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/

Akira Kurosawa retrospective featuring Kurosawa’s Original Artwork through December 14 at Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Science

Amanda Ross Ho, Matt Mullican, Frances Stark, and Cady Noland at Mitchell-Innes and Nash December 2-Januuary 10

Elizebeth Colbert
The New Yorker December 11

This past summer, Steven Chu, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist who currently heads Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory—and who has been tapped to be the next Secretary of Energy—delivered a talk on climate change and how to combat it. Consider, Chu said, the refrigerator.

Refrigerators consume a lot of energy; all alone, they account for almost fifteen per cent of the average home’s electricity use. In the mid nineteen-seventies, California—the state Chu now lives in—set about establishing the country’s first refrigerator-efficiency standards. Refrigerator manufacturers, of course, fought them. The standards couldn’t be met, they said, at anything like a price consumers could afford. California imposed the standards anyway, and then what happened, as Chu observed, is that “the manufacturers had to assign the job to the engineers, instead of to the lobbyists.” The following decade, standards were imposed for refrigerators nationwide. Since then, the size of the average American refrigerator has increased by more than ten per cent, while the price, in inflation-adjusted dollars, has been cut in half. Meanwhile, energy use has dropped by two-thirds.

The transition to more efficient fridges, Chu pointed out, has saved the equivalent of all the energy generated in the United States by wind turbines and solar cells. “I cannot impress upon you how important energy efficiency is,” he said.

Chu is an inspired choice to lead the Energy Department, but he’s clearly going to have his work cut out for him. Among the many groups that have failed to absorb the lessons of the refrigerator are Congress and its new ward, the American auto industry.

The same day that word of Chu’s appointment began to leak out, Congress backed away from a provision of the auto-bailout package that would have forced the automakers to abide by new efficiency standards that California—once again—is trying to set. California’s Clean Car rules would require vehicles sold in the state to become roughly twenty per cent more efficient by 2020. The U.S. automakers have been fighting the standards in court for years. Some drafts of the bailout bill would have forced them to drop these lawsuits in return for federal assistance; the Bush Administration, however, said that it would not agree to any package with that provision.

At this point, it looks like the legislation doesn’t have enough votes in the Senate to pass. But the saga isn’t over. Even if the measure is approved, Congress will almost certainly have to return to the issue next year, as the money in it—fourteen billion dollars—falls far short of what nearly every knowledgeable source says is needed to keep the automakers out of bankruptcy. One can only hope that, by that point, Chu has had more success getting his message out. If taxpayers are going to foot the bill for the automakers, at the very least their dollars ought to be going to the engineers, instead of to the lobbyists.

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
NY Times Published: December 10, 2008

As Barack Obama ponders whom to pick as agriculture secretary, he should reframe the question. What he needs is actually a bold reformer in a position renamed “secretary of food.”

A Department of Agriculture made sense 100 years ago when 35 percent of Americans engaged in farming. But today, fewer than 2 percent are farmers. In contrast, 100 percent of Americans eat.

Renaming the department would signal that Mr. Obama seeks to move away from a bankrupt structure of factory farming that squanders energy, exacerbates climate change and makes Americans unhealthy — all while costing taxpayers billions of dollars.

“We’re subsidizing the least healthy calories in the supermarket — high fructose corn syrup and hydrogenated soy oil, and we’re doing very little for farmers trying to grow real food,” notes Michael Pollan, author of such books as “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” and “In Defense of Food.”

The Agriculture Department — and the agriculture committees in Congress — have traditionally been handed over to industrial farming interests by Democrats and Republicans alike. The farm lobby uses that perch to inflict unhealthy food on American children in school-lunch programs, exacerbating our national crisis with diabetes and obesity.

But let’s be clear. The problem isn’t farmers. It’s the farm lobby — hijacked by industrial operators — and a bipartisan tradition of kowtowing to it.

I grew up on a farm in Yamhill, Ore., where my family grew cherries and timber and raised sheep and, at times, small numbers of cattle, hogs and geese. One of my regrets is that my kids don’t have the chance to grow up on a farm as well.

Yet the Agriculture Department doesn’t support rural towns like Yamhill; it bolsters industrial operations that have lobbying clout. The result is that family farms have to sell out to larger operators, undermining small towns.

One measure of the absurdity of the system: Every year you, the American taxpayer, send me a check for $588 in exchange for me not growing crops on timberland I own in Oregon (I forward the money to a charity). That’s right. The Agriculture Department pays a New York journalist not to grow crops in a forest in Oregon.

Modern confinement operations are less like farms than like meat assembly lines. They are dazzlingly efficient in some ways, but they use vast amounts of grain, as well as low-level antibiotics to reduce infections — and the result is a public health threat from antibiotic-resistant infections.

An industrial farm with 5,000 hogs produces as much waste as a town with 20,000 people. But while the town is required to have a sewage system, the industrial farm isn’t.

“They look profitable because we’re paying for their wastes,” notes Robert P. Martin, executive director of the Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production. “And then there’s the cost of antibiotic resistance to the economy as a whole.”

One study suggests that these large operations receive, in effect, a $24 subsidy for each hog raised. We face an obesity crisis and a budget crisis, and we subsidize bacon?

The need for change is increasingly obvious, for health, climate and even humanitarian reasons. California voters last month passed a landmark referendum (over the farm lobby’s furious protests) that will require factory farms to give minimum amounts of space to poultry and livestock. Society is becoming concerned not only with little boys who abuse cats but also with tycoons whose business model is abusing farm animals.

An online petition that can be found at www.fooddemocracynow.org calls for a reformist pick for agriculture secretary — and names six terrific candidates, such as Chuck Hassebrook, a reformer in Nebraska. On several occasions in the campaign, Mr. Obama made comments showing a deep understanding of food issues, but the names that people in the food industry say are under consideration for agriculture secretary represent the problem more than the solution.

Change we can believe in?

The most powerful signal Mr. Obama could send would be to name a reformer to a renamed position. A former secretary of agriculture, John Block, said publicly the other day that the agency should be renamed “the Department of Food, Agriculture and Forestry.” And another, Ann Veneman, told me that she believes it should be renamed, “Department of Food and Agriculture.” I’d prefer to see simply “Department of Food,” giving primacy to America’s 300 million eaters.

As Mr. Pollan told me: “Even if you don’t think agriculture is a high priority, given all the other problems we face, we’re not going to make progress on the issues Obama campaigned on — health care, climate change and energy independence — unless we reform agriculture.”

Your move, Mr. President-elect.

Eileen Quinlan
Downtime
Dec 14-Jan 24
opening Sunday, December 14, 6-8pm

Overduin and Kite

By MATT HIGGINS
NY Times Published: December 10, 2008

HALEIWA, Hawaii — In July, Christy Manuel arrived at the United States Open of Surfing in Huntington Beach, Calif., fed a parking meter for 20 minutes of time and walked to the shore where her daughter Malia, 14, was competing in a quarterfinal heat.

“I didn’t expect to be there all day,” Christy said.

But then Malia Manuel upset the former world champion Sofia Mulanovich, 25, to advance, sending her mother racing back to the meter.

“The guy was giving me a ticket,” she said. “I go, ‘Whoa, we’re still here.’ ”

Malia, now 15, of Kauai, Hawaii, won two more heats that day to become the youngest champion since the Open began in 1959. Coco Ho, 17, finished second.

Those two teenagers belong to a new generation of women who are shaking up the professional surfing establishment. Most are still in high school and remain a few years from competing full-time for prize money. But with a combination of powerful moves and progressive aerials, they have signaled a new era of performance in the sport.

“It’s definitely a changing of the guard in women’s surfing,” said Wayne Bartholomew, president of the Association of Surfing Professionals, the sanctioning body that runs the men’s and women’s professional tours.

In November, Carissa Moore, 16, won the Reef Hawaiian Pro at Haleiwa, on Oahu, by defeating the seven-time world champion Layne Beachley in the final matchup.

“We’re seeing the likes of Carissa Moore blow minds with her tailslides and the like,” said Beachley, 36, who will retire from full-time competition after the Billabong Pro Maui, which began Wednesday.

“I’ve never landed an aerial in my life,” Beachley said. “So I feel like I’m retiring at just the right time.”

Moore, of Honolulu, and her generation have looked to the men’s ranks for inspiration. “We’re maybe experimenting with our surfing a little bit, trying different things and really looking at what the guys are doing,” she said.

Manuel said she regularly surfed with boys back at her home break on Kauai. “It’s made me stronger, for sure, because I just grew up surfing with all my bros,” she said.

The new generation came of age at a time when women’s surfing has gained in popularity.

“When I started, it wasn’t really acceptable to be a woman in the water,” Beachley said. “Whereas now it’s actually encouraged, accepted and respected.”

That is true not only in Hawaii, but worldwide. The next generation includes Courtney Conlogue, 17, of Santa Ana, Calif.; and the Australians Sally Fitzgibbons, 17, and Stephanie Gilmore, 20, who clinched her second consecutive women’s world title last week at the Roxy Pro at Sunset Beach on Oahu.

“What’s happening in women’s surfing is pretty much the most exciting thing in surfing right now,” Bartholomew said. “There’s going to be unbelievable rivalries developing through the years. The actual performance levels are just going through the roof.”

In competition, the contrast between the new school and the veterans can be striking.

“I guess what’s different is in a heat we’re trying to combine power and flow and speed and all these different things,” Moore said. “And also at the same time add a little flair and a couple different tricks and stuff.”

Some note differences in attitudes, too. During the final of the Reef Hawaiian Pro last month, Ho dropped in on a wave Beachley was surfing, cut her off and launched an aerial.

Ho was cleared of any wrongdoing by the judges. But the move rankled Beachley, who believed it deprived her of a potential winning wave and demonstrated a lack of respect.

“I think it’s great that they’re taking it to world champs and challenging us,” Beachley, a native of Australia, said. “But I just think it’s a level of immaturity and insecurity if you have to resort to tactics like that.”

Moore defended Ho and her fellow teenagers, saying: “I actually read a lot of different comments that said it seems like this generation is aggressive. They are doing things that aren’t cool. I was like, wow. I think most of it is just what you do. It’s part of being a competitor.”

Moore said of Beachley: “We all have a lot of respect for her. And she’s a legend. But when you’re in a heat, you have your competitive hunger.”

Rather than being shunted aside, Beachley said, she believes that now is the time for her to relinquish her role as a caretaker for women’s surfing and make way for the youngsters.

She will continue to compete in select events and run her signature surfing event, the Beachley Classic, held on Manly Beach in Sydney, Australia, each October, which offers the richest prize purse on the women’s professional tour.

“The talent of these young girls, and also the tenacity and the hunger, gives me the confidence to leave it in their hands,” Beachley said.

For now, Moore appears uncomfortable speaking on behalf of her sport.

“I don’t know if I’ll ever be that,” she said about becoming an ambassador for women’s surfing. “It would definitely be an honor.”

Still, she has proved to be a leader in other ways. She left her sponsor, the surf apparel maker Roxy, to sign deals with Nike 6.0 and Red Bull in November. A representative from Nike declined to discuss the value of the contract. But a professional women’s surfer being coveted by mainstream sponsors has symbolic meaning for the sport.

Despite her new deals, Moore is still a few years away from becoming a full-fledged professional. A junior at the private Punahou School in Honolulu, she plans to complete her high school education first.

“The school part is really, really important,” she said. “It mostly keeps me grounded and you always have something to lean back on in the future if surfing doesn’t work out.”

And there are lessons with applications to surfing, too.

“In science we’re learning about evolution,” she said. “Surfing is survival of the fittest. We’ve got to adapt, evolve, just stay in the top.”

The EDAR - Everyone Deserves A Roof, a cross between a shopping cart and a pop-up camper, is a step up.

By Martha Groves
LA Times December 10, 2008

Christopher Raynor’s father kicked him out when he was 13, after his stepmother interrupted an orgy in his bedroom and the teen jammed a broom handle against her throat.

Now 40, Raynor has lived much of his life in the rough. His current domicile is a patch of dirt behind some pampas grass and coastal sage scrub where Pacific Coast Highway meets Temescal Canyon Road, in the backyard of Pacific Palisades.

Until a few weeks ago, he dozed on a thin mattress in the open air. Now he beds down in a snug mobile shelter called an EDAR (short for Everyone Deserves a Roof), a covered contraption that looks like the offspring of a shopping cart and a pop-up camper.

Raynor’s mother died of stomach cancer, his father was shot to death, and he himself has served time in jail. He spends much of each day intoxicated and grimy. He despises most people.

But he likes his EDAR.

“This is one of the greatest damn gifts you could ever give to anybody,” he says.

The EDAR is the brainchild of Peter Samuelson, a philanthropist and film producer whose credits include “Revenge of the Nerds” and “Arlington Road.” His life could hardly be more different from Raynor’s.

Samuelson grew up in a middle-class London household where performing charitable work was expected. His father, Sydney, founded Samuelson Film Service, a supplier of film and TV equipment, and in 1995 was knighted for his service to the British film industry.

Peter Samuelson went to Cambridge University on a full scholarship, earned a master’s degree in English literature and became fluent in French. He started in the film business as an interpreter for U.S. companies operating in Africa and Europe.

In 1975, after living off and on in Los Angeles, he settled here permanently, married an accountant and had four children.

“If you become an American on purpose, it’s a very special thing,” Samuelson, 57, said over breakfast at Nate’n Al deli in Beverly Hills. “America is not just a land of opportunity but also of personal responsibility. There’s an obligation to lift up society.”

In 1982, that obligation smacked Samuelson in the face when a cousin in London introduced him to a boy with an inoperable brain tumor. The child’s great wish was to see Disneyland. Samuelson and his cousin footed the bill to fly the boy and his mother to Los Angeles for a two-week whirlwind of wish fulfillment.

“He went back to London clutching his Mickey Mouse ears and died,” Samuelson said.

The experience prompted Samuelson to start the Starlight Foundation, an international charity that provides psychological and social services to seriously ill children and their families.

In 1990, he brought together director Steven Spielberg and Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, among others, to create the Starbright Foundation, which develops software and other products to help children cope with the medical, emotional and social challenges of their illnesses. In 2004, Starlight and Starbright merged to become the Starlight Starbright Children’s Foundation. Another Samuelson charity, First Star, advocates for abused and neglected children.

Three years ago, on his twice-weekly bike rides to the beach from his Holmby Hills house, Samuelson realized that he was seeing more homeless people. For three weeks, he interviewed dozens of them — men, women and children.

“Where do you spend the night?” he asked one woman. She led him by the hand into the bushes and showed him a large cardboard Sub-Zero box.

“That was my epiphany moment,” Samuelson said. “I’ve got the refrigerator. She’s got the box. What is wrong with this picture?”

A 2007 homeless census revealed that on any given day there were more than 73,000 homeless people in Los Angeles County. (Some critics contend the number is overstated.) Downtown’s skid row had the greatest concentration, with more than 5,000.

Samuelson said he was shocked by the demographics: About 60% of the homeless were men, 24% were women, and 15% were under 18. (Adult transgender individuals accounted for the rest.)

“I’ve always believed society is defined by how we deal with our weakest links,” he said. “The best of America is when we take care of the less fortunate.”

His first instinct was to build shelters, but then he did the math. Building a bed in a facility runs $50,000 to $100,000. The cost to house all of the county’s street denizens would run into the billions. Besides, many of them resist services. So he thought: What is there that’s better than a damp box on a rainy night even if it’s not as good as a bed?

The idea of a mobile, single-person shelter popped to mind.

Samuelson sponsored a contest at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena to design his “widget.”

Eric Lindeman and Jason Zasa took the honors, with a mobile shopping cart-like apparatus. The cart features bins to hold cans, bottles and other recyclables collected by day. It folds out to create a sleeping platform, topped by a canvas cover with zippers and windows.

Samuelson labeled it an EDAR, and established the EDAR Foundation, whose slogan is: “Thinking outside the box.”

With a donation from former EBay President Jeff Skoll, he took the design to Precision Wire Products, a manufacturer of shopping carts in Commerce. Precision produced a succession of prototypes, at least nine, to address critiques of the device: too big, too small, too flimsy, not readily collapsible. The units have been thrown down flights of stairs (they’re sturdy) and left in the rain (they don’t leak).

Three months ago, Samuelson decided to distribute 60 EDARs for testing. With the help of churches, missions and shelters, he and his assistants identified chronically homeless people who could benefit from an EDAR in the short term and might be willing to develop a lasting relationship with service providers.

After Dehanka Straughter was laid off from her job as a cook at a Compton preschool, she and her two sons, ages 2 and 6, were evicted from their $975-a-month apartment.

They sold their furniture, stored some possessions in Straughter’s unregistered car and stayed with family and friends for a few weeks. When Straughter saw people sleeping on the streets, she thought “that’s where we’d be next.” Then a friend told her that women and children could find temporary quarters at the Union Rescue Mission in downtown Los Angeles.

Now the petite Straughter, 27, sleeps in an EDAR with her boys on the fourth floor of the mission. They like it better than she does. “The kids adjust to anything,” she said. “They think they’re camping.”

Still, she says, “I’m happy to have a place to bathe and eat and sleep.”

With the economy sinking, mission Chief Executive Andy Bales is making room for more mothers with children and hopes to provide EDARs — indoors — for many of them. The EDAR Foundation provided 17 units; the mission has asked to buy 100 more, some for use in its winter shelter.

Bales hopes that with mass production, the price will drop to $400 from just under $500.

“They make a nice cot and provide a lot of privacy,” he said. “I had a 6-foot-7 friend lie down in one. He was comfortable.”

Raynor learned about EDAR from homeless acquaintances. A high school dropout and former construction worker, Raynor had spent three years in jail for auto theft and forgery. With police after him in Texas and his home state of Missouri, he went to Arizona. He left there in search of more temperate weather and found it next to Pacific Coast Highway.

As traffic rushed by one recent starry Friday night, Raynor reminisced about his brushes with the law. Beer can in hand, he spoke of jumping a freight train to Texas to search for a friend’s missing 13-year-old daughter. Wielding a sawed-off shotgun, he banged down a door and tied up two men who he thought knew her whereabouts. “How was I to know they were cops working on a sting operation?” he said.

Recently, a woman he described as his fiancee was struck and killed by a driver on PCH. Not long after, a male friend suffered the same fate, he said. The woman he’d married in Arizona disappeared from his life. He shares his PCH-adjacent turf with a woman named Yolanda, whose speech has been slurred by alcohol and a head injury.

Raynor said his EDAR is “very comfortable,” cooled by sea breezes by day and made cozy by his body heat at night.

“It’s about time someone took an initiative for people less fortunate than themselves,” he said.

In October, the EDAR won $10,000 in an innovation contest sponsored by Los Angeles Social Venture Partners, the Social Enterprise Institute and the USC Stevens Institute for Innovation. The EDAR Foundation ( www.edar.org) is seeking donations to produce more of the mobile shelters.

Students at Rand Corp., the Santa Monica think tank, are interviewing EDAR users and representatives of shelters and missions to assess how the units might fit into a system of comprehensive care for the homeless.

“The goal is to find out who will benefit most from this unit and therefore what the distribution plan should look like,” said Barbara Raymond, a consultant working on the study. Raymond sees possibilities for EDARs in refugee camps and for victims of natural disasters.

Meanwhile, lawyers are sorting out legal issues. Will municipal codes allow users to park their units anywhere? What about constitutional questions and not-in-my-backyard complaints?

Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the UC Irvine School of Law, said police fear the units could constitute dwellings where inhabitants would have a reasonable expectation of privacy. In that scenario, police would need warrants to search EDARs, which could become havens for drug use or prostitution. Chemerinsky maintains that cities could allow the units in designated public places as long as users consented to be searched, much like travelers entering an airport.

Samuelson anticipates those and other objections to his invention. Does the EDAR enable homelessness by making it more bearable? No, he insists.

“Why is the EDAR not regressive?” he said. “Because it is not nearly as good as a shelter bed. There’s no pretense it’s as good as permanent or temporary brick-and-mortar housing.” But it is, he says, “infinitely better than a damp cardboard box.”

Groves is a Times staff writer.

Karyn Lovegrove December 13 - January 31, 2009

By NATALIE ANGIER
NY Times Published: December 8, 2008

Imagine you’re in a dark room, running your fingers over a smooth surface in search of a single dot the size of this period. How high do you think the dot must be for your finger pads to feel it? A hundredth of an inch above background? A thousandth?

Well, take a tip from the economy and keep downsizing. Scientists have determined that the human finger is so sensitive it can detect a surface bump just one micron high. All our punctuation point need do, then, is poke above its glassy backdrop by 1/400,000th of an inch — the diameter of a bacterial cell — and our fastidious fingers can find it. The human eye, by contrast, can’t resolve anything much smaller than 100 microns. No wonder we rely on touch rather than vision when confronted by a new roll of toilet paper and its Abominable Invisible Seam.

Biologically, chronologically, allegorically and delusionally, touch is the mother of all sensory systems. It is an ancient sense in evolution: even the simplest single-celled organisms can feel when something brushes up against them and will respond by nudging closer or pulling away. It is the first sense aroused during a baby’s gestation and the last sense to fade at life’s culmination. Patients in a deep vegetative coma who seem otherwise lost to the world will show skin responsiveness when touched by a nurse.

Like a mother, touch is always hovering somewhere in the perceptual background, often ignored, but indispensable to our sense of safety and sanity. “Touch is so central to what we are, to the feeling of being ourselves, that we almost cannot imagine ourselves without it,” said Chris Dijkerman, a neuropsychologist at the Helmholtz Institute of Utrecht University in the Netherlands. “It’s not like vision, where you close your eyes and you don’t see anything. You can’t do that with touch. It’s always there.”

Long neglected in favor of the sensory heavyweights of vision and hearing, the study of touch lately has been gaining new cachet among neuroscientists, who sometimes refer to it by the amiably jargony term of haptics, Greek for touch. They’re exploring the implications of recently reported tactile illusions, of people being made to feel as though they had three arms, for example, or were levitating out of their bodies, with the hope of gaining insight into how the mind works.

Others are turning to haptics for more practical purposes, to build better touch screen devices and robot hands, a more well-rounded virtual life. “There’s a fair amount of research into new ways of offloading information onto our tactile sense,” said Lynette Jones of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “To have your cellphone buzzing as opposed to ringing turned out to have a lot of advantages in some situations, and the question is, where else can vibrotactile cues be applied?”

For all its antiquity and constancy, touch is not passive or primitive or stuck in its ways. It is our most active sense, our means of seizing the world and experiencing it, quite literally, first hand. Susan J. Lederman, a professor of psychology at Queen’s University in Canada, pointed out that while we can perceive something visually or acoustically from a distance and without really trying, if we want to learn about something tactilely, we must make a move. We must rub the fabric, pet the cat, squeeze the Charmin. And with every touchy foray, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle looms large. “Contact is a two-way street, and that’s not true for vision or audition,” Dr. Lederman said. “If you have a soft object and you squeeze it, you change its shape. The physical world reacts back.”

Another trait that distinguishes touch is its widespread distribution. Whereas the sensory receptors for sight, vision, smell and taste are clustered together in the head, conveniently close to the brain that interprets the fruits of their vigils, touch receptors are scattered throughout the skin and muscle tissue and must convey their signals by way of the spinal cord. There are also many distinct classes of touch-related receptors: mechanoreceptors that respond to pressure and vibrations, thermal receptors primed to sense warmth or cold, kinesthetic receptors that keep track of where our limbs are, and the dread nociceptors, or pain receptors — nerve bundles with bare endings that fire when surrounding tissue is damaged.

The signals from the various touch receptors converge on the brain and sketch out a so-called somatosensory homunculus, a highly plastic internal representation of the body. Like any map, the homunculus exaggerates some features and downplays others. Looming largest are cortical sketches of those body parts that are especially blessed with touch receptors, which means our hidden homunculus has a clownishly large face and mouth and a pair of Paul Bunyan hands. “Our hands and fingers are the tactile equivalent of the fovea in vision,” said Dr. Dijkerman, referring to the part of the retina where cone cell density is greatest and visual acuity highest. “If you want to explore the tactile world, your hands are the tool to use.”

Our hands are brilliant and can do many tasks automatically — button a shirt, fit a key in a lock, touch type for some of us, play piano for others. Dr. Lederman and her colleagues have shown that blindfolded subjects can easily recognize a wide range of common objects placed in their hands. But on some tactile tasks, touch is all thumbs. When people are given a raised line drawing of a common object, a bas-relief outline of, say, a screwdriver, they’re stumped. “If all we’ve got is contour information,” Dr. Lederman said, “no weight, no texture, no thermal information, well, we’re very, very bad with that.”

Touch also turns out to be easy to fool. Among the sensory tricks now being investigated is something called the Pinocchio illusion. Researchers have found that if they vibrate the tendon of the biceps, many people report feeling that their forearm is getting longer, their hand drifting ever further from their elbow. And if they are told to touch the forefinger of the vibrated arm to the tip of their nose, they feel as though their nose was lengthening, too.

Some tactile illusions require the collusion of other senses. People who watch a rubber hand being stroked while the same treatment is applied to one of their own hands kept out of view quickly come to believe that the rubber prosthesis is the real thing, and will wince with pain at the sight of a hammer slamming into it. Other researchers have reported what they call the parchment-skin illusion. Subjects who rubbed their hands together while listening to high-frequency sounds described their palms as feeling exceptionally dry and papery, as though their hands must be responsible for the rasping noise they heard. Look up, little Pinocchio! Somebody’s pulling your strings.

By MATT RICHTEL and KATE GALBRAITH
NY Times Published: December 7, 2008

Trash has crashed.

The economic downturn has decimated the market for recycled materials like cardboard, plastic, newspaper and metals. Across the country, this junk is accumulating by the ton in the yards and warehouses of recycling contractors, which are unable to find buyers or are unwilling to sell at rock-bottom prices.

Ordinarily the material would be turned into products like car parts, book covers and boxes for electronics. But with the slump in the scrap market, a trickle is starting to head for landfills instead of a second life.

“It’s awful,” said Briana Sternberg, education and outreach coordinator for Sedona Recycles, a nonprofit group in Arizona that recently stopped taking certain types of cardboard, like old cereal, rice and pasta boxes. There is no market for these, and the organization’s quarter-acre yard is already packed fence to fence.

“Either it goes to landfill or it begins to cost us money,” Ms. Sternberg said.

In West Virginia, an official of Kanawha County, which includes Charleston, the state capital, has called on residents to stockpile their own plastic and metals, which the county mostly stopped taking on Friday. In eastern Pennsylvania, the small town of Frackville recently suspended its recycling program when it became cheaper to dump than to recycle. In Montana, a recycler near Yellowstone National Park no longer takes anything but cardboard.

There are no signs yet of a nationwide abandonment of recycling programs. But industry executives say that after years of growth, the whole system is facing an abrupt slowdown.

Many large recyclers now say they are accumulating tons of material, either because they have contracts with big cities to continue to take the scrap or because they are banking on a price rebound in the next six months to a year.

“We’re warehousing it and warehousing it and warehousing it,” said Johnny Gold, senior vice president at the Newark Group, a company that has 13 recycling plants across the country. Mr. Gold said the industry had seen downturns before but not like this. “We never saw this coming.”

The precipitous drop in prices for recyclables makes the stock market’s performance seem almost enviable.

On the West Coast, for example, mixed paper is selling for $20 to $25 a ton, down from $105 in October, according to Official Board Markets, a newsletter that tracks paper prices. And recyclers say tin is worth about $5 a ton, down from $327 earlier this year. There is greater domestic demand for glass, so its price has not fallen as much.

This is a cyclical industry that has seen price swings before. The scrap market in general is closely tied to economic conditions because demand for some recyclables tracks closely with markets for new products. Cardboard, for instance, turns into the boxes that package electronics, rubber goes to shoe soles, and metal is made into auto parts.

One reason prices slid so rapidly this time is that demand from China, the biggest export market for recyclables from the United States, quickly dried up as the global economy slowed. China’s influence is so great that in recent years recyclables have been worth much less in areas of the United States that lack easy access to ports that can ship there.

The downturn offers some insight into the forces behind the recycling boom of recent years. Environmentally conscious consumers have been able to pat themselves on the back and feel good about sorting their recycling and putting it on the curb. But most recycling programs have been driven as much by raw economics as by activism.

Cities and their contractors made recycling easy in part because there was money to be made. Businesses, too — like grocery chains and other retailers — have profited by recycling thousands of tons of materials like cardboard each month.

But the drop in prices has made the profits shrink, or even disappear, undermining one rationale for recycling programs and their costly infrastructure.

“Before, you could be green by being greedy,” said Jim Wilcox, a professor at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley. “Now you’ve really got to rely more on your notions of civic participation.”

The impact of the downturn on individual recycling efforts varies. Most cities are keeping their recycling programs, in some cases because they are required by law, but also because the economics, while they have soured, still favor recycling over landfills.

In New York City, for instance, the city is getting paid $10 for a ton of paper, down from $50 or more before October, but it has no plans to cease recycling, said Robert Lange, the city’s recycling director. In Boston, one of the hardest-hit markets, prices are down to $5 a ton, and the city expects it will soon have to pay to unload its paper. But city officials said that would still be better than paying $80 a ton to put it in a landfill.

Some small towns are refusing to recycle some material, particularly the less lucrative plastics and metals, and experts say more are likely to do so if the price slump persists.

Businesses and institutions face their own challenges and decisions. Harvard, for instance, sends mixed recyclables — including soda bottles and student newspapers — to a nearby recycling center that used to pay $10 a ton. In November, Harvard received two letters from the recycler, the first saying it would begin charging $10 a ton and the second saying the price had risen to $20.

“I haven’t checked my mail today, but I hope there isn’t another one in there,” said Rob Gogan, the recycling and waste manager for the university’s facilities division. He said he did not mind paying as long as the price was less than $87 a ton, the cost for trash disposal.

The collapse of the market is slowing the momentum of recycling overall, said Mark Arzoumanian, editor in chief of Official Board Markets. He said the problem would hurt individual recycling businesses, but also major retailers, like Wal-Mart Stores, that profit by selling refuse.

Mr. Arzoumanian said paper mills in China and the United States that had signed contracts requiring them to buy recycled paper were seeking wiggle room, invoking clauses that cover extraordinary circumstances. “They are declaring ‘force majeure,’ which is a phrase I’d never thought I’d hear in paper recycling,” he said.

Mr. Arzoumanian and others said mills were also starting to become pickier about what they take in, rejecting cardboard and other products that they say are “contaminated” by plastic ties or other material.

The situation has also been rough on junk poachers — people who made a profitable trade of picking off cardboard and other refuse from bins before the recycling trucks could get to it. Those poachers have shut their operations, said Michael Sangiacomo, chief executive of Norcal Waste Systems, a recycling and garbage company that serves Northern California.

“I knew it was really bad a few weeks ago when our guys showed up and the corrugated cardboard was still there,” he said. “People started calling, saying ‘You didn’t pick up our cardboard,’ and I said, ‘We haven’t picked up your cardboard for years.’ ”

The recycling slump has even provoked a protest of sorts. At Ruthlawn Elementary School in South Charleston, W.V., second-graders who began recycling at the school in September were told that the program might be discontinued. They chose to forgo recess and instead use the time to write letters to the governor and mayor, imploring them to keep recycling, Rachel Fisk, their teacher, said.

The students’ pleas seem to have been heard; the city plans to start trucking the recyclables to Kentucky.

“They were telling them, ‘We really don’t care what you say about the economy. If you don’t recycle, our planet will be dirty,’ ” Ms. Fisk said.

By ROBERTA SMITH
NY Times Published: December 7, 2008

The first thing to be said about the fiscal crisis facing the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, horrendous as it is, is that it could be a lot worse. The museum regularly overran its budget and dipped into its endowment to cover operating costs, which is scandalously irresponsible.

But let’s keep some perspective. The museum needs to raise roughly $25 million and embrace a new strategy to stabilize itself. And it can do it.

This institution has to be born again, wrestled into a new phase of its marvelous history by the people who brought it into being in the first place, with help from the rest of the art world.

But first there needs to be a truce. Both the siege and the bunker mentality must be suspended. People have to set aside their rage at one another and at outside critics. They should stop fretting about their reputations or grudges. Egos have to be left at the door.

Imagine the museum as a gravely ill relative deeply loved by an enormous squabbling family. Does that family really want to come together for the first time at the funeral, especially knowing that the patient could, with cooler heads, have been saved? No. Let’s come together right now. The director of the museum, Jeremy Strick, has to have support and input from his museum-director colleagues about ways to restructure his staff. The directors are known to be a fairly friendly group. The museum’s board, drained by writing last-minute checks to keep the wolf from the door, should sit down with collectors, former trustees and the past and present cultural leaders of Los Angeles. (Joel Wachs, who moved to New York from Los Angeles to lead the Warhol Foundation, comes to mind.)

They need to commiserate, listen to one another, draft a rescue plan and see what kind of money they can scrape together. Everyone needs to step up, including Los Angeles museum professionals, current and former trustees, artists and interested parties everywhere.

But let’s back up for a second. What did Los Angeles get from the Museum of Contemporary Art, despite its chronic mismanagement of money? Plenty. Mainly, the city’s first — and still only — world-class museum.

Brought into existence in 1979 by a contentious group of Los Angeles collectors and artists in a touch-and-go process, the museum is known for an exhibition record that many feel is the best in the country and even the world. Its sweeping thematic-survey exhibitions reshaped our thinking about postwar art by venturing beyond the canon of American and Western European artists, beyond the limits of painting and sculpture.

The titles of those surveys broadcast their ambition: “Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object: 1949-1979.” “A Minimal Future? Art as Object, 1958-1968.” “Reconsidering the Objects of Art: 1965-1975.” “Art and Film Since 1945: Hall of Mirrors.” Each show came with a thick innovative catalog that resonated long after the exhibition was over.

These shows were in the tradition of the big exhibitions that the Museum of Modern Art once organized. They gave off sparks that challenged and inspired artists, especially those in the area. With the prodding of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles became an incubator of new work on a par with, if not ahead of, New York. In addition there were also monographic shows like a stunningly ambitious installation by Robert Gober in 1997, or a revelatory survey of Sigmar Polke’s photographic work in 1995. Since many of those shows traveled to New York, like the outstanding show of Robert Rauschenberg combines that opened in Los Angeles in 2006, the Museum of Contemporary Art was known as one of the greatest feeder museums in the country.

Yet along the way the museum has accommodated a level of financial brinkmanship and organizational dysfunction that often seems deluded. Its founding director was Pontus Hulten, the European impresario who helped invent the notion of the star curator and the sprawling thematic survey and was often indifferent to matters financial. Richard Koshalek, who, after working beside Hulten, became director in 1982, was another visionary, known to operate by seat-of-the-pants improvisation. For better yet also worse, this museum always put curators first.

Under Mr. Strick, who took over in 1999, its endowment has shrunk to $6 million from a reported $50 million as a result of further recklessness. Its board is widely reported to be pondering two rescue possibilities, neither of which is appealing although neither has been properly explained.

One is a merger with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. (Imagine the effect on New York if MoMA or the Whitney Museum of American Art had been subsumed into the Metropolitan Museum of Art at the age of 30. For one thing P.S. 1, which has been rejuvenated by its MoMA affiliation, might no longer exist.) The other option is a $30 million bailout offered by Eli Broad, the developer, collector and serial museum trustee.

Although Mr. Broad tends to want things his way, he is hardly alone on this score; noblesse oblige is not what it used to be. And he made two salient arguments in an op-ed article last month in The Los Angeles Times: the Museum of Contemporary Art must remain an autonomous entity, and it is time for other patrons to step up to the plate — time for Los Angeles to stop being, as he put it self-flatteringly, “a one-philanthropist town.”

But perhaps there is another way. What if everyone else stopped waiting for the rich people to write all the checks? Their support will be necessary, but the larger art world can also pitch in — not just with emotional support and excitement, but with money.

The recent art boom made quite a few artists almost as rich as philanthropists. You know who you are. But the nonrich need to consider seriously the degree to which the Museum of Contemporary Art has enriched their lives, personal and professional. What is it worth to you to have this museum continue to exist? Would you give $100? $500? $1,000? Would you give $2,300? In other words, take a page from the playbook of the recent campaign of the president-elect, who harnessed small donations, grass-roots organization and a galvanizing sense of individual empowerment to sail to victory.

But first the museum’s board and director need to draft an action plan in concert with Los Angeles’s city and cultural leaders.

We’re waiting. There’s a job to be done, and the no-drama rule must apply.

LE CORBUSIER
A Life
By Nicholas Fox Weber
Illustrated. 821 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $45
LE CORBUSIER LE GRAND
By
Illustrated. 768 pp. Phaidon. $200

By WITOLD RYBCZYNSKI
NY Times Book Review Published: December 5, 2008

Years ago, as an architecture student traveling in Europe, I sought out Le Corbusier’s home in Paris. I had the address from his books, over which I had pored for hours in the university library. Some of his writings were more than 40 years old, but their rousing rhetoric still made architecture seem more like a noble crusade than a mundane profession. Perhaps that’s why I imitated his spidery ink sketches and his military-looking stenciled lettering. I admired Frank Lloyd Wright’s buildings, but the old man — he had recently died — with his capes and flowery pronouncements, was a figure from another era. I had been taught that Ludwig Mies van der Rohe was a great architect, but his buildings left me unmoved — Mies is not for the young. “Corbu,” on the other hand, though he was 76, continued to produce designs that surprised and inspired — an unusual, spread-out one-story hospital for Venice, for example, with skylights instead of windows so you could see the sky while lying in bed. For a tyro, such invention was irresistible.

Le Corbusier lived in the 16th Arrondissement not far from the Bois de Boulogne, in the penthouse of an apartment building that he had designed himself more than 30 years earlier. The facade of the small seven-story building was more restrained than I had expected, mainly glass and glass blocks. The location, facing a sports field, seemed just right for someone who preached the merits of sun, fresh air and exercise. The street — Rue Nungesser-et-Coli — was named after two famous French fliers who had died attempting a trans-Atlantic flight two weeks before Lindbergh. That was appropriate, too, for Le Corbusier was a devotee of all things modern, and more than once in his career he had crashed and burned.

Although I peered into the darkened lobby — round columns, curved walls, colors — I didn’t dare to press the buzzer. Just as well, for as Nicholas Fox Weber writes in his new biography, “Le Corbusier: A Life,” the architect devoted every morning to painting in the studio that took up the front half of the apartment. Still, I should have been bolder. The following year — 1965 — he was dead, drowned while swimming in the Mediterranean. That fateful summer, Le Corbusier, who was starting to feel his age and had recently lost the two people who were in many ways his closest confidantes — his mother and his wife — ignored his doctor’s advice to take only a short dip at noon. Instead, he plunged in at 8 a.m. and swam for an hour or more. He was an experienced swimmer, and Weber cites speculation that the drowning may have been an “elegantly orchestrated suicide.” On the strength of flimsy evidence it seems a far-fetched claim, but by the end of this absorbing book the reader may be convinced that for this proud, solitary and down-to-earth man, such a decision would not have been out of character.

“He’s an odd duck,” is how the famous French architect Auguste Perret described Le Corbusier to a neighbor, “but he’ll interest you.” That was 1917. The 30-year-old Corbusier, who had earlier worked for Perret, a leading exponent of reinforced concrete, had just returned to Paris. Largely self-taught, he had studied watch-engraving, his father’s profession, then turned to architecture and spent a decade designing houses in his native La Chaux-de-Fonds, a town in the Jura Mountains of Switzerland. The chalet-like structures are unremarkable, except for the palatial house that he built for his parents; it ate up their life savings, and they were later obliged to sell it at a loss. A detail: the fledgling architect charged them a fee, albeit less than for his usual clients. One senses that it was the embarrassment of this misguided project, as much as a desire to leave his provincial surroundings, that encouraged him to try his luck in Paris.

Le Corbusier’s given name was Charles-Edouard Jeanneret. In 1920, he and his painter friend Amédée Ozenfant founded an art magazine, L’Esprit Nouveau. The firebrands both adopted noms de plume, but Weber suggests that in Jeanneret’s case, this was more than simply a fashionable gesture. “Charles-Edouard Jeanneret had long sought a means to counter the perpetual vagaries of his own mind,” he writes. “With his new name, he invented a person who had a protective shell.” Jeanneret was a romantic, a painter, a dreamer; Le Corbusier (he claimed that the name derived from an ancestor) was a realist: tough, obsessive, even unscrupulous, if the need arose. “It so happens that today I exist, much more rapidly and more powerfully than I would ever have thought,” he wrote a German friend. “I have created my identity on my own foundations, on my own terms.” Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde? Of course, he could not keep the two identities separate. The public man was always “Le Corbusier,” but letters to his wife and mother are sometimes signed “Edouard,” sometimes “Corbu.” On the tomb that he designed for himself, he is “Charles-Edouard Jeanneret called Le Corbusier,” although his wife is “Yvonne Le Corbusier.”

There have been nearly 400 architectural monographs on Le Corbusier’s work, by Weber’s count, but this is the first full-length biography, and it’s a good one. The author benefits from wide-ranging research. The German friend quoted above, for example, was William Ritter, a novelist and music critic with whom the young Le Corbusier had a long and intimate correspondence. Weber also had unprecedented access to the architect’s letters to his parents, especially his mother, to whom he wrote once a week for most of his adult life (she died at 99, only five years before him). Through these letters we meet a different Le Corbusier, not the hectoring, self-promoting missionary of modernism, but the concerned, dutiful son who describes his projects and achievements, clearly wanting his mother to be impressed — although she never is, quite. Le Corbusier’s older brother, Albert, a musician, remained her favorite.

Le Corbusier’s generation set out to remake architecture de novo. Most modernist architects were satisfied with following a simple formula: flat roofs, undecorated white walls, pipe railings, that sort of thing. Le Corbusier always went further. His white-box villas sprouted voluptuous curves, colors appeared on walls and ceilings, and he introduced traditional materials like brick and fieldstone. On my European tour in 1964 I saw as many of his buildings as I could. The earlier ones, like the Salvation Army headquarters in Paris and the Pavillon Suisse, a student dormitory, had the features associated with the International Style, but later works, like the chapel at Ronchamp and the vast Unité d’Habitation apartment block in Marseille, were different: cruder, more sculptural, almost primitive. An endearing rustic simplicity is a big part of Le Corbusier’s appeal, whether he is building millionaires’ residences or worker housing.

Weber’s admiring biography brings Le Corbusier to life, unraveling many obscure aspects of a man who was famously secretive and, though he wrote some 50 books, divulged very little of himself. The architect was a mass of contradictions: a hedonistic Calvinist, arrogant in public and often generous in private, elated and depressed by turns. We learn about the importance of music when he was a young man (his mother was a piano teacher), and his discovery of Louis Armstrong during a visit to Boston: “It was absolutely dazzling,” the architect recounted, “strength and truth.” Le Corbusier traveled widely for his work, always alone, and while he was an attentive husband, he was not a faithful one. He had several affairs, briefly with Josephine Baker and for many years with Marguerite Tjader Harris, a Swedish-American heiress. (Weber was also given access to previously unstudied correspondence between the two.) His mistresses saw a different man than the pontificating visionary. To Baker he was a “simple man and gay.” According to Tjader Harris, he “was not a complicated man, not even an intellectual, in the narrow meaning of the word. He lived by his faith and emotions.”

Weber, who has written a biography of the painter Balthus and, most recently, “The Clarks of Cooperstown,” a study of the art-collecting American family, allows Le Corbusier to emerge as a fascinating if flawed human being. But Weber is not an architectural historian, and he sometimes has a narrow view of his subject’s work. He devotes four chapters to Le Corbusier’s masterpiece, Ronchamp, whose construction he describes as “impeccable engineering,” seemingly unaware that the hidden and camouflaged structure, no less than the expressionistic form, actually represented a break with — if not a betrayal of — the modernist creed that Le Corbusier himself had proclaimed. Weber’s descriptions of buildings are sometimes over the top. The Villa Savoye is “a temple to the sun”; on the entrance ramp to the Mill owners’ Building in Ahmedabad, India, visitors arrive in “the sacred precincts of a modern temple”; the structure of the monastery of La Tourette “echoes the rugged and somewhat secretive lives of its inhabitants.” Weber calls L’Unité d’Habitation in Marseille “a turning point in the history of how human beings live,” but fails to explain why, since, even if many similarly enormous apartment blocks were built, such innovations as tiny, 12-foot-wide apartments (!) and an internal “commercial street” of shops never caught on.

When Jeanneret became Le Corbusier, he took on the persona not only of an astonishingly creative architect but also of an implacable, sometimes megalomaniacal city planner. Starting in 1925 with a hypothetical plan for rebuilding Paris that would have required demolishing 600 acres of the city, Le Corbusier spent a large part of his working life traveling the world, imagining, proposing and promoting a new kind of urbanism in which tall buildings surrounded by landscaped open space replaced traditional blocks and streets. He made it sound scientific — “Cartesian” was a favorite word— but the urban plans were no less fanciful than his building designs. Nevertheless, his planning ideas were influential. Unfortunately, as Lewis Mumford once pointed out, in practice, the Towers in a Park turned out to be Towers in a Parking Lot. On the whole, Weber gives his subject a pass on his failed social and urbanistic ideas. “For all his genius, Le Corbusier remained completely insensitive to certain aspects of human existence,” he acknowledges. That is putting it mildly.

The wonderfully titled “Le Corbusier Le Grand,” a 20-pound tome put together by the editors at Phaidon,is a giant scrapbook of the architect’s life and work, including photographs, drawings, travel sketches and reproductions of Le Corbusier’s paintings, as well as letters, newspaper clippings, travel documents, ID cards and other ephemera. It sounds confused and confusing, but it’s a remarkably effective way to document the great man’s life and work. Most architectural monographs include only carefully staged photographs of finished buildings. There are some of those here, but construction photos and impromptu views give a more rounded impression. The section on the Villa Savoye includes letters from the client, complaining about leaks and the architect, complaining about not being paid (all French documents are helpfully translated in an accompanying volume). The generous format of “Le Corbusier Le Grand,” 14 by 20 inches, enables even well-known photographs to gain new meaning from being greatly enlarged. There are also many interesting portraits and informal snapshots of the architect, who peers out unblinkingly through his trademark circular glasses (he had monocular vision). The photos also reveal another contradiction: in public, the self-proclaimed bourgeois scourge was always attired in impeccably tailored suits.

The most carefree photographs of Le Corbusier are those taken in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin on the Côte d’Azur, where he and his wife spent a month every summer. On a site overlooking the Mediterranean, the most famous architect in the world built a cabanon, or cabin, 12 feet square, a rustic structure that was a cross between a monk’s cell and a mountain hut of his native Jura. This was a home reduced, as Weber evocatively writes, “to diamond-hard truths.” One senses that here, at least, Edouard could shed the protective shell of Le Corbusier, and be himself.

Witold Rybczynski teaches architecture at the University of Pennsylvania. His next book, “My Two Polish Grandfathers,” will be published in the spring.

By Joe Strummer, Mick Jones, Paul Simonon and Topper Headon
Illustrated. 384 pp. Grand Central Publishing. $45

By ALAN LIGHT
NY Times Book Review Published: December 5, 2008

As usual, the credit — or the blame — lies with the Beatles. After the phenomenal success of the Fab Four’s “Anthology” in 2000, other bands followed with their own oversize oral-history ­autobiographies/scrapbooks. The Rolling Stones and the Doors, though, didn’t create the same kind of sensation; now it’s the Clash’s turn to find out if its legacy is well served by a tome bulky enough to challenge a rickety coffee table.

At first glance, the Clash is an unlikely subject for such deluxe treatment. The group blasted out of London as part of punk’s first wave; it opened for the Sex Pistols on the 1976 “Anarchy in the U.K.” tour, on which more than two-thirds of the dates were canceled out of terror, securing the new movement’s reputation. Over the next seven years — a neat parallel to the Beatles’ recording career, in fact — the Clash would create some of the greatest rock ’n’ roll of all time (Rolling Stone named “London Calling” the best album of the 1980s), only to split apart just as the band was achieving commercial success in the United States.

In the intervening years, and burnished by the singer/rhythm guitarist/folk hero Joe Strummer’s death in 2002, the Clash has become the lone punk representative in the classic rock canon. It has attained rarefied status as one of those bands with more books published about them than total albums released.

The text for “The Clash” is drawn mostly from interviews conducted during five days of filming for the Grammy-winning 2000 documentary “Westway to the World.” If this limited access doesn’t always allow topics to be pursued in the greatest depth, it’s enough to give a sense of the four personalities involved: Strummer, the group’s romantic conscience; the lead guitarist Mick Jones, the musical explorer with a head for pop; the bass player Paul Simonon, a rookie musician but the band’s soul and style guru; and Topper Headon, the stereotypical drummer just out for a good time (“Once I’d done my bit we were told to go home, so there wasn’t any trouble or damage bills”).

At least, that’s the easy read of the Clash lineup. The reality is that each one of the foursome comes across as thoughtful and serious about a project so superficially raw and explosive. The most effective part of “The Clash” is the band members’ plain-spoken retelling of their family lives: Jones and Simonon were both products of severely broken homes; Strummer, later known as the populist voice of punk, was the Turkish-born son of a diplomat and learned to rebel at boarding school. “I could see from an early age,” he says, “that authority was a system of control which didn’t have any inherent wisdom.”

For the children of an impoverished, racially torn England, punk was a way to fashion a new identity and strike back at an increasing sense of powerlessness. “Part of punk was that you had to shed all of what you knew before,” Strummer says. “We were almost Stalinist in the way that we insisted you had to cast off all your friends, everything you’d ever known . . . in a frenzied attempt to create something new.”

Even the band’s name was an instinctive reflection of the era. “We were in a confrontational situation all the time,” Simonon says. “There was a clash of colors, clash of people — it’s kind of self- explanatory.”

Surprisingly absent from “The Clash” is much sense of the group’s political side. Though that aspect of the work has been exaggerated over time, this was, after all, a band that titled one album “Sandinista!” But in the musicians’ own telling, their activist side was far more intuitive than strategic. “We were just picking things out of the paper to write about,” Jones says.

Elsewhere, the guitarist adds, “I was always concerned about how a thing looked just as much as how it sounded and what it was about,” and one thing that certainly shines through in these lavishly illustrated pages is the band’s visual focus; some of the photos are simply breathtaking, and every last show poster and backstage pass demonstrates the group’s near- perfect sense of style.

Each of the four contributes to this story, but time and again, it is Joe Strummer’s voice, his dramatic sense of language, that leaps off the page. He says of one song inspired by a line of movie dialogue that “it was like holding one end of a piece of string which had a song attached to it,” and as things start to go south for the Clash, he describes Jones as behaving “like Elizabeth Taylor in a filthy mood.”

A rock band is a mysterious thing. Somehow, every once in a while, a few individuals bump into one another, and they look exactly right together and share a focus and an aspiration and the right balance of musical similarities and differences. Then, suddenly, they don’t anymore.

“Whatever a group is, it’s the chemical mixture of those four people,” Strummer says. “It’s some weird thing that no scientist could ever quantify or measure, and thank God for that.”

Could this be Ricky and Leslie camping in Airman’s Cave in 1995 ?

Ricky Swallow, Lesley Vance,Violet Hopkins, Matt Connors
are having a giant garage/clothing sale THIS SUNDAY December 7th.

Super cheap holiday shopping! This will be fun….recession buster

High quality and large quantity of men’s and women’s vintage and designer clothing, including leather jackets, vintage hats and bags, dresses, shoes, belts, jewelry, scarves, military, workwear - all styles. Lots of hard to find small sizes included!!
Also: 50’s glassware, tableware, vintage furniture, books, collectibles, kitchenware, records, beach/surf and swim gear, sewing machine, replay tv dvr player, and lots more!

Also selling set of 4 Herman Miller/George Nelson upholstered dining/office chairs from 1952, purchased for $1200.00, offered at $800. They are in EXCELLENT condition.
Gorgeous turn of century wood craftsman table (w/fold out leaves) + 4 matching chairs, solid oak, hand crafted, retains cabinet maker’s label from Bristol, England $600.00 the set

Easy to find in the heart of Highland Park
5406 Monte Vista St, zip code 90042
a few blocks off the Ave. 52 exit on the 110 Freeway.

SUNDAY DECEMBER 7th, 9 AM – 4 PM

Hope you can make it!

ricky’s blog, ready for the house

matt’s blog, and a half

Anne Collier closes December 20 at Marc Foxx

Michaela Meise closes December 20 at Richard Telles

Michael Queenland, Walead Beshty, James Welling, Arthur Ou, and more closes at Hudson Franklin December 20

By HOLLAND COTTER
NY Times Published: December 4, 2008

NORTH ADAMS, Mass. — The Conceptual artist Sol LeWitt, who died last year, was our Fra Angelico. And the three-story 19th-century mill here, housing a survey of his panoramic wall drawings, is our Museo di San Marco: a building full of art conceived by one artist, executed by many hands, devoted to big ideas. So it will be for the next quarter century, which is how long “Sol LeWitt: A Wall Drawing Retrospective” is scheduled to run.

The setting is close to perfect. The space, with its generous windows, is large and flexible enough to accommodate more than a hundred of the ink-painting murals LeWitt designed between 1969 and 2007. On the campus of the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, set amid stony hills in a working-class New England town, the site suits the stringently sensuous, anyone-can-make-it spirit of his art.

The show’s timing is as ideal as it is regrettable. It is a pity that LeWitt, who conceived this project in collaboration with the Yale University Art Gallery and worked closely with Mass MoCA and the Williams College Museum of Art on its realization, couldn’t have seen the results, which look organic and embracing in a way that his 2000 traveling museum survey did not. He often said that beauty was not the point of his art, but the Mass MoCA installation is pretty gorgeous.

And no art, we suddenly see, is better suited to meet hard economic times. Most of the materials used in the wall drawings are five-and-dime simple: pencils, colored ink, crayons, brushes, paper. You could tote them around in a shopping bag, ready to tackle the first empty wall you found.

Not that these drawings are street art. They aren’t populist in that way; they were meant for the great indoors. But neither do they depend on elite settings — museums or galleries — to make sense. They are abstract, not arcane. Their visual effects can be complex, but their language is plain: lines, colors, clean surfaces, the basics of grade-school art class. No wonder they feel welcoming; they take us back to the past before they take us somewhere else.

Within those essential elements there’s diversity. The lines come straight and curved; vertical, diagonal, horizontal. They resolve into geometric shapes (cubes, grids, bulls’-eyes); they splinter and fight; they gather in doodly squiggles like metal shavings to a magnet. In many cases they simply stream on, parallel and continuous, from floor to ceiling and wall edge to wall edge, like some crazy, destinationless Bruckner scherzo that expresses high joy by running in place.

Most of the surfaces are matte and dry like frescos, though in one piece, first done in Germany in 1999, vertical bands of saturated colors are interrupted by a glossy black splat of thick acrylic. And within matte surfaces visual textures subtly vary depending on whether color has been drawn, brushed, washed or dabbed on.

The color range is dramatic. Early drawings from the 1970s are diagrammatic patterns of blue or black lines on white ground connecting corners of walls with door jambs and the odd fire-alarm unit. They might look mathematical or scientific, expressions of an American mania for measuring and surveying, if their logic wasn’t so batty. As it is, they turn the very idea of calculation into a game. They connect dots, but to no purpose. They turn space into a walk-in cat’s cradle.

By the 1980s, though, color had replaced or equaled line as a primary element. And the entire chromatic spectrum was brought into play. Sometimes hues were tamped down, but just as often they were high-keyed and brash, giving certain drawings — I’m thinking of a composition of snaking orange and green bands — the retinal hilarity of Op Art.

Lusciousness and austerity alternated over 40 years, but through all the blossomings and thinnings, this art remains, at a fundamental level, ordinary, modest, graspable, doable. It also stays resolutely impersonal, never sticking for long with any single graphic style, never showcasing a distinctive touch, never carrying a signature.

Although LeWitt came up with the initial designs, his relationship to the work was otherwise hands-off. He wrote instructions for how the work should be done — firm but easy-to-follow recipes with occasional sweeten-to-taste allowances — but hired other artists to do it. Some he trained, with the expectation that they would train others, who would in turn train still others, stretching on through generations.

To help assure smooth continuity, he devised art that didn’t require virtuosic talent, just straightforward artisan skills and patient attention. If a drawing was done correctly that was enough.

But the fact that LeWitt asked teams to do the work was significant. On a strictly practical level, this meant each piece could be expeditiously recreated. At the same time the collaborative model offered an alternative to a star-obsessed market. And, like a kind of mini private-sector version of the Works Progress Administration, it gave artists paying jobs doing what they liked to do.

Finally, he understood, as every teacher does, that doing preset tasks could stimulate creativity. Many of his drawings were done by supervised groups of art students — those at Mass MoCA included — in a learning-on-the-job tradition very similar to Renaissance workshop practice. A master artist provides the overarching concept; senior artists oversee production; apprentices do the grunt work and in the process discover and develop ideas of their own.

LeWitt’s work is, famously, about ideas before all else. He was one of the first artists to formally define — in a 1967 Artforum article — Conceptual Art. And he was among the first to make work that fit the definition: work that played down the unique art object, with its associations of individual genius, exchange value and physical permanence, in favor of utopian proposals, collective visions, objects that existed first and last as ideas. (“The wall drawing is a permanent installation, until destroyed,” LeWitt wrote in 1970.)

A small show called “The ABCDs of Sol LeWitt” at the Williams College Museum of Art, near Mass MoCA, zeroes in on that watershed 1960s moment with an archival display of his manuscripts and drawings, including a draft of the Artforum article with the words that put LeWitt’s career on the map:

“When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all the planning and decisions are made beforehand, and execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a machine that makes the art.” The wall drawings are prime examples of this definition in action.

Historically speaking, a visit to Mass MoCA should come after a look at the Williams College show, which has been organized by Lisa Corrin, the museum’s director, and Erica DiBenedetto, an art history student. (LeWitt would have appreciated the leveling.) But there is something to be said for seeing the wall drawings first: for just walking straight into the grand apparatus of concept and color, and letting it sing and shout and whisper around you.

After all, do you need to know the theological ideas behind the virgins and angels painted on the walls of San Marco by Fra Angelico and his anonymous assistants in order to be entranced? No. You will eventually want to know about those ideas 0f salvation and eternity, just as you will want to learn about the ideas — collaboration, generosity, the embrace of ephemerality — that underpin LeWitt’s art and make it, now more than ever, exemplary.

The ideas in Fra Angelico’s frescos are demanding and unworldly. The ideas in LeWitt’s drawings — in the monumental, abstract annunciations and visitations and sacred conversations at Mass MoCA — are exhilarating and of this moment on earth. So are we talking about Conceptual Art or spiritual art? I’d say both.

“Sol LeWitt: A Wall Drawing Retrospective” will remain on view for 25 years at Mass MoCA, North Adams, Mass., (413) 662-2111, massmoca.org. “The ABCDs of Sol LeWitt” continues through May 17 at Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Mass., (413) 597-2429, wcma.org.

Naomi Klein and the new new left.

by Larissa MacFarquhar
The New Yorker
December 8, 2008

The marquee outside the Bloor Cinema, in Toronto, advertised “The Last Mistress” at four, “Naomi Klein—the Shock Doctrine” at seven, and “Little Shop of Horrors” at nine-thirty. It was a warmish night. The falafel shop next door was doing a brisk business. A line of people holding tickets to the Naomi Klein event stretched to the end of the block and around the corner. Outside the entrance to the cinema, a middle-aged man and an elderly woman paced up and down selling copies of Socialist Action for a dollar. (The September issue included articles about capitalism’s contradictions, class war in Bolivia, and a commentary by Mumia Abu-Jamal—a regular feature.)

“We apologize for starting late, but it’s typical activist time, so I’m sure you’re used to it,” a young woman organizer said from the stage. The young woman wore a black necklace, black jeans, and black hoop earrings. She urged the audience to fight racism and poverty, and to work for education, international solidarity, justice for immigrants and refugees, and solidarity with Palestine and with the Mohawk of Tyendinaga and the Algonquin of Barriere Lake, on whose behalf the fund-raiser that night was being held. She squinted into the lights. “I’m glad you can’t see the audience from here,” she said, “because I don’t think I’ve ever spoken in front of eight hundred and fifty people except at a protest, and then you can always dissolve into a chant.” She consulted her notes. “To a different audience—to those that hold capital and power in this society—Naomi Klein’s words and her ideas are seen as a serious threat,” she said. “Her words are a source of inspiration . . . for those of us who were and are being radicalized by the anti-globalization, anti-colonial, and anti-poverty movements and the demands to change the system totally and completely.”

Klein ascended the stage. “It’s been an eventful few hours,” she said, smiling. The first bailout package announced by Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson had been voted down that afternoon by the House. “The President went on television and informed us that there would be Armageddon, essentially, if they didn’t get this deal . . . but it didn’t work!” she went on, over rowdy clapping. She was wearing dark jeans tucked into tall brown boots, a crisp white shirt, and a long black blazer. She was dressed for a fox hunt. She looked terrific.

She had spent the day curled up on the blue sofa in her living room, watching CNN while she waited restlessly to hear what would happen in Washington. She fortified herself with cups of coffee and a smoothie. She checked her iPhone for messages from an economist friend who was keeping her posted on what was going on behind the scenes. She followed the Dow as it pitched downward, thinking how ridiculous it was for Paulson to believe that he could control it. “This is politicians acting like traders,” she said, staring at the television. “A government shouldn’t play the market—it should govern.”

The past couple of weeks had been a giddy time. Since her book “The Shock Doctrine” was published last year, Klein, now thirty-eight, has become the most visible and influential figure on the American left—what Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky were thirty years ago. She speaks every few days, all over the world, and hundreds of people turn up to hear her. They visit her Web site and subscribe to her newsletter and send her passionate fan mail. She has become an icon’s icon: Radiohead and Laurie Anderson promote her books to their fans; John Cusack’s comedy “War, Inc.” was inspired by her reporting from Baghdad. The Mexican film director Alfonso Cuarón felt so strongly about “The Shock Doctrine” that he made a short promotional film about it for free. Now, suddenly, she was in demand everywhere. The economic crisis had looked at first like a textbook enactment of her “shock doctrine” theory, and everyone wanted her to go on TV and explain it.

The central thesis of the book is that capitalism and democracy, free markets and free people, do not, as we’ve been told, go hand in hand. On the contrary, capitalism—at least fundamentalist capitalism, of the type promoted by the late economist Milton Friedman and his “Chicago School” acolytes—is so unpopular, and so obviously harmful to everyone except the richest of the rich, that its establishment requires, at best, trickery and, at worst, terror and torture. Friedman believed that markets perform best when freed from government interference, so he advocated getting rid of tariffs, subsidies, minimum-wage laws, public housing, Social Security, financial regulation, and licensing requirements, including those for doctors—indeed, virtually every measure devised to protect people from the market’s harsh logic. Klein argues that the only circumstance in which a population would accept Friedman-style reforms is when it is in a state of shock, following a crisis of some sort—a natural disaster, a terrorist attack, a war. A person in shock regresses to a childlike state in which he longs for a parental figure to take control; similarly, a population in a state of shock will hand exceptional powers to its leaders, permitting them to destroy the regulatory functions of government.

Friedman once observed that much of the time societies are too paralyzed by the “tyranny of the status quo” to accept real reform, and that only a crisis can convince people that the way things are done needs to change. This idea is not particularly controversial. But from Friedman’s words Klein concludes that the Chicago School is “a movement that prays for crisis the way drought-struck farmers pray for rain.” Worse, Friedmanites are impatient—sometimes too impatient to sit around praying for acts of God. Natural disasters are tricky to engineer, but coups and terror are always possible. “Some of the most infamous human rights violations of this era,” she writes, “which have tended to be viewed as sadistic acts carried out by antidemocratic regimes”—Pinochet’s in Chile, for instance, or the Argentinean junta—“were in fact either committed with the deliberate intent of terrorizing the public or actively harnessed to prepare the ground for the introduction of radical free-market ‘reforms.’ ”

Klein first formulated her thesis in 2004, when she was reporting in Baghdad and noticed that Paul Bremer’s goal seemed to be to establish a perfect capitalist state in Iraq while its population was still reeling from the “shock and awe” bombing. Then she noticed that soon after the tsunami in Sri Lanka the coastline that had been inhabited by fishermen was being sold off to hotels. Then she noticed that Friedman had suggested taking advantage of Hurricane Katrina to replace New Orleans’s disastrous public schools with charter schools. The pattern was striking. But now that a shock had shaken Washington itself, something slightly different seemed to be going on. On the one hand, the initial reaction to the economic crisis followed her theory—the shock (the bank failures and the market’s nosedive) had inspired the government to attempt to seize unprecedented power (seven hundred billion dollars with no strings attached), claiming that in such a crisis everyone should simply trust it to do the right thing, even though the actions it wanted to take would seem to enrich the wealthiest at the expense of everybody else. That was the textbook part. But the plan wasn’t working. Constituents wrote thousands of outraged letters, and bloggers wrote about how this felt familiar, like the aftermath of September 11th, and how the bailout was the economic equivalent of the Patriot Act. It was just as she had written at the end of the book: memory was shock’s antidote. (Another difference, of course, was that the government wanted to enact not Friedman-style reforms but the opposite: enormous interference in the market. Still, since the point of this interference was to bail out banks, this difference did not strike Klein as of much importance.)

“Americans remembered that they thought Rudy Giuliani was their daddy after September 11th, which was why they’re a little less inclined to say that Paulson and Goldman Sachs were going to take care of them this time,” Klein told the audience at the Bloor Cinema. “I think actually their biggest mistake with the bailout was how short it was. It’s just two pages and three paragraphs, and so the weirdest thing happened: people read it.” Everyone laughed. “It sounded like a coup.”

She went on, “It’s worth thinking about what the right has been doing for the past thirty-five years as a counter-revolution that has been waged against our victories.” The New Deal is usually told as a history of F.D.R., she said, but we don’t talk enough about the pressure from below. Neighborhoods organized, and when their evicted neighbors’ furniture was put on the streets they moved it back into their homes. It was that kind of direct action that won victories like rent control, public housing, and the creation of Fannie Mae. The other thing that’s important to remember, she said, is that the organizers were a threat—of socialist revolution—and it was that which allowed F.D.R. to say to Wall Street, “We have to compromise, or else we’ve got a revolution on our hands.” Now, these market shocks are opportunities for the same reason that the crash was in the thirties, because we are seeing the failures of laissez-faire before our eyes. “It’s time to say, ‘Your model failed,’ ” she said. “This is a progressive moment: it’s ours to lose.”

Klein was born in 1970, but the political stories in which she places herself all begin in the thirties. The thirties and forties were the last time in America, she feels, that social movements were strong enough to force radical economic change in a progressive direction. They were also the last time that a certain kind of grand, bold political hope existed in her family—the last time before events combined to extinguish all thoughts, among Kleins, of utopia.

Her paternal grandparents, Anne and Philip, met at the Jack London Club—a leftist artists’ club—in Newark, New Jersey, sometime in the thirties. (Philip’s older brother, Sol, was more committed—he moved to the Soviet Union after the revolution and never came back.) Philip wanted to be a painter, and in 1936 he got a job as an animator for Disney. He worked on “Fantasia” and “Snow White” and “Pinocchio.” Disney animators had been trying to organize themselves in secret since the early thirties, but they didn’t pull it off until after the bonuses they were promised for “Snow White” failed to materialize. In the late spring of 1941, they went on strike. Philip and Anne, ardent believers in the union, lived in a tent across the street from the studio, cooking over open fires and manning the picket line. Their first son, Michael, Naomi’s father, was then three, and lived with them in the tent part of the time. The strike was settled in September, but a few months after that Philip was fired for being an agitator. In 1942, he and Anne moved back to New Jersey, and he went to work in a shipyard.

At the time they were ruining their lives for politics, Anne and Philip were experiencing the beginnings of a crisis of faith. Stalin had signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact: that was the first betrayal. Then came news of gulags in the Soviet Union. By the time of Khrushchev’s “secret speech” of 1956, in which he denounced the cult of Stalin and its consequences, Philip and Anne, along with many others, had bitterly abandoned Communism. They held on to their core beliefs in social justice and racial equality, and taught their sons to believe in those things, but apart from brief forays—Anne took ten-year-old Michael canvassing for the Progressive Party in 1948, and marched on Washington in support of the Rosenbergs—they withdrew from politics. They began to spend time at Nature Friends (later Camp Midvale)—a retreat near Paterson, founded in the twenties as a place where workers of all races could congregate and enjoy nature. Nature Friends became their life. Philip built a house nearby, and Anne grew her own vegetables. They went to see leftist singers like Pete Seeger and Paul Robeson and Woody Guthrie. Philip sought to revive his early ambition of becoming a painter, but all his figures looked like Disney cartoons. He tried sculpting in metal, and after a while this brought him a measure of satisfaction.

In high school, Michael Klein was in the band and the student council and was the captain of the swim team, but he led a double life. He’d been sent to Socialist summer camp, and his real friends were other red-diaper babies who lived in New York, with whom he could discuss his home life without fear of exposure. It was difficult and frightening to be the child of Communists. One of his most vivid childhood memories was seeing buses arrive at Camp Midvale in the early fall of 1949 and disgorge dozens of bloodied people who had gone to a Paul Robeson concert and had been attacked with rocks and bats by a local mob. The electrocution of the Rosenbergs, in 1953, which left their two boys orphaned at the ages of six and ten, terrified Michael, who was not much older.

Michael Klein never deviated from the beliefs of his parents, but, like them, he stayed away from political parties. In medical school, he protested against the Vietnam War and joined Physicians for Social Responsibility. When he was drafted, he didn’t sign the statement about not belonging to organizations with Communist ties, so the Army held a hearing to decide whether he was loyal enough to serve. Meanwhile, he had met a young activist filmmaker from Philadelphia named Bonnie Sherr, and got her pregnant. In the middle of his draft negotiations, she saw a documentary about American soldiers dropping napalm on civilian populations, commissioned by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. She said, “If a Canadian government agency can produce a film like this, we should get married and run away to Canada.” So they did.

They ended up in Montreal. Michael worked as a pediatrician in a public hospital. Bonnie had studied film in California—the first film she shot was of César Chávez’s first march in Sacramento. In Canada, she made a film in which welfare recipients interviewed one another about health care; she made a series of films about the community organizer Saul Alinsky; later, she made a film about women peace activists, at Greenham Common and in the Soviet Union. (“I had pretty simplistic political ideas about dialogue,” she says now. “You know, an enemy is somebody whose stories you haven’t heard.”) In 1980, she set out to make a feminist film about sex, to be titled “Celebration,” but instead made “Not a Love Story,” about pornography. She was involved in a feminist film group at the National Film Board called Studio D. Her friends at Studio D were into solstices and female spirituality, and at one point she confided to her daughter that she wanted to be a witch. “My mother was always saying things like that,” Klein recalled later in her mother’s memoir. “She always wanted to be more of a hippie earth mother than she actually was. . . . The Joan Baez fantasy ran deep. It would resurface every few years, and she would learn to play ‘Greensleeves’ again.”

Her parents’ careers, so very Canadian, give Klein’s commitment to public institutions an emotional force, beyond her sense that profit distorts certain functions, such as health care. “Both of my parents lived through a honeymoon period in the public sector,” she says. “My mother and Studio D were always furious because they weren’t getting the resources they thought they deserved, but from the outside perspective it was, like, Oh, my God. You were allowed to have a women’s studio making films about social change within a huge public institution! And my father was able to do something similar within the health-care system, starting the birthing room at the hospital”—he admitted midwives and alternative medicine, and waged a campaign against unnecessary surgical interventions in childbirth. “It’s easy to deride the idea of government in America, where people’s association with the public sphere is the post office.”

Naomi and her older brother, Seth, were brought up to be proud of the history of their family and of the left. “I can’t tell you a time,” Seth Klein says, “when I didn’t simultaneously know that I really liked Disney movies and that Walt Disney was a bastard.” When they drove to their cabin in Vermont on weekends, Bonnie and Michael would play tapes of a Pacifica Radio show that related American history through folk music—the story of McCarthyism through the Weavers, the civil-rights movement through the Freedom Singers. When Seth was little, he worried that all the good fights had already been fought, but Bonnie told him that she was sure he would find something that needed attending to, and from an early age he was on the lookout for what that thing might be—what fight would turn out to be his identity and his legacy. When he was in the sixth grade, his father took him to hear Helen Caldicott speak against nuclear weapons, and he decided that that was it. He started an anti-nuclear group, and after graduating he took a year off to travel around the country with the group, speaking to students.

While Seth was the good activist child, Naomi always resented being dragged to demonstrations. She found her mother’s feminism repellent. “She really didn’t like the way I dressed,” Bonnie says. “My crowd at Studio D wore long skirts, schlumpy clothes.” Naomi recalled that when she was eight or nine she spent “an entire journey through the Rockies conducting covert makeovers on everyone in the car. My father would lose the sandals and get a sharp, dignified suit, my mother a helmet hairdo and a wardrobe of smart pastel blazers, skirts and matching pumps.” She fought with her parents all the time. “Since I was an impeccable liar and rarely got caught,” Naomi recalled, “our fights were less about actual transgressions than about my silence, my sullenness and, as my dad was always fond of putting it, my ‘refusal to be part of this family.’ ”

Naomi spent her adolescence in her room writing poetry or experimenting in the bathroom with makeup. Bonnie was appalled. She worried that Naomi was turning into a brat, thinking about clothes, spending time in front of the mirror. “I think we were overly concerned about the kind of typical teen-age stuff she was into,” Bonnie says. “She read Judy Blume! I was beside myself. I was a feminist—I wanted my daughter to be good at math.” “They had imagined themselves to be breeding a new kind of post-revolutionary child,” Naomi wrote in her twenties. “Hadn’t they diligently mushed their own baby food? Read Parent Effectiveness Training? Banned war toys and other ‘gendered’ play?” Bonnie says now, “I think she thought, ‘What’s wrong with having a good time?’ And there was something in us—although I don’t like to admit it—something of the overearnest, you know? We were always fighting something. There were always people who were the bad guy.” In fact, it was worse than that. Naomi suffered from a kind of spiritual claustrophobia: she had glumly concluded that any path she chose in life—conformist or rebellious, lawyer or itinerant poet—would be equally hackneyed and ridiculous. And so even her parents’ idea of a good time, which usually involved getting out into nature and attending to one’s bodily needs under artificially primitive conditions (“another ponchoed picnic”), was to her just more proof of their irredeemable cheesiness and the vast gulf between them and herself. “All my parents wanted was the open road and a VW camper,” she wrote. “That was enough escape for them. The ocean, the night sky, some acoustic guitar. . . . ”

Soon after she graduated from high school, two catastrophic events erased her animus toward her parents and their politics. First, her mother had a severe stroke that initially left her quadriplegic. Naomi quit her job and spent most of the six months that Bonnie was in the hospital at her side. Then, during her first semester at the University of Toronto, a gunman killed fourteen women at the École Polytechnique in Montreal, declaring, “I hate feminists.” She decided to call herself a feminist from then on.

Klein sat on a table, inside the MTV studios, in Manhattan. She swung her legs back and forth. She was wearing a long necklace and black high-heeled mini-boots. She may have made up with her parents, but in matters of style she stands firm against activism of the old school. She wears jeans, but she is groomed as flawlessly as an anchorwoman. She giggles, she makes jokes. She smiles a lot, especially onstage, though it is never clear whether she is smiling in amusement, politeness, irritation, or for some other reason. Her demeanor is friendly but guarded.

While they were waiting for the interview to start, the interviewer, a young man in a black T-shirt, asked her what she’d been doing lately. She told him that she’d been working on the movie version of “The Shock Doctrine,” which was being made by the director of “Road to Guantánamo.”

“Did you see ‘Road to Guantánamo’?” she asked.

“No. I heard about it, though.”

“It’s excellent—it’s intercut between interviews with the Tipton Three”—three young British men who were held in Guantánamo for two years—“and they’re just, like, blokes, you know? The best moment in the film was when one of them suggests going to Afghanistan because they’ve got massive naans there. That was the reason.”

The producer, a young man in jeans and an acid-lime polo shirt, appeared.

“We’ll be talking about China and the Olympics, about Darfur and intervention,” the interviewer said. “But also about you personally—how you became who you are—because it’s a young audience that looks up to each and every person on the program. The goal is to have them want to be like that person.”

“Are you going to ask me my favorite band?” she asked.

“We will, yes, I’m afraid.”

“I’m going to say M.I.A., just so you know.”

“That will definitely ingratiate you with the demographic,” the producer said.

“I’m sucking up, that’s why I’m here. D’you think I could get some tea?”

Klein has been a person whom young people look up to since she found herself in charge of emotional teach-ins right after the Montreal massacre. She spent most of her time in college on politics and journalism; she was the editor-in-chief of the university paper, the Varsity. Then, after her third year, the Globe and Mail offered her a job, and she dropped out of school to take it. At the age of twenty-three, she took over as the editor of This Magazine, the Canadian equivalent of The Nation. But after a little more than a year she started to get discouraged about the state of the left—she felt that it had run out of things to say, apart from being outraged by people it disagreed with—and she decided to go back to school.

When she arrived back at university in 1996, she discovered that everything had changed. During her previous stint as an undergraduate, she had spent all her time protesting the underrepresentation of women and minorities in the curriculum and the media; campus politics in 1989 had mostly meant identity politics. But students in 1996 weren’t interested in identity; what they talked about was economics. At the time, corporations were starting to make inroads into schools: soft-drink companies were negotiating exclusive deals; advertisements were appearing in bathrooms. There was a feeling in the air that corporations were getting too powerful—more powerful than governments, but not accountable to anyone except their shareholders. And, at the same time that big corporations were withdrawing physically from the United States and opening factories overseas, visually, even spiritually, they were everywhere, insinuating their logos into what had once been public space. Young activists found this especially objectionable, perhaps because one of the places into which corporations insinuated themselves most effectively was youth and activism, folding mutiny into advertising so deftly that resistance seemed futile.

Klein dropped out of college again and started writing a book about the insidious new branding culture. She thought about how much she had loved shiny, plastic brand-name stuff when she was a kid—everyone had—and she concluded that a movement was doomed to hippies-only irrelevance if it condemned the longing and the pleasure that brands could create. “Soft drink and computer brands play the roles of deities in our culture,” she wrote later. “They are creating our most powerful iconography, they are the ones building our most utopian monuments.” She discovered that an anti-corporatist movement was brewing all over the world, in response to sweatshops abroad and brand encroachment at home. By 1999, she had finished “No Logo,” a book about brands and the new movement they had inspired. Then, in an extraordinary stroke of publishing luck, while “No Logo” was at the printer’s, enormous crowds of protesters suddenly materialized outside a meeting of the World Trade Organization in Seattle. The protest seemed to come out of nowhere—or, at least, that was how it appeared to the bewildered old left—and there was “No Logo” and Klein herself to explain it.

Klein lives with her husband, Avi Lewis, in a small house in Toronto, on a quiet street. Lewis is a host of political talk shows and a maker of documentaries; this year he is covering the U.S. elections for Al Jazeera English. Their house is very tidy, free of any sort of clutter. It is furnished simply, as though on one quick trip to Crate & Barrel. It does not look lived in, and, indeed, most of the time it is not: both Lewis and Klein are on the road so much that they estimate they have spent no more than two months in Toronto since they moved in, a year ago. Nonetheless, the house is important to her. “I come from such a line of wanderers that I wanted to stop wandering,” Klein says. “In Montreal, the city I grew up in, there’s no trace of us.” (Klein’s parents moved to British Columbia after Bonnie’s stroke, because the weather made it easier to get around in a wheelchair; Bonnie has become a disability-rights activist. Seth also lives in British Columbia, working on poverty issues for a think tank.) “I don’t like to go to the city I grew up in and feel like a stranger,” Klein says. “This is Avi’s city, he goes back generations here, and that’s as close to roots as I’m going to get.”

Although Klein and Lewis spend a lot of time apart, they make a point of preserving their dependence upon each other. Avi tries not to work when Naomi needs him. “He feeds her and takes care of her while she’s writing,” Bonnie says. “He edits things first.” He accompanies her on her book tours whenever he can. In 2002, Klein and Lewis concluded that their only hope of spending a long stretch together was to do a joint project, and they decided to make a film. They were tired of being against things all the time, and they were always being asked what they would suggest as an alternative, so they started travelling, looking for something that they could feel good about. They settled on Argentina, and ended up making “The Take,” a moving documentary about a group of laid-off workers who broke into their shuttered factory and started it up again as a collective. At the time, Buenos Aires was in turmoil, and every now and again a protest they were documenting would turn violent and the police would start shooting, and there was an ongoing discussion about what to do. Lewis wanted to run; Klein wanted to stay. “I was trying to dissuade the cowboys in our crew from putting themselves in danger,” Lewis says. “I was, like, ‘Just be safe, guys, it’s not our country, we’re here at best in a capacity of solidarity, it’s not the time to die.’ But Naomi said, ‘Here’s the principle: if something is happening and we’re the only ones witnessing it, we have a responsibility to posterity.’ ”

Klein and Lewis agree on most political issues, but Klein seems more ready to break things; more cynical; angrier. “I think Avi is too quick to reject revolutionary movements,” she says. “I think that incremental change makes sense in the Canadian context, but it doesn’t necessarily make sense in the mountains of Chiapas. I don’t fetishize guerrilla violence, but I think there are situations where people are justified in taking up arms. We’ve had fights about that.” Unlike Klein, the descendant of embittered ex-Communists, Lewis comes from a distinguished political family that has always been Socialist rather than Communist, and so has kept its political faith. “My earliest memories are of conventions and election nights, seeing grownups crying or celebrating,” Lewis says. “We understood in my family that we were part of a cause, a movement, and the Party, capitalized, was a big part of that.”

The politics of the Lewis family have changed very little in the past hundred years. Avi Lewis’s great-grandfather Maishe Losz was the leader of the Jewish Labor Bund, a secular Socialist party, in his small town just east of Bialystok. The Bund was anti-Bolshevik; it believed that revolution should be achieved through democratic processes, even if that meant compromise. Thus, the Bundist maxim: “It is better to go along with the masses in a not totally correct direction than to separate oneself from them and remain a purist.” In 1921, fearing that he would be killed by the Red Army, Losz fled to Canada. Losz’s son David Lewis became the national leader of the Canadian democratic socialist party, the New Democratic Party. The N.D.P. never formed a national government, but it came to power in the provinces: in Canada, socialism was mainstream. David Lewis persuaded the Party to delete the eradication of capitalism from its manifesto, and he crushed movement dogmatism and indiscipline. (“When in heaven’s name are we going to learn that working-class politics and the struggle for power are not a Sunday-school class?” he asked.) David’s son Stephen, Avi’s father, also followed in the family tradition, and was elected the leader of the N.D.P. in Ontario at the age of thirty-two. (Avi’s mother, Michele Landsberg, is a journalist, who is well known in Canada for her feminism and her pugnacious left-wing politics—in her columns, conservatives are always “jack-booted” or “henchmen.”) When, in the late sixties, a faction called “the Waffle” threatened to splinter the Party, Stephen Lewis crushed it, just as his father had crushed factions before. For Stephen and for David, loyalty to the Party was paramount. They would not permit the left to destroy itself.

Stephen Lewis left office thirty years ago, and David Lewis died in 1981, but the Lewises are still well known and beloved in Canada. “I live in that fantasy world in which you should say what you believe in and shouldn’t retreat because the electorate may not be receptive,” Stephen Lewis says. “That may explain why my own leadership was one of remarkable futility, almost legendary futility.” Recently, Lewis spent five years as the United Nations special envoy for H.I.V. /AIDS in Africa, but his respite from campaigning has not made him quieter. “I’m more fundamentalist now,” he says. “I have no patience for capitalism at all. I see now that there is almost nothing that is positive in this ugly international system, and that’s why I embrace Naomi’s view of the way the world works. I’m actually tired of my rhetorical outbursts—I’d like to engage in physical aggression.”

“I think there is, for my parents’ generation, a sense of defeat,” Avi Lewis says. “They grew up in a postwar period when it seemed like the world was changeable—a welfare state had been built and had to be protected and extended. But their adult lives have encompassed a long deterioration of the standard of living for the majority of people on this continent, and as they’ve seen the gains of the sixties and seventies largely erased, they’ve started to feel more and more hopeless. Whereas Naomi and I grew up in a time when the backlash was already well under way, so we may be just as pessimistic, but we don’t feel defeated, because we never had the luxury of hope.”

These days, Avi Lewis looks very much like the product of his family, but this was not always so. “I rebelled furiously, but without rebelling in the most hurtful way, which would have been to rebel politically,” he says. “I was a host on MuchMusic, which is our MTV. I knew that I wasn’t doing politics the way I was brought up to, and I was conflicted about that. My parents would ask me, ‘Are you sure you know what you’re doing? I know you love music, and it’s cool for you to hang out with Bowie, and you sometimes get to do a one-hour special on music and politics in South Africa, which is sort of political, but are you sure you’re doing the most you can?’ I was alienated from my own political inheritance. I had a tradition to fit into. I had a platform from the time I was four or five years old.” It was at this point that Lewis met Klein. They were both covering the Canadian elections in 1993—he for MuchMusic, she for CBC. When Lewis met Klein, he felt that she was freer of her family than he was of his, and this somehow relieved him of the urge to run away. “I always got the feeling that Naomi was the author of her own politics,” Lewis says. “And when I got close to her I started seizing the reins of my own political development.”

To Klein’s and Lewis’s parents, it seems that the only difference between their children and their families is style. “I remember Stephen’s father debating William F. Buckley when I was an undergraduate,” Michele Landsberg says. “The place was packed to the rafters, and we went mad with joy when David trounced that snakelike William Buckley. Remembering David’s rhetoric, a lot of it was sentimental and heartfelt old Socialist lingo, talking about the poor working man in his tattered raincoat. Naomi would use more irony, because we’ve gotten past our romanticism about how we change the world.” But their parents never doubted what ought to be done to make the world better; Lewis and Klein are not so sure. “Naomi takes the responsibility of young people listening to her and looking up to her really, really seriously,” Lewis says. “Which is precisely why she refuses to say, ‘Here’s the alternative, here’s what we all have to line up and fight for.’ Suspicion of people who know what the answer is—that’s very characteristic of our generation, and that’s one of the reasons I’ve never gone into politics. It’s very difficult for both of us when people look to us for the kind of certainty that earlier generations had.” One of the few political leaders whom Klein really likes is Subcommandant Marcos, the head of the Zapatistas, in Mexico, who makes a fetish of his elusiveness and doubt.

In “No Logo,” Klein celebrated the anarchic formlessness of the anti-corporate protests—what she wryly termed “laissez-faire organizing.” Her generation of activists was “challenging systems of centralized power on principle, as critical of left-wing, one-size-fits-all state solutions as of right-wing market ones,” she wrote. “It is often said disparagingly that this movement lacks ideology, an overarching message, a master plan. This is absolutely true, and we should be extraordinarily thankful.” These days, the movement long gone, she is not so sanguine about it. “What I was responding to at the time was people on the left who I thought were opportunistically trying to impose their solutions,” she says. “I was hoping that more of an articulation would emerge in a grass-roots way, but it’s not happening—I think because the entire discussion was severed on September 11th. The mainstream N.G.O.s became frightened of being associated with people who seemed quasi-terrorist, and then we started talking about war.” Lewis has never been as enamored as Klein of the movement’s lack of discipline, and she admits now that he may have been right. “Seeing how easy it was for everything to evaporate, without institutions taking that energy and nailing it down—we were too ephemeral,” she says. “It was that experience that made me feel like we need to be more tangible, whether it’s political parties or putting it in writing.”

In the end, despite all his suspicion of leaders and certainty, Lewis loves and honors his family tradition. The N.D.P. regularly approaches him about running for office (as it does Klein), and he thinks seriously about doing so (she does not). During the recent election campaign in Canada, Klein advocated strategic voting—voting for either the Liberals or the N.D.P., depending on which had a better chance of winning in a particular district, to promote the greater goal of unseating the Tories. “I don’t believe enough in the N.D.P. to really care,” she says. Avi tried to talk her out of it, while her father-in-law was appalled. “I don’t have one minute’s use for strategic voting,” Stephen Lewis says. “I just believe in the most intransigent of ways that you vote for your convictions.” But Klein doesn’t have much use for political parties. When she is asked about this, she explains that she has seen liberation movements betrayed by the politicians they fought to get elected, but her impatience appears to be rooted in something more than that: she seems to dislike parties and, indeed, governments, in a visceral way, almost the way that Milton Friedman does. In principle, she is a Keynesian, but she distrusts centralization, institutions, platforms, theories—anything except extremely small, local, ad-hoc, spontaneous initiatives. Basically, she really, really doesn’t like being told what to do.

It is clear, in “The Shock Doctrine,” just how deeply she disdains the political. She tends to conflate very different right-wing groups—neoconservatives, crony capitalists, libertarians. (In the end, “The Shock Doctrine” is not so much anti-Friedman as anti-corporate.) And in hunting down instances in which ideology has been used as a cover for enriching cronies and corporations, she slides into the position that politics is always and everywhere about enrichment. Her great strength—following the money; never taking ideology at face value but always questioning who benefits from it; helping to pull the left back to the economic analysis that it forgot during the era of “the personal is political”—is also a weakness. Her materialism is such that she sometimes seems scarcely to believe that politics exists at all. At one point, for instance, she argues that the Israeli élite lost interest in peace in large part because Israeli companies were doing a booming business in security technology, which benefits from war. She argues that the Chinese Communist Party cracked down on protesters in Tiananmen Square not in order to protect its power but in order to protect Deng Xiaoping’s economic-liberalization program (of which breach of orthodoxy, in fact, many in the Party were quite suspicious—a suspicion only reinforced by the pro-Western protests).

“I’m not a utopian thinker,” Klein says. “I don’t imagine my ideal society. I don’t really like to read those books, either. I’m just much more comfortable talking about things that are.” The only time she has ever felt a whiff of utopia was in Buenos Aires, in 2002, when the political system had virtually disintegrated—during the time that she and Lewis were filming “The Take.” “That moment in Argentina was an incredible time because a vacuum opened up,” she says. “They had thrown out four Presidents in two weeks, and they had no idea what to do. Every institution was in crisis. The politicians were hiding in their homes. When they came out, housewives attacked them with brooms. And, walking around Buenos Aires at night, there were meetings on every other street corner. Every plaza where there was a streetlight, people were meeting under it and talking about what to do about the external debt, I swear to God. Groups of one hundred or five hundred people. And organizing buying groceries together because they could get cheaper prices, setting up barters because the currency was worthless. It was the most inspiring thing I’ve ever seen.”

Klein believes that change comes about only when social movements become so large and disruptive that politicians can no longer ignore them. This is another of her ongoing arguments with her in-laws: whether social movements can really change things. Stephen Lewis is as susceptible to their allure as the next new leftist—he drove down to Little Rock in 1957, when Orval Faubus called out the militia, to witness the civil-rights movement firsthand—but in the end he remains a politician. “Naomi’s and Avi’s profound skepticism is not a skepticism I share, even though they have far more evidence than I do,” he says. “There was a period when people like Avi and Naomi actually thought that the social movements could sort of take over. But you may have a green movement which has influence on carbon tax, you may have a campaign for nuclear disarmament which lowers the temperature over the arms race, but you never have an over-all gestalt which can do everything from day care to foreign aid and see it as part of an over-all pattern to change the world. That has to come through politics.”

Both Klein and Lewis are skeptical about Barack Obama. “I’ve been at rallies and seen him speak, and I feel that feeling that one feels,” Lewis says. “It is thrilling. And it’s churlish not to allow yourself to be thrilled. We crave inspiration, and it’s a bleak life to always be dissecting things. But the main feeling that Obama creates in me is fear, because I see people fooling themselves. If you actually look at his policies, what they reflect is the triumph of the right-wing political paradigm since Reagan, and I think he could set things back dramatically, because for young people who are getting engaged in politics for the first time, for them to be disillusioned is very, very damaging.” Because Klein doesn’t expect much from any politician, she doesn’t spend time wishing Obama were more progressive. “I don’t want to appear too cynical, but when I first saw the ‘Yes We Can’ rock video that Will.I.Am made, my first response was ‘Wow, finally a politician is making ads that are as good as Nike’s,’ ” she says. “The ‘Yes We Can’ slogan means whatever you want it to mean. It’s very ‘Just Do It.’ When you hear it, you catch yourself thinking, Yeah! We’re gonna end torture and shut down Guantánamo and get out of Iraq! And then you think, Wait a minute, is he really saying that? He’s not really saying that, is he? He’s saying we’re going to send more troops to Afghanistan. He’s telling regular people what they want to hear, and then in the back rooms he’s making deals and signing on to the status quo. But if people don’t like where Obama is they should move the center.” To this end, Klein has been taking every opportunity to call for the nationalization of the oil companies. “It’s the job of the left to move the center,” she says. “Get out there and say some crazy stuff! And then, suddenly, it’ll seem more reasonable for politicians to take riskier positions.”

For someone who places so much weight on social movements, though, Klein can get dyspeptic when she finds herself in the middle of one. Activists are so earnest, so dedicated, so—like her parents. “Marches depress me,” she says. “Going for a walk and chanting—I get nothing out of it.” When she began participating in the anti-globalization movement, she understood that protests outside trade summits were the main way that the movement was making itself heard, but they still seemed a little comical to her. “Is this really what we want?” she wrote in a column in the summer of 2000. “A movement of meeting stalkers, following the trade bureaucrats as if they were the Grateful Dead?” The World Social Forum in Brazil ought to have been a place where she felt at home, but there was too much chanting, and José Bové went around with bodyguards to protect him from the paparazzi, and the activists kept accusing one another of racism and classism, and the cultural interludes were hard to take. “A line of dancers appeared on stage, heads bowed in shame, feet shuffling,” she wrote, describing one. “[Then] the people on stage began to run, brandishing the tools of their empowerment: hammers, saws, bricks, axes, books, pens, computer keyboards, raised fists. In the final scene, a pregnant woman planted seeds—seeds, we were told, of another world.”

The only kind of protest she likes is the Yippie kind, theatrical enough to be entertaining and self-mocking enough to dilute the earnestness to a level that she can tolerate. At the protests in Quebec City during the Summit of the Americas in 2001, for example—when the officials surrounded themselves with a tall protective fence, a group of activists built a medieval-style wood catapult and lobbed Teddy bears over the top. “Quebec City was just madness,” she says. “It was one of those times when nobody knows what’s going to happen, and there are these breakthrough moments, these liberated moments, these moments of euphoria. It was mostly young people, and they were getting gassed, but they were still enjoying themselves tremendously, playing cat and mouse with the police. What I loved about it was that the whole city joined in—people working in cafés on the main streets, and neighbors got buckets of water to wash out people’s eyes. It was like an alternative reality.”

After the death of Milton Friedman, in 2006, the University of Chicago decided to set up an institute in his honor. The institute was opposed by many professors, who formed a group to protest it. Klein offered to debate someone from the institute’s board, but nobody would do it, so she agreed to go to Chicago and talk about her own objections to the project.

The evening was sponsored in part by the Platypus Affiliated Society—a student-teacher reading group that focusses on the Frankfurt School and the Second International period of Marxism—and a few of Platypus’s members, tall, thin, pale young men, had set up a table out front. Platypus was founded on the idea that the left didn’t have a proper sense of its own history, especially the bad bits, and that a study of that history would help it emerge from the troubled state in which it found itself. (“Protest has devolved into an insular subculture of self-hatred, frustration, and anxiety derived from a pathological attitude towards social integration,” a typically morose editorial in the Platypus Review declares.) Given its emphasis on self-criticism, Platypus was not a natural constituency for Klein’s work, but because she was coming to the campus the group read “The Shock Doctrine,” and also Hayek and Friedman. “The conservatives engage the questions of freedom and utopia directly,” Ian Morrison, the editor of Platypus’s newsletter, said. “We were very struck that Klein seemed to back away from utopianism, because we feel that the left has liquidated itself in part because it’s conceded talk about freedom to someone like Bush.” Platypus’s interrogation of the past has led it in a variety of directions. Several of its members also belonged to the new Students for a Democratic Society, a revival of the new-left group from the sixties. In August, Platypus participated in a historical reënactment, in Grant Park, of the 1968 Democratic Convention, minus the police. “As a group of young, largely inexperienced activists it was the only organizing framework we could find which emphasized active participation,” read a writeup of the event in the Platypus Review. “Other forms seemed linguistically and ideologically flaccid. . . . We didn’t want to view our history—our radical history—as if from a riverbank, we wanted to jump in and splash around in it. . . . We debated, for instance, the ethics of nominating a live pig for the presidency: what should we feed it, and where would it stay?”

The Platypus men filed into the front row of Assembly Hall, and Klein stood at the lectern. There was a good crowd, not just people from the campus. Three anarchists had driven up from St. Louis specially to see her. “What we have been living since Reagan is a policy of liberating the forces of greed,” she declared. “I don’t think the project has actually been the development of the world and the elimination of poverty. I think this has been a class war waged by the rich against the poor, I think that they won, and I think the poor are fighting back.”

Klein never tempers her arguments in search of converts from the center; she rallies her base. She’s not interested in making the left part of the mainstream; she wants to convince the left that it doesn’t need the mainstream. “Part of what makes us less strong than we should be,” she says, “those of us who don’t believe that profit should govern every aspect of our lives, is that part of us accepts the narrative that neoliberal ideas have triumphed around the world because they were popular and our ideas failed.” For this reason, it is important to her, in “The Shock Doctrine,” that there be virtually no exceptions—that is, instances where radical market reforms are enacted with the consent of a people. (In passing, she concedes Reagan and Sarkozy.) But some of her examples are less plausible than others. She argues that the Falklands War—a ten-week venture whose main impact on Britain was an outpouring of jingoistic glee—was “a large enough political crisis,” creating sufficient “disorder” to enable Margaret Thatcher to “impose” her economic agenda. (It is true that, without the glee, Thatcher might not have won the next election, but ill-gotten popularity and traumatized regression are not the same thing.) Klein dismisses as a “propaganda exercise” a referendum held by Boris Yeltsin in which a majority of voters supported his reforms, on the odd ground that it was nonbinding. She maintains that the war in Chechnya was waged not in order to crush secessionism but in order to protect Yeltsin’s economic policy. Thus, she concludes, it “contributed significantly to the Chicago School crusade death toll.” “Naomi is a pattern recognizer,” Lewis says. “Some people feel that she’s bent examples to fit the thesis. But her great strength is helping people recognize patterns in the world, because that’s the fundamental first step toward changing things.”

Throughout “The Shock Doctrine,” Klein is at pains to portray Friedman as a quasi-Satanic figure. The first chapter of the book describes the horrifying psychiatric experiments performed in the nineteen-fifties by one Donald Ewen Cameron, in which subjects were tortured by electroshock. She characterizes this work as a metaphor for the economic shocks performed in Friedman’s name; the next chapter, about Friedman, is titled “The Other Doctor Shock.” The promotional film that Klein made with Alfonso Cuarón is even cruder—a pastiche of disturbing footage of patients receiving electroshock treatment, images of prisoners being tortured, and the sound of a child wailing in an echoey room. “Unable to advance their agenda democratically, Friedman and his disciples were drawn to the power of shock,” Klein says in the voice-over, in the calmly terrorizing tone of a campaign attack ad. “Friedman understood that, just as prisoners are softened up for interrogation by the shock of their capture, massive disasters could serve to soften us up for his radical free-market crusade.”

Why does Klein place such emphasis on Friedman? Perhaps because she wants to draw a parallel between capitalism and Communism, to make their two histories look as similar as possible, and for that she needs not the messy, pragmatic, ad-hoc capitalism of corporations but the purist, utopian capitalism of the Chicago School. Violent autocrats of the free-market persuasion, though there have been many, have not soiled Friedman’s name in the way that Stalin soiled Marx; somehow, the misdeeds of a Pinochet or a Suharto or a Yeltsin are attributed to these men as individuals—to their lust for power, their greed, their drinking. But Klein holds capitalism guilty of all their sins. Friedman’s followers must no longer get away with shaking their heads when their advisees start killing people, she believes. They should feel themselves dupes, fellow-travellers, accessories: they should acknowledge their willed ignorance and complicity, as her grandparents and the Communists of their generation were forced to do.

“My grandparents were pretty hard-core Marxists, and in the thirties and forties they believed fervently in the dream of egalitarianism that the Soviet Union represented,” Klein told the audience in Chicago. “They had their illusions shattered by the reality of gulags, of extreme repression, hypocrisy, Stalin’s pact with Hitler. . . . The left has been held accountable for the crimes committed in the name of its extreme ideologies, and I believe that’s been a very healthy process. . . . When you start issuing policy prescriptions, when you start advising heads of state, you no longer have the luxury of only being judged on how you think your ideas will affect the world. You begin having to contend with how they actually affect the world, even when that reality contradicts all of your utopian theories.”

The day after the Chicago event, Klein taped an appearance on “The Colbert Report,” then went directly to the airport for a flight to France. She came back and went on a speaking tour to Texas, Colorado, California, and Wisconsin, did two panels in New York, and then later flew to Chicago for its humanities festival and to Miami for the book fair. She spent a week in Poland. Everywhere she went, she stuck to her theme. “The crash on Wall Street should be for Friedmanism what the fall of the Berlin Wall was for authoritarian Communism, an indictment of an ideology,” she says. It was clear to her that the past month had proved what she’d been saying for years. Now, if she could only speak often enough, to enough people, and explain things persuasively enough, maybe the left would stop wringing its hands and the right would start apologizing. It seemed unlikely, but she would try all the same. ♦

The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles faces a financial crisis that threatens its survival as an independent institution.

By EDWARD WYATT and JORI FINKEL
NY Times Published: December 4, 2008

LOS ANGELES — When this city’s Museum of Contemporary Art appointed a classically trained curator from the Art Institute of Chicago as its director in 1999, many viewed it as a welcome sign that art rather than business would be kept at the forefront of one of the most dynamic museums in the country.

They did not know how right they were. Nearly 10 years later, the museum remains internationally renowned for its collection of postwar art and for organizing some of the most serious and ambitious contemporary art exhibitions anywhere.

Yet by putting art ahead of the bottom line, the Museum of Contemporary Art has nearly killed itself. The museum has operated at a deficit in six of the last eight years, and its endowment has shrunk to about $6 million from nearly $50 million in 1999, according to people who have been briefed on the finances.

Now the California attorney general has begun an audit to determine if the museum broke laws governing the use of restricted money by nonprofit organizations. And local artists, curators and collectors, including current and former board members, are lobbying to remove the museum’s director, Jeremy Strick, its board, or both.

The museum’s tailspin has brought an outpouring of grief and disbelief in a city that has recently cast itself as a rival to New York as the nation’s art capital. The closing of such a respected museum, or even its merger into another institution, would leave a formidable hole not only in the city’s psyche but in the national cultural landscape as well.

“The museum has a very significant role beyond the culture of Los Angeles,” said Connie Butler, a former curator there who is now chief drawings curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. “People in the art world feel they are going to wake up one morning and one of the greatest resources in terms of contemporary art in the Western world is going to be permanently altered.”

Museum officials say they expect a solution to the crisis by the end of the year, if not by the next board meeting, on Dec. 16. A possible merger with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art has been discussed and is supported by some trustees, although the museum’s official position is that it wants to remain independent.

Eli Broad, the billionaire philanthropist who frequently plays the role of Medici here, offered $30 million last month in support of the Museum of Contemporary Art, on the condition that half of it be matched by contributions from other donors. So far, no other donors have stepped forward.

Museum officials would not agree to be interviewed for this article or to discuss the scope of the state’s audit. In written responses to questions, the museum said it was “pursuing and assessing all of its options,” including talks with Mr. Broad and with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art about possible partnerships. “Central to all these discussions is MOCA’s commitment to its core mission,” the museum said.

Part of its challenge may be that the very people who are considering the museum’s options include those who oversaw its decline. One of the board’s two co-chairmen, Tom Unterman, for example, has served on the board’s finance committee for the last eight years and was finance chairman the last three. David G. Johnson, the other co-chairman of the board, was previously head of its governance committee.

“It’s obvious that there needs to be new management,” said Jane Nathanson, a member of the boards of both the Museum of Contemporary Art and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. “MOCA needs to look deeply into the way it has functioned and move forward to rebuild the reputation of the museum.”

Some trustees have departed in recent years, frustrated with what they called the museum’s financial recklessness and lack of leadership. “I saw the train wreck coming,” said Susan Nimoy, a collector who left the board in 2006 after pushing hard, she said, to bring the budget in line with available money.

“My main complaint to the board was that none of you would run your household budget the way this institution is run,” Mrs. Nimoy said. “I think every one of those trustees should resign and Jeremy should resign.”

The museum was founded in 1979 by a corps of collectors after the demise of the Pasadena Art Museum left Los Angeles without a major museum dedicated to modern or contemporary art. The city agreed that if the founders could raise $10 million for operating costs, it would help pay for construction of a new museum downtown.

While the building was in development downtown, a nearby city warehouse was renovated for use as a temporary home. It opened in 1983, three years before the main building was completed on Grand Avenue. (The warehouse, known as the Geffen Contemporary, remains in use, and the museum also maintains a small gallery at the Pacific Design Center in West Hollywood.)

Dean Valentine, a media entrepreneur and former museum trustee, described the museum as central to the city’s becoming a major cultural center. “For many artists in Los Angeles, it was the first institution that expressed interest in their work,” Mr. Valentine said, comparing its importance for West Coast artists to that of MoMA in New York for the Abstract Expressionists some 50 years ago.

Historically, one problem dogging the museum has been the lack of a proper home for its permanent collection, which features early work by John Baldessari, Ed Ruscha and Robert Rauschenberg, among others. The Grand Avenue building is considered too small by today’s standards while the larger Geffen Contemporary lacks necessary climate controls to preserve art.

“It’s a source of frustration for many of us,” Mr. Valentine said. Like Mrs. Nimoy, he left the museum board in 2006, unhappy with the leadership; both have since joined the board of the Hammer Museum here.

Given its financial crisis, the Museum of Contemporary Art has announced plans to close the Geffen for six months next year and is promoting the location online for rental to film crews.

According to its financial statements, the only time in the last seven years that the museum has managed to finish with a surplus was in the 2007 fiscal year, when its revenues topped expenses by $3 million. But much of that surplus came from a gain on the sale of investments; admissions and membership revenues had declined, and the budget surpassed $21 million, the highest ever.

The museum said it expected its audited financial statements, once completed, to show that it generated a surplus in the 2008 fiscal year as well, although it declined to provide details.

Yet in nearly every year since 2000, the museum has drawn down on the principal of its endowment to pay for operations, a practice frowned upon as risky in the museum world.

And at times the museum has secured financing for exhibitions in ways that many other museums would shun. To help pay for last year’s Takashi Murakami exhibition, the museum solicited hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations from art galleries that represented the artist and therefore stood to gain from any related career boost.

The museum said in a statement that it recently bolstered its ability to raise money, hiring a new director of development and nearly doubling its donations in the last two years. It noted that in the last seven years, 20 of the board’s 40 members, including life trustees, have given more than $1 million in addition to their required annual gifts.

But others say the reluctance of potential donors to respond publicly to Mr. Broad’s offer of matching money stems from a lack of confidence in the museum’s stewardship.

Meanwhile, his rescue plan has stirred concern that Mr. Broad will try to call the shots at the Museum of Contemporary Art, as he did while a trustee there in the 1980s, before a rift led to his departure. Some potential donors have said privately that his role as a major benefactor of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art would give him too much power if he were to lead the rescue of the Museum of Contemporary Art.

In an interview this week, Mr. Broad offered details of his plan, saying he would give the museum $15 million in installments equal to however much the museum raised, plus $3 million a year for five years to pay for operations and exhibitions.

Mr. Broad has also said privately that he favors a management change, according to people who have been part of the discussions. Although the museum does not receive direct city financing, its main buildings were financed by or leased from the city. Eric Garcetti, who as president of the Los Angeles City Council is a nonvoting member of the museum’s board, said, “There does seem to be a consensus forming that new leadership should be brought in to run the museum, that the board should be reinvigorated and there should be a paring down of the budget.”

“I believe,” Mr. Garcetti said, “that the public deserves more reassurance that an institution that the public helped fund will be held to a higher standard.”

in Vancouver, November 8 through February 15

Rudolph’s Twitchell House, destroyed in 2007.

NY magazine By David Hay

Published Nov 23, 2008

Since the architect Paul Rudolph’s death, in 1997, his reputation has undergone one of the most dramatic rehabilitations imaginable, and his brutalist, sometimes off-putting buildings—once criticized as the worst of high modernism’s excesses—are now recognized as some of the most expressive American architecture of the twentieth century. They are also some of the most threatened. In 2002, in an effort to honor Rudolph’s legacy and advocate for preserving his work, friends of the architect, including Ernst Wagner, established the Paul Rudolph Foundation. But since then, seven of his buildings have been demolished, and earlier this month, in the face of mounting criticism that the foundation has not helped halt the destruction, Wagner, in poor health, announced he would resign as president. “I felt like Don Quixote,” he says, sitting in his apartment in the Rudolph-designed townhouse on East 58th Street. “But what the hell can you do? You need someone like Jackie O. to raise a huge hurrah.”

This past year has been particularly heart-wrenching for Rudolph fans: While his most famous building, the A&A building at Yale University, was rededicated this month as Paul Rudolph Hall after a $126 million restoration, both the elegantly cantilevered Micheels House in Westport, Connecticut, and his Cerrito House in Watch Hill, Rhode Island, were torn down. And next year could be even worse, as at least ten more Rudolph buildings are under threat, including the Concourse Building in Singapore, the Blue Cross Blue Shield skyscraper in Boston, and his Orange County Government Center in Goshen. In Sarasota, Florida, the campaign to save Rudolph’s Riverview High School has stalled, and the Cohen House in nearby Siesta Key is now likely headed into foreclosure.

Architectural preservationists across the country recognize that saving the aging canon of mid-century modernism can be expensive, especially in the case of Rudolph, a modernist with a proclivity for experimentation. But in California, groups like the John Lautner Foundation have found success at matching modernist houses with architecturally sophisticated new owners, listing houses for sale on their Website and inviting a prominent Realtor to their advisory board. Wagner, who has been the primary source of funding for the Rudolph Foundation, does not employ a full-time director, relying instead on a constant turnover of volunteers, and the foundation’s board has not met for two years. (The architectural historian Michael Sorkin was surprised to find himself listed as a board member, and the advisory committee includes the architectural critic Peter Blake, who died two years ago.)

To Donald Luckenbill, one of the original directors, the foundation has devolved into nothing more than “a little club that Ernst had in the building.” Robert A.M. Stern, dean of the Yale School of Architecture, says that it is “well intentioned but not powerful enough nor sufficiently endowed to have any clout.”

Until a new director is chosen in January, Kelvin Dickinson and two other volunteer architects are at the helm. But their efforts are mainly academic—expanding Rudolph’s fan base on the Web and preparing an exhibition of his demolished buildings, scheduled to show at Cooper Union in 2010. “We need to hire someone full time,” Dickinson says. “If something like the Micheels House comes along again, we’re way unprepared for it.”

Can restoring Paul Rudolph’s signature building rescue the architect’s reputation as well?

By Witold Rybczynski for The Slate
Posted Wednesday, Dec. 3, 2008, at 7:02 AM ET

The newly refurbished and expanded Art and Architecture Building at Yale is a reminder of the important role that fashion plays in the fortunes of architects. When the A&A Building was built in 1963, its architect, Paul Rudolph, was the profession’s golden boy. His meteoric rise had begun in Florida in the 1950s with a string of delicate Modernist houses, ingeniously adapted to the subtropical climate. These had led to larger commissions, notably a high school in Sarasota and an art center at Wellesley College. At only 40, Rudolph was made chairman of Yale’s architecture department, and then, five years later, came the widely acclaimed A&A, which propelled him into the front rank of the postwar generation’s emerging architectural stars.

Rudolph acknowledged that the A&A was influenced by Le Corbusier, who had pioneered an expressive architectural style using bare concrete, generally referred to as brutalism. But the building also had American roots, namely Frank Lloyd Wright’s famous Larkin Building in Buffalo, N.Y. An odd mixture, but Rudolph pulled it off and gave it his own spin, with walls of rough striated concrete that resembled corduroy. The resulting composition of vast, pinwheeling forms produced a lyrical monumentalism unmatched by any of his contemporaries.

Yet by the time of his death in 1997, Rudolph was all but forgotten. What happened? In a word, taste—changing taste. By the 1970s, Postmodernism had introduced wit and irony to architecture, neither of which interested the serious Rudolph, whose brand of heroic monumentalism now struck many people—and many potential clients—as bombastic. (It is also true that his inventive buildings often had functional problems—the proverbial leaky roofs.) Commissions eventually dried up, at least in the United States, although he continued to build in Asia. He was regularly passed over for the Pritzker Prize, which went instead to contemporaries such as I.M. Pei and Kevin Roche. Although by then Rudolph had moved away from concrete and brutalism, he was ever tied to that style by the A&A, which also suffered from neglect. Disliked by students and faculty, badly damaged in a mysterious fire in 1969, insensitively altered, and poorly maintained, it remained an ill-kempt, embarrassing reminder of a stalled talent.