NY Times Published: May 4, 2011
Editorial

The killing of Osama bin Laden provoked a host of reactions from Americans: celebration, triumph, relief, closure and renewed grief. One reaction, however, was both cynical and disturbing: crowing by the apologists and practitioners of torture that Bin Laden’s death vindicated their immoral and illegal behavior after the Sept. 11 attacks.

Jose Rodriguez Jr. was the leader of counterterrorism for the C.I.A. from 2002-2005 when Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and other Al Qaeda leaders were captured. He told Time magazine that the recent events show that President Obama should not have banned so-called enhanced interrogation techniques. (Mr. Rodriguez, you may remember, ordered the destruction of interrogation videos.)

John Yoo, the former Bush Justice Department lawyer who twisted the Constitution and the Geneva Conventions into an unrecognizable mess to excuse torture, wrote in The Wall Street Journal that the killing of Bin Laden proved that waterboarding and other abuses were proper. Donald Rumsfeld, the former defense secretary, said at first that no coerced evidence played a role in tracking down Bin Laden, but by Tuesday he was reciting the talking points about the virtues of prisoner abuse.

There is no final answer to whether any of the prisoners tortured in President George W. Bush’s illegal camps gave up information that eventually proved useful in finding Bin Laden. A detailed account in The Times on Wednesday by Scott Shane and Charlie Savage concluded that torture “played a small role at most” in the years and years of painstaking intelligence and detective work that led a Navy Seals team to Bin Laden’s hideout in Pakistan.

That squares with the frequent testimony over the past decade from many other interrogators and officials. They have said repeatedly, and said again this week, that the best information came from prisoners who were not tortured. The Times article said Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who was waterboarded 183 times, fed false information to his captors during torture.

Even if it were true that some tidbit was blurted out by a prisoner while being tormented by C.I.A. interrogators, that does not remotely justify Mr. Bush’s decision to violate the law and any acceptable moral standard.

This was not the “ticking time bomb” scenario that Bush-era officials often invoked to rationalize abusive interrogations. If, as Representative Peter King, the Long Island Republican, said, information from abused prisoners “directly led” to the redoubt, why didn’t the Bush administration follow that trail years ago?

There are many arguments against torture. It is immoral and illegal and counterproductive. The Bush administration’s abuses — and ends justify the means arguments — did huge damage to this country’s standing and gave its enemies succor and comfort. If that isn’t enough, there is also the pragmatic argument that most experienced interrogators think that the same information, or better, can be obtained through legal and humane means.

No matter what Mr. Yoo and friends may claim, the real lesson of the Bin Laden operation is that it demonstrated what can be done with focused intelligence work and persistence.

The battered intelligence community should now be basking in the glory of a successful operation. It should not be dragged back into the muck and murk by political figures whose sole agenda seems to be to rationalize actions that cost this country dearly — in our inability to hold credible trials for very bad men and in the continued damage to our reputation.

Oyasuminasai
Stainless steel and enamel
21.75″ x 18.5″ x 28.5″

May 6 – 29, 2011
Opening Reception: Thursday, May 5th; 7-9 PM

La Luz De Jesus
4633 Hollywood Boulevard
Los Angeles, CA 90027-5413
(323) 666-7667

Peter Shire

Tech bubbles happen, but we usually gain from the innovation left behind. This one—driven by social networking—could leave us empty-handed

By Ashlee Vance
April 14, 2011
Bloomberg Business Week

As a 23-year-old math genius one year out of Harvard, Jeff Hammerbacher arrived at Facebook when the company was still in its infancy. This was in April 2006, and Mark Zuckerberg gave Hammerbacher—one of Facebook’s first 100 employees—the lofty title of research scientist and put him to work analyzing how people used the social networking service. Specifically, he was given the assignment of uncovering why Facebook took off at some universities and flopped at others. The company also wanted to track differences in behavior between high-school-age kids and older, drunker college students. “I was there to answer these high-level questions, and they really didn’t have any tools to do that yet,” he says.

Over the next two years, Hammerbacher assembled a team to build a new class of analytical technology. His crew gathered huge volumes of data, pored over it, and learned much about people’s relationships, tendencies, and desires. Facebook has since turned these insights into precision advertising, the foundation of its business. It offers companies access to a captive pool of people who have effectively volunteered to have their actions monitored like so many lab rats. The hope—as signified by Facebook’s value, now at $65 billion according to research firm Nyppex—is that more data translate into better ads and higher sales.

After a couple years at Facebook, Hammerbacher grew restless. He figured that much of the groundbreaking computer science had been done. Something else gnawed at him. Hammerbacher looked around Silicon Valley at companies like his own, Google (GOOG), and Twitter, and saw his peers wasting their talents. “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads,” he says. “That sucks.”

You might say Hammerbacher is a conscientious objector to the ad-based business model and marketing-driven culture that now permeates tech. Online ads have been around since the dawn of the Web, but only in recent years have they become the rapturous life dream of Silicon Valley. Arriving on the heels of Facebook have been blockbusters such as the game maker Zynga and coupon peddler Groupon. These companies have engaged in a frenetic, costly war to hire the best executives and engineers they can find. Investors have joined in, throwing money at the Web stars and sending valuations into the stratosphere. Inevitably, copycats have arrived, and investors are pushing and shoving to get in early on that action, too. Once again, 11 years after the dot-com-era peak of the Nasdaq, Silicon Valley is reaching the saturation point with business plans that hinge on crossed fingers as much as anything else. “We are certainly in another bubble,” says Matthew Cowan, co-founder of the tech investment firm Bridgescale Partners. “And it’s being driven by social media and consumer-oriented applications.”

There’s always someone out there crying bubble, it seems; the trick is figuring out when it’s easy money—and when it’s a shell game. Some bubbles actually do some good, even if they don’t end happily. In the 1980s, the rise of Microsoft (MSFT), Compaq (HPQ), and Intel (INTC) pushed personal computers into millions of businesses and homes—and the stocks of those companies soared. Tech stumbled in the late 1980s, and the Valley was left with lots of cheap microprocessors and theories on what to do with them. The dot-com boom was built on infatuation with anything Web-related. Then the correction began in early 2000, eventually vaporizing about $6 trillion in shareholder value. But that cycle, too, left behind an Internet infrastructure that has come to benefit businesses and consumers.

This time, the hype centers on more precise ways to sell. At Zynga, they’re mastering the art of coaxing game players to take surveys and snatch up credit-card deals. Elsewhere, engineers burn the midnight oil making sure that a shoe ad follows a consumer from Web site to Web site until the person finally cracks and buys some new kicks.

This latest craze reflects a natural evolution. A focus on what economists call general-purpose technology—steam power, the Internet router—has given way to interest in consumer products such as iPhones and streaming movies. “Any generation of smart people will be drawn to where the money is, and right now it’s the ad generation,” says Steve Perlman, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur who once sold WebTV to Microsoft for $425 million and is now running OnLive, an online video game service. “There is a goodness to it in that people are building on the underpinnings laid by other people.”

So if this tech bubble is about getting shoppers to buy, what’s left if and when it pops? Perlman grows agitated when asked that question. Hands waving and voice rising, he says that venture capitalists have become consumed with finding overnight sensations. They’ve pulled away from funding risky projects that create more of those general-purpose technologies—inventions that lay the foundation for more invention. “Facebook is not the kind of technology that will stop us from having dropped cell phone calls, and neither is Groupon or any of these advertising things,” he says. “We need them. O.K., great. But they are building on top of old technology, and at some point you exhaust the fuel of the underpinnings.”

And if that fuel of innovation is exhausted? “My fear is that Silicon Valley has become more like Hollywood,” says Glenn Kelman, chief executive officer of online real estate brokerage Redfin, who has been a software executive for 20 years. “An entertainment-oriented, hit-driven business that doesn’t fundamentally increase American competitiveness.”

Hammerbacher quit Facebook in 2008, took some time off, and then co-founded Cloudera, a data-analysis software startup. He’s 28 now and speaks with the classic Silicon Valley blend of preternatural self-assurance and save-the-worldism, especially when he gets going on tech’s hottest properties. “If instead of pointing their incredible infrastructure at making people click on ads,” he likes to ask, “they pointed it at great unsolved problems in science, how would the world be different today?” And yet, other than the fact that he bailed from a sweet, pre-IPO gig at the hottest ad-driven tech company of them all, Hammerbacher typifies the new breed of Silicon Valley advertising whiz kid. He’s not really a programmer or an engineer; he’s mostly just really, really good at math.

Hammerbacher grew up in Indiana and Michigan, the son of a General Motors (GM) assembly-line worker. As a teenager, he perfected his curve ball to the point that college scouts from the University of Michigan and Harvard fought for his services. “I was either going to be a baseball player, a poet, or a mathematician,” he says. Hammerbacher went with math and Harvard. Unlike one of his more prominent Harvard acquaintances—Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg—Hammerbacher graduated. He took a job at Bear Stearns.

On Wall Street, the math geeks are known as quants. They’re the ones who create sophisticated trading algorithms that can ingest vast amounts of market data and then form buy and sell decisions in milliseconds. Hammerbacher was a quant. After about 10 months, he got back in touch with Zuckerberg, who offered him the Facebook job in California. That’s when Hammerbacher redirected his quant proclivities toward consumer technology. He became, as it were, a Want.

At social networking companies, Wants may sit among the computer scientists and engineers, but theirs is the central mission: to poke around in data, hunt for trends, and figure out formulas that will put the right ad in front of the right person. Wants gauge the personality types of customers, measure their desire for certain products, and discern what will motivate people to act on ads. “The most coveted employee in Silicon Valley today is not a software engineer. It is a mathematician,” says Kelman, the Redfin CEO. “The mathematicians are trying to tickle your fancy long enough to see one more ad.”

Sometimes the objective is simply to turn people on. Zynga, the maker of popular Facebook games such as CityVille and FarmVille, collects 60 billion data points per day—how long people play games, when they play them, what they’re buying, and so forth. The Wants (Zynga’s term is “data ninjas”) troll this information to figure out which people like to visit their friends’ farms and cities, the most popular items people buy, and how often people send notes to their friends. Discovery: People enjoy the games more if they receive gifts from their friends, such as the virtual wood and nails needed to build a digital barn. As for the poor folks without many friends who aren’t having as much fun, the Wants came up with a solution. “We made it easier for those players to find the parts elsewhere in the game, so they relied less on receiving the items as gifts,” says Ken Rudin, Zynga’s vice-president for analytics.

These consumer-targeting operations look a lot like what quants do on Wall Street. A Want system, for example, might watch what someone searches for on Google, what they write about in Gmail, and the websites they visit. “You get all this data and then build very rapid decision-making models based on their history and commercial intent,” says Will Price, CEO of Flite, an online ad service. “You have to make all of those calculations before the Web page loads.”

Ultimately, ad-tech companies are giving consumers what they desire and, in many cases, providing valuable services. Google delivers free access to much of the world’s information along with free maps, office software, and smartphone software. It also takes profits from ads and directs them toward tough engineering projects like building cars that can drive themselves and sending robots to the moon. The Era of Ads also gives the Wants something they yearn for: a ticket out of Nerdsville. “It lets people that are left- brain leaning expand their career opportunities,” says Doug Mack, CEO of One Kings Lane, a daily deal site that specializes in designer goods. “People that might have been in engineering can go into marketing, business development, and even sales. They can get on the leadership track.” And while the Wants plumb the depths of the consumer mind and advance their own careers, investors are getting something too, at least on paper: almost unimaginable valuations. Just since the fourth quarter, Zynga has risen 81 percent in value, to a cool $8 billion, according to Nyppex.

No one is suggesting that the top tier of ad-centric companies—Facebook, Google—is going down should the bubble pop. As for the next tier or two down, where a profusion of startups is piling into every possible niche involving social networking and ads—the fate of those companies is anybody’s guess. Among the many unveilings in March, one stood out: An app called Color, made by a seven-month-old startup of the same name. Color lets people take and store their pictures. More than that, it uses geolocation and ambient-noise-matching technology to figure out where a person is and then automatically shares his photos with other nearby people and vice versa. People at a concert, for example, could see photos taken by all the other people at that concert. The same goes for birthday parties, sporting events, or a night out at a bar. The app also shares photos among your friends in the Color social network, so you can see how Jane is spending her vacation or what John ate for breakfast, if he bothered to take a photo of it.

Whether Color ends up as a profitable app remains to be seen. The company has yet to settle on a business model, although its executives say it’ll probably incorporate some form of local advertising. Figuring out all those location-based news feeds on the fly requires serious computational power, and that part of the business is headed by Color’s math wizard and chief product officer, DJ Patil.

Patil’s Silicon Valley pedigree is impeccable. His father, Suhas Patil, emigrated from India and founded the chip company Cirrus Logic (CRUS). DJ struggled in high school, did some time at a junior college, and through force of will decided to get good at math. He made it into the University of California at San Diego, where he took every math course he could. He became a theoretical math guru and went on to research weather patterns, the collapse of sardine populations, the formation of sand dunes, and, during a stint for the Defense Dept., the detection of biological weapons in Central Asia. “All of these things were about how to use science and math to achieve these broader means,” Patil says. Eventually, Silicon Valley lured him back. He went to work for eBay (EBAY), creating an antifraud system for the retail site. “I took ideas from the bioweapons threat anticipation project,” he says. “It’s all about looking at a network and your social interactions to find out if you’re good or bad.”

Patil, 36, agonized about his jump away from the one true path of Silicon Valley righteousness, doing gritty research worthy of his father’s generation. “There is a time in life where that kind of work is easy to do and a time when it’s hard to do,” he says. “With a kid and a family, it was getting hard.”

Having gone through a similar self-inquiry, Hammerbacher doesn’t begrudge talented technologists like Patil for plying their trade in the glitzy land of networked photo sharing. The two are friends, in fact; they’ve gotten together to talk about data and the challenges in parsing vast quantities of it. At social networking companies, Hammerbacher says, “there are some people that just really buy the mission—connecting people. I don’t think there is anything wrong with those people. But it just didn’t resonate with me.”

After quitting Facebook in 2008, Hammerbacher surveyed the science and business landscape and saw that all types of organizations were running into similar problems faced by consumer Web companies. They were producing unprecedented amounts of information—DNA sequences, seismic data for energy companies, sales information—and struggling to find ways to pull insights out of the data. Hammerbacher and his fellow Cloudera founders figured they could redirect the analytical tools created by Web companies to a new pursuit, namely bringing researchers and businesses into the modern age.

Cloudera is essentially trying to build a type of operating system, à la Windows, for examining huge stockpiles of information. Where Windows manages the basic functions of a PC and its software, Cloudera’s technology helps companies break data into digestible chunks that can be spread across relatively cheap computers. Customers can then pose rapid-fire questions and receive answers. But instead of asking what a group of friends “like” the most on Facebook, the customers ask questions such as, “What gene do all these cancer patients share?”

Eric Schadt, the chief scientific officer at Pacific Biosciences, a maker of genome sequencing machines, says new-drug discovery and cancer cures depend on analytical tools. Companies using Pacific Bio’s machines will produce mountains of information every day as they sequence more and more people. Their goal: to map the complex interactions among genes, organs, and other body systems and raise questions about how the interactions result in certain illnesses—and cures. The scientists have struggled to build the analytical tools needed to perform this work and are looking to Silicon Valley for help. “It won’t be old school biologists that drive the next leaps in pharma,” says Schadt. “It will be guys like Jeff who understand what to do with big data.”

Even if Cloudera doesn’t find a cure for cancer, rid Silicon Valley of ad-think, and persuade a generation of brainiacs to embrace the adventure that is business software, Price argues, the tech industry will have the same entrepreneurial fervor of yesteryear. “You can make a lot of jokes about Zynga and playing FarmVille, but they are generating billions of dollars,” the Flite CEO says. “The greatest thing about the Valley is that people come and work in these super-intense, high-pressure environments and see what it takes to create a business and take risk.” A parade of employees has left Google and Facebook to start their own companies, dabbling in everything from more ad systems to robotics and publishing. “It’s almost a perpetual-motion machine,” Price says.

Perpetual-motion machines sound great until you remember that they don’t exist. So far, the Wants have failed to carry the rest of the industry toward higher ground. “It’s clear that the new industry that is building around Internet advertising and these other services doesn’t create that many jobs,” says Christophe Lécuyer, a historian who has written numerous books about Silicon Valley’s economic history. “The loss of manufacturing and design knowhow is truly worrisome.”

Dial back the clock 25 years to an earlier tech boom. In 1986, Microsoft, Oracle (ORCL), and Sun Microsystems went public. Compaq went from launch to the Fortune 500 in four years—the quickest run in history. Each of those companies has waxed and waned, yet all helped build technology that begat other technologies. And now? Groupon, which e-mails coupons to people, may be the fastest-growing company of all time. Its revenue could hit $4 billion this year, up from $750 million last year, and the startup has reached a valuation of $25 billion. Its technological legacy is cute e-mail.

There have always been foundational technologies and flashier derivatives built atop them. Sometimes one cycle’s glamour company becomes the next one’s hard-core technology company; witness Amazon.com’s (AMZN) transformation over the past decade from mere e-commerce powerhouse to e-commerce powerhouse and purveyor of cloud-computing capabilities to other companies. Has the pendulum swung too far? “It’s a safe bet that sometime in the next 20 months, the capital markets will close, the music will stop, and the world will look bleak again,” says Bridgescale Partners’ Cowan. “The legitimate concern here is that we are not diversifying, so that we have roots to fall back on when we enter a different part of the cycle.”

“via”

Marc Camille Chaimowicz
Shoe Waste?
1971/2005

May 9 – July 25, 2011

Richard Aldrich, Troy Brauntuch, Manon de Boer, Matthew Buckingham, Moyra Davey, Thea Djordjadze, Aurélien Froment, Rachel Harrison, Charline von Heyl, Ull Hohn, William E. Jones, Elad Lassry, Rosalind Nashashibi, Blinky Palermo, Laure Prouvost, Steve Roden, Emily Roysdon, and Rosemarie Trockel

Novel with Ed Atkins, Marc Camille Chaimowicz, Steven Claydon, Sergej Jensen, Sam Lewitt, R.H. Quaytman, Josef Strau, and Paul Thek

Sculpture Center

By DAVID FIRESTONE
NY Times Published: May 1, 2011

Only one Republican represents New York City in Congress, and even in his 13th Congressional District, which includes Staten Island and a small southwest corner of Brooklyn, it’s a high-wire act. You can talk all you want about the need to cut federal spending and taxes when you’re in the Staten Island part of the district, but try that after crossing the Verrazano Bridge, and you’re going to need some protection.

That Republican is Michael Grimm, one of the freshmen elected in last November’s wave, and he learned that lesson rather painfully on Wednesday night in a junior high school auditorium in the Dyker Heights section of the borough. It was his first town hall meeting in Brooklyn, and it came less than two weeks after he voted for the ravaging new House Republican budget. That plan would essentially privatize Medicare, slash Medicaid and many other federal programs that are very popular in New York, and further cut taxes for the rich.

The crowd lay in wait for him with sharpened reports from the Congressional Budget Office, incendiary printouts from liberal blogs, and even a few lethal rolled-up newspapers with articles about the House plan. Mr. Grimm was left standing, but only after 90 minutes of high-decibel debate, during which a school security guard had to threaten to remove several citizens vibrating with anger about Medicare.

It began when he asked the crowd of about 100 people whether they believed the nation faced a debt crisis. A woman near the front row responded that the nation faced a revenue crisis. Someone else shouted out that taxes were too low, and a third person shouted that it was all President George W. Bush’s fault for cutting taxes on the rich. There was a big round of applause, and with that the evening became a battle of statistics and worldviews, in perhaps the only section of the city divided enough to match the national debate.

“Adjust Medicare, don’t kill it!” shouted one woman. “The program just isn’t sustainable,” Mr. Grimm said, trying to control his meeting. “That’s a flat-out lie,” said a man in a Communications Workers of America shirt.

Around the country, Republican lawmakers on recess have encountered bitter opposition as they meet with constituents infuriated at their Medicare vote. Republicans have complained that the town meetings have been targeted by Democratic activist groups like MoveOn. It’s true, but the criticism is no less legitimate than when members of the Tea Party swarmed town halls in 2009 at the height of the health care debate.

Many of Mr. Grimm’s critics at the Brooklyn meeting were wearing union shirts, or reading from printouts. One woman who almost got thrown out for shouting is a regular contributor to the Daily Kos Web site. A few said in interviews that they lived in more affluent sections of the borough. But just as many appeared to be Mr. Grimm’s constituents, and said they had grave concerns about his vote to cut the safety net while benefiting the rich.

“If this whole budget is about trying to get out of debt,” asked one woman, “then why are we still providing tax cuts to the people who need it less?”

Mr. Grimm responded in a depressingly familiar way: “What this debate has turned into is class warfare — let’s be honest about it,” he said. Lower taxes across the board would increase government revenue, he maintained, in the face of loud catcalls from those who pointed out that that economic theory has long since been discredited.

According to one show of hands, nearly half the audience voted for Mr. Grimm, and while they occasionally applauded, they were far quieter than the critics. None stood up to support his vote on Medicare. At his Staten Island meeting the next night, someone even rose to accuse him of trying to “kill Grandma.” Mr. Grimm, who won election by only three percentage points in 2010 (and who lost the Brooklyn section) may find his vote makes the task quite a bit harder in 2012.

Untitled #8 (2011)
Ceramic, 8″ by 5″ by 5″

“Stonehenge”

May 1 through May 31, 2011

Stan Bitters “Stonehenge”

The daring German filmmaker Werner Herzog once walked a thousand miles to propose to a woman. He once plotted to firebomb his leading man’s house and once ate his own shoe to square a bet. He once got shot in the stomach during a TV interview, then insisted on finishing.

By Chris Heath
May 2011
GQ Magazine

Today Werner Herzog has chosen to be interviewed indoors. Perhaps it’s for the best. One of the more puzzling and improbable moments in the legendary 68-year-old German director’s career, and there have been many, came when he was doing a filmed interview for a BBC program called The Culture Show in 2006. He was standing a few miles from here on some barren scrubland in the Hollywood Hills, chosen so that the city of Los Angeles would be the backdrop falling away behind him, and he was explaining how nobody seems to care about his films in Germany when an unexpected noise interrupted him. Herzog flinched. Understandably so, because he had just been shot.

It has never been established who was doing the shooting—if it was more than just someone with an air rifle taking a random pop at a stranger for fun, it may have been because Herzog and the film crew were trespassing. Afterward, Herzog refused to call the police, fearing a SWAT-type overreaction, and he also declined, for the same reason, to seek medical help. Still, the pellet made its mark—under his mauve and pink windmill-motif boxer shorts, now blood-blotted, was a seeping entry wound near Herzog’s groin.

This shooting is an event he still chooses to play down—”It was kind of insignificant”—although I get the sense he also quite likes the opportunity to play it down. “It was just very silly,” he insists. “I have been shot at, without being hit, much more seriously. What I experienced here was completely harmless.” Barely worth noting. Though when I persist in challenging him to name one other person who has ever been shot in this way while doing a TV interview in America, he naturally has no answer. “The funny thing is, people sometimes believe I make things up, and nobody would believe it if it hadn’t been caught on tape. Nobody would have believed it.”

He is right. It seemed so unlikely, so preposterous, and yet somehow so perfectly Herzog. So much so, I tell him, that I think some people still suspect it was a great stunt he’d somehow arranged.

“You may speculate as much as you want,” says Herzog, a man whose own work frequently involves fascinating juxtapositions of fact and fantasy, and who is long accustomed to drawing such suspicions. In 2005 he made an acclaimed documentary about a man called Timothy Treadwell who tried to live alongside, and was ultimately killed and eaten by, bears in Alaska. The film was built around footage Treadwell had filmed of himself with the bears. Or so Herzog said. “You find on the Internet,” he recounts, “that the film Grizzly Man is all done in a studio with digital effects: ‘No man walks three feet toward a bear and even touches his nose.’ There’s a massive following of this idea. People believe it was digital effects and that it was Peter Jackson in New Zealand who ultimately made the film.” This seems to please him.

For what it’s worth, I don’t think there’s even a chance that Herzog faked Treadwell’s home movies (the contents of Treadwell’s footage were well-known before Herzog’s documentary), let alone set up his own Hollywood Hills shooting, even if he’s somewhat attracted by the absurdity of people believing he might have. (The indoor space he has chosen for our meeting, the Museum of Jurassic Technology, is a kind of grand, wonderful art project masquerading as a conventional museum and thrives on a similar spirit; he calls it “my favorite place in America.”) But these days, he also finds himself surrounded by other kinds of fictions. “I find it interesting that there are impostors out on the Internet,” he says, “pretending to be Werner Herzog.”

He partly means the kind of mundane wannabes who set up competing Werner Herzog Facebook pages, but more interesting are those impersonators exploiting a public fascination with Herzog’s way of speaking English, in a Bavarian accent with its own very distinctive, mannered enunciation that has become familiar from his documentaries. “My voice,” he notes, “has become kind of notorious.” This recent epidemic of faux-Herzog narration appears to have begun with YouTube videos in which imitators read aloud children’s books such as Curious George, Where’s Waldo?, and Winnie the Pooh, wherein his clipped Teutonic tone—methodical, world-weary, and as stoic as he can manage to be in the face of mankind’s annoying idiocy, but still somehow also grouchily acceptant that there may yet be wonder in the universe—seems both hilarious and poignant.

“It’s mushrooming,” he says of all this imitation. “What it’s about I don’t know, but I welcome it, because I see them as some kind of protectors around me. As though they were bodyguards.”

Like Saddam Hussein’s?

He nods. “The doppelgängers. The paid stooges, shielding me.”

As for that one insignificant Hollywood- hillside projectile that nonetheless got through, Herzog concedes that he does still have a slight scar.

“It still hurts,” he says, “when I laugh very hard. Slightly. I feel the spot here. Don’t make me laugh too hard.”

One’s first instinct is that this probably won’t be the greatest challenge to be faced when interviewing Werner Herzog.

···

Herzog’s original renown came from the innovative, unconventional, and often mysterious feature films he released in the ’70s and early ’80s—movies like Aguirre, Wrath of God; Stroszek; Even Dwarfs Started Small; and, most famously, Fitzcarraldo. It’s hard to remember now that there was a time, not just before Netflix but before VHS home video, when most movies were secrets. Movies with special images and weird dissonant ways of looking at the world could usually be seen only with great effort, typically when they came to the one cinema in town that catered to the arty college crowd; even the keenest movie fan might have to wait many years to see every film by a favorite director. Herzog’s were the kind of films that thrived in such a world. They may at times have been narratively oblique and frustrating, but they would contain moments—sometimes of great beauty and vision, and sometimes of surreal jarring oddness—that many who saw them would hold within and cherish for years.

The myth of his movies was compounded by the myth of Herzog himself; over time he became almost as famous for the stories of what happened during the making of his movies as for the movies themselves, particularly the two he made in the Peruvian Amazon, Aguirre and Fitzcarraldo. Fitzcarraldo took several years to complete and was beset by obstacles, and its on-screen story—the tale of an ambitious delusional man with a crazy dream to carry a ship from one river to another over a jungle-covered mountain—seemed to also become the story of its making. (Characteristically, Herzog decided that the best way to film a ship being moved over a mountain deep in the rain forest was to actually move a ship over a mountain deep in the rain forest, and film it.) From such stories, and from the intense and obsessive man Herzog seemed to be in the interviews he would give back then, the perception grew that he might genuinely be crazy.

Even now, though he rejects the conclusion, Herzog seems to simultaneously encourage and discourage such talk. “I read something very beautiful,” he tells me. “A journalist writing on the Internet when I did the film My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done, and David Lynch was the executive producer. And it said, beautifully, ‘The potentially insane David Lynch is finally teaming up with the certified insane Werner Herzog.’ I found this totally wonderful. I find it kind of humorous, and it appeals to a kind of opinion out there that I must be insane, because I moved a ship over a mountain and things like that. And of course my answer to that is: ‘I have seen many other colleagues in filmmaking, and I am the only one who is clinically sane.’ ”

Likewise, Herzog suggests that he has been making movies for the mass market all along. He has a phrase that he likes to use: the secret mainstream. “All my films are mainstream,” he asserts. “Sometimes people fail to notice that.” I take this as both an assertion and a provocation, for the world’s failure to notice this has been at times emphatic. But there are signs recently that the gap is narrowing. In the past few years he has made feature films starring Christian Bale (the surprisingly straitlaced Rescue Dawn) and Nicolas Cage (the wonderfully demented Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans), and two well-received documentaries, Grizzly Man and his Oscar-nominated exploration of life in the Antarctic, Encounters at the End of the World.

His latest film, Cave of Forgotten Dreams, is a documentary about the oldest paintings known to man. Chauvet cave, which had been closed off by a rockfall about 20,000 years ago, was discovered in southern France in 1994 and has remained off-limits to all but a few chosen scientists who may only study the images on its walls for a few weeks each year. Because this is a film by Werner Herzog, much of it is made up of respectful and almost reverent footage of the paintings and of thoughtful if also typically idiosyncratic encounters with their guardians and studiers, but it is also a movie that ends with footage of some albino crocodiles swimming in a nearby but otherwise unrelated French eco-park over which Herzog’s voice can be heard wondering what the reptiles would make of the paintings.

It is also in 3-D.

Herzog’s producer first suggested this. “I immediately had the feeling it was a wrong idea,” Herzog tells me. Later, when he realized just how deeply integrated the images were into the extreme contours of the rockfaces—”such a drama of formations and bulges and protrusions and niches and pendants”—he changed his mind. Completely. It was, he then decided, “the only way to do it.”

Nonetheless, he remains a skeptic about 3-D generally, though he has only seen one other movie from the modern 3-D era: Avatar. (He’s not a big consumer of modern popular culture. When he was recently asked to appear in a long-running TV show, he asked for the network to send over a DVD—Herzog was, it turns out, the last man in America to see The Simpsons.) Though he says he appreciated Avatar’s “sheer fireworks,” he also says that he found them exhausting enough that he had to take off the glasses every now and then and that he thought the use of regular action-movie quick editing was a mistake.

And aside from that?

“I don’t like the storytelling, the kind of New Age climate that it creates, which I just can’t stand.”

You didn’t feel chastened as part of a cruel, exploitative, invasive race?

“I didn’t. But it doesn’t matter.”

Did you care what happened?

“No.”

Explaining his own film, Herzog says, “I follow my own fascinations….” He also has a story about how he saw a book of cave paintings in a shop when he was a child and saved up for six months to buy it. But when I ask him to consider why he has always been fascinated by cave paintings, he looks at me as though I have just said something slightly distasteful. (Steady yourself. We are only seconds away from tumbling down a vortex and toward our first real-life glimpse of the world as seen by Werner Herzog.)

“Oh, I don’t want introspection,” he demurs. “I don’t like to look at myself.”

Why?

“I’ve always been suspicious. I don’t even look into my face. I shaved this morning, and I look at my cheeks so that I don’t cut myself, but I don’t even want to know the color of my eyes. I think psychology and self-reflection is one of the major catastrophes of the twentieth century. A major, major mistake. And it’s only one of the mistakes of the twentieth century, which makes me think that the twentieth century in its entirety was a mistake.”

What’s the mistake with psychology and self-reflection?

“There’s something profoundly wrong—as wrong as the Spanish Inquisition was. The Spanish Inquisition had one goal, to eradicate all traces of Muslim faith on the soil of Spain, and hence you had to confess and proclaim the innermost deepest nature of your faith to the commission. And almost as a parallel event, explaining and scrutinizing the human soul, into all its niches and crooks and abysses and dark corners, is not doing good to humans. We have to have our dark corners and the unexplained. We will become uninhabitable in a way an apartment will become uninhabitable if you illuminate every single dark corner and under the table and wherever—you cannot live in a house like this anymore. And you cannot live with a person anymore—let’s say in a marriage or a deep friendship—if everything is illuminated, explained, and put out on the table. There is something profoundly wrong. It’s a mistake. It’s a fundamentally wrong approach toward human beings.”

And so if humans persist in this way…?

“They persist in stupidity, then.”

And what will the consequence be?

“For example, for me, I could never ever be with a woman who is three times a week with a psychiatrist. It’s like an iron curtain between us. Like venetian blinds rattling down.”

I don’t know if it’s related, but you’ve previously mentioned an intense antipathy to yoga classes. Could you be with a woman who did yoga?

“Of course not. Of course not. I think there should be holy war against yoga classes. It detours us from real thinking. It’s just this kind of…feeling and floating and meditation and whatever. It’s as tourism in religions. People all of a sudden becoming Buddhist here in Los Angeles.”

For the record, the principal reason Herzog gives for living in Los Angeles is his marriage to the 41-year-old photographer Lena, his third wife. But I think he also enjoys people’s surprise at finding him here. As he argued a couple of years back during an event at the New York Public Library: “The last half century, almost every single important cultural trend and technological trend originated from California—like computers, like the free-speech movement, like accepting gay and lesbian people as an integral part of society…on and on and on.” Los Angeles, he likes to tell people, is the only city in America with any real substance.

···

To propose to his first wife, Herzog traveled on foot about a thousand miles, across the Alps. (Herzog, who had made several other such journeys, is insistent that this not be referred to as walking. “Traveling on foot,” he says. “Walking is something different.”) He went because he had something important to ask. When I press him to explain further, he says: “There are certain things out there that a manly man has to do in his life, at least once.”

Years ago Herzog declared that if he ever opened a film school, people should have to travel by foot from Madrid to Kiev before even being permitted to apply. In the past couple of years, he has finally created such a school—he calls it the Rogue Film School—which exists as occasional weekend seminars popping up around the globe. Though the actual application process is not as strident as he’d once anticipated—not quite—his policy hasn’t wavered in spirit. “Three months traveling on foot, let’s say, which would be something like 3,000 kilometers,” he declares, “would have more value than three years in film school.”

Point four of the school’s online rules forcibly clarifies this: “The Rogue Film School will not teach anything technical related to filmmaking.” Other points illuminate aspects of Herzog’s aesthetic, attitude, and method. There are taboos (one of which will be already familiar): “Censorship will be enforced. There will be no talk of shamans, of yoga classes, nutritional values, herbal teas, discovering your Boundaries, and Inner Growth.” There are compulsory and voluntary reading lists. (On the former, Virgil and Hemingway. On the latter, the Warren Commission Report into the JFK assassination: “A most fantastic crime story—a most conclusive, most intelligent thing that human mind can ever put together,” Herzog tells me. “It’s a fantastic piece of human ingenuity.” He declares that anyone who has actually read it has no doubt that Oswald did it, and did it alone. “Everybody raves and rants against it, and nobody has read it, including those like Oliver Stone who has made a film on the assassination. He has not read it. I know it because I asked him. Oh no, he is not reading this kind of crap. I said, ‘You’re wrong, and shame on you.’ “) There is also a list of applicable skills for would-be filmmakers. As well as traveling on foot, these include the art of lock-picking, the creation of your own shooting permit, and the neutralization of bureaucracy.

Another skill Herzog has advocated for filmmakers (and, I suspect, pretty much anyone else whom he considers truly worthy of respect) is the ability to milk a cow: “If an actor knows how to milk a cow, I always know it will not be difficult to be in business with him.” Herzog has also previously claimed that when he walks into a room, he can tell who in there has previously had hand to udder. Or, at the very least, would.

“I can tell from miles away, yes,” he confirms. “Woody Allen is not ever going to milk a cow.”

···

Much of the mythology surrounding Herzog’s early work is entwined with that surrounding the lead actor in five of Herzog’s best films, Klaus Kinski. It’s hard to think of two other regular collaborators who insulted each other so much in their public writings and statements. Here is how Kinski first describes Herzog in his autobiography: “His speech is clumsy, with a toad-like indolence, long winded, pedantic, choppy…. It takes forever and a day for him to push out a clump of hardened brain snot. Even if his vocal cords were sliced through, he’d keep talking like a ventriloquist. Even if his throat were cut and his head were chopped off, speech balloons would still dangle from his mouth like gases emitted by internal decay.” It goes on like this for pages and pages, for years and years: “I’ve never in my life met anybody so dull, humourless, uptight, inhibited, mindless, depressing, boring and swaggering…the spawn of his megalomania, which he mistakes for genius. Herzog is a miserable, hateful, malevolent, avaricious, money-hungry, nasty, sadistic, treacherous, cowardly creep…. He’s the same decaying garbage heap that he was ten years ago—only more moronic, more mindless, more murderous.” And so on.

Kinski died in 1991, and Herzog has long claimed that they actually colluded on some of these descriptions, Herzog helping Kinski to find ever-more-insulting synonyms. He points out that, for all the harsh words hurled, they kept working together: “He refused offers by Fellini, Kurosawa, others. It was clear to him that the films we made would define him. Why does he refuse an offer by Fellini, for example? Because he thought he made bad films. And I share his opinion.”

Still, there was also genuine enmity and contempt at times in their relationship, and sometimes more than that. One of these moments came near the end of their first collaboration, Aguirre, Wrath of God, when Kinski announced that he was leaving the Peruvian jungle and abandoning the film. Herzog took Kinski aside and told him: “You leave this jungle now and you’ll find eight bullets in you. The ninth one is for me.” And he has always insisted that he absolutely meant what he said and that Kinski knew that he did, which was why he stayed.

When I ask him about this, Herzog says that he had thought through this scenario months before. “And I had very clearly thought about even the unthinkable. I had made up my mind months before it came to that moment. So there was no thinking at all, there was no emotion at all. I was talking to him in a very low voice—he barely could hear me.”

But if he had called your bluff and carried on leaving? You really think you would have…?

[pause] “I don’t want to speculate about it anymore. I only can say in retrospect when I look back at this moment, yes, I think I would have shot him.”

The thing that puzzles me, and maybe I’m being too logical about it, is that you don’t win by shooting him.

“Of course not. It had to do with a duty. A duty that was much higher than the two of us. Violating a duty—that’s what I would not… [pause] like to allow.”

In the documentary that Herzog made about Kinski after his death, My Best Fiend, he alludes in passing to one other time when he sincerely entertained murderous thoughts toward his leading man, when he planned to firebomb Kinski’s house until deterred by Kinski’s dog. I’d like to know more.

“We had plans to kill each other, strangely enough, at exactly the same time,” Herzog begins, a little hesitantly. “But you have to see it as these beautiful plots, like in a detective story, and those were mostly plots, I would say, in sheer fantasy. But at some moment it got closer than just a pure fantasy.”

What were you going to do?

[pause] “Well, as I said, I plotted to kill him.”

Did you actually have the firebomb?

[long pause] “I can’t answer that. I only can answer that he had this very vigilant shepherd dog, and the presence of the shepherd dog dissuaded me.”

But no man goes to firebomb a house and gets close enough to be dissuaded by a dog without having a device ready to do the deed—would that be a fair observation?

He wriggles a little on his seat and laughs nervously. “I’m sorry, but you have to start speculating now yourself.”

Is this some sense of self-preservation?

“To firebomb Kinski?”

No, not explaining further. Do you not want to explain because it is incriminating? Or embarrassing?

“Well, there is a certain embarrassment about it, let’s face it. But it certainly had its funny side to it as well. Like in Italian comedies in the ’50s when the bank robbers tried to drill through a wall into the bank and they end up in the kitchen with their own people having a glass of wine. It had elements of a farce.”

I think the exact moment it stops being a farce is probably when a bomb goes off.

“Yeah, and let’s face it, it still remains a farce, and I’m glad, and let’s live with that.”

Do you think you ever could have done something like that?

[pause] “I can’t answer that.” [I begin to talk about something else but he interrupts me.] “But let me say one more thing. Those were the times decades back. In a way I have matured. And I’m a very fluffy…at least a fluffy husband. You have to ask my wife.”

So you’re not completely proud of every way that you were?

“Of course not.”

···

There is certainly a sternness and an intellectual ferocity about Herzog, but that is not the whole story. Our conversation is punctuated by more laughter than you’d imagine, if not of an intensity to irritate old wounds, and there is also a quite unexpected sweetness and gentleness about him.

It is Herzog who brings up the moment captured on film in Burden of Dreams, the documentary made about the filming of Fitzcarraldo—”a moment which I still feel very strongly inside of me”—where he suggests, after a series of trials and mishaps and disasters, that he should no longer make movies anymore and that perhaps he would be better to go straight to an insane asylum. “Or I should do something more dignified,” he reflects. “A grown-up man should do something more dignified. You never see a cattle rancher who is not dignified. You never see a farmer who grows wheat and is not dignified. No one is undignified for raising cattle, and filmmakers are.”

You still think that?

“Yes.”

And you feel yourself undignified, being a filmmaker?

“It’s always borderline. You have to look at yourself, and you know there is something very, very strange about what you are doing.”

When you look at other filmmakers, do you think they are engaged in something that—

He interrupts me. “Always, always the same. And you can straightaway, when you see films on filmmakers—they’re always, always embarrassing. Including me. I cannot elude that embarrassment, either. I do not feel it as deeply as others should feel who have an ego problem and play the king on the hill, the genius behind the camera. That’s an additional embarrassment. But when you look at movies made about filmmakers, they are without exception embarrassments.”

I suppose the counterargument should be something about this glorious role as a grand storyteller, the spinner of illusions.

“There is nothing glorious about making a film. It is an endless sequence of banalities.”

With a magical goal?

“Yes. But shooting a film itself is nothing but banalities. [Then, as though reluctantly, he continues.] However, there’s very rare moments where I get the feeling sometimes I’m like the little girl in the fairy tale who steps out into the night, in the stars, and she holds her apron open, and the stars are raining into her apron. Those moments I have seen and I have had. But they are very rare.”

Untitled #2, 2008, from the series “The Dog and The Wolf”

Through April 30, 2011

Stephen Bulger

“Arrest at Los Angeles Federal Building Protest”, 1965

Opening, April 16, 6 – 8 pm
Exhibition continues through May 16, 2011

Michael Kohn

Paul Krugman’s lonely crusade.

By Benjamin Wallace-Wells
New York Magazine Published Apr 24, 2011

If you are looking not only for clues into Barack Obama’s character but for a definition of what his presidency will mean to the country, then the speech on fiscal policy that he delivered at George Washington University the Wednesday before last is the most significant one he has ever given. It is, in its own way, an astonishing document, alive with the themes that undergirded his Philadelphia speech on race and his Nobel Prize acceptance, on the tragic enmeshment of American limitations and American strength. Obama was responding mostly to the Republican budget plan, and he understood exactly what its author, Representative Paul Ryan, had in his sights: “This vision,” Obama said, “is less about reducing the deficit than it is about changing the basic social compact in America.”

And yet, having defined the fight so starkly, Obama delivered a plea for compromise. He ended a stirring defense of the welfare state by explaining his plans to gut it. Then he said that even this proposed $2 trillion cut in government spending was only a starting point for negotiation: “I don’t expect the details in any final agreement to look exactly like the approach I laid out today,” he said. “This is a democracy; that’s not how things work.” There were notes of deference, and passivity: If Obama believed that his vision of society was at stake, why place it so squarely on the partisan bargaining table—or why not at least begin with a stronger gambit? This was, at any rate, the point of view of one particular strain of liberal reaction, whose position was summed up with poignant resignation by New York Times columnist Paul Krugman. “I could live with this as an end result,” he wrote. “If this becomes the left pole, and the center is halfway between this and Ryan, then no.”

For the first two years of the Obama administration, Krugman has been building, in his columns and on his blog, not just a critique of this presidency but something grander and more expansively detailed, something closer to an alternate architecture for what Obamaism might be. The project has remade Krugman’s public image, as if he had spent years becoming a chemically isolate form of himself—first a moderate, then an anti-Bush partisan, and now the leading exponent of a kind of liberal purism against which the compromises of the White House might be judged. Krugman’s counterfactual Obama would have provided far more stimulus money and would have nationalized Citigroup and Bank of America. He would have written off Republicans and worked only with Democrats to fashion a health-care reform bill that included a so-called public option. The president of Krugman’s dreams would have made his singular long-term goal the preservation of the welfare state and the middle-class society it was designed to create.

This purism is not a role Krugman is altogether comfortable with, but it is one he has sought: His blog is titled The Conscience of a Liberal. He uses it as a kind of workroom for his column, and it is now, according to Technorati, the most popular single-author blog online—a more statistically rigorous counterpart to Rachel Maddow’s show and the Huffington Post. The comment section has become a repository for a certain form of liberal anguish, and a community unto itself: “His campaign promised a better, more equitable America. Those who believed him feel betrayed,” wrote one commenter in regard to a recent column titled “The President Is Missing.”And another: “Come on, Professor Krugman, will you lead the people out?”

In December, Krugman and five other liberal economic thinkers (Joseph Stiglitz, Robert Reich, Jeffrey Sachs, Alan Blinder, and Larry Mishel) were invited to the Oval Office for a 90-minute off-the-record audience with the president. It was a month after the midterms, and many progressives were worried that even the modified liberalism of the administration’s first two years would dissolve in a new spirit of conciliation with the ascendant right. The economists present understood the meeting, one of them says, as the moment when Obama “talked to the left.”

The economists sat ringing Obama—two Nobelists, a former Labor secretary, and a former vice-chairman of the Fed. Not a Gentile among them, Krugman noticed, but “an amazingly high proportion of beards.” To begin the meeting, Obama asked each of his guests to identify the most pressing economic issue. Five of the economists emphasized the same problem. Unemployment, they said, was so high that the recovery might never get out of first gear. It was not the time for austerity; the president should focus on short-term job creation and turn to the deficit later. But the other economist, Sachs, the director of the Earth Institute at Columbia, held out. Concentrate on the long-term outlook, he told the president.

For Krugman, the path forward was perfectly clear: The only way to avert a deepening crisis was massive Keynesian stimulus. During the nineties in Japan, he had seen the nightmare alternative. Officials in Tokyo, faced with a very similar scenario, had done too little to stimulate the economy, again and again, and as their nation’s recovery stumbled, they found they were toggling an unplugged joystick. And yet now, after more than two years of economic calamity at home, the liberal solution again wasn’t getting through: Krugman couldn’t even build a consensus among six like-minded economists, let alone convince a Democratic president. “I have no idea what Jeff was talking about,” he says.

The previous day, the president had announced a deal with congressional Republicans, agreeing to extend the Bush tax cuts in exchange for middle-class tax relief and an extension of unemployment benefits. Now, in the Oval Office, he told his guests that this effort had been his “last chance to move the dial” on jobs, as one economist present recalls, and that, with the exception of smaller initiatives (he mentioned infrastructure spending), the politics had now made further stimulus impossible. Soon, each of the economists was pushing “his own thing,” Krugman says. The official photograph the White House sent the participants could be read as a document of the moment of realization: Blinder sitting rigid and intent, Stiglitz’s face wry and unsurprised, as if he had expected the whole thing. Krugman alone seems to be surging out of his seat, his eyebrows arched, a roused alarm.

Even then, these economists recognized what a paltry, bowdlerized proxy for the left they were: six academics, and by any broad ideological standard a pretty moderate group, comfortable with markets and free trade. But liberals had long ago ceased to rally around class. “In the United States,” Blinder told me weeks later, a little bleakly, a little apologetically, “there is no left left.” Krugman, looking back, diagnoses two problems. First, the progressive economists had been too disorganized. And then they had been too late.

A Chorus of Commenters Recent responses to Paul Krugman’s columns and blog posts. “You cannot be a true Liberal and fill your cabinet with Wall Street and ignore all of the positions you stated forcefully.” “The very thought of a Democratic president negotiating cuts in Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid must have FDR rolling over in his grave.” “Could it be that corporations really do run the country, and that the president learned he does not have the power to oppose them? In other words, is the republic already dead?” “It’s true that Obama is to the right of Nixon.” “Change we can believe in? Hogwash.”

For a century, liberals have been chasing the same organizing idea: to perfect the welfare state—the soaringly aspirational, deeply flawed apparatus of Social Security, public health insurance, and progressive taxation designed to guarantee a secure middle class—and to extend its protections to every American. A year ago, after Obama’s health-care reforms became law, that project looked closer to completion. Now we are debating the terms of its erosion—with Republican proposals to cut the benefits of Medicare and Medicaid, conservative efforts to repeal protections for labor unions, and an emerging Washington consensus that the costs of a broad welfare state may be beyond what Americans will willingly pay. The White House meeting this past December, viewed in retrospect, seemed to mark the end of the expansive first part of Obama’s administration and the beginning of an austere second phase. Krugman, departing, found himself left in the position that every purist fears, holding blueprints for impossible buildings.

“I think what people like Paul Ryan are trying to do is set us on a glide path to a much harsher society,” Krugman now says. “A country in which, step by step, more and more people are cast out into a situation of not having health insurance and poverty, and so we slide back to a Victorian notion that life is full of evils and that’s too bad but that’s the way that God made the world. That large numbers of the poor, large numbers of the elderly just live in dire poverty and don’t have health care because life is tough.” For two years, Krugman has been arguing that this trajectory might have been averted if only Obama had been a little less deferential, a little more demanding, a little more alarmed. And so Krugman has given the debate on the left its shape: whether the president could have mounted a more effective defense of the welfare state, and whether liberalism’s tragic flaw is Obama’s instinct for conciliation or his leading critic’s naïveté.

Paul Krugman is a lonely man. That he is comfortable in his solitude, that he emphasizes its virtues, that his intelligence gives it a poetic gloss, none of this diminishes the poignancy of his isolation. Krugman grew up an only child and is deeply self-conscious. He will list his shortcomings as though he’d been preparing for the chance: “Loner. Ordinarily shy. Shy with individuals.” He is married but has no children nor—rare for a Nobelist—many protégés. When I asked him if there were any friends of his I could talk to in order to understand him better, he hesitated, then said, “That’s going to be hard.” One colleague at Princeton, where Krugman has taught since 2000, says the economist will avert his eyes when circumstance places the two of them alone in an elevator, his nose stuck in the corner, so as to avoid conversation. Krugman’s wife, Robin Wells, an academic economist herself, was recently reading the Ian McEwan novel Solar, whose protagonist is a Nobel Prize–winning physicist who has been married five times, and she found the scenario implausible. “You could never win the Nobel Prize with that kind of personal life,” she says. “It’s too distracting.”

Krugman is short and has a very round, very full belly; he is both generally agreeable and chronically rushed, and this gives him a myopic, distracted air. When he talks about himself, his ideas always arise only from his scholarship, as if once, long ago, he had erected a wall between his immersion in the world and his study of it. At Yale, he says, he formed no impression of the aspiring New York bankers and Washington lawyers who were his peers. Later, though he traveled frequently to Japan and met often with government ministers in the years when the country slipped into its lost decade, he says those meetings did nothing to shape his analysis. He has wondered often about why Larry Summers chose to support a smaller stimulus, but though he and Summers spoke every month or two when Summers was in the White House, Krugman never asked him. “He’s not oblivious to human nature; he will have conversations about this person or that and their motivations,” Wells says. “But he does keep it separate.”

Krugman had begun the work that would eventually win him the Nobel Prize—an aggressive revision of international trade theory—by the time he was in his mid-twenties, and so for nearly all of his adult life he has had good evidence for the proposition that he is smarter than just about everyone else around him, and capable of seeing things more clearly. Krugman is gleeful about being right, joyous in the revelation of his correctness, and many of his most visible early fights were with free-trade skeptics on the left. Of Robert Reich, for instance, Krugman wrote: “talented writer, too bad he never gets anything right.” He was a liberal and a Democrat, but even in 1999, when he was hired by Howell Raines to write his Times column, “I still saw equivalent craziness on both sides.”

This evenhandedness began to disappear almost immediately. Four months after his first column, Krugman began studying the economic proposals of the Bush campaign and found, somewhat to his astonishment, that they were deeply disingenuous. “That was a radicalizing experience. Not just that the presidential candidate of one of America’s major political parties could say something that was demonstrably false, but that nobody was willing to say so,” Krugman says. “That was pretty awesome.” The Iraq War seemed insane to him, and he said so, forcefully. In 2003, these were sometimes unpopular positions, and Krugman and Wells found themselves turning to the progressive blogs; at times it felt as if it were the economist, his wife, and the Internet against the world.

But Krugman’s writing voice—sarcastic, data-driven, flecked with just a little bit of maybe-there’s-a-bomb-in-the-wastebasket zeal—was perfect for the Internet. His self-certain empiricism matched liberal vanities as precisely as Rush Limbaugh’s stagy authenticity matches conservative ones, and he became a vehicle for the concentrating energies of the progressive generation of 2006. “What I think Krugman got intuitively is that liberals understand politics as a policy argument,” says Ezra Klein, now a Washington Post columnist and then an influential political blogger. “On the right, there’s something of a cultural underlay to the worldview: We are the real Americans, and they are not. Liberals want to say, We are correct on the evidence, and they are not.”

In the aftermath of the 2006 election, the assumption was that the new progressive converts of the Bush era had simply become Democrats. But as the liberal dissatisfaction with the present White House has grown, it has become possible to think that their alienation was not limited to the Bush administration. The language Krugman uses to describe the Establishment still has the pitched, outsider intensity of liberalism during the Bush years—mocking the Very Serious People who he believes form conventional wisdom in Washington.

What Krugman and others have been documenting is a disillusionment that extends beyond politics: the moral absenteeism of Wall Street, the acquiescence of the foreign-policy Establishment during Iraq, Enron, the steroid crisis in Major League Baseball. “If you’re a bewildered suburban teacher or software-company middle manager or law-firm partner and you’ve had this sense that the entire governing institutions of the country are flawed, it’s very unsettling,” says Christopher Hayes, who is the Washington editor of The Nation and is writing a book about the crisis of authority in American life.

Americans had lost faith in what Hayes began to think of as “elites”—bankers, pundits, the Washington Establishment. For liberals, Krugman stood for a separate authority, which could be considered “expertise”—the scientists and academics who could measure how society was shifting, how the climate was warming, the degree of violence regressive social policies had inflicted on the middle class. What Krugman represented, Hayes believes, was that the experts themselves had given up on the elites. “Krugman embodies what you might call expert militancy,” Hayes says. “It’s a kind of pugnaciousness and ability to say, ‘The whole thing is rigged, this person is a liar, this person is stupid.’ ”

Being a progressive during the Bush years imposed a certain kind of loneliness. Krugman helped relieve the loneliness. “You think, how could that be?” Hayes says. “And then Paul Krugman’s like, ‘No. It is rigged. You are right.’ ”

Each Thursday this semester, Krugman has been teaching a course on the economics of the welfare state to a dozen Princeton undergraduates and one octogenarian emeritus type, who is auditing. When he first started teaching, Krugman says, he was “absolutely scared out of my mind,” but now, more than 30 years on, the classroom is where he seems most at ease. There is something admirably unglamorous about the way Krugman has dealt with his fame: When I first tried to reach Joseph Stiglitz, he was in Mauritius, meeting with a head of state; when I first contacted Jeffrey Sachs, he was traveling through Senegal; and when I first called Krugman, he was schlepping home on New Jersey Transit.

The topics of Krugman’s weekly seminar are sometimes adjusted to follow current events and the demands of his column, and so one Thursday in early April, the class was considering Paul Ryan’s plan to balance the budget, which the House would later approve by an extremely partisan vote. Krugman had prepared slides, but after a sustained five-minute assault on the projection technology, he gave up. “Never mind,” he said, abandoning the projection screen. “I can just sketch it on the board myself.” And he began, as he often does these days, with a graph, the y-axis measuring portion of GDP, the x-axis showing change over time.

These simple little graphs are in some ways the source of Krugman’s academic reputation—he has the ability to distill knotty theories into perfectly contained models. This clarity is the house style of MIT, where Krugman went to graduate school. Some economists refer derisively to “MIT toy models,” arguing that they can elide as much as they reveal, but still it is Krugman’s elegance that is most impressive to those in the field: a mind so precise that it can reduce society to its mathematical essence and reveal its truths on a graph.

At the board, Krugman started sketching the American government’s expenditures, projected into the future and divided into three subgroups—Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, and “everything else,” which means defense, education, foreign aid, and much more. In 2010, “everything else” required 12 percent of GDP. By 2030, under the Ryan plan, it would get only 5.25 percent, and by 2050, 3.5. Krugman had run the numbers, and he said that the last time that figure had even approached 3.5 percent was during the Coolidge administration, when the country looked radically different—when, for instance, it had effectively no standing military. The Ryan plan made other policy choices that were to Krugman socially corrosive: It would, for instance, effectively end Medicare as we know it. But it was the reduction of “everything else” to a third of its current share that seemed simply impossible. There was a long silence in the classroom. “This is a pretty amazing number,” Krugman said. “I try to present both sides, but this is pretty hard to understand.”

Krugman is always alert to the possibility of the extreme. “When things go crazy, my instinct is to go radical on policy.”

A few years ago, Krugman, having decided that he was going to be writing about politics and so he should know more about it, did a very Krugman thing. He didn’t talk to people who worked in Washington. Instead, he started to read the political-science literature. Krugman had never understood the press coverage of politics, which seemed to emphasize its most irrelevant aspects. Why dwell on a presidential candidate’s psychology when the trends in unemployment would tell you who would win an election? But viewed through the prism of political science, politics began to seem much more familiar to him. There was a mathematics to it—you could assemble data, draw correlations, understand what was essential and what was noise. The underlying shape of politics came sweeping into view: If you arranged members of Congress from left to right based on how they voted on welfare-state issues—Social Security, Medicare, unemployment insurance—it turned out that this left-to-right axis could predict every other vote: On Iraq expenditures, on abortion, whatever. “When you realize the fundamental divide in U.S. politics is just this one-­dimensional thing, and that is how you feel about the welfare state,” Krugman says, “that changes things.”

You could see something else in the data, too. From 1979 to 2004, the income of the richest one percent of Americans grew by 176 percent, that of the richest one fifth of the country by 69 percent, and that of everyone else by less than 25 percent. Working through the numbers, Krugman came to believe that “only a fraction” of the change was compelled by global forces, which had been the standard explanation. The rest, he concluded, was political.

It was Krugman’s Princeton colleague Larry Bartels who made the critical connection, in research Krugman devoured and still cites. Perhaps the most important influence on income inequality, Bartels argued, was something economists had not ­emphasized: whether a Democrat or a Republican was in the White House. Since World War II, Bartels found, wealthy families in the 95th percentile in income had seen identical income growth under both parties. But for families in the 20th percentile, the difference was astonishing: Under Democratic presidents, their income grew at six times the rate it did under Republican ones. There was, for Krugman, a kind of radicalization implied in this.

What is so riveting about the present moment, Krugman told his class, is that “there are wild possibilities.” Perhaps there was a one percent chance, he mused, growing excited, that a Draft Hillary movement would emerge on the left, throwing out the president in favor of the secretary of State; there was probably an equal chance, he said, that the next president would be Michele Bachmann. Society seemed at a precipice: If health-care reform truly takes effect, then popular inertia might take over and “we become an ordinary advanced country, where it’s taken for granted that of course society is going to make sure everybody has basic health care.” But it was easy to see how inertia could also invert into “erosion that eventually swallows Medicare and Medicaid.” Class was ending, the students picking up their books, and Krugman lingered, seeming to want to say something broad about the current political moment. What he settled on was a quiet awe. “God knows,” he said. “It’s amazing.”

Krugman has always been alert to the possibility of the extreme; perhaps it is the science-fiction fan in him. But he was also deeply influenced by what he observed in the nineties, when he was studying crises in international economics—in Japan, mostly, but also in Argentina, whose minister of the economy at the time was a man named Domingo Cavallo. Krugman knew of him—Cavallo was a star graduate student at Harvard when Krugman was at MIT—and had followed his career as he rose through the Argentine government. Cavallo liberalized the economy and drew overseas capital to Buenos Aires—“lionized by the financial press, the maestro of the Argentine miracle,” as Krugman recalls. But when the Argentine economy slowed, international investors withdrew, unemployment grew to 25 percent, and by 2003 an estimated 30,000 people in Greater Buenos Aires were surviving by scrounging for cardboard to sell to recycling plants.

If you were looking at the American economy during the eighties and nineties, you could enjoy a certain measure of serenity. Economists celebrated the Great Moderation—recessions were muted, fluctuations less pronounced—and economic science seemed sophisticated enough to permit policy-makers to predict and avoid catastrophe. “If you were domestic, the image you had was Alan Greenspan heroically fighting off all problems,” Krugman says. But if your focus was international, you saw crisis everywhere: Mexico, Asia, Russia, Brazil, Japan. And then there was Argentina, where the state stepped back just when it was needed most. If Domingo Cavallo, one of the elect, could preside over this collapse, then perhaps there but for the grace of God went Alan Greenspan. What Krugman took from Argentina—and what he thinks even liberals in Washington missed—was “a certain level of understanding,” he says, “that important people have no idea what they’re doing.”

“This is absurd,” says Larry Summers. “Excuse me, I think I’m the guy who pushed President Clinton and the IMF to commit $40 billion to Mexico—the largest piece of assistance since the Marshall Plan. I think I’m a guy who was central in concerting all the banks with respect to the Korean crisis. You can argue the merits of the choices we advocated, but the idea that somehow I’m unaware of the fact that there are international crises? Ludicrous.” Some problems, Summers says, can’t be best understood only from afar. “Tim Geithner was the U.S. Treasury’s man in Japan during the crisis in the late eighties and early nineties while Paul was doing trade theory.

“Paul hasn’t liked any president or any Treasury secretary,” Summers continues. “He always gravitates to opposition and dramatic policy because it’s much more interesting than agreement when you’re involved in commenting on rather than making policy. He savaged the early Clinton administration from the right, blistering Laura Tyson and Bob Reich, and then moved to savage the more liberal Obama administration from the left. He liked the Bush administration least of all. The only politician I remember him praising in the last sixteen years is John Edwards.”

I ask Summers what he thinks is Krugman’s underlying complaint with the Obama administration. “Paul may be the smartest and most creative applied economic thinker of this era,” he says, “but there is some element of him that is like the guy in the bleachers who always demands the fake kick, the triple-reverse, the long bomb, or the big trade.”

The two economists have known each other since the late seventies, when they were both graduate students in Cambridge, and there were moments in conversation with Krugman that I began to suspect he viewed Summers as a one-man control group for his study of himself. They each share a high assessment of the other’s intellect (“Larry’s extremely smart—ask him and he’ll tell you,” Krugman says). Krugman’s sense of humor is built upon self-deprecation, and sometimes Summers’s sense of humor is built upon deprecating Krugman, too. In the early eighties, when the two worked together in the Reagan administration, Krugman realized that Summers had a talent for effectiveness—winning meetings, organizing subordinates, convincing economic novices of his point of view—that he himself could not hope to match. Summers became the insider and Krugman the outsider.

Krugman has been arguing with Summers about policy, he says, for most of their adult lives, and their arguments have often followed the same line: “Let’s put it this way,” Krugman says. “When things go crazy, my instinct is to go radical on policy, and Larry’s is to be a little more cautious.”

Summers concedes that a bigger stimulus would have been the optimal policy in 2009. “The Obama administration asked for less than all that it recognized pure macroeconomic analysis would have called for, and it only got 75 cents on the dollar. But political constraints and practical problems with moving spending quickly constrained us. The president’s political advisers felt, and history bears them out on this since the bill only passed by a whisker, that asking for even more would have put rapid passage at risk.” But Krugman also wanted a radical government takeover of the floundering banks, and even many liberal economists now believe this was a panicked response to a moment of crisis. The banks soon recovered without it. Here, “the Obama administration’s somewhat messier confrontation with reality averted the disaster that would have come with nationalization,” Summers says.

Krugman has been suspicious of Obama since the beginning of the campaign, and his early doubts have remained. “It’s not so much—it’s not a values difference. I think Obama was and is committed to the welfare state.” What has always troubled him, Krugman says, is Obama’s conviction “that we can find the center and work with these people.” This seems to Krugman a deeply naïve view of politics, though one that is pervasive in Washington. “There are really very, very few things, very few values issues on which both sides of our political divide agree,” he says. “You may in the end get an agreement that involves both parties but is not bi-partisan in any positive sense of the word.”

And so perhaps this is part of the political legacy of the Bush years: a subtle shift in what makes you a progressive, and how liberal lines are drawn. The debates among Democrats in the nineties mostly followed established ideological lines—some believed that Clinton’s centrism was whitewashing liberalism, others that he was modernizing it. But there is less ideological divergence among Democrats now. The deep liberal disappointment with the president has a different source: He believes in politics more than they do. If you believe, like Obama, that politics is what brings the social compact to life, then the only way to build an equitable society is to make sure everyone has an equal say. Or if you believe, like Krugman, that the data can show you the shape that the fairest society should take, then politics might not always make good on the social compact. Politics, instead, might make it impossible.

Krugman’s purism is partly tactical, his way of correcting for the inevitable dilutions of legislative negotiation. “You want to have a pretty clear vision of what it is you want even though you know what you’re going to get is only a small fraction of that,” he says. When he pushed for a stimulus so large that it seemed implausible it would pass Congress, “I was making a political calculation of my own, that a policy that only did half of what was necessary would lead to political disaster.” His online commenters are more absolute, and they have sometimes turned on him when he has acquiesced to political realities (when, for instance, he eventually endorsed Obama’s health-care reform after having attacked its compromises). But Krugman insists he is playing a more sophisticated game than his supporters and critics give him credit for. “Do we know that if they’d really gone bigger in their proposals, they would have gotten more and it would have worked out better? Of course we don’t,” he says. “But I don’t think it was just me being an outsider and not having a grasp of the realities. I think in some ways I had a better grasp than the insiders had.”

There are times, however, when the consequences of Krugman’s perspective, the darkness of his view of American politics, come into view. In the health-care-reform debate, he saw evidence of “racial hate-mongering.” When the crazed assassin Jared Loughner shot Representative Gabrielle Giffords in January, Krugman saw intimations of a broader disorder to come. “The harshness and the incipient violence are very real,” he told me. The liberal historian Michael Kazin, of Georgetown, told me he thought Krugman’s account of the right succumbed to the old Marxist flaw of false consciousness: “Unlike what Krugman says, conservatism is not some kind of smoke screen for another agenda.” In his 2007 book The Conscience of a Liberal, Krugman was plainer still: “Yes, Virginia,” he wrote, “there is a vast right-wing conspiracy.”

The first time I interviewed Krugman, we were sitting in the lobby of the Hilton in midtown, talking about Giffords and Loughner. “I really do think it’s been true,” Krugman said, “that for the past ten years, making sure that you spend a lot of time hanging out with people who are in the mainstream has been really detrimental to seeing what is happening.”

I brought up the work of the legal scholar Cass Sunstein, now with the Obama administration, who has studied the radicalizing effects of ideological isolation—the idea, born from studies of three-judge panels, that if you are not in regular conversation with people who differ from you, you can become far more extreme. It is a very Obama idea, and I asked Krugman if he ever worried that he might succumb to that tendency. “It could happen,” he says. “But I work a lot from data; that’s enough of an anchor. I have a good sense when a claim has gone too far.”

This is the claim of a supreme self-confidence. To say “I am anchored in the data” is really to say “I understand exactly what the data mean.” But it is also the logical extension of a particular view of human nature, one equipped with such a clear view of the way society should be arranged that it can’t comprehend the greed, weakness, and compromise that forestall it. There is society, beautifully. And then there are people.

Back in 2006, when he was writing The Conscience of a Liberal, Krugman found himself searching for a way to describe his own political Eden, his vision of America before the Fall. He knew the moment that he wanted to describe: the fifties and early sixties, when prosperity was not only broad but broadly shared. Wells, looking over a draft, thought his account was too numerical, too cold. She suggested that he describe his own childhood, in the ­middle-class suburb of Merrick, Long Island. And so Krugman began writing with an almost choking nostalgia, the sort of feeling that he usually despises: “The political and economic environment of my youth stands revealed as a paradise lost, an exceptional moment in our nation’s history …”

Krugman remembers Merrick in these terms, as a place that provoked in him “amazingly little alienation.” “All the mothers waiting to pick up the fathers at the train station in the evening,” he says, remembering. “You were in an area where there were a lot of quiet streets, and it was possible to take bike rides all over Long Island. We used to ride up to Sagamore Hill, the old Teddy Roosevelt estate.” The Krugmans lived in a less lush part of Merrick, full of small ranch ­houses each containing the promise of social ascent. “I remember there was often a typical conversational thing about how well the plumbers—basically the unionized blue-collar occupations—were doing, as opposed to white-collar middle managers like my father.”

This Edenic Merrick has long since evaporated, giving way to something more socially distended and bizarre. (Amy Fisher, for instance, attended Krugman’s high school.) Would he prefer Merrick in the sixties to his current life? “Knowing that I am in fact me, this is a much better society for me to live in. And not because of the money but because it’s more open, more tolerant,” Krugman says. The food, he says, musing, is “a lot better.” You can get really good coffee just about anywhere.

But talking about Merrick prompts Krugman to think about how that moment might have been extended. “Suppose an alternative history in which big-box stores, Wal-Mart and others, were unionized,” he says. “You could easily imagine that you could have a large number of service-sector workers who were, if not like autoworkers, like ­manufacturing-sector union workers in the golden age of private-sector unions.” He thinks for another minute. It might not have been Utopia, he says, but it could have been France. But now these possibilities seem further away than ever. Part of the basic loneliness of economic study is that you are always looking back, at data sets that are already completed. And so you realize your vision of a perfect society just as it disappears from view.

Blinky Palermo: Retrospective 1964-1977 “Composition With 8 Red Rectangles” (1964), part of the show at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington.

By ROBERTA SMITH
NY Times Published: April 26, 2011

WASHINGTON — As art mediums go, painting is both intractably consistent and endlessly malleable, and perhaps never more so than now. While it continues to renew itself in its traditional paint-on-canvas incarnations, there’s also a well-established maverick branch that is constantly stretching the medium, extending it into installation art or questioning its status as a precious, high-skill commodity, sometimes by eliminating paint altogether.

One of the pioneers of this stretching and questioning is the German painter Blinky Palermo, whose invigorating first American retrospective currently fills one ring of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden’s doughnut-shaped building. The survey teems with spare yet surprisingly spritely works — many of them previously unexhibited in this country — that push and prod painting in various directions while still luxuriating in its optical possibilities, especially where color is concerned.

Blinky Palermo, a precocious art star in Europe at the time of his sudden death in 1977 at 33, comes across here as remarkably focused, not the least in his unwavering dedication to abstraction. He painted on canvas, wood and metal; made shaped works that he sometimes paired in eccentric, mismatched diptychs; executed temporary pieces for specific architectural settings; and fashioned severe modernist abstractions from swathes of solid-colored department store fabric.

The through line is that nearly everything he made seems to imply the phrase “this is a painting” simultaneously as a statement and a question, and to leave us juggling our perceptions and preconceptions. The “Fabric Paintings” read as simultaneously mildly satiric — send-ups of Brice Marden’s exquisitely wrought monochrome panel paintings — and optically engaging in their own right, with their subtle color juxtapositions and physical modesty. Sometimes the artist’s wit is more overt, as in “Blue Disk and Staff,” from 1968, a borderline sculpture with a borderline mythological title, which consists of a tall, thin piece of wood and a circle of wood, both completely wrapped in vivid blue tape. They lean side by side against the wall, suggesting a “Shield and Spear.”

First seen at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art last fall, the Blinky Palermo show was organized by the Dia Art Foundation in New York City and the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y., under the direction of Lynne Cooke, Dia’s veteran curator. This summer it will appear upstate, split between Dia:Beacon in Beacon, N.Y., and Bard.

The Hirshhorn version, then, is the last chance to see the exhibition whole, and it is hard to imagine it looking much better than it does in the museum’s serene, gently curving galleries. The show is another sign of the Hirshhorn’s quiet rejuvenation under Richard Koshalek, the former director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles who took over the museum in Washington in 2009. Among other things, Mr. Koshalek has removed the false ceilings in some of the Hirshhorn’s galleries, revealing more of the cast concrete vaults that give the building, designed by Gordon Bunshaft, its air of industrial ruggedness.

This kind of adjustment would have pleased Blinky Palermo, some of whose environmental pieces consisted of little more than painting the molding of a space or outlining a wall in a thin band of color. He was born Peter Schwarze in Leipzig, Germany, in 1943, and adopted as an infant, with his twin brother, Michael, by foster parents named Heisterkamp, who moved to Munster in what was then West Germany in 1952.

He grew up enthralled by American culture, especially the Beat Generation and the Abstract Expressionists, and in the early ’60s he took the name of the American gangster (and Sonny Liston’s manager) whom he was said to resemble. By then, he was enrolled at the Düsseldorf Academy of Art, a student and favorite of Joseph Beuys, the sage of “social sculpture,” who later said that Blinky Palermo had “a far greater porosity” than any of his other students.

At the Hirshhorn, Blinky Palermo’s “porosity” comes across as an openness to history, to playful suggestion and to the complexity of visual experience, guided by a stringent sense of economy and strong doubts about painting’s traditional materials.

Ms. Cooke lays out the prevailing characterizations of Blinky Palermo’s achievement in her lead-off essay: that he was a Conceptual-oriented manipulator of architectural sites not unlike Sol LeWitt, Daniel Buren and Michael Asher; a fellow traveler of American Minimalist painters like Ellsworth Kelly, Agnes Martin, Robert Ryman and Marden (and their predecessors Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko); or part of the tradition of European mysticism stemming from Malevich and Mondrian and even earlier. (This last can seem a bit far-fetched, yet an untitled two-part work dated 1967-72 — a small canvas brushed in shades of brown and black, paired with a large attenuated wood T — neatly distills a Caspar David Friedrich cross-in-the-landscape painting.) However distinct these artistic positions may sometimes seem, they are certainly effortlessly encompassed by Blinky Palermo’s art.

Many of the earliest works in the show come across as wry, layered tributes to Modernism’s illustrious past. “Composition With 8 Red Rectangles” of 1964 is a scattering of bright red rectangles that pays homage to the Russian Modernist Malevich by using a title nearly identical to that of his painting “Suprametism With Eight Red Rectangles” from 1915. But the references to Malevich’s legacy continue: The Russian artist’s rectangles are, in the main, elongated, while Blinky Palermo’s tend toward squares, which means they also evoke Malevich’s paintings of groundbreaking abstractions of single black, white or red squares, while their arrangement conjures a well-known photograph of Malevich’s small geometric abstractions dotting the corner of the last futurist exhibition in St. Petersburg in 1915.

In “Blue Bridge” of 1964-65, a schematic blue-black bridge stretches edge to edge across a field of bright red; its title collapses the names of the Blue Rider and the Bridge, the two artists’ groups that initiated German Expressionism, and hence modern German painting.

In the mid 1960s, as Blinky Palermo moved away from conventional rectangular canvases, the perceptual poetry of his work increased. “Untitled (Totem)” is simply a vertical strip of wood, 7 feet by about 2 inches. It is painted orange and punctuated, like a primitive ladder, with five short, horizontal pieces of canvas-wrapped wood, each painted white with a portion of a blue triangle. Suggesting abstracted traffic cones down the center line of a highway, it turns the wall into a landscape.

The idiosyncratic diptych “Daydream I” considers the life of abstract forms — either cushily ensconced on canvas or liberated from it — with a dark green triangle painted on what is essentially a small, reddish canvas pillow paired with an identically sized dark green triangle made of painted wood. At the end of the decade, the artist devised a do-it-yourself stencil kit that people could buy and use to make their own Blinky Palermo triangles, in blue; it has been used at the Hirshhorn over a doorway.

In the mid-’70s, Blinky Palermo lived and worked primarily in New York; after returning to Germany in 1976, he made a new kind of work: an environmental yet portable multipart piece titled “To the People of the City of New York.” Owned by the Dia Art Foundation and often on view at Dia:Beacon, it consists of 40 smallish panel paintings in combinations of red, black and gold — the colors of the West and East German flags (and now the German one) — arranged in different groupings. Poised between Germany and America, its mysterious yet lively contrapuntal semaphore leaves you wondering what would have followed, had Blinky Palermo been granted more than a dozen very full years of maturity.

“Blinky Palermo: Retrospective 1964-1977” runs through May 15 at the Hirshhorn Museum

Marc Camille Chaimowicz

Jutta Koether

Lisa Lapinski

Dianna Molzan

May 1st-June 11th, 2011

Opening Sunday, May 1st, 6-8 pm

Overduin and Kite

May 7 – July 1, 2011

Mathew Marks

By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Times Published: April 24, 2011

When I listen to current discussions of the federal budget, the message I hear sounds like this: We’re in crisis! We must take drastic action immediately! And we must keep taxes low, if not actually cut them further!

You have to wonder: If things are that serious, shouldn’t we be raising taxes, not cutting them?

My description of the budget debate is in no way an exaggeration. Consider the Ryan budget proposal, which all the Very Serious People assured us was courageous and important. That proposal begins by warning that “a major debt crisis is inevitable” unless we confront the deficit. It then calls, not for tax increases, but for tax cuts, with taxes on the wealthy falling to their lowest level since 1931.

And because of those large tax cuts, the only way the Ryan proposal can even claim to reduce the deficit is through savage cuts in spending, mainly falling on the poor and vulnerable. (A realistic assessment suggests that the proposal would actually increase the deficit.)

President Obama’s proposal is a lot better. At least it calls for raising taxes on high incomes back to Clinton-era levels. But it preserves the rest of the Bush tax cuts — cuts that were originally sold as a way to dispose of a large budget surplus. And, as a result, it still relies heavily on spending cuts, even as it falls short of actually balancing the budget.

So why isn’t someone offering a proposal reflecting the reality that the Bush tax cuts were a huge mistake, and suggesting that increased revenue play a major role in deficit reduction? Actually, someone is — and I’ll get to that in a moment. First, though, let’s talk about the current state of American taxes.

From the tone of much budget discussion, you might think that we were groaning under crushing, unprecedented levels of taxation. The reality is that effective federal tax rates at every level of income have fallen significantly over the past 30 years, especially at the top. And, over all, U.S. taxes are much lower as a percentage of national income than taxes in most other wealthy nations.

The point is that we aren’t that heavily taxed, either by historical standards or in comparison with other nations. So if you’re truly horrified by the budget deficit, why not propose tax increases as part of the solution?

Wait, there’s more. The core of the Ryan proposal is a plan to privatize and defund Medicare. Yet this would do nothing to reduce the deficit over the next 10 years, which is why all the near-term deficit reduction comes from brutal reductions in aid to the needy and unspecified cuts in discretionary spending. Tax increases, by contrast, can be fast-acting remedies for red ink.

And that’s why the only major budget proposal out there offering a plausible path to balancing the budget is the one that includes significant tax increases: the “People’s Budget” from the Congressional Progressive Caucus, which — unlike the Ryan plan, which was just right-wing orthodoxy with an added dose of magical thinking — is genuinely courageous because it calls for shared sacrifice.

True, it increases revenue partly by imposing substantially higher taxes on the wealthy, which is popular everywhere except inside the Beltway. But it also calls for a rise in the Social Security cap, significantly raising taxes on around 6 percent of workers. And, by rescinding many of the Bush tax cuts, not just those affecting top incomes, it would modestly raise taxes even on middle-income families.

All of this, combined with spending cuts mostly focused on defense, is projected to yield a balanced budget by 2021. And the proposal achieves this without dismantling the legacy of the New Deal, which gave us Social Security, and the Great Society, which gave us Medicare and Medicaid.

But if the progressive proposal has all these virtues, why isn’t it getting anywhere near as much attention as the much less serious Ryan proposal? It’s true that it has no chance of becoming law anytime soon. But that’s equally true of the Ryan proposal.

The answer, I’m sorry to say, is the insincerity of many if not most self-proclaimed deficit hawks. To the extent that they care about the deficit at all, it takes second place to their desire to do precisely what the People’s Budget avoids doing, namely, tear up our current social contract, turning the clock back 80 years under the guise of necessity. They don’t want to be told that such a radical turn to the right is not, in fact, necessary.

But, it isn’t, as the progressive budget proposal shows. We do need to bring the deficit down, although we aren’t facing an immediate crisis. How we go about stemming the tide of red ink is, however, a choice — and by making tax increases part of the solution, we can avoid savaging the poor and undermining the security of the middle class.  

Reyner Banham in 1984, in front of a mural at John Muir School in Santa Monica. Credit: Los Angeles Times

The interchange linking the 10 and 405 freeways, completed in 1964. Credit: Los Angeles Times

Banham on his Bickerton bicycle in the Mojave Desert, 1981. Credit: Tim Street-Porter

The Los Angeles Times
April 22, 2011

Banham74 This month Reading L.A. arrives at a major milestone: “Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies,” written by the British architectural historian and critic Reyner Banham and published in 1971. As it turns 40 this year, the book remains — with Carey McWilliams’ 1946 “Southern California: As Island on the Land” and Mike Davis’ 1990 “City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles” — among the few volumes to grasp the city in all its urban and architectural complexity. Davis called it “the textbook on Los Angeles.”

Compared to McWilliams and Davis, however — especially to the dystopian, myth-busting Davis — Banham was an unalloyed admirer of Los Angeles. The documentary that the BBC produced in 1972 about the his travels around the city, now easy to track down on the Internet, is fittingly called “Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles.”
But Banham’s optimistic take on the city is not what makes the book worth revisiting. It’s the fact that its tone and especially its structure seem uncannily to reflect the spirit of Los Angeles itself. (Among books that focus on the urbanism of a single city, perhaps only Rem Koolhaas’ “Delirious New York” finds a more inventive fit between literary strategy and civic personality.) In alternating chapters, Banham mixes traditional architectural history with impressionistic reports on what it was like, in those days, to drift carelessly from one highway interchange to another or to explore the “four ecologies” of the book’s subtitle: the flatlands (which Banham labeled the “Plains of Id”), the beach cities (“Surfurbia”), the freeways (“Autopia”) and the foothills.

The point was to suggest the multi-centered character of Los Angeles, its easy mobility and its essential informality. “Simply to go from the oldest monument to the newest could well prove a short, boring and uninstructive journey,” Banham wrote in the opening chapter, “because the point about this giant city, which has grown almost simultaneously all over, is that all its parts are equal and equally accessible from all other parts at once.”

Banham also wanted to make room in the book for roadside architecture and the high points of civil engineering — notably the freeway system itself, which he called “one of the greater works of Man.” (He singled out the interchange linking the 10 and 405 freeways — “a work of art” — for special praise.) Still, he made a point of crediting the early Pacific Electric rail lines for setting out the basic development patterns in Los Angeles — patterns the highways would later follow to a large degree and fix in monumental concrete form. “The automobile and the architecture alike,” he wrote, “are the products of the Pacific Electric Railroad as a way of life.”

In the mid-1960s, when Banham began traveling here from London, Southern California, to the degree that it had an international architectural reputation at all, was known mostly as an endless, smog-filled example of car-centric urbanism. The headline on Roger Jellinek’s New York Times review of “Four Ecologies” said it all: “In Praise (!) of Los Angeles.”

But Banham, who was in his early 40s on those initial trips to California, saw two kinds of promise in Los Angeles: first as a new sort of 20th century city, in his view liberated rather than thrown into chaos by its lack of planning, and second, just as important, as the vehicle for a fresh approach to writing architectural history.

A champion of Pop Art and pop culture, Banham had already shown his impatience with traditional notions of beauty, architectural scholarship and city-making in his work of the 1950s and early 1960s. His membership with the architects Alison and Peter Smithson, the photographer Nigel Henderson and others in the so-called Independent Group in London put him at the center of early debates in Britain about how to demolish those old critical and historical standards for good.

In Los Angeles he found his ideal subject: a globally important but under-scrutinized city he could explore in relative anonymity, diving deeply into a place typically written off as superficial. “Los Angeles does not get the attention it deserves,” he wrote in “Four Ecologies.” “It gets attention, but it’s like the attention that Sodom and Gomorrah have received, primarily a reflection of other people’s bad consciences.”

The locals were not universally pleased with their new admirer. Esther McCoy, whom we have met in Reading L.A. already, reviewed the book for Progressive Architecture magazine and praised Banham’s “eye and his scholarship and his wit” as well as “the cinematic form of ‘Los Angeles,’ those quick cuts between ecologies … and architectural essays.” All in all, she said, it was “an impish and valuable book.” But she complained that some of Banham’s central conclusions were “off course,” reminding readers that Los Angeles was hardly unique among American cities in showing a deep fascination with mobility.

Peter Plagens, meanwhile, a young artist and journalist who would go on to become the art critic for Newsweek, wrote an entertainingly outraged review of the book for Artforum in which he labeled Banham a new sort of cultural interloper in the American West: the “chic debunker of current anti-L.A. mythology … who finds that L.A. is really a groovy place in spite of its evils and often because of them, if you know how to look at it right.”

Plagens concluded that the biggest problem with Banham’s praise for L.A. was that it might “have a trickle-down effect (i.e., the hacks who do shopping centers, Hawaiian restaurants, and savings-and-loans, the dried-up civil servants in the division of highways, and the legions of show-biz fringies will sleep a little easier and work a little harder now that their enterprises have been authenticated). In a more humane society where Banham’s doctrines would be measured against the subdividers’ rape of the land and the lead particles in little kids’ lungs, the author might be stood up against a wall and shot.”

In a recent email exchange, Plagens recalled that his editors at Artforum initially asked him to write a straightforward and relatively brief review. But “I went nuts and it turned out to be a frothing-at-the-mouth essay against Banham and the book.

“From what I gather on Google,” Plagens went on, “the years have made me the bad guy: a young, provincial, anti-intellectual, offended local nipping at the feet of the big-time, world-traveler architecture critic. I still think I was right that a) Banham was another of those sun-loving Brits, found in droves in the movie business, who had an appreciation of Southern California that was only a half-step up from midwestern tourists at Disneyland, and b) the root of the matter in the early 1970s was, as the last line of my piece said, ‘The fashionable son-of-a-bitch doesn’t have to live here.’ Meaning, he didn’t have to suffer, primarily, the air, which was toxic to a degree younger people don’t remember. Everything Banham liked about L.A. — Googie architecture, wide freeways, going everywhere in a car, pop culture almost the only culture — I thought was part of the problem.”

Banham unquestionably got certain things right. He grasped Frank Gehry’s talent after seeing a single early and unassuming project, the 1964 Danziger Studio on Melrose. (“Although the forms look commonly boxy, the planning and organization are not.”) His analysis of the early pioneers of L.A. modernism — particularly the way he spliced the subtle differences between Rudolph Schindler and Richard Neutra — holds up surprisingly well, as does his take on the post-war Case Study Houses.

What seems most dated about the book at 40 is how effortlessly it equates literal, automotive mobility in Los Angeles with the economic, class-based kind — a transposition that surely had something to do with Banham’s Englishness. His Los Angeles was a city where the beaches and foothills were wide open not only as places to explore by car but also as places to buy a house and make a life. In the line that seems most ancient of all, Banham calls the modern houses perched in the winding roads of L.A.’s hills “epitomes of the great middle-class suburban dream.” (I actually scribbled “Ha!” in the margin next to that sentence.) Meanwhile, the flatlands, which Banham acknowledged could be rather ugly — “the only parts of Los Angeles flat enough and boring enough to compare with the cities of the Middle West” — were in his mind not really neighborhoods at all as much as “a great service area feeding and supplying the foothills and beaches.”

Whether all of that was true in 1971 is debatable; it certainly isn’t any longer. There aren’t many middle-class families who can afford a modern house in the hills or anywhere near the beach. As far as the plains are concerned, rising residential density means the long snaking boulevards of the L.A. basin are hardly just the skeleton for a “great service area,” nor are they mere corridors to carry cars; more and more they are places to live (in apartment buildings rather than single-family houses), go to school or walk to the corner store.

The plains, for a huge and growing percentage of the population, are Los Angeles, and vice versa.

An even bigger change since Banham’s day is that we no longer think of mobility in Los Angeles as something that has to do exclusively with the automobile. Banham was a dedicated cyclist, but when he got to L.A. he ditched his beloved Bickerton for a car: “Like earlier generations of English intellectuals who taught themselves Italian in order to read Dante in the original,” he writes in one of the book’s signature lines, “I learned to drive in order to read Los Angeles in the original.”

Today’s Los Angeles, by contrast, is in the midst of a great and difficult reassessment of what mobility means — and might mean for future generations. We are finally (if slowly, and expensively) building a comprehensive transit system, and cyclists and pedestrians alike are happily getting more attention from city planners and architects.

To be sure, we remain in the very, very early stages of the effort to wean ourselves from the automobile, from the convenience of what Banham called a “door-to-door” means of navigating the city. But there is a growing understanding that reading contemporary Los Angeles requires not getting into the car but climbing out of it — at least from time to time.

Opens April 23 6-8pm
Through May 21, 2011

Marc Foxx

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

Opens May 9, 2011

Mathew Marks

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

By Robert Faturechi
Los Angeles Times
April 22, 2011

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

Then one caught his attention.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Times Published: April 21, 2011

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

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

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

What has gone wrong with us?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Steve Lopez
April 17, 2011
The Los Angeles Times

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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