How Many Goodly Creatures Are There on Mr. Herzog’s Planet

By MANOHLA DARGIS
NY Times Published: June 11, 2008

Few filmmakers make the end of days seem as hauntingly beautiful as Werner Herzog does, or as inexorable. In his documentary “Encounters at the End of the World,” this professional madman and restlessly curious filmmaker travels to the blinding white of the Antarctic, where he meets melancholic scientists, brooding journeymen and various poets of the soul who, ensconced in the American headquarters, McMurdo Station, have traveled so far beyond the familiar coordinates — so far beyond traditional cities, suburbs and banal existence — that they might as well be on another planet.

Call it Planet Herzog. Though I’m certain that the men and the smattering of women in the documentary are far from ordinary — their fantastic milieu and haunted eyes suggest as much — part of what makes them memorable is how Mr. Herzog weaves them into his story. And make no mistake: from his familiar droning voice-over to his ethereally lovely images and stubborn fatalism, this is very much Werner Herzog’s story of the Antarctic and not, as he intimates right up front, a heartfelt tale of “fluffy” penguins, an easy swipe at the palatable pleasures of the documentary “March of the Penguins.” Though there are, as it happens, some penguins here too, most memorably a Herzogean creature that may trouble your dreams.

Like many of Mr. Herzog’s movies, fiction and nonfiction, “Encounters at the End of the World” itself has the quality of a dream: it’s at once vivid and vague, easy to grasp and somehow beyond reach. Its inspiration can be found in his 2005 movie, “The Wild Blue Yonder,” a self-described science fiction fantasy (about outer and inner spaces, for starters) that mixes fiction with nonfiction. Its most striking nonfiction moments come courtesy of the underwater video images shot in the Antarctic by his friend and sometime composer, the guitarist Henry Kaiser, of divers swimming in the eerie blue under a shelf of crystal ice. (Mr. Kaiser produced this new movie and, with David Lindley, did its plaintive, effective string-centric music.)

These same underwater explorers return in “Encounters at the End of the World,” floating in cerulean amid otherworldly creatures, like fuzzy-looking clams that languidly snap open and close like fur castanets and an undulating jellyfish with silvery, near-transparent tentacles and what looks like a raw steak at its center. I could watch these surreal creatures for hours, and from the way he returns to these images, you get the sense that so could Mr. Herzog. But there are other sights and sounds to marvel at, including the Weddell seals that loll about indifferently on the surface, soaking up rays like fat, lazy tourists but, once underwater, create a symphony of electronic-like calls that one scientist accurately compares to Pink Floyd.

One of the beauties of “Encounters at the End of the World” is that all the furry and floating animals are no more wondrous than the bipeds tramping through and around McMurdo: the linguist turned philosopher, the banker turned bus driver and the female adventurer who, for drama and odd entertainment, likes to have herself zipped up in a carryall bag. (She’s her own baggage.) Mr. Herzog opens his mind, heart and eyes to all these wayfarers who — despite the persistent strain of melancholy that touches each and every person who appears on camera — seem eerily at peace at the bottom of the world. One reason may be that, like Mr. Herzog, more than a few evince a deep-felt pessimism about both the present and the future.

If this were a nature documentary like any other, the casual talk about global warming and other calamities might cast shadows across this bright expanse. But there’s something about Mr. Herzog — including the accidental if now well-practiced comedy that colors even his most dramatic pronouncements — that inevitably keeps his pictures from growing too dark. One reason is beauty, which in his hands has a way of keeping the worst at bay; it is, after all, hard to fully despair in the face of so much of the natural world’s splendors. Another reason, I think, has to do with Mr. Herzog’s seemingly unshakable faith in human beings, who for all their misdeeds at times reach a state of exaltedness. They soar — just like that jellyfish.

ENCOUNTERS AT THE END OF THE WORLD

Opens on Wednesday in Manhattan.

Written, directed and narrated by Werner Herzog; director of photography, Peter Zeitlinger; edited by Joe Bini; music by Henry Kaiser and David Lindley; produced by Mr. Kaiser; released by ThinkFilm. Shown with Matthew Walker’s three-minute animated film “John and Karen.” At Film Forum, 209 West Houston Street, west of Avenue of the Americas, South Village. Running time: 1 hour 39 minutes. This film is rated G.

By KATIE ZEZIMA
NY Times Published: June 10, 2008

WEST GREENWICH, R.I. — Last summer, Kerry Beaudry heard yelping from her German shepherd, Holly, and went outside to investigate. What she found still gives her chills. A small, mangy creature was on top of Holly, digging its claws into the scruff of her neck and gnawing at her face.

“I had never seen anything like it,” Ms. Beaudry recalled. “I didn’t know what it was. It kind of looked like a fox. But it was very, very ratty looking and had fangs and claws. It was creepy looking, but not that big.”

The animal was a fisher, a weasel-like predator of the deep woods that was saved from extinction in the Northeast and Midwest and has migrated into suburban backyards.

The small, sleek animal has cultivated a reputation as a ferocious killer of small pets, including cats and chickens, putting animal owners on edge. Holly escaped when Ms. Beaudry’s husband beat the fisher away with a broom.

At the same time, the fisher’s ability to adapt quickly to non-native habitats astounds biologists, who see it as a conservation success. Population statistics are hard to come by, because the animal is difficult to spot and large-scale studies have not been done. But biologists say that counts of road kill as well as the fisher’s presence in new territories clearly indicate its expanding numbers.

“Ten to 15 years ago, biologists said fishers only lived in deep forested areas, like the central Adirondacks, and now you find them in farmland and the suburbs,” said Gordon Batcheller, a wildlife biologist with the New York State Environmental Conservation Department.

Sinewy, with bushy tails and beady eyes, fishers weigh 5 to 15 pounds and live on land and in trees. They are mainly carnivorous, typically eating squirrels, mice, voles and other small animals, as well as nuts and seeds. Fishers are also one of the porcupine’s few enemies, killing it by attacking its snout and flipping it on its back.

“Fishers are pretty vicious,” said Michelle Johnson, the animal control officer in West Greenwich.

The fisher belongs to the mustelid family, which includes weasels, otters and wolverines. It has the aggressive, carnivorous temperament of a wolverine and can climb trees like a marten. Like weasels, a fisher will kill multiple animals at a time in a confined space. Fishers are nocturnal and not easily spotted.

Humans have been the fisher’s biggest enemy, as deforestation and trapping for its pelt helped push it toward extinction early in the 20th century.

“Fishers were wiped out in many areas,” said Trina Moruzzi, a wildlife biologist with the Massachusetts Fish and Game Department. “In Massachusetts, they were no longer found in the state.”

Many Eastern and Midwestern states started reintroducing fishers last century to help thin porcupines, which were attacking trees. Vermont was the first state to bring back fishers, releasing 125 in the 1950s. Twenty years later, the species was flourishing.

What biologists did not know was that the fishers were not only thriving, but also moving. The Vermont fishers made their way to southern New Hampshire and north-central Massachusetts, which had ample natural forest, as well as trees planted for suburban developments. More recently, fishers were reintroduced in Michigan and Pennsylvania.

As its population expanded, so did its range, Dr. Moruzzi said. Male fishers are extremely territorial, moving elsewhere if another male arrives. Female fishers tend to overlap one another, Dr. Moruzzi said. Males enter a female’s territory to mate each spring and set off on their own for a year.

“There’s only so many territories that can be inhabited,” Dr. Moruzzi said. “And that’s how fishers have gone into so many new areas.”

Most recently, those areas include Cape Cod, where a fisher was positively identified this year in Sandwich. Others have been spotted as far east as Chatham. Scientists theorize that they swam across the Cape Cod Canal or ran over a bridge. Fishers have also been spotted in Brookline, Mass., just outside Boston.

The Vermont fishers have traveled as far south as Rhode Island and coastal Connecticut, flummoxing residents who cannot identify the creature in their backyard. Rhode Island started documenting fisher road kill in 1999 in the northern part of the state. This year, one was found in South Kingston, on the coast.

Last year, said Lori Gibson, a wildlife biologist with the Rhode Island Fish and Wildlife Division, the state received 43 complaints about fishers. A vast majority involved fishers’ attacking pets.

The vast majority of the calls were about a fisher attacking a pet, Dr. Gibson said. Wildlife officials in Connecticut, Massachusetts, New York and Rhode Island are trying to educate pet owners about the fisher and urging owners to keep cats inside and chickens in secure coops.

Lorraine Blake, who runs a farm in Norton, Mass., said a fisher killed three of her five chickens last year. Ms. Blake said the fisher decapitated one chicken through the wire on the side of the coop. The next day, it broke into the coop and killed two more chickens.

“I was never worried about fishers,” Ms. Blake said. “I haven’t seen it since. It’s like the little bugger knows I’m trying to catch it now.”

In suburban Lexington, Mass., officials hung fliers in the common area of a condominium complex urging residents to keep cats and small dogs indoors because a fisher was spotted in nearby woods. In Northborough, Mass., officials put a warning in the newspaper asking that residents seal all garbage cans and refrain from putting out food for animals.

“They find our homes so attractive, because we supply some of the things they like,” Dr. Gibson said. “And it’s New England. We have stone walls that attract mice. So it’s an attractive surrounding for them. It’s kind of unrealistic to think we can make them go away.”

As fishers make themselves known in the suburbs, biologists try to reassure people that they rarely attack humans.

“There’s an old wives’ tale that fishers are voracious predators and you should take care of your children and keep your children away from them,” Dr. Moruzzi said. “I say they are voracious predators, but only if you’re a squirrel or a rabbit.”

A rabid fisher is more likely to go after humans, animal control officers said.

Louise Scheuerman of Scotia, N.Y., was taking out the trash one day in February when a fisher jumped out of her garbage can, followed her into the garage and attacked her feet. Ms. Scheuerman beat off the fisher with a fire extinguisher, ran inside and called the police, who tracked the fisher in the snow. They shot it, and the animal tested positive for rabies.

“They took one look at the prints and said ‘That’s a fisher,’ ” Ms. Scheuerman recounted. “And I said, ‘A what?’ ”

Ms. Scheuerman sustained nerve damage to her feet and took a series of rabies vaccine for five weeks.

She did not leave her house for more than two weeks after the attack, she said, adding: “I was pretty shaky for quite a while. Apparently in 200 years in New York State, I was the second person bit by a rabid fisher. Couldn’t I have won the Lotto? It would have been much nicer.”

By BENEDICT CAREY
NY Times Published: June 10, 2008

Staring at a pattern meant to evoke an optical illusion is usually an act of idle curiosity, akin to palm reading or astrology. The dot disappears, or it doesn’t. The silhouette of the dancer spins clockwise or counterclockwise. The three-dimensional face materializes or not, and the explanation always seems to have something to do with the eye or creativity or even personality.

That’s the usual cue to nod and feign renewed absorption in the pattern.

In fact, scientists have investigated such illusions for hundreds of years, looking for clues to how the brain constructs a seamless whole from the bouncing kaleidoscope of light coming through the eyes. Brain researchers today call the illusions perceptual, not optical, because the entire visual system is involved, and their theories about what is occurring can sound as exotic as anyone’s.

In the current issue of the journal Cognitive Science, researchers at the California Institute of Technology and the University of Sussex argue that the brain’s adaptive ability to see into the near future creates many common illusions.

“It takes time for the brain to process visual information, so it has to anticipate the future to perceive the present,” said Mark Changizi, the lead author of the paper, who is now at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. “One common functional mechanism can explain many of these seemingly unrelated illusions.” His co-authors were Andrew Hsieh, Romi Nijhawan, Ryota Kanai and Shinsuke Shimojo.

One fundamental debate in visual research is whether the brain uses a bag of ad hoc tricks to build a streaming model of the world, or a general principle, like filling in disjointed images based on inference from new evidence and past experience. The answer may be both. But perceptual illusions provide a keyhole to glimpse the system.

When shown two images in quick succession, one of a dot on the left of a screen and one with the dot on the right, the brain sees motion from left to right, even though there was none. The visual system has apparently constructed the scenario after it has been perceived, reconciling the jagged images by imputing motion.

In an experiment originated by Dr. Nijhawan, people watch an object pass a flashbulb. The timing is exact: the bulb flashes precisely as the object passes. But people perceive that the object has moved past the bulb before it flashes. Scientists argue that the brain has evolved to see a split second into the future when it perceives motion. Because it takes the brain at least a tenth of a second to model visual information, it is working with old information. By modeling the future during movement, it is “seeing” the present.

Dr. Changizi and his colleagues hold that it is a general principle the brain applies to a wide variety of illusions that trick the brain into sensing motion.

“It’s likely that there are many different neural mechanisms involved in perceptual illusions,” said Jacob Feldman, a Rutgers psychologist. “But the idea that there may be some overarching explanation that accounts for these separate mechanisms is compelling and satisfying to some scientists.”

Timothy Hubbard, a psychologist at Texas Christian University, said the principle of perceiving the present was sound, adding, “If a person’s response to an object, to catch, hit, block, whatever, is to be optimal, that response should be calibrated to where the object would be”— not a split second earlier, when the perception occurred.

This is why identical squares arranged around the center of a spoked-wheel image appear misshapen, said Dr. Changizi, who writes about it in a book due in 2009, “The Vision Revolution.” The sides of squares closer to the center appear to bulge. The sides farther out appear shorter. The radiating lines in the pattern trick the brain into perceiving motion forward, so it projects objects forward, making those nearer the center appear closer to the eye.

The same effect can be seen by leaning forward toward a precise checkerboard. The image seems to bulge forward, this time because the eyes are moving.

Dr. Changizi says such illusions can also occur in real life. When a golf ball or baseball rolls through the grass and suddenly drops into a hole, the brain sometimes perceives a trace of the ball on the other side of the hole.

“But these are things that we don’t experience very often,” he said, “because the brain is so good at covering up its mistakes.”

Annette Kelm, Big Print #6 (Jungle Leaves - cotton twill 1947 design Dorothy Draper, courtesy Schumacher & Co), 2007
c-print; 131,5 x 100,5 cm

Date: June 13, 2008 - August 24, 2008
Location: Witte de With
Witte de With presents a solo exhibition of new and existing works by the Berlin-based photographer Annette Kelm.
Thursday 12 June Opening of the exhibition
5 p.m. Tour of the exhibition with Nicolaus Schafhausen (reservations@wdw.nl).
6 p.m. Opening*

With intense visual clarity, she portrays objects dislocated from their usual context. Contrary to their apparent simplicity and reduced aesthetic, Kelm’s images contain a wealth of references, from interior design and architecture, to Hollywood films or current day concerns with exoticism and global trade.

Among the works shown at Witte de With are a selection from Kelm’s Big Prints series of 2007, photographs of printed fabrics designed by Dorothy Draper, an American decorator for the rich and famous in the 1940s. Draper’s designs borrowed heavily from Hawaiian and African fabrics, transforming tribal patterns into chic wallpapers and fabrics. Here the fabrics are photographed flat and at close range, highlighting the beauty of the patterns’ compositions, as well as the disjunction between the fabric’s woven texture and the glossy paper of the photographic print.

Also presented at Witte de With is Caps (2008), a series of 20 images of almost identical caps, edged in different colors and taken from various angles. Kelm found these hats in New York’s Chinatown and was attracted by their marriage of the traditional Chinese straw hat with the shape of the classic all-American baseball cap.

For this exhibition, Kelm has produced a new body of work exploring the pre-fabricated houses that emerged in Germany in the post-war years. Intrigued by the high level of ornamentation they display – quite at odds with usual notions of pre-fab architecture – Kelm photographed these houses using a 4×5 large format plate camera, a slow process with only one shot per plate. The resulting images treat each house as an object, but avoid a Becher-like categorization, capturing instead the poetic quality of these “Swiss” chalets and “Swedish” villas.

Revealing her own research-based practice, Kelm’s works spark off a chain reaction of associations and draw upon the rich vocabulary of the history of painting, sculpture and – particularly – photography. Despite the seemingly deadpan presentation of her subject matter, Kelm’s photographs contain a certain natural beauty and reveal a subtle sense of humor. This lyrical quality sets her apart from earlier conceptual photographers (eg. Dan Graham, Christopher Williams), demonstrating her reassessment of contemporary photography and the freshness of her approach.

At Witte de With, Kelm’s photographs are presented within the remains of Liam Gillick’s solo exhibition, which imposed an architectural meta-structure onto the gallery spaces. This framework designated which rooms were to be used for the presentation of Gillick’s work and which were to be seen as “institutional zones”, for which he gave back the responsibility to the curatorial team. Witte de With chose to use these spaces to present the work of other artists, first with Manon de Boer, then Keren Cytter, Gareth Moore, Claire Fontaine and now – as a final installment – Annette Kelm. Gillick’s meta-structure will be dismantled as Kelm’s show closes.

Curated by: Nicolaus Schafhausen, Zoë Gray

Publication: Witte de With and KW Institute for Contemporary Art Berlin will publish a new book by Annette Kelm in 2008, designed by Hendrik Schwantes. It will feature a dialogue between the artist, Nicolaus Schafhausen and Susanne Pfeffer, and essays by Zoë Gray and Dirk von Lowtzow.

* Saâdane Afif’s exhibition opens the same evening and at 7 p.m. he will be in conversation with Sam Stevelynck from Gonzo magazine (Language: English). Afif’s exhibition also runs until 24 August.

With thanks to: Johann Koenig, Berlin; Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen e.V.; Goethe Institut, Rotterdam.

Witte de With, Center for Contemporary Art

marc foxx

By DYLAN LOEB McCLAIN
NY Times Published: June 7, 2008

The rapper RZA, a founder of the Wu-Tang Clan, sat in a suite on the 48th floor of the Mandarin Oriental hotel overlooking Central Park, staring at a chess game through a pair of sunglasses. His hand was frozen a few inches above the board as he looked for a strategy to thwart his opponent.

Chess has long had an important role in the aesthetic of the Wu-Tang Clan, which has songs about the game. In “The Wu-Tang Manual,” a 2005 book about the group and its members, RZA (pronounced RIZ-a) wrote that chess is part of the Wu-Tang essence “because it’s a game of war — it’s about battle. And Wu-Tang was formed in battles, from challenging each other.”

RZA, 38, learned the game when he was 11, from a girl who, as he writes in the manual, also took his virginity. Though he and his cousin GZA, another founder of the group, both love chess, they did not play much when they were younger because, GZA said, they were too poor to own a board.

Now they play chess almost every day, and RZA, holder of the Hip-Hop Chess Federation belt — a trophy he picked up last fall at a tournament in San Francisco that featured rappers and martial-arts experts — is turning his interest into a business. On Monday he started WuChess (wuchess.com), a Web site where fans can play chess online, chat, see scores of their games and other personal information, and get news about RZA and Wu-Tang. RZA said that the site might one day offer monthly tournaments, with the winner playing him online.

“The way you have to think in chess is good for everyday thinking, really,” he said, “especially for brothers in the urban community who never take that second look, never take that second thought.”

Membership costs $48 a year, which could deter potential subscribers. On techcrunch.com, a site that critiques Internet offerings, several readers applauded the idea of combining hip-hop and chess, but others complained about the fee.

Patrick Mahoney, president of chesspark.com, the company that developed the WuChess site, said that about 5,000 people had preregistered for membership and that several hundred had already paid. He added that hundreds of free memberships would be given to school-age children through organizations that contact him, and that 10 to 20 percent of the site’s revenue would finance academic scholarships to be awarded by the Hip-Hop Chess Federation.

Marley Kaplan, chief executive of Chess-in-the-Schools, a nonprofit group that teaches chess in poorer New York City school districts, said that RZA’s involvement might encourage some children to play, but that she doubted it would make a big impact. “Most kids get interested in chess through schools and through family and friends,” she said. “We taught 20,000 kids this year and I bet if you surveyed them, none of them knows that he plays chess,” referring to RZA.

Mr. Mahoney said the site was primarily meant to be a “competitive platform,” and there it comes up a bit short so far. Because there aren’t many members yet, it can be hard to find good opponents. And the pieces are designed using martial-arts and Wu-Tang symbols, which can make playing confusing. (Instead of a horse’s head, for example, the knight is a silhouette of a martial-arts fighter flying through the air.) Mr. Mahoney said users would eventually be able to select from more traditional piece designs.

WuChess is just one of many projects occupying RZA’s attention. On June 24, under the alter ego Bobby Digital, he is releasing a solo album, “Digi Snax” (Koch Entertainment); he starts an American tour to promote it on Tuesday. He’s also writing music for “Afro Samurai,” an animated show on Spike TV, and appearing in two coming movies: “Gospel Hill” with Danny Glover and “Repossession Mambo” with Jude Law.

In July he’s touring in Europe with the Wu-Tang Clan, although his relationship with several members is fractured. One member, U-God, has sued Wu-Tang and RZA, claiming that he is owed $170,000. Several other members, including Method Man, Masta Killa, Raekwon and Ghostface Killah, publicly disagreed with RZA over the artistic direction of “8 Diagrams” (SRC/Universal Motown), the album released by Wu-Tang last year, which he produced. RZA said of the feud, “It’s that same kind of relationship you may have with your siblings where you are brothers forever, you are sisters forever, but sometimes you can’t stand each other.”

As the 10-minute game in his hotel room drew to a close, RZA put up stiff resistance, but soon his king was encircled. His opponent, the chess columnist of The New York Times, pushed his remaining rook down the board, forcing checkmate. RZA laughed and bumped fists with his challenger; it had been a good battle.

link to wuchess.com

From the Los Angeles Times
T.J. SIMERS:

Lakers haven’t won a championship since their longtime broadcaster died, and he hasn’t been forgotten by his widow or the fans.
June 8 2008

BOSTON — The other day Kobe Bryant was saying he just “missed some bunnies” in the first game of the NBA Finals, or as Chick Hearn would’ve been telling us, “Marge could have made those shots.”

It doesn’t seem so long ago, but it will be six years this week, Chick doing his final Lakers broadcast after 42 years behind the microphone, a championship-clinching victory over the New Jersey Nets.

Two months later a fall in his backyard led to his death.

“If he was still here, he would have been so happy, I don’t think he could have stood it,” Marge says. “I think he would have finally had his heart attack.”

What a hoot. Marge, about to turn 91, married for almost 64 years to Fran, as she still refers to her high school sweetheart, and as feisty and original as the voice who once worked 3,338 consecutive Laker games.

“We were soul mates,” she says. “I don’t know what that means, but it sounds like us.”

The same might be said about Chick and Lakers fans, everyone knowing just what he meant when he would say, “He’s in the popcorn machine,” or who he was talking about when he would mention “The Big Fella.”

Nine championships, Chick behind the microphone for each of them, but he dies before they pass out the rings for winning it all in 2002 — a ring dedicated to him.

“That’s the one I’ve kept, the one I wear,” Marge says. “I gave all the others to family members.

“It has a microphone and the words, ’slam dunk,’ which you know he originated. And you’re not going to believe this, but you know who did that — who put that on all the rings?”

As Chick might have said to sidekick Keith Erickson, “I’ll bet you an ice cream” you don’t get it.

“It was Phil Jackson’s doing,” Marge says. “Fran wouldn’t have believed it, but that’s what Jeanie [Buss] told me.”

Chick never really got close to Jackson, and back in the day he would say how it frustrated him, but as Marge says, “Phil seems like a hard man to get to know for everyone, and I don’t know if anyone ever gets close to him.”

How about Jeanie?

“He better be close to her,” Marge says. “She’s the best.”

JACKSON’S FACE lights up when Chick’s name is mentioned Saturday afternoon. He says it’s true — when asked to help design the 2002 championship ring, he thought of Chick. “He’s human after all,” as Chick might say.

“It was the appropriate thing to do,” Jackson says. “He died before he ever got the ring, and it was so sad for everyone in L.A.”

Chick was so popular, his funeral was broadcast live on TV, the freeway stopped to allow only those with invitations to exit, and easy to understand, as Marge says.

“You know what we would do when the team had a day off? We would bar-hop and talk to all the bartenders. He liked people. He actually liked people.

“And he was always proud of the fact that the person who could not afford a ticket could listen to the game and still enjoy it. Those were his kind of fans, those were the ones he loved.”

When the Lakers were on the road, Marge never missed a broadcast. For home games, “I used to sit three rows in front of him,” she says. “But I’ve moved to the other side of the court behind the visiting team so it gets me away from where he was. I miss him, you know.

“My heart still sinks every once in a while. I hear the national anthem, look up, and shed a tear occasionally. It’s a terrible feeling when you’re alone and don’t have anybody.”

Hard to sit undisturbed, though, Lakers fans stopping by Marge’s seat to tell her how her husband affected their lives, Chick doing this and Chick doing that.

“And I just know how much he would have absolutely loved this team,” she gushes, “and how happy he would have been doing games that mean so much again.”

The Lakers, though, are one down to the Celtics and a long way from putting this series in the refrigerator.

“You know what his favorite saying was?” Marge says. “Whenever he could say something hasn’t happened ’since Hector was a pup.’ I have no idea who Hector was, and he probably didn’t either.

“My favorite was the ‘bunny hop in the pea patch.’ He used it a lot because he knew I liked it.”

If he were still here, he’d be sitting on the Nokia Theatre stage Friday night along with Vin Scully and JohnWooden.

“That would’ve been great, but that’s life, isn’t it?” says Marge, who while still living in Encino would join Wooden for dinner at the Valley Inn. “You know he doesn’t eat like an old person — he eats like a man.”

Marge has moved into a Fullerton retirement home, “and when I talk about Fran,” she says with a laugh, “the girls all want to know, who is this Fran I’m always talking about?

“But I’m not sitting around moaning and groaning. I’m in a putting contest — imagine that. Fran wouldn’t have stood for me doing nothing. We had a wonderful 64 years together until the shocker of all shockers, we come home from Las Vegas, he falls and dies in our backyard.”

Chick did a Las Vegas broadcast for Magic’s fantasy camp, his broadcasting sidekick telling Marge later that Chick had signed off by telling the fans, “goodbye.”

To this day it confounds Marge. “He never did that, never said goodbye to the fans,” she says.

As for the years that have passed, and the new broadcast team in place, Marge laughs when asked how they are doing.

“I can hear Fran now: ‘Marge, shut your mouth.’ But I think the kid that does the radio is tremendous and I think Chick would have thought so too.”

And now, should the Lakers win yet another championship, it will be the first without Chick leading the parade.

“I talk to him all the time,” Marge says. “When I was first alone there was nobody else to talk with, so we talked and I would imagine what he would say back.

“I know this, if there is any help up there available for the Lakers, Fran’s going to find it.”

Keep that in mind should it all come down to last-second heroics, the voice in the distance a familiar one, chirping, “he shot that from way out yonder.”

By MARTIN FACKLER
NY TimesPublished: June 7, 2008

TOKYO — A car company that hid dangerous flaws to avoid embarrassing recalls. A meat processor that sold ground pig hearts as beef. A fancy restaurant chain that served customers leftover sashimi from other diners.

In recent years, Japan’s faith in its corporate establishment has been shaken by a series of scandals in which companies of all sizes have been caught in frauds ranging from the merely nauseating to the patently dangerous. More shocking than the misdeeds is the fact that employees are blowing the whistle.

A decade ago, corporate whistle-blowing was almost unheard-of in Japan. A person’s place of employment was part of his identity, and unflinching company loyalty was the highest of virtues. But the unquestioningly obedient salaryman is becoming a relic, the result of a broader transformation of Japan and the global economy.

When this country had Asia’s hottest economy, fast-growing companies could afford to buy employee loyalty with guarantees of lifetime jobs, and a sense of belonging at a company that treated workers like extended family. But that social contract began disintegrating in the economic stagnation of the 1990s, the “lost decade,” characterized by declining job security and falling wages.

Now, lawyers and economists say Japanese workers are beginning to speak out — despite a still potent risk of ostracism because of the widely held view that such disclosure constitutes an act of betrayal.

Some employees act to defend the public interest, others to protect themselves from possible prosecution for their part in wrongdoing.

“The company is losing its place at the center of the employee’s universe,” said Naoki Yanagida, an employment lawyer.

The first high-profile instance of a corporate whistle-blower was in 2000, when an employee at Mitsubishi Motors exposed the company’s cover-up of accident-causing defects, including failing brakes and leaking fluids, generating investigations that led to arrests of executives and near bankruptcy for the automaker.

Now, Japan routinely sees several scandals a year caused by employees airing dirty corporate laundry, though the exact number is hard to count because Japanese authorities and media often do not always reveal the sources of information.

In fact, the scandals seem to be having a snowball effect, as each revelation of wrongdoing prompts more whistle-blowers to come forward, say whistle-blowers and experts.

This happened in one of the biggest recent scandals, in which a meat processor called Meat Hope collapsed in July after revelations that it had mixed pork, mutton and chicken into products falsely labeled as pure ground beef. The employee who blew the whistle was Kiroku Akahane, 72, a sales executive at the company, which was based in the northern town of Tomakomai.

Mr. Akahane said he knew of the company’s subterfuges for more than a decade, and had long felt torn between guilt toward customers and loyalty toward his company that he described as Japan’s “samurai spirit.” What finally moved him to take his story to a newspaper last year was the growing media attention on whistle-blowers. This made him afraid that if he did not act first, another employee would eventually expose the company, possibly implicating him.

“Defending the public good is noble, but in the end, I just wanted to avoid arrest,” said Mr. Akahane, who said his wife opposed his decision while his daughter supported him. Since exposing his company, Mr. Akahane says he is treated like an outcast in Tomakomai, barred from joining an annual neighborhood religious festival and even shunned by relatives. He now goes to a psychiatric hospital to deal with depression, he said.

Mr. Akahane’s difficulties underscore the high personal costs of blowing the whistle in a group-oriented society that still frowns on individuals who stand out. Japan itself appears torn between its traditional ethic of group loyalty, and a recognition that it needs greater transparency and stronger checks and balances to function as a modern economy. As a result, Japan has so far greeted whistle-blowers with an ambivalent mixture of praise and ostracism.

Indeed, one of the most disturbing revelations for the Japanese has been just how rampant these swindles and frauds are, particularly in protected domestic industries like food services and agriculture.

“Whistle-blowers are exposing problems that have probably existed for a long time, but were just hidden from sight,” said Koji Morioka, an economics professor at Kansai University who has researched the whistle-blowing phenomenon.

Mr. Morioka and others say the scandals are the product of an outdated economic system in which these tight-knit industries are shielded from outside oversight by regulators who collude with companies instead of protecting consumers.

Mr. Akahane said that he went to the media out of desperation after regulators refused to act. He said he was ignored after visiting several government agencies, including the Ministry of Agriculture, to whom he brought samples of ground meat that Meat Hope sold as beef but that actually contained pork hearts.

Yoichi Mizutani ran into similar problems. Mr. Mizutani, 54, owned a refrigerated warehouse in the western city of Nishinomiya that did a booming business with local meat companies. Then one day in December 2001, an employee saw workers from one of his biggest customers, the meat processor Snow Brand, using his warehouse to put frozen slabs of Australian beef into boxes for sale as domestic meat.

He said such fraud is common in the meat industry, whose members are expected to observe a code of silence. He said his outrage boiled over when he called Snow Brand to ask about the incident, and was told to shut up. He eventually told two Japanese newspapers, generating a scandal that resulted in suspended prison terms for five executives.

“I thought of how many small company owners in this industry, like me, lie awake at night, tormented by guilt over what they are doing,” Mr. Mizutani said. “The industry talks of itself as one big family, which protects its own. But injustice is injustice.”

After he went public, Mr. Mizutani said all meat companies shunned him, driving his warehouse out of business. For a year, Mr. Mizutani, who is divorced, supported himself and his three children by working day jobs, and at one point even sold books on a blanket in front of a train station. Things took a turn for the better when his plight was reported by a local television news station. With donations from viewers, including a Buddhist temple, he restarted his warehouse business, this time dealing in frozen vegetables and seafood. He also became a minor folk hero, starring in a comic strip that celebrates whistle-blowers. He now defiantly revels in his rebel status, shedding his gray suit for flip-flops, a T-shirt and dyed blond hair with a black streak.

He said he has received several phone calls from people asking whether they should blow the whistle on misdeeds by their employers. “I ask them, ‘Are you prepared to lose your own arm and a leg? Because that is how hard it will be,’ ” he said.

Still, the Snow Brand case became a milestone in Japan, helping open the floodgates for a series of similar scandals. Recent high-profile cases exposed by whistle-blowers include the cookie maker Ishiya Trading, which admitted to selling expired products, and luxury restaurant chain Senba Kitcho, which closed its four outlets after admitting it served leftover sashimi and expired food to customers.

As concern has risen, the government responded by passing a law that went into effect two years ago aimed at protecting whistle-blowers by making it illegal for employers to punish them. Some large companies have also set up internal phone lines, allowing employees to report problems anonymously.

Even supposedly anonymous whistle-blowers face risks. Masakatsu Yamada was a used car salesman who called such an internal line at Toyota two years ago to report problems, including falsified sales records at the Toyota dealership where he worked in Osaka. But the person who took the call, an outside lawyer hired by Toyota, told the company Mr. Yamada’s name.

After that, Mr. Yamada said he become a pariah among colleagues and eventually left his job. Unable to make mortgage payments, he lost his house, and now lives in a small apartment, surviving on his wife’s salary as a part-time postal worker. While bitter, he says he does not regret what he did.

“My life is all messed up,” said Mr. Yamada, 47. “But society won’t change unless average people like me stand up.”

moca

JAMES BARRON
NY Times Published: June 6, 2008

Two men, one a practiced French stuntman known for climbing tall buildings, the other a New Yorker who said he wanted to raise awareness of the dangers of malaria, scaled the 52-story New York Times Building in Times Square on Thursday just hours apart. Each was arrested when he stepped safely onto the roof.

Later in the day, a man identified by the police as Renaldo Clarke scaled the tower’s western side, where people on the 50th floor watched his ascent. More Photos »

The first, Alain Robert, the Frenchman, went up the north face of the year-old skyscraper in the morning, unfurling a bright green banner near the top. The words on the banner were illegible from the sidewalk, but from office windows inside the tower the message could be clearly read: “Global warming kills more people than 9/11 every week.”

The other, identified by the police as Renaldo Clarke, 32, of Brooklyn, climbed the Eighth Avenue side starting about 6 p.m.

A spokeswoman for The Times, Catherine J. Mathis, said that after the first climber was arrested, two additional building security guards were assigned to patrol the area outside, on 40th and 41st Streets.

Both climbers grabbed onto one of the building’s most distinctive features, the ladderlike horizontal rods that form an exterior curtain surrounding the floor-to-ceiling windows. And then, in turn, they were off on a hand-over-hand trip up the face of a New York skyscraper, with no ropes or harnesses, a trip that left the cellphone-camera-snapping crowds that swirled below thinking of Spider-Man, or maybe King Kong.

“He was staring at me on the fourth floor,” said Kim Severson, a reporter for The Times’s Dining section, who saw Mr. Clarke pass by. “At first, I thought, ‘Is he a window washer?’ But he had no equipment. He turned and climbed up at a very rapid pace. He looked very focused. He looked very solemn and determined.”

Both times, the police and Times security officials cordoned off the sidewalk below as crowds gathered. Both times, television news helicopters circled, zooming in as each climber grabbed onto ever-higher rungs.

“It’s very scary,” said Dan Sella, an associate at the law firm of Covington & Burling L.L.P., who watched Mr. Clarke go by on the 41st floor.

But witnesses said there appeared to be differences between the climbs. Mr. Robert seemed better prepared, with a fanny pack that contained chalk to help his grip and liquid to drink.

“When Alain came up this side, it was a cakewalk for him,” said Nick Mudge, 24, a chef at Covington & Burling.

Mr. Clarke — his hands blackened by dirt from the ceramic rods — looked “fatigued” as he passed the 43rd floor, Mr. Mudge said. “He stopped and hung by his arms. His feet were just swinging back and forth.”

Mr. Clarke took to stopping at floors where there were breaks in the bars, and looking inside, where small crowds stared back.

“He mouthed to me, ‘What floor am I on?’ ” said Andrew M. Bratt, an associate at Covington & Burling. “I hand-signaled that he was on 41. He nodded and looked down and moved on. He was smiling.”

Mr. Clarke smiled even when one of the ceramic rods cracked underfoot as he made his way from the 47th floor to the 48th, another witness said.

The crowd in front of the Port Authority Bus Terminal, across Eighth Avenue, let out a cheer in exuberant relief when Mr. Clarke made it safely to the top. But some spectators criticized the stunt.

“He’s disrupting the city,” said Zee Mosher, 33, a graphic designer with a portrait of Buckminster Fuller tattooed on his neck. “He’s endangering his own life and the lives of other people.”

The chief spokesman for the police, Paul J. Browne, said that Mr. Clarke, of Brooklyn, was taken to Bellevue Hospital Center for psychiatric evaluation after his arrest.

Shortly before 11 p.m. Thursday, the police said, Mr. Clarke was moved from Bellevue to the Midtown South Precinct station house. He emerged from Midtown South about a half-hour later. He paused for a moment at the top of the steps as reporters shouted questions.

When asked if he was a copycat climber, he said, flatly, “No.”

Officers then loaded him into an unmarked car and took him to Central Booking to be arraigned. Mr. Clarke was charged with reckless endangerment, criminal trespass and disorderly conduct.

Mr. Robert, 45, who was released on bail early Friday, was facing the same charges as well as a charge of making graffiti, in reference to the banner he unfurled after his climb.

After being freed, Mr. Robert would only say that he was “very happy to be released.” He was overheard telling friends in French that he was tired.

At Mr. Robert’s arraignment early Friday before Judge Abraham Clott of Manhattan Criminal Court, an assistant district attorney, Heather Pearson, arguing that Mr. Robert’s actions had been “extremely dangerous to other people,” asked the judge to set bail at $20,000 and to require Mr. Robert to surrender his passport.

Judge Clott set bail at a much lower amount — $2,000 in cash or a $3,000 bond — and did not ask Mr. Robert to surrender his passport. Mr. Robert was ordered to appear in court again on Wednesday.

A lawyer representing Mr. Robert, Daniel N. Arshack, told the judge that Mr. Robert’s climb was motivated by “personal conviction.”

“This was a political act, an act of free speech,” Mr. Arshack said.

Ms. Pearson said that while he was being held at the Midtown South station house, Mr. Robert told the police that he had “climbed up 83 buildings all over the world” and that he had been “arrested 14 times.”

Mr. Arshack asked Judge Clott to dismiss the charges, saying that all of them were “insufficient as a matter of law.” The judge denied the motion.

No formal plea was entered, but Mr. Arshack said Mr. Robert would plead not guilty to all charges.

At The New York Times Building, officers put up interlocking metal barricades on the sidewalk, apparently to deter other would-be climbers, after Mr. Clarke was led out in handcuffs. The ceramic rods that surround the building — and served as a ladder for Mr. Robert and Mr. Clarke — start about 20 feet above the sidewalk on the 40th and 41st Street sides of the tower, and 35 feet above the sidewalk on the Eighth Avenue side.

The barricades could make it more difficult to reach the ceramic rods. So could a ring of police officers who took up positions around the building about 90 minutes after Mr. Clarke reached the top. Mr. Browne said Times security officials had told the police that The New York Times Company was contracting with an outside firm for additional security after Mr. Clarke’s climb.

A news cameraman who was on the scene moments after Mr. Clarke began climbing showed video indicating that he climbed the large perforated beams rising out of the sidewalk like a jungle gym, and pulled himself easily onto the horizontal rods. It was unclear how Mr. Robert began his ascent.

Both climbers came back down in a freight elevator surrounded by police officers, and then into police vans. Mr. Clarke said along the way that this was his third such conquest. He said he had climbed two other Manhattan buildings — including the Hearst Tower, at 56th Street and Eighth Avenue — but had not been arrested either time. It was not immediately possible to confirm that claim.

When a reporter asked why he had climbed the Times Building, he said, “For malaria.” He was wearing a T-shirt that said: “Malaria No More. Save the Children.” He also wore loose-fitting salmon-colored pants, a leather belt and yellow climbing shoes.

Mr. Clarke smiled, as if he was being carried victorious off an athletic field instead of being ushered into a police van. When he was asked how his climb would increase awareness of malaria, he smiled into a reporter’s video camera and said, “I’m going to be on the news, no?”

“I got to the top,” he declared.

On the street outside the building, at 620 Eighth Avenue, he grinned at a small crowd that cheered him. A girl reached toward the window of the police van and gave him a thumbs-up.

The Times Building was designed by the architect Renzo Piano and opened last year. Mr. Piano is known for exposing the structural elements of his buildings in an effort to merge function and design. One of his early successes was as a designer of the Centre Pompidou in Paris, which has been described as “a giant climbing frame.”

Mr. Piano could not be reached on Thursday at his office in New York or through his assistant in Paris.

Bruce Ratner, whose company, Forest City Ratner, was a development partner in the Times Building, issued a statement that said: “We of course deplore the reckless behavior today by the two individuals who climbed The New York Times Building. We have added additional security to the building and will work with the city to stop any similar efforts. What happened today was not just a stunt. It was a violation of the law and a careless and dangerous threat to public safety.”

Mr. Robert is famous for scaling structures like the National Bank of Abu Dhabi, the Sydney Opera House in Australia and the Eiffel Tower and Montparnasse Tower in Paris.

“Climbing is my passion, my philosophy of life,” Mr. Robert states on his Web site, adding, “Although I suffer from vertigo, although my accidents left me disabled up to 60 percent, I have become the best solo climber.”

On Thursday morning, he weaved in and out of the ceramic-rod lattice sheathing the Times Building, pausing on exterior beams every few floors. He stopped occasionally to wave to the crowd, which included construction workers on a building across West 41st Street and others in front of the bus terminal. Each time he took his hand away to wave, there were gasps from observers.

As Mr. Robert went up the outside, hand over hand, police officers from the Emergency Services Unit went up on the inside, riding in the freight elevator.

Mr. Robert raised his hands as if to surrender when he made it to the roof.

New York skyscrapers and chilling, attention-getting stunts have a long history together. The French stunt artist Philippe Petit walked along a high wire strung between the twin towers of the World Trade Center in 1974, a feat that is the subject of a new documentary, “Man on a Wire.”

In 2006, another stuntman, Jeb Corliss, was arrested after trying to jump off the observation deck of the Empire State Building.

By the end of Thursday, some patrolmen and police officials had been sent to the Times Building twice. Among them was Inspector James McCarthy, the commanding officer of the Midtown South Precinct, who shook his head after Mr. Clarke was in custody.

“That’s the last climber today,” he said.

Reporting was contributed by Charles V. Bagli, Russ Buettner, Sewell Chan, Glenn Collins, David W. Dunlap, Jason Grant, Christine Hauser, Corey Kilgannon, Eric Konigsberg, Jennifer 8. Lee, Trymaine Lee, Patrick McGeehan, Colin Moynihan, William K. Rashbaum and Paul von Zielbauer.
More Articles in New York Region »

By NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF
NY Times Published: June 8, 2008

“Don’t tell anyone,” Rem Koolhaas said to me several years ago as we headed down the F.D.R. Drive in New York, “but the 20th-century city is over. It has nothing new to teach us anymore. Our job is simply to maintain it.” Koolhaas’s viewpoint is widely shared by close observers of the evolution of cities. But not even Koolhaas, it seems, was completely prepared for what would come next.

In both China and the Persian Gulf, cities comparable in size to New York have sprouted up almost overnight. Only 30 years ago, Shenzhen was a small fishing village of a few thousand people, and Dubai had merely a quarter million people. Today Shenzhen has a population of eight million, and Dubai’s glittering towers, rising out of the desert in disorderly rows, have become playgrounds for wealthy expatriates from Riyadh and Moscow. Long-established cities like Beijing and Guangzhou have more than doubled in size in a few decades, their original outlines swallowed by rings of new development. Built at phenomenal speeds, these generic or instant cities, as they have been called, have no recognizable center, no single identity. It is sometimes hard to think of them as cities at all. Dubai, which lays claim to some of the world’s most expensive private islands, the tallest building and soon the largest theme park, has been derided as an urban tomb where the rich live walled off from the poor migrant workers who serve them. Shenzhen is often criticized as a product of unregulated development, better suited to the speculators that first spurred its growth than to the workers housed in huge complexes of factory-run barracks. Yet for architects these cities have also become vast fields of urban experimentation, on a scale that not even the early Modernists, who first envisioned the city as a field of gleaming towers, could have dreamed of.

“The old contextual model is not very relevant anymore,” Jesse Reiser, an American architect working in Dubai, told me recently. “What context are we talking about in a city that’s a few decades old? The problem is that we are only beginning to figure out where to go from here.”

The sheer number of projects under construction and the corresponding investment in civic infrastructure — entire networks of new subway systems, freeways and canals; gargantuan new airports and public parks — can give the impression that anything is possible in this new world. The scale of these undertakings recalls the early part of the last century in America, when the country was confidently pointed toward the future. But it would be unimaginable in an American city today, where, in the face of shrinking state and city budgets, expanding a single subway line can seem like a heroic act. “In America, I could never do work like I do here,” Steven Holl, a New York architect with several large projects in China, recently told me, referring to his latest complex in Beijing. “We’ve become too backward-looking. In China, they want to make everything look new. This is their moment in time. They want to make the 21st century their century. For some reason, our society wants to make everything old. I think we somehow lost our nerve.”

Holl has reason to be exhilarated. His Beijing project, “Linked Hybrid,” is one of the most innovative housing complexes anywhere in the world: eight asymmetrical towers joined by a network of enclosed bridges that create a pedestrian zone in the sky. Yet this exhilaration also comes at a price: only the wealthiest of Beijing’s residents can afford to live here. Climbing to the top of one of Holl’s towers, I looked out through a haze of smog at the acres of luxury-housing towers that surround his own, the kind of alienating subdivisions that are so often cited as a symptom of the city’s unbridled, dehumanizing development. Protected by armed guards, these residential high-rises stood on what was until quite recently a working-class neighborhood, even though the poor quality of their construction makes them seem decades old. Nearby, a new freeway cut through the neighborhood, further disfiguring an area that, however modest, was once bursting with life.

“If you take Venturi’s ideas about the city,” Holl said, referring to Robert Venturi’s groundbreaking work, “Learning From Las Vegas,” which called on architects to reconsider the importance of the everyday (strip malls, billboards, storefronts), “and put them in Beijing or Tokyo, they don’t hold any water at all. When you get into this scale, the rules have to be rewritten. The density is so incredible.” Because of this density, cities like Beijing have few of the features we associate with a traditional metropolis. They do not radiate from a historic center as Paris and New York do. Instead, their vast size means that they function primarily as a series of decentralized neighborhoods, something closer in spirit to Los Angeles. The breathtaking speed of their construction means that they usually lack the layers — the mix of architectural styles and intricately related social strata — that give a city its complexity and from which architects have typically drawn inspiration.

In Dubai, for instance, what might once have been the product of 100 years of urban growth has been compressed into a decade or so. Given such seismic shifts, even the most talented architects can seem to flounder for new models. No one wants to return to the deadly homogeneity associated with Modernism’s tabula rasa planning strategies. The image of Le Corbusier hovering godlike above Paris ready to wipe aside entire districts and replace them with glass towers remains an emblem of Modernism’s attack on the city’s historical fabric. Yet the notion of finding “authenticity” in a sprawling metropolitan area that is barely 30 years old also seems absurd. How do you breathe life into a project at such a scale? How do you instill the fine-grained texture of a healthy community into one that rose overnight?

Cities like these, built on a colossal scale, seem to absorb any urban model, no matter how unique, virtually unnoticed. A project that could have a significant impact on the character of, say, New York — like the development plans for ground zero — can seem a mere blip in Beijing, which has embarked on dozens of similarly sized endeavors in the last decade alone. “The irony is that we still don’t know if postmodernism was the end of Modernism or just an interruption,” Koolhaas told me recently. “Was it a brief hiatus, and now we are returning to something that has been going on for a long time, or is it something radically different? We are in a condition we don’t understand yet.”

For architects faced with building these large urban developments, the difficulty is to create something where there was nothing. If much of contemporary architecture depends on sifting through the cultural and historical layers that a site accumulates over time — whether neo-Classical monuments or Socialist-era housing — what can be done if there is nothing to sift through but sand?

In a recent design for a six-and-a-half-square-mile development in Dubai called Waterfront City, Koolhaas proposed creating an urban island inspired by a section of Midtown Manhattan. The design linked a dense grid of conventional towers to the mainland by a system of bridges. A series of stunning “iconic” buildings — a gigantic, hollowed-out Piranesian sphere at the island’s edge; a spiraling tower that winds around an airy public atrium — were intended to give the city a distinct flavor. Koolhaas said he hoped, in this way, to infuse this entirely new development with something of the feeling of an older city. But while the outlines are intriguing, he is still coming to terms with how to create an organic whole. In the early stages of the design, Koolhaas experimented with somewhat conventional models of public space: a boardwalk along the island’s perimeter, a narrow park cutting through its center, classical arcades lining the downtown streets. But the majority of Dubai’s inhabitants are foreign-born, and the arcaded streets could easily suggest a theme-park version of a traditional Arab city. Koolhaas is painfully aware of how hard it is to escape the generic.

“A city like Dubai is literally built on a desert,” Koolhaas conceded when I asked him about the project. “There is a weird alternation between density and emptiness. You rarely feel that you are designing for people who are actually there but for communities that have yet to be assembled. The vernacular is too faint, too precarious to become something on which you can base an architecture.”

Koolhaas says he hopes that the plan will gain in complexity as the buildings’ functions are worked out; he says he was thrilled to learn that the government wanted both a courthouse and a mosque on the island. “Another option that I personally find very interesting,” Koolhaas told me, “is the modernist vernacular of the 1970s — buildings that once you put them in Singapore or Dubai take on totally different meanings. Some of the modern typologies work in Asia even though they are totally dysfunctional in America. Typologies we’ve rejected turn out to be viable in other contexts.”

The challenges of building what amounts to a small-scale city from scratch are compounded by the realities of working in a global marketplace. An architect of Koolhaas’s stature may be grappling simultaneously with the design of a television headquarters complex in Beijing, a stock exchange in Shenzhen and a 20-block neighborhood in Dubai, as well as a dozen buildings in Europe. The intense competition for these commissions means that architects are often forced to churn out seductive designs in weeks or months, tweaking their models to fit local conditions.

Several years ago, the London-based, Iraqi-born architect Zaha Hadid received a phone call from a Chinese developer asking if she might be interested in designing a 500-acre urban development on the outskirts of Singapore. Hadid had never met the developer before. She was soon working on the master plan for “One North,” a mixed-use development with a projected population of about 140,000. Located on what was once a military site, Hadid’s design conjured a high-tech mountainous terrain. Dubbed the “urban carpet,” it was intended to blend office and residential towers and highways and public parks into a seamless whole. Against the rigid lines of the traditional street grid, the sinuous curves of the freeways suggested a more fluid, mobile society. The rooftops, whose heights were subject to stringent regulations, looked as if they were cut from a single piece of crumpled fabric, giving the composition a haunting unity. “We wanted to create a complex order rather than either the monotony of Modernism or the chaos you find in contemporary cities,” Hadid said.

Yet once construction began, the design of the buildings was left to local architects hired by the developer. As the towers rose in clusters scattered across the site, it was difficult to read the formal intent. With more than 20 blocks now complete, parts of the city look surprisingly conventional.

Hadid revived the concept several years later, when she won a competition to create a 1,360-acre business district in a former industrial zone on the outskirts of Istanbul. This time, the context was more promising: a hilly landscape at the edge of the sea flanked by older working-class neighborhoods on either side. To allow the development to grow in a more natural way than at One North, it would be built in phases that would begin at the waterfront and spread inland, eventually connecting to the street grid of the older neighborhoods. In an effort to preserve the texture of her original concept, Hadid developed a series of building prototypes, including a star-shaped tower and a housing block organized around a central court, and staggered the heights of the buildings to reflect the existing terrain.

If Hadid’s plan is formally inventive, it is still unclear whether it has escaped the homogeneity that was a hallmark of Modernist urban-renewal projects. Its sheer size coupled with the fact that the shapes of the buildings were conceived by a single architect means the result may well be more uniform, and ultimately more rigid, than Hadid intended.

Indeed, contemporary architects’ urban plans may be less tied to location than they would like to admit. When a Chinese developer approached the New York-based Jesse Reiser and Nanako Umemoto to design a 1,235-acre development in Foshan, on the Pearl River Delta, they (with a Chinese partner) came up with a system of urban “mats”: a multilayered network of roads and low-rise commercial spaces, topped by a park surrounded by residential and commercial buildings. The park followed the contours of the roadways below; sunken courtyards allowed light to spill down into the underground spaces. Last year, the Chinese project fell through, and Reiser and Umemoto reworked the idea for a developer in Dubai. The layout was reconfigured to fit the new waterfront site; souks were added as a nod to local traditions. The result is a remarkably nuanced view of how to knit together the various elements of urban life, but it also seems as if it could exist anywhere.

The walkable, mixed-use neighborhoods celebrated by Jane Jacobs may seem impossibly remote, but encouraging signs of a more textured urban reality can still be found. Take Holl’s Linked Hybrid in Beijing, for example, which has a surprisingly open, communal spirit. A series of massive portals lead from the street to an elaborate internal courtyard garden, a restaurant, a theater and a kindergarten, integrating the complex into the surrounding neighborhood. Bridges connect the towers 12 to 19 stories above ground and are conceived as a continuous string of public zones, with bars and nightclubs overlooking a glittering view of the city and a suspended swimming pool. “The developer’s openness to ideas was amazing,” Holl says. “When they first asked me to do the project, it was just housing. I suggested adding the cinematheque, the kindergarten. I added an 80-room hotel and the swimming pool as well. Anywhere else, they’d build it in phases over several years. It’s too big. After our meeting, they said we’re building the whole thing all at once. I couldn’t believe it. We haven’t had to compromise anything.

“But what makes it possible is the density. The Modernist idea of the street in the air that became a place of social interaction never worked in Europe. Beijing is so dense that I can keep all of the shops functioning on the street, and there’s still enough energy to activate the bridges as well.”

Holl is continuing to explore these ideas in another megaproject, this time on the outskirts of Shenzhen: a zigzag-shaped office complex propped up on big steel columns that make room for a dreamy public garden. The density in much of Shenzhen can make Beijing look spacious. The imposing skyline of glass-and-steel towers, plastered with electronic billboards, was built mostly within the last decade, part of the boom that followed foreign investment in the area, when it was declared a special economic zone in the early ’80s. The Chinese government initially allowed many of the small villages that lined the delta to hold on to their land. As land values rose around them, the villagers remained in their increasingly populated districts, where they built cheap, and often instantly decrepit, towers that were so close together they were dubbed “handshake buildings”: you could literally reach out your window and shake hands with your neighbor across the street. The villages are poignant testimonies to the hardships that young workers, recently transplanted from the countryside, face in the new China. Many live packed a half dozen or more in one-bedroom apartments. But if Shenzhen is an emblem of what can happen when free-market capitalism is allowed to run amok, it is also an example of the spontaneous creativity that occurs when people are left to fend for themselves. On a recent visit, the alleyways, dark and claustrophobic, were thick with shops. Elderly people played mah-jongg on card tables in the street; two young children sat at a small desk doing their homework in a tiny storefront that doubled as their bedroom.

Wenyi Wu, a young architect working for a Chinese firm called Urbanus, led me around the area. The firm has been studying how people carve a living space out of seemingly inhospitable environments, hoping to develop an urbanist model more deeply rooted in the spontaneity of everyday life. He took me to a small museum Urbanus designed on the outskirts of the city. A series of stepped galleries stand at the base of a hill between an urban village and some banal housing complexes above. A series of long ramps pierce the building, joining the two worlds. More ramps encircle the exterior, so that you have the impression of moving through a system of loosely connected alleyways. The idea was to transform the unregulated character of the urban village into something more formal and humane — to extract the essence of its character without romanticizing the squalor. The circuitous paths of the ramps echo the surrounding alleyways; the layout of the galleries suggests the footprint of the migrant workers’ housing but on a more intimate scale.

Other architects, hoping to build in ways that reflect an emerging vernacular, are taking a similar approach, looking at more modest and more informally constructed urban neighborhoods for inspiration. Shumon Basar, a London-based critic and independent curator, recently described a number of small, unplanned settlements in and around Dubai. The dense and gritty neighborhood of Deira, for instance, has little in common with Sheikh Zayed Road and its fortified glass towers. Built mainly in the 1970s, Deira’s low concrete structures and labyrinthine alleyways are home to a lively population of Southeast Asian workers. Similarly, the thriving, traditionally Muslim middle-class neighborhoods of Sharjah, the third-largest city in the United Arab Emirates, were built without the flashiness of more recent developments. Basar wonders if, despite their modesty, these areas could form the basis for a fresh urban strategy based neither on imported Western models nor on clichés about local souks.

As Holl told me recently in his New York office, working on a large scale doesn’t mean that the particulars of place no longer matter. “I don’t think of any of my buildings as a model for something, the way the Modernists did,” Holl said. “If it works, it works in its specific context. You can’t just move it somewhere else.”

But is site specificity enough? “The amount of building becomes obscene without a blueprint,” Koolhaas said. “Each time you ask yourself, Do you have the right to do this much work on this scale if you don’t have an opinion about what the world should be like? We really feel that. But is there time for a manifesto? I don’t know.”

Nicolai Ouroussoff is the architecture critic of The New York Times

closes july 14, get there soon

The U.S. Pavilion for the 1967 World’s Fair, in Montreal. The inventions that Fuller (in 1959, flying in a helicopter over Ohio) designed had a hallucinatory appeal.

The visions of Buckminster Fuller.
by Elizabeth Kolbert
The New Yorker June 9-16

One of Buckminster Fuller’s earliest inventions was a car shaped like a blimp. The car had three wheels—two up front, one in the back—and a periscope instead of a rear window. Owing to its unusual design, it could be maneuvered into a parking space nose first and could execute a hundred-and-eighty-degree turn so tightly that it would end up practically where it had started, facing the opposite direction. In Bridgeport, Connecticut, where the car was introduced in the summer of 1933, it caused such a sensation that gridlock followed, and anxious drivers implored Fuller to keep it off the streets at rush hour.
Fuller called his invention the Dymaxion Vehicle. He believed that it would not just revolutionize automaking but help bring about a wholesale reordering of modern life. Soon, Fuller thought, people would be living in standardized, prefabricated dwellings, and this, in turn, would allow them to occupy regions previously considered uninhabitable—the Arctic, the Sahara, the tops of mountains. The Dymaxion Vehicle would carry them to their new homes; it would be capable of travelling on the roughest roads and—once the technology for the requisite engines had been worked out—it would also (somehow) be able to fly. Fuller envisioned the Dymaxion taking off almost vertically, like a duck.
Fuller’s schemes often had the hallucinatory quality associated with science fiction (or mental hospitals). It concerned him not in the least that things had always been done a certain way in the past. In addition to flying cars, he imagined mass-produced bathrooms that could be installed like refrigerators; underwater settlements that would be restocked by submarine; and floating communities that, along with all their inhabitants, would hover among the clouds. Most famously, he dreamed up the geodesic dome. “If you are in a shipwreck and all the boats are gone, a piano top . . . that comes along makes a fortuitous life preserver,” Fuller once wrote. “But this is not to say that the best way to design a life preserver is in the form of a piano top. I think that we are clinging to a great many piano tops in accepting yesterday’s fortuitous contrivings.” Fuller may have spent his life inventing things, but he claimed that he was not particularly interested in inventions. He called himself a “comprehensive, anticipatory design scientist”—a “comprehensivist,” for short—and believed that his task was to innovate in such a way as to benefit the greatest number of people using the least amount of resources. “My objective was humanity’s comprehensive success in the universe” is how he once put it. “I could have ended up with a pair of flying slippers.”
Fuller’s career is the subject of a new exhibition, “Buckminster Fuller: Starting with the Universe,” which opens later this month at the Whitney Museum of American Art. The exhibition traces the long, loopy arc of his career from early doodlings to plans he drew up shortly before his death, twenty-five years ago this summer. It will feature studies for several of his geodesic domes and the only surviving Dymaxion Vehicle. By staging the retrospective, the Whitney raises—or, really, one should say, re-raises—the question of Fuller’s relevance. Was he an important cultural figure because he produced inventions of practical value or because he didn’t?

Richard Buckminster Fuller, Jr.—Bucky, to his friends—was born on July 12, 1895, into one of New England’s most venerable and, at the same time, most freethinking families. His great-great-grandfather, the Reverend Timothy Fuller, a Massachusetts delegate to the Federal Constitutional Assembly, was so outraged by the Constitution’s sanctioning of slavery that he came out against ratification. His great-aunt Margaret Fuller, a friend of Emerson and Thoreau, edited the transcendentalist journal The Dial and later became America’s first female foreign correspondent.
Growing up in Milton, Massachusetts, Bucky was a boisterous but hopelessly nearsighted child; until he was fitted with glasses, he refused to believe that the world was not blurry. Like all Fuller men, he was sent off to Harvard. Halfway through his freshman year, he withdrew his tuition money from the bank to entertain some chorus girls in Manhattan. He was expelled. The following fall, he was reinstated, only to be thrown out again. Fuller never did graduate from Harvard, or any other school. He took a job with a meatpacking firm, then joined the Navy, where he invented a winchlike device for rescuing pilots of the service’s primitive airplanes. (The pilots often ended up head down, under water.)
During the First World War, Fuller married Anne Hewlett, the daughter of a prominent architect, and when the war was over he started a business with his father-in-law, manufacturing bricks out of wood shavings. Despite the general prosperity of the period, the company struggled and, in 1927, nearly bankrupt, it was bought out. At just about the same time, Anne gave birth to a daughter. With no job and a new baby to support, Fuller became depressed. One day, he was walking by Lake Michigan, thinking about, in his words, “Buckminster Fuller—life or death,” when he found himself suspended several feet above the ground, surrounded by sparkling light. Time seemed to stand still, and a voice spoke to him. “You do not have the right to eliminate yourself,” it said. “You do not belong to you. You belong to Universe.” (In Fuller’s idiosyncratic English, “universe”—capitalized—is never preceded by the definite article.) It was at this point, according to Fuller, that he decided to embark on his “lifelong experiment.” The experiment’s aim was nothing less than determining “what, if anything,” an individual could do “on behalf of all humanity.” For this study, Fuller would serve both as the researcher and as the object of inquiry. (He referred to himself as Guinea Pig B, the “B” apparently being for Bucky.) Fuller moved his wife and daughter into a tiny studio in a Chicago slum and, instead of finding a job, took to spending his days in the library, reading Gandhi and Leonardo. He began to record his own ideas, which soon filled two thousand pages. In 1928, he edited the manuscript down to fifty pages, and had it published in a booklet called “4D Time Lock,” which he sent out to, among others, Vincent Astor, Bertrand Russell, and Henry Ford.
Like most of Fuller’s writings, “4D Time Lock” is nearly impossible to read; its sentences, Slinky-like, stretch on and on and on. (One of his biographers observed of “4D Time Lock” that “worse prose is barely conceivable.”) At its heart is a critique of the construction industry. Imagine, Fuller says, what would happen if a person, seeking to purchase an automobile, had to hire a designer, then send the plans out for bid, then show them to the bank, and then have them approved by the town council, all before work on the vehicle could begin. “Few would have the temerity to go through with it,” he notes, and those who did would have to pay something like fifty thousand dollars—half a million in today’s money—per car. Such a system, so obviously absurd for autos, persisted for houses, Fuller argued, because of retrograde thinking. (His own failure at peddling wood-composite bricks he cited as evidence of the construction industry’s recalcitrance.) What was needed was a “New Era Home,” which would be “erectable in one day, complete in every detail,” and, on top of that, “drudgery-proof,” with “every living appliance known to mankind, built-in.”
Not coincidentally, Fuller was working to design just such a home. One plan, which never made it beyond the sketching stage, called for ultra-lightweight towers to be assembled at a central location, then transported to any spot in the world, via zeppelin. (Fuller envisioned the zeppelin crew excavating the site by dropping a small bomb.) A second, only slightly less fabulous proposal was for what Fuller came to call the Dymaxion House. The hexagonal-shaped, single-family home was to be stamped out of metal and suspended from a central mast that would contain all its wiring and plumbing. When a family moved, the Dymaxion House could be disassembled and taken along, like a bed or a table. Fuller constructed a scale model of the house, which was exhibited in 1929 at Marshall Field’s as part of a display of modern furniture. But no full-size version could be produced, because many of the components, including what Fuller called a “radio-television receiver,” did not yet exist. Fuller estimated that it would take a billion dollars to develop the necessary technologies. Not surprisingly, the money wasn’t forthcoming.
uller was fond of neologisms. He coined the word “livingry,” as the opposite of “weaponry”—which he called “killingry”—and popularized the term “spaceship earth.” (He claimed to have invented “debunk,” but probably did not.) Another one of his coinages was “ephemeralization,” which meant, roughly speaking, “dematerialization.” Fuller was a strong believer in the notion that “less is more,” and not just in the aestheticized, Miesian sense of the phrase. He imagined that buildings would eventually be “ephemeralized” to such an extent that construction materials would be dispensed with altogether, and builders would instead rely on “electrical field and other utterly invisible environment controls.”
Fuller’s favorite neologism, “dymaxion,” was concocted purely for public relations. When Marshall Field’s displayed his model house, it wanted a catchy label, so it hired a consultant, who fashioned “dymaxion” out of bits of “dynamic,” “maximum,” and “ion.” Fuller was so taken with the word, which had no known meaning, that he adopted it as a sort of brand name. The Dymaxion House led to the Dymaxion Vehicle, which led, in turn, to the Dymaxion Bathroom and the Dymaxion Deployment Unit, essentially a grain bin with windows. As a child, Fuller had assembled scrapbooks of letters and newspaper articles on subjects that interested him; when, later, he decided to keep a more systematic record of his life, including everything from his correspondence to his dry-cleaning bills, it became the Dymaxion Chronofile.
All the Dymaxion projects generated a great deal of hype, and that was clearly Fuller’s desire. All of them also flopped. The first prototype of the Dymaxion Vehicle had been on the road for just three months when it crashed, near the entrance to the Chicago World’s Fair; the driver was killed, and one of the passengers—a British aviation expert—was seriously injured. Eventually, it was revealed that another car was responsible for the accident, but only two more Dymaxion Vehicles were produced before production was halted, in 1934. Only thirteen models of the Dymaxion Bathroom—a single unit that came with a built-in tub, toilet, and sink—were constructed before the manufacturer pulled the plug on that project, in 1936. The Dymaxion Deployment Unit, which Fuller imagined being used as a mobile shelter, failed because after the United States entered the Second World War he could no longer obtain any steel. In 1945, Fuller attempted to mass-produce the Dymaxion House, entering into a joint effort with Beech Aircraft, which was based in Wichita. Two examples of the house were built before that project, too, collapsed. (The only surviving prototype, known as the Wichita House, looks like a cross between an onion dome and a flying saucer; it is now on display at the Henry Ford Museum, in Dearborn, Michigan.)
Following this string of disappointments, Fuller might have decided that his “experiment” had run its course. Instead, he kept right on going. Turning his attention to mathematics, he concluded that the Cartesian coördinate system had got things all wrong and invented his own system, which he called Synergetic Geometry. Synergetic Geometry was based on sixty-degree (rather than ninety-degree) angles, took the tetrahedron to be the basic building block of the universe, and avoided the use of pi, a number that Fuller found deeply distasteful. By 1948, Fuller’s geometric investigations had led him to the idea of the geodesic dome—essentially, a series of struts that could support a covering skin. That summer, he was invited to teach at Black Mountain College, in North Carolina, where some of the other instructors included Josef Albers, Willem and Elaine de Kooning, John Cage, and Merce Cunningham. (“I remember thinking it’s Bucky Fuller and his magic show,” Cunningham would later recall of Fuller’s arrival.) Toward the end of his stay, Fuller and a team of students assembled a trial dome out of Venetian-blind slats. Immediately upon being completed, the dome sagged and fell in on itself. (Some of the observers referred to it as a “flopahedron.”) Fuller insisted that this outcome had been intentional—he was, he said, trying to determine the critical point at which the dome would collapse—but no one seems to have believed this. The following year, Anne Fuller sold thirty thousand dollars’ worth of I.B.M. stock to finance Bucky’s continuing research, and in 1950 he succeeded in erecting a dome fifty feet in diameter.
The geodesic dome is a prime example of “ephemeralization”; it can enclose more space with less material than virtually any other structure. The first commercial use of Fuller’s design came in 1953, when the Ford Motor Company decided to cover the central courtyard of its Rotunda building, in Dearborn. The walls of the building, which had been erected for a temporary exhibit, were not strong enough to support a conventional dome. Fuller designed a geodesic dome of aluminum struts fitted with fibreglass panes. The structure spanned ninety-three feet, yet weighed just eight and a half tons. It received a tremendous amount of press, almost all of it positive, with the result that geodesic domes soon became popular for all sorts of purposes. They seemed to spring up “like toadstools after a rain,” as one commentator put it.
he geodesic dome transformed Fuller from an eccentric outsider into an eccentric insider. He was hired by the Pentagon to design protective housing for radar equipment along the Distant Early Warning, or DEW, line; the structure became known as a radome. He also developed a system for erecting temporary domes at trade fairs all around the world. (Nikita Khrushchev supposedly became so enamored of one such dome, built for a fair in Moscow, that he insisted that “Buckingham Fuller” come to Russia “and teach our engineers.”) Fuller was offered an appointment at Southern Illinois University, in Carbondale, and he had a dome-home built near campus for himself and Anne. In 1965, he was commissioned by the United States Information Agency to design the U.S. Pavilion for the Montreal Expo. Though the exhibit inside was criticized as uninspiring, Fuller’s dome, which looked as if it were about to float free of the earth, was a hit.
As the fame of the dome—and domes themselves—spread, Fuller was in near-constant demand as a speaker. “I travel between Southern and Northern hemispheres and around the world so frequently that I no longer have any so-called normal winter and summer, nor normal night and day,” he wrote in “Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth.” “I wear three watches to tell me what time it is.” Castro-like, Fuller could lecture for ten hours at a stretch. (A friend of mine who took an architecture course from Fuller at Yale recalls that classes lasted from nine o’clock in the morning until five in the evening, and that Fuller talked basically the entire time.) Audiences were enraptured and also, it seems, mystified. “It was great! What did he say?” became the standard joke. The first “Whole Earth Catalog,” which was dedicated to Fuller, noted that his language “makes demands on your head like suddenly discovering an extra engine in your car.”
In “Bucky,” a biography-cum-meditation, published in 1973, the critic Hugh Kenner observed, “One of the ways I could arrange this book would make Fuller’s talk seem systematic. I could also make it look like a string of platitudes, or like a set of notions never entertained before, or like a delirium.” On the one hand, Fuller insisted that all the world’s problems—from hunger and illiteracy to war—could be solved by technology. “You may . . . want to ask me how we are going to resolve the ever-accelerating dangerous impasse of world-opposed politicians and ideological dogmas,” he observed at one point. “I answer, it will be resolved by the computer.” On the other hand, he rejected fundamental tenets of modern science, most notably evolution. “We arrived from elsewhere in Universe as complete human beings,” he maintained. He further insisted that humans had spread not from Africa but from Polynesia, and that dolphins were descended from these early, seafaring earthlings.
Although he looked to nature as the exemplar of efficient design, he was not terribly interested in the natural world, and mocked those who warned about problems like resource depletion and overpopulation. “When world realization of its unlimited wealth has been established there as yet will be room for the whole of humanity to stand indoors in greater New York City, with more room for each human than at an average cocktail party,” he wrote. He envisioned cutting people off from the elements entirely by building domed cities, which, he claimed, would offer free climate control, winter and summer. “A two-mile-diameter dome has been calculated to cover Mid-Manhattan Island, spanning west to east at 42nd Street,” he observed. “The cost saving in ten years would pay for the dome. Domed cities are going to be essential to the occupation of the Arctic and the Antarctic.” As an alternative, he developed a plan for a tetrahedral city, which was intended to house a million people and float in Tokyo Bay.
He also envisioned what he called Cloud Nines, communities that would dwell in extremely lightweight spheres, covered in a polyethylene skin. As the sun warmed the air inside, Fuller claimed, the sphere and all the buildings within it would rise into the air, like a balloon. “Many thousands of passengers could be housed aboard one-mile-diameter and larger cloud structures,” he wrote. In the late seventies, Fuller took up with Werner Erhard, the controversial founder of the equally controversial est movement, and the pair set off on a speaking tour across America. Fuller championed, and for many years adhered to, a dietary regimen that consisted exclusively of prunes, tea, steak, and Jell-O.
he Dymaxion Vehicle, the Dymaxion House, “comprehensive, anticipatory design,” Synergetic Geometry, floating cities, Jell-O—what does it all add up to? In conjunction with the Whitney retrospective, the exhibition’s two curators, K. Michael Hays and Dana Miller, have put together a book of essays, articles, and photographs—“Buckminster Fuller: Starting with the Universe.” Several of the authors in the volume gamely, if inconclusively, grapple with Fuller’s legacy. Antoine Picon, a professor of architecture at Harvard, notes that the detail with which Fuller’s life was recorded—the Dymaxion Chronofile eventually grew to more than two hundred thousand pages—has had the paradoxical effect of obscuring its significance. Elizabeth A. T. Smith, the chief curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, writes that Fuller’s influence on “creative practice” has been “more wide-ranging than previously thought,” but goes on to acknowledge that this influence is “difficult to pinpoint or define with certainty.” In their introduction, Hays and Miller maintain that Fuller helped “us see the perils and possibilities” of the twentieth century. They stress his “continuing relevance as an aid to history,” though exactly what they mean by this seems purposefully unclear.
The fact that so few of Fuller’s ideas were ever realized certainly makes it hard to argue for his importance as an inventor. Even his most successful creation, the geodesic dome, proved to be a dud. In 1994, Stewart Brand, the founding editor of the “Whole Earth Catalog” and an early, self-described dome “propagandist,” called geodesics a “massive, total failure”:

Domes leaked, always. The angles between the facets could never be sealed successfully. If you gave up and tried to shingle the whole damn thing—dangerous process, ugly result—the nearly horizontal shingles on top still took in water. The inside was basically one big room, impossible to subdivide, with too much space wasted up high. The shape made it a whispering gallery that broadcast private sounds to everyone.

Among the domes that leaked were Fuller’s own home, in Carbondale, and the structure atop the Ford Rotunda. (When workmen were sent to try to reseal the Rotunda’s dome, they ended up burning down the entire building.)
Fuller’s impact as a social theorist is equally ambiguous. He insisted that the future could be radically different from the past, that humanity was capable of finding solutions to the most intractable-seeming problems, and that the only thing standing in the way was the tendency to cling to old “piano tops.” But Fuller was also deeply pessimistic about people’s capacity for change, which was why, he said, he had become an inventor in the first place. “I made up my mind . . . that I would never try to reform man—that’s much too difficult,” he told an interviewer for this magazine in 1966. “What I would do was to try to modify the environment in such a way as to get man moving in preferred directions.” Fuller’s writings and speeches are filled with this sort of tension, or, if you prefer, contradiction. He was a material determinist who believed in radical autonomy, an individualist who extolled mass production, and an environmentalist who wanted to dome over the Arctic. In the end, Fuller’s greatest accomplishment may consist not in any particular idea or artifact but in the whole unlikely experiment that was Guinea Pig B. Instead of destroying himself, Fuller listened to Universe. He spent the next fifty years in a headlong, ceaseless act of self-assertion, one that took so many forms that, twenty-five years after his death, we are still trying to sort it all out. ♦

the new yorker

Olivia Judson
NY Times June 3, 2008,

They just keep getting weirder. The “they” I’m referring to are the bdelloid rotifers — small transparent animals that live in damp places such as puddles, or patches of moss. Among evolutionists, these animals have something of a cult following, because they have a lifestyle that is not supposed to exist. As far as anyone can tell, the bdelloid rotifers are ancient asexuals: they appear to have been living entirely without sex for more than 85 million years. And each time we learn more details of their lifestyle, the wackier it becomes.

Evolving to live without sex is easy; all sorts of organisms do it the whole time. For example: aphids, weevils, snails, water fleas, nematode worms, scorpions, even the occasional lizard, have all been known to evolve asexuality. Instead of reproducing via eggs and sperm, asexuals can reproduce in any number of ways. For instance, some bud off a piece of themselves; the piece grows into a whole new animal. The bdelloids, like many other asexuals, reproduce by means of eggs that don’t need to be fertilized.

No, evolving asexuality isn’t the hard part. The hard part is making an evolutionary success of it.

In the short-term, asexuals seem to have an advantage: they don’t have to waste time finding and seducing mates, but can just get on with reproducing. Not having to find a mate makes it easy for asexuals to live in transient habitats, such as puddles, for it doesn’t matter if they never encounter anyone else. Moreover, because asexuals only have daughters, their populations can grow rapidly. In a sexual population such as humans, females must have, on average, two children for the population to remain the same size. In an asexual population, females only need to have one. If each female has two, the population grows. Sex, in other words, is expensive.

Yet if you look at the great tree of life, asexual groups tend to be out on the twigs: there are no great branches of the tree that contain only asexuals. In other words, no one can point to a big group, such as birds or fish, or even snails, and say, “That’s a group composed only of asexuals.” What this means is that asexuality evolves often, but rarely persists for long: asexuals typically go extinct soon after they appear.

The swift extinction of asexuals, and the absence of big asexual groups, suggests that sex is essential for long-term evolutionary success: giving up sex is a Bad Idea, a kind of evolutionary suicide.

Exactly why this is so remains unclear. But it’s thought to have something to do with the fact that sex generates new gene combinations. Whereas a sexual creature like you or me inherits a unique mix of genes from our parents, asexuals are lumbered with the same set of genes their mother had. For an asexual, then, the only source of genetic novelty is mutation. (Mutations and sex are both sources of genetic variation, but they work differently. Mutations — accidental changes to DNA — are the ultimate source of genetic novelty. However, mutations tend to be harmful more often than they are helpful: they tend to disrupt genes that are already working. Sex, in contrast, takes pre-existing genetic variation and shuffles it, generating new gene combinations.)

Which brings me to the bdelloids. These animals are the great exception: a group of more than 450 species from which sex is entirely absent. How are they managing to flourish despite this epic period of abstinence? For they do flourish: bdelloids are everywhere. Go outside, collect some damp moss, and stick it under the microscope, and the odds are you’ll find some. You can even find them in Antarctica.

One possibility is that they are having sex after all, just very secretly. Certainly, other supposed ancient asexuals turned out to be having sex on the sly. For instance one group of aphids that were thought to be ancient asexuals turned out to be producing males. And genetic evidence has revealed sex in several groups, such as the Placazoa (small animals that live in the sea), that have never actually been seen doing it.

But genetic evidence suggests that the bdelloids are not having conventional sex: their genomes show no sign of it. Instead, they seem to be getting up to something else entirely.

It now looks as though the bdelloids do acquire new genes from time to time — that mutation isn’t their only source of genetic novelty. Yet their means of getting new genes is unlike anything previously known for an animal. Namely: they seem to pick up genes from the environment, and add them into their genomes.

The latest analysis of bdelloid genomes shows that the animals don’t just have rotifer genes. They also have dozens of genes from bacteria, fungi, and plants. For instance, the genome of the bdelloid rotifer Adineta vaga contains genes that bacteria use for making components of their cell walls. (What the rotifer is using them for is unclear.) Some of the other genes the animal has acquired are known only from a few groups of bacteria and fungi.

Which is seriously weird. Horizontal gene transfer — the technical term for when genes move sideways between distantly-related species — is common among bacteria, but extremely rare in animals. The likely reason for the difference is that bacteria have only one cell, and their genes are not sequestered in a cell nucleus, so adding a new piece of DNA here or there is easy. Animals, in contrast, not only keep their genes away from the rest of the cell, in a cell nucleus. They also have specialized sex cells — eggs and sperm. In order for a gene from a fungus to be permanently added to, say, the human genome, it must somehow get into the sex cells.

No one knows how the bdelloids pick up these genes. One idea is that it may be due to another oddity of their lifestyle: their ability to dry up and blow away. When the piece of moss they are living in dries up, these animals often dry up, too. It’s a state of suspended animation — add water and, all being well, they come back to life as frisky, or even friskier, than before. (This isn’t unique to bdelloids — some other small animals have evolved to endure desiccation. But most of these others can only do it at particular stages of their lives. The bdelloids can do it at any time. They can also — probably as a consequence of their desiccation abilities — survive high levels of radiation. Much higher than other animals can.) During the drying and rehydration, cell membranes may become disrupted, and their DNA fragmented. Perhaps all this makes it easier for stray bits of foreign DNA to get into the cells that will become eggs.

Some of the bacterial genes were clearly acquired a long time ago. We know this because they have evolved features that bacterial genes lack. Which suggests that getting new genes this way may be rather rare — the sort of thing that happens maybe once every five hundred thousand years or so. All the same, the occasional acquisition of foreign genes may have helped the bdelloids to their profoundly unorthodox success.

But personally, I’m glad that making a go of chastity is so difficult. For the real lesson from these weird sisters is that, for most of us, it’s far better to have sex.

**********

NOTES:

The ease of evolving asexuality, and the possible advantages of sex, have been much discussed; see, for example, Bell, G. 1982. “The Masterpiece of Nature: The Evolution and Genetics of Sexuality.” University of California Press. For a non-technical account, see chapter 13 of my book, “Dr. Tatiana’s Sex Advice to All Creation.” Metropolitan Books.

For the number of bdelloid species, see Segers, H. 2007. “Annotated checklist of the rotifers (Phylum Rotifera), with notes on nomenclature, taxonomy, and distribution.” Zootaxa 1564: 1-104. For bdelloids in Antarctica, see Izaguirre, I., Allende, L. and Marinone, M. C. 2003. “Comparative study of the planktonic communities of three lakes of contrasting trophic status at Hope Bay (Antarctic Peninsula).” Journal of Plankton Research 25: 1079-1097.

For how genetics gives clues to sexual or asexual lifestyles, and for examples of “asexuals” engaging in sex on the sly, see Normark, B. B., Judson, O. P. and Moran, N. A. 2003. “Genomic signatures of ancient asexual lineages.” Biological Journal of the Linnean Society 79: 69-84. For the detection of sex in Placozoa, see Signorovitch, A. Y., Dellaporta, S. L. and Buss, L. W. 2005. “Molecular signatures for sex in the Placozoa.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 102: 15518-15522.

For genetic evidence of the asexuality of bdelloids, see Mark Welch D. and Meselson M. 2000. “Evidence for the evolution of bdelloid rotifers without sexual reproduction or genetic exchange.” Science 288:1211-1215; Arkhipova, I. and Meselson, M. 2000. “Transposable elements in sexual and ancient asexual taxa.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 97: 14473-14477; and Barraclough, T. G., Fontaneto, D., Ricci, C. and Herniou, E. A. 2007. “Evidence for inefficient selection against deleterious mutations in cytochrome oxidase I of asexual bdelloid rotifers.” Molecular Biology and Evolution 24: 1952-1962.

For horizontal gene transfer in bdelloids (including the hypothesis that their lifestyle somehow facilitates it), see Gladyshev, E. A., Meselson, M. and Arkhipova, I. R. 2008. “Massive horizontal gene transfer in bdelloid rotifers.” Science 320: 1210-1213. For their ability to dry up and blow away, see Ricci, C. N. 1987. “Ecology of bdelloids: how to be successful.” Hydrobiologia 147:117-127. For their resistance to radiation, see Gladyshev, E. and Meselson, M. 2008. “Extreme resistance of bdelloid rotifers to ionizing radiation.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 105: 5139-5144.

Many thanks to Dan Haydon and Jonathan Swire for insights, comments and suggestions.

ny times

By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL
NY Times Published: June 3, 2008

FORTUNA, Spain — Lush fields of lettuce and hothouses of tomatoes line the roads. Verdant new developments of plush pastel vacation homes beckon buyers from Britain and Germany. Golf courses — dozens of them, all recently built — give way to the beach. At last, this hardscrabble corner of southeast Spain is thriving.

There is only one problem with the picture of bounty: this province, Murcia, is running out of water. Swaths of southeast Spain are steadily turning into desert, a process spurred on by global warming and poorly planned development.

Murcia, traditionally a poor farming region, has undergone a resort-building boom in recent years, even as many of its farmers have switched to more thirsty crops, encouraged by water transfer plans, which have become increasingly untenable. The combination has put new pressures on the land and its dwindling supply of water.

This year, farmers are fighting developers over water rights. They are fighting one another over who gets to water their crops. And in a sign of their mounting desperation, they are buying and selling water like gold on a rapidly growing black market, mostly from illegal wells.

Southern Spain has long been plagued by cyclical droughts, but the current crisis, scientists say, probably reflects a more permanent climate change brought on by global warming. And it is a harbinger of a new kind of conflict.

The battles of yesterday were fought over land, they warn. Those of the present center on oil. But those of the future — a future made hotter and drier by climate change in much of the world — seem likely to focus on water, they say.

“Water will be the environmental issue this year — the problem is urgent and immediate,” said Barbara Helferrich, a spokeswoman for the European Union’s Environment Directorate. “If you already have water shortages in spring, you know it’s going to be a really bad summer.”

Dozens of world leaders will be meeting at the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization headquarters in Rome starting Tuesday to address a global food crisis caused in part by water shortages in Africa, Australia and here in southern Spain.

Climate change means that creeping deserts may eventually drive 135 million people off their land, the United Nations estimates. Most of them are in the developing world. But Southern Europe is experiencing the problem now, its climate drying to the point that it is becoming more like Africa’s, scientists say.

For Murcia, the arrival of the water crisis has been accelerated by developers and farmers who have hewed to water-hungry ventures highly unsuited to a drier, warmer climate: crops like lettuce that need ample irrigation, resorts that promise a swimming pool in the yard, acres of freshly sodded golf courses that sop up millions of gallons a day.

“I come under a lot of pressure to release water from farmers and also from developers,” said Antonio Pérez Gracia, the water manager here in Fortuna, sipping coffee with farmers in a bar in the town’s dusty square. He rued the fact that he could provide each property owner with only 30 percent of its government-determined water allotment.

“I’m not sure what we’ll do this summer,” he added, noting that the local aquifer was sinking so quickly that the pumps would not reach it soon. “I come under a lot of pressure to release water, from farmers and also from developers. They can complain as much as they want, but if there’s no more water, there’s no more water.”

Rubén Vives, a farmer who relies on Mr. Pérez Gracia’s largess, said he could not afford the black market water prices. “This year, my livelihood is in danger,” said Mr. Vives, who has farmed low-water crops like lemons here for nearly two decades.

The hundreds of thousands of wells — most of them illegal — that have in the past provided a temporary reprieve from thirst have depleted underground water to the point of no return. Water from northern Spain that was once transferred here has also slowed to a trickle, as wetter northern provinces are drying up, too.

The scramble for water has set off scandals. Local officials are in prison for taking payoffs to grant building permits in places where there is not adequate water. Chema Gil, a journalist who exposed one such scheme, has been subject to death threats, carries pepper spray and is guarded day and night by the Guardia Civil, a police force with military and civilian functions.

“The model of Murcia is completely unsustainable,” Mr. Gil said. “We consume two and a half times more water than the system can recover. So where do you get it? Import it from elsewhere? Dry up the aquifer? With climate change we’re heading into a cul-de-sac. All the water we’re using to water lettuce and golf courses will be needed just to drink.”

Facing a national crisis, Spain has become something of an unwitting laboratory, sponsoring a European conference on water issues this summer and announcing a national action plan this year to fight desertification. That plan includes a shift to more efficient methods of irrigation, as well as an extensive program of desalinization plants to provide the fresh water that nature does not.

The Spanish Environment Ministry estimates that one-third of the county is at risk of turning into desert from a combination of climate change and poor land use.

Still, national officials visibly stiffen when asked about the “Africanization” of Spain’s climate — a term now common among scientists.

“We are in much better shape than Africa, but within the E.U. our situation is serious,” said Antonio Serrano Rodríguez, the secretary general for land and biodiversity at Spain’s Environment Ministry.

Still, Mr. Serrano and others acknowledge the broad outlines of the problem. “There will be places that can’t be farmed any more, that were marginal and are now useless,” Mr. Serrano said. “We have parts of the country that are close to the limit.”

While southern Spain has always been dry and plagued by cyclical droughts, the average surface temperature in Spain has risen 2.7 degrees compared with about 1.4 degrees globally since 1880, records show.

Rainfall here is predicted to fall 20 percent from this year to 2020, and 40 percent by 2070, according to United Nations projections.

The changes on the Almarcha family farm in Albanilla over the past three decades are a testament to that hotter, drier climate here. Until two decades ago, the farm grew wheat and barley, watered only by rain. As rainfall dropped, Carlo Almarcha, 51, switched to growing almonds.

About 10 years ago, he quit almonds and changed to organic peaches and pears, “since they need less water,” he explained. Recently he took up olives and figs, “which resist drought and are less sensitive to weather.”

Mr. Almarcha participates in a government water trading system, started last year, in which farmers pay three times the normal price — 33 cents instead of 12 per cubic meter — to get extra water. The black market rate is even higher. Still, his outlook is bleak.

“You used to know that this week in spring there will be rain,” he said, standing in his work boots on parched soil of an olive grove that was once a wheat field. “Now you never know when or if it will come. Also, there’s no winter any more and plants need cold to rest. So there’s less growth. Sometimes none. Even plants all seem confused.”

While Mr. Almarcha has gradually moved toward less thirsty crops, the government’s previous water transfer plans have moved many farmers in the opposite direction. The farmers have shifted to producing a wide range of water-hungry fruits and vegetables that had never been grown in the south. Murcia is traditionally known for figs and date palms.

“You can’t grow strawberries naturally in Huelva — it’s too hot,” said Raquel Montón, a climate specialist at Greenpeace in Madrid, referring to the nearby strawberry capital of Spain. “In Sarragosa, which is a desert, we grow corn, the most water-thirsty crop. It’s insane. The only thing that would be more insane is putting up casinos and golf courses.” Which, of course, Murcia has.

In 2001, a new land use law in Murcia made it far easier for residents to sell land for resort development. Though southern Spain has long had elaborate systems for managing its relatively scarce water, today everyone, it seems, has found ways to get around them.

Grass on golf courses or surrounding villas is sometimes labeled a “crop,” making owners eligible for water that would not be allocated to keep leisure space green. Foreign investors plant a few trees and call their vacation homes “farms” so they are eligible for irrigation water, Mr. Pérez Gracia said.

“Once a property owner’s got a water allotment, he asks for a change of land use,” he explained. “Then he’s got his property and he’s got his water. It’s supposed to be for irrigation, but people use it for what they want. No one knows if it goes to a swimming pool.”

While he said his “heart goes out to the real farmers,” he did not have the personnel to monitor how people use their allotments.

With so much money to be made, officials set aside laws and policies that might encourage sustainable development, Mr. Gil, the journalist, said. At first, he was vilified in the community when he wrote articles critical of the developments. Recently, as people are discovering that the water is running out, the attitude is shifting.

But even so, people and politicians tend to regard water as a limitless resource. “Politicians think in four-year blocks, so it’s O.K. as long as it doesn’t run out on their watch,” said Ms. Montón of Greenpeace. “People think about it, but they don’t really think about what happens tomorrow. They don’t worry until they turn on the tap and nothing flows.”

ny times

The private homes of architectural masters such as Alvar Aalto and Le Corbusier show their talent distilled.

By Christopher Hawthorne

From the center of Helsinki, the quickest way to get to the house that the great Finnish architect Alvar Aalto designed for himself and his family in the 1930s is to take the streetcar. After a handful of stops, the bustle of the city gives way to a quiet, leafy neighborhood called Munkkiniemi. And there, overlooking a balding soccer field, is a modest, boxy house, sheathed in white-painted brick and vertical-wood panels, with almost no windows facing the street.

The sense of arrival is not grand, to put it mildly. There is no allée of trees down which other leading European architects might have raced in their sleek motorcars, eager to see what Aalto, who was in his late 30s when the house was finished in 1936, had created. The setting is so entirely pleasant and suburban that it’s hard to imagine what’s inside will be revelatory.

Maybe revelatory is the wrong word. As a traveler, visiting houses that noted architects designed for themselves is always at the top of my list. It’s not because I guess that the houses are going to wow me the way a bold new museum or skyscraper might–or because I find voyeuristic pleasure in seeing how famous designers lived and the sofas and lampshades they chose (though there is a bit of that, I admit).

It’s because I know these homes will offer a concentrated blast of vision –architectural talent distilled almost to its essence. The best are models of concision, dense and economical, full of passionate meanings that can take a few visits to tease out. They are poems rather than prose, espresso instead of watered-down coffee.

The reasons are fairly simple. Architects tend to be relatively young when they get their first chance to design their own residences. If they’ve already done residential work, they are taking ideas they’ve explored in those projects–almost always bigger and more elaborate than what they can afford for themselves–and are recasting them in tighter spaces on an unforgiving budget. If they’ve yet to design much of anything, they are using their own houses to explore ideas that will pop up in later projects.

There is an occasional whiff of overreach about them. Young architects who think of their houses as manifestoes, or more practically as advertisements for their work, may be tempted to build elements they don’t need in an effort to impress potential clients. But more often, great architects use their houses to test abstract design ideas against the particulars of their more prosaic needs–and without a lot of money to spare.

We have a long list of such houses in Los Angeles, of course, including supremely inventive examples by Frank Gehry, Rudolf Schindler and Charles and Ray Eames. Of those houses, only Schindler’s is regularly open to the public. Gehry still lives in his much-altered Santa Monica bungalow, which makes tour bus visits awkward. In fact, you can imagine that one reason Gehry is designing a secluded new house for his family in Venice is that he’s grown tired of looking out past his cup of morning coffee and seeing an architecture student across the street, sitting on the curb with a sketchbook.

Philip Johnson never had to deal with that problem at his iconic Glass House in Connecticut because though the house, finished in 1949, is spare and entirely transparent, it sits on a tree-filled estate covering nearly 50 acres. He dealt with the tricky problem of balancing public access with privacy by donating the house to the National Trust for Historic Preservation and decreeing that it not admit visitors until he was safely deceased, which he has been now for three years.

Europe has a deeper collection of architects’ houses open for tours. London’s John Soane Museum is not really a museum but the architect’s densely furnished and idiosyncratic home, which he tinkered with from 1812 until nearly 1840, layering ideas about ornament and light one upon the other.

In southern France, the tiny cabin overlooking the Mediterranean that the masterful Le Corbusier built for himself and his wife is open for tours two mornings a week. Though I’ve never taken one, I imagine they last about 10 minutes, for the house is about 150 square feet. Outside, it looks like a log cabin, inside, like a ship.

Its size makes you wonder why Le Corbusier, while he was sketching grandiose and ruthlessly progressive plans for European cities, designed such a miniature romantic getaway for himself. It’s a bit like finding out that New York’s tyrannical urban renewal czar Robert Moses rode a bike around Greenwich Village and preferred sleeping in a tent under the stars.

Back in Helsinki, the joys of the Aalto house take awhile to reveal themselves. The house, with an exterior that seems loosely inspired by the sliding planes of Cubism, is a study in varying degrees of privacy and exposure. Much of the ground floor is occupied by Aalto’s narrow double-height studio, where he and his assistants worked. It leads into a formal living room with a piano and broad views of the garden: a space big enough for entertaining.

At the top of the stairs, Aalto created a spot just for his family, onto which all the bedrooms open. He, his wife and two kids gathered there to eat breakfast. It’s really no more than a glorified landing–but with its fireplace and near-perfect proportions, maybe the most beautiful landing I’ve ever seen.

The power of that room, out of all proportion to its size or apparent ambition, is a reminder of why visiting an architect’s house can be such a memorable experience, especially for design aficionados. Aalto, in the end, saved his most impressive architectural gesture for a part of the house that his frequent guests, and even many of his employees, would never see.

Christopher Hawthorne is the architecture critic of The Times.

la times

Bo Diddley died today, at the age of seventy-nine, after more than a year of illness: he had a stroke last spring and then a heart attack in August. Diddley, born Ellas Bates and raised as Ellas McDaniel, was perhaps the most distinctive of the early rockers, in the sense that he had the most rigidly formed visual persona (square guitar, sunglasses, black hat) and the most rigidly formed musical persona. The Bo Diddley beat didn’t start with him—it was on streets and in various hambone compositions—but it became canonical in his hands, and went on to star in such songs as Buddy Holly’s “Not Fade Away,” the Stooges’ “1969,” George Michael’s “Faith,” and hundreds of others. Of course, Diddley was also an influential songwriter whose songs were covered by everyone from the Rolling Stones to the New York Dolls to the Sex Pistols. He was an innovative guitarist and a masterful showman who kept on playing well into his seventies. Here he is, as he should forever be remembered, playing “Road Runner” in 1960.—Ben Greenman for The New Yorker

Boekie Woekie

By KABIR CHIBBER
NY Times Published: June 1, 2008

Amsterdam is the antithesis of one-stop shopping.

The city is full of places, one after the other, that only sell a particular item, from antique light fittings to used sewing machines. Amsterdam, the Dutch capital, revels in the joy of random discovery.

Even by these artisanal standards, Boekie Woekie — which sells only books by artists — is one of the most unusual shops in Amsterdam. You won’t find texts about the Dutch masters or the latest superstars from the Tate, just the self-published curiosities of underground painters, photographers and philosophers.

Arranged neatly on wooden shelves, photocopied journals sit next to expensive hardcovers. One prominent piece, called “Mop Art,” is defiantly displayed next to a large green feather. Boekie Woekie is a highly personal labor of love for its owners to prove a shop like this still has a place in the world.

Jan Voss, 63, is one of the six artists who founded Boekie Woekie 23 years ago, and he can still be found cracking jokes behind the counter, a rarity in this age of staff uniforms and Barnes & Noble store cards.

The artists started the shop as an experiment (and also as a way of getting rid of all the books accumulating in their apartments). The group has since expanded but remains an artists’ co-operative that has survived in the heart of the city without any subsidies and stayed true to its original goals.

Boekie Woekie is by the canals in the heart of the Nine Streets, an area of independent boutiques, art galleries and coffeehouses . No matter how much the city around it evolves, Boekie Woekie remains stubbornly old-fashioned; the Web site gives instructions on how to submit orders by fax.

The owners say the art world is corrupt and that they aren’t particularly impressed that Amsterdam is the Unesco-designated World Book Capital this year, or that the city hosted the world’s biggest book market in May.

“If I could do it again, I would make sure the store was bigger, so it would send a real signal to the world,” Mr. Voss said, and sighed.

In fact, the shop is more than adequate, especially for people who get a thrill from finding something they didn’t know they wanted. He says the most popular things in the store are the vacuum cleaner bags full of dust from the books.

Boekie Woekie, Berenstraat 16, Amsterdam; (31 20-639-0507; www.boekiewoekie.com). Open daily from noon until 6 p.m.

boekie woekie

by Patricia Marx
The New Yorker June 2

Michael Seidenberg has a beard with deckled edges, a boyish face with only minor wear, a spine in fine shape, a mint mind, and a Brooklyn provenance, circa early nineteen-fifties. He also has a used-book shop, but mum’s the word. Brazen Head Books, originally situated in Brooklyn and, later, on East Eighty-fourth Street in Manhattan, has just reëmerged (after a decade-long retirement) as a by-appointment-only concern, housed in an apartment whose address Seidenberg would just as soon keep secret.

One recent Sunday, several writers, a couple of filmmakers, a photographer, an art restorer, a scientist, and certain other personages gathered at this hideaway to celebrate—in a nonchalant sort of way—Brazen Head’s latest incarnation. They had been invited by the novelist Jonathan Lethem, who met Seidenberg about thirty years ago, when Lethem, then fourteen, worked at the Brooklyn shop, doing grunt work in exchange for books.

The guests, as per invitation, arrived at staggered intervals, for the not-Barnes-&-Noble-scale operation space—three cozy rooms and a closet-size nook—was hardly meant for crowds. Still, there was a remarkable abundance of books.
“Is this, like, the greatest garage sale of all time?” Vince Passaro, a novelist and essayist, said. Passaro was browsing in the middle room, where there is a section dedicated to the works of John Cowper Powys, one of Seidenberg’s favorites and the author of the 1956 novel “ The Brazen Head.” A brazen head, should you have forgotten your medieval history, is a brass head that was supposedly able to answer any question. The statue’s powers, Seidenberg explained, sitting at a big old desk, were dormant until an alchemical rite was performed, the last step of which required the involvement of a Hebrew virgin. “The reason we have so few brazen heads in contemporary times,” he theorized, “is that it’s hard to find a Hebrew virgin nowadays.”

In the back room, the writers Peter Straub, Sean Wilsey, and Nathan Englander were playing Name That Year—holding up collectible books and trying to guess the year of publication. They were also discussing why two similar-looking first editions of Marilynne Robinson’s “Housekeeping” were priced so differently. “Foxing,” Wilsey said, adding that that was the only biblio term he knew and he wanted to use it.
The buzzer seemed to be always buzzing, and Seidenberg to be always leading a guided tour and chronicling the history of Brazen Head to yet another newcomer. Briefly:

In the nineteen-seventies, Seidenberg ran a bookshop, a puppet troupe and theatre, and a moving company—all out of the same storefront. One day, he noticed a commercial rental on the Upper East Side and, on a whim, grabbed it, and decided to concentrate his business efforts on books. But the shop struggled.
“One reason was that the entrance was a few steps below the sidewalk, and lots of people seem to have an aversion to walking down,” he said. Seven years later, the rent quadrupled, and Seidenberg lost his lease. The contents of the store were relocated to his apartment, on the same block. “It was an amount of books you wouldn’t necessarily want to live with,” he said. So he and his wife left, and the literature stayed. Occasionally, Seidenberg would set up a booth at a book fair. He also peddled paperbacks on the street for a while, an experience that he found disheartening. Long stretches of staring at his books and wondering what to do with them followed. And then, last year, his friend George Bisacca, a conservator of paintings at the Metropolitan Museum, stepped in. Bisacca transformed the higgledy-piggledy storage space into the bookshop-in-an-apartment that it is today.

To say that Seidenberg’s shop is back in business is not quite accurate, for business was never his model. He envisions a hangout, where readers can relax in comfortable chairs with a favorite book. “I had this idea of telling customers they couldn’t buy anything the first time they came,” he said, “so that they’d believe me when I say nobody is obliged to buy anything.” His wife nixed that idea.

That first Sunday evening, Seidenberg estimated that he grossed about nine hundred dollars, on purchases that ranged from two dollars to two hundred. He was very pleased, and it moved him to relate a story from the dark period, not too long ago, when he was selling books on the street. “Once, a couple stopped,” he recalled. “And the man asked his girlfriend, ‘Do you want a book?’ She said, ‘No, I already have a book.’ ” ♦

In addition to Gram and Emmylou The Fallen Angels were :
Neil Flanz - pedal steel
ND Smart ll - Drums
Kyle Tullis - bass
Jock Bartley - electric guitar
Mike Martin - tambourine

found on steve hadley’s cabinssence

By CAROL VOGEL
NY Times Published: June 2, 2008

On an unusually cold and rainy spring afternoon, Olafur Eliasson was huddled under a large umbrella in Lower Manhattan gazing down the East River toward Governors Island.

“You could be in Sweden or Denmark,” he said of the gray, even light. “Fog makes everything more explicit. See how Governors Island fades in the rain?”

It seemed fitting that Mr. Eliasson, a Danish-Icelandic artist who is world-famous for creating his own weather systems, was enveloped in a misty landscape that could well have been of his own making.

He had traveled straight from the airport to Pier 35 on the East River after flying in from his home and studio in Berlin. He has been a familiar presence at the site for the last several months, having visited every two weeks to check on the progress of his “New York City Waterfalls.”

His much-publicized $15 million initiative is to create four waterfalls ranging from 90 to 120 feet in height that will appear from June 26 to Oct. 13 and run from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. In addition to the waterfall at Pier 35, just north of the Manhattan Bridge, there will be one in Brooklyn at the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge, another between Piers 4 and 5 near the Brooklyn Heights Promenade and a fourth on the north shore of Governors Island.

Organized by the nonprofit Public Art Fund and the city of New York, it is being billed as the city’s biggest public art project since “The Gates,” the $20 million effort by the artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude in which 7,500 gates festooned with saffron-colored fabric panels were positioned along Central Park’s pathways for 16 days in 2005.

It is also Mr. Eliasson’s first public art project in New York. When he proposed the idea to the Public Art Fund, Susan K. Freedman, the organization’s president, decided that such an undertaking could be accomplished only with the city’s heft behind it. “It was too ambitious,” she said. “This has been two intense years of getting permits and making sure it was environmentally safe.”

Altogether, at least 108 people have been involved, including engineers, scientists, divers, scientists, riggers and environmentalists.

As has often been the case with arts projects, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s office was eager to be involved. “The mayor is always looking for new ways to showcase New York,” said First Deputy Mayor Patricia E. Harris. She added that several city and state agencies also played a role. “There’s never been a manual for how to put waterfalls in the East River,” she explained.

Ms. Harris said she hoped this multiborough project would attract visitors, just as “The Gates” generated an estimated $254 million in economic activity for the city. Hotels are offering special waterfall packages. Tourist agencies are planning bicycle and boat tours. The Circle Line Downtown will be running special waterfall excursions, too, some of them free, with an audio introduction by Mr. Eliasson.

City officials and the Public Art Fund say that no city money is being used to pay for the waterfalls, with all of the funds coming from foundations, corporations and private supporters.

The spot where Mr. Eliasson paused on that recent rainy day, an esplanade frequented by joggers and dog walkers as well as tourists visiting Lower Manhattan, holds a particular fascination for him. “From here you can see all four sites at once,” he said.

An intense man with a small frame and rumpled brown hair, the artist, 47, in flawless English, tried to explain the mechanics of his project. All that was visible that afternoon were several steel scaffolding constructions on the shoreline by Pier 35, floating black devices to prevent boats and fish from interfering with underwater filters.

A cage beneath the river’s surface pumps water through a pipe running upward along the scaffolding, shooting it through a trough at the top and then down the other side to frothy effect.

Mr. Eliasson said he purposely left the scaffolding highly visible. “Scaffolding is not an unfamiliar structure in New York,” he said. “You see it on every construction site in the city. I want people to know that this is both a natural phenomenon and a cultural one.”

He said he designed the scaffolding to match the scale of the surrounding buildings so it would blend into the urban landscape. Once the waterfalls are turned on, their sound will meld with the other sounds of the city.

Mr. Eliasson is an old hand at creating ephemeral atmospheres. Perhaps his best known is “The Weather Project,” an installation in 2003 inside the cavernous Turbine Hall at the Tate Modern in London. That consisted of a giant sun created from hundreds of light bulbs placed at the top of one wall, a mirrored ceiling and a mist machine. Over six months, it attracted more than two million visitors.

Given that much of New York City is surrounded by water, the idea of creating waterfalls seemed obvious to Mr. Eliasson, who suggests that New Yorkers are not as strongly connected to their waterfronts as urban Europeans are.

Throughout history, he said, New Yorkers “have always taken water for granted.” He added: “Now people can engage in something as epic as a waterfall, see the wind and feel its gravity. You realize that the East River is not just static.”

These are not Mr. Eliasson’s first waterfalls. In 2005, for instance, he fashioned a 20-foot-tall waterfall in a small garden on the campus of Dundee University in Scotland. At the P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center in Long Island City, Queens, he created a reverse waterfall in 1998, devising pumps and a basin that sent the water traveling uphill. That project is on view through June 30 as part of “Take Your Time: Olafur Eliasson,” a midcareer retrospective and two-part exhibition at P.S. 1 and the Museum of Modern Art.

Artists throughout history have found romance in waterfalls, of course. In the United States, Hudson River School painters like Thomas Cole, Frederic Edwin Church and Asher B. Durand all included them in their landscapes.

“Viewers will be seeing something they know from a picture, but now they will be experiencing them as a physical thing,” Mr. Eliasson said.

Unlike the much-trumpeted opening of “The Gates,” the artist said, he expects no official celebratory fanfare when the waterfalls are finally up and running.

“It’s important to be very straightforward and not to overamplify or overmystify things,” Mr. Eliasson said. “The waterfalls will just be turned on in the morning, and that’s it.”

“New York City Waterfalls” will run between June 26 and Oct. 13 at Pier 35; at the eastern foot of the Brooklyn Bridge; between Piers 4 and 5 near the Brooklyn Heights Promenade; and on the north shore of Governors Island.

ny times

Yves Saint Laurent, the fashion designer credited with morphing haute couture into more accessible ready-to-wear, has died in Paris. He was 71.

The reclusive Frenchman, who had retired from fashion in 2002 after four decades at the top of his trade, had been ill for some time, suffering respiratory illness.

Once the protégé of Christian Dior, Saint Laurent was one of a handful of designers who dominated 20th century fashion, on a par with Coco Chanel and Christian Lacroix.

As he bowed out seven years ago, Saint Laurent said: “I have nothing in common with this new world of fashion, which has been reduced to mere window-dressing. Elegance and beauty have been banished.”

Yves Henri Donat Mathieu Saint Laurent was born in the coastal town of Oran, Algeria, on August 1, 1936, at a time when the North African country was still considered part of France.

A shy, lonely, child, he became fascinated by clothes, and already had a solid portfolio of sketches when he first arrived in Paris in 1953, aged 17.

Michel de Brunoff, editor of Vogue, who was to become a key supporter, was quickly won over, and published them.

The following year Saint Laurent won three of the four categories in a design competition in Paris – and de Brunoff advised Christian Dior to hire him.

He took over the fashion house when Dior died suddenly three years later, but in 1960 was called up to fight in his native Algeria in the war of independence.

On his return, he struck out on his own founding his own couture house at the start of the 1960s, at a time when the world was changing and there was a new appetite for originality.

Saint Laurent rode his luck through the rise of the youth market and pop culture fuelled by the economic boom of the 1960s, when women suddenly had more economic freedom.

His name and the familiar YSL logo became synonymous with all the latest trends, and one of his best-known creations a ladies jacket and pants called “le smoking”, became a symbol for the emerging women’s movement.

In his later years the depression that had haunted him all his life became more oppressive, and at his farewell bash in 2002 Saint Laurent admitted to having recourse to “those false friends which are tranquillisers and narcotics”.

However, his designs from all seasons are still coveted and worn regularly by adoring fashionistas.

the telegraph uk

Karyn Lovegrove Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of Mystery of the Invisible Clock, a group exhibition organized by Los Angeles-based artist and curator Joshua Nathanson at their new location at Hudson Salon, 500 South Hudson Avenue, Los Angeles, California 90020.

The exhibition, featuring works by Justin Beal, Will Benedict, Antoine Catal, Jamie Chan, Kathrine De Place Bjorn, Mari Eastman, Anja Funder, Jesse Gillan, Lothar Hempel, Roger Herman, Jen Kuroki, Anna Mayer, Rebecca Morris, Carter Mull, Joshua Nathanson, Nora Jean Petersen, Astrid Sourkova, Lucie Stahl, Mateo Tannatt, Alexander Wolff and Alivia Zivich, will open on Saturday May 31 from 5 to 9pm.

The opening will feature music by Douglas Armour and Milk Monster, and hors d’ouevre by Miles Ake. A reading curated by Sarah Wang will take place on Saturday, July 12.

karyn lovegrove gallery

By MAUREEN DOWD
NY Times Published: June 1, 2008

They say that every president gets the psychoanalyst he deserves. And every Hamlet gets his Rosencrantz.

So now comes Scott McClellan, once the most loyal of the Texas Bushies, to reveal “What Happened,” as the title of his book promises, to turn W. from a genial, humble, bipartisan good ol’ boy to a delusional, disconnected, arrogant, ideological flop.

Although his analytical skills are extremely limited, the former White House press secretary — Secret Service code name Matrix — takes a stab at illuminating Junior’s bumpy and improbable boomerang journey from family black sheep and famous screw-up back to family black sheep and famous screw-up.

How did W. start out wanting to restore honor and dignity to the White House and end up scraping all the honor and dignity off the White House?

It turns out that our president is a one-man refutation of Malcolm Gladwell’s best seller “Blink,” about the value of trusting your gut.

Every gut instinct he had was wildly off the mark and hideously damaging to all concerned.

It seems that if you trust your gut without ever feeding your gut any facts or news or contrary opinions, if you keep your gut on a steady diet of grandiosity, ignorance, sycophants, and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, those snap decisions can be ruinous.

We already know What Happened, but it feels good to hear Scott say it. His conscience was spurred by hurt feelings.

In Washington, it is rarely the geopolitical or human consequences that cause people to turn on leaders behaving immorally. The town is far more narcissistic and practical than that.

The people who should be sounding the alarm for democracy’s sake, and the sake of all the young Americans losing lives and limbs, get truly outraged only when they are played for fools and fall guys, when their own reputations are at stake.

It was not the fake casus belli that made Colin Powell’s blood boil. What really got Powell disgusted was that W. and Dick Cheney used him, tapping into his credibility to sell their trumped-up war; that George Tenet failed to help him scrub his U.N. speech of all Cheney’s garbage; and that W. showed him the door so the more malleable Condi could have his job.

Tenet was privately worried about a war buildup not backed up by C.I.A. facts, but he only publicly sounded the alarm years later in a lucrative memoir fueled by payback, after Condi and Cheney tried to cast him as the fall guy on W.M.D.

McClellan did not realize the value of a favorite maxim — “The truth shall set you free” — until he was hung out to dry by his bosses in the Valerie Plame affair, repeating the lies Karl Rove and Scooter Libby brazenly told him about not being the leakers.

“Clearly,” McClellan says, sounding like the breast-heaving heroine of a Victorian romance, “I had allowed myself to be deceived.” He felt “something fall out of me into the abyss.”

And that was even before “the breaking point,” when he learned the worst about his idol — that the president who had denounced leaks about his warrantless surveillance program, who had promised to fire anyone leaking classified information about Plame, was himself the one who authorized Dick Cheney to let Scooter leak part of the top-secret National Intelligence Estimate.

“Yeah, I did,” Mr. Bush told his sap of a press secretary on Air Force One. His tone, the stunned McClellan said, was “as if discussing something no more important than a baseball score.”

He recalled the first time that he had begun to suspect that W. might be just another dissembling pol: when he overheard his boss, during his 2000 bid, ludicrously telling a supporter that he couldn’t remember, from his wild partying days, if he had tried cocaine.

“He isn’t the kind of person to flat-out lie,” McClellan said, but added, “I was witnessing Bush convincing himself to believe something that probably was not true.” He’d see a lot more of it over the next six years before Bush tearfully booted him out.

W.’s dwindling cadre hit back hard. In Stockholm, Condi — labeled “sometimes too accommodating” by the author — scoffed: “The president was very clear about the reasons for going to war.”

She’s right. He was very clear about it being because of W.M.D. Then he was very clear about it being to rid the world of a tyrant. Then he was very clear about it being to spread democracy. When that didn’t work out, he was very clear about it being that we can’t leave because we can’t leave.

He was always wrong, but always very clear.

through june 21 at luhring augustine