Hofman, right, cultivates mushrooms.

By ROBERT STONE
NY Times Published: December 24, 2008

In the circles where LSD eventually thrived, the moment of its discovery was more cherished than even the famous intersection of a fine English apple with Isaac Newton’s inquiring mind, the comic cosmic instant that gave us gravity. According to legend, Dr. Albert Hofmann, a research chemist at the Sandoz pharmaceutical company, fell from his bicycle in April 1943 on his way home through the streets of Basel, Switzerland, after accidently dosing himself with LSD at the laboratory. The story presented another example of enlightenment as trickster. As a narrative it was very fondly regarded because so many of us imagined a clueless botanist pedaling over the cobblestones with the clockwork Helvetian order dissolving under him.

At Sandoz, Hofmann specialized in the investigation of naturally occurring compounds that might make useful medicines. Among these was a rye fungus called ergot, known principally as the cause of a grim disease called St. Anthony’s Fire, which resulted in gangrene and convulsions. Ergot had one positive effect: in appropriate doses it facilitated childbirth. Hofmann set out to find whether there might be further therapeutic applications for ergot derivatives. Indeed, he discovered some for Sandoz, including Hydergine, a medication that, among other things, enhances memory function in the elderly. Most famously, of course, Hofmann’s ergot experiments synthesized D-lysergic acid diethylamide tartrate, LSD. On April 16, 1943, he apparently absorbed a minuscule amount of the lysergic acid he was synthesizing through his fingertips. He went home (he doesn’t say how) and subsequently submitted a report to Sandoz. This reads in part:

“At home I lay down and sank into a not unpleasant intoxicatedlike condition, characterized by an extremely stimulated imagination.”

A few days later at work, Hofmann decided to adopt the Romantic methods of Stevenson’s celebrated Dr. Jekyll. His experimental notes commence: ‘4/19/43 16:20 0.5 cc of 1/2 promil aqueous solution of diethylamide tartrate orally = .25 mg tartrate.” By 1700 hours he was reporting other symptoms along with a “desire to laugh.”

The laughter was Mr. Hyde’s, not Dr. Jekyll’s, because for most of this occasion Hofmann was in the grip of what less cultivated experimenters would later call a bummer.

“A demon had invaded me, had taken possession of my body, mind and soul. . . . It was the demon that scornfully triumphed over my will.”

Hofmann did make the journey home by bicycle, with the help of an assistant. Contrary to legend, there is no record of his falling. As the hours of Hofmann’s investigation passed, he felt progressively better. In the morning “everything glistened and sparkled.”

On the basis of Hofmann’s report, three other officials of Sandoz sampled LSD. A psychiatric researcher at the University of Zurich, Dr. Werner Stoll, repeated the experiment, and Sandoz came to the conclusion that modified LSD-25 was a psychotropic compound that was nontoxic and could have enormous use as a psychiatric aid. A decision was made to make LSD available after the war to research institutes and physicians as an experimental drug.

Hofmann was by no means a technocratic philistine. The amazing mystical elements activated by this strange fungoid compound were of particular interest to him, though he says he never imagined mere recreational inebriation as a goal for users. He did, however, anticipate self-experimentation by “writers, painters, musicians and other intellectuals.” By people, in other words, as respectably educated folk used to say, “who possessed the background.”

How could Hofmann, swathed in the cultural Gemütlichkeit of Switzerland, understand that shortly — in America in the ’60s — we were all, all of us, going to be writers, painters, musicians and other intellectuals?

Actually Hofmann soon had his eye on America and its discontents. He associated “abuse” of LSD with what he called “materialism, alienation from nature through industrialization and increasing urbanization, lack of satisfaction . . . a mechanized, lifeless working world, ennui and purposelessness in a wealthy, saturated society.”

Hofmann was a wise man, however, and no more judgmental than any scientist should be, and in his writings on the subject he treats the hippie acid culture with grandfatherly moderation. Meeting Timothy Leary, a figure who arguably turned his magic medicine into a social threat, he remonstrated firmly with him, tried hard to see Leary’s ineffable good points and afterward called him “a charming personage.”

As a highly valued executive researcher at Sandoz (now part of Novartis), he traveled the world to study psychotropic compounds. With his wife he went to Mexico to sample psychedelics at their practical source, as administered by the curanderos and curanderas of the Sierra Mazateca. It was Hofmann who succeeded in synthesizing psilocybin from the “magic mushroom” of the Mazatecas. He also isolated a compound similar to LSD from another Native American botanic sacramental, the ololiuhqui vine. As a scientist he was fascinated by the ritual practiced by the ancient Greeks at Eleusis each fall. These rites, honoring the grain goddess Demeter, celebrated antiquity’s most profound mystery cult. Initiates described an intense life-changing experience in the course of the nighttime ceremonies. Hofmann believed that one of the components of the sacred kykeon, the potion distributed to adepts, was a barley extract containing ergot.

Hofmann was close to many of the artists and thinkers who shared his fascination with varieties of perception. He corresponded with Aldous Huxley and was also a friend of the German mystic and novelist Ernst Jünger. He came to know prominent members of the American Beat generation, including Allen Ginsberg, whom he met in California in 1977. Hofmann never approved of mass intoxication or drug use in adolescence. Contrary to assertions, however, he did not regret his discovery. No great scientist known to history can have been less fanatical or more serene. He was always a humanist committed to the spirit.

Over his long life, Hofmann took LSD many times. He developed a personal mysticism involving nature, for which he had a lifelong passion. One thing this very tolerant man decried in the Western drive for facile satisfaction was an alienation from the outdoors. The use of LSD made him more and more conscious of it. In nature he saw “a miraculous, powerful, unfathomable reality.”

The singer and painter Bruno S. at the Stadtklause in Berlin.

By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN
NY Times Published: December 24, 2008

BERLIN — The other evening Bruno S. sang at an old bar here called the Stadtklause, a cozy wood-paneled dive near the remains of the Anhalter Bahnhof, the grand railway station torn down after the war. Franz-Josef Göbel, who runs the place, invited Bruno a couple of years ago to come sing whenever he felt up to it, not for money, just to have a place to go, and since then Bruno has stopped by on the odd night.

As usual he set himself up in the entryway, on a low green stool, cradling his accordion, his little bells on a table beside him. A plastic bag, parked at a corner of the table, contained his bronchitis pills. He sang the songs he always sings, about prison and despair, bloodshed and lost love, songs Berlin street singers have sung for hundreds of years. Customers mostly squeezed past him, oblivious. A few stopped to listen. One woman wept.

“Do you know who that is?” my friend Ingrid had asked me when she came by my family’s apartment one day late last spring. An old musician was seated before a rickety cardboard box below the window. He sang in a croaking voice on the empty sidewalk in the afternoon sunshine, his back toward the brick church across the street.

“That’s Bruno S.,” Ingrid said excitedly. She looked as if she had come across Marlene Dietrich, returned from the dead.

His real name is Bruno Schleinstein. Everybody has always called him Bruno S. Years ago he was famous, a kind of movie star, although that’s not quite the right term. It summons to mind George Clooney.

During the 1970s Bruno was the star in two remarkable Werner Herzog films, “The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser” and “Stroszek,” in which he occupied the roles of damaged characters so completely and genuinely, so uncannily, that it was never quite clear how much he actually understood about what use was being made of him by the director. His performances were riveting, but he was obviously not well mentally, and even as he came across in his own way as knowing, he was at the same time simply being himself, and the question hovered: How much was fiction, how much reality?

Then he dropped down the memory chute.

When we introduced ourselves that day, he kept his eyes firmly cast downward. He was toothless and shaggy, and he spoke haltingly, forcing out his words, but there was something gentle about him. He agreed we could come see him at home.

And so we began to visit him in his cluttered apartment on a street full of prostitutes where he lives alone. During the summer he sang for us. During the fall he showed us a painting he was working on. He is an outsider artist, a good one. Endart, a gallery in town, sells his work. The proceeds supplement his small government pension.

Recently, with Christmas coming, we dropped in to ask how he was doing. This is not a good season for people who are alone. He said he hated the Christmas markets around town, where “the gentlemen who go in come out like plucked chickens with all their feathers flying, and such beautiful colored feathers.” That’s how Bruno tends to talk. He makes up words and phrases or borrows them from old songs and gives them a twist. Liederbann: a spell of songs. Das Loch der vergessenheit: the hole of forgottenness. He says he transmits (durchgeben) his songs, he doesn’t sing them.

When the conversation turns to Mr. Herzog or to his mother or brother and sister, words tend to fail him, and he becomes distraught. Otherwise he’s mischievous, puckish, remote but always glad for the company.

Born in 1932, he was abandoned as a baby to an orphanage, becoming a Reichsausschusskind; in psychiatric clinics the Nazis performed experiments on mentally disabled children whom they called ausschusskinder, the discarded children, a word no German would ever use today. Nobody visited him. He knew who his relatives were, but they declined to know him. After the war he learned to play the accordion in the institutions through which he was shuffled. Music gave him a measure of solace and a way to escape his loneliness.

On his own as an adult, he got a job as a laborer and began to sing in courtyards around the city, as musicians had done for ages. Mr. Herzog came across him in a 1970 documentary, “Bruno the Black,” about street musicians. It’s hard to imagine today what an international celebrity and figure of fascination to German intellectuals that Bruno became, a real man about town, but then, in the way of such things, he drifted into obscurity, resentful and confused.

“Everybody threw him away,” Bruno likes to say, preferring the third person to refer to himself.

At Stadtklause he sang “Mamatschi” (“Dear Mama”), in which a poor boy grows up wishing for a little horse. The horse arrives years later pulling the hearse that bears his dead mother away.

Between stanzas Bruno mixed in a German Christmas tune and “Holy Night,” playing the melodies on the bells. These had been arranged on the table in no obvious order so that he fished around like someone searching frantically through a messy drawer looking for a lost key.

He sang other moritaten, black-humored ballads out of which eventually came “Threepenny Opera” — the music plied by roving hurdy-gurdy musicians with whiny voices whose partners displayed hand-painted pictures, multimedia entertainment for the masses until the Nazis banned it.

“Once upon a time there was a beautiful town,” Bruno sang in the bar the other night. “You could go everywhere, in all the courtyards and on all the streets,” he added. “After the wall fell, everything changed.” Ingrid collected a few coins from patrons gathered for a holiday party. Bruno won’t ever ask for money.

We visited him a couple of days ago. In what is not a large apartment, he swims in an ocean of papers, magazines, records, biscuit tins, fans, lamps, old phonograph equipment, old tape players and radios, antique sewing machines, antique coffee grinders (he has a whole collection of them), two pianos, a large wooden model of a castle on which is painted “Brunos Burg” (“Bruno’s Fortress”), a machine for sewing shoes, a dental chair, an operating table (from Mr. Herzog, he said) and boxes of indefinite content. The piles leave narrow passageways through which to navigate gingerly.

There is too much, in too much seeming disarray, to take in. In the kitchen, next to the stove and amid the muddle of pots and blenders, Bruno has wedged a low glass tabletop on which to paint.

He has been working on the same painting at least since the late summer, protecting it under layers of newspapers, towels, pens and paint, which he peels away, as one doffs heavy clothing.

The picture shows a vast conflagration. A vase falls from a tottering column, which Bruno explains is the incident that started the fire, a recurring dream he has about Berlin. A man flees; another screams. Above it all the symbol of the city, the Berlin bear, wears a golden crown, surrounded by a rain of black crosses.

“I gave the Berlin bear a solemn crown, but when your mother town is estranged from you, death can’t be far away,” Bruno said, cryptically as usual.

“I wish she could see it,” he said, now talking about his mother. “If she did, she would die straightaway of a heart attack because she would see her son’s death.”

He calls her Mrs. Bremse, which translates both as “brake” and “horse fly.” It turns out that he had been playing all those months ago near the church up the street from us because his brother, long dead, used to live in the neighborhood.

Bruno sang for us again. He sang “Mamatschi” and “Die Gedanken Sind Frei” (“Thoughts Are Free”). To Bruno, who often says he feels imprisoned, it’s a song about the impossibility of finding refuge even in one’s thoughts.

“Ah!” he exclaimed, lighting up when we asked what he was doing on Christmas Day. “He will transmit,” he said about himself. He’ll be at the spot where we met him on that spring day months ago.

“He will take his accordion and his bells and go around the houses, and one of the songs for sure will be ‘Mamatschi,’ ” Bruno announced. “Because this will touch people.”

By KIM SEVERSON
NY Times Published: December 23, 2008

FROM the moment it was clear that Barack Obama was going to be president, people who have dedicated their lives to changing how America eats thought they had found their St. Nicholas.

It wasn’t long before the letters to Santa began piling up.

Ruth Reichl, the editor of Gourmet magazine, wants a new high-profile White House chef who cooks delicious local food. Wayne Pacelle, head of the Humane Society of the United States, wants policies requiring better treatment for farm animals.

Parents want better public-school lunches. Consumer groups are dreaming of a new, stronger food safety system. Nutrition reformers want prisoners to be fed less soy. And a farmer in Maine is asking the president-elect to plow under an acre of White House lawn for an organic vegetable garden.

Although Mr. Obama has proposed changes in the nation’s farm and rural policies and emphasizes the connection between diet and health, there is nothing to indicate he has a special interest in a radical makeover of the way food is grown and sold.

Still, the dream endures. To advocates who have watched scattered calls for changes in food policy gather political and popular momentum, Mr. Obama looks like their kind of president.

Not only does he seem to possess a more-sophisticated palate than some of his recent predecessors, but he will also take office in an age when organic food is mainstream, cooking competitions are among the top-rated TV shows and books calling for an overhaul in the American food system are best sellers.

“People are so interested in a massive change in food and agriculture that they are dining out on hope now. That is like the main ingredient,” said Eddie Gehman Kohan, a blogger from Los Angeles who started Obamafoodorama.com to document just about any conceivable link between Mr. Obama and food, whether it is a debate on agriculture policy or an image of Mr. Obama rendered in tiny cupcakes.

“He is the first president who might actually have eaten organic food, or at least eats out at great restaurants,” Ms. Gehman Kohan said.

Still, no one is sure just how serious Mr. Obama really is about the politics of food. So like mystery buffs studying the book jacket of “The Da Vinci Code,” interested eaters dissect every aspect of his life as it relates to the plate.

They look for clues in the lunch menus at Sidwell Friends School in Washington, where his two daughters will be eating items like herbes de Provence pita, local pears and organic chopped salad, served with unbleached napkins in a cafeteria with a serious recycling program. They point out that when Mr. Obama was a child, his family used food stamps and that in interviews he has referred to his appreciation of the philosophy put forth by Michael Pollan, the reform-minded food writer.

They note with approval that Rahm Emanuel, Mr. Obama’s chief of staff, belongs to a synagogue that runs a community supported agriculture program and that his social secretary, Desirée Rogers, is from the food-obsessed city of New Orleans. They also see promising signs in Mr. Obama’s fondness for some of Chicago’s better restaurants, like Spiaggia and Topolobampo.

As for Michelle Obama, she has said in interviews that she tries to buy organic food and watches the amount of high-fructose corn syrup in her family’s diet. And, as she confided on “The View” on ABC, “We’re bacon people.”

Add it all up and Mr. Obama looks like the first foodie president since Thomas Jefferson. For more recent comparisons, one could look at President Bush, who is a fitness buff but who aligned himself with large agricultural companies like Cargill and Monsanto that some advocates for sustainable agriculture and organic food fight against.

President Bill Clinton certainly seemed to love food, but in his White House years his tastes ran more toward Big Macs than grass-fed beef. Only after his presidency, and serious health problems, did he turn his attention to issues of obesity and diet.

The Obamas are a different kind of first family, said David Kamp, who traced the history of the modern gourmet-food movement in his book, “The United States of Arugula” (Broadway, 2006). “This time we have a Democrat in office that seems to live the dream and speak the language of both food progressivism and personal fitness,” Mr. Kamp said.

For many food activists, a shiny new secretary of agriculture was high on the Christmas wish list.

One of the first names to come up was Mr. Pollan, who in October wrote an open letter to the future president in The New York Times Magazine, explaining the ways in which he believes the food system needs fixing.

Even after Mr. Pollan repeatedly pointed out that he was unqualified and uninterested in the job of overseeing a $97-billion budget and more than 100,000 employees, his supporters kept pushing with more fanaticism than Clay Aiken’s Claymates.

A couple of longtime Iowans, the celebrity pig farmer Paul Willis and his neighbor Dave Murphy, started a more serious drive. They compiled a list of six candidates who they thought would have the best interests of farm-based rural America and sustainable agriculture at heart. More than 50,000 people signed their petition, the restaurateur Alice Waters and the writer Wendell Berry among them.

But Santa had other plans. Last week, Mr. Obama appointed Tom Vilsack, the former governor of Iowa, which grows much of the nation’s corn and soybeans. Mr. Vilsack has talked about reducing subsidies to some megafarms, supports better treatment of farm animals and wants healthier food in schools. But his selection drew criticism because he is a big fan of alternative fuels like corn-based ethanol and is a supporter of biotechnology, both anathema to people who want to shift government support from large-scale agricultural interests to smaller farms growing food that takes a more direct path to the table.

“Americans were promised ‘change,’ not just another shill for Monsanto and corporate agribusiness,” wrote Ronnie Cummins of the Organic Consumers Association, which has promised to fight the confirmation of Mr. Vilsack. Mr. Willis and Mr. Murphy immediately shook off the blow and sent out a new petition to have someone more like-minded placed as undersecretary.

Food advocates aren’t the only ones whose hopes for the new administration received a quick kick to the curb. A coalition of more than 140 environmental groups and scientists sent letters supporting one candidate to lead the Department of the Interior. Mr. Obama chose someone else.

Multiply that by every special interest and it becomes clear that just because changing the food system is the first priority for some, it isn’t so for everyone. The pragmatists among the food reformers understand.

“This president is taking over when the economy is the worst it has been in our lifetime and we are in the middle of wars,” said Ann Cooper, the chef who transformed the school food program for the Berkeley Unified School District in California and is about to do the same in Boulder, Colo. “I think it’s somewhere between naïve and fairy tale to think his No. 1 focus is going to be on food.”

Still, she has her own little wish, which is that the new president will move responsibility for school food programs to the Department of Education or the Department of Health and Human Services from the Department of Agriculture. That way, the focus might shift away from the commodity foods that are the backbone of most school lunches and toward menus tailored to the health and development of children.

Some food-system reformers may have a better chance of getting what they want than others do. A coalition of community-based groups called the U.S. Working Group on the Food Crisis wrote to Mr. Obama asking him to make hunger and the global food crisis a top priority. Their optimism is based on Mr. Obama’s promise to abolish childhood hunger by 2015.

They are also banking on his desire to tackle climate change and overhaul energy and health care policies.

“If he’s serious about doing this, then he’ll have to address the current problems of our food system, which are inextricably linked to these other problems,” said Christina Schiavoni of World Hunger Year, which is part of the coalition. “There’s no getting around it.”

In her view and others’, diets filled with healthier food produced by less intrusive farming practices can reduce medical problems like obesity and diabetes and be easier on the environment.

And even if Mr. Obama can’t or won’t deliver the changes some are hoping for, maybe he’ll just leave a little something in their stockings.

A new White House chef, maybe? Cristeta Comerford, the first woman to hold the executive chef job, has been in the position since 2005, not long by White House standards. Still, some people think it’s time for a change. “What the president eats could have a major impact on everyone in the country,” said Ms. Reichl, who along with Ms. Waters and Danny Meyer, the restaurateur, sent a letter to Mr. Obama offering to help him select someone to head the White House kitchen.

A chef who cooks local and organic food and picks some of it from a presidential garden could change things faster than any cabinet appointment, Ms. Reichl said.

“It’s like the hat manufacturers being furious because J. F. K. didn’t wear a hat, and suddenly everyone in America stopped wearing hats,” she said. “It’s that simple.

By OLIVER MORTON
NY Times Published: December 23, 2008

THEY came for the Moon, and for the first three orbits it was to the Moon that the astronauts of Apollo 8 devoted their attention. Only on their fourth time round did they lift their eyes to see their home world, rising silently above the Moon’s desert plains, blue and white and beautiful. When, later on that Christmas Eve in 1968, they read the opening lines of Genesis on live television, they did it with a sense of the heavens and the Earth, of the form and the void, enriched by the wonder they had seen rising into the Moon’s black sky.

The photograph of that earthrise by the astronaut Bill Anders forms part of the Apollo program’s enduring legacy — eclipsing, in many memories, any discoveries about the Moon or renewed sense of national pride. It and other pictures looking back at the Earth provided a new perspective on the thing that all humanity shares. As Robert Poole documents in his history, “Earthrise: How Man First Saw the Earth,” that perspective had deep cultural effects, notably in the emotional resonance it offered the growing environmental movement. Seen from the Moon, the Earth seemed so small, so isolated, so terribly fragile.

It takes nothing from the beauty and power of the image, though, to point out that it was the photographer, far more than its subject, who was isolated, and that the fragility is an illusion. The planet Earth is a remarkably robust thing, and this strength flows from its ancient and intimate connection to the cosmos beyond. To see the photo this way does not undermine its environmental relevance — but it does recast it.

That the Earth is small is undeniable. If the inner solar system were the size of the United States, the Earth would be the size of a football field; if the distance to the center of the galaxy were a mile, the Earth would be less than an atom. But if the “Earthrise” photo could have captured our planet in the dimension of time instead of space, things would look different. In its duration, as opposed to its diameter, the Earth demands to be measured on a cosmic scale. At more than four billion years old, it stretches a third of the way across the history of the universe, a third of the way back to the Big Bang itself. Many of the stars you can see on a clear winter’s night are younger than the planet beneath your feet.

Mere persistence is not, in itself, that great a feat. The barren rocks of the Moon have persisted almost as long. But the Earth has not merely endured; it has lived. For almost 90 percent of its history the planet has been inhabited, and shaped by life. The biological mechanisms that first operated in the dawn of life animate the creatures of the Earth to this day, forming an unbroken chain at least 3.8 billion years long.

This unfailing, uninterrupted life demonstrates that the planet is far from fragile. The living Earth is tough on scales it is hard to credit. Life has watched continents crash together and tear themselves apart; skies glowing like bright coals; tropical seas frozen into stillness: it has endured. Slaked in radiation from nearby supernovae, pummeled by asteroids, it has barely faltered and never stopped. Our civilization may be — is — out of balance with its environment; current human ways of life are frighteningly precarious. But to read the fragility of our way of life onto life itself is foolish.

Humans can kill species and diminish ecosystems. Such vandalism poses real dangers to its perpetrators, since human civilization relies on the services some of these ecosystems provide. But at the scale of the planet’s life taken as a whole it is penny-ante stuff. Humanity poses no existential risk to life on Earth, and nor will anything else for hundreds of millions of years. Rich, varied, ever changing — the Earth is all of these. Fragile it is not.

Why so robust? The reason rests in the second great misconception: that the Earth is isolated. This is true only if your sense of connection depends on physical matter moving from place to place. The dust and rocks that rain down from space are indeed the merest spattering, even if some of the larger rocks occasionally cause a little dinosaur-killing discomfort; the traces of gas blown off the top of the atmosphere are truly negligible. Matter trickles in, whispers out. But matter is not everything.

An unending spate of pure luminous energy pours from the Sun in all directions. Eight minutes downstream at the speed of light, part of this extraordinary flux crashes down on the Earth in a 170,000-trillion-watt torrent. Some of it splashes back into space; Major Anders’s “Earthrise” captures that reflected light in the brilliant white of clouds and polar ice. Most, though, is absorbed; this is the energy that drives the winds, makes the waves and currents flow, heats the rocks and warms the sky. The Sun’s energy flows through the earth system and out the other side, ebbing back into the coldness of space as a tide of infrared radiation.

A very small fraction of this energy is caught, not by rock and wind and water, but by life. That fraction of a percent captured by plants and other photosynthetic organisms flows into and through the food webs of the world. It is this sunlight, endlessly refreshed, that allows the grass to grow, the birds to sing — and you to live. The Sun’s energy flows through your breakfast cereal, your morning coffee, your veins and your mind. It animates you as it has animated almost all the Earth’s life for billions of years.

The science of thermodynamics tells us that closed systems tend toward equilibrium, toward dullness, toward entropy. If the Earth were truly as isolated as it looks, that unavoidable tendency would be the lot of life. But the Earth is as open as the sky. Energy from elsewhere floods through it, creating endless chances for complexity and improbability, washing the world’s entropy back into space. The flow of energy that unites almost every living creature on the planet is the same flow that connects our environment to the universe beyond.

For this flow to work, the energy must get out as well as get in. If Major Anders had had a camera working in the infrared, that departing energy would have shown up as a warm glow on the night side of the planet. Forty years on, that glow has dimmed a little; less energy is getting out. By thickening the skies with carbon dioxide, we are blocking the energy’s flow, and allowing a buildup of heat here at the surface of the Earth. This greenhouse warming is small beer in any cosmic sense. It poses no threat to the continuation of life on Earth, but it does pose a threat to tens of millions of people, and will do so for generations to come.

Happily, to see the problem of global warming in terms of this flow of energy is to see its solution. By putting a little of the cosmic energy to use — by developing wind power, appropriate energy crops, hydropower and, most promising of all, solar power — we could do away with the need for that sky-thickening carbon dioxide. Other flows of energy could help too — flows of heat from the depths of the Earth and of radiation bequeathed to us in the uranium of dead stars. But it is solar energy, indirectly or directly, that will dominate the picture, simply because of its abundance. The Sun delivers more energy to the Earth in an hour than humanity uses in a year.

To substitute these flows for the fossil fuels poised to despoil our planet and also run out on us — worst of both worlds — is an epic task. But the message that frames all the other messages of “Earthrise” is that we can rise to epic tasks. Look where the photo was taken. “If we can put a man on the Moon …” quickly became shorthand for society’s failure to achieve goals that seemed far simpler. But still: we put a man on the Moon, and that does say something. Efforts on a similar scale aimed at harvesting the energy flowing about us are entirely appropriate, and could make things a great deal better. We cannot solve all problems; some climate change is inevitable. But catastrophe is not.

“Earthrise” showed us where we are, what we can do and what we share. It showed us who we are, together; the people of a tough, long-lasting world, shot through with the light of a continuous creation.

Oliver Morton, the author of “Mapping Mars: Science, Imagination and the Birth of a World,” and, most recently, “Eating the Sun: How Plants Power the Planet,” is the chief news and features editor of the journal Nature.

The jewel of a French Christmas, the bûche, or Yule log, at Fauchon in Paris, where upscale cakes are quite extravagant.

By STEVEN ERLANGER and BASIL KATZ
NY Times Published: December 23, 2008

PARIS — There is an economic crisis here this Christmas, but you can’t really see it. Paris glitters like a fashion model, lighted with flashing bulbs and studded with diamonds, drinking Champagne and eating cake.

Even if more of the jewels are rhinestones, it is only fitting — the Champagne company Moët et Chandon has a curvy bottle dressed in rhinestones, too, and not just any rhinestones: Swarovski crystal. The bottle can be yours, in an elegant chiller, for about $125.

“We are into the starification of the product, turning it into a gem,” said Marie Mascré, who spent four years at the rival Veuve Clicquot Ponsardin and now runs a wine-marketing company. She pointed to a bottle of 1999 Piper-Heidsieck in a darkly illuminated window, with the word “Rare” running in sexily cursive letters on the shimmering bottle.

“These bottles represent a dream, a fantasy, imagination,” she said. “You’re almost no longer interested in the taste! Maybe you don’t have access to a share on a private jet, but you can have your own little moment of luxury, of escape.”

Every French holiday or celebration is associated with Champagne, but Christmas and New Year’s represent a major part of the market, especially because a gift of Champagne is both easy and socially safe.

But Christmas is even more important for the Bûche de Noël, the Yule log popular wherever France put down its roots. It is traditionally a spongy cake bound with chocolate butter cream and decorated to look like a chunk of tree cut from the forest, often adorned with marzipan mushrooms and other bucolic delights, like spun sugar moss.

In Paris, however, the bûche is another opportunity for creativity, commerce, competition and consumption. Every bakery has bûches, large and small, but the big houses like Dalloyau and Lenôtre, and the artisan pastry and chocolate shops, like Jean-Paul Hévin and Pierre Hermé, all produce special bûches every year.

Of course, it’s not just the endless variety of flavors but also the quality of the ingredients and the imagination of the designs. Some look like beds, others like suitcases or ice-cream bars. It can be a long way from the forest.

Lenôtre actually hires a prominent designer — this year, Hubert de Givenchy — to create a special bûche. Given that St. Hubert is the patron saint of hunters (and of mathematicians, by the way, but of course you knew that), Mr. Givenchy designed a cake with two stag heads at each end, cast in clear sugar like crystal, their antlers festooned with gold leaf like a Buddha and lighted from underneath by two tiny LED lamps that last 12 hours.

The flavor is chocolate, sourced from Tanzania, Ghana and São Tomé and Príncipe, with a hint of Earl Gray tea. And it is swathed in chocolate colored and textured to look like maroon velvet.

There is a golden ribbon of pulled sugar, “like Murano glass,” and, of course, the Givenchy signature on a chocolate plaque. Don’t forget the light dusting of 22-karat gold.

Only 700 are made for sale, and the cost is $160, compared to $60 to $75 for an “ordinary” Lenôtre bûche. The company, which also has a thriving catering business, expects to sell 15,000 bûches this Christmas.

At the high end is Jean-Paul Hévin, selling 2,500 to 3,000 bûches, including an odd and whimsical one of a woman’s stiletto-heeled shoe made of chocolate, with even a small scuff mark at the heel, called the “Cinderella.” It is filled with three round Christmas tree ornaments of red and gold, also made of chocolate. The price: a little over $100.

He also makes a Bûche Maison, in the shape of a house, with a chocolate roof, and smaller bûchettes looking like Eskimo ice-cream bars, with wooden sticks, and a Bûche du Voyage, with a red coating and a detailed handle somehow fashioned out of chocolate.

At 50, Mr. Hévin employs 70 people, having started 20 years ago with his wife and a third person. “We all want to create something special,” he said. “But there is one rule above all, I have to take pleasure in it, and then my clients will find pleasure.”

There are worries at the huge Parisian wine shop Lavinia, where more than 500 different kinds of Champagne from dozens of producers all compete for the festive euro. Wholesale Champagne sales turned down in October by 16.5 percent compared to last year, according to industry figures, but 2008 will be a good year, the buyers agree, if not quite the record sales of 338.7 million bottles in 2007.

“When things go well, people drink to celebrate, and when things go badly, they drink to console themselves,” said Yannick Branchereau, Lavinia’s director in France. Lavinia has a full range, but also stocks some of France’s most revered Champagnes, like the 1982 Salon Blanc de Blancs, Le Mesnil, for $2,800, or the simple 1997 for $420, and Bollinger’s 1999 Blanc de Noirs, made from some of the few vines that survived the phylloxera plague of the mid-19th century, for about $1,100.

Of course there are French scrooges appalled by all the excess.

Périco Legasse, the food critic, said angrily that prices now defined quality. “For Champagne we’ve arrived at these total price aberrations, and you have to dress them up to attract people’s attention with the image, with fashion, with sex.”

He hated the designer bûches, he said. “In selling these disgusting things at the price of gold, we are coming to the end of the system. This is the sub-primes transposed to consumption.”

Raphaël Gimenez, the owner of Les Caprices de l’Instant, a wine store, exploded like, well, a shaken bottle of bubbly. “Champagne? Man, that’s all about smashing the bottle on your Lamborghini or ripping a thousand-euro bill for the hell of it. It’s party, show, not wine,” he said. “With the collapse of the price of oil, of gas, of gold and of lead, this kind of crazy superficiality has to end. Why not just say we’re broke, and that’s it?

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
NY TimesPublished: December 23, 2008

I had a bad day last Friday, but it was an all-too-typical day for America.

It actually started well, on Kau Sai Chau, an island off Hong Kong, where I stood on a rocky hilltop overlooking the South China Sea and talked to my wife back in Maryland, static-free, using a friend’s Chinese cellphone. A few hours later, I took off from Hong Kong’s ultramodern airport after riding out there from downtown on a sleek high-speed train — with wireless connectivity that was so good I was able to surf the Web the whole way on my laptop.

Landing at Kennedy Airport from Hong Kong was, as I’ve argued before, like going from the Jetsons to the Flintstones. The ugly, low-ceilinged arrival hall was cramped, and using a luggage cart cost $3. (Couldn’t we at least supply foreign visitors with a free luggage cart, like other major airports in the world?) As I looked around at this dingy room, it reminded of somewhere I had been before. Then I remembered: It was the luggage hall in the old Hong Kong Kai Tak Airport. It closed in 1998.

The next day I went to Penn Station, where the escalators down to the tracks are so narrow that they seem to have been designed before suitcases were invented. The disgusting track-side platforms apparently have not been cleaned since World War II. I took the Acela, America’s sorry excuse for a bullet train, from New York to Washington. Along the way, I tried to use my cellphone to conduct an interview and my conversation was interrupted by three dropped calls within one 15-minute span.

All I could think to myself was: If we’re so smart, why are other people living so much better than us? What has become of our infrastructure, which is so crucial to productivity? Back home, I was greeted by the news that General Motors was being bailed out — that’s the G.M. that Fortune magazine just noted “lost more than $72 billion in the past four years, and yet you can count on one hand the number of executives who have been reassigned or lost their job.”

My fellow Americans, we can’t continue in this mode of “Dumb as we wanna be.” We’ve indulged ourselves for too long with tax cuts that we can’t afford, bailouts of auto companies that have become giant wealth-destruction machines, energy prices that do not encourage investment in 21st-century renewable power systems or efficient cars, public schools with no national standards to prevent illiterates from graduating and immigration policies that have our colleges educating the world’s best scientists and engineers and then, when these foreigners graduate, instead of stapling green cards to their diplomas, we order them to go home and start companies to compete against ours.

To top it off, we’ve fallen into a trend of diverting and rewarding the best of our collective I.Q. to people doing financial engineering rather than real engineering. These rocket scientists and engineers were designing complex financial instruments to make money out of money — rather than designing cars, phones, computers, teaching tools, Internet programs and medical equipment that could improve the lives and productivity of millions.

For all these reasons, our present crisis is not just a financial meltdown crying out for a cash injection. We are in much deeper trouble. In fact, we as a country have become General Motors — as a result of our national drift. Look in the mirror: G.M. is us.

That’s why we don’t just need a bailout. We need a reboot. We need a build out. We need a buildup. We need a national makeover. That is why the next few months are among the most important in U.S. history. Because of the financial crisis, Barack Obama has the bipartisan support to spend $1 trillion in stimulus. But we must make certain that every bailout dollar, which we’re borrowing from our kids’ future, is spent wisely.

It has to go into training teachers, educating scientists and engineers, paying for research and building the most productivity-enhancing infrastructure — without building white elephants. Generally, I’d like to see fewer government dollars shoveled out and more creative tax incentives to stimulate the private sector to catalyze new industries and new markets. If we allow this money to be spent on pork, it will be the end of us.

America still has the right stuff to thrive. We still have the most creative, diverse, innovative culture and open society — in a world where the ability to imagine and generate new ideas with speed and to implement them through global collaboration is the most important competitive advantage. China may have great airports, but last week it went back to censoring The New York Times and other Western news sites. Censorship restricts your people’s imaginations. That’s really, really dumb. And that’s why for all our missteps, the 21st century is still up for grabs.

John Kennedy led us on a journey to discover the moon. Obama needs to lead us on a journey to rediscover, rebuild and reinvent our own backyard.

Merry Christmas!

By BENEDICT CAREY
NY Times Published: December 22, 2008

The man, a doctor left blind by two successive strokes, refused to take part in the experiment. He could not see anything, he said, and had no interest in navigating an obstacle course — a cluttered hallway — for the benefit of science. Why bother?

When he finally tried it, though, something remarkable happened. He zigzagged down the hall, sidestepping a garbage can, a tripod, a stack of paper and several boxes as if he could see everything clearly. A researcher shadowed him in case he stumbled.

“You just had to see it to believe it,” said Beatrice de Gelder, a neuroscientist at Harvard and Tilburg University in the Netherlands, who with an international team of brain researchers reported on the patient on Monday in the journal Current Biology. A video is online at www.beatricedegelder.com/books.html.

The study, which included extensive brain imaging, is the most dramatic demonstration to date of so-called blindsight, the native ability to sense things using the brain’s primitive, subcortical — and entirely subconscious — visual system.

Scientists have previously reported cases of blindsight in people with partial damage to their visual lobes. The new report is the first to show it in a person whose visual lobes — one in each hemisphere, under the skull at the back of the head — were completely destroyed. The finding suggests that people with similar injuries may be able to recover some crude visual sense with practice.

“It’s a very rigorously done report and the first demonstration of this in someone with apparent total absence of a striate cortex, the visual processing region,” said Dr. Richard Held, an emeritus professor of cognitive and brain science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who with Ernst Pöppel and Douglas Frost wrote the first published account of blindsight in a person, in 1973.

The man in the new study, an African living in Switzerland at the time, suffered the two strokes in his 50s, weeks apart, and was profoundly blind by any of the usual measures. Unlike people suffering from eye injuries, or congenital blindness in which the visual system develops abnormally, his brain was otherwise healthy, as were his eyes, so he had the necessary tools to process subconscious vision. What he lacked were the circuits that cobble together a clear, conscious picture.

The research team took brain scans and magnetic resonance images to see the damage, finding no evidence of visual activity in the cortex. They also found no evidence that the patient was navigating by echolocation, the way that bats do. Both the patient, T. N., and the researcher shadowing him walked the course in silence.

The man himself was as dumbfounded as anyone that he was able to navigate the obstacle course.

“The more educated people are,” Dr. de Gelder said, “in my experience, the less likely they are to believe they have these resources that they are not aware of to avoid obstacles. And this was a very educated person.”

Scientists have long known that the brain digests what comes through the eyes using two sets of circuits. Cells in the retina project not only to the visual cortex — the destroyed regions in this man — but also to subcortical areas, which in T. N. were intact. These include the superior colliculus, which is crucial in eye movements and may have other sensory functions; and, probably, circuits running through the amygdala, which registers emotion.

In an earlier experiment, one of the authors of the new paper, Dr. Alan Pegna of Geneva University Hospitals, found that the same African doctor had emotional blindsight. When presented with images of fearful faces, he cringed subconsciously in the same way that almost everyone does, even though he could not consciously see the faces. The subcortical, primitive visual system apparently registers not only solid objects but also strong social signals.

Dr. Held, the M.I.T. neuroscientist, said that in lower mammals these midbrain systems appeared to play a much larger role in perception. In a study of rats published in the journal Science last Friday, researchers demonstrated that cells deep in the brain were in fact specialized to register certain qualities of the environment.

They include place cells, which fire when an animal passes a certain landmark, and head-direction cells, which track which way the face is pointing. But the new study also found strong evidence of what the scientists, from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, called “border cells,” which fire when an animal is close to a wall or boundary of some kind.

All of these types of neurons, which exist in some form in humans, may too have assisted T. N. in his navigation of the obstacle course.

In time, and with practice, people with brain injuries may learn to lean more heavily on such subconscious or semiconscious systems, and perhaps even begin to construct some conscious vision from them.

“It’s not clear how sharp it would be,” Dr. Held said. “Probably a vague, low-resolution spatial sense. But it might allow them to move around more independently.”

in rome, november 21 - jan 17

In a 2,000-square-foot industrial walk-in cooler, famed porterhouses have been dry-aged to perfection for more than 100 years.

By ALAN FEUER
NY TimesPublished: December 22, 2008

The New York porterhouse — that cut of meat found between the prime ribs and the sirloin of a cow — is a specialty dish as local and distinctive as the London broil, the Viennese schnitzel or the Parisian steak frites. It is thicker and more marbled than a T-bone, infinitely more tender than sirloin and, according to the greatest chefs, likely to be even more flavorful than the best filet mignon.

It is also — and consensus is fairly widespread on the point — New York City’s signature cut of beef. While the provenance of its name is steeped in doubt (some say it derives from Martin Morrison’s 19th-century porter house, or travelers’ inn, on Pearl Street), there is no mistaking that the dish has always found its truest home and fullest flower of expression in the enormous — and enormously crowded — meat box at Peter Luger Steak House, that Brooklyn gastro-institution, at 178 Broadway in Williamsburg, where porterhouses have been dry-aged to perfection for more than 100 years.

A 2,000-square-foot industrial walk-in cooler, the meat box is larger than many city domiciles, and is equally congested, packed from floor to ceiling at any given time with 30,000 pounds of raw, aging meat. Its smells are earthy and specific, a mineral combination of hazelnuts and sea salt, and the fatty pink short loins resting on the clean steel racks like the promise of abundance give the impression of a gluttony so bountiful and imminent that one can feel its reverberations coming through the floor, a full flight up, in the front of the house.

“It’s our sacred place,” said Jody Storch, the meat buyer and a granddaughter of Sol Forman, the Brooklyn manufacturer of metalwares who bought the restaurant from the Luger family for “a whimsically low bid” nearly 60 years ago. “It’s the heart and soul of our business. It’s almost like our vault.”

Buried under Peter Luger’s kitchen, the meat box does possess a stony vaultlike coolness, mechanically enhanced these days by oscillating fans and a softly humming Bohn refrigeration unit, which keeps the air chilled between 32 and 36 degrees. Dry-aging is essentially a process of controlled rot: at near-freezing temperatures, the natural enzymes in the meat deteriorate the muscle, inflicting it with tenderness and leaving behind not only that enriched nutty flavor, but also a delicate brownish crust.

With its old-world furnishings, its blunt, gruff-mannered staff of servers and a starkly (almost unattractive) industrial locale, Peter Luger, which opened in 1887, has always had a traditional appeal. It is at once a memory and an incarnation of everything old and steadfast in New York, on a par in its augustness with antiquities like the Oak Room, the waterfront, La Cosa Nostra and the corner Irish bar.

But perhaps foremost it is a present-day reminder of an era when the city actually worked: when tin and sugar were produced in its factories, when garments were assembled in its textile lofts, when cargo freighters full of sofas and bananas were unloaded at its docks. If that’s the case, then one is tempted to consider Luger’s meat box — despite its practicality — as an atavistic symbol. For down there in the basement, 15 tons of beef are literally working on themselves: They are growing richer, inching ever closer toward their day upon the table in the silent, patient labor of their toil.

The homefront during the world wars is a great place to look for strange technology and new social practices.

So, permit me a brief digression from green tech into the gender-bending agricultural and industrial story of Britain during the war told in the pages of the aforementioned 1918 National Geographics.

Judson Welliver tells us, “Everybody knows how British women have taken the places of men in industry, but nobody who has not seen can understand.”

Indeed the photos from the article are stunning. Hearty British “lumberjanes” sawing and cutting. A misty meadow of sheep attended by a “shepherdess”. The names themselves are strange, sort of like women’s college basketball team mascots: The Lady Vols, or what have you.

The most shocking photo, though, shows British women tending to 250,000 bell jars, each growing a single head of lettuce. These mini-greenhouses allowed the British to keep producing vegetables at a time when their fields would have normally lain dormant. (A larger version)

The caption reads, “UNDER 250,000 IMMENSE GLASS BELLS THIS GROUP OF WOMEN WAR WORKERS IS HELPING TO RAISE FOOD FOR GREAT BRITAIN.”

It continues:

The scene is Burhill Intensive Gardens, at Horsham, where, in compliance with the British Government’s instructions, every available inch of space is being utilized to supply British troops and civilian population with food. Under this sea of bells a quarter of a million heads of lettuce are cultivated.

Apparently this worked quite well, as Welliver tells us that in 1918, Britain “has produced foodstuffs enough to feed it for 40 of the 52 weeks,” a feat not accomplished for more than 50 years. All that food growing, though, left its mark on the land:

Sacred parks and beloved areas of grass lands have been sacrificed; but the food was produced, because there were no ships in which to import it. Not again will Britain permit itself to be dependent for its daily bread on the uncertainties of importation… The 1918 achievement would not have been so striking in normal conditions as to labor, animals, implements, fertilization, and the like; but in the circumstances of its accomplishment it is one of the war’s wonders.

Let’s leave aside for a minute all the gender stuff and just contemplate a group of people waking up in the morning for their first day at their new job, walking down the road to what used to be their favorite park, where they once strolled looking for cute boys, and seeing this “sea of bells.” This is not a field, it’s government projects for a species of plant; each and every lettuce head gets its own house to further its development and speed its way into the mouths attached to the system. And where’d they get all those Bell Jars?

That lettuce must have felt like the most special lettuce in the whole world, at least until it was plucked and boiled and eaten. Another reason to fear for your life if you find yourself living in a glass house.

It’s also sad that a quick search for “Burhill Intensive Gardens” — clearly one of the more insane experiments in agriculture you’re likely to find — comes up with a whopping 0 results. This is a PhD dissertation waiting to be written! The Bell jar and the Lettuce: An exploration at the intersection of solar energy, war, gender, and agriculture. (Perhaps this is my second book?)

Here’s the first place to look for more information: the full-text version of this 1909 book about the gardeners of Paris. Apparently, Parisian urban gardeners employed the bell jars — called cloches — to protect their plants and raise salad greens early in the season. The book, first published in 1909, was designed as a practical guide to “intensive” farming the French way. Voila:

A promoter of this system, quoted in the book, had this to say to his British compatriots about the French and their stinkin’ cloches:

We have several important things to learn from the French, and not the least among these is the winter and spring culture of salads inasmuch as enormous quantities of these are sent from Paris to our markets during the spring months… The fact that we have to be supported by our neighbours with articles that could be so easily produced in this country is almost ridiculous. It is impossible to exaggerate the importance of this culture for a nation of gardeners like the British ; and if it were the only hint that we could take from the French cultivators with advantage, it would be well worth consideration.

It might have taken a world war, but the British got with the Francoculture, even if they appear to have abandoned it in later years.

Now, we can (sort of) return to our story, picking up the thread of the bell jar in agriculture with this article on “American intensive solar gardening,” written by a couple of hippy homesteaders, Leandre Poisson and Gretchen Vogel Poisson, in the 90s:

In 1976 Lea conceived of a gardening device that met all of his design requirements: it was inexpensive, easy to build, and used resources and energy wisely. We christened this device the Solar Pod. That fall we prepared a bed and planted it with lettuce, but we didn’t place the Pod on the bed until February. When we shoveled off the snow and uncovered the bed, which we had protected with a scrap of fiberglass, to our surprise the lettuce still looked green and edible underneath all that snow.

After we set the Pod in place, we were amazed by how the soil under it heated up and how the lettuce grew . . . and grew, and grew. It was quite possible the most photographed lettuce in history. Friends came to see the experiment, and they mentioned to us that the Pod reminded them of intensive gardens in France. The following winter we discovered several books on French intensive gardening, or what the French call the Marais system.

Eventually Lea designed what he thought of as a better cloche, too. He made it out of a material called “Sunlite,” produced by the Kalwall Corporation, that was a “solar-friendly, fiberglass-reinforced plastic sheet glazing material.” They wrapped it into a cone, leaving a hole at the top, and stuck it in the ground around the plants. “The best and final configuration, coincidentally or not, resembles the profile of the great pyramids,” they write. “We christened this lightweight modern cloche the Solar Cone.”

Next thing they knew, their plants were going wild. “The hole on the top permitted the necessary gas exchange of carbon dioxide and oxygen, but inside each cone the environment resembled a miniature rain forest,” they surmised. All their success — and some appearances on the New England lecture circuit — got them thinking that maybe they’d actually come up with something new, a distinct American variety of an old European practice:

As we distilled and further refined our gardening system over the next decade, we began to realize that we were not longer translating the French system to America. We were in the process of developing our own unique system - a simple, state-of-the-art, flexible, and continuously productive method of growing food on very little land - which we named “American intensive gardening.”

While defining their agricultural system, they might have also hit upon the best short description of the mythical American: “simple, state-of-the-art, flexible, and continuously productive.”

originally posted by alex madrigal

found on bldgblog

Dorothy, a 73-year-old retired librarian, and her husband Herb, an 85-year-old retired postal clerk started buying minimal and conceptual art in New York in the early 1960s, living on Dorothy’s salary and spending Herb’s on art. Thirty years later, the Vogels had managed to accumulate over 4,000 pieces, filling every corner of their living space from the bathroom to the kitchen. “Not even a toothpick could be squeezed into the apartment,” recalls Dorothy. Their apartment was near collapse, holding way over its limit - something had to be done.

In 1992, the Vogels made headlines that shocked the art world: their entire collection was moved to the National Gallery of Art, the vast majority of it as an outright gift to the institution. Many of the works they acquired at modest prices appreciated so significantly that their collection became worth several million dollars, yet the Vogels never sold a single piece to breakdown the collection. Herb and Dorothy still live in the same apartment today- with 19 turtles, lots of fish, one cat -once completely emptied, now refilled again with piles of artworks.

originally found on tagbanger

“Teardrop”…the B side to “Sleepwalk” the huge hit.

Sleepwalk

Best remembered for their instrumental guitar classic “Sleepwalk,” brothers Santo and Johnny Farina were born and raised in Brooklyn. Inspired by the country music he heard on the radio, Santo adopted the steel guitar as a teen, and at age 14 he formed an instrumental trio, soon after writing his first original songs; in time he began teaching his younger sibling Johnny to play standard electric guitar, and they started performing as a duo. For the tiny Brooklyn label Trinity Records, Santo and Johnny debuted in 1959 with “Sleepwalk,” a hauntingly atmospheric instrumental they’d composed with the aid of their mother. The single became a major local favorite and was then licensed to the Canadian-American imprint, where it topped the Billboard pop charts in August of that year.

originally found on Steve Hadley’s blog

by Holland Cutter
NY TimesPublished: December 18, 2008

Indirect Object
Mitchell-Innes & Nash
534 West 26th Street, Chelsea
Through Jan. 10

Three of the four artists in “Indirect Object” were also part of the 2008 Whitney Biennial, a show that focused on a tendency in new art to abandon formal wholeness, polish and conceptual resolution — qualities that traditionally set art objects apart from other objects — in favor of accumulation and accident, with meanings deferred.

The historical roots of such work lie in assemblage, from Cubism to Happenings, hooked to Conceptualism. The results — materially concrete but porously organized — are made up of archives of images and ideas that seem to be in the process of being sorted out in front of you, with you invited to participate in the sorting. Process seems to be the point.

For “New Seizure #1” Amanda Ross-Ho lines up found pictures of ordinary things — workbench tools, for example — on a plain Sheetrock panel. With its perforated surface, the panel looks like a standard store-bought Pegboard. But the holes have been hand-drilled. And the panel, instead of being attached to a wall, leans against it. Deliberate and casual meet in work that looks solid but is unfixed.

Frances Stark’s work operates in a similar way with different kinds of clipped images: words. Those in “An Unfolding Soft Secretary With Finials” are harvested from junk-mail fliers, disposable things that Ms. Stark didn’t toss out but didn’t keep intact. Instead she has incorporated them almost invisibly into a collage that looks like a cross between a cleared tabletop and a Japanese calligraphic scroll: ordinary and precious, and unreadable.

Two pieces by Matt Mullican are part of a long-term project, “Learning From That Person’s Work.” One is a collage of colored-ink abstractions, the other a big tangle of words written in a kind of bubble script. Technically they are both by an alter-ego persona called That Artist, who manifests himself when Mr. Mullican is under hypnosis. Whatever the source, they are part of a vast body of art produced over decades, which Mr. Mullican considers an encompassing vision of a utopian world. Significantly, it seems to be a utopia without definable qualities and without specific goals. It is an inventory of idealism that keeps growing larger and has no known point of closure.

Cady Noland, whose art wasn’t in the 2008 Biennial but whose influence was, also works assemblage-fashion with found images, though her art is conceptually more focused than that of the other three artists in “Indirect Object.” In “Bernard, Patty, Weed and Tanya” news images of the young Patricia Hearst, her former boyfriend Steven Weed and her bodyguard and future husband, Bernard Shaw, are silk-screened on an aluminum sheet. In “Standing Cowboy” (1991) a Marlboro Man shape is cut from wood. The first piece has the slick look of commercial design; the second resembles a giant cookie. You think: Political art. Then you think: Joke. Then: Same thing. This is art about social pathology, but its take is oblique: diagnostic, not prescriptive.

The story of Ms. Noland’s career is as enigmatic as her art. In the 1990s she simply pulled up stakes and left the art world behind. Whether she left art behind too, no one seems to know. But indirectly she is still highly productive. A whole generation of younger artists carry forward her spirit. Her cumulative work seems to grow bigger the more we see it.

It has been estimated that about 90 percent of deep-sea animals are bioluminescent. Yet in many cases, scientists do not know how these animals benefit from the energy-intensive process of producing their own light. Some jellies use bioluminescence as a defense—they glow when disturbed in order to light up their predators, making their attackers vulnerable to even larger animals. A few deep-sea fishes and squids have glowing organs that look like lures, but even these animals have never been observed actually using their glowing organs to capture prey.

Note; Scientists say that their deep sea exploration’s have maybe touched 1% of the area being explored. “Every time we go down we see a wealth of new species.”

originally found on Steve Hadley’s blog

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
NY Times Published: December 17, 2008

When the human body was evolving, almost the only things we drank were breast milk for the first few years and then water, water and more water.

It would obviously have been bad if we had evolved to feel full when water was sloshing about our stomachs because then we wouldn’t have eaten our fill the next time we speared a mastodon. Today, the unfortunate result is that if you drink a bottle of 7-Up, you still don’t feel full — the body treats the liquid as empty calories, like water — and so you won’t eat any less the next time you spear a Big Mac.

That has presented a huge problem in an age of sugary drinks, and some scholars believe they have become a major source of obesity. That’s why the new soda tax proposed by Gov. David Paterson of New York is such a breakthrough.

Mr. Paterson suggested the tax — an 18 percent sales tax on soft drinks and other nondiet sugary beverages — to help raise $400 million a year to plug a hole in the state budget. But it’s also a landmark effort that, if other states follow, could help make us healthier.

Let’s break for a quiz: What was the biggest health care breakthrough in the last 40 years in the United States? Heart bypasses? CAT scans and M.R.I.’s? New cancer treatments?

No, it was the cigarette tax. Every 10 percent price increase on cigarettes reduced sales by about 3 percent over all, and 7 percent among teenagers, according to the 2005 book “Prescription for a Healthy Nation.” Just the 1983 increase in the federal tax on cigarettes saved 40,000 lives per year.

In effect, the most promising cure for lung cancer didn’t emerge from a medical research lab but from money-grubbing politicians. Likewise, the best cure for obesity may turn out to be not a pill but a tax.

These days, sugary drinks are to American health roughly what tobacco was a generation ago. A tax would shift some consumers, especially kids, to diet drinks or water.

“Soft drinks are linked to diabetes and obesity in the way that tobacco is to lung cancer,” says Barry Popkin, a nutrition specialist at the University of North Carolina and author of the excellent new book, “The World Is Fat.” He warns that the cola industry will spend vast sums fighting the proposed tax.

One of industry’s objections is that soft drinks aren’t the only problem. That’s true, and I’d love to see a “Twinkie tax” as well. But evidence is accumulating that sugary drinks are a major contributor to obesity because of the evolutionary heritage I mentioned at the outset: Except for soups, liquid calories don’t register with the body, according to Professor Popkin and other specialists.

If you have a snack, even something unhealthy like potato chips, you’ll eat less at your next meal. But have a Coke, and despite all those calories, you’ll still eat just as much. Indeed, according to some studies, you’ll actually eat more.

“These findings raise the possibility that soft drinks increase hunger, decrease satiety or simply calibrate people to a high level of sweetness that generalizes to preferences in other foods,” said a peer-reviewed article last year in the American Journal of Public Health.

The average American consumes about 35 gallons of nondiet soda each year and gets far more added sugar from soda than from desserts.

Barack Obama has pledged to move toward a system of universal health coverage, and Democrats mostly see health care reform as a matter of providing access to doctors. Access and universal coverage are indeed essential, but there’s only so much doctors can do in this environment.

One priority must be a public health campaign to change social behavior. A starting point is to recognize that risky teen behavior these days can involve not just alcohol, drugs or sex but also extra-large Cokes.

One new study estimates that 24 million Americans now have diabetes, more than four times the number in 1980. The total direct and indirect cost to Americans is $218 billion each year — an average of $1,900 per American household. Each year, diabetes contributes to the deaths of more than 200,000 Americans.

Part of the solution must come from reforming agriculture so that we stop subsidizing corn that ends up as high fructose corn syrup inside soft drinks. Unfortunately, Mr. Obama on Wednesday chose Tom Vilsack, the former governor of Iowa who has longstanding ties to agribusiness interests, as agriculture secretary — his weakest selection so far.

The soft-drink industry will throw enormous resources into defeating the proposed New York tax on sugary drinks. We should stand behind Governor Paterson’s bold gesture. He is blazing a path that other states should follow.

Losing weight is never easy, but one of the most effective diets would start with a soft drink tax.

at martin janda vienna

found on matt connor’s blog andahalf

found on cabinessence

By DAVID BROOKS
NY Times Published: December 15, 2008

All day long, you are affected by large forces. Genes influence your intelligence and willingness to take risks. Social dynamics unconsciously shape your choices. Instantaneous perceptions set off neural reactions in your head without you even being aware of them.

Over the past few years, scientists have made a series of exciting discoveries about how these deep patterns influence daily life. Nobody has done more to bring these discoveries to public attention than Malcolm Gladwell.

Gladwell’s important new book, “Outliers,” seems at first glance to be a description of exceptionally talented individuals. But in fact, it’s another book about deep patterns. Exceptionally successful people are not lone pioneers who created their own success, he argues. They are the lucky beneficiaries of social arrangements.

As Gladwell told Jason Zengerle of New York magazine: “The book’s saying, ‘Great people aren’t so great. Their own greatness is not the salient fact about them. It’s the kind of fortunate mix of opportunities they’ve been given.’ ”

Gladwell’s noncontroversial claim is that some people have more opportunities than other people. Bill Gates was lucky to go to a great private school with its own computer at the dawn of the information revolution. Gladwell’s more interesting claim is that social forces largely explain why some people work harder when presented with those opportunities.

Chinese people work hard because they grew up in a culture built around rice farming. Tending a rice paddy required working up to 3,000 hours a year, and it left a cultural legacy that prizes industriousness. Many upper-middle-class American kids are raised in an atmosphere of “concerted cultivation,” which inculcates a fanatical devotion to meritocratic striving.

In Gladwell’s account, individual traits play a smaller role in explaining success while social circumstances play a larger one. As he told Zengerle, “I am explicitly turning my back on, I think, these kind of empty models that say, you know, you can be whatever you want to be. Well, actually, you can’t be whatever you want to be. The world decides what you can and can’t be.”

As usual, Gladwell intelligently captures a larger tendency of thought — the growing appreciation of the power of cultural patterns, social contagions, memes. His book is being received by reviewers as a call to action for the Obama age. It could lead policy makers to finally reject policies built on the assumption that people are coldly rational utility-maximizing individuals. It could cause them to focus more on policies that foster relationships, social bonds and cultures of achievement.

Yet, I can’t help but feel that Gladwell and others who share his emphasis are getting swept away by the coolness of the new discoveries. They’ve lost sight of the point at which the influence of social forces ends and the influence of the self-initiating individual begins.

Most successful people begin with two beliefs: the future can be better than the present, and I have the power to make it so. They were often showered by good fortune, but relied at crucial moments upon achievements of individual will.

Most successful people also have a phenomenal ability to consciously focus their attention. We know from experiments with subjects as diverse as obsessive-compulsive disorder sufferers and Buddhist monks that people who can self-consciously focus attention have the power to rewire their brains.

Control of attention is the ultimate individual power. People who can do that are not prisoners of the stimuli around them. They can choose from the patterns in the world and lengthen their time horizons. This individual power leads to others. It leads to self-control, the ability to formulate strategies in order to resist impulses. If forced to choose, we would all rather our children be poor with self-control than rich without it.

It leads to resilience, the ability to persevere with an idea even when all the influences in the world say it can’t be done. A common story among entrepreneurs is that people told them they were too stupid to do something, and they set out to prove the jerks wrong.

It leads to creativity. Individuals who can focus attention have the ability to hold a subject or problem in their mind long enough to see it anew.

Gladwell’s social determinism is a useful corrective to the Homo economicus view of human nature. It’s also pleasantly egalitarian. The less successful are not less worthy, they’re just less lucky. But it slights the centrality of individual character and individual creativity. And it doesn’t fully explain the genuine greatness of humanity’s outliers. As the classical philosophers understood, examples of individual greatness inspire achievement more reliably than any other form of education. If Gladwell can reduce William Shakespeare to a mere product of social forces, I’ll buy 25 more copies of “Outliers” and give them away in Times Square.

By MICHAEL BRICK
NY Times Published: December 15, 2008

SEATTLE — He had been called a vagabond, a recluse and a schemer, a cantankerous mountain man hiding his little black book of secret climbing techniques from the world. In seven decades, he had claimed more virgin ascents than any mountaineer alive. Some ascribed his feats to vengeance of a long-ago slight, others to the murder of his own fears. He was said to howl at tourists. His past was the stuff of lore, his plans the stuff of mystery.

Then, this fall, word of his next expedition spread among the worldwide network of contacts whose telephone numbers he kept scribbled on notecards wrapped with rubber bands in the gearbox pocket of his station wagon. The plan was announced in disarmingly casual fashion.

“Hi everyone, Fred Beckey called yesterday and he is going to northern Spain in early to mid-December,” began one posting this autumn at an online rock climbing forum. “Might be a long shot, but he’s looking for a partner to hook up with in Barcelona.”

Wolfgang Paul Heinrich Beckey: The name, shortened and altered when his family had emigrated from pre-war Düsseldorf to the Pacific Northwest, resounded across the archives of mountaineering journals, the pages of literary guidebooks and the maps of newly discovered peaks. His own reluctant namesake, Mount Beckey, rises some 8,500 feet in a largely uncharted subrange near the Cathedral Spires of southeastern Alaska.

By the turn of the latest century, any self-respecting young climber could recite the high points of the Fred Beckey legend: Born in 1923 to a father who practiced medicine and a mother who performed arias, a teenage Fred rejected the life of a city intellectual for the pursuit of wild things. Learning to climb in the Boy Scouts, he joined the first ascent of Mount Despair in 1939.

As a young man, Beckey earned a master’s degree in business administration and entered the printing industry, but the assignments he accepted, like driving a delivery truck, traded career ambitions for precious time.

From his first expeditions in the North Cascades, Beckey cast himself as a renegade. Defined by defiance, he ascended peaks termed unclimbable by the Mountaineers, a local outfit renowned for classes and publications promoting the sport. In return, the Mountaineers rejected his guidebook manuscripts.

Many of the climbers of Beckey’s era, their lives staked on trust and cooperation, grew wary of his gruff manner, his outlier reputation, his intransigence. He was labeled a showboat, a womanizer and worse. When his partners were hurt or killed on expeditions, including Charles Shiverick in the Coast Range of British Columbia in 1947 and Bruno Spirig in the Himalayas in 1955, Beckey was criticized. In the early 1960s, as the first American team was assembled to summit Mount Everest, no one invited Beckey.

Setting out with his brother, Helmy, Beckey put up new routes across Wyoming, Colorado, California, British Columbia and Alaska. Though he preferred Alpine scenery, he climbed desert rock formations, icy crags and boulders, the Gunks, the Bitterroots and the Bugaboos.

As other mountaineers began to focus on repeating ascents for speed, Beckey roamed Europe, China and the North American backcountry in search of unconquered peaks. By his own account, he climbed Mount Rainier, a two-hour drive from Seattle, only five times. In the summer of 1954 alone, he scaled Mounts McKinley, Hunter and Deborah in the Alaska Range, an accomplishment that became known as his Triple Crown of First Ascents. By 1963, when he logged 26 first ascents in a single year, his legend was secure.

“He’s been everywhere, he’s done amazing things everywhere,” said Dave Burdick, known as Alpine Dave, a 28-year-old climber from Seattle. “And it’s just this drive he has.”

But in the fullness of time, Beckey’s legacy emerged as something grander than a list of records. That drive, born of a wanderlust once characterized as recklessness, fermented into a sort of sublime seeking. It appeared most vividly in his guidebook prose, a stirring amalgam of technical analysis, historical insight, geographical research and a sense of wonderment.

“If Thoreau and Emerson describe the transcendental American theme, then Beckey — after Ahab, akin to Kerouac — describes the oddly manic drive to scale and map and detail the wilderness in a modern way,” said Steve Costie, executive director of the Mountaineers, which eventually accepted Beckey as a member. “Almost adversarial; never transcendental.”

Far past retirement age, Beckey has kept hard to the road, recruiting younger companions to split the cost of travel.

“In my climbing lifetime, he was well known for being on the trailing edge of his career — that was 30 years ago, too — but still being ambitious,” said John Middendorf, 49, a onetime climbing partner, speaking by telephone from Tasmania. “His mode of operation was to invite climbers on expeditions, things he wanted to do but couldn’t necessarily do.”

This fall, despite the crumbling economy and the weak dollar, the chance to join the 85-year-old Beckey in Europe became a source of temptation for climbers around the world.

“I’m essentially going because, yeah, I like to climb, never been to Spain, but I’m mostly going to hang out with Beckey,” said Diane Kearns, 49, an instructor from Winchester, Va. “ The opportunity to get to know Fred is tremendous. He’s a legend in his own time.”

A few miles northeast of downtown Seattle, on a narrow lane of wood pines and berry trees, where the bumper stickers of parked cars promote Democrats, motorcycling and the concept of coexistence, an open garage door exposed stacks of mountain gear. Beside a “No Soliciting” sign, a lean, hunched figure emerged from a clapboard house. He extended a greeting: two thumbs up.

His breathing was labored, his hearing aid out of commission. His long fingers, swabbed with paint, turned slightly inward. His lips folded over his teeth and his silvery blue eyes were rimmed red. He wore a zippered Patagonia jacket, a huge digital watch and a ball cap that read, “Red River Gorge Climbing Coalition.”

Inside the kitchen, coffee was brewing. From the radio Don Henley sang about how those days are gone forever and he should just let them go. Where other people’s houses might display portraits of family members, framed pictures of mountain peaks covered the walls here. The table was cluttered with photographs and notes for a new manuscript, a career retrospective to be entitled Classic Climbs.

“You’ve got to be physically pretty strong to be any good at it at all,” Beckey said. “You’ve got to have a hard-core mental attitude. You’ve got to have the right mantra. You’ve got to have dedication, a sense of security, safety and sensitivity with your partners, and a good sense of balance. It’s a combination of many, many things. You need to have the capability or desire to accept a certain amount of risk. A lot of it is maybe spiritual, not a religious type, but you have to have an affinity with the outdoors.”

To complete his opus, he said, a handful of ascents remained, including routes up Mount Monarch in the Coast Range, Longs Peak in Rocky Mountain National Park and Mount Assiniboine in the Canadian Rockies. The coming European trip he ascribed partly to whim, partly to a desire to visit his brother, who has returned home to Germany.

“One of my reasons to do it is I hate Christmas shopping,” Beckey said. “I’m single, I don’t have kids, it’s going to be raining here.”

At late morning, he drove down to the new waterfront headquarters of the Mountaineers. As officials showed him an outdoor climbing gym constructed of composite rock and plastic complete with a short trail of rocks and an eight-inch layer of shredded tires designed to cushion a fall, two young women backed away in reverence, snapping photographs and speaking in hushed tones of “Mr. Beckey.”

Later, in a reflective moment, he would say: “You’re putting yourself on the line. Man used to put himself on the line all the time. Nowadays we’re protected by the police, fire, everything. There’s not much adventure left. Unless you look for it.”

But for now, Beckey dug around inside the manmade crevices, finding his grip, pulling himself up a foot, two feet, five feet into the air. Asked by the Mountaineers about his next expedition, he said he did not know. Then he slid down onto the bed of shredded rubber, remarked upon the fineness of the weather and walked up the hill and away.

George Brecht performing his “Incidental Music” in Amsterdam in 1961. Many of his “pieces” consisted just of instructions.

By KEN JOHNSON
NY Times Published: December 15, 2008

George Brecht, a core member of Fluxus, the loosely affiliated international group of playful Conceptual artists that emerged in the early 1960s, died on Dec. 5 in Cologne, Germany. He was 82 and lived in Cologne.

He died in his sleep, said Geoffrey Hendricks, a friend, who was also a Fluxus member. He had been in failing health for several years.

Mr. Brecht came of age as an artist in the late 1950s, when Abstract Expressionism and the cult of the heroic creative genius were ascendant. Inspired by the Conceptual art of Marcel Duchamp and the experimental music of John Cage, he began to imagine a more modest, slyly provocative kind of art that would focus attention on the perceptual and cognitive experience of the viewer.

American, European and Asian artists who were thinking along similar lines included Dick Higgins, Alison Knowles, Ben Vautier, Nam June Paik and George Maciunas, who in 1962 came up with the name Fluxus for this confederation of like-minded Conceptualists.

Like many other Fluxus artists, Mr. Brecht created assemblages consisting of ordinary objects in boxes and cabinets, as well as arrangements that often included chairs. He also made paintings and sculptures that played with language, like a piece with white plastic letters spelling “sign of the times.”

His most important and original contribution was a form he called the “event score,” which typically was printed on a small white card that he would mail to friends. The event score consisted of a title followed by eccentric instructions. The directive for “String Quartet,” for example, read simply, “Shaking hands.” The musicians would perform it by doing just that.

One of his most famous pieces was “Drip Music,” in which “a source of water and an empty vessel are arranged so that the water falls into the vessel.” Performances of “Drip Music” can be seen on Youtube.com.

He created event scores for sculptures as well. Instructions for “Three Arrangements,” for example, read, “on a shelf/on a clothes tree/black object white chair.”

Mr. Brecht said that he did not care if any of his event scores were realized and that he did not think that there was a correct way to perform one. He once wrote that his events were “like little enlightenments I wanted to communicate to my friends who would know what to do with them.”

Mr. Brecht was born George MacDiarmid on Aug. 27, 1926, in New York. His father, a flutist who played in the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra and the NBC Radio Orchestra, died when his son was 8. Mr. Brecht changed his last name to Brecht — not in reference to Bertolt Brecht, but because he liked the sound of the name — around 1945 while serving in the United States Army in Germany.

After the war Mr. Brecht studied chemistry at the Philadelphia College of Pharmacy and Science in Philadelphia, and he supported himself as a research chemist from 1950 to 1965.

In the mid-1950s, following the lead of Jackson Pollock, Mr. Brecht produced paintings using chance operations and materials like bed sheets, ink and marbles. In 1958-59, he attended a class in experimental music composition taught by John Cage at what was then the New School for Social Research in New York. Soon he was producing compositions even more radical than those of Mr. Cage.

In the early 1960s, Mr. Brecht taught in what was then the unusually progressive art department of Rutgers University, along with Mr. Hendricks, Allan Kaprow (who became known as an inventor of the “happening”) and Robert Watts, who also became a Fluxus artist.

Mr. Brecht’s first solo exhibition, “Toward Events: An Arrangement,” was at Reuben Gallery in New York in 1959. During the next five years, he participated in many group exhibitions and performances in New York. His work “Repository” (1961), a wall cabinet containing a pocket watch, a thermometer, rubber balls, toothbrushes and other objects, was included in “The Art of Assemblage,” the famous 1961 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, and the museum later bought it. Nine years later, Mr. Brecht was included in “Information,” another landmark show at the Modern.

In 1965, Mr. Brecht left New York. He lived in Rome, the South of France, London and Düsseldorf, Germany, before settling in Cologne in 1972.

He is survived by his wife, Hertha, and a son, Eric, who lives in Southern California.

Mr. Brecht’s work was especially appreciated in Europe. He was included in Documenta, the giant exhibition in Kassel, Germany, in 1972 and 1977. In 2005 the Museum Ludwig in Cologne organized a comprehensive career retrospective, which traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Barcelona.

Mr. Brecht once described his art as a way of “ensuring that the details of everyday life, the random constellations of objects that surround us, stop going unnoticed.”

A worker preparing cod (that’s Mr. Cod, to you) at the Rui Costa e Sousa plant in Ílhavo, Portugal. Frozen cod is gaining popularity.

By ELAINE SCIOLINO
NY Times Published: December 15, 2008

ÍLHAVO, Portugal — Cod, the salted, cured, dried, smelly kind, may be the closest thing this country has to a national symbol.

Bacalhau, as the fish is called here, is to Christmas Eve in Portugal what turkey is to Thanksgiving in America. Treasured since the 16th century, when Portuguese fishermen first brought it back from Newfoundland, it bore the nickname fiel amigo — faithful friend. Its correct preparation is a source of pride, a sign of respect for family values.

Every Portuguese, it seems, likes to boast that there are 1,000 recipes for bacalhau and that the people here eat more of it than do those anywhere else in the world.

“The greatest friend of Portugal is bacalhau,” said Fernando Santos, an officer of the Friends of Bacalhau, a club that has 46 chapters around the world, hosts salt cod lunches and distributes cod-decorated neckties, pins, baseball caps, T-shirts and flags. “It has always come from afar, but it is part of our identity.”

So as Christmas approaches, the rush is on to find the best-quality salt cod at the best price before supplies dwindle and prices inevitably soar. But the preparation — a ritual of soaking stiff, smelly slabs of fish in cold water that must be changed every few hours for two to three days before cooking — is less romantic than it once was. These days, more and more Portuguese are opting for frozen bacalhau.

“Frozen is the best! Frozen is the future!” said Gonçalo Guedes Vaz, managing director of Rui Costa e Sousa, a major producer of both frozen and traditional bacalhau, at the company’s state-of-the-art processing plant in this northwestern port city. “Women have no time to stay home and soak. So we do the job for them. Traditional cod soon will be a thing of the past.”

Frozen, ready-to-cook bacalhau — fish that has been salted and dried, then soaked and prepared like traditional bacalhau and then frozen — accounts for as much as 25 percent of the bacalhau sold in Portugal. In the year and a half since Rui Costa e Sousa has been freezing part of its catch, frozen cod has grown to about 2,000 tons, or 17 percent of its production. Within five years, the company says, it wants that figure to hit 50 percent.

While one part of the plant is devoted to processing traditional salt cod, Mr. Guedes Vaz revels in showing visitors the operations of the frozen food side of the business. Computers keep records on every fish that passes through.

In one vast hall, an army of women in hairnets and rubber gloves furiously sort, grade, wash, gut and scan mountains of cod. In another, shovel-wielding women cover the cod with salt.

The cod sits in salt brine for at least 21 days, then is put through a sophisticated drying process. In a bathing room, 90 tons of cod can be soaked simultaneously in eight vast bins of water that are monitored by computers for temperature and salt content.

In other rooms, lasers help workers cut the soaked and desalted fish into finished products, from precision-weighed steaks for grilling to shredded pieces to cook with onions and potatoes. The hardiest workers don thermal vests for the tough assignment in the finishing rooms, where frozen cod moves on conveyor belts to be glazed, labeled and packaged in plastic.

“Look at those loins!” Mr. Guedes Vaz said. “We do this much better than you can do it at home. We have total control.”

To prove it, Mr. Guedes Vaz has set up a small corporate dining room, where Isabel Santos, a chef with no formal training but a lot of loyalty, prepares the company’s premier frozen brand, Sr. Bacalhau (Mr. Cod), in half a dozen different ways.

“I used to make bacalhau the old-fashioned way, but since I discovered Senhor Bacalhau here, I am faithful only to him,” she said.

The divide is on display in the retail markets in Lisbon, the capital. In the city’s main supermarket, hundreds of salt-encrusted bacalhau piled high in one section compete with vast frozen cases of bacalhau in another.

They receive equal praise. “I really don’t see much difference in the quality,” said Ana Dinis, the fish department saleswoman. “Frozen is more expensive, but frankly, less salty, more reliable.”

Indeed, it is easy to work hard on bacalhau and still get it wrong. If the soaking temperature is too cold, the fibers of the fish’s flesh do not open up properly and the finished product will be too salty. If the cod is soaked too long, it will turn spongy.

Every family has a horror story of the relative who spent days preparing bacalhau only to serve it too dry or too salty. In other words, inedible.

The changing culinary habits of the Portuguese are mourned as a loss of a part of the country’s culture. “Frozen tastes nothing like real bacalhau, properly prepared,” said José Bento dos Santos, a winemaker and the host of a television cooking show. “I doubt the next generation will know it, just as it will not know the taste of real strawberries or melons.”

That view is shared on Rua do Arsenal, the old working-class shopping street for traditional bacalhau in the Baixa section of Lisbon. Although many of the shops have shut in the past 25 years, there is still so much salt cod here that the street greets passers-by with the smell of salt brine and pungent old fish, sort of like the smell of old socks.

“I never ate the frozen stuff but I hear from people who have that it’s disgusting,” said Fernando Pereira, who sells nine grades of the stiff, salt-caked whole fish in his shop, King of Bacalhau, alongside dusty bottles of port, absinthe, whiskey and olive oil, open sacks of beans and grains and packages of cod cheeks, face and tongue.

During the four decades of António de Oliveira Salazar’s dictatorship, cod was the country’s cheapest source of protein. Cod fishing was subsidized by the state. Cod fishermen were revered as national heroes; cod was the staple for good Catholics on Fridays and holy days.

In the past 15 years, strict quotas limiting cod fishing have driven up prices and made cod a luxury for the working class. Many upscale customers, meanwhile, have turned to supermarkets. Mr. Pereira’s business has declined by 50 percent. The move to frozen cod has only made things worse.

“I am suffering, but I cannot sell the business,” he said. “It’s a family tradition.”

\Kiosk, 2006. Dornbirn, Austria. Found on directorioarco.blogspot.com/