By MAUREEN DOWD
NY Times Published: January 17, 2009

As Barack Obama got to town, one of the first things he did was seek the counsel of past presidents, including George Bush senior.

As W. was leaving town, one of the last things he did was explain why he never sought the counsel of his father on issues that his father knew intimately, like Iraq and Saddam.

When Brit Hume did a joint interview last week with Bush father and son, dubbed “41st guy” and “43rd guy” by W., the Fox anchor asked whether it was true that “there wasn’t a lot of give and take” between them, except on family matters.

“See,” the Oedipally oddball W. replied, “the interesting thing is that a president has got plenty of advisers, but what a president never has is someone who gave him unconditional love.”

He talks about his father, the commander in chief who went to war with Saddam before he did, like a puppy. “You rarely have people,” he said, “who can pick up the phone and say, ‘I love you, son,’ or, ‘Hang in there, son.’ ”

Maybe he wouldn’t have needed so many Hang-in-there-sons if he had actually consulted his dad before he ignorantly and fraudulently rammed into the Middle East.

When W. admits the convoluted nature of his relationship with his father, diminishing a knowledgeable former president to the status of a blankie, you realize that, despite all the cocky swagger we’ve seen, this is not a confident man.

That is vividly apparent as we watch W. and Obama share the stage as they pass the battered baton. One seems small and inconsequential, even though he keeps insisting he’s not; the other grows large and impressive, filling Americans with cockeyed hope even as he warns them not to expect too much too soon.

Even Obama’s caution — a commodity notably absent from the White House for eight years — fills people with optimism.

W. lives in the shadow of his father’s presence, while Obama lives in the shadow of his father’s absence. W.’s parlous presidency, spent trashing the Constitution, the economy and the environment, was bound up, and burdened by, the psychological traits of an asphyxiated and pampered son.

The exiting and entering presidents are opposite poles — one the parody of a monosyllabic Western gunslinger who disdains nuance, and one a complex, polysyllabic professor sort who will make a decision only after he has held it up to the light and examined it from all sides.

W. was immune to doubt and afraid of it. (His fear of doubt led to the cooking of war intelligence.) Obama is delighted by doubt.

It’s astonishing that, as banks continue to fail and Americans continue to lose jobs and homes, W. was obtuse enough to go on TV and give a canned ode to can-do-ism. “Good and evil are present in this world,” he reiterated, “and between the two of them there can be no compromise.”

He gives the good-and-evil view of things a bad name. Good and evil are not like the Redskins and the Cowboys. Good and evil intermingle in the same breath, let alone the same society. A moral analysis cannot be a simplistic analysis.

“You may not agree with some of the tough decisions I have made,” he said Thursday night. “But I hope you can agree that I was willing to make the tough decisions.”

Actually, no. His decisions have been, for the most part, disastrous. If he’d paid as much attention to facts as fitness, 9/11, Iraq, the drowning of New Orleans, the deterioration in Afghanistan and the financial deregulation orgy could have been prevented.

Bush fancied himself the Decider; Obama fancies himself the Convener. Some worry that a President Obama will overdo it and turn the Situation Room into the Seminar Room. (He’s already showing a distressing lack of concern over whether his cherished eggheads bend the rules, like Tim Geithner’s not paying all his taxes, because, after all, they’re the Best and the Brightest, not ordinary folk.)

W., Cheney and Rummy loved making enemies, under the mistaken assumption that the more people hated America, the more the Bushies were standing up for principle. But is Obama neurotically reluctant to make enemies, and overly concerned with winning over those who have smacked him, from Hillary and Bill to conservative columnists?

If W. and Cheney preferred Fox News on the TVs in the White House because they liked hearing their cheerleaders, Obama may leave the channel on Fox because he prefers seducing and sparring with antagonists to spooning with allies.

Right now, though, it’s a huge relief to be getting an inquisitive, complicated mind in the White House.

W. decided there was no need to be president of the whole country. He could just be president of his base. Obama is determined to be president of as much of the country as possible.

We’re trading a dogmatic president for one who’s shopping for a dog. It feels good.

Beach Clown is the new style silently taking over this season, with labels like Band Of Outsiders & Dries Van Noten offering striped cotton shirts in sophisticated palettes. Whilst using the term ‘Beach Clown’ to specifically define a fashion style is a relatively new thing (*credit to Ms K.Breslin of Los Angeles here) its roots shoot back deep into the collective creative consciousness. Trying however to designate the original ‘Beach Clown’ can get as gratuitous as crowning an individual for producing the first striped painting. All we know is this; that the Bauhaus were big players and early promoters of the Beach Clown aesthetic, and that by the time the movement reached the states it had been reconstituted into a somewhat softer more malleable ‘lifestyle’ movement. Whilst Brian Wilson’s brothers denied his emphatic calls to name the band ‘The Beach Clowns’, for fear of being too closely associated with the style (viewed by many as European vice) they agreed to adopt the candy striped button down shirts as their signature look, and in doing so inadvertenty gave the Beach Clown movement its most enduring endorsement.

originally posted on ready4thehouse

Kelly Breslin gave me some other examples of her so called ” Beach Clown ” aesthetic I thought I should add. Evidently Beach Clown is more than fashion. Its a universal movement.

barnett newman

Rich Aldrich

Lecia Dole - Recio

Matt Connors

Ettore Sottsass

Sam Kauffman

Walter van Beirendonck

Bernhard Willhelm

January 9 - February 14 at David Zwirner

The Los Angeles Times
By David Pierson
January 14, 2009

The customers pour in daily at Noodle World in Alhambra, usually expecting nothing more than a heaping plate of Thai pad see-ew or a steaming bowl of Vietnamese pho.

But on occasion, they react the way Martin Moreno did when entering the restaurant for the first time.

“Oh my God, there’s a Bob’s Big Boy,” the furniture seller said, staring at a statue of a boy in checkered overalls. “In an Asian restaurant?”

The statue is a curiosity that has endured for 12 years, puzzling and delighting patrons who either remember eating double-decker cheeseburgers or wouldn’t know Pappy Parker fried chicken if it landed in their wonton soup.

For Thai American owner John Mekpongsatorn, the statue is an essential part of his bustling business — a perfect symbol of the Southern California melting pot he wanted his chain to reflect. The result is a restaurant many affectionately call the “Asian Denny’s” for its no-fuss diner decor and a menu that spans Japan to Malaysia.

And in this fiberglass figure, this symbol of mid-20th century kitsch, is the story of how Noodle World settled into its place as a cross-cultural success — and won over a changing community.

::

Before Noodle World became a stalwart on Valley Boulevard’s ethnic restaurant row, battling rival noodle houses that could pass for ones in Saigon or Taipei, it was one of hundreds of Bob’s Big Boy restaurants that flourished across the nation.

By the 1980s, the hamburger chain, founded in 1936 in Glendale, was beginning to fall out of favor and closed dozens of locations. Along with a national shift away from burger joints came a huge demographic change in the largely white and Latino San Gabriel Valley. Between 1980 and 1996 — the year that this Bob’s Big Boy closed — Alhambra’s Asian population nearly quadrupled, to 47% of residents.

The 37-year-old Mekpongsatorn, who was born and raised in North Hollywood and now lives in Monterey Park, loved Bob’s Big Boy as a child. He liked trying to reach up and touch the statue’s hamburger when he wasn’t quite tall enough.

When he heard the restaurant was up for sale, he was overcome with nostalgia. Mekpongsatorn quickly made an offer and considered the possibilities. Noodle World could be an Asian riff on an American classic, he thought.

But not all went according to plan. When Mekpongsatorn was in escrow for the property, Bob’s Big Boy corporate offices had movers reclaim some of the company’s decorations, most notably the statue.

Mekpongsatorn was crestfallen. He’d lost his prized mascot. At the same time, it was becoming clear that, symbolically, the neighborhood had lost something too. As much as the area’s new residents might welcome a noodle house, for some old-timers the disappearance of Bob’s Big Boy — the burger joint as well as the statue — was an uncomfortable reminder that the community had changed. Some could not accept that the ketchup and mustard on the tables were gone, replaced with chili oil and jalapeno-spiked vinegar.

“I remember older ladies coming in thinking it was still a Bob’s Big Boy, putting the menu down and asking, ‘What’s going on here?” Mekpongsatorn said. “They’d get up and walk out.”

Mekpongsatorn was troubled. He did not feel the need to apologize for the community’s changes, but he also did not want to erase some of its fonder memories.

As the months passed, Mekpongsatorn gained more Asian clientele, but he did not see much of the non-Asians who had filled the place when it was a Big Boy.

Then Mekpongsatorn stumbled upon a slightly smaller Bob’s Big Boy statue at the Rose Bowl Flea Market. Perhaps this would do the trick, he thought, and reach out to those who felt left out as the community changed. He paid $200 and lugged it onto his pickup truck. It was installed above a divider between the kitchen and the dining room.

The chubby figure was a hit. People heard about it through the neighborhood grapevine, as one old-timer told another that a Big Boy statue had taken up residence inside the noodle house.

Mekpongsatorn started seeing more whites and Latinos venture in.

“The families started coming back,” Mekpongsatorn said.

One of those longtime patrons was Nora Escobar, who has lived in Alhambra since 1979. For years, she would cozy up to the counter and order hash browns, bacon and black coffee.

Breakfast would often stretch to lunch as she bantered for hours about finances and city politics with the regulars. When she heard that the restaurant had been converted into a noodle house, Escobar felt a slight disbelief.

“I decided to drop by and see if the statue was still outside,” she said. “I was sad to see it was no longer there. I thought, ‘The immigrants are taking over.’ Then I walked in and I saw the boy up there.”

“There’s so many different places now it’s hard to reminisce,” said Escobar, 55. “Everything is new now. Nobody has any respect for what’s old. But they didn’t forget what the boy represents.”

Several years passed and Mekpongsatorn’s business continued to grow. He opened locations on the Westside and in Pasadena. He fended off imitators. He dabbled in Thai-Western fusion but never found a strong enough following for curiosities like bratwurst with tamarind.

Then in 2002, a Times food critic, Max Jacobson, wrote a 728-word review lauding Noodle World’s Thai dishes and the statue. A week after it was published, Mekpongsatorn received a letter from Big Boy Restaurants International in Warren, Mich., saying he was violating the company’s trademark.

“We demand that you immediately cease and desist your use of the character and words,” the letter said.

Fearing a lawsuit, Mekpongsatorn removed the statue.

“The next week, there was madness,” he said. “I had so many people say, ‘Where’s the statue? My kid wants to see the statue.’ Then people would come up to me and tell me how their aunt used to work at the Big Boy’s and how they used to take their son’s basketball team to the Big Boy’s. It was all these stories about how the restaurant was a pillar. I had to get the statue back.”

He decided to write a letter to Big Boy Restaurants. Mekpongsatorn described visiting the chain as a child, always asking for a coloring book and looking at statuettes in the glass case by the cashier.

“I chose to display the statue in my restaurant for nostalgic reasons,” Mekpongsatorn wrote. “I just wanted others to recall the fond events of their childhood as well; and I felt that seeing the statue would bring back the memories of happiness and joy that Bob’s Big Boy brought to them.”

He did not know whether his plea would work. He flirted with the idea of starting a petition drive. He even considered modifying the statue by replacing the hamburger with a bowl of noodles and putting chopsticks in the other hand.

A month later, Mekpongsatorn got his answer.

“In light of your personal history with Big Boy,” the letter started, “we would be willing to offer you a license agreement to allow for your continued use of the Big Boy statue. The fee under the license agreement would be $1 per year.”

Mekpongsatorn was instructed to put a plaque under the statue explaining the agreement. The letter signed off, “We hope that this arrangement will allow your continued use of our icon without too much trouble.”

“It was a good feeling dusting off the statue,” said Mekpongsatorn, who had kept the boy warehoused.

People were touched by Mekpongsatorn’s persistence, and today the statue remains integral to the restaurant’s identity — even if founder Bob Wian could never have imagined that his legacy would live on in an Asian noodle house.

“He’s a very good businessman,” said Owen Guenthard, executive director of the Alhambra Chamber of Commerce. “He keeps a symbol of a bygone era.”

Jerry Munoz, a regular customer, likes to plant himself in a booth by a window. There’s a sense of comfort looking up at the statue that reminds him of earlier times. Munoz came to Bob’s Big Boy as a child with his parents. He took dates there, and when his own kids were young they loved to order malts and poke the statue in the stomach.

“It’s very important to people that he recognized the Bob’s Big Boy,” said Munoz, 60, lunching on pad Thai. “It shows they understand the history.”

Escobar said she has come to embrace both Noodle World and her city’s change.

“I didn’t know what to order in the beginning,” said Escobar, a social worker. “So I ordered what every Latino orders, chicken fried rice.”

She loved the big portions and came back every weekend to try something new.

“Now I go all the time and order shrimp or soup. I love the Thai iced tea,” she said. “Change is change, and we like what we have now.”

For the younger generation, Noodle World’s appeal is not the nostalgia but the food and atmosphere.

On a table in the center of the dining room sat friends Trun Phan, 21; Shubo Jiang, 20; and Hearing Choy, 20. As it was for the generation before them who came to Bob’s Big Boy, the three Asian Americans said Noodle World was a destination after high school football games and dances. But instead of burgers and shakes, they came for boba tea and fried noodles.

“It’s always lively, and it’s open late,” said Choy, an Alhambra resident, naming two of the key ingredients for any successful restaurant in the San Gabriel Valley.

The statue, however, was meaningless.

“I have no idea what that is,” Jiang said.

“Maybe this used to be a hamburger place,” Phan said.

Recently Mekpongsatorn completed a new year’s ritual — making his annual payment to use the statue, due on the first of every year.

“A nice, crisp dollar bill,” he said. “Certified mail.”

Dr. Sylvia A. Earle pilots a one-person submersible known as Deep Worker through Drake’s Bay in California. In the 1980s, she helped found two companies to make innovative vehicles that could open the sea’s dark recesses to human exploration, and ever since she has sought to illuminate the abyss.

This glass sponge, a cousin of the barrel sponge, produced dense reefs in ancient seas that were shallow and warm. In modern times, the delicate animals were thought to exist only as fossils until explorers in the 1990s discovered large reefs of living relics.

A seastar, a cousin of the coinoids, sand dollars, sea cucumbers and brittle stars.

This moon jelly, viewed from below, seems to merge with the sky and sea. Its cousins are found throughout most of the world’s oceans. They feed on plankton, the sea’s drifting life.

This brown algae and its cousins love coastal waters that are cool or cold. Some form wispy clusters of filaments, while others resemble delicate ribbons or leafy, golden-brown shrubs. One of its relatives forms the kelp forests that thrive off the California coast. It can grow as much as a foot a day, producing what are considered the largest of the sea’s photosynthetic organisms.

By WILLIAM J. BROAD
NY Times Published: January 12, 2009

In 1953, when Sylvia A. Earle began studying algae, the marine plants and related microbes were often considered weeds or worse. Boaters ridiculed them as scum that turned patches of sea into pea soup.

Today, Dr. Earle notes that just one type — Prochlorococcus, so small that millions can fit in a drop of water — has achieved fame as perhaps the most abundant photosynthetic organism on the planet. It daily releases countless tons of oxygen into the atmosphere.

The tiny organism is estimated to provide the oxygen in “one in every five breaths we take,” Dr. Earle said in an interview. And it is just one of thousands of types of marine algae and photosynthetic microbes — everything from invisible cells to plantlike growths to kelp forests.

A student of the big and the small, Dr. Earle is a co-author of “Ocean: An Illustrated Atlas,” published recently by National Geographic. Its maps and graphs, prose and pictures detail how discoveries like the surprising ubiquity of Prochlorococcus are illuminating the sea, its immense impact on the planet and its habitability.

Dr. Earle, an oceanographer and former chief scientist of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, has participated in more than a half-century of ocean exploration and protection. She has done pioneering research on algae, probed the ecology of coral reefs, set records for deep diving, tracked marine mammals and lobbied for the creation of marine sanctuaries.

She had a hand in President Bush’s designation last week of vast parts of the American-controlled Pacific Ocean as marine monuments. The new protected areas — including the ocean’s deepest spot, down nearly seven miles — are bigger than California.

Dr. Earle’s passion extends to the far horizon. In the atlas, she reports that some 90 percent of deep-sea creatures use bioluminescence in their life strategies and that the eerie glows may turn out to constitute the planet’s most common form of communication.

“So many things have been discovered,” she mused. “But then you turn around and — there’s another breakthrough. We’ll probably have to update the atlas in five years.”

Her knowledge makes her well qualified to reflect on what is still unknown, as she does repeatedly in the atlas. For instance, she describes how sunlight filters through seawater to surprising depths (its blue component penetrating to at least 250 meters, or 820 feet) but notes that scientists have yet to determine the maximum depth at which sea life can engage in photosynthesis.

One algae, she notes, thrives more than 650 feet down — far deeper than scuba divers go.

“What’s astonishing to me is how fast the insights are coming,” she said in the interview. “It’s the greatest era of planetary exploration in all of human history. And we’ve tried to cram it between two covers.”

She and her atlas have many fans. “There’s no one else like Sylvia,” said Marcia K. McNutt, director of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in California. “She’s one of these rare combinations of energy, passion and eloquence.”

Robert B. Gagosian, president of the Consortium for Ocean Leadership, a private group in Washington that represents the nation’s top ocean institutions, called her a kind of global insurance policy. “I don’t know anyone who is as passionate and committed,” he said. “She wants to make sure people understand the importance of the ocean for the future of humanity.”

Sylvia Alice Earle, 73, grew up on a small farm in southern New Jersey and spent summers at the shore. For college, she went to Florida and fell head over heels for ocean research, her mentor an algae specialist. She graduated in 1966 with a Ph.D. from Duke University.

Her love of plant life is reflected in the atlas’s portrayals of algae as well as a beautiful map that reveals the ocean’s highly variable concentrations of chlorophyll — the green pigments that power most photosynthetic organisms. Remarkably, the satellite map shows chlorophyll hot spots in the icy waters around the north and south poles.

Beyond Florida, much of her early research focused on coral reefs, which live in symbiosis with tiny algae. On a 1964 voyage, she studied the western Indian Ocean. “We went to places where nobody had dived before,” she said. “There aren’t many like that today.”

The atlas showcases a distinctive reef in Aldabra, one of the Indian isles Dr. Earle visited. The reef looks like a large mushroom, with only its stalk in the water. Aldabra, one of the world’s most isolated ecosystems, is now considered a natural laboratory for coral study and is protected as a World Heritage Site.

In the 1970s, Dr. Earle traveled the globe to study the behavior of humpback whales, going to Alaska, Hawaii, Australia, Bermuda, New Zealand and South Africa. She learned how industrial whaling had decimated whale populations and vowed to help protect the marine mammals and their home.

“I started to realize the magnitude of the problem,” she said. “It’s like a tiger. How do you save it? You protect the forest. How do you save a whale? You have to protect the ocean.”

The atlas, in addition to maps, satellite images and diagrams, features a stunning portrait of a humpback mother and calf, the youngster seeming to caress its parent with an extended flipper.

Dr. Earle said she felt increasingly frustrated during her early research because equipment limitations meant that she and her colleagues, with few exceptions, could only skim the sea’s surface. Crushing pressures and inky darkness made the ocean depths incredibly difficult to explore.

In the 1980s, she helped found two companies to make innovative vehicles that could open the sea’s dark recesses to human exploration, and ever since has sought to illuminate the abyss.

So, too, the atlas looks at giant mountain chains of the seabed that spew hot lava and power bizarre ecosystems. The wonders include “Lost City,” an area of the Atlantic where volcanic geysers form ghostly spires up to 180 feet high.

While the maps reveal much hidden terrain, the atlas notes that the seabed “is still not as well imaged or mapped as the Moon or the surface of Mars.”

Over the decades, Dr. Earle has increasingly moved beyond exploration to spend time on issues of oceanic destruction and conservation. The atlas documents the devastation that humans have visited on the sea, as well as the threat of greater harm.

Dead California sea lions dangle topsy-turvy from a gill net in a gruesome photo. The caption notes that more than 300,000 marine mammals are estimated to die annually in fishing gear. A mosaic shows the scores of debris (cigarette lighters, toy parts, bottle tops) removed from the digestive tract of an albatross chick after its diet proved fatal.

Another photo shows what a haul of orange roughy looks like — a mountain of flesh on a heaving deck. The deep-sea fish reproduces very slowly and lives up to 250 years, prompting warnings that industrial fishing threatens to drive it to extinction.

Recent events, Dr. Earl and her co-author, Linda K. Glover, write in the atlas, “have shattered the notion that the ocean is so vast, so resilient, there is little humans can do to alter its nature.”

Echoing the arc of her career, the atlas details the growing efforts to create marine sanctuaries and protected areas around the globe. Research, it notes, reveals that fully protected areas can produce greater numbers of larger fish and greater diversity in only five years.

The problem, Dr. Earle said in the interview, is that the protected zones add up to a very small part of the global ocean, which covers more than 70 percent of the planet’s surface.

“It’s alarming how few they are compared to the size,” she said. “They’re a tiny fraction of 1 percent. On land, across the world, about 12 percent is off limits for development, in parks or preserves.”

The protected areas in the western Pacific that Mr. Bush designated as national monuments a week ago encircle the Northern Mariana Islands (including the Mariana Trench, the deepest canyon on Earth) and parts of a sprawling collection of reefs and atolls known as the Line Islands.

The explorer in Dr. Earle lives on, and she dreams of a vehicle that will carry her to the trench’s depths. “If you can go to the deepest place, you can go anyplace,” she said, clearly taken with the thought. “I want to see if we can go deep and learn more about the heart of the ocean.”

Los Angeles Times
By Mary MacVean
January 10, 2009

These days, digging some holes and planting a little lettuce or a few beets is a political act. Just ask Julie Stern, who shares a backyard organic garden with her neighbor in Topanga Canyon. Stern worked at the polls on election day. “There’s a feeling you had,” she said. “You saw your neighbors, and you felt good about what you did.” Growing food, she added, “I sort of do feel the same way.”

Or ask Sandra Young, who put two raised beds in the neatly kept frontyard of her Westside house.

“For me, it’s much more a political question than a gardening question,” Young said, adding that when her family moved to the house 10 years ago, she asked: “What are we doing with all this grass?” Though she claimed she had too little time to be a top-notch gardener, last month beets, carrots, lettuces, basil and parsley were growing steps from her front door. Gardening, she said, is one thing she can do, “a step in the right direction.”

Decades ago, the victory gardens planted at the behest of the federal government helped the United States cope with food shortages during World War II. (In World War I, they were liberty gardens.) By 1943, Americans planted more than 20 million victory gardens — at homes and schools and in parks — that were reported to produce 8 million tons of food that one old film called “America’s hidden weapon.”

Now, in community gardens and backyards, and of course on the Internet, a new victory garden movement has captured the attention of people who want to lessen their reliance on mass-produced or imported food, reduce their carbon footprint, foster a sense of community or save on their grocery bills in a fractured economic climate.

When the National Gardening Assn. compiles its annual data later this month, market research director Bruce Butterfield expects to see a 10% rise in food gardening for 2008. Based on anecdotal evidence and trends in past recessions, he expects even stronger growth this year.

“People want to have more connection with their own world,” said Yvonne Savio, manager of the Common Ground Garden Program for the Los Angeles County UC Cooperative Extension, which includes a master gardener program that aims to help poor people grow food. Applications, she said, have doubled in the past three years.

Jimmy Williams, who runs Hayground Organic Gardening from his Los Angeles house, has 6,000 to 10,000 seedlings on the roof of his small garage alone. His business — selling seedlings and designing gardens — has quadrupled in the last year, he said. Why?

People find that food tastes better if they grow it themselves, he said. Plus, there’s the economy. “They’re worried,” Williams said. “They don’t know what’s going to happen.”

The desire to grow food, however, crosses economic lines. Some people are struggling financially, but others simply prefer lettuce over lawns. Do-it-yourself types are eager for delicious, healthful food close at hand.

“Even super-rich people who can afford to send people to any store anywhere — they even want gardens,” Williams said.

Christy Wilhelmi, who teaches gardening at Santa Monica College and in her Mar Vista backyard, notes that growing your own makes the shortest path possible from field to table, eliminating the need to transport crops, sometimes thousands of miles. Behind her house, she gardens in eight raised beds, growing heirloom varieties of asparagus, strawberries, tomatoes and more to do her part to increase biodiversity. She would like to add chickens. They would eat kitchen scraps and some garden pests, and they would provide eggs.

::

“It’s very cyclical,” said Charlie Nardozzi, senior horticulturist with the National Gardening Assn., which is based in South Burlington, Vt. After the second World War, gardening became mostly a hobby in the ’50s and ’60s. But then came the “back to the land” movement of the 1970s, when growing food again had serious purpose.

It petered out in the ’80s and ’90s but has surged again today, buoyed by philosophical issues as well as economic ones, Nardozzi said. Seed companies have reported running out of some vegetables, and demand is higher than it’s been in years, he said.

At the W. Atlee Burpee & Co., sales of seeds for vegetables and herbs last year rose 40% compared with 2007, the company said. A spokeswoman cited spikes in food and gas prices, as well as worries about food safety and interest in organic food.

In the 1940s, Jean-Marie Putnam and Lloyd C. Cosper’s book, “Gardens for Victory,” emphasized the financial savings: “Those dollars can go into the bank account, or you may patriotically transform your beet, onion and cabbage savings directly into Defense Bonds.”

Today there is a confluence of concerns — a victory garden movement with a 21st century agenda, eager to involve people from the White House to your backyard.

“It’s the new call to service,” said Mary Tokita, who has a plot at a community garden in Eagle Rock and is active on the Los Angeles Community Garden Council. More community gardens are opening, and rooftops are being planted downtown, she said. “It’s very, very heartening.”

The movement has every potential to feel as urgent as the victory gardens of old, said Blair Randall, director of the Garden for the Environment, a demonstration garden in San Francisco where classes are offered in growing and composting.

“There is a greater diversity of reasons — economic, environmental, people who care about their food,” he said.

::

Julie Stern and Christo Brock were drawn to growing delicious food, and both frequent farmers markets and Whole Foods. Stern can’t wait to grow the prized ‘San Marzano’ tomatoes next summer. Though neither is poor, Stern recently quit a high-paying job to devote time to fiction writing and likes the idea of lower grocery bills.

“I feel fortunate that I can pay a premium to do what I think is right,” Brock said. At the same time, he said, “growing your own garden is frugal. I like that.”

In October, he and Stern started leeks, peas, beets, carrots and a few other things, all grown organically in Stern’s Topanga Canyon yard. They’re also making compost and steeping a manure “tea” to be used as liquid fertilizer.

Brock, a documentary filmmaker, doesn’t think of himself as a patriotic gardener, but he is worried about the future of the planet.

“The produce from Chile — it’s not ripe or it has no flavor. And now it has a big carbon footprint,” he said.

Other converts can be found at community gardens, many of which were established during L.A. Mayor Tom Bradley’s administration, said David King, a board member of the American Community Gardening Assn. One common goal was “good, clean, wholesome food for under-served populations.”

Most of the gardens are in middle-class or low-income areas. Today, community gardeners are motivated by economics as well as interest in the way food is grown, said King, who tends the 1-acre garden at Venice High School.

“There is a positive connection between putting their fingers in the soil and their own mental or spiritual well-being,” he said.

Rudolph Forrest, a 51-year-old hospital respiratory technician, has been out of work for nine months. In September, he got a plot at his neighborhood community garden, the Stanford Avalon garden in Watts. Since then, he’s been working his soil, adding compost to make it rich and organic. A vegan, he plans to eat from it, and he hopes to start a business using his crops for smoothie ingredients. He plans to grow strawberries, melons, grapes and more.

Like many of the approximately 70 community gardens in Los Angeles, this one has a waiting list. It sits near Locke High School, on a narrow stretch of Department of Public Works land under power lines. The gardeners here have relatively big plots, 10 feet by 30 feet. They pay $11 a month for water and maintenance, and some of them sell what they grow.

“It makes all the sense in the world for me to get a plot, grow my own food and live,” Forrest said one Sunday morning standing by his garden, while two crows chased a red-tailed hawk above. “This is a new reality. And I am actually excited.”

::

The new victory garden movement still is after the brass ring: a president calling on citizens to plant food, and a first family with a garden. The writer Michael Pollan, chef Alice Waters and plenty of others have called on the Obamas to follow the example of the Franklin D. Roosevelt family by planting a food garden to replace some of that pristine lawn at the White House. An online petition organized by the group Kitchen Gardeners International hopes to persuade President-elect Barack Obama to plant an organic garden on “the First Lawn.”

In addition to feeding White House residents, the food would be served to visiting dignitaries or go to shelters. So far, there’s no word on whether Obama will take the suggestion. “It would be so symbolic to tear up some of the lawn and put in vegetables,” said the gardening association’s Nardozzi. “It would be great.

By CHRISTINE HAUGHNEY
NY Times Published: January 10, 2009

The workshop where John Randall assembles $3,000 pine-beam tables is so cramped that he holds client meetings at a sawdust-covered worktable and has to shuffle his equipment around to make elbow room for himself and a co-worker.

A welder at Stiegelbauer Associates, which makes sets for TV programs. The company has had to limit staff but is profitable.
But the recession notwithstanding, he has enough orders to keep busy through April and hopes to buy a $2,000 drill press and hire another full-time woodworker soon. So Mr. Randall recently signed a lease to double his space at the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

“It doesn’t feel like a slowdown,” he said. “We all may not have any work in three months. But we’ve been saying that for three months.”

Mr. Randall’s three-man company, Bien Hecho, may be one of the brighter lights in the city’s darkening economy. For more than 50 years, large-scale manufacturing in New York has been shrinking as textile factories, printing plants and sugar refineries have shut down or moved south and overseas.

But in recent years, small manufacturers like Bien Hecho (Spanish for “well made”) have been on the rise, making products for niche markets and wealthy customers. And now, even as the broader economy is suffering, many of those manufacturers are proving surprisingly resilient, city officials and economic analysts say.

Some businesses are making products that government agencies and companies are still buying, like body armor for soldiers in Iraq and sets for television programs like “Saturday Night Live.” They also make food products like tortillas for local immigrant communities and baguettes for Manhattan restaurants. Others make luxury goods, like high-end audio speakers, that affluent customers are still buying.

“There’s quite a market for niche products in New York City,” said Jonathan Bowles, the director of the Center for an Urban Future, a nonpartisan research group in Manhattan, and an author of several manufacturing studies. “For a lot of the niche manufacturers, including those that are broadly appealing to the high-end market, they may be doing O.K.”

The Brooklyn Navy Yard, on the East River between the Williamsburg and Manhattan Bridges, has become a hot house for more than 200 of the city’s small manufacturers, its sprawling 300-acre campus filled with the sounds of hammering and drilling on any given afternoon.

Indeed, the Navy Yard has had so much demand for new space that despite the recession, it plans to add 1.5 million square feet in the next two years, its largest expansion since World War II, said Andrew H. Kimball, the president and chief executive of the Navy Yard. The expansion is expected to be completed by January 2011, and Navy Yard executives hope that the tenants’ total work force, currently 5,000, will grow by 2,000. While data is sparse, many experts and city officials say they believe that smaller companies are helping the broader manufacturing sector to perform better than other parts of the economy.

A recent study of unemployment data by the Fiscal Policy Institute, a liberal research group, shows that the number of workers in manufacturing who are receiving unemployment benefits grew by 11 percent between October 2007 and October 2008, compared with a 67 percent increase in the finance and insurance industries and 56 percent in the construction industry.

“If they’ve been flourishing, they’ll be able to survive,” said Mitchell Moss, a professor of urban policy and planning at New York University who has tracked the rise of the city’s niche manufacturers. “Their competitive advantage is the quality and design of their production.”

That is not to say that all niche manufacturers will avoid the recession or that their prosperity will boost the economy. At least one woodworking company at the Navy Yard has gone out of business. Some businesses there reported that business is not as strong as before. And many face limited growth because there are only so many customers for products like body armor, $6,000 speakers and $3,000 tables.

“There’s a natural limitation to what they do,” said Cliff Waldman, an economist with the Manufacturers Alliance/M.A.P.I., a research organization in Arlington, Va., that is supported by multinational manufacturers. “They have a few people with specialized skills and they service a few markets.”

But it is also clear that smaller manufacturers have been expanding even as the city’s more traditional industrial base has continued to shrink. In Brooklyn, the number of jobs for niche manufacturers, which are not only small but also tend to have local clients, rose by 17 percent between 2001 and 2007, said James Parrott, the chief economist of the Fiscal Policy Institute. In the same period, the number for manufacturers making products for mass markets declined by 48 percent.

Niche manufacturers currently make up a quarter of the more than 25,000 manufacturing jobs in Brooklyn, Mr. Parrott said. No similar statistics were available for the rest of the city, which has a total of more than 92,000 manufacturing workers, he said.

The Brooklyn Navy Yard has housed manufacturing tenants since the city bought the land for $24 million in 1967.

Today, 70 percent of the Navy Yard’s 243 businesses have roughly five employees or fewer and specialize in niche products. Many business owners interviewed said they were staying strong in this market by employing few workers and keeping their products specialized.

“They tend to be very nimble, even in the downtimes,” said Mr. Kimball. “They can make it through a difficult stretch easier than the bigger players.”

Stiegelbauer Associates, which makes sets for television productions, remains profitable partly by limiting the staff to 15 workers and employing extra union workers for bigger jobs, according to Steve Paone, its vice president. The business has declined in recent years as soap operas like “Guiding Light” have invested more in permanent rather than temporary sets and have filmed more on location.

But because he ran a leaner business, he said the company was able to profit when a regular client, “Saturday Night Live,” added three election specials to its standard schedule of 22 shows in the fall. The company also picked up work with the new Jimmy Fallon show. Still, Mr. Paone is cautious about whether the recent streak will continue because so many television programs have cut back.

“They’ve been busier than ever. But they’re one of the few,” he said about “Saturday Night Live.”

Other manufacturers are thriving by selling products that government agencies consider essential.

Caleb Crye, the managing director of Crye Precision, said he had not seen any decline in demand for his security products, which include body armor for Navy Seals, flame-resistant uniforms for military officials and nape pads — Army helmet attachments that protect soldiers’ spinal cords by covering the backs of their necks.

Business has been good enough, he said, to avoid layoffs and keep his 70 workers at the Navy Yard and 30 workers in New Jersey busy.

Some products that have become too expensive for some people remain necessities for others.

John Devore, whose three-person company, DeVore Fidelity, designs $2,000 to $16,800 speakers, said that since Thanksgiving, business had dropped off among buyers from England, France and Israel. But that decline was balanced by orders from smaller West Coast audio stores, where consumers are spending more on fine speakers for their homes.

“While my business hasn’t really dropped off, it seems like it’s coming from different stores,” he said.

Then there are New Yorkers who still seem to have enough money to spend on luxury goods like custom-designed furniture.

Scott Jordan, a custom furniture maker at the Navy Yard, saw his business dip by more than 30 percent in November from the year before. But since Christmas, weekly sales for his $2,600 sleeper sofas and $3,000 beds have picked up. He says that while his more affluent clients may be cost-conscious, they are not “worried about where their next paycheck is coming from.”

“A good night’s sleep is more important than ever,” he said.

Lecia Dole-Recio, Untitled (gry.rd.ppr), 2008, Gouache, graphite, tape, glue, paper, cardboard, 73 5/8 x 64 3/4 inches, LDR0608

January 10 - February 7 at Richard Telles

By JAMES CAMPBELL
NY Times Published: January 9, 2009

In June 1958, Allen Ginsberg wrote to Jack Kerouac about a series of catastrophes that had befallen members of their circle on the West Coast. Neal Cassady was in the San Bruno county jail, awaiting trial for having offered marijuana to a pair of undercover policemen. A woman friend — “little doomed Connie” — had fallen in with “some evil teaheads or something” and been strangled, according to an outside source, “Tuesday AM by a . . . seaman who confessed that PM.” Al Sublette, who features in Kerouac’s novel “Big Sur” under the name Mal Damlette, was also in prison — “I heard for a burglary.” All the news from out West, much of it conveyed by Cassady’s “haggard” wife Carolyn, with whom Ginsberg had been on unfriendly terms since she disturbed him in bed with Neal, “sounds evil . . . except letters from Gary.” In a note to Cassady himself two weeks later, Ginsberg admitted being at a loss to offer practical help. “I wrote Gary Snyder, he’s the only one with a strong sense . . . to . . . find what need be done.”

The graph of Ginsberg’s emotional life rose and fell alarmingly over the years (he died in 1997, at 70). The early correspondence in “The Letters of Allen Ginsberg” reflects a multifaceted distress: at his mother’s “severe nervous breakdowns,” related fears for his own mental health, and a comprehensive sexual anxiety. In 1949, having fallen in with some petty criminals, he was arrested for harboring stolen goods and subsequently committed to the New York State Psychiatric Institute, where he met the future dedicatee of “Howl,” Carl Solomon.

Within a quarter-century, however, Ginsberg had become America’s most famous living poet, attracting a congregation in which common readers mingled with political activists, students of oriental philosophy and a variety of social casualties. Words worth’s famous pronouncement — “We poets in our youth begin in gladness; / But thereof comes in the end despondency and madness” — appears to have been put into reverse by Ginsberg. The open homosexual and Blake-inspired visionary took every opportunity to demonstrate that candor triumphed over shame — by taking off his clothes at a poetry reading, for example. Madness to gladness was his determined course. If the world seemed reluctant to follow, the solution was obvious: change the world.

Yet letters written in the late 1980s to his longtime partner, Peter Orlovsky, and to his friend and fellow poet, Gregory Corso, suggest that Ginsberg, a man of great geniality and natural generosity, trailed the old discontents behind him. They turned up in the form of other people’s drug and alcohol addictions, pathological self-centeredness and occasional violence. In June 1987, he issued an ultimatum to Orlovsky, who had socked the psychiatrist R. D. Laing on the mouth during a get-together in Colorado, leaving Laing with “a big blue swollen lip.” Orlovsky’s recollection of the event was dim, therefore Ginsberg felt obliged to remind him:

“You poured milk and apple juice over the harmonium as well as R. D. Laing. . . . A teapot lid was broken, tiny fragments, no vacuum cleaner yet and I was too injured to get thing straight till now. One cigarette burn on rug, one on hallway linoleum. My shin got kicked when you overturned the coffee table while I was sitting on the couch watching you and Laing go at it.

“The violence had escalated so high after you bit Laing on the mouth that, after knocking you down in anger myself, and you throwing a chair at me . . . I finally called the police.”

In a letter to Corso the following year, Ginsberg complained that it was impossible to conduct a conversation with others in his own apartment, while Corso demanded “complete separate attention, like unhappy tantrum child. . . . I think you’re trying to trouble me. . . . Finally I resolve not to take it, ‘Gregory I’ll only see you when you’re sober.’ ” He adds that while “drunk or on crack” the previous evening, Orlovsky had threatened to kill him. Detained for the night, Orlovsky was released the next morning. “God knows where this will end.” Another poet and friend, Anne Waldman, blamed Ginsberg for “enabling” Orlovsky, and continually reactivating a mutual dependency.

Throughout the story unfolded by Bill Morgan, Ginsberg’s biographer and archivist, who has chosen 165 letters from more than 3,700 that are known to exist, Ginsberg trains his gaze on the elusive equilibrium. In 1968, he bought a farm in Cherry Valley, N.Y., which held out the promise of rural tranquility. In a letter to Snyder, he described the setup: “We have three goats (I now milk goats), 1 cow 1 horse (chestnut mare for pleasure) 15 chickens 3 ducks 2 geese. . . . More kibbutz than commune.” Corso and Orlovsky were also present, however, as well as Orlovsky’s difficult brother Julius. Signing off, Ginsberg told Snyder, “I keep straying on mental anger warpaths, then come back to milking goats.”

“The Selected Letters of Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder,” also edited by Morgan, is much taken up with discussions of meditation and Oriental studies, on which Snyder appears as the master, Ginsberg the willing disciple. The two men met in Berkeley in 1955 and took part in the famous Six Gallery poetry reading at which Ginsberg gave the first notable reading of “Howl.” After the event, which served as an informal coming-out reception for the Beat Generation in San Francisco, he published “Howl and Other Poems,” which became the subject of an obscenity prosecution, then moved to Europe to join forces with William Burroughs. Meanwhile, Snyder entered a Japanese Zen monastery, embarking on a course of study that would last until his return to the United States permanently in 1969.

Their separate paths are marked throughout the correspondence. In July 1967, Ginsberg writes, “Been in London — arrested for reading ‘Who Be Kind To’ in Spoleto. . . . Evening with Paul McCart ney.” Early in the new year, back in the United States, he reports that he has been in court for taking part in a sit-in and is experiencing “the sense of a real authoritarian threat from government already established, and lack of any alternatives but black power urban violence or withdrawal to Neolithic countries.” Snyder, writing from Japan, recommends a newspaper which contains “my brief account of the Banyan Ashram of last summer. I still think you would find it a restful and creative thing to do this year — come over here and join us farming and fishing — no newspapermen, no literature.”

As the Cherry Valley experiment sank under the weight of indiscipline — “The farm never became the escape from addictions that Ginsberg had hoped,” Morgan writes in one of the helpful notes that run throughout “The Letters of Allen Ginsberg” but are absent from the companion volume — Ginsberg attached himself to Snyder in a material sense, by building a small house on the 100-acre estate Snyder had purchased together with like-minded settlers in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, where he still lives. The plans for the cabin, the harnessing of expertise for its construction — “Dear Gary: Fine build 10’ x 11’ hut, sounds ideal” — and the subsequent arrangements for use when Ginsberg was absent (most of the time) form the ground of the “Selected Letters.” Snyder is revealed as a man of practical as much as mystical wisdom, with a knack for good accounting. Mutual respect is the dominant note.

Readers hoping for exchanges of constructive literary criticism are likely to be disappointed, which is a pity since, when they do occur, they are to the point. Making a selection of Snyder’s poetry for a teaching course in 1976, Ginsberg writes: “I went thru last book” — “Turtle Island” — “looking for examples of hard-line riprap solidity and noticed you were getting as bad as me into psychopolitical generalization which violated ‘no ideas but in things’ rule.” Some years later, having read Snyder’s collection “Axe Handles,” Ginsberg pinpoints a strength that his friend was apt to neglect: “I liked best the poems where you have a definite narrative structure.”

The artists Ginsberg looks up to most, on this evidence, are not poets but singers. Visiting Pound in 1967, he brings records by “Beatles and Dylan and Donovan” as gifts. Pound “sat thru fl hour of loud rock smiling” but remained otherwise silent. When he calls on John Lennon in 1976, the former Beatle admits to difficulties with the written word but tells Ginsberg he heard “Howl” on the radio one night, and “suddenly realized what I was doing and dug it.” To his future biographer Barry Miles, Ginsberg writes: “It sure was nice hearing Lennon close that gap, complete that circle and treat me like a fellow artist as he walked me to the door goodbye.”

There is a vast quantity of documentary material available on Ginsberg: journals, interviews, biographies, a variorum edition of “Howl” edited by Miles (perhaps the best book to read about Ginsberg’s poetry), and now these volumes of letters edited with devotion by Bill Morgan. Yet the reader retains the sense that, for all his explorations of sexual possibility, inner space, Zen “mind,” and the world’s continents, Ginsberg, who repeatedly (and apparently seriously) ranked Corso with Keats, was willing to cover but a small patch of contemporary literary geography. A letter to Thom Gunn, author of an illuminating essay on Ginsberg’s poetry, shows how appreciative he was of criticism that reached beyond accustomed cultish adoration: “I was moved — almost to tears — by your sympathetic perceptions.” Gunn took special delight in poetry of the 16th century but knew how to read Ginsberg with pleasure; if Ginsberg ever returned the compliment, to Gunn or to other writers outside the Beat and Black Mountain circles, there is no sign of it here.

James Campbell is the author of “This Is the Beat Generation.” A collection of his essays,” Syncopations,” was published in 2008.

January 31 - March 29, 2009
ATELIER BOW-WOW SMALL CASE STUDY
Cal Arts/ Redcat Theatre in The Disney Concert Hall
Opening reception: Friday, January 30, 6:00 - 9:00 pm
Artist talk: Saturday, January 31, 2 pm

Founded by Yoshiharu Tsukamoto and Momoyo Kaijima in 1992, Tokyo-based architecture studio Atelier Bow-Wow explores the use and function of space within urban environments. Bow-Wow developed the term “pet architecture”-a style of small, ad hoc, multifunctional structures that make the most of limited space. Using the framework of art galleries or museums to experiment with form and behavior, Bow-Wow’s newly commissioned project for REDCAT is the culmination of an extended Los Angeles residency period, during which Tsukamoto and Kaijima researched the Case Study House program and made this postwar project a point of departure in thinking about domestic dwellings. Informed by the principles of the program-which enlisted architects to design low-cost homes for the masses with prefabricated materials-as well as the urban dynamics of contemporary Los Angeles, Bow-Wow’s Small Case Study House responds to contemporary models for housing in L.A. as they relate to concepts of customization, re-use, and “architectural behaviorology.” This is Atelier Bow-Wow’s first solo exhibition in the United States.

redcat

By MARK BITTMAN
Ny Times Published: January 6, 2009

PERHAPS, like me, you have this romantic notion of shopping daily — maybe even a mental vision of yourself making the rounds, wicker basket in hand, of your little Shropshire or Provençal or Tuscan village. The reality, of course, is that few of us provision our kitchens or cook exclusively with ultra-fresh ingredients, especially in winter, when there simply are no ultra-fresh ingredients.

But if your goal is to cook and cook quickly, to get a satisfying and enjoyable variety of real food on the table as often as possible, a well-stocked pantry and fridge can sustain you. Replenished weekly or even less frequently, with an occasional stop for fresh vegetables, meat, fish and dairy, they are the core supply houses for the home cook.

While you’re stocking up, you might clear out a bit of the detritus that’s cluttering your shelves. Some of these things take up more space than they’re worth, while others are so much better in their real forms that the difference is laughable. Sadly, some remain in common usage even among good cooks. My point here is not to criminalize their use, but to point out how easily and successfully we can substitute for them, in every case with better results.

Here, then, is my little list of items you might spurn, along with some essential pantry and long-keeping refrigerator items you might consider. Note that I’m not including the ultra-obvious, things that are more or less ubiquitous in the contemporary American pantry, like potatoes, eggs and honey.

OUT Packaged bread crumbs or croutons.

IN Take crumbs, cubes or slices of bread, and either toast evenly in a low oven until dry and lightly browned, tossing occasionally; or cook in olive oil until brown and crisp, stirring frequently. The first keep a long time, and are multipurpose; the second are best used quickly, and are incomparably delicious.

OUT Bouillon cubes or powder, or canned stock.

IN Simmer a carrot, a celery stalk and half an onion in a couple of cups of water for 10 minutes and you’re better off; if you have any chicken scraps, even a half-hour of cooking with those same vegetables will give you something 10 times better than any canned stock.

OUT Aerosol oil. At about $12 a pint, twice as expensive as halfway decent extra virgin olive oil, which spray oil most decidedly is not; and it contains additives.

IN Get some good olive oil and a hand-pumped sprayer or even simpler, a brush. Simplest: your fingers.

OUT Bottled salad dressing and marinades. The biggest rip-offs imaginable.

IN Take good oil and vinegar or lemon juice, and combine them with salt, pepper, maybe a little Dijon, in a proportion of about three parts oil to one of vinegar. Customize from there, because you may like more vinegar or less, and you undoubtedly will want a little shallot, or balsamic vinegar, or honey, or garlic, or tarragon, or soy sauce. …

OUT Bottled lemon juice.

IN Lemons. Try buying six at a time, then experiment; I never put lemon on something and regret it. (Scramble a couple of eggs in chicken stock, then finish with a lot of lemon, black pepper and dill; call this egg-lemon soup, or avgolemono.) Don’t forget the zest: you can grate it and add it to many pan sauces, or hummus and other purées. And don’t worry about reamers, squeezers or any of that junk; squeeze from one hand into the other and let your fingers filter out the pips.

OUT Spices older than a year: smell before using; if you get a whiff of dust or must before you smell the spice, toss it. I find it easier to clean house once a year and buy new ones.

IN Fresh spices. Almost all spices are worth having. But some that you might think about using more frequently include cardamom (try a tiny bit in your next coffee cake, apple cake, spice cake or rice pilaf); ground cumin (a better starting place in chili — in fact, in many bean dishes — than chili powder); fennel seeds (these will give a Provençal flavor to any tomato sauce or soup; grind them first, or not); an assortment of dried chilies (I store them all together, because dried chipotles make the rest of them slightly smoky); fresh — or at least dried — ginger, which is lovely grated over most vegetables; pimentón, the smoked Spanish red pepper that is insanely popular in restaurants but still barely making inroads among home cooks; and good curry powder.

OUT Dried parsley and basil. They’re worthless.

IN Fresh parsley, which keeps at least a week in the refrigerator. (Try your favorite summer pesto recipe with parsley in place of basil, or simply purée some parsley with a little oil, water, salt and a whisper of garlic. Or add a chopped handful to any salad or almost anything else.) And dried tarragon, rosemary and dill, all of which I use all winter; mix a teaspoon or so of tarragon or rosemary — not more, they’re strong — with olive oil or melted butter and brush on roasted or broiled chicken while it cooks, or add a pinch to vinaigrette. Dill is also good with chicken; on plain broiled fish, with lemon; or in many simple soups.

OUT Canned beans (except in emergencies).

IN Dried beans. More economical, better tasting, space saving and available in far more varieties. Cook a pound once a week and you’ll always have them around (you can freeze small amounts in their cooking liquid, or water, indefinitely). If you’re not sold, try this: soak and cook a pound of white beans. Take some and finish with fresh chopped sage, garlic and good olive oil. Purée another cup or so with a boiled potato and lots of garlic. Mix some with a bit of cooking liquid, and add a can of tomatoes; some chopped celery, carrots and onions; cooked pasta; and cheese and call it pasta fagiole or minestrone. If there are any left, mix them with a can of olive-oil-packed tuna or sardines. And that’s just white beans.

OUT Imitation vanilla.

IN Vanilla beans. They’re expensive, but they keep. (If you look online you can find bargains in bulk, which is why I have 25 in my refrigerator.) If you slice a pod in half and simmer it with some leftover rice and any kind of milk (dairy, coconut, almond…), you’ll never go back to extract.

OUT Grated imitation “Parmesan” (beware the green cylinder, or any other pre-grated cheese for that matter).

IN Real Parmigiano-Reggiano. Wrapped well, it keeps for a year (scrape mold off if necessary). Grated over anything, there is no more magical ingredient. Think about pasta with butter and Parmesan (does your mouth water?). But also think about any egg dish, with Parmesan; anything sautéed with a coating of bread crumbs and Parmesan; or asparagus, broccoli, spinach or any other cooked vegetable, topped with Parmesan (and maybe some bread crumbs) and run under the broiler; how great. Save the rinds to throw in pots of sauce, soup, tomato-y stew or risotto.

OUT Canned peas (and most other canned vegetables, come to think of it).

IN Frozen peas. Especially if you have little kids and make pasta or rice with peas (and Parmesan!); not bad. Or purée with a little lemon juice and salt for a nice spread or dip. In fact, many frozen vegetables are better than you might think.

OUT Tomato paste in a can.

IN Tomato paste in a tube. You rarely need more than two tablespoons so you feel guilty opening a can; this solves that problem. Stir some into vegetables sautéed in olive oil, for example, then add water for fast soup. Or add a bit to almost any vegetable as it cooks in olive oil and garlic — especially cabbage, dark greens, carrots or cauliflower.

OUT Premade pie crusts. O.K., these are a real convenience, but almost all use inferior fats. I’d rather make a “pie” or quiche with no crust than use these.

IN Crumble graham crackers with melted butter and press into a pan. But really — if you put a pinch of salt, a cup of flour, a stick of very cold, cut-up butter in a food processor, then blend with a touch of water until it almost comes together — you have a dough you can refrigerate or freeze and roll out whenever you want, in five minutes.

OUT Cheap balsamic or flavored vinegars.

IN Sherry vinegar. More acidic and more genuine than all but the most expensive balsamic. Try a salad of salted cabbage (shred, then toss with a couple of tablespoons of salt in a colander for an hour or two, then rinse and drain), tossed with plenty of black pepper, a little olive oil and enough sherry vinegar to make the whole thing sharp.

OUT Minute Rice or boil-in-a-bag grains.

IN Genuine grains. Critical; as many different types as you have space for. Short grain rice — for risotto, paella, just good cooked rice — of course. Barley, pearled or not; a super rice alternative, with any kind of gravy, reduction sauce, pan drippings, what have you. Ground corn for polenta, grits, cornbread or thickener (whisk some — not much — into a soup and see what happens). Quinoa — people can’t believe how flavorful this is until they try it. Bulgur, which is ready in maybe 10 minutes (it requires only steeping), and everyone likes. If you’re in doubt about how to cook any of these, combine them with abundant salted water and cook as you would pasta, then drain when tender; you can’t go far wrong.

OUT “Pancake” syrup, which is more akin to Coke than to the real thing.

IN Real maple syrup, an indigenous gift from nature and the north country.

YOU SHOULD ALSO STOCK:

REAL BACON OR PROSCIUTTO Or other traditionally smoked or cured meat of some kind. If you have a quarter pound of prosciutto in the house at all times you can make almost anything — simple cooked grains, beans, vegetables, tomato sauces, soups — taste better. And, tightly wrapped, it’ll keep for weeks in the fridge or months in the freezer.

FISH SAUCE You have soy sauce, presumably; this is different, stronger, cruder (or should I say “less refined”?) in a way — and absolutely delicious. Use sparingly, but use; start by sprinkling a little over plain steamed vegetables, along with a lot of black pepper.

CANNED COCONUT MILK Try this: cook some onions in oil with curry powder; stir in coconut milk; poach chicken, fish, tofu, or even meat in that. Serve over rice.

MISO PASTE Never goes bad, as far as I can tell, and its flavor is incomparable. Whisk into boiling water for real soup in three minutes; thin a bit (with sake if you have it), and smear on meat or fish that’s almost done broiling; add a spoonful to vinaigrette. Etc.

CAPERS, GOOD OLIVES (BUY IN BULK, NOT CANS) AND GOOD ANCHOVIES (IN OLIVE OIL, PLEASE) The combination of the three makes a powerful paste, or pasta sauce, or dip.

WALNUTS And/or other nuts, but walnuts are most basic and useful. Try a purée with garlic, oil and a little water, as a pasta sauce, or just add to salads or cooked grains.

PIGNOLI With raisins, they make any dish Sicilian.

DRIED FRUIT For snacking, in braises (braised pork with prunes is a classic winter dish), or just soaked in water (or booze) or poached for dessert. Don’t forget dried tomatoes, too.

DRIED MUSHROOMS Don’t even bother to reconstitute if you’re cooking with liquid; just toss them in.

FROZEN SHRIMP Incredibly convenient.

WINTER SQUASH AND SWEET POTATOES These store almost as well as potatoes and are more nutritious and equally interesting. A sweet potato roasted until the exterior is nearly blackened and the interior is mush is a wonderful snack. The best winter squashes (delicata, for example) have edible skins and are amazing just chunked and roasted with a little oil (and maybe some ginger or garlic). For butternut- or acorn-type squashes, poke holes through to the center with a skewer in a few places and roast in a 400 degree oven until soft. Let cool, then peel and seed.

Rob Holman of Oregon State University with sand samples from nearly 1,000 sites around the world.

By CORNELIA DEAN
NY Times Published: January 5, 2009

CORVALLIS, Ore. — As a young geophysicist in the 1980s, Rob Holman attended a conference in San Francisco that included a field trip to a beach. Dr. Holman, who grew up inland, in Ottawa, stared at the ocean, assessing the strengths and vectors of the waves and currents. But when he looked around, everyone else was studying the sand.

He realized, he recalled, that “sand is not the same everywhere.” So he started collecting it. “I collected a few samples and put them in jars,” he said. “Then I had so many I built a rack. Then I built three more racks. Then I built four more.”

Today Dr. Holman is best known as a coastal oceanographer at Oregon State University whose computerized photography system, called Argus, has given researchers new ways to observe and measure beaches. But he still collects sand, which he displays on shelves in the corridor outside his office. By now he has almost a thousand samples. They come from his travels and from geologists and amateurs all over the world (including this reporter) who send him grainy shipments in envelopes, plastic bags, paper towels and other wrappings. Each offering is dried and transferred to glass laboratory jars a few inches high, which Dr. Holman labels by latitude and longitude of their site, as best he can determine them from the sometimes sketchy information his contributors provide.

The collection includes sand from all continents, including Antarctica. “Dutch colleagues are particularly good” at mailing in sand, Dr. Holman said. “Africa is lacking in samples,” a deficiency he attributes in part to an unfortunate accident. “Early on, I had a rack collapse,” he said.

Though these offerings have not necessarily ended up in the formal display, he has also received a bottle containing a gimmick portrait in purple sand, Hawaiian sand samples sold in packages to tourists, salt and pepper (“that was actually my secretary”) and all kinds of other things that were found on beaches, or might have been, including jelly beans and M&Ms. He accepts contributions of sand from inland riverbeds and places like Ayers Rock, in the Australian Outback, and even from hotel lobby ashtrays “if it’s a high-class place,” he said. These are listed as “miscellaneous.”

Occasionally offerings come from the community of psammophiles (formally, plants that live in sand) — people who collect sand for fun. There are more of them than one might think. Sand collecting “is not a new hobby or a passing fad,” according to the Web site of one group, the International Sand Collectors Society (www.sandcollectors.org). Its motto: “Discovering the World, Grain by Grain.”

Dr. Holman watches some sand sites, but from a distance. “I don’t participate in the chats,” he said.

For Dr. Holman, what started almost as a joke has become a valuable teaching tool. Geology students at the university study his collection, and they can learn a lot from it. “This row is a north to south transect along the East Coast,” he said one day recently, pointing to tubes containing samples collected at sites from Cape Cod to Key West. “It just gets lighter and finer.” That is because most of the time sand is not stationary on the beach. On the East Coast, “the big waves come in from the northeast, and they drive the littoral drift predominantly from north to south,” Dr. Holman said, referring to the longshore movement of sand.

By the time a grain of sand washes up on a beach in Florida, it has been battered by waves for a long time. “The physical action of being continually beaten causes the grains to break down, the angular corners to break off,” he said. “They become more rounded.”

And relatively dense mineral grains, like garnet, have settled out. The result is a row of samples shifting from the relatively dark, coarse grains of the Northeast to the fine white beach sand of the Southeast.

Dr. Holman keeps about two dozen especially telling samples in a portable “teaching rack” for use in classes and at lectures. Some are dark volcanic grains. One vial, from the Banzai Pipeline, a surfing mecca in Oahu, “is all broken up shells with rounded edges,” he said. “This sand cannot last very long.”

The rack “illustrates a lot of the things we need to know about how beach sands are different,” he said. “I have occasionally taken in sand to a student exam and said, ‘Tell me about this beach.’ A good person can do very well. There are a number of characteristics you can look at — the nature of the sand and the shape, where would the minerals come from, different transport and aging. Those all affect the sand you see on the beach.”

Dr. Holman also takes the teaching rack with him when he gives talks to the public, an effort to encourage people “to think about what they see on beaches.”

“Then I show them some Argus pictures, which always make them think about sandbars and how mobile they are,” he said.

Argus is the system Dr. Holman developed in research he began about 20 years ago at the Army Corps of Engineers research pier on the coast at Duck, N.C. Researchers assigned to the Duck pier regularly send instruments into the surf to make precise measurements of the underwater topography in the surf zone, particularly the formation and movement of sandbars along the beach.

Understanding these sandbars is critical to study of beach erosion and climate-related sea level rise, but the surf zone is a notoriously hostile research environment. Setting up and maintaining instruments there is almost impossible unless the equipment is so sturdy it distorts its own data, by interfering with the flow of water and sand. As a practical matter, the measurements made routinely at Duck are unobtainable almost anywhere else, and certainly not here in Oregon, where the wave climate is the harshest of any coastline in the Lower 48.

Dr. Holman used the Duck instrument data and time-lapse film from a camera he mounted on a tower at the Corps installation to figure out how to correlate photographic information to changes in the topography under the surf.

The results were surprising. For one thing, sandbars were not moving in simple patterns, as many coastal scientists had thought they did. “The biggest thing we learned is how much more complicated it is than we thought it was,” he said. “There is a richness of morphologies.”

Using Argus data, scientists can watch, almost in real time, as sandbars appear, disappear, curve, drift, breach and otherwise act up under the camouflage of breaking waves. The system can even be used to spot rip currents in real time. The lesson of Argus, he said, is “never give up observing”

S. Jeffress Williams, a coastal geologist with the United States Geological Survey, called the system “a critical piece of new technology.”

“The Argus system allows us to quantify and document visually the changes that take place along the coast on a variety of different time frames,” he said. Dr. Williams, a contributor to Dr. Holman’s collection, said that without the system, these observations would be difficult or even impossible. “A lot of the changes take place during storms and at times when it is difficult to have people out on the beach making observations and taking measurements.”

At one time, Dr. Holman said, coastal scientists thought that if they understood all the underlying physics, they would understand everything about beaches. “The pendulum has swung back,” he said. “Argus has been part of that. Argus helped us realize that our simple concepts were simple.”

While it is true that all beaches “live by the same rules” in that the movement of wind, water, waves and sand is always a matter of F = ma (force equals mass times acceleration), beaches behave differently. “We hope to figure that out,” he said.

Today, there are Argus installations at Duck and in Oregon, California, Hawaii, England, the Netherlands, Australia, New Zealand, Spain, Italy and Brazil.

Dr. Holman has also begun working with NATO in hopes of adapting routine reconnaissance images, most of which are discarded, to the Argus system.

Meanwhile, sand keeps piling up. When he first displayed the collection, Dr. Holman said, “the dean was a little queasy” about investing in shelving. But now it may be time for another infusion of money. Though he installed shelves with what he thought was ample room, he said, “we have run out of space.”

Matt Connors
Untitled
2008
oil on canvas, wood frame
29 1/2 x 23 1/2 inches

Varda Caivano
Untitled
2003
oil on canvas
18 x 14 1/4 inches

at Karyn Lovegrove

By JOSHUA YAFFA
NY Times Published: January 2, 2009

My parents arrived in Berkeley in 1969, just as city cops were storming People’s Park. They took an evening photography course in a crumbling studio not far from the Bay Bridge. After each class, their teacher, a failed portrait photographer who had turned to Native American hallucinogens in an attempt to revive his work, would prepare a communal meal for the half-dozen students, using the same solvent-stained pots and pans that he had just used to mix photo-developing chemicals. Phenidone and potassium bromide were somehow acceptable foodstuffs, my parents reasoned, but brown soda, processed cheese and red dye No. 2, no way.

Such was the prejudice my sister had to overcome to get her first taste of Burger King. Jess was 5 in 1980, when she made an errant turn on her roller skates and had a run-in with a brick wall. The accident left her with a crumpled nose oozing blood and snot and what she realized was a perhaps once-in-a-lifetime chance for a hamburger.

At the hospital, the deal was struck. Jess wouldn’t freak out as the doctor threaded the dozen stitches, and in return, my mother would grant one fast-food burger of her choosing. My sister, having no real empirical knowledge of the matter, didn’t really know the difference between a vanilla milkshake and a packet of mayonnaise. She went with a Whopper.

I didn’t have it much easier. Although I lacked a massive facial injury to bolster my case, I staged a demonstration of my own at age 9. I had found my wedge issue, the inherent contradiction in my parents’ dueling child-rearing impulses — their proud insistence upon a child’s right to self-determination versus the desire to feed the family as if we were a stable of horses.

My father, a lawyer, intervened with a compromise. My sister and I would each be allowed to pick out a box of sugary cereal once a year on our birthdays. I usually went with Frosted Flakes. My sister went straight for the hard stuff, choosing noxiously sweet boxes of Cocoa Puffs or Cookie Crunch.

At school, other kids’ lunches amazed me, and I could only imagine what other sorts of exotic and deviant child-rearing my classmates were receiving at home. As poor 10-year-old Ryan Oliver took a swig from his can of Pepsi, I pictured his father, taking a drag on a menthol cigarette just before dropping in on a skateboard on the half-pipe in the family’s living room.

Bargains were struck in the lunchroom. Want a look at my worksheet from math class? Sure. Just make sure your mom throws an extra stash of Pringles in your lunch tomorrow. Sleep overs took on the kind of salivatory anticipation that most children reserve for Halloween. Other kids aimed straight for the Nintendo, or perhaps for the host’s action figures. I headed for the kitchen cabinet. After sucking down a few cans of Coke and burying my face in chocolate wrappers, I would streak through the house with the bleary-eyed zeal of an enraptured Pentecostal. “Perhaps we should call his folks,” I could hear my friend’s parents whispering, as I collapsed on the kitchen floor.

It turned out that even my father had ways to cope. When I became old enough to be trusted, sometime just before my bar mitzvah, my father let me in on his secret. Sent to pick up the groceries for the week, he would also buy an extra-large tub of cheese balls, which the two of us would devour in rapturous silence on the car ride home. As we pulled into the garage, my father would inspect his beard in the rearview mirror, careful to brush off any telltale orange powder. “Don’t tell your mother,” he said. As if I ever would.

True liberation came only when I went away to college. Walking into the dining hall carried the same tingle of anticipation as descending into a Bangkok opium den, where I knew I could engage in vice without fear of punishment but still with a thick patina of guilt. There, with half-glazed eyes, I spent afternoons dipping slices of greasy cafeteria pizza into cups of ranch dressing. Nights were for sneaking beer into the dorms and eating late-night cheese steaks with hot sauce and fries.

These days, my sister is famous for sitting at the table at large family gatherings and eating Cool Whip right out of the plastic container. She calls me to make sick moaning noises after she has eaten too much chocolate and tolerates the disapproving looks I make when she gives my nephew sips of Sprite.

For my part, I never got over the subconscious aversion I had for the soda fountain, and I atoned for the sin of eating processed lunch meat by following it with a piece of fresh fruit. I was always pushing against authority, until one day I realized I wasn’t anymore, when I found myself stuffing a half-pound of spinach into a bag at the farmers’ market.

By RICHARD S. CHANG
NY Times Published: January 2, 2009

IF Detroit sold a car that could withstand 30 years of hard driving and cost less than $7,000, its main industry would be in a better place than it is today.

But while a new-model car with such credentials does not exist, Tom Cucciniello may have found the next best thing.

Mr. Cucciniello, co-owner of a linen supply company here, is the proud proprietor of three beautiful old Mercedes-Benz diesels: a 1979 300D, a 1983 300SD and a 1985 300D. The cars have already logged an average of 170,000 miles apiece, and Mr. Cucciniello reckons that together they have a million more to go.

“People generally get around 350,000 in these cars,” he said recently, standing outside his house, though he is hoping for more than 400,000 from each of his.

Renowned for their durability, the big Mercedes diesels built from the mid-1970s to the mid-’80s were also notoriously slow and loud.

Mr. Cucciniello, who is 50, didn’t know about the drawbacks when he first test-drove a Mercedes diesel around 15 years ago. On the road, he spotted a car for sale and tailed it until the owner stopped and got out. Mr. Cucciniello approached the startled man for a test drive, which in turn startled Mr. Cucciniello right back.

“I put my foot on the gas, and it didn’t move,” he said, exaggerating the car’s acceleration only slightly. In 1975, Road & Track found that the 300D took 20.3 seconds to reach 60 miles an hour from a stop.

Mr. Cucciniello didn’t buy the car, which he said he regretted for years — so much so, in fact, that when he next saw a used one for sale in good condition (the 1985 car), this time parked on the side of the road, he bought it then and there.

And he bought another, and another.

“They’re a great value,” Mr. Cucciniello said. He estimated that he has spent around $6,600 altogether for the three cars, which he proudly insisted will last the rest of his life. His wife drives the 1985, while he switches between the 1979 and the 1983 every other month. In the summer, Mr. Cucciniello takes one to his summer home on Lake Champlain in Vermont: about 250 miles each way.

You could say that he has gotten used to the speed (or lack thereof). One recent afternoon, he encouraged a visitor to floor the accelerator on the 1979 model and laughed at the results (none).

As for the noise, “that’s not loud to me,” he said above a subdued but ever-present clatter, lifting a tight fist. “That’s strong. It’s like a tractor.”

Sitting inside the 1979 car, Mr. Cucciniello seemed chipper in a pink shirt, a brown vest and chinos. He displayed the exuberance of someone who has beaten the odds in Vegas. “Look at that interior!” he said with enthusiasm, and rightfully so.

The blue upholstery looked untouched. Mr. Cucciniello had the stuffing replaced in the seats, but everything else inside was original. The cabin could have been a museum exhibit, down to the analog stereo (and its chunky buttons), which pulled in an adult alternative station loud and clear.

“For $2,000, where are you going to find something like this?” he asked.

Mr. Cucciniello found the 1979 car through a combination of luck and persistence. Although he bought it some five years ago, his pursuit goes back around 10 years (even before he bought the ’85).

He saw it on the road, and true to his modus operandi, he followed the car until it stopped at a traffic light. He got out of his car and handed the owner, an elderly woman, his business card. She should call him, he said, if she ever wanted to sell the car.

She didn’t, but four years later Mr. Cucciniello got a call from her daughter, who didn’t think her mother should be driving anymore. It was a done deal.

He bought the 1983 300SD (which is longer than the standard 300D) in a similar fashion. After learning about the car through a hot tip from his “auto body guy,” he approached the owner, who was in his 90s, and asked if he wanted to sell.

The man played hardball.

“He wanted $9,000 for it,” Mr. Cucciniello said. “The Blue Book value was $2,300, so I offered him $2,300. He didn’t take it.”

A few months later, the man died, and his secretary called Mr. Cucciniello on behalf of the man’s children, who “basically gave the car away.”

That completed his eccentric car collection.

They are three diesels of varying degrees of torpor. The 1979 is powered by a 5-cylinder engine with less than 90 horsepower. The other models came with turbocharged 5-cylinders, which made them faster, but not by much. (They were rated at about 120 horsepower.)

“It’s fine,” Mr. Cucciniello said. “In my younger days, I was a reckless driver and racked up some tickets. I haven’t had a run-in with the police since I got these.”

His goal these days is more of a lasting satisfaction.

“I’m 50 years old, so I’m trying not to buy another car,” he said, but hinted that his days of stopping Mercedes diesel drivers on the road might not be over. Friends and relatives have caught the bug (his brother-in-law was the latest to buy one), and they’ll need an expert to steer them in the right direction.

by Kelefa Sanneh
The New Yorker January, 5, 2009

I’m trying to run a tight ship,” Will Oldham said when he came to the door. By which he meant “Don’t be late again.” It was a Friday afternoon in Louisville, Kentucky, and Oldham was in his working house, a cozy place that would be perfect for a small family, were it not for all the musical instruments and studio equipment. It’s tucked behind some trees on a dense residential street in the Highlands, an area known for its charming shops and rising property values. (He also has a sleeping house nearby, which is just about empty.) Oldham tends to hide his thoughts behind a faint, ambiguous smile, and hides his smile behind an unpruned beard, which can make him seem like a man out of time. This impression is underscored by his excellent posture—though that may merely be evidence of a childhood spent in the theatre, learning to be conscious of his body and how it moves. The front hall was full of CDs, books, and boxes of T-shirts, and Oldham was holding a small stack of light-blue envelopes, the same shade as the cover of his most recent album. On the front of one, he had written, “Mom . . . plus siblings.” There were concert tickets inside, and they had to be delivered soon, because the concert was twenty-four hours away. It was time to go.
He walked across the street to his car, a well-worn minivan. A bumper sticker said, “When you have overpowered an enemy, show him forgiveness out of gratitude for the ability to overpower him.” (The quote comes from Ali ibn Abu Talib, the central figure in Shia Islam; Oldham got hooked on Muslim bumper stickers after seeing some in a shop in Chicago.) Louisville is his home town: lots of people there know him, and lots more people know who he is. Oldham must be one of the country’s most celebrated singer-songwriters, and if it’s a relatively small number of people doing the celebrating—well, that just shows how hard they’ve been working. He hadn’t driven more than a few blocks before a man waved him over and asked if he had a spare ticket for the concert. He did.
Oldham has been releasing records for fifteen years, though almost never under his own name. His first recordings were credited to Palace Brothers, a name inspired by John Steinbeck’s “Cannery Row”—in which the characters’ makeshift home is known as the Palace Flophouse—and by close-harmony duos such as the Louvin Brothers, who helped expand the scope of early country music, and the Everly Brothers, whose hits from half a century ago underscored the link between country music and early rock and roll. Oldham was a student of music history, clearly, but he never sounded studious. He had an eerie, strangulated voice, half wild and half broken. And he sang vivid and peculiar songs, which sometimes sounded like old standards rewritten as fever dreams or, occasionally, as inscrutable dirty jokes.

These days, he calls himself Bonnie “Prince” Billy, and his music is a little bit easier to love and a lot harder to dismiss. He has settled into character as an uncanny troubadour, singing a sort of transfigured country music, and he has become, in his own subterranean way, a canonical figure. Johnny Cash covered him, Björk has championed him (she invited him to appear on the soundtrack of “Drawing Restraint 9”), and Madonna, he suspects, has quoted him (her song “Let It Will Be” seems to borrow from his “O Let It Be,” though he says, “I’m fully prepared to accept that it’s a coincidence”). One tribute came from the indie folksinger Jeffrey Lewis, whose song “Williamsburg Will Oldham Horror” affectionately portrays Oldham as both a hero and a brute; the joke is that most indie-rock listeners already think of him that way. And a recent, unenthusiastic review in the London Independent nonetheless concluded that Oldham was “the underground artist most likely to work his way into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.” Although he has never signed with a major label, and has never risen higher than No. 194 on Billboard’s album chart, his concerts sell out all over the world. If he remains a spectral figure, that is no coincidence. In an online tour diary from a few years ago, he wrote, “It is more rewarding to be complicit with scarcity than excess.”
He is known, too, as a recluse and an enigma—two words that journalists often use to describe people who don’t particularly enjoy talking to journalists. He is cagey in interviews; he hates photo shoots. But he rarely goes more than a few months without some kind of record release. And in the past few years he has swum closer to the surface. He has rerecorded some of his best-loved songs with deft Nashville professionals, prettifying—or, if you like, desecrating—his own beloved back catalogue of obscurities. He has starred in a Kanye West video, alongside the comedian Zach Galifianakis. He appeared in the independent films “Junebug,” “Old Joy,” and “Wendy and Lucy,” the new Michelle Williams film (he also wrote a melody for her to hum in it). And he played a police officer in “Trapped in the Closet,” the multipart comic opera by the R. & B. singer R. Kelly, who is one of Oldham’s favorites. It’s a small part, but he looks as if he’s having fun.
ldham’s mother, Joanne, was still living in the home where he grew up, a two-story house on a hill at the end of a leafy cul-de-sac. After delivering most of his envelopes, he went to see her, stopping at a liquor store on the way to buy some tonic water. Joanne is a soft-spoken but lively woman who seems nearly unshockable. She is an artist; she drew the image on the cover of her son’s most recent album, “Lie Down in the Light”—the one with the light-blue cover. (Her assignment: re-create “The Wrestlers,” by Gustave Courbet, but turn it into an image of Jacob wrestling the angel.) In the spirit of hospitality, she offered a warning: she said that her son wasn’t always easy to interview. The word she used was “ornery.”
“Ornery” also happens to be the title of a profile of the country-music singer Merle Haggard that was published in this magazine, in 1990. To Oldham, Haggard, like R. Kelly, is a living hero. (In this trinity the third member is Leonard Cohen.) He says that fond memories of that story, which was written by Bryan Di Salvatore, persuaded him to coöperate for this story, although not without trepidation. In Di Salvatore’s piece, Haggard is discovered in the kitchen of his tour bus, with his feet stretched out under a table, “naked except for a plaid flannel shirt and après-ski boots.” Oldham says, “That’s, like, an ideal for me. That’s such a great life.”
Oldham served drinks and talked about a recent European tour, during which he smuggled psychedelic mushrooms across a border (he hid them in his underwear) and stole a hairpin from a flamenco singer (he hid it in his beard).Soon, it was time for dinner, and after some back-and-forth Oldham and his mother decided on an upscale pub nearby. Oldham started up the minivan, which is equipped with a fearsome-looking sound system. To demonstrate its capabilities, he cranked up an old cabaret song.
“It’s Mabel Mercer, so it’s not really a test of the system,” he said.
“I remember Mabel Mercer,” Joanne said. “God.”
he concert hadn’t been Oldham’s idea; it had come from his friend Oscar Parsons, a singer and guitarist from western Virginia (on his MySpace page, he calls himself a “skinny ass billhilly”), who first befriended Oldham by offering him some homemade blueberry moonshine. Parsons wanted to know how much Oldham charged for a concert. Oldham said, “Fuck, anywhere from zero to twenty-five thousand dollars. It depends who asks.” They rented a P.A. system, and agreed that Oscar’s group—Thomas A. Minor and the Picket Line, with Oscar in the role of Thomas—would be the opening act and also Oldham’s backing band. They asked Oscar’s sister Jennifer, who lives in Los Angeles, to print the tickets on a letterpress. She made three hundred, and they quickly disappeared from Louisville shops, at ten dollars apiece.
By way of rehearsal, Oldham and the band had spent the week giving brief, unannounced performances at local bars. On Thursday night, he had called up Joe’s Palm Room, a venerable and predominantly African-American establishment, and asked, “Do y’all have music tonight?”
The answer was no.
“Do you want some?”
No.
“So if we came down there with some instruments and played some music, would you like that?”
No.
“For free?”
Eventually, the staff had consented to let Oldham and his band play, or, at any rate, consented not to stop them from playing. A few fans managed to track him down, but many of the people in the audience had no idea that they were watching one of Louisville’s most celebrated residents, and Oldham seemed proud to have won over a few skeptics. His favorite review came from a regular patron who had been moved to shout, “Sing that shit!”
ill Oldham was born in 1970, the second of three boys; Joanne was a full-time mother, and his father, Joe, who died in 2006, was a lawyer and an amateur photographer. By the early nineteen-eighties, Oldham was getting musical tips from his older brother, Ned, who was immersed in Louisville’s fertile punk-rock scene, and he soon developed his own adventurous listening habits—he struck up a correspondence with the noisemaker and poet Lydia Lunch, after meeting her at a Sonic Youth show during a trip to New York. (He also remembers sending a “fairly elaborate” package, including a collage, to Glenn Danzig, the former leader of the horror-punk band the Misfits; he says that Danzig, in turn, sent him a package that included a rare copy of “Cough/Cool,” the band’s 1977 début single.) Despite his strong and particular musical tastes, Oldham was taken with acting—or, more accurately, he was taken with the idea of getting into character. He studied at the Walden Theatre, appeared onstage at Louisville’s acclaimed Actors Theatre, and auditioned for a role in “Matewan,” John Sayles’s film about a coal strike in the nineteen-twenties. He got the part of Danny, a prophetic boy preacher, which meant two months away from high school, living with actors (including Chris Cooper and James Earl Jones), the crew, and a tutor in West Virginia, and earning twelve hundred and fifty dollars a week, plus a per diem. When he got back to Louisville, he couldn’t figure out what to do next; with some nudging from his parents, he finished high school and applied to Brown. He lasted one semester before dropping out; he moved to Los Angeles, then to New York, tried Brown again, and finally left for good.
All the while, he remained loosely connected to Louisville’s music scene. While he was shooting “Matewan,” some of his best friends formed a band called Slint; Oldham shot the cover photograph for Slint’s 1991 album, “Spiderland,” which was recognized, belatedly, as an indie-rock classic. But he never felt the itch to start his own band. “Singing seemed more real to me than acting—and therefore didn’t seem very interesting,” he says. He had an agent, for a time, and landed a few more roles (he played the father in “Everybody’s Baby,” a TV movie about Jessica McClure, the baby who fell down a well), but he came to realize that acting wasn’t very interesting to him, either: an awful lot of it appeared to consist of fussing over lights and line readings.
He was unmoored and, sometimes, mentally fragile. “I retreated into a purely imaginary world,” he says now, remembering the time he attempted to stop speaking, in the hope of discovering a more intuitive means of communication and a more sympathetic community. He eventually found both through music, though he started writing songs only because people around him told him to. He learned his first few guitar chords about the time he went to Brown, and began experimenting with words and melodies at the insistence of Ned and the guys from Slint. He remembers a slow-breaking revelation: “I thought, O.K., music can be a construction, like a movie or like a book. It’s not a person singing about their life—someone has actually learned a craft.” He made some recordings, including “Ohio River Boat Song,” which has become one of his signatures. (It’s a Kentuckified version of a Scottish folk standard, “Loch Tay Boat Song”; instead of singing “I look towards Ben Lawers,” in reference to a Scottish mountain, he sings, “I look towards Floyds Knobs,” in reference to some hills in southern Indiana, across the river from Louisville.) Because he didn’t have a better plan, he sent out four packages: to the New York indie-rock labels Matador and Homestead (no reply); the Los Angeles upstart Interscope (a polite no); and Drag City, a quirky young label based in Chicago.
Dan Koretzky, a co-founder of Drag City, agreed to release a two-song single and then Oldham’s 1993 début album, “There Is No-One What Will Take Care of You.” Except for a few years during which he tried putting out his own albums, Oldham has worked with Drag City ever since. The album, which included a version of a song by the mysterious nineteen-twenties gospel singer Washington Phillips, got Oldham some attention, and some gigs. (He and his bandmates were offered a thousand dollars a show to be an opening act on the 1994 Lollapalooza tour; they signed up, and, he says, saw their fee raised by two hundred and fifty dollars after the death of Kurt Cobain, whose band, Nirvana, had been scheduled as the headliner.) The songs were slow, as if Oldham’s Kentucky warble were pulling the recalcitrant instruments along, and the lyrics, which were full of references to death and sin, helped encourage all sorts of fantasies about Oldham. One reviewer wondered if the album had been recorded in a barn. Oldham says that he had set out to make a swaggering blockbuster, in the tradition of the Rolling Stones’ “Sticky Fingers.” (Suffice it to say that what he made was closer in spirit to “Moonlight Mile,” that album’s ruminative finale, than to its first song, “Brown Sugar.”) He claims to have been baffled by the response. “When people were saying, ‘This sounds Southern,’ ‘This sounds country,’ ‘This sounds Appalachian,’ I was just, like, ‘What the fuck? We made a rock record!’ ”
The idea that he is some sort of folk-art naïf, or an Ivy League dropout pretending to be some sort of folk-art naïf, long haunted and irritated him. And he spent much of the nineteen-nineties embracing and rejecting various pretenses. Oldham’s second album, “Days in the Wake,” from 1994, is a simple recording of him singing and strumming; “Viva Last Blues,” which he made with a full band and released in 1995, includes a half-heroic rock song called “Work Hard/Play Hard.” With each album, he tweaked his name: Palace Brothers became Palace, then Palace Songs, and finally Palace Music. “Arise Therefore,” a dark and tangled album from 1996, was released with no artist’s name at all, and “Joya,” which he made twice (he thought the original version sounded “unfocussed”), was simply credited to Will Oldham.
The idea, all along, was to erase the person making the music so that listeners would focus on the music itself. Of course, it didn’t work that way: with each new release came a barrage of questions about Oldham’s new name, and the evasions only added to his mystique. And so, one day in 1998, flying back from a tour of Australia, he created Bonnie “Prince” Billy, inspired equally by Bonnie Prince Charlie, the eighteenth-century pretender to the English throne, and Nat King Cole. “He’s going to sing songs that have verses, choruses, and bridges,” Oldham decided. “He’s, like, a Brill Building or Nashville songwriter.” Oldham had finally found a role that he loved. A casual listener might not have noticed the difference, but it’s not clear that Oldham has any casual listeners.
Oldham’s fans tend to be nearly as obsessed with his music as he is (a number of fan Web sites attempt to track his output, which now includes more than a hundred albums, singles, and collaborations), but he still likes the idea of being an old-fashioned artiste, humbly amusing the general public. And this new character was proof of his commitment. He says, “Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy can be more entertaining, ideally, than Palace Brothers were or Will Oldham was.” True to form, he signalled the start of this “entertaining” era with a bleak, subdued album called “I See a Darkness,” which had a skull on the cover. The album, which appeared in 1999, wasn’t necessarily more fun than Oldham’s previous ones but it was more direct. The title song has become one of his most popular; Johnny Cash sang it, on “American III: Solitary Man,” an album from 2000 produced by Rick Rubin, who has long been an Oldham fan. It’s a solemn song, but the homely lyrics tug against the prophetic tone of the title: “Well, I hope that someday, buddy, we have peace in our lives / Together or apart, alone or with our wives.” Part of the thrill was the feeling—however illusory—that, for once, you knew exactly what Oldham was talking about.
ickets for the concert carried a stern warning—“No Beer, Alcohol or Drugs”—and some legalese, which, it turned out, was adapted from Ticketmaster (“This ticket is a revocable license and may be taken up and admission refused for any reason”). No address was given, in order to discourage gate-crashers; ticket holders had to e-mail for directions, which led them to a small field in the southeastern exurbs of Louisville, past a “Do Not Enter” sign, and down a gravel road. The concert site was a clearing on a lake; the land belonged to the family of Brad Reinstedler, a banjo player in Oscar Parsons’s band, whose friends had named the field Funtown and elected him mayor. Weeks before the concert, on a Louisville music blog called Backseat Sandbar, one fan spread word of the lake and advised concertgoers to bring bathing suits. Reinstedler replied, “There will be no swimming due to some unfortunate circumstances.” He had purchased liability insurance for the concert, but not enough to insure swimmers.
Cars began arriving at around five in the afternoon; they were met by volunteers who checked for tickets and directed parking. One of them explained how he planned to enforce the no-alcohol policy: “If they got more beers than what I think they can handle, then I’m gon’ take a few of ’em.” This plan proved unnecessary: alcohol consumption was moderate, although some visitors talked reverently about a “waterfall” in the woods, which turned out to be a beer keg next to someone’s car. Gate-crashers were scarce. Oldham is, in his soft-spoken way, an intimidating presence, and it appeared that no one wanted to get on his bad side. “You print the rules and cross your fingers,” he said.
Even he had to admit that this was as pleasant a concert setting as could be imagined. The stage was a flatbed trailer set up in front of a log cabin; it was a breezy summer afternoon, and people brought folding chairs and beach blankets. His mother was there, with a collection of aunts and uncles. Parsons, shirtless in swimming trunks and as skinny as advertised, sang some charming, shambling mountain songs with his band, and then there was a fake marriage ceremony, in case the neighbors were watching—they had been told that the gathering was for a wedding, on the theory that this would make them less likely to call the police. Then Oldham took the stage, with Parsons and the band surrounding him. He was wearing a maroon tank top, orange-and-pink pants, blue Crocs, and a pink Boston Red Sox cap, with “cam” and “odia” scrawled on either side of the “B.”
Parsons began strumming, and Oldham leaned in to test the microphone. “Y-y-yeah,” he said. Then he clasped his hands behind his back and started singing “Easy Does It,” the first song from “Lie Down in the Light.” His singing has grown more precise over the years, and he sometimes closes one eye, pirate-like, or shakes his head, as if he were fighting to push his voice closer to the notes that he hears in his mind. Volunteers had distributed commemorative Bonnie “Prince” Billy kazoos to the first hundred or so people who showed up, and before a song called “Goat and Ram” (which begins by expounding upon the central creed of Islam: “There is no God but God / God in your body, which is mine”) he asked audience members to get out their kazoos and toot along, creating an E drone. Someone asked why there weren’t enough kazoos to go around. “We’ve actually got a complaint box up here,” he said, motioning toward his crotch. “It’s right here.” He thought for a moment. “But it’s already full.”
There was one unexpected cover: a version of “Little Boxes,” the sixties folk hit that served as the theme song of the Showtime series “Weeds,” one of Parsons’s favorites. And Oldham found ways to transform some of his own earlier songs: “Death to Everyone,” a dirge, became a high-spirited sing-along. During “A King at Night,” he smiled at band members who flubbed the occasional note, and some of the people on blankets joined him in the refrain: “This is how I start another day in my kingdom.” Bent forward, with one knee up, he looked a bit like a court jester. The sun was setting, so the Christmas lights that had been hung above the stage seemed to grow brighter with every song. He was accompanied all night by the thrum of cicadas, and the music was punctuated by an occasional splash from the lake.
Oldham has been singing a lot of duets recently, using the conventions of male-female singing—calls and responses, low declarations and high harmonies—to mimic the stylized love he sings about, which sounds more traditional than confessional. The clear-voiced singer Marty Slayton, who sometimes sings backup for George Strait, helped him nudge his old songs a little way toward the country mainstream on “Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy Sings Greatest Palace Music,” in 2004; the first time he heard her voice over his it was “almost an erotic experience,” he says. “The Letting Go,” from 2006, was dominated by the unexpected countermelodies of Dawn McCarthy, who leads her own group, Faun Fables, which is now signed to Drag City. (He got to know her by taking her on tour, along with a then unheralded singer and harpist named Joanna Newsom.) For his latest album, he found an unlikely duet partner in Ashley Webber, a relatively unknown Canadian singer whom he met on tour. Onstage, Cheyenne Mize, a dexterous fiddler, filled in for Webber. When he called out “O lady,” she called back “O boy!”
This most recent album, “Lie Down in the Light,” sounds generous, like an invitation. “It’s O.K. to accept good fortune,” Oldham says, by way of explaining the title. But the song of the same name, which he performed at Funtown, could just as easily describe the apocalypse:

When the sun welcomes us in
And the earth’s protective skin
Fails and peels back, face to chin
Then we start it all again

Why do you frown?
Why do you try?
Why don’t you lie down in the light?

Oldham’s voice goes up on those last three words, as if he really wanted to know. And, near the end of the song, Parsons, still shirtless, broke the eerie mood with a Jew’s-harp solo. Friends hooted their approval.
When the show was over, the crowd dispersed, helped along by an announcement that there was an after-party at a bar in town. (This was true, though perhaps misleading, since none of the performers had any plans to attend.) Parsons passed around some moonshine, and Oldham created a cocktail of his own by mashing some watermelon into a plastic cup of tequila. A young fan was sitting at his feet, rapt. She had come from California, and had brought him some marijuana-infused caramel—“weedamel,” she called it.
It was time to go swimming. Oldham was one of the first people in the lake, and others wanted to know if it was cold. He looked thoughtful. This was not a simple question. “I found it cold, but there are others who are not finding it cold,” he said. “My body temperature dropped right before I went in—the world became cold.” He conjectured that maybe the water felt cold to him only because he was anticipating the cold feeling of getting out of it. He got out and dried off. The group headed back to the cabin. People pawed through a table full of empty potato-chip bags, looking for a bottle that had something in it. It was past three, and some of the revellers were talking about lighting a bonfire. More people left. Some tents appeared in the field. Oldham retreated to his minivan, and by dawn he was gone.
e looked none the worse for wear-the next afternoon, sitting in his kitchen. Remembering his disappearance the previous night, Oldham said, “I figured I should sleep for, like, an hour and a half. For legal reasons.” He had agreed to talk about music, and so he did, although the idea makes him uneasy, not least because he knows the pitfalls. In the pre-Internet era, a generation of young bands internalized the financial priorities of the used-record stores that they relied on; it was as if they envied those valuable used records, ancient enough and obscure enough to be rediscovered—and priced accordingly. Long before 1997, when the Smithsonian reissued Harry Smith’s 1952 “Anthology of American Folk Music,” Oldham was fascinated by what Greil Marcus once called the “old, weird America.” But he also knows that, for many singers, a fixation on the antique and the quirky has been a handicap. “Old” is merely a word for something that was once new and survived; no amount of affectation will provide a shortcut. And “weird,” misapplied, can be even worse. Surely, Washington Phillips, with his modified zither (if that’s what it was) and his gutbucket sermons, never set out to be weird. And if Phillips nevertheless was weird—well, weird to whom?
Oldham has been careful to avoid getting sentimental about days gone by, and he goes out of his way to remind listeners that he doesn’t want to be heard as an alternative to the new, seemingly normal America. His repertoire of cover songs includes “Just to See You Smile,” which was a hit for Tim McGraw, and Mariah Carey’s defiant ballad “Can’t Take That Away (Mariah’s Theme).” At first, these could have been interpreted as inclusive and faintly condescending gestures, as if he were welcoming a few vulgar favorites into his rarefied world. But by now Oldham’s abiding interest in truly popular song is more appealing: an expression of impudence and aspiration. Why shouldn’t his sturdy but cryptic odes find their place among the blockbusters?
In discussions with Drag City, Oldham sometimes referred to “Lie Down in the Light” as “LIDL,” or “the little record,” partly because he knew that he wouldn’t be doing much to promote it. In March, he plans to release “the big record,” a deeply satisfying album called “Beware,” which conjures a mood of resolution, maybe even finality. (In the stately country song “I Don’t Belong to Anyone,” he amplifies the title of his 1993 début album: “I don’t belong to anyone, there’s no one who’ll take care of me / It’s kind of easy to have some fun when you don’t belong to anyone.”) He intends to promote the album with singles, a photo shoot, and a handful of interviews, if only to prove that record promotion doesn’t really work, at least not for him.
He is inspired, and challenged, by the example of Merle Haggard. “He’s writing and singing better than he ever has,” Oldham says. “And it’s just like, well, there’s no excuse, then. You can’t just say that it goes away, or that the music industry kills it, or whatever.” He also likes the idea of stopping, content in the knowledge that he has done what he came to do. But he knows that he has contemplated quitting before. “Sometimes,” he says, “we need to tell ourselves that we’re not going to do certain things, just in order to stay sane.”
As night fell, the conversation turned to the indie-rock industry that supports Oldham, and the indie-rock community that he keeps at arm’s length. These days, it is, to a large extent, a world sustained by bars (where the musicians circulate) and the Internet (where the music circulates), both of which Oldham dislikes. He’s always looking for ways to widen his circle: he’d love to get in the studio with R. Kelly, or spend a week watching Haggard work. And he resists the idea that, with his endless flow of obscurities and his maniacal fan base, he is one of the most blog-friendly musicians in the country. He asked, “At that show last night, what do you think, eighty per cent of the people read blogs? Fifty? Thirty? Ten? Ninety?” There were certainly plenty of cameras, and, sure enough, on Monday morning the indie-rock Web site Pitchfork posted six photographs and a brief write-up.
He went out to the minivan to retrieve something: a book of his lyrics, handprinted and bound by a woman in West Virginia. “There were supposed to be three hundred,” he said. “But a couple of pages got fucked up, so I think there are about two hundred and seventy-five or so. And I’ve just given them away, because I don’t know how to sell ’em—you know, I don’t want them to end up on eBay.” He proffered a copy, with an inscription inside: “K. GOOD LUCK. BPB.” But it was clear that he wasn’t feeling entirely optimistic about having agreed to a magazine profile. “My mother’s a huge fan, and I really liked that Merle piece, but definitely there’s already . . .” He trailed off. “I don’t know. I really hate press. And it’s . . . yeah.” ♦

nice new paintings by Matt Connors on andahalf

By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN
NY Times Published: December 31, 2008

BERLIN — A hole has appeared in the center of town here. The symbolism is impossible to miss.

Berlin’s plan is to erect a fake Baroque palace, a copy of the Hohenzollern Stadtschloss that once stood where that hole is, the site culminating the great avenue called Unter den Linden, at whose other end is the Brandenburg Gate. In December a little-known Italian architect, Franco Stella, won what passed for the building’s competition, which required a design faithfully reproducing three of the four original facades and much of the interior courtyard, leaving the fourth to the designer’s imagination.

Few serious architects bothered to apply.

The idea has been years in the making, but exactly what’s supposed to go inside this new Schloss still remains vague. At the moment the scheme calls for a museum of non-Western art, a library, restaurants and cafes. German officials, often inclined toward euphemism, have christened it the Humboldt Forum, after the philosopher and his naturalist brother. Carson Chan, who runs a gallery here, put it better. “A Schloss-shaped mall,” he said.

The saga of the Schloss, a cultural misadventure from the start, captures Berlin in a nutshell, as a city forever missing the point of itself. The original Stadtschloss, partly damaged during the war, was ripped down in 1950 by the Communist East Germans as a loathed emblem of Prussian militarism and imperial power. They replaced it in the mid-’70s with the Palace of the Republic, a bronzed glass-and-steel behemoth, the last remains of which were torn down, at eye-popping cost, during this past summer and fall. The palace housed the East German parliament but also a clutch of restaurants, theaters, art galleries and bowling alleys that provided East Berliners with a measure of escape from the drudgery of Communist life. Even some West Germans developed a little nostalgia for it, as the place before which news reporters in East Berlin were always posing.

When it was shuttered after the wall fell (asbestos was the official excuse), artists remade the abandoned space into a hot spot for new art shows and performances. The derelict palace epitomized hipster Berlin, a capital of second chances and opportunistic subcultures. Clubs in former Nazi bunkers, bars in Communist-era high rises, theaters in disused factories, art galleries in empty tenements — like the bygone Palace of the Republic they are what has attracted young people since the wall fell to a city that, historically, has kept failing to become the metropolis it aspired to be, and instead always became something more interesting.

It’s hard to find a thinking Berliner these days who actually likes the Schloss idea, the latest in a slew of historical reconstructions across Germany and Central Europe that includes the Alte Kommandantur, a former Baroque palace just next door to the Schloss, and also the Frauenkirche in Dresden and the Stadtschloss in Braunschweig, which has become a mall.

Some sites should be reconstructed. Supporters of the new Schloss tend to be West Germans angry at the former East Germany for tearing the old Schloss down, and also cautious Berliners fearful of what happened at places like Potsdamer Platz, not far from the Schlossplatz. Who can blame them? Potsdamer Platz today is a trash bin for big-name modern architects who did some of their worst work there.

They were following a lousy master plan. Having come of age during the post-modern 1980s, Berlin’s urban bureaucrats envision the city as a kind of “hand-me-down Paris,” as Niklas Maak, an architecture critic here, put it on a recent afternoon — a stage-set of an old capital, with phony, manufactured charm, erasing traces of the bad years of the 20th century, with all the dissonance that, to younger Berliners, is a civic virtue.

Willed forgetfulness is unforgivable here, of all places. The same cluelessness caused officials last year to mothball Tempelhof, an ingenious work of ’30s design, a functioning airport with a soaring, light-filled terminal in the very heart of town, a 15-minute taxi ride from the Brandenburg Gate, where Gary Cooper and Errol Flynn descended into a scrum of flashbulbs on the tarmac — now empty, made useless toward no clear end.

The outcome is uncertain at the Schloss too. Its projected cost is $800 million, but no one believes that figure won’t skyrocket. Having pushed the plan, the federal government is stuck with the tab, but, facing the same gloomy financial picture as everyone else, Germany may simply not have the money. A newspaper here this week reported that there may not be enough qualified stonecutters in the whole of Europe to do the job. Here’s hoping that’s true.

Did I mention that the original, 18th-century Stadtschloss, by Andreas Schlüter and Johann Friedrich Eosander von Göthe, was a hulking, unlovable pile? Even the emperors didn’t want to live there. Proponents of reconstruction argue a new Schloss would restore an urban complex that includes great buildings by Karl Friedrich Schinkel, Berlin’s most important Neoclassical architect. But this makes less than no sense, not least because Berlin decided during the 19th century to construct an appalling wedding cake of a cathedral next to, and all out of proportion with, Schinkel’s landmark Altes Museum, which is across the street from the Schloss.

Sorry, Humboldt Forum. Ingeborg Junge-Reyer, the Berlin senator in charge of urban development, told me the other morning, with a perfectly straight face, “It is decisive that it is called the Humboldt Forum, not the Schloss, because the name Humboldt symbolizes knowledge, openness to other cultures, and to culture, and that fits Germany.” Wilhelm von Humboldt, the great philosopher, educator and friend of Goethe and Schiller, and his brother Alexander von Humboldt, the naturalist, like Schinkel evoke the glory days of Berlin’s Enlightenment. Meanwhile a German official advocating the Schloss got in hot water recently by suggesting that the forum would include studios open to the public for artists from Africa, Asia and other exotic places, bringing to mind the old Hottentot and freak show displays. The official later insisted this wasn’t what he meant.

Speaking of which, competitors for the Schloss design almost totally ignored the issue of what a museum of non-Western cultures might look like within an imitation of an imperial palace. Quai Branly, the museum Jean Nouvel recently designed in Paris for this same purpose, is in many ways a calamity, but it at least began from the serious premise that devising such a building in a Western capital during the 21st century is a complex issue demanding careful consideration. Arising only as an afterthought, as something to put in the Schloss, the museum here entered almost not at all into the discussion. If the Schloss gets built, it’s a ticking bomb.

Mr. Stella, a student of Aldo Rossi, the Italian architect who championed historic renewal, seems giddy with victory and is full of talk now about public piazzas and civic continuity. You wouldn’t build a modern building in San Marco in Venice, he said over coffee the other day. Why should Berlin stick a modern building on this site?

“I don’t ask myself about political issues, whether the person who built the building was a king,” he added. “The Schloss was important for the German nation and because Berlin is disjointed, not homogeneous, it’s all the more important to recover its history. Memory is what distinguishes Europe from America.”

That’s ridiculous, but more to the point few Berliners are still alive who can remember the original Schloss. The Palace of the Republic, by contrast, though generally lamented as an eyesore, and, occupying only the eastern end of the Schlossplatz, badly oriented on the site, did belong to the living memory of many Berliners; and more than a few of them were heartbroken to see it erased. Post-1950s German architecture is undergoing reconsideration, deservedly so. It’s a mystery why thrifty Germans never considered simply inviting architects to reuse the frame while filling out the empty space that the old Schloss once occupied with a larger building. Good designers might have considered it a challenge.

Instead competitors for the Schloss had few options. They envisioned walls of Renaissance stonework and glass boxes slid into the ersatz facades like boxes of matches left partly open. Mr. Stella’s design had the distinction of being simple. The single facade left for him to design he imagined as a grid of square loggias, intended to evoke Schinkel’s Altes Museum, recalling Rossi too, and maybe a bit of fascist architecture.

It’s ultimately a monument to civic caution and historical ambivalence. The Schloss represents Berlin today, a capital of pipe dreams, and broke; fashionable but provincial, megalomaniacal yet insecure, a Petri dish for youth culture, stodgy and fearful, steeped in history but brand new. The city sprawls across lively neighborhoods riven by expanses of nowhere.

Add to that the big hole at the center, on which a pavilion for contemporary art, a kind of oversized trailer, is now temporarily parked on the western corner of the Schlossplatz, like a handkerchief covering a corpse.

thanks to Basil Katz

By CHARLES McGRATH
NY Times Published: December 30, 2008

On Thursday, J. D. Salinger turns 90. There probably won’t be a party, or if there is we’ll never know. For more than 50 years Mr. Salinger has lived in seclusion in the small town of Cornish, N.H. For a while it used to be a journalistic sport for newspapers and magazines to send reporters up to Cornish in hopes of a sighting, or at least a quotation from a garrulous local, but Mr. Salinger hasn’t been photographed in decades now and the neighbors have all clammed up. He’s been so secretive he makes Thomas Pynchon seem like a gadabout.

Mr. Salinger’s disappearing act has succeeded so well, in fact, that it may be hard for readers who aren’t middle-aged to appreciate what a sensation he once caused. With its very first sentence, his novel “The Catcher in the Rye,” which came out in 1951, introduced a brand-new voice in American writing, and it quickly became a cult book, a rite of passage for the brainy and disaffected. “Nine Stories,” published two years later, made Mr. Salinger a darling of the critics as well, for the way it dismantled the traditional architecture of the short story and replaced it with one in which a story could turn on a tiny shift of mood or tone.

In the 1960s, though, when he was at the peak of his fame, Mr. Salinger went silent. “Franny and Zooey,” a collection of two long stories about the fictional Glass family, came out in 1961; two more long stories about the Glasses, “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters” and “Seymour: An Introduction,” appeared together in book form in 1963. The last work of Mr. Salinger’s to appear in print was “Hapworth 16, 1924,” a short story that took up most of the June 19, 1965, issue of The New Yorker. In the ’70s he stopped giving interviews, and in the late ’80s he went all the way to the Supreme Court to block the British critic Ian Hamilton from quoting his letters in a biography.

So what has Mr. Salinger been doing for the last 40 years? The question obsesses Salingerologists, of whom there are still a great many, and there are all kinds of theories. He hasn’t written a word. Or he writes all the time and, like Gogol at the end of his life, burns the manuscripts. Or he has volumes and volumes just waiting to be published posthumously.

Joyce Maynard, who lived with Mr. Salinger in the early ’70s, wrote in a 1998 memoir that she had seen shelves of notebooks devoted to the Glass family and believed there were at least two new novels locked away in a safe.

“Hapworth,” which has never been published in book form, may be our only clue to what Mr. Salinger is thinking, and it’s unlike anything else he has written. The story used to be available only in samizdat — photocopies of photocopies passed along from hand to hand and becoming blurrier with each recopying — though it has become somewhat more accessible since the 2005 DVD edition of “The Complete New Yorker.” In 1997 Mr. Salinger agreed to let Orchises Press, a small publisher in Alexandria, Va., bring out a hardcover edition, but five years later he backed out of the deal.

Ever since, Salinger fans have been poring over the text, looking for hidden meaning. Did the author’s temporary willingness to reissue “Hapworth” indicate a throat-clearing, a warming up of the famously silent machinery? Or was it instead an act of closure, a final binding-up of the Glass family saga — one that, coming last but also at the chronological beginning, brings the whole enterprise full circle?

“Hapworth,” to summarize the unsummarizable, is a letter — or rather a transcription of a letter — 25,000 words, written in haste, by the 7-year old Seymour Glass, away at summer camp, to his parents, the long-suffering ex-vaudevillians Les and Bessie, and his siblings Walt, Waker and Boo Boo, back in New York.

Seymour, we learn, is already reading several languages and lusting after Mrs. Happy, the young wife of the camp owner. He condescends to his campmates and dispenses advice to the various members of the family: Les should be careful about his accent when singing, Boo Boo needs to practice her handwriting, Walt his manners, and so on.

The letter concludes with an extraordinary annotated list of books Seymour would like sent to him — a lifetime of reading for most people, but in his case merely the books he needs to get through the next six weeks: “Any unbigoted or bigoted books on God or merely religion, as written by persons whose last names begin with any letter after H; to stay on the safe side, please include H itself, though I think I have mostly exhausted it. … The complete works again of Count Leo Tolstoy. … Charles Dickens, either in blessed entirety or in any touching shape or form. My God, I salute you, Charles Dickens!” And so on, all the way through Proust — in French, naturally — Goethe, and Porter Smith’s “Chinese Materia Medica.”

“Hapworth,” in short, must be the longest, most pretentious (and least plausible) letter from camp ever written. But though it’s the work of a prodigy, it’s also, like all camp letters, a homesick cry for attention.

Its author is the same Seymour who, while on his honeymoon in Florida years later (but — it gets confusing — 17 years earlier in real time, in the 1948 short story “A Perfect Day for Bananafish”), will take an automatic pistol from the bottom of his suitcase and shoot himself through the temple as his bride lies napping in the twin bed next to him. And the same Seymour — the family saint, poet and mystic — whom we’ve heard about at such length in the later Glass stories.

Or is he the same? The Seymour of “Bananafish,” and “Raise High the Roof Beam,” is more a sweetly charming neurotic than the ethereal, otherworldly figure described in “Seymour: An Introduction,” who in turn seems not in the least like the superior, boastful little genius of “Hapworth.” The discrepancies among the various versions of Seymour is such that some critics have questioned the motives and reliability of Buddy, Seymour’s younger brother and the family scribe, who is our source for much of what we know (and also the transcriber of the “Hapworth” letter).

But that kind of tricky, Nabokovian reading feels forced in this case. Mr. Salinger seems less interested in keeping the details straight than in getting them right and offering some explanation, or justification perhaps, for that moment, still startling even after many rereadings, when Seymour blows his brains out. It’s as if Mr. Salinger realized, belatedly, that he had prematurely killed his best character and wanted to make it up to him.

And at some point, it seems fair to say, he fell in love with this project — not just with Seymour but with the whole clan. Who can blame him? The Glasses are one of the liveliest, funniest, most fully realized families in all of fiction. The trouble is that like a lot of families, they occasionally take themselves too seriously and presume to lecture the rest of the world. In the early ’60s, as a certain amount of sentimental and half-baked mysticism began to be spouted by some of the younger Glasses, the critics quickly turned on Mr. Salinger, and “Hapworth” was grumpily dismissed.

What makes “Hapworth” so fascinating, though, is that it’s the only work of Mr. Salinger’s in which the voice is not secure, as the young Seymour fidgets first with one tone and then with another — by turns earnest, anxious, playful and sarcastic. In effect he’s always revising himself. He worries about his spirituality and then skewers his fellow campers. He wants to be like Jesus, and he wants to sleep with Mrs. Happy. He yearns to be left alone, and is desperate to be noticed. He wants to be a saint, and even if he can’t quite admit it yet, he wants to be a great author. Intentionally or not, he seems like a projection of his creator.

In general what has dated most in Mr. Salinger’s writing is not the prose — much of the dialogue, in the stories especially and in the second half of “Franny and Zooey,” still seems brilliant and fresh — but the ideas. Mr. Salinger’s fixation on the difference between “phoniness,” as Holden Caulfield would put it, and authenticity now has a twilight, ’50s feeling about it. It’s no longer news, and probably never was.

This is the theme, though, that comes increasingly to dominate the Glass chronicles: the unsolvable problem of ego and self-consciousness, of how to lead a spiritual life in a vulgar, material society. The very thing that makes the Glasses, and Seymour especially, so appealing to Mr. Salinger — that they’re too sensitive and exceptional for this world — is also what came to make them irritating to so many readers.

Another way to pose the Glass problem is: How do you make art for an audience, or a critical establishment, too crass to understand it? This is the issue that caused Seymour to give up, presumably, and one is tempted to say it’s what soured Mr. Salinger on wanting to see anything else in print.

Sadly, though, Mr. Salinger’s spiritual side is his least convincing. His gift is less for profundity than for observation, for listening and for comedy. Except perhaps for Mark Twain, no other American writer has registered with such precision the humor — and the pathos — of false sophistication and the vital banality of big-city pretension.

For all his reclusiveness, moreover, Mr. Salinger has none of the sage’s self-effacement; his manner is a big and showy one, given to tours-de-force and to large emotional gestures. In spite of his best efforts to silence himself or become a seer, he remains an original and influential stylist — the kind of writer the mature Seymour (but not necessarily the precocious 7-year-old) would probably deplore

thanks to steven tsou

new Animal Collective found on Matt Connor’s blog

By BOB HERBERT
NY Times Published: December 29, 2008

Does anyone know where George W. Bush is?

You don’t hear much from him anymore. The last image most of us remember is of the president ducking a pair of size 10s that were hurled at him in Baghdad.

We’re still at war in Iraq and Afghanistan. Israel is thrashing the Palestinians in Gaza. And the U.S. economy is about as vibrant as the 0-16 Detroit Lions.

But hardly a peep have we heard from George, the 43rd.

When Mr. Bush officially takes his leave in three weeks (in reality, he checked out long ago), most Americans will be content to sigh good riddance. I disagree. I don’t think he should be allowed to slip quietly out of town. There should be a great hue and cry — a loud, collective angry howl, demonstrations with signs and bullhorns and fiery speeches — over the damage he’s done to this country.

This is the man who gave us the war in Iraq and Guantánamo and torture and rendition; who turned the Clinton economy and the budget surplus into fool’s gold; who dithered while New Orleans drowned; who trampled our civil liberties at home and ruined our reputation abroad; who let Dick Cheney run hog wild and thought Brownie was doing a heckuva job.

The Bush administration specialized in deceit. How else could you get the public (and a feckless Congress) to go along with an invasion of Iraq as an absolutely essential response to the Sept. 11 attacks, when Iraq had had nothing to do with the Sept. 11 attacks?

Exploiting the public’s understandable fears, Mr. Bush made it sound as if Iraq was about to nuke us: “We cannot wait,” he said, “for the final proof — the smoking gun that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.”

He then set the blaze that has continued to rage for nearly six years, consuming more than 4,000 American lives and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. (A car bomb over the weekend killed two dozen more Iraqis, many of them religious pilgrims.) The financial cost to the U.S. will eventually reach $3 trillion or more, according to the Nobel laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz.

A year into the war Mr. Bush was cracking jokes about it at the annual dinner of the Radio and Television Correspondents Association. He displayed a series of photos that showed him searching the Oval Office, peering behind curtains and looking under the furniture. A mock caption had Mr. Bush saying: “Those weapons of mass destruction have got to be somewhere.”

And then there’s the Bush economy, another disaster, a trapdoor through which middle-class Americans can plunge toward the bracing experiences normally reserved for the poor and the destitute.

Mr. Bush traveled the country in the early days of his presidency, promoting his tax cut plans as hugely beneficial to small-business people and families of modest means. This was more deceit. The tax cuts would go overwhelmingly to the very rich.

The president would give the wealthy and the powerful virtually everything they wanted. He would throw sand into the regulatory apparatus and help foster the most extreme income disparities since the years leading up to the Great Depression. Once again he was lighting a fire. This time the flames would engulf the economy and, as with Iraq, bring catastrophe.

If the U.S. were a product line, it would be seen now as deeply damaged goods, subject to recall.

There seemed to be no end to Mr. Bush’s talent for destruction. He tried to hand the piggy bank known as Social Security over to the marauders of the financial sector, but saner heads prevailed.

In New Orleans, the president failed to intervene swiftly and decisively to aid the tens of thousands of poor people who were very publicly suffering and, in many cases, dying. He then compounded this colossal failure of leadership by traveling to New Orleans and promising, in a dramatic, floodlit appearance, to spare no effort in rebuilding the flood-torn region and the wrecked lives of the victims.

He went further, vowing to confront the issue of poverty in America “with bold action.”

It was all nonsense, of course. He did nothing of the kind.

The catalog of his transgressions against the nation’s interests — sins of commission and omission — would keep Mr. Bush in a confessional for the rest of his life. Don’t hold your breath. He’s hardly the contrite sort.

He told ABC’s Charlie Gibson: “I don’t spend a lot of time really worrying about short-term history. I guess I don’t worry about long-term history, either, since I’m not going to be around to read it.”

The president chuckled, thinking — as he did when he made his jokes about the missing weapons of mass destruction — that there was something funny going on.

LA Times, Steve Lopez
December 28, 2008

They had every kind of trophy you could imagine at House of Trophies in Boyle Heights. Soccer, basketball, baseball, football, even fishing. They had trophies 6 inches tall and 6 feet tall, plaques and desk ornaments too, for retiring cops and transit workers and for great teachers.

But nothing for musicians.

I told a clerk I needed a trophy with something a little different on it, like maybe a string player.

It was an unusual request, I could tell, but he went to his computer and came back with a printed image of a conductor and a musical symbol.

“We could do something like this,” he said.

I decided to put my faith in House of Trophies and began making plans for the awards ceremony. The plan was to honor a friend I’m constantly asked about by readers and also to recognize two of my buddy’s pals.

Since I began writing about Nathaniel Anthony Ayers, a street musician I met almost four years ago in downtown Los Angeles, I’ve been asked to speak at mental health symposiums, skid row fundraisers, universities and high schools and all kinds of award banquets.

I usually walk away with a plaque and a bad case of guilt. All those groups really should be honoring Mr. Ayers, not me. He’s the one who’s had to muster the courage to face each day. He’s the one who has given a face to the anonymous thousands in the same fight. And he’s the one whose story, I hope, is helping de-stigmatize mental illness.

I usually pass along the awards I get to Mr. Ayers, but I thought he should have his very own, which is how I ended up at House of Trophies.

Mr. Ayers had been telling me for months that he wanted to celebrate Beethoven’s birthday on Dec. 16. I don’t know a lot of people who walk around with Beethoven’s date of birth in their heads, but nothing about Mr. Ayers is typical.

Ever since he stumbled upon the Beethoven statue in Pershing Square several years ago, he has conducted himself as if Ludwig were god of the universe and everything beyond.

Mr. Ayers had told me he’d like to perform at Beethoven’s birthday party with some of his friends from the Los Angeles Philharmonic. But as the date approached, he feared he wouldn’t be sharp enough to play with the pros. He said if he really worked at it, he’d be in good shape by Beethoven’s birthday next year. But he wondered if we could still have a party.

Among the few dozen guests were violinist Robert Gupta, pianist Joanne Pearce Martin and cellist Ben Hong, all friends of Mr. Ayers and all members of the L.A. Phil.

Also attending was Adam Crane, the former L.A. Phil publicist who made Mr. Ayers welcome at Disney Hall concerts and became one of his closest friends. Mr. Ayers has had a tough adjustment since Crane moved on to the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, occasionally strolling up to Disney Hall to see if Crane has decided to come back. Crane was coming to town anyway in December and adjusted his schedule to get here in time for Mr. Ayers’ Beethoven party.

As the party approached, I began worrying that the man of the hour might not attend. Mr. Ayers has had a painful, chronic stomach problem for which he was refusing treatment, no matter how bad the agony. Doctors and meds, he says, are not for him. Not yet, anyway, because he recalls too vividly the days of restraints, shock therapy and Thorazine. He is still tough to be around at times and a challenge for the staff at Lamp Community, which handles hard-core, chronic cases of mental illness.

A book I wrote about Mr. Ayers came out last year, and I had been nervous about how he would react to it and to a movie based on the book that will be out in April. He once told me he preferred experiencing life to seeing it reflected in a mirror. Developing insight into one’s own illness is difficult for many people. After reading the book, though, he thanked me. He said it wasn’t easy to read, but he felt that he needed to. As for the movie, he said he had no desire to see it, in part because the very thought of two-dimensional images on a screen is spooky to him.

So I was shocked when, at the last minute, he decided to see a screening for cast and crew. Many of his friends at Lamp play themselves in the movie because director Joe Wright insisted on not using actors. They were excited about seeing themselves on the screen, and Nathaniel wanted to be with them, rather than miss what in effect was his own party.

We sat together at the Arclight. I’d seen the movie, but still I was anxious, and so was Mr. Ayers. He kept his eyes closed through the entire film, but he experienced it — felt it, really — in his own way. He loved the music, grumbled at certain depictions, laughed at funny lines and joined in the shout-outs when his friends saw themselves up on the screen.

I was humbled by him, proud of him, worried for him. What he’s got doesn’t go away. Every day’s a challenge.

The first award at the Beethoven party was presented in absentia to Peter Snyder, an L.A. Phil cellist who retired last week after nearly 40 years with the orchestra.

Snyder has already moved up to the Central Coast and couldn’t make the party. He was the musician who volunteered to give lessons to Mr. Ayers in a vacant skid row apartment three years ago, hoping it would make Mr. Ayers comfortable enough to move in off the streets of skid row.

Those lessons were the key, I think, even though Mr. Ayers resisted moving indoors, saying that he couldn’t leave Beethoven alone on the streets of downtown L.A. Crane got him past that by going to the Disney Hall gift shop and getting a bust of Beethoven to place in the apartment. Mr. Ayers has lived in that apartment ever since.

At the Beethoven party, held in a basement music room at the L.A. Times, Crane’s plaque was inscribed “Mensch of the Century.”

Mr. Ayers was not just the man of the hour but the life of the party. He warmed nicely to the crowd, had a smile on his face most of the evening and was in his glory when Gupta and Martin offered a rousing rendition of the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto.

He also did pretty well in his own performance despite the lack of any rehearsal, playing cello to Martin’s piano on the Bloch Prayer and a bit of the Schubert Arpeggione Sonata.

Standing tall on the piano throughout the performance was Mr. Ayers’ new trophy, a gaudy 2-foot-tall beauty with metallic red and the best fake gold available. It was inscribed:

“Disciples of Beethoven Award

“For a half century of devotion to music. For a talent that knows no bounds. And for a story of courage and perseverance that speaks to thousands.”

(After this column was written on Friday, Mr. Ayers’ stomach pain became so intense that he agreed to go to the hospital, and he took his violin with him. He was diagnosed with gastritis and was discharged Saturday morning, but not before serenading staff and patients.)

By TERI KARUSH ROGERS
NY Times Published: December 26, 2008

IN a city awash in creature comforts for those who can still afford them, a few remain unattainable at any price. Some New Yorkers who yearn for the comfort of creatures — specifically, cats and dogs — find themselves stymied by their apartment buildings’ restrictions on pets.

But just as city dwellers are accustomed to settling when it comes to real estate, many aspiring cat and dog owners turn to other species to satisfy their yen for a cuddle, companionship or wish to convey childhood lessons in responsibility.

A partial list of things that slither, hop, glide, swim or scurry beyond the purview of co-op boards, landlords and occasionally, the law, includes chinchillas, parrots, bearded dragons, tortoises, pythons, fancy mice, monkeys and ferrets, along with a more pedestrian assortment of gerbils, guinea pigs and goldfish.

Many owners of these creatures swear that their offbeat choices have turned out to be nearly as satisfying as a dog or a cat.

Consider Pounce, the free-range rabbit sharing a two-bedroom apartment with Jennifer Edwards, Jim Gaherty and their sons, Dylan, 13, and Liam, 10.

Before Pounce arrived last April in their Upper West Side no-dogs-allowed co-op, the family had owned beta fish and gerbils.

“The big problem with any of those is cleaning the cages and tanks, and when there’s no payoff, it’s kind of a drag,” said Ms. Edwards, 44, a health care policy consultant whose allergy to cats ruled out a feline solution to the family’s desire for a more interactive pet.

“I had no interest in living with birds because they’re not my style — they’re in my airspace,” Ms. Edwards said. “It was hard to figure out a pet that would be acceptable to me and cuddly enough for the kids. I thought maybe turtles or some sort of reptiles — they’re not cuddly, but they don’t jump out of your hands.”

A rabbit didn’t enter their thoughts until the day Dylan happened upon a floppy-eared Holland lop at a pet store. As he wandered around the shop cradling the 12-week-old bunny, Ms. Edwards recalled, “people started telling us how trainable rabbits are — how they can be litter-box-trained and you can let them out of their cages.”

They took the rabbit home and within a month (during which Pounce litter-box-trained himself) they gave him virtually free rein over their two-bedroom apartment. (Pounce’s occasional misfires take the form of odorless hard pellets about the size of an M&M.)

“He’s a lot more petlike than I expected,” Ms. Edwards said. “Rabbits like company, and they’re smart.”

Pounce typically spends his days with Ms. Edwards in her dining-room-cum-home-office. The plump six-pound rabbit nibbles on timothy hay and the edges of low-lying folders.

When the boys are home, the rabbit may decide he needs some quiet time under the sofa. Or he may lounge attentively between Dylan and Liam while they play video games. Later at night, he snuggles up against the adults on the sofa for television.

To be sure, Pounce has his naughty side. Rabbits are notorious chewers, and Pounce is no exception. He has gnawed through electrical cords and the corners of doors and drawers (now sealed with clear packing tape to prevent further incursions). Pounce has also denuded more than one potted herb plant left on a seductively low-hanging shelf.

He also sheds enough to warrant Ms. Edwards’s use of the vacuum cleaner once or twice between her housekeeper’s biweekly visits, and the special recycled paper lining his litter box needs to be changed twice a week to prevent odor.

On the other hand, unlike the dog the family had initially wished for — and now could have, thanks to a recent change in building pet policy — Pounce doesn’t bark, need grooming or demand to be taken for walks.

Mr. Gaherty, 45, a geophysicist, wasn’t consulted on the decision to adopt Pounce. But he sounded affectionate toward the rabbit in a nonpublic, indeterminate-pronoun kind of way.

“I’m a dog person, and you can’t say it’s like a dog,” Mr. Gaherty said. “You can use food to make it responsive. Rabbit food smells better than cat food, litter boxes smell bad either way, and rabbits chew but cats scratch, which is probably worse.”

Like the Edwards-Gaherty family, would-be dog owners usually list interactivity high on their list of desired pet qualities, which is why many choose birds as a substitute.

“Birds are extremely intelligent,” said Linda Pesek, a veterinarian at the Center for Avian and Exotic Medicine on the Upper West Side. “They can recognize their owners, and they can interact.”

Tonia Misvaer couldn’t agree more. She and her husband wanted a dog, a pet prohibited by the lease on their rented apartment on the Upper West Side. They bought their first avian, a small parrot known as a lovebird, on impulse four and a half years ago.

“Yogi had a lot of personality,” said Ms. Misvaer, 33, a graphic designer. The couple trained the bird to go to the bathroom in its cage and gave it unfettered access to their 900-square-foot duplex.

“We were surprised that they make really interesting pets,” Ms. Misvaer said. “He had a chest of toys he played with on the floor, and he particularly liked to push things off bookshelves. We both liked him a lot, although he didn’t like my husband. He would poop in his shoes every once in awhile and drop things on his head.”

After Yogi died from a melamine-poisoned treat a year and a half ago, the couple bought two more birds.

“We wanted a little bit better of a parrot — one that could maybe talk and live longer,” she said. They settled on Swami, a Meyer’s parrot, and Odin, a Jardine’s parrot.

“They’re both quiet birds and fairly small,” Ms. Misvaer said. “A lot of times when people think of parrots they think of huge macaw parrots. But Swami is six inches and Odin is seven or eight inches tall. They don’t squawk or scream, so they’re good apartment birds.”

So far, the birds have learned a few words and can dog-whistle. (Swami can also wolf-whistle, which Ms. Misvaer discovered while riding with him on a crowded subway.)

The facet of avian husbandry that has surprised Ms. Misvaer most is how time-consuming it is.

“A dog will hang out and sit on your lap or take a nap,” she said, “but birds are constantly active. I mean, they’ll sleep a lot, but they demand a lot of attention. Odin has terrible separation anxiety. When I’m in the apartment he will run across the floor and look up at me until I pick him up and put him on my shoulder. Also, if you want a healthy parrot you really need to cook. We spend maybe 30 to 60 minutes a day preparing food —cutting up fresh fruit and vegetables and baking bird bread.”

It’s common for neophyte owners to assume that birds are low-maintenance creatures, said Stephen L. Zawistowski, an animal behaviorist and the executive vice president and science adviser for the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.

“They’re not a great pet if you’re out of the apartment all day,” Mr. Zawistowski said. “They need company more so than a cat. If you don’t interact with birds, they can develop behavior problems, and as a form of anxiety they will actually pick out their feathers.”

Mr. Zawistowski says many bird owners are also stunned by how loud birds can be. For apartment dwellers, he recommends finches, especially the hardier zebra and society varieties: “They tweet a lot, but they’re not superloud. They’re interesting and active. You don’t need a massive cage. And you can keep several of them, so you don’t have to worry about social questions.”

Parakeets are louder, more active and comical, he said, while “canaries have been an immensely popular bird in the city of New York since the mid-1800s.”

“But with apartments you have to be very careful of cleaning products and pesticides, and the Teflon frying pans release fumes on the stove that are toxic to birds,” he said, “so you have to keep them away from the kitchen and the cleaning products.”

There is also the matter of keeping pets away from the neighbors: Tales abound of escaped hamsters, among other things, that wind up in someone else’s apartment.

This is of special import in a no-pet building, as most buildings with restrictions on pets prohibit any sort of animal — not just cats or dogs — without the permission of the board, said Lisa Breier Urban, a real estate lawyer with Breier Deutschmeister Urban & Fromme in Manhattan.

“That’s not to say people don’t go to the pet store and buy whatever they want,” she said. “It’s much easier to harbor a pet in the building if it’s not a dog. Unless the animal is a nuisance, the buildings in general are not going to enforce the rules.”

Typically, the nuisance consists of a foul odor coming from an apartment with cats, but not always.

“We had a case where someone had two or three rabbits and they were not keeping the cages clean,” Ms. Urban said. “The neighbors complained about the smell, and the building required that the people get rid of the rabbits. And we had a case a couple of years ago where a rent-stabilized tenant had a lizard that ate crickets. The crickets were shipped in by mail, but somehow they got out all over the building and they had a huge cricket problem.”

Beyond the special challenges presented by their sometimes hopping diets, reptiles frequently require high temperatures and humidity levels to thrive.

Some owners, however, appreciate reptilian reserve.

Evan Cohen has lived with a five-foot-long iguana, Roxy, for the past 11 years in a studio apartment in Greenwich Village. The iguana is house-trained (each morning it relieves itself in a paper-towel-lined bathtub, which Mr. Cohen scrubs down with bleach afterward) and wanders freely through the 525-square-foot dwelling.

“I think that to him, this is his apartment, and he’s letting me live here,” said Mr. Cohen, 36, a former jack-of-all-trades who is now an undergraduate student at Columbia University. “I think he’d prefer it if I wasn’t living here. I admit he’s not a snuggly type of animal, but that never really bothered me — you can still pick up a 13-pound-lizard and hold him and pet him as much as he’ll tolerate.”

Alice and Morgan Dontanville were barred by their lease from getting a dog, but wanted something that was cuddly as well as quiet, clean and relatively low maintenance. Back in high school Mr. Dontanville had owned an intelligent and extroverted rat; this led them to consider something in the rodent family. They eventually settled on a chinchilla.

“Chinchillas have the advantages of the other rodents — they’re friendly and they respond to you — without the weird tail,” Ms. Dontanville said. “He looks like a cross between a small bunny and a giant mouse with a squirrel-esque tail. He has tiny little feet and legs and a big, pudgy, unbelievably silky body.”

The Dontanvilles bought their first chinchilla several months ago at a pet store. After a couple of weeks, it fell ill with an intestinal blockage and, $2,000 in vet bills later, had to be euthanized. After learning more about the proper care and feeding of chinchillas (don’t give them pet-store food, recommended Ms. Dontanville, or keep the temperature over 75 degrees), they bought their current chinchilla, a six-month-old male named Ajax, from a breeder in Brooklyn.

Ajax lives on Ms. Dontanville’s former craft table a few feet from the kitchen, inside a 32-inch-high black-wire cage made for rats. He is conveniently nocturnal, springing to life around 9 p.m. after the couple come home from work to their garden apartment in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. Several evenings a week they take Ajax out of his cage for a romp in the chinchilla-proof second bedroom. (Chinchillas will chew practically anything, including much that is harmful to them.)

“At first he was hiding a lot, but now he’s sitting on my lap a lot,” said Ms. Dontanville, adding that she and her husband had become surprisingly obsessed by Ajax. “He’s very affectionate and responsive but doesn’t really like to be held yet — you interact more than cuddle with him.”

Grooming consists of an excited wriggle in a metal container about the size of a shoebox, filled with a specially purchased ash-like dust. And while chinchillas can’t be completely house-trained, their arborio-rice-size droppings are easy to sweep up.

Much like dogs, Ms. Dontanville said, chinchillas care about and respond to attention from their owners. “You feel like you really matter, and he loves your attention the same way a dog really loves human attention,” she said. “It’s the appeal of a puppy without the daily walks and the pooper scooper.”

A group of friends skating the pool of a foreclosed home this month in Fresno, Calif. Skaters are coming to places like Fresno from as far as Germany and Australia.

By JESSE McKINLEY and MALIA WOLLAN
NY Times Published: December 28, 2008

On a recent morning, a 27-year-old skateboarder who goes by the name Josh Peacock peered into a swimming pool in Fresno, Calif., emptied by his own hands — and the foreclosure crisis — and flashed a smile as wide as a half-pipe.

“We have more pools than we know what to do with,” said Mr. Peacock, who lives in Fresno, the Central Valley city where thousands of homes, many with pools behind them, are in foreclosure. “I can’t even keep track of them all anymore.”

Across the nation, the ultimate symbol of suburban success has become one more reminder of the economic meltdown, with builders going under, pools going to seed and skaters finding a surplus of deserted pools in which to perfect their acrobatic aerials.

In these boom times for skaters, Mr. Peacock travels with a gas-powered pump, five-gallon buckets, shovels and a push broom, risking trespassing charges in the pursuit of emptying forlorn pools and turning them into de facto skate parks.

“We can just hit them back to back,” said Mr. Peacock, who preferred to give his skateboarding name because of the illegality of his activities.

Skaters are coming to places like Fresno from as far as Germany and Australia. Mr. Peacock said his floor and couch were covered by sleeping bags of visiting skateboarders each weekend.

Some skateboarders use realty tracking sites like realquest.com and realtor.com to find foreclosed houses with pools, while others trawl through satellite images from Google Earth. On the Web site skateandannoy.com, where skaters trade tips about how to find and drain abandoned pools, one poster wrote about the current economic malaise. “God bless Greenspan,” the post read, “patron saint of pool skatin’.”

Pool builders feel differently, of course. In Phoenix, for example, where scorching summers can make pools seem like a survival tool, the city has issued fewer than half the number of residential pool permits this year as in 2007, as builders are being pummeled by declining home construction and evaporating credit for potential buyers. Several large companies have gone bust this year, including Riviera Pools, which once sponsored the swimming pool at Chase Field, where the Arizona Diamondbacks play baseball. Smaller contractors, retailers and pool cleaning companies have also failed, leaving unpaid bills and unfinished projects.

“You’ve got people that still want to build pools, but now you’re getting maybe 20 percent or 10 percent that can actually qualify now,” said Dave Brandenburg, a pool builder in north Phoenix who estimated business was off 40 percent to 70 percent. “Before it was, ‘Sure, no problem.’ Now it’s like, ‘Sorry.’ ”

Business is just as bad in Florida, where builders like Ben Evans, the chief executive at American Pools and Spas in Orlando, said he had let much of his staff go as orders for pools dropped to 150 this year, from about 1,000 in 2007.

“I’m just looking for my bailout money,” Mr. Evans said, ruefully. “Do you know where that is?”

In many warmer states, the authorities are trying literally to bail out pools, using pumps, dredges and strong stomachs to attack a surge in abandoned ones that have attracted all manner of nastiness — rats or belligerent raccoons, or algae, dead leaves and worse. These so-called green pools can become a breeding ground for mosquitoes carrying West Nile virus.

California officials estimate that there are tens of thousands of abandoned pools in the state, with as many as 5,000 in places like Sacramento County, where a building boom in the capital’s suburbs has gone bust. California law calls for fines of up to $1,000 per day for egregious cases of pools left with standing water, but officials say the sheer numbers of cases are daunting.

John Rusmisel, the district manager for Alameda County’s mosquito abatement district, said he used a promotional company that flies banners over football games and other events to help find the fetid swimming pools.

“They were up there seeing all these funky pools,” said Mr. Rusmisel, who added that his workload had doubled in the last year. “So they just started to take pictures.”

Once he finds a problem pool, his workers treat it with a combination of insecticide and mosquitofish, pinky-size carp that find mosquito larvae delectable. But they do not empty any pools, he said, because in a good rain, an empty pool can be partially lifted out of the hole by groundwater, he said. “I’ve seen them float up a foot or two,” Mr. Rusmisel said.

Dirk Voss, a code enforcement agent in Oxnard, Calif., northwest of Los Angeles, said even those residents who manage to stay in their homes often could not maintain the pool. “They don’t want to pay for the power to run the motor or pay for the chemicals to treat them,” Mr. Voss said.

But skaters do not mind doing the work, whether it is that of scouting for pools or scouring them. Adam Morgan, 28, a skater from Los Angeles, said it used to take months to find a good skating pool. Now the task is a breeze.

“There are more pools right now than I could possibly skate,” Mr. Morgan said. “It’s pretty exciting.” Mr. Peacock travels around town in his pickup searching for the addresses of homes he has learned have been foreclosed on, either via the Internet or from a friend who works in real estate. He has also learned to spot a foreclosed house, he said, by looking for “dead grass on the lawn and lockboxes on the front door.”

Once he has found a pool he likes — he prefers older, kidney-shaped ones — he drains the water into the gutter with his pool pump, sometimes setting up orange cones on the sidewalk to appear more official. Later, he returns to shovel out the muck, and then lets the pool dry. In order to maintain a sense of public service, the skateboarders adhere to basic rules: no graffiti, pack out trash and never mess with or enter the houses.

A day or two later, the skating begins, often in short bursts during the workday to avoid disturbing neighbors or attracting police attention. Twice in recent weeks, Mr. Peacock said, the police caught the skateboarders in an empty pool and demanded they leave but did not issue citations.

Mr. Peacock said he was helping the environment. “I’m doing the city a favor,” he said, by emptying fetid pools. “They’re always talking about West Nile on the news. Those little fish can only eat so much.”