add the celestial body to clay’s shape-shifting abilities.

thanks to kelly breslin

thanks to nate lentz

Nancy de Holl
Untitled, 2009
oil on canvas
20 x 16″

Matt Connors
Untitled, 2009
wood & found canvas
21 x 19″

July 21 through August 18

Parker Jones

By Lewis Segal
LA Times, July 27, 2009

Merce Cunningham, arguably the greatest, most pioneering and widely influential contemporary choreographer of the past half-century, has died. He was 90. A seminal artist that fellow choreographer Bill T. Jones called “the champion in the struggle to say that dance is its own primary language, with its own agenda and criteria,” died peacefully Sunday at his home in New York, his foundation announced in a statement Monday.

Cunningham challenged nearly every assumption about how dances are made and perceived. “Dancing is a spiritual exercise in physical form,” he wrote in 1952. Evolving over the years from a fluid and even balletic modern dance style to a technique emphasizing sudden, virtuosic changes of direction, balance and body-focus, Cunningham refused to interpret music, tell stories, depict characters or even to accept the idea of the choreographer as a kind of all-knowing god.

Instead, he used chance (throwing dice, flipping a coin) to help him discover possibilities beyond his imagination, insisting that the choreography, score, scenic design and costumes for a work should be created independently and come together only at the final rehearsals or first performance.

“Cunningham is happiest when he can create a situation in which no one knows what to expect,” Times music critic Mark Swed wrote in 2003, “not his audience, not his dancers or collaborators, not least himself.”

Refusing to accept center stage as the sole magnet of attention, Cunningham divided theatrical space into independent zones of action, believing that dance should reflect a world in which people constantly monitor many simultaneous activities. “The society is so fragmented …” he told The Times in 1997, “and I see no reason why it shouldn’t affect the way one makes a dance.”

Finally, he built a company that not only showcased his theoretical and collaborative innovations but made them exciting, surprising and deeply persuasive. “Every piece is so different in its dynamics and space and variety of language,” former Kirov Ballet superstar Mikhail Baryshnikov told New York Newsday in 1999. “No words can describe my admiration and fascination with this man.”

Mercier Philip Cunningham was born in the lumber town of Centralia, Wash., on April 16, 1919. At 8, he could perform a sailor’s hornpipe. At 12, he began studying with a former vaudeville and circus performer named Maude Barrett. “I started as a tap dancer,” he said in a 2005 Times interview. “It was my first theater experience, and it has stayed with me all my life.”

Like his father, his brothers became lawyers, but Cunningham studied acting in the Cornish School of Fine Arts in Seattle, soon switching his major from theater to dance. There he met composer John Cage, who was soon to be his lifelong personal and professional partner.

Further studies at Mills College in Oakland and at the Bennington Summer School of Dance in Vermont led to his being invited to join the Martha Graham Dance Company in 1939. For the next six years, major roles were created for him in such Graham masterworks as “El Penitente” (1939), “Letter to the World” (1940), “Deaths and Entrances” (1943) and “Appalachian Spring” (1944).

In 1944, Cunningham and Cage gave their first joint concert in New York (six solos to Cage’s music), and the following year he left Graham to freelance. Cunningham formed his own company in 1953, allying himself with leading members of the American avant-garde: painters Andy Warhol, Frank Stella and Jasper Johns, among others. Robert Rauschenberg became his first resident designer, and Cage served as music director.

Although Cunningham still choreographed to music as late as 1953, he had already come to believe in creating dances without reference to (or even knowledge of) their accompaniments. From Cage, he also developed a commitment to chance procedures.

“When you work on something that you don’t know about, how do you figure out what’s right for that moment?” he asked rhetorically in the 2005 Times interview. “Using chance can be a way of looking at what you do in another way without depending always on your memory. It helps something else to come out that otherwise you wouldn’t have known about.”

The relationship with Cage deepened into what people who knew them call one of the great (if sometimes turbulent) love stories of the age — one inseparable from the couple’s revolutionary achievements as artists. “They amazed me by their air of living for art and freedom,” critic Alfred Kazin wrote of them.

But it wasn’t a time when anyone, anywhere celebrated what amounted to a gay marriage, and, what’s more, the personal style cultivated by Cage and Cunningham left their story largely untold. “I don’t think I was guarded about my personal life,” Cunningham said to the Guardian in 2000. “John and I were together. We did our work together. We traveled together. What more is there to say?”

In 1964, Cunningham’s company made its first international tour. In Paris, “people threw things at us — eggs and tomatoes,” original company member Carolyn Brown told the Guardian in 2000. “During the interval, they went out to get more.” The reception in Venice was markedly better, and in London the company became a sensation.

London put Cunningham on the map — in the United States as well as abroad. “No performances were as crucial to the company’s future as those in that first London season,” Brown recalled in a 2001 article she wrote for the New York Times. “It’s an old story, isn’t it? Artists, unappreciated in their own land, must cross the waters and prove themselves in the Old World before being sanctioned in their own New World.”

Cunningham returned to America a recognized contemporary master, with new innovations to explore. In what he called events, for example, he took sequences from his existing repertory and strung them together to different music and new (or no) decor in free-form pure-movement cavalcades. He was still controversial within the dance community, but as British director Peter Brook wrote of the company in 1964, “the very things that are criticized, laughed at and ignored will only a few months later be imitated everywhere.”

Beginning in the 1970s, Cunningham worked extensively on dance-for-camera projects, often in collaboration with Elliott Caplan and Charles Atlas. (Atlas’ documentary “Merce Cunningham: A Lifetime of Dance” was released in 2000.)

His interest in technology took him in a new direction starting in the early 1990s, when he began using computer animation as a preliminary stage in the choreographic process. “The computer allows you to make phrases of movements, and then you can look at them and repeat them, over and over, in a way that you can’t ask the dancers to do because they get tired,” he said in the 2005 Times interview. “And you can change it and they can’t get angry at you.”

“Very often you discover something that you think is impossible. You do it, you try it out — and it is impossible. But while you’re doing it, you discover something else you didn’t know about. I always think there’s something else — not necessarily that I’m going to find it, but I know there’s always something else.”

At the turn of the century, Cunningham experimented with futuristic motion-capture technology in a work titled “Biped,” putting live dancing in juxtaposition with projected imagery developed out of the digital manipulation of movement impulses. His growing expertise in computer choreography also allowed him to create and demonstrate moves that arthritis and other ailments kept him from executing himself.

Although the winding-down process was gradual, he essentially stopped performing with his company not long after Cage’s death in 1992. But he did make occasional appearances in non-dancing roles. For example, in 2001 he played composer Erik Satie] in “Alphabet,” a radio play by Cage staged in a number of international venues. And in the 2002 revival of his 1965 dance piece “How to Pass, Kick, Fall and Run,” he and company archivist David Vaughan] read the stories that Cage wrote as accompaniments for the dancing.

Funding his company was never easy, but honors and awards became plentiful as the dance world began to accept and celebrate Cunningham’s innovations. In 1982, the French government made him a Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters in the Legion of Honor. In 1984, he was named an honorary member of the American Institute of Arts and Letters, and he was chosen the following year for the Kennedy Center Honors, the Laurence Olivier Award and a MacArthur Fellowship.

Other major honors included two Guggenheim fellowships (1954 and 1959), the Dance Magazine Award (1960), the Capezio Award (1977), the Samuel H. Scripps/American Dance Festival Award (1982) the National Medal of Arts (1990), the Wexner Prize (with Cage, 1993), the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale (1995), the Handel Medallion from the mayor of New York City (1999), a special Nijinsky Prize (2000), the Arts and Business Council Kitty Carlisle Hart ] Award (2002) and the Edward MacDowell Medal (2003).

Cunningham collaborated on two books about his work — “Changes: Notes on Choreography” (1968) and “The Dancer and the Dance” (1985) — along with creating “Other Animals” (2002), a book of his drawings and journals. Major studies of his career and choreography can also be found in “Merce Cunningham: Fifty Years” (1997) and “Merce Cunningham: Dancing in Space and Time” (1998).

By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Times Published: July 26, 2009

Right now the fate of health care reform seems to rest in the hands of relatively conservative Democrats — mainly members of the Blue Dog Coalition, created in 1995. And you might be tempted to say that President Obama needs to give those Democrats what they want.

But he can’t — because the Blue Dogs aren’t making sense.

To grasp the problem, you need to understand the outline of the proposed reform (all of the Democratic plans on the table agree on the essentials.)

Reform, if it happens, will rest on four main pillars: regulation, mandates, subsidies and competition.

By regulation I mean the nationwide imposition of rules that would prevent insurance companies from denying coverage based on your medical history, or dropping your coverage when you get sick. This would stop insurers from gaming the system by covering only healthy people.

On the other side, individuals would also be prevented from gaming the system: Americans would be required to buy insurance even if they’re currently healthy, rather than signing up only when they need care. And all but the smallest businesses would be required either to provide their employees with insurance, or to pay fees that help cover the cost of subsidies — subsidies that would make insurance affordable for lower-income American families.

Finally, there would be a public option: a government-run insurance plan competing with private insurers, which would help hold down costs.

The subsidy portion of health reform would cost around a trillion dollars over the next decade. In all the plans currently on the table, this expense would be offset with a combination of cost savings elsewhere and additional taxes, so that there would be no overall effect on the federal deficit.

So what are the objections of the Blue Dogs?

Well, they talk a lot about fiscal responsibility, which basically boils down to worrying about the cost of those subsidies. And it’s tempting to stop right there, and cry foul. After all, where were those concerns about fiscal responsibility back in 2001, when most conservative Democrats voted enthusiastically for that year’s big Bush tax cut — a tax cut that added $1.35 trillion to the deficit?

But it’s actually much worse than that — because even as they complain about the plan’s cost, the Blue Dogs are making demands that would greatly increase that cost.

There has been a lot of publicity about Blue Dog opposition to the public option, and rightly so: a plan without a public option to hold down insurance premiums would cost taxpayers more than a plan with such an option.

But Blue Dogs have also been complaining about the employer mandate, which is even more at odds with their supposed concern about spending. The Congressional Budget Office has already weighed in on this issue: without an employer mandate, health care reform would be undermined as many companies dropped their existing insurance plans, forcing workers to seek federal aid — and causing the cost of subsidies to balloon. It makes no sense at all to complain about the cost of subsidies and at the same time oppose an employer mandate.

So what do the Blue Dogs want?

Maybe they’re just being complete hypocrites. It’s worth remembering the history of one of the Blue Dog Coalition’s founders: former Representative Billy Tauzin of Louisiana. Mr. Tauzin switched to the Republicans soon after the group’s creation; eight years later he pushed through the 2003 Medicare Modernization Act, a deeply irresponsible bill that included huge giveaways to drug and insurance companies. And then he left Congress to become, yes, the lavishly paid president of PhRMA, the pharmaceutical industry lobby.

One interpretation, then, is that the Blue Dogs are basically following in Mr. Tauzin’s footsteps: if their position is incoherent, it’s because they’re nothing but corporate tools, defending special interests. And as the Center for Responsive Politics pointed out in a recent report, drug and insurance companies have lately been pouring money into Blue Dog coffers.

But I guess I’m not quite that cynical. After all, today’s Blue Dogs are politicians who didn’t go the Tauzin route — they didn’t switch parties even when the G.O.P. seemed to hold all the cards and pundits were declaring the Republican majority permanent. So these are Democrats who, despite their relative conservatism, have shown some commitment to their party and its values.

Now, however, they face their moment of truth. For they can’t extract major concessions on the shape of health care reform without dooming the whole project: knock away any of the four main pillars of reform, and the whole thing will collapse — and probably take the Obama presidency down with it.

Is that what the Blue Dogs really want to see happen? We’ll soon find out.

Nisan had a real-life girlfriend who left him, something Nemutan isn’t likely to do.

By LISA KATAYAMA
NY Times Published: July 21, 2009

Nisan didn’t mean to fall in love with Nemutan. Their first encounter — at a comic-book convention that Nisan’s gaming friends dragged him to in Tokyo — was serendipitous. Nisan was wandering aimlessly around the crowded exhibition hall when he suddenly found himself staring into Nemutan’s bright blue eyes. In the beginning, they were just friends. Then, when Nisan got his driver’s license a few months later, he invited Nemutan for a ride around town in his beat-up Toyota. They went to a beach, not far from the home he shares with his parents in a suburb of Tokyo. It was the first of many road trips they would take together. As they got to know each other, they traveled hundreds of miles west — to Kyoto, Osaka and Nara, sleeping in his car or crashing on friends’ couches to save money. They took touristy pictures under cherry trees, frolicked like children on merry-go-rounds and slurped noodles on street corners. Now, after three years together, they are virtually inseparable. “I’ve experienced so many amazing things because of her,” Nisan told me, rubbing Nemutan’s leg warmly. “She has really changed my life.”

Nemutan doesn’t really have a leg. She’s a stuffed pillowcase — a 2-D depiction of a character, Nemu, from an X-rated version of a PC video game called Da Capo, printed on synthetic fabric. In the game, which is less a game than an interactive visual novel about a schoolyard romance, Nemu is the loudmouthed little sister of the main character, whom she calls nisan, or “big brother,” a nickname Nisan adopted as his own when he met Nemu. When I joined the couple for lunch at their favorite all-you-can-eat salad bar in the Tokyo suburb of Hachioji, he insisted on being called only by this new nickname, addressing his body-pillow girlfriend using the suffix “tan” to show how much he adored her. Nemutan is 10, maybe 12 years old and wears a little blue bikini and gold ribbons in her hair. Nisan knows she’s not real, but that hasn’t stopped him from loving her just the same. “Of course she’s my girlfriend,” he said, widening his eyes as if shocked by the question. “I have real feelings for her.”

At 37, Nisan is already balding, and his remaining hair has gone gray. “I can’t eat meat because of my diabetes,” he said, chomping on a forkful of lettuce and okra. “I’m just an unlucky guy.” As Nisan and I talked, Nemutan stared demurely at her pumpkin soup. It was a national holiday, and the restaurant was packed with young families. Several mothers gave Nemutan inquisitive looks, but the majority seemed not to notice her.

Nisan told me that not long ago he had a real girlfriend, but that she dumped him. He carries Nemutan almost everywhere he goes, though he is more self-conscious about it than he may seem at first. “Some people don’t find this funny,” he said, “and it also takes up a lot of room.” He treats her the way any decent man would treat a girlfriend — he takes her out on the weekends to sing karaoke or take purikura, photo-booth pictures imprinted on a sheet of tiny stickers. In the few hours we spent together, I watched him position her gently in the restaurant booth and later in the back seat of his car, making sure to keep her upright and not to touch her private parts. He doesn’t take her to work, but he has a backup body pillow with the same Nemutan cover inside his desk drawer in case he has to work late at his tech-support job. “She’s great for falling asleep with on an office chair.” Nisan has seven Nemutan covers in total — he buys them at Internet auctions and at fan conventions whenever he finds a good deal (he paid $70 for the original). If one gets too faded and dirty from overuse, he layers a new one over it. On the day that I first met Nisan and Nemutan, Nisan was carrying a new Nemutan cover in his bag in case she needed to look fresh for a photograph. He knows it’s weird for a grown man to be so obsessed with a video-game character, but he just can’t imagine life without Nemutan. “When I die, I want to be buried with her in my arms.”

Nisan is part of a thriving subculture of men and women in Japan who indulge in real relationships with imaginary characters. These 2-D lovers, as they are called, are a subset of otaku culture— the obsessive fandom that has surrounded anime, manga and video games in Japan in the last decade. It’s impossible to say exactly what portion of otaku are 2-D lovers, because the distinction between the two can be blurry. Like most otaku, the majority of 2-D lovers go to work, pay rent, hang out with friends (some are even married). Unlike most otaku, though, they have real romantic feelings for their toys. The less extreme might have a hidden collection of figurines based on anime characters that they go on “dates” with during off hours. A more serious 2-D lover, like Nisan, actually believes that a lumpy pillow with a drawing of a prepubescent anime character on it is his girlfriend.

According to many who study the phenomenon, the rise of 2-D love can be attributed in part to the difficulty many young Japanese have in navigating modern romantic life. According to a government survey, more than a quarter of men and women between the ages of 30 and 34 are virgins; 50 percent of men and women in Japan do not have friends of the opposite sex. One of the biggest best sellers in the country last year was “Health and Physical Education for Over Thirty,” a six-chapter, manga-illustrated guidebook that holds the reader’s hand from the first meeting to sex to marriage.

Most 2-D lovers prefer a different kind of self-help. The guru of the 2-D love movement, Toru Honda, a 40-year-old man with a boyishly round face and puppy-dog eyes, has written half a dozen books advocating the 2-D lifestyle. A few years ago, Honda, a college dropout who worked a succession of jobs at video-game companies, began to use the Internet to urge otaku to stand with pride against good-looking men and women. His site generated enough buzz to earn him a publishing contract, and in 2005 he released a book condemning what he calls “romantic capitalism.” Honda argues that romance was marketed so excessively through B-movies, soap operas and novels during Japan’s economic bubble of the ’80s that it has become a commodity and its true value has been lost; romance is so tainted with social constructs that it can be bought by only good looks and money. According to Honda, somewhere along the way, decent men like himself lost interest in the notion entirely and turned to 2-D. “Pure love is completely gone in the real world,” Honda wrote. “As long as you train your imagination, a 2-D relationship is much more passionate than a 3-D one.” Honda insists that he’s advocating not prurience but a whole new kind of romance. If, as some researchers suggest, romantic love can be broken down into electrical impulses in the brain, then why not train the mind to simulate those signals while looking at an inanimate character?

Honda’s fans took his message to heart. When he admitted to watching human porn at a panel discussion in Tokyo in 2005, several hundred hard-core 2-D lovers in the audience booed with shock that their dear leader had nostalgia for the 3-D world. Later, in an interview with a Japanese newspaper, Honda clarified his position, saying that he was worried 2-D love was becoming an easy way out for young otaku, who might still have a shot at success in the real world. “I’m not saying that everyone should throw away hopes of real romance right away. I am simply saying that guys like me who have gotten to a point of no return can be happy living in 2-D.”

In Japan the fetishistic love for two-dimensional characters is enough of a phenomenon to have earned its own slang word, moe, homonymous with the Japanese words for “burning” or “budding.” In an ideal moe relationship, a man frees himself from the expectations of an ordinary human relationship and expresses his passion for a chosen character, without fear of being judged or rejected.

“It’s enlightenment training,” Takuro Morinaga, one of Japan’s leading behavioral economists, told me. “It’s like becoming a Buddha.” According to Morinaga, every male otaku can be classified on a moe scale. “On one end, you have the normal guy, who has no interest in anime characters and only likes human women,” he explained. “The opposite end, of course, is the hard-core 2-D lover.” Morinaga, a self-described otaku, didn’t have much luck with women until he became a well-regarded economist. Now he has a wife and a private office in a fancy apartment building near ritzy Tokyo Bay. “I’m a 2 — I still like human women better,” he said, a wide grin forming. “But there are many men who are on the opposite side of the scale. I understand their feelings completely. These guys don’t want to push ahead in society; they just want to create their own little flower-bed world and live there peacefully.”

For Nisan, who would probably score an 8 or a 9 on Morinaga’s moe scale, 2-D love is a substitute for real, monogamous romance. For others, just as fanatic as he, it can be a way of having more than one girlfriend at a time. Whatever a particular 2-D lover’s bent, there is a product made for him. Moe subculture has spawned a substantial market of goods centered on the desire to live in 2-D, from virtual girlfriends to body pillows to busty desktop-size figurines to cafes with waitresses dressed up as video-game characters. Every day, 2-D lovers come from all over Japan to Tokyo’s Akihabara district just to scour specialty shops and attend fan events in search of new character girlfriends to add to their collections.

I first met Ken Okayama one brisk and unusually windy Sunday morning in February, in front of a towering business hotel adjacent to Akihabara station. A tall and rather good-looking 38-year-old man, Okayama lives with relatives and works at a rural paint-application company in western Japan. He flies to Tokyo two to three times a year for the newest anime-related paraphernalia. “We don’t get a lot of anime in the boonies,” he said as he led me through a maze of nearly identical, unnamed side streets to the Gee! Store, sandwiched between a nondescript apartment building and a row of coin-operated lockers in a narrow alley. The walls were covered with kitschy posters, pillows and paraphernalia featuring wide-eyed, multicolor-haired anime girls in frilly panties and bikini tops. “There are two things you should be mindful of when buying a body pillow,” Okayama whispered as we combed the aisles, trying not to disturb the handful of other men perusing the merchandise. “First, there’s image quality. And then you have to choose one that feels good on the skin.” Polyester, for example, is less desirable than smooth knit.

Okayama was an early adopter of 2-D. He discovered anime about two decades ago when he was new to the work force and feeling suicidal. “I was having a lot of trouble,” he told me over coffee, making a slicing gesture with his hand by his neck. That’s when he encountered Sasami, a blue-haired, 10-year-old cartoon character from the anime “Tenchi Muyo!”

She lifted him right out of his misery. “It’s hard to explain in words, but it’s a feeling similar to romance. Sasami gave me the will to keep going.” Since then, Okayama has turned to 2-D for all his emotional needs — the desire to buy new anime helped him get through a period of unemployment in 2003, and his body-pillow girlfriends, whom he dates two or three at a time, consoled him when his first real-life girlfriend dumped him in 2007.

“I was steps away from getting married,” he explained earnestly when prodded about his experience. “You have to make sure you don’t hurt a real person; you have to watch what you say, and you have to keep your room clean. In Japan, it’s not O.K. to like another person if you’re already with somebody else. With an anime character, you can like one character one day and a different character the next.”

Okayama’s flings were unconsummated, but for others 2-D love is a full-fledged alternative sexual lifestyle. Several hours after parting with Okayama in Akihabara, I met Momo at a fan convention. Momo, who makes X-rated body-pillow covers and sells them through his one-man club, Youkouro, which translates roughly as Furnace of Child Love, was there on business. The convention was being held inside a stuffy warehouse filled with boxes of 8-by-10, pamphlet-style, home-brewed manga and swarmed with thousands of anime fetishists, mostly men. Many 2-D lovers are unsatisfied with what the market has to offer, so they custom-make their own fantasy goods and come to conventions to barter and socialize with the like-minded. We left the warehouse and made our way to a fancy shopping mall, where we sat down on a bench. Momo began to flip through a catalog of more than a dozen prints of prepubescent anime characters with giant doe eyes in erotic poses. I flinched when a 5-year-old girl and her father plopped down behind us, but if Momo felt uneasy, he didn’t show it. On the contrary, he seemed giddy from the great sales he’d made. “I sold four pillow covers today,” he said proudly.

Momo, whose real name is Toru Taima, has more than 150 body-pillow covers at home. His current favorite is Karada-chan, a copper-haired sixth grader from the anime “A Direction in the Day After Tomorrow.” She’s fully clothed in the cartoon, but in Momo’s imagination and thus on his pillow cover, she appears naked, her cheeks flushed, her prepubescent nipples hidden by her forearms, her white panties rolled down to her ankles. A translucent square etched onto the pillow cover censors her hairless vagina.

Every night, Karada-chan and at least two other animated preteens, drawn with large pink nipples and exaggerated labia, share a mattress with Momo, one on each side and another on top. “They’re so cute, I can’t stand it,” he said shyly. “It’s like my favorite girl comes to marry me every night. I just can’t stop thinking about them.” When Momo talks about Karada-chan, his mousy face lights up like a kid opening Christmas presents. “Her existence to me is like daughter, younger sister and bride all put into one.” Does he have sex with her? “Yes.” Is he interested in real women? “It’s not like I’m completely uninterested. But the last girl I really liked was when I was 12 years old.”

Momo told me he never looks at child porn. He lives with his sister and his 3-year-old niece, whom he insists he has no sexual feelings for. “I am not doing anything to harm anybody,” he said adamantly. “To me, these are works of art. They’re cute girls that live in my imagination.”

Momo says he hopes that one day soon, there will be a 3-D version of Karada-chan. In March, Japan’s National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology unveiled a 5-foot-2, 95-pound girl robot made “for entertainment purposes,” with an anime face and human proportions. The robot girl walked, batted her eyelashes and spoke basic Japanese. Momo is hopeful and confident that, in the very near future, this technology will be marketed. “I don’t care if people understand or not,” Momo said. “I just want them to leave me alone. I don’t have any nostalgia for reality. I’m happy living in the 2-D world.”

But not all 2-D lovers, as Toru Honda recognized, are ready to cast reality aside entirely. I couldn’t help remembering what Nisan told me, Nemutan held tightly in his left arm, as we walked out of the restaurant to the parking lot. “Of course I want to get married,” he said as we drove back to West Hachioji station listening to his favorite Eurobeat CD. “But look at me. How can someone who carries this around get married? People are probably wondering what psychiatric ward I escaped from. I would think the same thing if I saw me.” He widened his eyes in self-ridicule, then, the next moment, his expression became somber. “I’m pretty conflicted inside. People say there are some otaku who don’t want to get married, but that’s not true. Some have so little confidence that they’ve just given up, but deep inside their souls, they want it just as much as anybody else.”

If he ever does find true three-dimensional love, Nisan said, he hopes that his wife will accept Nemutan for who she is: “She is my life’s work. I would be devastated if that was taken away from me.”

Lisa Katayama is the author of “Urawaza: Secret Everyday Tips and Tricks From Japan” and blogs about Japanese pop culture at TokyoMango.com.
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A woman and a child of the Kamayurá tribe in the Amazon bathed in a lake on the evening of June 6. Members of the tribe usually bathe three times each day.

By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL
NY Times Published: July 24, 2009

XINGU NATIONAL PARK, Brazil — As the naked, painted young men of the Kamayurá tribe prepare for the ritualized war games of a festival, they end their haunting fireside chant with a blowing sound — “whoosh, whoosh” — a symbolic attempt to eliminate the scent of fish so they will not be detected by enemies. For centuries, fish from jungle lakes and rivers have been a staple of the Kamayurá diet, the tribe’s primary source of protein.

But fish smells are not a problem for the warriors anymore. Deforestation and, some scientists contend, global climate change are making the Amazon region drier and hotter, decimating fish stocks in this area and imperiling the Kamayurá’s very existence. Like other small indigenous cultures around the world with little money or capacity to move, they are struggling to adapt to the changes.

“Us old monkeys can take the hunger, but the little ones suffer — they’re always asking for fish,” said Kotok, the tribe’s chief, who stood in front of a hut containing the tribe’s sacred flutes on a recent evening. He wore a white T-shirt over the tribe’s traditional dress, which is basically nothing.

Chief Kotok, who like all of the Kamayurá people goes by only one name, said that men can now fish all night without a bite in streams where fish used to be abundant; they safely swim in lakes previously teeming with piranhas.

Responsible for 3 wives, 24 children and hundreds of other tribe members, he said his once-idyllic existence had turned into a kind of bad dream.

“I’m stressed and anxious — this has all changed so quickly, and life has become very hard,” he said in Portuguese, speaking through an interpreter. “As a chief, I have to have vision and look down the road, but I don’t know what will happen to my children and grandchildren.”

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says that up to 30 percent of animals and plants face an increased risk of extinction if global temperatures rise 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) in coming decades. But anthropologists also fear a wave of cultural extinction for dozens of small indigenous groups — the loss of their traditions, their arts, their languages.

“In some places, people will have to move to preserve their culture,” said Gonzalo Oviedo, a senior adviser on social policy at the International Union for Conservation of Nature in Gland, Switzerland. “But some of those that are small and marginal will assimilate and disappear.”

To make do without fish, Kamayurá children are eating ants on their traditional spongy flatbread, made from tropical cassava flour. “There aren’t as many around because the kids have eaten them,” Chief Kotok said of the ants. Sometimes members of the tribe kill monkeys for their meat, but, the chief said, “You have to eat 30 monkeys to fill your stomach.”

Living deep in the forest with no transportation and little money, he noted, “We don’t have a way to go to the grocery store for rice and beans to supplement what is missing.”

Tacuma, the tribe’s wizened senior shaman, said that the only threat he could remember rivaling climate change was a measles virus that arrived deep in the Amazon in 1954, killing more than 90 percent of the Kamayurá.

Cultures threatened by climate change span the globe. They include rainforest residents like the Kamayurá who face dwindling food supplies; remote Arctic communities where the only roads were frozen rivers that are now flowing most of the year; and residents of low-lying islands whose land is threatened by rising seas.

Many indigenous people depend intimately on the cycles of nature and have had to adapt to climate variations — a season of drought, for example, or a hurricane that kills animals.

But worldwide, the change is large, rapid and inexorable, heading in only one direction: warmer. Eskimo settlements like Kivalina and Shishmaref in Alaska are “literally being washed away,” said Thomas Thornton, an anthropologist who studies the region, because the sea ice that long protected their shores is melting and the seas around are rising. Without that hard ice, it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to hunt for seals, a mainstay of the traditional diet.

Some Eskimo groups are suing polluters and developed nations, demanding compensation and help with adapting.

“As they see it, they didn’t cause the problem, and their lifestyle is being threatened by pollution from industrial nations,” said Dr. Thornton, who is a researcher at the Environmental Change Institute at the University of Oxford. “The message is that this is about people, not just about polar bears and wildlife.”

At climate negotiations in December in Poznan, Poland, the United Nations created an “adaptation fund” through which rich nations could in theory help poor nations adjust to climate change. But some of the money was expected to come from voluntary contributions, and there have been none so far, said Yvo De Boer, the executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. “It would help if rich countries could make financial commitments,” he said.

Throughout history, the traditional final response for indigenous cultures threatened by untenable climate conditions or political strife was to move. But today, moving is often impossible. Land surrounding tribes is now usually occupied by an expanding global population, and once-nomadic groups have often settled down, building homes and schools and even declaring statehood.

The Kamayurá live in the middle of Xingu National Park, a vast territory that was once deep in the Amazon but is now surrounded by farms and ranches.

About 5,000 square miles of Amazon forest are being cut down annually in recent years, according to the Brazilian government. And with far less foliage, there is less moisture in the regional water cycle, lending unpredictability to seasonal rains and leaving the climate drier and hotter.

That has upended the cycles of nature that long regulated Kamayurá life. They wake with the sun and have no set meals, eating whenever they are hungry.

Fish stocks began to dwindle in the 1990s and “have just collapsed” since 2006, said Chief Kotok, who is considering the possibility of fish farming, in which fish would be fed in a penned area of a lake. With hotter temperatures as well as less rain and humidity in the region, water levels in rivers are extremely low. Fish cannot get to their spawning grounds.

Last year, for the first time, the beach on the lake that abuts the village was not covered by water in the rainy season, rendering useless the tribe’s method of catching turtles by putting food in holes that would fill up, luring the animals.

The tribe’s agriculture has suffered, too. For centuries, the Kamayurá planted their summer crops when a certain star appeared on the horizon. “When it appeared, everyone celebrated because it was the sign to start planting cassava since the rain and wind would come,” Chief Kotok recalled. But starting seven or eight seasons ago, the star’s appearance was no longer followed by rain, an ominous divergence, forcing the tribe to adjust its schedule.

It has been an ever-shifting game of trial and error since. Last year, families had to plant their cassava four times — it died in September, October and November because there was not enough moisture in the ground. It was not until December that the planting took. The corn also failed, said Mapulu, the chief’s sister. “It sprouted and withered away,” she said.

A specialist in medicinal plants, Ms. Mapulu said that a root she used to treat diarrhea and other ailments had become nearly impossible to find because the forest flora had changed. The grass they use to bound together the essential beams of their huts has also become difficult to find.

But perhaps the Kamayurá’s greatest fear are the new summer forest fires. Once too moist to ignite, the forest here is now flammable because of the drier weather. In 2007, Xingu National Park burned for the first time, and thousands of acres were destroyed.

“The whole Xingu was burning — it stung our lungs and our eyes,” Chief Kotok said. “We had nowhere to escape. We suffered along with the animals.”

Thanks to Jonathan Maghen

By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Times Published: July 23, 2009

The talking heads on cable TV panned President Obama’s Wednesday press conference. You see, he didn’t offer a lot of folksy anecdotes.

Shame on them. The health care system is in crisis. The fate of America’s middle class hangs in the balance. And there on our TVs was a president with an impressive command of the issues, who truly understands the stakes.

Mr. Obama was especially good when he talked about controlling medical costs. And there’s a crucial lesson there — namely, that when it comes to reforming health care, compassion and cost-effectiveness go hand in hand.

To see what I mean, compare what Mr. Obama has said and done about health care with the statements and actions of his predecessor.

President Bush, you may remember, was notably unconcerned with the plight of the uninsured. “I mean, people have access to health care in America,” he once remarked. “After all, you just go to an emergency room.”

Meanwhile, Mr. Bush claimed to be against excessive government expenditure. So what did he do to rein in the cost of Medicare, the biggest single item driving federal spending?

Nothing. In fact, the 2003 Medicare Modernization Act drove costs up both by preventing bargaining over drug prices and by locking in subsidies to insurance companies.

Now President Obama is trying to provide every American with access to health insurance — and he’s also doing more to control health care costs than any previous president.

I don’t know how many people understand the significance of Mr. Obama’s proposal to give MedPAC, the expert advisory board to Medicare, real power. But it’s a major step toward reducing the useless spending — the proliferation of procedures with no medical benefits — that bloats American health care costs.

And both the Obama administration and Congressional Democrats have also been emphasizing the importance of “comparative effectiveness research” — seeing which medical procedures actually work.

So the Obama administration’s commitment to health care for all goes along with an unprecedented willingness to get serious about spending health care dollars wisely. And that’s part of a broader pattern.

Many health care experts believe that one main reason we spend far more on health than any other advanced nation, without better health outcomes, is the fee-for-service system in which hospitals and doctors are paid for procedures, not results. As the president said Wednesday, this creates an incentive for health providers to do more tests, more operations, and so on, whether or not these procedures actually help patients.

So where in America is there serious consideration of moving away from fee-for-service to a more comprehensive, integrated approach to health care? The answer is: Massachusetts — which introduced a health-care plan three years ago that was, in some respects, a dress rehearsal for national health reform, and is now looking for ways to help control costs.

Why does meaningful action on medical costs go along with compassion? One answer is that compassion means not closing your eyes to the human consequences of rising costs. When health insurance premiums doubled during the Bush years, our health care system “controlled costs” by dropping coverage for many workers — but as far as the Bush administration was concerned, that wasn’t a problem. If you believe in universal coverage, on the other hand, it is a problem, and demands a solution.

Beyond that, I’d suggest that would-be health reformers won’t have the moral authority to confront our system’s inefficiency unless they’re also prepared to end its cruelty. If President Bush had tried to rein in Medicare spending, he would have been accused, with considerable justice, of cutting benefits so that he could give the wealthy even more tax cuts. President Obama, by contrast, can link Medicare reform with the goal of protecting less fortunate Americans and making the middle class more secure.

As a practical, political matter, then, controlling health care costs and expanding health care access aren’t opposing alternatives — you have to do both, or neither.

At one point in his remarks Mr. Obama talked about a red pill and a blue pill. I suspect, though I’m not sure, that he was alluding to the scene in the movie “The Matrix” in which one pill brings ignorance and the other knowledge.

Well, in the case of health care, one pill means continuing on our current path — a path along which health care premiums will continue to soar, the number of uninsured Americans will skyrocket and Medicare costs will break the federal budget. The other pill means reforming our system, guaranteeing health care for all Americans at the same time we make medicine more cost-effective.

Which pill would you choose?

A nice collection of Stig Lindberg ceramics.

A collection of Jens Quistgaard Peppermills and a Marcel Breuer “Long Chair”

If you get a chance try to stop by Sam Kauffman. A great selection of unusual objects.

Open Saturdays from 12-5 or by appointment.

Sam Kaufman Gallery. 7965 Beverly Boulevard Los Angeles, CA 90048. USA Phone: 323-857-1965. E-Mail: palaeomodern@yahoo.com

Sam Kauffman on 1st dibs

An asteroid or comet plunged into the solar system’s largest planet and left a mark that was first spotted Sunday. The event is the first of its kind in 15 years, JPL astronomers say.

By John Johnson Jr.
LA Times July 22, 2009
For only the second time in recent history, scientists have observed the results of an object plunging into the solar system’s largest planet.

The object, thought to be an asteroid or comet, left a large dark bruise that can still be seen spreading over Jupiter’s southern hemisphere, according to Leigh Fletcher, a planetary scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada-Flintridge.

“This is an incredible event,” Fletcher said in an interview. The last time something like this happened was 15 years ago, when fragments of the Shoemaker-Levy comet plunged into the huge gaseous envelope that makes up most of the planet.

Scientists were able to follow all 20 or so fragments as they entered the outer atmosphere, made up mostly of hydrogen and helium.

This time, the object that hit the planet was not observed. The first announcement of a new scar on the planet’s exterior came Sunday from amateur Australian astronomer Anthony Wesley.

As word spread, professional astronomers around the world turned their attention to the planet, which is so large it could hold 1,400 Earths. At its closest, Jupiter is about 390 million miles from Earth, four times as far as the Earth is from the sun.

Some of the sharpest observations came from the Keck II telescope in Hawaii. UC Berkeley astronomer Paul Kalas had previously requested viewing time on the telescope and used the opportunity Monday to confirm the amateur observation.

“We don’t see other bright features along the same latitude, so this was most likely the result of a single asteroid, not a chain of fragments” as with Shoemaker-Levy, UC Berkeley astronomer Franck Marchis said in a statement.

The event could help scientists better understand the meteorology on Jupiter, Fletcher said. The scar was probably a result of the object disturbing high altitude aerosols, or dust particles, in the atmosphere.

When first analyzed, it was about the size of the Pacific Ocean. Fletcher said Tuesday that the bruise was growing and would probably continue to do so until fading away in a few days or weeks.

Even at its largest, the feature will probably remain a mere blot compared with the planet’s Great Red Spot, a long-lasting storm that is twice the diameter of Earth.

The home funeral for Nathaniel Roe, 92, who died in Peterborough, N.H., on June 6. His family handled the arrangements

Chuck Lakin assembling a pine coffin in April on his home workbench in Waterville, Me.

Mr. Lakin’s bookcase coffin, which is two seven-inch-deep boxes hinged together.

By KATIE ZEZIMA
NY Times Published: July 20, 2009

PETERBOROUGH, N.H. — When Nathaniel Roe, 92, died at his 18th-century farmhouse here the morning of June 6, his family did not call a funeral home to handle the arrangements.

Instead, Mr. Roe’s children, like a growing number of people nationwide, decided to care for their father in death as they had in the last months of his life. They washed Mr. Roe’s body, dressed him in his favorite Harrods tweed jacket and red Brooks Brothers tie and laid him on a bed so family members could privately say their last goodbyes.

The next day, Mr. Roe was placed in a pine coffin made by his son, along with a tuft of wool from the sheep he once kept. He was buried on his farm in a grove off a walking path he traversed each day.

“It just seemed like the natural, loving way to do things,” said Jennifer Roe-Ward, Mr. Roe’s granddaughter. “It let him have his dignity.”

Advocates say the number of home funerals, where everything from caring for the dead to the visiting hours to the building of the coffin is done at home, has soared in the last five years, putting the funerals “where home births were 30 years ago,” according to Chuck Lakin, a home funeral proponent and coffin builder in Waterville, Me.

The cost savings can be substantial, all the more important in an economic downturn. The average American funeral costs about $6,000 for the services of a funeral home, in addition to the costs of cremation or burial. A home funeral can be as inexpensive as the cost of pine for a coffin (for a backyard burial) or a few hundred dollars for cremation or several hundred dollars for cemetery costs.

The Roes spent $250.

More people are inquiring about the lower-cost options, said Joshua Slocum, director of the Funeral Consumers Alliance, a nonprofit watchdog group. “Home funerals aren’t for everybody, but if there’s not enough money to pay the mortgage, there certainly isn’t enough money to pay for a funeral,” Mr. Slocum said.

Baby boomers who are handling arrangements for the first time are particularly looking for a more intimate experience.

“It’s organic and informal, and it’s on our terms,” said Nancy Manahan of Minneapolis, who helped care for her sister-in-law, Diane Manahan, after she died of cancer in 2001, and was a co-author of a book, “Living Consciously, Dying Gracefully,” about the experience. “It’s not having strangers intruding into the privacy of the family. It’s not outsourcing the dying process to professionals.”

While only a tiny portion of the nation’s dead are cared for at home, the number is growing. There are at least 45 organizations or individuals nationwide that help families with the process, compared with only two in 2002, Mr. Slocum said.

The cost of a death midwife, as some of the coaches call themselves, varies from about $200 for an initial consultation to $3,000 if the midwife needs to travel.

In Connecticut, Indiana, Louisiana, Michigan, Nebraska and New York, laws require that a funeral director handle human remains at some point in the process. In the 44 other states and the District of Columbia, loved ones can be responsible for the body themselves.

Families are typically required to obtain the death certificate and a burial transit permit so the body can be moved from a hospital to a cemetery, or, more typically, a crematory.

But even in states where a funeral director is required, home funerals are far less expensive.

“I think with our economy being the way that it currently is, and it’s getting worse, that many people who may not have chosen to do these types of things may be forced to because of the finances,” said Verlene McLemore, of Detroit, who held a home funeral for her son, Dean, in 2007. She spent about $1,300 for a funeral director’s services.

Some families, like the Roes, choose burial on private land, with a town permit. In most states, those rules are an issue of local control. “Can Grandma be buried in the backyard? Yes, for the most part if the backyard is rural or semirural,” said Mr. Slocum.

(Some members of Michael Jackson’s family have spoken of making Neverland Ranch near Santa Barbara the singer’s final resting place, but officials say no one has submitted an application to the California Cemetery and Funeral Bureau, which would have to approve the home burial.)

Recently, some states, with the backing of the funeral industry, have considered restricting the practice of home funerals. Oregon legislators last month passed a bill that would require death midwives to be licensed, something no state currently does.

Many death midwives are like Jerrigrace Lyons, who was asked to participate in the home funeral of a close friend, a 54-year-old woman who died unexpectedly in 1994. Ms. Lyons was initially frightened at the prospect of handling the body, but she participated anyway.

The experience was life changing, she said, and inspired her to help others plan home funerals. She opened Final Passages in Sebastopol, Calif., in 1995 and said she had helped more than 300 families with funerals. Weekend workshops for those interested in home funerals have a waiting list.

Ms. Lyons educates the bereaved about the realities of after-death care: placing dry ice underneath the body to keep it cool, tying the jaw shut so it does not open.

Mr. Lakin, a woodworker, makes coffins specifically for home funerals. Ranging in price from $480 to $1,200, they double as bookcases, entertainment centers and coffee tables until they need to be used.

He became interested in home funerals after his father died 30 years ago and he felt there was a “disconnect” during the funeral process. Mr. Lakin is now a resource for funeral directors in central Maine and a local hospice.

His coffins are sold to people like Ginny Landry, 77, who wants a home funeral one day but is content to use her coffin to showcase the quilts she makes. It once stood in her bedroom, but her husband, Rudolph, made her move it to a guest room because he pictured her in the coffin every time he laid eyes on it.

“It’s very comforting to me, knowing I have it there so my children won’t have to make a decision as to where I’m going to go,” Ms. Landry said.

During her battle with cancer, Diane Manahan also requested a home funeral, and the family did not know then how much it would help them with their grief.

“There’s something about touching, watching, sitting with a body that lets you know the person is no longer there,” Nancy Manahan said. “We didn’t even realize how emotionally meaningful those rituals are, doing it ourselves, until we did it.”

By David A. Keeps
LA Times July 21, 2009

Otto Heino, the Ojai-based master potter, educator and symbol of the midcentury California studio crafts movement who along with his late wife, Vivika, reformulated a lost-to-the-ages Chinese glaze that made him a multimillionaire, has died. He was 94.

Heino died Thursday of acute renal failure at Community Memorial Hospital in Ventura, said George Gemmingen, a friend.

The Finnish American Heino, who worked in collaboration with his wife until her death in 1995, earned an international reputation for robust yet beautiful wheel-thrown stoneware with artistically applied glazes that included glossy cobalt blues, silky reds and raspy earth tones.

In the mid-1990s, he became celebrated in Asia for a buttery yellow glaze that he and his wife had labored on for more than a decade. He claimed to have been offered millions for the formula but never sold it.

“Otto’s work is a wonderful blending of Scandinavian modernism and Japanese folk pottery,” said Jo Lauria, a coauthor of the ceramics book “Color and Fire” (2000). “He had a macho relationship with clay, and it was a badge of honor to be able to throw huge pieces, but they were always functional, emphasizing the sensuality of the glaze, the way in which it catches the light and invites you to touch it.”

Heino’s handmade vessels, which retain the ridges his fingers formed when shaping the clay, exhibit a style that was wholly his own.

Gerard O’Brien, owner of the Reform Gallery in Los Angeles, which sells the Heinos’ pieces, called the potter’s work “hearty and gutsy” and “ruggedly American.”

Still actively producing work for museums, international collectors and his home gallery until his death, Heino could throw 100-pound mounds of clay into 24-inch-wide platters. Without assistants or apprentices, he fired kilns of his own design, producing thousands of pieces a year. Those with the prized yellow glaze, popular during the Chin dynasty (AD 265 to 420), sold for $25,000 and up.

“I am the oldest, richest potter in the world,” Heino told The Times in a 2008 interview.

Though he indulged a passion for cars, purchasing a Rolls-Royce and a Bentley, Heino was also a philanthropist, donating his work and funds to ceramic institutions and the Ventura County Museum of History and Art, which staged exhibitions of his work in 1995 and 2005.

He was even more generous with his time, teaching, demonstrating and mentoring generations of potters from around the world.

Christy Johnson, director and curator of the American Museum of Ceramic Art in Pomona, said the Heinos “represented a time when the artist’s character was considered to be part of the beauty of their pieces. Their devotion to the work, to each other, and to teaching contributed to the fine quality of the work.”

Don Pilcher, a potter who studied under the Heinos at Chouinard Art Institute, said they were devoted to their craft and to passing along their knowledge as a legacy.

“They treated me, and others, like a son,” he wrote in an e-mail. “Watching Otto fire a kiln was a master class in care, precision and patience, I never saw anybody more reluctant to turn off a kiln. It was as if he were having an affair with the fire.”

Otto Heino was born April 20, 1915, in East Hampton, Conn., the fifth of 12 children of Finnish immigrants August and Lena Heino. He was raised on a New Hampshire farm where every child played a musical instrument; Otto’s was trombone. The large family survived the Great Depression raising dairy cattle and delivering milk. By the start of World War II, Heino had established a successful trucking business.

For five years, he served in the Army Air Forces as a fighter plane crew chief and a B-17 gunner.

During this time, he changed his Finnish first name, Aho, to Otto, which, along with his blond hair and blue eyes, helped him survive when he was twice shot down over Germany.

On a furlough in England, the war-weary hero visited the pottery studio of Bernard Leach, who had introduced Japanese techniques to British ceramics.

After observing the master at work, Gemmingen recalls, “Otto said, ‘If I live through this war I am going to dedicate myself to this.’ ”

After the war, Heino attended the League of New Hampshire Arts and Crafts on the GI Bill. He married his pottery instructor, Vivika Timeriasieff, in 1950.

Two years later, they moved to Los Angeles when she succeeded glazing master Glen Lukens in a teaching post at USC. Heino’s mechanical skills and education in ceramics helped him land a job with NASA working on rockets and space capsules.

In the mid-1950s, the couple lived and worked in a Victorian house on Hoover Street in Los Angeles.

“They opened a shop that sold only handmade pots and people told them they were crazy,” said O’Brien, “but they were successful and inspired other people to do crafts as a way of life.”

After a stint on the East Coast in the 1960s, the Heinos returned to California and purchased the Ojai home of a former student, acclaimed ceramist Beatrice Wood, and in 1973 established a gallery, The Pottery.

Heino earned the 1978 gold medal at the Sixth Biennial International de Ceramique in Vallauris, France, for a pot with two birds perched on the rim.

He and Vivika showed their work at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the American Craft Museum in New York, now called the Museum of Arts & Design.

Even after having a pacemaker installed in 2008, Heino remained indefatigable, telling The Times, “Never hurry, never worry. If you’re negative, you’ll never make it.”

The Pottery, which had been open to the public, has been closed.

Heino’s ashes are stored in one of the artist’s lidded jars decorated with one of his familiar birds and his renowned yellow glaze.

The Heinos had no children. Otto Heino is survived by his youngest sister, Olga Rogowski, of Canoga Park.

Memorial services are pending.

Donations may be made to Vivika and Otto Heino scholarship funds administered by Ojai Studio Artists, www.ojaistudioartists.org, or the League of New Hampshire Craftsmen, www.nhcrafts.org.

thanks to basil katz

Moonwalk memories are kept fresh at a Long Island museum.

By PETER APPLEBOME
NY Times Published: July 19, 2009
GARDEN CITY, N.Y. — Frank Pullo remembers many things about the era from 1962 to 1972 when teams of Grumman engineers and technicians in Bethpage on Long Island built all of NASA’s lunar modules, including the 23-foot-tall spacecraft that landed on the moon’s Sea of Tranquillity 40 years ago today.

Mr. Pullo, an electrical engineer in charge of testing and retesting the various systems on the modules, remembers the intricacies of verification protocols and the endless workweeks — like the wrap-up of building Lunar Module 6, when he did not go home for a week and slept in the astronauts’ trailers. But mostly he remembers the intoxicating feeling of being part of history.

“I used this analogy even then,” said Mr. Pullo, now 76, who, like many of the former Grumman engineers, works part time as a docent at the Cradle of Aviation Museum here in Garden City, where two of the four remaining modules not still on the moon reside.

“I told everyone, this is like building the pyramids, something that’s been around for 5,000 years,” he said. “It’s a first, and it isn’t a small first — going to another world — something that will be around for a long, long time.”

For a few days, we have been all awash in lunar fever (with a chaser of Cronkite nostalgia), which will have its extended 15 minutes in the media pinwheel only to disappear once again. But for Long Island, there is a more lasting question. It’s easy to forget that this was America’s first aviation center and then an early aerospace capital, where names like Grumman, Republic, Sikorsky Curtiss, Sperry and Fairchild all but defined the most glamorous, high-tech business of the mid-20th century.

American aviation was essentially born on the broad, flat, treeless Hempstead Plains. Long Island was the starting point for the first transcontinental plane flight in 1911. Most famously, in 1927 Charles Lindbergh took off for Paris from Roosevelt Field, which by the 1930s was the largest civilian airfield in America.

Twice in history, the whole world has been totally transfixed by a story of flight — Lindbergh’s flight across the Atlantic, and the Apollo 11 crew’s first walk on the moon. Long Island was central to both of them.

Roosevelt Field is now a shopping mall, and Northrop Grumman, as the manufacturer is now known, has a small operation on Long Island but does most of its work in California or Virginia, or other places far from here. So what replaces Grumman and Republic and the suburban wonks of NASA’s past? Right now, no one is sure.

In some ways, it was inevitable. There are still plenty of high-tech aviation parts and engineering design firms on Long Island, approximately 240 of which produce aircraft parts. But the big manufacturing and fabrication work that once came to Long Island was destined to move to newer areas with more land, cheaper housing and lower living costs.

Still, there’s something bittersweet about it all, particularly as Long Island gropes around for a new economic engine and a forward-looking cultural identity. In the public mind, Long Island was once Gatsby and the shore and the romance of flight. Now it’s …what? At worst it’s Joey Buttafuoco, the most iconic Long Islander of recent decades. At best, in the vision of Thomas R. Suozzi, the Nassau County executive, it’s the template for modern suburbia desperately in need of a 2.0 upgrade.

Indeed, NASA was the first great industrial triumph of suburbia. Far removed technologically and culturally from the factories of Detroit, the stockyards of Chicago or the sweatshops of New York, the green industrial campuses of Long Island, Houston and Southern California produced one of history’s crowning achievements.

Particularly in the dour mood of the moment, it’s easy to look back and see what was lost and wonder if there really is a 2.0 version that can compete with it. It is easy to be pessimistic.

Even F. Scott Fitzgerald, in perhaps the greatest American novel of them all, got it wrong in the book’s final reverie, when Nick Carraway contemplates Jay Gatsby’s failed dreams on Long Island’s Gold Coast, and the pristine New World that once captivated the Dutch explorers: “For a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.”

But, as we were reminded over the weekend in the endlessly repeated images of Walter Cronkite shaking his head, almost speechless, as men first walked on the moon, nothing — not the pyramids, not the New World — was more wondrous than the marvel of exploration produced by those Grumman engineers and their counterparts around the country 40 years ago.

You could look at it wistfully as a reminder of what was. Or you could look at it hopefully as a reminder of what could still be.

Sergej Jensen, Sigmar Polke, Stan Brakhage, Cerith Wyn Evans, Saul Fletcher, JD Williams
July 2 through August 22

Michael Benevento

Bernhard Willhelm Spring Summer 2010 Collection

Dolphins and diver in “The Cove,” a documentary directed by Louie Psihoyos, below, about the clandestine slaughter of dolphins in a Japanese seaside town.

By LARRY ROHTER
NY Times Published: July 16, 2009

LIKE many people in his generation, Louie Psihoyos was a landlubber who grew up watching “Flipper” and Jacques Cousteau adventures on television. After National Geographic magazine hired him straight out of college as a staff photographer, his admiration for the intelligence and beauty of dolphins, and for the oceans as an ecological system, grew as he learned how to dive and began to work underwater.

But none of that quite prepared him for the experience of making “The Cove,” an award-winning documentary about the clandestine slaughter of dolphins in Japan that opens July 31. The film is the first that Mr. Psihoyos — “rhymes with sequoias,” he said — has directed, and everything about it has been a challenge, from having to make the transition from still photography, to the subject matter itself, to the cloak-and-dagger techniques used to obtain images that range, as Mr. Psihoyos put it, “from the heartbreakingly beautiful to the heartbreakingly sad.”

“The Cove,” in other words, is an unconventional documentary, one that looks very much like a feature film, with the dramatic arcs and suspense one would expect in a James Bond or Hollywood action movie. And because the film contains graphic images of the mass killing of a species of animal that humans regard fondly, with images as unsettling as those of baby seals being clubbed to death in Canada, it seems destined to generate an emotional and contentious debate.

Which is exactly what Mr. Psihoyos, 52, had in mind when he began filming “The Cove” in 2005. “What I set out to do was not so much make a movie as to create a movement,” he said by telephone from his office in Boulder, Colo. “This movie is a tool to shut this thing down and end the barbarism we saw back there in that cove.”

Commercial whaling has been outlawed worldwide since the mid-1980s, but that prohibition has not been extended to smaller cetaceans, or marine mammals, like dolphins, in large part because of Japan’s opposition. As a result around 21,000 dolphins are killed there each year, according to Japanese government estimates, in places like Taiji, a small seaside town south of Osaka where most of “The Cove” was filmed

Some of Mr. Psihoyos’s footage from Taiji, which the movie calls “a little town with a really big secret,” shows local fishermen and their allies trying to block his cameras and trailing and intimidating him and his crew. The fishermen seem to fear that if images of their bloody and brutal annual harvest, for food purposes and for what they call “pest control,” become widely known, the public in Japan and abroad will be so horrified and disgusted that it will demand an end to the slaughter.

In addition to its cast of dolphins “The Cove” has a central human character: Ric O’Barry, the original trainer of the five dolphins used to portray Flipper on the mid-1960s television series. He later became an ardent environmentalist campaigner and now serves as a marine mammal specialist for the Earth Island Institute in California and is the leader of the Save Japan Dolphins coalition.

Although Mr. O’Barry, 68, may be the protagonist of the film, he makes for an admittedly flawed hero. Not content to be simply passionate, he comes across as obsessed with his cause and interested in little else. But he said he is satisfied with the way he is portrayed in “The Cove” and grateful for the galvanizing effect he expects the film to have.

“I think it’s very fair, because I am a little crazed,” he said. “I am focused like a laser beam on the dolphin captivity issue, because I helped create this mess. I think about that cove every day, because once you have seen what goes on there — not the movie but the real thing — you can’t unsee it. So maybe I have crossed a line.”

“The Cove” has the feel and flow of a feature film in part because it did not suffer from the financial constraints that often afflict documentaries. One of Mr. Psihoyos’s dive buddies is Jim Clark, the billionaire founder of Netscape, who started the environmental group known as the Oceanic Preservation Society along with Mr. Psihoyos and agreed to bankroll “The Cove” more out of conviction than a desire to add to his bank account.

Mr. Psihoyos refers to the production team he hired, which included a pair of free divers, a maritime technician and a “clandestine operations” organizer, as “Oceans 11.” At one point they asked Industrial Lights & Magic, the George Lucas special effects company, to make fake rocks that could hide high-definition cameras and microphones, which were then secretly installed at the cove in Taiji.

In addition some of the filming was done at night, with the crew in camouflage and face paint and using military-style thermal cameras to film the fishermen and police officers who were trying to keep them away from the cove. Part of that material has ended up in the film, as has footage shot from unmanned aerial drones and a blimp equipped with a remote-controlled camera.

“We didn’t need filmmakers to make this film, we needed pirates,” Mr. Psihoyos said. “The joke on the set was that we are all professionals, but not at this, and the truth is that the real heavy lifting was done by nonfilmmakers.”

Even after shooting dozens of hours of film Mr. Psihoyos wasn’t sure what he had. Early last year another dive enthusiast from Mr. Clark’s circle, the television and film actor and director Fisher Stevens, was brought on board as a producer to help sort things out.

“When we went through the footage, we all agreed that this is Ric’s story,” Mr. Stevens said. “I also saw these crazy guys trying to get their footage with thermal cameras, but I had to convince Louie, who has an amazing visual style, that he had to be in the film as the storyteller. He didn’t want to do it at first, but in the end we sat down and replotted and broke it down into acts, just like a feature, to make it as entertaining as possible.”

If a distributor can be found in Japan, “The Cove” is likely to generate controversy for reasons that go beyond the killings shown in the film. After Mr. Psihoyos asked scientists to run tests, extremely high concentrations of mercury were found in some of the dolphin meat sold in Japanese supermarkets; the same was the case for some meat labeled there as whale, which fetches a higher price, but which actually turned out to have come from dolphins.

In a country still scarred by memories of Minamata disease, which first appeared in the mid-1950s in a coastal town whose waters had been polluted by a chemical plant, that can only be alarming news. Minamata disease is a form of mercury poisoning, caused by the consumption of contaminated fish, that has killed more than 1,000 people in Japan and has been blamed for nerve damage and congenital defects in thousands of others there.

Responding by e-mail to a set of written questions, Shuya Nakatsuka, a first secretary at the Japanese Embassy in Washington who is in charge of fisheries issues, took exception with some of the main arguments of “The Cove.”

He acknowledged that the Japanese government has advised pregnant women to avoid eating dolphin meat because of the mercury but said that “there is no campaign to prevent the Japanese public from knowing about what is happening to dolphins,” and that “information about the conservation and management of dolphins and fisheries is publicly available.”

Since “each government is responsible for the management of dolphins within its waters,” Mr. Nakatsuka wrote, “the Japanese government will continue to authorize the use of dolphins at a sustainable level.”

He added that “the catch quota of dolphins is set by the Japanese government based on scientific information to maintain the stock level for sustainable use.” Because “many dietary habits and food cultures are historically established,” he wrote, it is incumbent upon foreigners “to recognize national and cultural differences.”

Ending the mass killing of dolphins for commercial purposes is not the only goal of “The Cove” however. Mr. O’Barry said he hoped that scenes filmed in Taiji, showing what he says are representatives of marine amusement parks selecting young female dolphins for purchase, training and exhibition, will also turn public opinion against the use of the animals for entertainment.

Though Mr. O’Barry’s first job after he left the Navy was at Miami Seaquarium, which led to his being hired for “Flipper,” he long ago became an adversary of the amusement park industry. He was arrested for freeing dolphins from a park in the Bahamas and at the moment is being sued for $300 million by an aquatic park in the Dominican Republic that alleges he interfered with its business.

“The misinformation in the movie is pretty devastating,” said Marilee Menard, executive director of the Alliance of Marine Mammal Parks and Aquariums, a trade group representing more than 50 such facilities in the United States and abroad. “It is not as he is saying, that all aquariums and parks are acquiring these animals. Our members have a tremendous breeding program, follow strict guidelines, condemn these practices and have none of these animals from Japan in our parks.”

Mr. Psihoyos, however, is not backing down. He said his only concern was whether a mass audience will respond to “The Cove,” which has a PG-13 rating, with the same enthusiasm that has greeted the film at Sundance and other festivals, where the response was standing ovations and queries about how to “stop the war against dolphins.”

“To translate that to theatrical success is what terrifies me,” Mr. Psihoyos said. “I’m very conscious that when you go see a movie like this, it’s not just $10 and a box of popcorn. I wanted to make sure that every frame, every second, is considered, and I believe I’ve accomplished what I set out to do. Now the scary part is trying to fill theaters.”