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Drag City

The Los Angeles Department of Engineering has developed a plan that would significantly transform the Los Angeles River.

By NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF
NY Times Published: March 25, 2009

THE country has fallen on hard times, but those of us who love cities know we have been living in the dark ages for a while now. We know that turning things around will take more than just pouring money into shovel-ready projects, regardless of how they might boost the economy. Windmills won’t do it either. We long for a bold urban vision.

With their crowded neighborhoods and web of public services, cities are not only invaluable cultural incubators; they are also vastly more efficient than suburbs. But for years they have been neglected, and in many cases forcibly harmed, by policies that favored sprawl over density and conformity over difference.

Such policies have caused many of our urban centers to devolve into generic theme parks and others, like Detroit, to decay into ghost towns. They have also sparked the rise of ecologically unsustainable gated communities and reinforced economic disparities by building walls between racial, ethnic and class groups.

Correcting this imbalance will require a radical adjustment in how we think of cities and government’s role in them. At times it will mean destruction rather than repair. And it demands listening to people who have spent the last decade imagining and in many cases planning for more sustainable, livable and socially just cities.

The changes needed may seem extravagant, but they are not impossible. Many of those who see the current economic crisis as a chance to rebuild the country’s infrastructure have pointed to previous major government public works projects, like Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Works Projects Administration in the 1930s and 1940s and Dwight D. Eisenhower’s 1956 National Interstate and Defense Highways Act, as a reminder of what this country was once capable of.

Although the W.P.A. is mostly associated with rural dams and roadways, there’s hardly a city in America where it didn’t leave its mark, from riverfront parks to schools and housing projects.

Eisenhower’s investment in highways was equally audacious, but its effect on cities has not always been positive; in many ways the Highways Act set the stage for decades during which suburban interests trumped urban ones.

Inspired by the German autobahn, which Eisenhower saw firsthand during World War II, the program was an attempt to retool the country’s immense military-industrial complex for a peacetime economy. Creating thousands of miles of intercity highways, the program fueled America’s postwar car culture and suburban sprawl, in addition to changing permanently the way towns and cities have evolved.

Most notably it accelerated certain seismic cultural shifts born of the cold war and the civil rights era by creating the means by which middle-class families would flee perceived urban threats — racial friction, potential Soviet bombs — for the supposed security of the suburbs. In many cities intracity highways became dividing lines between white and black.

In New Orleans, for example, the 10 Freeway bulldozed through one of the city’s most vibrant African-American communities, becoming a psychological barrier between the black middle-class Treme neighborhood and the tourist-infested French Quarter. The Santa Monica Freeway, built around the same time, walled off poor African-American areas like Crenshaw and South Central from the rest of the city to the north.

By the early 1980s, when both President Obama and I were in college, the anti-big-government, pro-privatization rhetoric of the Reagan years was catching on, and the entire notion of public spending, let alone spending on large public works projects, was becoming passé.

In many major cities this void was filled by private developers, who began refurbishing parks and old historic quarters. The result was sanitized versions of real cities organized around themed districts, convention centers and sports complexes. Meanwhile the roads, bridges and sewer systems that held these cities together were allowed to disintegrate.

At the same time Europe and Asia began to supplant America as places where visions of the future were being built. The European Union spent decades building one of the most efficient networks of high-speed trains in the world, a railway that has unified the continent while leading to the cultural revival of cities like Brussels and Lille. And environmental standards for new construction were not only encouraged, they became the law — and have been for more than a decade.

This investment in traditional large-scale infrastructure projects is increasingly being coupled with serious thinking about the future of cities themselves. The Swedish government recently began a promising competition for a design that would replace a decrepit 1930s-era bridge in the heart of Stockholm with a seamless system of locks, roadways and shops. In Madrid the government is completing a plan to bury a four-mile strip of freeway underground and cover it up with parks and new housing. And only a few weeks ago the French government concluded a nine-month study on the future of metropolitan Paris. The study, which included some of Europe’s most celebrated architects, is the first phase in a plan to create a more sustainable, socially integrated model of “the post-Kyoto city.”

Even China, a country where centralized planning often looks like a grotesque parody of American postwar development, is beginning to move toward more sustainable, dense urban models. The government recently announced an $88 billion plan for freight and passenger trains that will link every major urban center along the country’s coast, from Beijing to the Pearl River Delta. And it is building miles of subway lines in booming cities like Shenzhen and Guangzhou.

The problem in America is not a lack of ideas. It is a tendency to equate any large-scale government construction project, no matter how thoughtful, with the most brutal urban renewal tactics of the 1950s. One result has been that pioneering projects that skillfully blend basic infrastructure with broader urban needs like housing and park space are usually killed in their infancy. Another is that we now have an archaic and grotesquely wasteful federal system in which upkeep for roads, subways, housing, public parkland and our water supply are all handled separately.

With money now available to invest again in such basic needs, I’d like to look at four cities representing a range of urban challenges and some of the plans available to address them. Though none of the plans are ideal as they stand today (and some of them represent only the germ of an idea), evaluated and addressed together as part of a coordinated effort, they could begin to form a blueprint for making our cities more efficient, sustainable and livable.

New Orleans

In the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina architects and urban planners all over the country began a spirited investigation of how to make New Orleans safer and more sustainable. The nonprofit Urban Land Institute, devoted to urban issues, presented a report a few months after the storm, based purely on the city’s topography, that proposed returning some of its most devastated low-lying areas to wetlands and concentrating more housing on higher ground — a plan that would, among other things, reduce the burden on the levees and canals that protect the city from storms.

At the same time local architects and preservationists began a campaign to preserve the layers of historical fabric that had been damaged by or lost in the storm, including downtown’s Art Deco Charity Hospital, some early Modernist schools, New Deal-era public housing and the Ninth Ward’s shotgun houses, as well as the Spanish-influenced architecture of the French Quarter.

Even some private developers seemed to understand the importance of balancing social and environmental concerns. Sean Cummings, a local developer, has proposed a master plan for a six-mile-long park on a site along the city’s riverfront, currently a strip of decrepit wharfs, abandoned warehouses and parking lots.

Designed by a formidable team of architects that includes Enrique Norten, George Hargreaves, Alex Krieger and Allen Eskew, the proposal is a model of how to knit together conflicting urban realities. A matrix of public parks, outdoor markets and mid-rise residential towers is woven through the existing fabric of old warehouses. Landscaped boulevards would extend from the park into a mix of working-class and gentrified neighborhoods. What’s more, concentrating more housing on high land along the river fit nicely with the Urban Land Institute’s vision for a more sustainable city.

So far none of these initiatives have achieved much traction. Local communities attacked (understandably) the institute’s plan as insensitive to the populations it sought to relocate. Subsequently the idea of adjusting the city’s footprint in any way became politically toxic, and Mayor C. Ray Nagin quickly made it clear that the city’s redevelopment would be left in the hands of private interests.

Mr. Cummings has received $30 million in federal funds for the first phase of his riverfront plan. But the money is solely for park construction, and so far the project doesn’t include the subsidized housing that would prevent it from becoming an enclave for upper-middle-class whites.

Meanwhile the Department of Housing and Urban Development recently began bulldozing thousands of units of New Deal-era public housing over the objections of many local activists, while the Army Corps of Engineers is shoring up existing canals and levees as if the city were going to grow back to its original size — something no sane person believes.

Even so, the fate of New Orleans has yet to be determined. Many of the city’s low-lying areas are as barren now as they were a week after the storm. And it’s still possible to imagine a more sustainable, socially inclusive city, one that could serve as a model as powerful and far reaching as the American subdivisions of the 1950s. For that to happen, however, a range of government agencies would need to work together to come up with a more coordinated plan.

Los Angeles

Los Angeles has not suffered the trauma of New Orleans, but it is a city famously devoid of a functioning public transportation network and public parkland. These deficiencies will only become more glaring as the city’s population continues to boom.

As far back as the 1930s Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. proposed digging up parts of the Los Angeles River’s concrete bed and transforming its banks into a necklace of parks that would extend most of the 51 miles from the San Fernando Valley through downtown Los Angeles to Long Beach and provide green space for some of the city’s poorest neighborhoods.

Almost 70 years later the Los Angeles City Council, prodded by a mix of local advocates and architects, revived that vision. Recognizing that the river has become both an industrial blight and an impenetrable barrier between the Latino neighborhoods of East Los Angeles and the white enclaves of downtown, the council developed a plan that would tear out part of the concrete bed and return it to its natural state, while repaving other areas in stone. At some points the sides of the riverbed would step down to allow for landscaped walkways. Parks and bike paths would be built along the banks.

So far, however, there is little money to pursue the plan. About $6 million in state grants to help develop the greenway were postponed in December. And so far the federal government has allotted only enough money for the Corps of Engineers, which oversees the river, to continue a feasibility study for concrete removal.

According to Ed P. Reyes, a member of the City Council and a major sponsor of the plan, an investment of $100 million would allow the city to complete a significant section of the plan near downtown, which would provide valuable parkland to one of the city’s poorest neighborhoods and also offer the public a tangible example of the project’s transformative power.

Wilshire Boulevard is another favorite cause for the architects and city planners of Los Angeles. In the early 1990s Frank Gehry and I took a drive down the city’s once-great commercial spine, which stretches 16 miles from downtown Los Angeles to Santa Monica.

Mr. Gehry guided me through the range of communities that the boulevard intersects, from the Latino neighborhoods near MacArthur Park to Koreatown to the many cultural institutions that include the Wiltern Theater, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Hammer Museum. The philanthropist Eli Broad is currently planning yet another museum at the corner of Wilshire and Santa Monica Boulevards in Beverly Hills.

Mr. Gehry suggested that by concentrating more public transportation and cultural institutions along this thoroughfare, Los Angeles might finally find its center, both geographically and socially.

He is not alone in this fantasy. Los Angeles has the most talented cluster of architects practicing anywhere in the United States, and at one point or another most of them have invested significant brain power in figuring out how to remake Wilshire Boulevard. Michael Maltzan has looked at how new public school construction could be connected to the public transportation network along Wilshire, a plan that not only would be cost effective but also could begin healing some of the city’s deep class divisions.

There was an ideal moment, about a decade ago, when this vision might have taken hold; the county’s Metropolitan Transit Authority was just then in the midst of constructing a federally financed multibillion-dollar metro system, including a line that would have run the length of Wilshire Boulevard. The Los Angeles Unified School District was building scores of new schools. And the city’s rapid growth had led to a boom in new development.

Work on the metro ground to a halt several years ago after costs spiraled out of control, and when it was discovered that the district’s flagship school had been built on a toxic waste site, the agency quickly scaled back its goals.

Now a new mayor, Antonio Villaraigosa, is trying to revive the idea of expanding the metro. Without an overhaul of the city’s transportation network it is only a matter of time before the city breaks down, a victim of pollution and overcongestion. A citywide plan that anchored Los Angeles along two major axes — the green river and the asphalt boulevard — could save it from becoming a third world city.

The Bronx

Smaller projects too can have a powerful impact on a region’s identity. In the South Bronx the nonprofit Pratt Center for Community Developmenthas been fighting to demolish parts of the Sheridan and Bruckner Expressways. The Sheridan, which forms a barrier between poor Puerto Rican and Dominican communities in the South Bronx and the Bronx River, was a particular brutal example of Robert Moses’ urban renewal projects. Had it been completed, it would have torn through part of the Bronx Zoo.

When state officials unveiled a plan in 1997 to expand the expressway’s entry ramps, easing truck traffic to the city’s commercial food markets, the community rebelled, and Pratt began to develop a counterplan that would dismantle the expressway altogether and free up 28 acres of land. More specifically, the plan would extend local streets across the site to a new riverfront park, provide up to 1,200 units of affordable housing, create a new sewage facility and restore wetlands along the river. Commercial development could be linked to a planned commuter train station.

Not long ago the state agreed to consider the plan. But even if the plan is adopted, it is not yet clear who would pay for one of its most critical components, the housing, which in the past would have simply been turned over to private developers. What is more, the plan essentially remains a sketch; it still lacks the design elements that could bring it fully to life.

Buffalo

Perhaps the most intriguing test case for reimagining our failing cities is in Buffalo, where the federal government is pressing ahead with a plan to expand its border crossing facilities. The city was once a center of architectural experimentation, with landmarks by virtually every great American architect of the late 19th and early 20th century. Frederick Law Olmsted Sr., the father of American landscaping, created a string of elegant public parks intended for the city’s factory workers.

Like other Rust Belt cities, Buffalo began its decline more than a half-century ago, a victim of failing industries and suburban flight. Large sections of Olmsted’s parks and boulevards were demolished; an elevated expressway sliced through one of these parks, cutting it off from the riverfront; many of downtown’s once-proud buildings were left abandoned.

Yet rather than reverse that trend, the government now seems determined to accelerate it. The Homeland Security Department is planning to expand an area at the entry to the Peace Bridge to make room for new inspection facilities and parking. That plan would require the demolition of five and a half blocks in a diverse working-class neighborhood with a rich architectural history, from late-19th-century Italianate mansions to modest two-family homes built in the 1920s.

Local preservationists argue that protecting the city’s historic neighborhoods is fundamental to the city’s survival. Pointing out that bridge traffic is steadily shrinking, they are pressing the government to upgrade the train system and dismantle parts of the elevated freeway to allow better access to the riverfront. Not only would they like to see Olmsted’s late-19th-century vision restored; they would also like to see it joined to a more comprehensive vision for the city’s future.

At this point there is no concrete plan to counter the government’s, but the potential is great. The city’s architectural fabric is rich. It has an active grass-roots preservation movement. And few sites better sum up the challenges of trying to save a shrinking city. I for one would love to see what a talented architect could accomplish if his imagination were given free rein over such a promising site.

Getting the projects I’ve described off the ground is not as impossible as it may seem. Only last week the federal Departments of Transportation and Housing and Urban Development announced the creation of an urban task force that would promote the development of sustainable communities linked to public transportation — a small but encouraging step in advancing a more integrated approach to urban growth.

In September the White House and Congress will also have a rare opportunity to rethink the antiquated transportation authorization bill, which comes up for review once every six years and funnels hundreds of billions of dollars each year into highway construction and repairs.

Given that the administration has already made sustainability a priority, that money could be redirected to other projects, like efforts that reinforce density rather than encourage urban sprawl. It could be used to replace crumbling expressways with the kind of local roads and parks that bind communities together rather than tear them apart.

I am also a fan of a National Infrastructure Bank, an idea that was first proposed by the financiers Felix Rohatyn and Everett Ehrlich.

The bank would function something like a domestic World Bank, financing large-scale undertakings like subways, airports and harbor improvements. Presumably it would be able to funnel money into the more sustainable, forward-looking projects. It could also establish a review process similar to the one created by the government’s General Services Administration in the mid-1990s, which attracted some of the country’s best talents to design federal courthouses and office buildings. Lavishing similar attention on bridges, pump stations, trains, public housing and schools would not only be a significant step in rebuilding a sense of civic pride; it would also prove that our society values the public infrastructure that binds us together as much as it values, say, sheltering the rich.

A half-century ago American engineering was the envy of the rest of the world. Cities like New York, Los Angeles and New Orleans were considered models for a brilliant new future. Europe, with its suffocating traditions and historical baggage, was dismissed as a decadent, aging culture.

It is no small paradox that many people in the world now see us in similar terms.

President Obama has a rare opportunity to build a new, more enlightened version of this country, one rooted in his own egalitarian ideals. It is an opportunity that may not come around again.

via archinect

Peine del Viento (Wind Comb)
San Sebastián, Spain

A space from which to admire the sea and the wind,
created by the architect Luis Peña Ganchegui and the sculptor
Eduardo Chillida. 1975

Eduardo Chillida Juantegui

Luis Peña Ganchegui

Wildcat Hill, 1938

China Cove, Point Lobos, 1938

By RICHARD B. WOODWARD
Published: March 29, 2009

LANDSCAPE photographers are remembered for the places they took pictures of and almost never for the places they lived. The most eloquent cenotaph to the lives of Carleton Watkins and Ansel Adams is the mountains and waterfalls of Yosemite National Park. A trip to San Francisco in search of Watkins’s demolished studio or Adams’s unspectacular childhood home, on the other hand, won’t figure in many Americans’ vacation plans this year.

One exception to this biographic amnesia, and a worthy candidate for a plaque from the National Register of Historic Places, is Edward Weston’s house on the Monterey Peninsula. If American modernist photography can be said to have a spiritual birthplace that can still be visited, it’s his home on Wildcat Hill in Carmel Highlands where he lived off and on from 1938 until his death in 1958. Many of the Weston photographs that now sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars were printed here. What’s more, his commanding series of seascapes and landscapes were taken only a few miles from the front door, at what is now the Point Lobos State Reserve.

Designed by his third son, Neil, the simple pine-wood cabin is now a private residence not open to the public. But enough pilgrims have figured out the location by now from published records that the obliging owners, Kim Weston and his wife, Gina, are on their third guestbook. “We see a ton of people,” he said cheerfully when I showed up one warm afternoon this past fall. The couple host workshops, and school groups regularly troop through.

A grandson of Edward and a fine-art photographer himself, with a studio and salesroom in a building adjacent to the cabin, Kim is the son of Cole Weston who, along with his older brother Brett, followed Edward into the photography trade. Kim’s sister, Cara, who lives farther down the Monterey Peninsula, near Big Sur, makes her living with a camera, and their former stepmother, Margaret, operates the Weston Gallery in Carmel where prints by Edward, his sons, and other fine-art photographers are for sale.

The cabin has been thoroughly lived in for the last 50 years and yet is very much as Edward left it. The roof beams have an aged, smoky patina. Kim and Gina chose to keep the place uninsulated, and the room’s only source of heat is a fireplace that has burned logs almost every day for decades, even in summer. Most of the light issues through a large picture window that faces down the hill toward the Pacific. In his book “Edward Weston: The Last Years at Carmel,” the historian David Travis wrote that the cabin possesses “what the Japanese call wabi, which can be translated as quiet simplicity, humility, and even frugality.”

A group of Edward’s prints lines the walls. He continued his famous experimental still-life series of peppers, cabbages and toadstools during his early years in Carmel. Other relics include a 4 x 5 camera on a tripod, his desk, and a bowl, gourd and candlesticks from his years in Mexico. A bookcase carries the warning: “I do not lend books to my friends. I do not want to lose my books, or my friends.” A cat door leading to the backyard is a reminder of the photographs he made during the 1940s of the local wild feline population the owners once attracted.

Edward’s darkroom, not much bigger than a walk-in closet, occupies the north corner of the room. He had no enlarger here and used a bare frosted light bulb to make contact prints from his 8 x 10 and 4 x 5 negatives.

“We want to show that you don’t need much, just a few trays,” said Kim, who has covered the walls with photographs from the time his grandfather lived here with his second wife, Charis.

According to entries in a guestbook kept by Charis and Edward, early visitors to the cabin included the arts patron Walter Arensberg, who called it “a palatial shack,” and the poet Robinson Jeffers. A modernist ally of Weston and eventually a portrait subject, he and his wife, Una, had moved to Carmel in 1914 when the town claimed only 350 residents. By the time Weston arrived in 1929 to work as a portrait photographer in the community, Highway 1 had opened and the area soon became so crowded that laws against development were called for.

It was Brett Weston who discovered the photographic potential of Point Lobos. Across the road and only a few miles north from the cabin, the 348 acres of wild ocean shoreline had been saved as a nature preserve only because the owner, A. M. Allan, who made his fortune as a designer of racetracks, had kept it in one piece and sold it to California in 1933 for $631,000. (Point Lobos State Reserve now covers 554 acres, and in 1960, 750 submerged acres were added to the park to create the first underwater sanctuary in the country.)

Point Lobos had a film career long before any Weston began to photograph there in earnest. An outcrop of rock and pine battered day and night by the mighty Pacific, it was a favorite background for early Hollywood producers and asked to stand in for the rugged littoral of various nations in more than a dozen silent movies, including “Tess of the Storm Country,” starring Mary Pickford, and “The Iron Mask,” with Douglas Fairbanks leaping along the California coast as D’Artagnan.

This fanciful and immensely popular way of framing the world in a camera is what Weston was most against in 1929 when he moved down from San Francisco. A recent convert to modernist truth-telling after several years in Mexico, he sought to present without gauziness or melodrama the brute forces that shaped this corner of the American paradise. In a 1929 entry from his “Daybooks” he complained (not entirely grammatically) about how others had portrayed the natural forms of Point Lobos:

“Poor abused cypress, — photographed in all their picturesqueness by tourists, ‘pictorialists,’ etched, painted, and generally vilified by every self-labelled ‘artist.’ But no one has done it — to my knowledge — as I have, and will.”

He was as good as his word. The place has never been the same since Weston showed it to us. Just as his friend Ansel Adams has defined how generations view Yosemite and the High Sierra, so it is hard to look at the dark ocean, tide pools, kelp beds, sand, stone and bent cypresses of Point Lobos and Big Sur without filtering them through the lens of Edward Weston.

“The camera should be used for a recording of life, for rendering the very substance and quintessence of the thing itself, whether it be polished steel or palpitating flesh,” Edward wrote in a 1932 manifesto for Group f/64, a San Francisco collective organized to promote “straight photography.” Its members included Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham and the photographer and filmmaker Willard Van Dyke, with Weston as the unofficial leader. One of the enduring strengths of Weston’s photographs from Point Lobos, taken off and on for almost 20 years, is that although he abstracts nature into black-and-white tones, he renders things faithfully, with an uncanny scientific sensuousness: the chilly temperature of stone, the warm grain of trees parched by wind and sun, the rigid stillness of a tide pool, the different velocities and patterns of waves on sand, the dark depths of the ocean.

Point Lobos is where Weston became a supreme landscape photographer, and a number of the sites where he set up his tripod — the kelp beds at China Cove, the white sands of Gibson Beach — can be explored in an hour or two. But no Weston memorial trip is complete without a brief visit to Carmel.

During his early years in the community, he supported his family by taking portraits of the town’s society and well-to-do tourists. But by the mid-1930s he would no longer retouch and his interest (as well as his need) for clients dropped off. Even though Edward would be appalled by the town’s many shops that target free spenders, the Weston Gallery has prime examples of his work. Tor House and Hawk Tower, built by Robinson Jeffers for his wife, are also not to be missed if your schedule can accommodate its peculiar hours (open Monday through Thursday from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. and Friday and Saturday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.)

A superb portrait by Weston of Jeffers looking suitably aquiline hangs on a stone wall in Hawk Tower.

The 1930s were kind to Edward, with his artistic reputation expanding across Europe and America. But it was always a hardscrabble existence, and wives and children learned that photography came first. Guggenheim grants and sporadic print sales kept him going. The cabin on Wildcat Hill became his base of operations. During World War II the 50-something Weston fulfilled his patriotic duty as a spotter of enemy aircraft. He would watch the Pacific Ocean through binoculars atop a hill in Carmel Highlands close to where Ansel Adams later built a large house.

In 1948 Edward made his last photographs of Point Lobos, many of them studies of cracked, gray stone blocks. Parkinson’s, diagnosed in 1946, ended his picture-taking. His marriage to Charis had collapsed three years earlier and he was looked after by his children, with Cole becoming his chief assistant in the darkroom. Neil designed a separate bedroom for the cabin to increase his comfort.

After Edward’s death in 1958 his ashes were scattered at Point Lobos on Pebbly Beach, since renamed Weston Beach. On my last day I went there at sunset. More than a dozen photographers, young and old, with tripods and without, were hopping across wet boulders, training their cameras on tide pools and crashing waves.

It is impossible and therefore pointless, I thought, for anyone to believe this place can still be captured, even in color and digitally enhanced, with the forceful eyes of Weston. He did it 75 years ago. Photography at Point Lobos died with him.

Then the wind picked up on the ocean and the light degraded another shade, and the inconstancy of the scene brought my dull senses to attention. Some of the photographers continued to work, turning to flash in the soon-to-be dark. My condescension faded. Point Lobos only appears more stable and timeless than New York City. Nature changes every minute and there’s nothing wrong in trying to see it anew every day.

ROCKS, SURF AND SEA LIONS

Point Lobos State Reserve is three miles south of Carmel on Route 1. The entrance fee is $10 per vehicle, $9 for senior citizens. Open every day from 8 a.m. until a half-hour after sunset, the reserve has limited parking, and visitors can be asked to wait at the main gate for a spot. No pets are allowed, other than guide dogs for the blind.

A visit to Point Lobos should probably begin at the Allan Memorial Grove. A nice feature allows the free borrowing of binoculars from the information station. (You must leave your car keys as collateral.) Many use the glasses to spy on the sea lions, usually lazing on rocks in Headland Cove. Without too much effort, you can also spot otters snacking on abalone or, twice annually, pods of migrating gray, humpback and blue whales.

Even though the complex human habitation here did not capture Weston’s photographic interest, the Whaling Station Museum, to the right as you drive in, is well worth a stop. It contains artifacts unearthed from the more than 45 prehistoric human settlements found on the reserve. Rumsen Indian tribes occupied the area for some 2,500 years. Chinese, Japanese and Portuguese immigrants hunted whales, fished and harvested abalone here. An opium scale, a pair of chopsticks, a domino and a clay soy sauce bottle in glass cases offer evidence of their daily lives. For more information call (831) 624-4909 or go to pt-lobos.parks.state.ca.us/index.html

kelly breslin

By ROBERTA SMITH
NY Times Published: March 26, 2009

James Castle was the artist of silence, grayness and folded cardboard. Silence because he was born deaf and refused to read, write, speak, sign or finger spell. Grayness because of the velvety, overcast drawings he made all his life: extravagantly tonal images of landscapes, farmyards and interiors rendered in a mixture of soot and spit applied to found paper with sticks and rags. Their muted yet solid forms in some way embodied both Castle’s silent world and his loyalty to it.

And folded cardboard because of the flattened yet bulky toylike sculptures — figures, farm animals, articles of clothing and pieces of furniture — that Castle made from discarded boxes, string and paper. This detritus he gleaned from the post office and general store that his parents oversaw in their house in an Idaho farming community named Garden Valley. In his understanding of structure, moving parts and the abbreviation of familiar forms, Castle used cardboard as brilliantly as Alexander Calder used wire, but with more corners.

Castle was born in Idaho in 1899, nine years after it became a state, and died there in 1977, without ever venturing very far from the three successive farms on which his family lived. He probably never knew the meaning of the word “artist,” but he must have sensed his specialness on some level. You can feel his conviction in the drawings and constructions in the two latest New York gallery shows of his extraordinary work, which has been known to the mainstream art world only since the late 1990s.

Knoedler & Company has mounted its fourth Castle show, a display of 34 of the atmospheric, intimate drawings that make Castle something like the Vuillard of the American West; the works in this show have not been previously exhibited. Ameringer Yohe Fine Art is showing drawings and constructions, including an especially imposing one of a big, black pram whose square wheels are highlighted with foil.

These substantial shows are coincidental and taken together offer compensation if (like me) you missed the lavish Castle retrospective that was mounted by the Philadelphia Museum of Art last fall and that will travel this fall to Chicago and Berkeley, Calif., with a possible final stop in New York.

Castle’s artistry is implicit in his work’s consistency, optimism, command of perspective and proportion, and psychological delicacy. His soot medium permitted a singular range of grays — charcoal blacks to cloudy-day silvers — as well as variously wet-dry surfaces that suggest charcoal, then ink, then ink wash, then crayon.

The constants are a fervent concentration and an affection for both the process and the subject. His many views of the farmstead of his childhood (executed largely from memory) include everything from doorknobs to open vistas, all methodically studied and recorded in a way that makes his environment feel safe and firmly grounded.

Castle not only spent most of his waking hours making art, he also fit the classic if not clichéd persona of an artist. He was touchy about the reception, display and preservation of his work. He insistently showed his drawings to visitors, wanted a positive reaction and noticed when he didn’t get one.

As Castle’s niece, Gerry Garrow, remarks in a documentary on view at Ameringer Yohe, the less than enthusiastic were not shown anything the next time they visited. (Directed by Jeffrey Wolf and produced by the Foundation for American Self-Taught Artists, the DVD comes with the catalog of the Philadelphia show.)

Castle’s curatorial tendencies included storing much of his art in wrapped and tied bundles, putting his drawings up around the house and objecting if anyone moved them. As Ms. Garrow notes in the documentary, he liked to commandeer empty sheds or chicken coops for use in making and displaying his work. From the film you get the feeling that given more leeway, Castle might have created his own private, diminutive Marfa, à la Donald Judd.

The pride and pleasure artists take in their efforts is nowhere more evident than when Castle’s depicted his own art. Once he had installed his pieces to his liking, he often made drawings of the arrangement. An especially elaborate one at Knoedler shows several drawings mounted on two sides of what appears to be a stall with books that were also his handiwork laid out on the floor.

(There are no books in either show, although they appear again in a kind of close-up rendering, also at Knoedler, of the scene in the stall. Made primarily by copying images, words and letters from other books, magazines or comics, Castle’s books tend to resemble either school primers or photo albums.)

Both shows include drawings of Castle’s totemic, square-headed figures, lined up on shelves or the ground and sometimes looking a bit like the denizens of “South Park.” At Knoedler one drawing shows a room where repeating drawings of a mountain form a narrow frieze around the tops of the walls. In another interior image at Knoedler a cluster of drawings shares a wall with a chest of drawers and a monumental wood armchair that recurs in several works.

At Ameringer Yohe, the chair fills the entire sheet of one drawing, looming upward, like the throne of the Lincoln Memorial. Nearby an especially powerful drawing depicts constructions of Castle’s sister Peggy and himself, looking a little like gods who need appeasing. Especially him: the hat suggests Al Capone; the overcoat, Yohji Yamamoto. In one especially self-referential drawing at Ameringer Yohe, Castle gives us a picture of what appears to be a drawing in progress.

Castle’s interest in depicting the built environment has been frequently noted. The world he lived in was like his mediums, very much made from scratch, mostly with the materials at hand. It was also built straightforwardly from repeating units: fence posts and split rails; houses made of logs, planks or clapboard. Indoors there were wood walls, ceiling beams and wallpaper, some of it boldly checkered, and floorboards and flowered carpets, like the one in a drawing of a big front hall with a patterned carpetbag sitting front and center, at Knoedler.

Castle brought his world to order with these repeating units, and he shaped, planed and smoothed them, much as they had been in real life. They enabled him to depict the recession of space with unwavering accuracy while also flattening it, creating a marvelous push-pull tension.

It is not known if Castle was taught one-point perspective or just picked it up. But actually his compositions are so solid and accurate that it seems quite likely that he had a photographic memory. It is the perfect inborn skill for his silent, carefully shaded vision.

“James Castle Drawings: Vision and Touch” runs through April 25 at Knoedler & Company, 19 East 70th Street, Manhattan; (212) 794-0550. “James Castle” runs through April 18 at Ameringer Yohe Fine Art, 20 West 57th Street, Manhattan; (212) 445-0102.

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
NY Times Published: March 26, 2009

Ever wonder how financial experts could lead the world over the economic cliff?

One explanation is that so-called experts turn out to be, in many situations, a stunningly poor source of expertise. There’s evidence that what matters in making a sound forecast or decision isn’t so much knowledge or experience as good judgment — or, to be more precise, the way a person’s mind works.

More on that in a moment. First, let’s acknowledge that even very smart people allow themselves to be buffaloed by an apparent “expert” on occasion.

The best example of the awe that an “expert” inspires is the “Dr. Fox effect.” It’s named for a pioneering series of psychology experiments in which an actor was paid to give a meaningless presentation to professional educators.

The actor was introduced as “Dr. Myron L. Fox” (no such real person existed) and was described as an eminent authority on the application of mathematics to human behavior. He then delivered a lecture on “mathematical game theory as applied to physician education” — except that by design it had no point and was completely devoid of substance. However, it was warmly delivered and full of jokes and interesting neologisms.

Afterward, those in attendance were given questionnaires and asked to rate “Dr. Fox.” They were mostly impressed. “Excellent presentation, enjoyed listening,” wrote one. Another protested: “Too intellectual a presentation.”

A different study illustrated the genuflection to “experts” another way. It found that a president who goes on television to make a case moves public opinion only negligibly, by less than a percentage point. But experts who are trotted out on television can move public opinion by more than 3 percentage points, because they seem to be reliable or impartial authorities.

But do experts actually get it right themselves?

The expert on experts is Philip Tetlock, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. His 2005 book, “Expert Political Judgment,” is based on two decades of tracking some 82,000 predictions by 284 experts. The experts’ forecasts were tracked both on the subjects of their specialties and on subjects that they knew little about.

The result? The predictions of experts were, on average, only a tiny bit better than random guesses — the equivalent of a chimpanzee throwing darts at a board.

“It made virtually no difference whether participants had doctorates, whether they were economists, political scientists, journalists or historians, whether they had policy experience or access to classified information, or whether they had logged many or few years of experience,” Mr. Tetlock wrote.

Indeed, the only consistent predictor was fame — and it was an inverse relationship. The more famous experts did worse than unknown ones. That had to do with a fault in the media. Talent bookers for television shows and reporters tended to call up experts who provided strong, coherent points of view, who saw things in blacks and whites. People who shouted — like, yes, Jim Cramer!

Mr. Tetlock called experts such as these the “hedgehogs,” after a famous distinction by the late Sir Isaiah Berlin (my favorite philosopher) between hedgehogs and foxes. Hedgehogs tend to have a focused worldview, an ideological leaning, strong convictions; foxes are more cautious, more centrist, more likely to adjust their views, more pragmatic, more prone to self-doubt, more inclined to see complexity and nuance. And it turns out that while foxes don’t give great sound-bites, they are far more likely to get things right.

This was the distinction that mattered most among the forecasters, not whether they had expertise. Over all, the foxes did significantly better, both in areas they knew well and in areas they didn’t.

Other studies have confirmed the general sense that expertise is overrated. In one experiment, clinical psychologists did no better than their secretaries in their diagnoses. In another, a white rat in a maze repeatedly beat groups of Yale undergraduates in understanding the optimal way to get food dropped in the maze. The students overanalyzed and saw patterns that didn’t exist, so they were beaten by the rodent.

The marketplace of ideas for now doesn’t clear out bad pundits and bad ideas partly because there’s no accountability. We trumpet our successes and ignore failures — or else attempt to explain that the failure doesn’t count because the situation changed or that we were basically right but the timing was off.

For example, I boast about having warned in 2002 and 2003 that Iraq would be a violent mess after we invaded. But I tend to make excuses for my own incorrect forecast in early 2007 that the troop “surge” would fail.

So what about a system to evaluate us prognosticators? Professor Tetlock suggests that various foundations might try to create a “trans-ideological Consumer Reports for punditry,” monitoring and evaluating the records of various experts and pundits as a public service. I agree: Hold us accountable!

By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Times Published: March 26, 2009

On Monday, Lawrence Summers, the head of the National Economic Council, responded to criticisms of the Obama administration’s plan to subsidize private purchases of toxic assets. “I don’t know of any economist,” he declared, “who doesn’t believe that better functioning capital markets in which assets can be traded are a good idea.”

Leave aside for a moment the question of whether a market in which buyers have to be bribed to participate can really be described as “better functioning.” Even so, Mr. Summers needs to get out more. Quite a few economists have reconsidered their favorable opinion of capital markets and asset trading in the light of the current crisis.

But it has become increasingly clear over the past few days that top officials in the Obama administration are still in the grip of the market mystique. They still believe in the magic of the financial marketplace and in the prowess of the wizards who perform that magic.

The market mystique didn’t always rule financial policy. America emerged from the Great Depression with a tightly regulated banking system, which made finance a staid, even boring business. Banks attracted depositors by providing convenient branch locations and maybe a free toaster or two; they used the money thus attracted to make loans, and that was that.

And the financial system wasn’t just boring. It was also, by today’s standards, small. Even during the “go-go years,” the bull market of the 1960s, finance and insurance together accounted for less than 4 percent of G.D.P. The relative unimportance of finance was reflected in the list of stocks making up the Dow Jones Industrial Average, which until 1982 contained not a single financial company.

It all sounds primitive by today’s standards. Yet that boring, primitive financial system serviced an economy that doubled living standards over the course of a generation.

After 1980, of course, a very different financial system emerged. In the deregulation-minded Reagan era, old-fashioned banking was increasingly replaced by wheeling and dealing on a grand scale. The new system was much bigger than the old regime: On the eve of the current crisis, finance and insurance accounted for 8 percent of G.D.P., more than twice their share in the 1960s. By early last year, the Dow contained five financial companies — giants like A.I.G., Citigroup and Bank of America.

And finance became anything but boring. It attracted many of our sharpest minds and made a select few immensely rich.

Underlying the glamorous new world of finance was the process of securitization. Loans no longer stayed with the lender. Instead, they were sold on to others, who sliced, diced and pureed individual debts to synthesize new assets. Subprime mortgages, credit card debts, car loans — all went into the financial system’s juicer. Out the other end, supposedly, came sweet-tasting AAA investments. And financial wizards were lavishly rewarded for overseeing the process.

But the wizards were frauds, whether they knew it or not, and their magic turned out to be no more than a collection of cheap stage tricks. Above all, the key promise of securitization — that it would make the financial system more robust by spreading risk more widely — turned out to be a lie. Banks used securitization to increase their risk, not reduce it, and in the process they made the economy more, not less, vulnerable to financial disruption.

Sooner or later, things were bound to go wrong, and eventually they did. Bear Stearns failed; Lehman failed; but most of all, securitization failed.

Which brings us back to the Obama administration’s approach to the financial crisis.

Much discussion of the toxic-asset plan has focused on the details and the arithmetic, and rightly so. Beyond that, however, what’s striking is the vision expressed both in the content of the financial plan and in statements by administration officials. In essence, the administration seems to believe that once investors calm down, securitization — and the business of finance — can resume where it left off a year or two ago.

To be fair, officials are calling for more regulation. Indeed, on Thursday Tim Geithner, the Treasury secretary, laid out plans for enhanced regulation that would have been considered radical not long ago.

But the underlying vision remains that of a financial system more or less the same as it was two years ago, albeit somewhat tamed by new rules.

As you can guess, I don’t share that vision. I don’t think this is just a financial panic; I believe that it represents the failure of a whole model of banking, of an overgrown financial sector that did more harm than good. I don’t think the Obama administration can bring securitization back to life, and I don’t believe it should try.

“Le Corbusier — The Art of Architecture” has drawn crowds to the Barbican Center in London, part of a complex designed in a Brutalist vein that Le Corbusier inspired.

By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN
NY Times Published: March 25, 2009

LONDON — It’s odd to think that the Modernist architect Le Corbusier has had a bigger influence on housing in Britain than in any other European country.

Odd because he never designed a building here, and also because so many Britons have long held him in particular contempt. Since the 1970s he has been about as popular around here as the French national soccer team, and more than a few concrete, Corbu-style projects, large numbers of which were constructed after the war to ease a convalescing nation’s housing shortage, have since been torn down or fallen into disrepair.

But as Peter Rees, a longtime city planning officer in London, put it recently, about the whole range of such projects, “They were either blown up, or they’re now loved.”

Loved may be an exaggeration. But there is at least fresh debate about whether to preserve what used to be regarded simply as bad Corbu-derived architecture. Occasionally a cultural figure provides a little window into a nation’s shifting identity, and in Britain the self-regarding Swiss-born, Paris-based architectural genius who died in 1965, at 77, may now be one such figure.

An excellent traveling overview of his work, at the Barbican Center here, has turned out to be, of all things, popular. Big crowds have been visiting the gallery, itself a sign of some Corbu revisionism in that the Barbican, opened in 1982 near St. Paul’s Cathedral and designed by the British firm Chamberlin, Powell & Bon in a Brutalist vein that Le Corbusier partly inspired, has always been a place Londoners loved to hate. They voted it the city’s ugliest building in a poll in 2003, and have long moaned about its inscrutable labyrinth of concrete walkways and underpasses.

But Corinna Gardner, an assistant curator for the exhibition there, said that smart Londoners have actually been moving into the Barbican Estate and Golden Lane Estate, vast concrete apartment complexes that, with the Barbican Center, make up what Mr. Rees described as the largest Corbusian-inspired urban development in all of Europe. Likewise the refurbished Brunswick Center, near Russell Square, another Brutalist behemoth, with a ziggurat design, once an infamous example of failed council housing, has become fashionable. Well-heeled Londoners promenaded through its fancy shopping mall the other day.

Ms. Gardner added that “ladies who lunch” have even been turning up at the Le Corbusier show, when not long ago most wouldn’t have been caught dead at the Barbican. That hardly proves a national cultural volte-face, but just three years ago a survey of modern design at the Victoria and Albert Museum provoked an angry passel of letters in local newspapers, which singled out Le Corbusier for a special caning. His problem, it seems, wasn’t only that a generation or two of modern British architects latched onto his urban plans to devise their own concrete, modular apartment blocks, which often weren’t very good.

There was also something, well, un-British about him.

“We have always thought in terms of living in homes, not apartments, and we tend to be very traditional,” Ms. Gardner explained. At that moment she was standing before a model of Corbu’s proposal to demolish a swath of central Paris and replace it with a suite of concrete towers. Across the gallery was his plan, also never realized, to wreak similar havoc in Algiers.

Mr. Rees, contemplating those sweeping schemes in his office at Guildhall, elaborated. “Corbu said, ‘I am to be worshiped,’ which is very French, to see architects on a higher plane.” Mr. Rees spoke like a true Englishman, although he made clear that he is Welsh.

“Architects are seen here more as public servants rather than as gods,” he continued. “We value individuality in Britain and resist being told how to live. The Romans tried to plan London, but what they did was quickly undone. We’ve been added to by waves of immigrants, from the Normans and Vikings on, bringing with them different cultural ideas. We’re a mongrel people. More than 300 languages are spoken by children in London today, and if you live in London for three months, you’re a Londoner. You will never be a Parisian unless your grandparents were Parisians.”

I tried that chestnut about British individualism on Peter Mandler, a Cambridge historian. “It’s a self-regarding British myth that we’re special and that there is something foreign out there called the Continent; that we’re the land of liberty, and here the Englishman’s home is his castle, never mind that most people in Britain never lived in houses with their own gardens. By the ’60s more Britons lived in apartment blocks than anyone else in Europe.

“But there was during the 1920s and ’30s a visceral reaction here against Continental culture, and Paris was beginning to be seen not as a healthy rival but as something dangerous. It had to do with ‘othering’ the French who, unlike the British, the British liked to tell themselves, lived in bee hives. After the war this same attitude was predicated on nostalgia for Britain’s last moment of greatness, around 1940, and so the story had lingering cachet into the ’60s and ’70s. We’re not talking, in other words, about a timeless narrative but about a powerful one implicating Le Corbusier, which gained a purchase on British thinking during the high water mark of modernism.”

In truth, only about 7 percent of the British population today is black and Asian, much of that demographic in London. The benign melting pot myth itself goes back to imperial days.

But stories people tell themselves, whether true or not, can be as good as true to the people who tell them. Visiting Tate Britain after seeing the Corbu show one morning, I stopped into the “Van Dyck and Britain” exhibition, and noticed an oil sketch by Rubens and two Van Dyck portraits that the Tate had recently bought: pictures by foreigners who worked here, acquired by a museum for British art. Upstairs, in the permanent galleries, on loan from Andrew Lloyd Webber, there was also a view of London by Canaletto, hanging not far from a painting by Samuel Scott, an English artist and follower of Canaletto’s.

All of which is to say that the canon of British art seems to be expanding along with Britain’s view of itself, and maybe this helps to account for some small change in the climate around Le Corbusier. And of course then there is the simple matter of fair play, a British obsession.

“The problem with so many apartment developments built in the U.K.,” Mr. Rees said, “was that there was no taking into account the vital French ingredient of the concierge.” He didn’t literally mean French buildings all have concierges, obviously. He meant British housing wasn’t planned with long-term maintenance in mind, and Le Corbusier became a scapegoat for what resulted.

The show, a large and elegant affair, reminds us instead of the many beautiful buildings he designed and of his paintings. Like other groundbreaking figures, he wanted to be admired for something he didn’t actually do very well. He imagined Picasso and Mondrian to be his peers.

On the other hand, he left us the Unité d’Habitation in Marseille, the modular housing project that became the model for countless bad imitations. It’s a remarkable building. An old black-and-white photograph of the roof, devised as a public square with parapets tall enough to block a view of the city and frame the mountains beyond, shows children playing in the sunshine.

On the barren concrete patio outside the Barbican it happened to be warm and springlike when I left the show.

Usually almost nobody’s out there. But what do you know?

That day there were children playing in the sunshine.

at china art objects 10 year anniversary group show

March 21 – April 19

luhring augustine

Martin Kersels: Heavyweight Champion, Installation View,
Santa Monica Museum of Art, 2008

March 25, 2009
12:00 PM – 2:00 PM
University Park Campus
Graduate Fine Arts Building
Lecture Forum

usc roski lectures

The New York Times March 24, 2009
By THE EDITORS

It has been 46 years since Sylvia Plath gassed herself to death in her kitchen, and it was worldwide news when her daughter Frieda Hughes announced that Plath’s 47-year-old son, Nicholas Hughes, a fisheries biologist in Alaska, killed himself last week.

Why, of all the stories of creative, brilliant people who have suffered from fatal depressions, does Plath’s tragic legacy resonate so widely? Here, Joyce Carol Oates, Peter D. Kramer, Erica Jong, Andrew Solomon and Elaine Showalter offer their thoughts.

Joyce Carol Oates, novelist
Peter D. Kramer, “Against Depression”
Erica Jong, novelist and poet
Andrew Solomon, “The Noonday Demon”
Elaine Showalter, professor emerita, Princeton University
Her Reputation Rises, as Others Fade

Joyce Carol Oates, the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Princeton University, is the author, most recently, of “Dear Husband,” a story collection.

The suicide of Sylvia Plath was and is obviously of enormous cultural significance because Plath was a brilliant poet — at the time of her death she was already considered a very important poet and since her death, her reputation has risen continuously while others who were her gifted contemporaries — Anne Sexton, John Berryman, even the much-acclaimed Robert Lowell — appear to have faded.

Also, Plath wrote specifically about suicide — her own suicide, much-meditated and plotted — and her much-publicized ill treatment at the hands of her husband Ted Hughes made her into a feminist martyr of a kind. (Though Plath herself was contemptuous of feminism and of most other women.) It is probably not the case that “creative” people commit suicide to a degree beyond that of the general population but this is the popular stereotype.

It is known that a suicide in a family may precipitate subsequent suicides in the family; one can surmise that for the children or relatives of suicides, especially those who are prominent and whose suicides have been much dramatized, self-destruction provides an “exit” that seems ready-made, as it would not be for others. (I cannot comment on Plath’s and Hughes’s son, because I don’t know his personal history.)

Ernest Hemingway, who committed suicide at the age of 62, has the father in his short story “Indian Camp” offer an explanation of an Indian’s suicide — “Maybe he just couldn’t take it any longer.” A young person associated with both Plath and Hughes would have had to contend with the literary-journalist’s equivalent of Tabloid Hell; maybe he couldn’t take it any longer. (The kindest response would be a sympathetic silence on the part of the media.)

Serve the Sufferers

Peter D. Kramer is the author of “Against Depression.”

Suicide is humbling for us, the observers. In the case of Sylvia Plath, we have all the narrative information anyone could wish: her prose fiction, her poetry, her correspondence, her journals, and then the Husband’s, too.

With all this testimony — brave, generous, self-aware, subtle, forceful — we do not know. Does Ted drive her to it, and his next wife as well? Or is it progressive deterioration of the brain? (Now that we’re better at examining them, we can say that the brains of suicides look very bad.) Both, is the sophisticated conclusion, environment and genes, social circumstance and biology, cognition and animal drive — which is to conclude vaguely indeed.

“Of course there are two,” Plath writes in her poem “Death and Co.,” meaning the wife and the husband — but now one might think of the mother and the child. Two turns out to be a low estimate.

What we know most about is the horror of suicide, for the agent, for the survivors. Advocates who speak on these matters say that death from suicide is about as frequent as death from the common cancers — only a bit rarer than death from breast cancer, for example — but that while there are breast cancer centers, for treatment, for prevention, for research, at many hospitals, there are suicide centers at almost none. Tonight, that mundane observation seems to me as thoughtful a response as any to these losses. As doctors, given copious testimony, we should be able to comment with more wisdom; as a culture, we should to be able to serve sufferers better.

An Exemplar of Inexorable Fate

Erica Jong is the author, most recently, of ”Love Comes First,” her seventh collection of poems.

Star-crossed lovers always fascinate, and Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes were surely star-crossed. Their attraction was fierce and they both chronicled it with brilliance. Sylvia Plath wrote powerfully of her attraction to suicide, then killed herself. Ted Hughes was also no slouch when it came to the pull of mortality (witness his book, “Crow”).

We are often drawn to characters who seem to be exemplars of the inexorability of fate, of destiny. And they were such. In their lives, in their work, they seemed to express the darkest workings of the unconscious.

People born to do that are not often steady parents. And we know that suicidal parents often produce suicidal children. I knew Ted a little, did not know Sylvia, but was very sad to hear of their son’s death.

The legend of tragic, fated lovers seldom includes happy children.

The Lure of a Birthright

Andrew Solomon is the author, most recently, of “The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression” and of the forthcoming “A Dozen Kinds of Love: Raising Challenging Children.”

Suicide runs in families. It’s not entirely clear to what extent this is a genetic predisposition, and to what extent having a parent who has killed himself or herself simply makes the option feel more readily available, though both are certainly true.

Suicide is the end point of many depressions, but there are plenty of people who, though acutely depressed, do not become suicidal. Committing suicide requires a mix of depression and impulsivity; so much of depression is passive and meek and deactivating. The pain may be intolerable, but the prospect of doing anything as deliberate as suicide is overwhelming.

The model of the literary suicide, of the writer whose thrall to craft is either the consequence or the cause of most dire depression, is a frequent one; David Foster Wallace is the latest link in this sorry chain. Sylvia Plath wrote about depression so explicitly and so beautifully in “The Bell Jar,” where she described how:

I couldn’t get myself to react. I felt very still and very empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo.

For anyone who has been depressed, that description rings astonishingly true. She had talent and looks and was married to a great poet, but these externals cannot assuage that eye-of-the-storm despair. For a long time, all of Plath’s work (as Virginia Woolf’s) was read through the lens of her suicide. She is in fact a remarkable poet, whose writing would warrant our attention even if she had lived her days out happily taking her children to soccer practice in suburbia.

Now her son has killed himself, after a long battle with depression. It’s sad to think that in this time of psychopharmacological and cognitive-behavioral wonders, he was not able to get above his illness. I do not know what treatment he received or sought, but I do know that he had a birthright to the dull eye, and to that sadly final way of dealing with it. Parents who suffer from depression cannot help passing along that illness.

Those who commit suicide implant the idea that this is a viable option, but it seems likely that Nicholas Hughes was beset by demons he can rightly call his own. And every life that is lost to suicide is tragic, be it associated with poetry or not.

A Rare Genius

Elaine Showalter is professor emerita of English at Princeton University and the author of “A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx.”

Sylvia Plath, who killed herself at the age of 30, was one of the great American poets of the 20th century. No other poet in English except Keats, and no American poet, produced so much enduring work in such a brief lifetime.

Plath’s ambition to become what she called “the Poetess of America” and her fierce preparation to fulfill that ambition added to the unique intensity of her life and legend. Plath’s poetry and fiction, appearing during the decades when women were demanding liberation from secondary lives, spoke to its readers with searing immediacy. Our sorrow at the waste and loss of a brilliant writer, and our anger at the restrictions and prohibitions Plath faced as a woman artist, fueled her legend.

In short, Plath was not just “talented and creative” but a rare genius. Her story will continue to compel attention for a very long while.

Published: March 24 Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) – NASA’s online contest to name a new room at the international space station went awry. Comedian Stephen Colbert won.

The name “Colbert” beat out NASA’s four suggested options in the space agency’s effort to have the public help name the addition. The new room will be launched later this year.

NASA’s mistake was allowing write-ins. Colbert urged viewers of his Comedy Central show, “The Colbert Report” to write in his name. And they complied, with 230,539 votes. That clobbered Serenity, one of the NASA choices, by more than 40,000 votes. Nearly 1.2 million votes were cast by the time the contest ended Friday.

NASA reserves the right to choose an appropriate name. Agency spokesman John Yembrick said NASA will decide in April, but will give top vote-getters “the most consideration.”

Thanks to Jonathan Maghen

Stan VanDerBeek, Contemporary Print from ‘A La Mode’ film, 1958

March 14 – April 18, 2009

The Box

above image by Annette Kelm

Published: March 23, 2009
Associated Press

DENVER (AP) – A parrot that alerted his owner about a baby who was choking was recognized as a hero by the Red Cross. Willie the parrot was given the Animal Lifesaver Award during the “Breakfast of Champions” event attended by Gov. Bill Ritter and Mayor John Hickenlooper.

Willie received the award Friday for his actions in November, when he and owner Megan Howard were baby-sitting a toddler. Willie repeatedly yelled “Mama, baby” when Howard went to the bathroom and the toddler started to choke on her breakfast.

Howard saved the baby by performing the Heimlich maneuver but she said Willie “is the real hero.”

via Jonathan / Tagbanger

By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Times Published: March 22, 2009

Over the weekend The Times and other newspapers reported leaked details about the Obama administration’s bank rescue plan, which is to be officially released this week. If the reports are correct, Tim Geithner, the Treasury secretary, has persuaded President Obama to recycle Bush administration policy — specifically, the “cash for trash” plan proposed, then abandoned, six months ago by then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson.

This is more than disappointing. In fact, it fills me with a sense of despair.

After all, we’ve just been through the firestorm over the A.I.G. bonuses, during which administration officials claimed that they knew nothing, couldn’t do anything, and anyway it was someone else’s fault. Meanwhile, the administration has failed to quell the public’s doubts about what banks are doing with taxpayer money.

And now Mr. Obama has apparently settled on a financial plan that, in essence, assumes that banks are fundamentally sound and that bankers know what they’re doing.

It’s as if the president were determined to confirm the growing perception that he and his economic team are out of touch, that their economic vision is clouded by excessively close ties to Wall Street. And by the time Mr. Obama realizes that he needs to change course, his political capital may be gone.

Let’s talk for a moment about the economics of the situation.

Right now, our economy is being dragged down by our dysfunctional financial system, which has been crippled by huge losses on mortgage-backed securities and other assets.

As economic historians can tell you, this is an old story, not that different from dozens of similar crises over the centuries. And there’s a time-honored procedure for dealing with the aftermath of widespread financial failure. It goes like this: the government secures confidence in the system by guaranteeing many (though not necessarily all) bank debts. At the same time, it takes temporary control of truly insolvent banks, in order to clean up their books.

That’s what Sweden did in the early 1990s. It’s also what we ourselves did after the savings and loan debacle of the Reagan years. And there’s no reason we can’t do the same thing now.

But the Obama administration, like the Bush administration, apparently wants an easier way out. The common element to the Paulson and Geithner plans is the insistence that the bad assets on banks’ books are really worth much, much more than anyone is currently willing to pay for them. In fact, their true value is so high that if they were properly priced, banks wouldn’t be in trouble.

And so the plan is to use taxpayer funds to drive the prices of bad assets up to “fair” levels. Mr. Paulson proposed having the government buy the assets directly. Mr. Geithner instead proposes a complicated scheme in which the government lends money to private investors, who then use the money to buy the stuff. The idea, says Mr. Obama’s top economic adviser, is to use “the expertise of the market” to set the value of toxic assets.

But the Geithner scheme would offer a one-way bet: if asset values go up, the investors profit, but if they go down, the investors can walk away from their debt. So this isn’t really about letting markets work. It’s just an indirect, disguised way to subsidize purchases of bad assets.

The likely cost to taxpayers aside, there’s something strange going on here. By my count, this is the third time Obama administration officials have floated a scheme that is essentially a rehash of the Paulson plan, each time adding a new set of bells and whistles and claiming that they’re doing something completely different. This is starting to look obsessive.

But the real problem with this plan is that it won’t work. Yes, troubled assets may be somewhat undervalued. But the fact is that financial executives literally bet their banks on the belief that there was no housing bubble, and the related belief that unprecedented levels of household debt were no problem. They lost that bet. And no amount of financial hocus-pocus — for that is what the Geithner plan amounts to — will change that fact.

You might say, why not try the plan and see what happens? One answer is that time is wasting: every month that we fail to come to grips with the economic crisis another 600,000 jobs are lost.

Even more important, however, is the way Mr. Obama is squandering his credibility. If this plan fails — as it almost surely will — it’s unlikely that he’ll be able to persuade Congress to come up with more funds to do what he should have done in the first place.

All is not lost: the public wants Mr. Obama to succeed, which means that he can still rescue his bank rescue plan. But time is running out.

Hand Crafted Industrial Lamps
Opening Friday, March 21, 7-9 PM
1102 Mohawk Street, Los Angeles

Atelier

March 22, 2009
Dallas News

Sarah Moore, Beaumont Enterprise

BEAUMONT – The Amish, with their bearded men in broad-brimmed hats and suspenders, have come to the Texas Gulf Coast, working to rebuild it stronger than it was before.

Members of the Old Order Amish from Missouri are building what likely is the region’s first beach house that uses a frame traditional to Amish barns.

Missouri resident Danny Schwartz, an order member, came to Texas bringing his building skills to the monumental task of rebuilding the Gulf Coast after Hurricane Ike. He heard about the problems when a neighbor returned from the Bolivar Peninsula, near Galveston.

“He said, ‘What they need is what we’ve got,’ ” said Schwartz, 54.

Schwartz’s first clients were Blake and Bunny Rising, a couple who had lived in Crystal Beach on the Bolivar Peninsula for several years. They were left with nothing but a few timbers, but they loved their beach life too much not to rebuild.

“This is home for us,” said Blake Rising, a district manager for Spec’s liquor stores. “I moved a thousand miles to be on this spot. For the people who live here, this is a lifestyle most people would envy.”

But this time around, they are doing their best to make the house as strong and high off the ground as possible.

They raised it from 18 feet to 22 feet above sea level, and decided to go with the Amish-style frame for practical as well as appearance reasons.

They first heard about the style’s benefits from the Missouri man who had come to Texas for the cleanup. They did a little research and were ready to work with Schwartz when he came to Texas in November.

The frame was engineered to withstand winds of 185 mph, 25 mph above Texas code requirements, said Chris Waters of Boumans Construction. Schwartz showed them a house he built that withstood a tornado with speeds of up to 318 mph.

The mortise-and-tenon style is a traditional Amish barn construction using heavy timber beams. The end of one beam is carved to fit into a hole in the other. The two are held in place with pegs.

“We’re hoping to build a lot of them,” Schwartz said. “We don’t want to intrude – we want to use local people. My wish is to help out, not hinder.”

Schwartz oversaw the Risings’ work from floor level, while three of his sons worked up on the beams of the rising structure.

More than 30 feet above the ground, the sons moved about comfortably on the frame, guiding preassembled parts made at home into place and hammering in the pegs.

Soon the graceful lines of the simple structure began to emerge.

While the exposed beams will give the inside of the house a distinctive appearance, the outer finish does not appear ostentatious among the beach houses around it.

A deck on the front of the house shows off some detail of the exposed beams.

“To me it looks beachy,” Blake Rising said.

via wetsand

March 21 – April 25, 2009

Marc Foxx

Tokyo!
A Film by Michel Gondry, Leos Carax, and Bong Joon-ho
Three of World Cinema’s Great Visionaries Each Direct a Segment of this Surreal Triptych Film
NYC: March 6, 2009, LA: March 20, 2009 and Nationwide Through April

LOS ANGELES, CA – Liberation Entertainment and Vitagraph Films Present Tokyo! Three of world cinema’s great visionaries: Michel Gondry (Be Kind Rewind, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), Léos Carax (The Lovers on the Bridge, Pola X), and Bong Joon-ho (The Host) each direct a segment of this surreal triptych film, set in the ultra-modern Japanese metropolis, Tokyo. An Official Selection at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival, Un Certain Regard, it screens in cities across the U.S. starting in March 2009 with its New York City premiere at Landmark Sunshine Theatre on Friday, March 6th, in Los Angeles at the Nuart on Friday, March 20th (as well as in San Francisco, Berkeley and San Jose on the 20th), and in other cities such as Washington, D.C. (3/27), San Diego and Philadelphia (4/10), Columbus, OH (4/24), and more TBA. For more information please visit http://www.tokyothemovie.com.

“Gondry, Carax, and Joon-Ho have each contributed a poignant commentary about what life is like in Tokyo and beyond, and when pieced together the result is quietly observational, imaginative and often, very funny.” — Nylon Magazine

Rhapsody, psychogeography, urban valentine, freak show, mindwalk and many other things, Tokyo! is a fantasy in three movements that will make you see one of the world’s greatest cities – if not any city – with a new point of view. In the tradition of such films as New York Stories, Night On Earth, Paris je t’aime, and its forthcoming sequel New York I Love You, Tokyo! addresses the timeless question of whether we shape cities, or if cities shape us – while in the process, revealing the rich humanity at the heart of modern urban life. The surreal world of Tokyo! utilizes some inspired visual effects and animation.

“Interior Design” (Dir. Michel Gondry) –
Tokyo! opens with the first of three featurettes, “Interior Design,” from beloved international sensation Michel Gondry, whose previous features, including, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), The Science of Sleep (2006), and Be Kind Rewind (2008), revealed a master of surrealist whimsy at the very top of his game.

Hiroko and Akira (Ayako Fujitani and Ryo Kase) are a young couple from the provinces who arrive in Tokyo with limited funds, short-term lodging and what appears to be a solid and mutually supportive relationship that will seemingly carry them through any challenge. Akira is an aspiring filmmaker whose debut feature will soon screen in the city — and hopefully land him an entrée to a more solid career; in the interim he lands work wrapping gifts at a local department store. After securing short-term housing in the cramped studio apartment of old school chum Akemi (Ayumi Ito) — a career girl with a demanding boyfriend who grows weary of Akemi’s houseguests — Hiroko hits the streets of Tokyo in search of a suitable apartment, finding a series of rat-infested hovels that neither she nor Akira can afford on their limited salaries. After Akira’s film screens, to dubious acclaim, one spectator informs Hiroko of the inherent struggles in relationships between creative types: often times, one half of a couple feels invisible, useless or unappreciated, something Hiroko relates to wholeheartedly in the wake of her numerous trials and tribulations in the unfamiliar city of Tokyo. She starts to question her role in the relationship, resulting in a Kafkaesque transformation of self-discovery that will delight fans of Gondry’s trademark surrealism. Adapted from Gabrielle Bell’s comic “Cecil and Jordan in New York.”

“Merde” (Dir. Léos Carax) –
Tokyo! continues with the second featurette, “Merde,” from acclaimed French filmmaker Léos Carax, whose previous features include the Cannes Film Festival selection Pola X (1999), the international art-house sensation The Lovers on the Bridge (1991), starring “Merde” lead actor Denis Lavant and Juliette Binoche, and the classic French indies Mauvais Sang (Bad Blood; 1986) and Boy Meets Girl (1984).

Merde (a French term translating as “shit”) is the name given to an unkempt, gibberish-spewing subterranean creature of the Tokyo sewers, played by Denis Lavant, who rises from the underground lair where he dwells to attack unsuspecting locals in increasingly brazen and terrifying ways: he steals cash and cigarettes from passersby, frightens old women and salaciously licks schoolgirls, resulting in a televised media frenzy that creates mounting hysteria among the Tokyo populace.

After discovering an arsenal of hand grenades in his underground lair, Merde slips into full-on assault mode, hurling the munitions at random citizens and creating a Godzilla-like atmosphere of urban terror, which the media promptly laps up and reflects back to its equally voracious television audience.

Enter pompous French magistrate Maître Voland (Jean-François Balmer) — a dead ringer for the sewer creature’s gnarled and twisted demeanor — who arrives in Tokyo to represent Merde’s inevitable televised trial, claiming to be the sole person in the world able to speak his client’s unintelligible language. The media circus mounts as lawyer defends client in a surreal court of law hungry for a satisfying resolution. Merde is tried, convicted and sentenced to death — until justice takes an unexpected turn.

“Shaking Tokyo” (Dir. Bong Joon-ho) –
The Tokyo! triptych concludes with the romantic featurette “Shaking Tokyo” from Bong Joon-ho, whose Korean monster movie The Host was the hit of the 2006 Cannes Film Festival before becoming a international box office sensation.

Teruyuki Kagawa stars as a Tokyo shut-in, or hikikimori, who has not left his apartment in a decade. His only link to the outside world is through his telephone, which he uses to command every necessity from a series of random and anonymous delivery people, including the pizza that he lives on and the hundreds of discarded pizza cartons he meticulously stacks in and around his cramped apartment. But one day is different — his pizza arrives thanks to a lovely young woman who succeeds in catching the shut-in’s eye. Suddenly an earthquake strikes Tokyo, prompting the beautiful young delivery woman to faint in her client’s apartment. And then the unthinkable happens — the hikikimori falls hopelessly in love.

Time passes and the shut-in discovers through another pizza delivery person that the improbable object of his affections has become a hikikimori in her own right. Taking a bold leap into the unknown, our hero crosses the threshold of his apartment and takes to the streets in search of his paramour, at last discovering his kindred spirit — at the very moment another earthquake strikes.
______________________________________

In Japanese with English subtitles
Running time: 1 hour, 50 minutes
Color 35 mm 1.85, Dolby SRD/DTS 2008
France/Japan/Korea/Germany
______________________________________

Tokyo! Screenings (as of 1/27/09):

3/6/09: NYC
Landmark’s Sunshine Cinema
143 East Houston Street, New York, NY 10002
(on the Lower East Side)
212-330-8182

3/20/09: LA
Landmark’s Nuart Theatre
11272 Santa Monica Boulevard, West Los Angeles, CA 90025
310-281-8223

Thanks to Steven Tsou “I’m not as big of a fan of the Michel
Gondry or the Bong Joon-Ho contribution. The Gondry section was a little too
SF/NYBrooklyn/SilverlakeEchoPark. Upper Middle Class Liberal Urban
Elite. The Bong Joon-Ho was some kind of lonely guy fantasy….
although his popularity in S. Korea may say something about gender
relations there. Neither Gondry nor Bong’s sections seemed as particular
to Tokyo as Carax’s.”

EDGAR BRYAN
Spiral Scratch
2006
oil and acrylic on canvas
72″ x 68″

1999 – 2009
10 Year Anniversary Show
March 21 to April 15, 2009
Opening Reception, Saturday March 21, 6-9PM

china art objects

Alice Waters, the celebrity chef and an early advocate of local ingredients, at a farmers’ market in January. She and other food activists see the White House as an ally in Washington.

By ANDREW MARTIN
NY Times Published: March 21, 2009

AS tens of thousands of people recently strolled among booths of the nation’s largest organic and natural foods show here, munching on fair-trade chocolate and sipping organic wine, a few dozen pioneers of the industry sneaked off to an out-of-the-way conference room.

Although unit sales of organic food have leveled off and even declined lately, versus a year earlier, the mood among those crowded into the conference room was upbeat as they awaited a private screening of a documentary called “Food Inc.” — a withering critique of agribusiness and industrially produced food.

They also gathered to relish their changing political fortunes, courtesy of the Obama administration.

“This has never been just about business,” said Gary Hirshberg, chief executive of Stonyfield Farm, the maker of organic yogurt. “We are here to change the world. We dreamt for decades of having this moment.”

After being largely ignored for years by Washington, advocates of organic and locally grown food have found a receptive ear in the White House, which has vowed to encourage a more nutritious and sustainable food supply.

The most vocal booster so far has been the first lady, Michelle Obama, who has emphasized the need for fresh, unprocessed, locally grown food and, last week, started work on a White House vegetable garden. More surprising, perhaps, are the pronouncements out of the Department of Agriculture, an agency with long and close ties to agribusiness.

In mid-February, Tom Vilsack, the new secretary of agriculture, took a jackhammer to a patch of pavement outside his headquarters to create his own organic “people’s garden.” Two weeks later, the Obama administration named Kathleen Merrigan, an assistant professor at Tufts University and a longtime champion of sustainable agriculture and healthy food, as Mr. Vilsack’s top deputy.

Mr. Hirshberg and other sustainable-food activists are hoping that such actions are precursors to major changes in the way the federal government oversees the nation’s food supply and farms, changes that could significantly bolster demand for fresh, local and organic products. Already, they have offered plenty of ambitious ideas.

For instance, the celebrity chef Alice Waters recommends that the federal government triple its budget for school lunches to provide youngsters with healthier food. And the author Michael Pollan has called on President Obama to pursue a “reform of the entire food system” by focusing on a Pollan priority: diversified, regional food networks.

Still, some activists worry that their dreams of a less-processed American diet may soon collide with the realities of Washington and the financial gloom over much of the country. Even the Bush administration, reviled by many food activists, came to Washington intent on reforming farm subsidies, only to be slapped down by Congress.

Mr. Pollan, who contributes to The New York Times Magazine, likens sustainable-food activists to the environmental movement in the 1970s. Though encouraged by the Obama administration’s positions, he worries that food activists may lack political savvy.

“The movement is not ready for prime time,” he says. “It’s not like we have an infrastructure with legislation ready to go.”

Even so, many activists say they are packing their bags and heading to Washington. They are bringing along a copy of “Food Inc.,” which includes attacks on the corn lobby and Monsanto, and intend to provide a private screening for Mr. Vilsack and Ms. Merrigan.

“We are so used to being outside the door,” says Walter Robb, co-president and chief operating officer of Whole Foods Market, the grocery chain that played a crucial role in making organic and natural food more mainstream. “We are in the door now.”

AT the heart of the sustainable-food movement is a belief that America has become efficient at producing cheap, abundant food that profits corporations and agribusiness, but is unhealthy and bad for the environment.

The federal government is culpable, the activists say, because it pays farmers billions in subsidies each year for growing grains and soybeans. A result is an abundance of corn and soybeans that provide cheap feed for livestock and inexpensive food ingredients like high-fructose corn syrup.

They argue that farm policy — and federal dollars — should instead encourage farmers to grow more diverse crops, reward conservation practices and promote local food networks that rely less on fossil fuels for such things as fertilizer and transportation.

Last year, mandatory spending on farm subsidies was $7.5 billion, compared with $15 million for programs for organic and local foods, according to the House Appropriations Committee.

But advocates of conventional agriculture argue that organic farming simply can’t provide enough food because the yields tend to be lower than those for crops grown with chemical fertilizer.

“We think there’s a place for organic, but don’t think we can feed ourselves and the world with organic,” says Rick Tolman, chief executive of the National Corn Growers Association. “It’s not as productive, more labor-intensive and tends to be more expensive.”

The ideas are hardly new. The farmland philosopher and author Wendell Berry has been making many of the same points for decades. What is new is that the sustainable-food movement has gained both commercial heft, with the rapid success of organic and natural foods in the last decade, and celebrity cachet, with a growing cast of chefs, authors and even celebrities like Oprah Winfrey and Gwyneth Paltrow who champion the cause.

It has also been aided by more awareness of the obesity epidemic, particularly among children, and by concerns about food safety amid seemingly continual outbreaks of tainted supplies.

While their arguments haven’t gained much traction in Washington, sustainable-food activists and entrepreneurs have convinced more Americans to watch what they eat.

They have encouraged the growth of farmers’ markets and created such a demand for organic, natural and local products that they are now sold at many major grocers, including Wal-Mart.

“Increasingly, companies are looking to reduce the amount of additives,” says Ted Smyth, who retired earlier this year as senior vice president at H. J. Heinz, the food giant. “Consumers are looking for more authentic foods. This trend absolutely has percolated through into mainstream foods.”

While the idea of sustainable food is creeping into the mainstream, the epicenter of the movement remains the liberal stronghold of Berkeley, Calif.

It was there in 1971 that Ms. Waters started a restaurant, Chez Panisse, that used fresh, organic and locally grown products, a novelty at the time that has been widely copied by other chefs. In the years since, she has become a food celebrity, the “mother of slow food,” as a “60 Minutes” profile called her.

Mr. Pollan teaches journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, and is among a group of authors who have tapped into a wide audience for books that encourage local or organic foods while detailing what they view as health and environmental risks of processed foods and large-scale agriculture.

His book “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” has remained on best-seller lists since it was published in 2006. Another activist, Eric Schlosser, wrote “Fast Food Nation,” a critical look at industrialized fast food that was published in 2001 and is now required reading at some colleges. And Marion Nestle, a nutrition professor at New York University, has become a ubiquitous and widely quoted critic of commercial food manufacturers.

Beyond authors, academics and chefs, the sustainable-food movement also owes much of its current success to pioneers in the organic and natural foods industry. Many started their businesses for idealistic reasons and have since turned their start-ups into multimillion-dollar, even billion-dollar, corporations.

Manufacturers improved their organic and natural products, long confined to musty natural-food stores, so they could compete with conventional foods on packaging and taste. Whole Foods Market also lured more mainstream customers by redefining what a grocery store should look like, creating lush displays of produce and fish that have influenced more traditional grocers.

Nancy M. Childs, a professor of food marketing at St. Joseph’s University, said sustainable food activists forced the broader public to focus on the quality and sourcing of food, which in turn has prompted demand for farmers’ markets and local produce. She says that “continual attention in the news” also gave the movement legs.

But Ms. Childs worries that some of the activists’ recommendations for buying fresh, local or organic food cannot be adopted by many Americans because those foods may be too expensive. “By singling out certain lifestyles and foods, it’s diminishing very good quality nutrition sources,” she says. “Frozen goods, canned goods, they are not bad things. What’s important is that people eat well, within their means.”

“We’d all love to live on a farm in Vermont, right?” she adds.

Even Jeffrey Hollender, the president of the green cleaning-products company Seventh Generation, worries that some of his movement’s messages are a tough sell when consumers are stretched thin.

Although some people argue that there are hidden costs to cheap food, from environmental damage caused by factory farms and fertilizer runoff to the health costs associated with eating highly processed, calorie-laden food, the fact remains that commercially produced food is relatively inexpensive.

“The idea of the true cost of food?” Mr. Hollender asks. “That’s the last thing consumers want to hear right now.”

The sustainable-food crowd isn’t alone in its love fest with the Obama administration and Mr. Vilsack. Food-safety activists have praised Mr. Vilsack’s remarks about creating a single food-safety agency, and nutrition advocates are enthused about his comments on school lunches and health care reform.

“There are tremendous opportunities with health care reform,” says Michael F. Jacobson, executive director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest. “Cutting sodium consumption in half should save over 100,000 lives a year.”

THERE is little in Tom Vilsack’s résumé to suggest that he would one day be lionized by America’s food glitterati.

A native of Pittsburgh, he became a small-town mayor and lawyer in Iowa, where he represented struggling farmers during the farm crisis in the 1980s. As a state senator and later as governor of Iowa, Mr. Vilsack promoted ethanol production and agricultural biotech, leading one consumer group to label him a “shill” for Monsanto.

When a coalition of food activists and farmers, Food Democracy Now, circulated a petition urging President Obama to pick an agriculture secretary committed to sustainability, Mr. Vilsack was not one of its recommended candidates.

Mr. Vilsack said that he was a chubby child and maintains a deep affection for cookies. But something has changed in Mr. Vilsack, an avid runner, including his eating habits. “I’m much more inclined to eat fresh fruits and vegetables,” he says. “I had organic yogurt for breakfast. Trust me, I would have not have had that two years ago, or four years ago.”

He was motivated to eat healthier because he is expecting his first grandchild and regrets that his parents did not live to meet his own children.

Mr. Vilsack’s brief tenure at the agriculture department has unnerved the food lobby and cheered sustainable-food activists, who are in agreement with many of his stated priorities.

He has said he hopes to devote more resources to child nutrition to improve the quality of school breakfasts and lunches. He also wants to make sure that only healthy choices are available in school vending machines.

Noting that the department’s recently released Census of Agriculture included more than 100,000 new small farmers, he said he wanted his agency to help them develop regional distribution networks. The small farms’ produce could be sold to institutional buyers like schools.

Ultimately, he said, agriculture and food policy should fit into the Obama administration’s planned overhaul of health care, by encouraging nutrition to prevent disease. It should also be part of the effort to combat climate change, by encouraging renewable energy and conservation on farms, he said.

Of course, Mr. Vilsack will need the approval of Congress for any major changes in farm policy, and therein lies his greatest challenge. Congress passed a farm bill last year that details farm policy for the next five years, and farm-state legislators say they are not interested in starting over.

When the Obama administration recently proposed a budget that would cut subsidies to the nation’s largest farmers and bolster child nutrition payments, it was greeted with hostility in Congress, even by some Democrats.

It didn’t help that Mr. Vilsack framed the budget as a choice between helping 90,000 farmers or 30 million children, a statement that he later characterized as inartful.

Representative Frank D. Lucas, Republican of Oklahoma and the ranking minority member of the House Agriculture Committee, said in a statement that “this proposal is ill-timed, ill-conceived and completely out of touch with the realities of agriculture production.”

FOR all the enthusiasm that sustainable-food activists and celebrities have for the Obama administration, their sudden interest in Washington has already ruffled feathers.

Ms. Waters wrote a letter to the Obamas in January suggesting that she convene a “kitchen cabinet” to pick a suitable chef for the White House, “a person with integrity and devotion to the ideals of environmentalism, health and conservation.” Her letter touched off withering criticism in the blogosphere, with one food pundit blasting what he called Ms. Waters’s “inflexible brand of gastronomical correctness.”

The Obamas stuck with the existing chef, who it turns out was already an ardent — though quiet — proponent of locally grown food.

In addition, some sustainable-farm advocates who have worked on these issues for decades in Washington are chafing at the idea of celebrity activists swooping into town.

Ferd Hoefner, policy director of the Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, says that during the Carter administration he fought to get $5 million in federal money to promote farmers’ markets (about the same as allocated last year).

While he acknowledges that it has been an uphill fight, Mr. Hoefner said the activists had made major strides in recent years, winning more federal dollars for organic research and to help farmers convert to organic methods and add value to their operations by, for example, converting to grass-fed beef. As part of the economic stimulus plan, the Agriculture Department also plans to award $250 million in loan guarantees, spread over the next two years, for local and regional food networks, he said.

Mr. Hoefner said he was impressed by the number of people who rallied for a White House garden. “We just want to make sure that interest in that symbolic action can be channeled into some of the more difficult policy challenges,” he said.

Senator Tom Harkin, Democrat of Iowa and chairman of the Senate Agriculture Committee, welcomes newcomers to the cause but cautions that farm policy “does not have sharp turns.”

Mr. Harkin has spent years trying to increase federal dollars for child nutrition and for conservation programs that reward farmers for protecting the environment, relatively small programs that he says can expand under the Obama administration.

“We bend the track a little bit and get the train going in a little bit different direction,” he says. “We’re hoping we can bend it a little bit more. Consumers are demanding it.”

There are already signs that the sustainable-agriculture track is bending farther than before. The conservative pundit George F. Will wrote a column endorsing many of Mr. Pollan’s ideas, and a prominent food industry lobbyist who requested anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to speak to reporters said he was amazed at how many members of Congress were carrying copies of “The Omnivore’s Dilemma.”

“I’m not sure how much it’s penetrating the mom shopping at Food Lion,” he says. “I’ve had so many members mention Michael’s name to me, it’s staggering.”

Back in Anaheim, Mr. Hirshberg, the head of Stonyfield Farm, said he, too, is optimistic that change is at hand. But he reminded the small crowd that the organic industry remains a “rounding error,” roughly 3 percent, of the overall food and beverage business.

“We’re at the starting line,” he says. “This is our job, our government. We’ve got to take it back.”