by Stan Brakhage via storkbitesman

By LAWRENCE DOWNES
NY Times Published: November 23, 2008

WHEN Ry Cooder and I got to El Mirage Dry Lake, it was 110 degrees and heading to 117, hot enough to cook your head inside your hat. The Mojave Desert in daylight will cut the gizzard right out of you, Tom Joad once said, which is why the Okies crossed it at night.

I put away the map and Ry pulled the S.U.V. through the gate and stopped. The gravel road fell away below us and vanished into the bone-white lakebed. The mirage was working: a shoreline shimmered wetly in the distance, made of bent sunlight and sand.

El Mirage Dry Lake sounds like a place one step away from nonexistence, but it’s about 100 miles north of Los Angeles, out among the Joshua trees. It’s not far from Edwards Air Force Base, in the Mojave’s military-paranormal sector, where secretive government installations lie low among the jackrabbits — a land of spy planes, space aliens, off-road vehicles, sturdy reptiles and people with freaky desert habits, like racing vintage hot rods on dry lakebeds.

It is, in other words, a critical stop on Ry’s California trail.

Ry Cooder — the rock and blues guitarist, roots musician, record producer, songwriter and composer — is a son of Santa Monica who has spent nearly 40 years exploring all corners of the musical planet, like a sharp-eared extraterrestrial on a lifelong voyage of discovery. (His two-CD career anthology, released last month, has a perfect title: “The U.F.O. Has Landed.”) But even that barely covers it — it’s strictly from his solo albums and the haunting scores he wrote for films like “Alamo Bay” and “Paris, Texas.” If you add all the records he has made with other musicians, like Gabby Pahinui, Flaco Jiménez, Ali Farka Touré, Mavis Staples, the Chieftains and, most famously, the Cuban all-stars of the Buena Vista Social Club, you can only wonder where on earth he could go next.

The answer: his own backyard.

Ry’s latest project may be his strangest and most ambitious. It’s a trilogy of concept albums, plus a short novel, that resurrects a lost California of places and people that Ry, who is 61, remembers from growing up in the 1950s. It was a dryer and poorer place then, but rich in things he likes, like simplicity and ingenuity, good musicians, cool cats and hot cars. Time and neglect have bulldozed most of it into oblivion.

“I like beautiful things, and things that are tough and serious,” he told me, in a tone that suggested the national supply of such things was running out.

Ry is steeped in California lore (he’s as much a writer and historian as a master of the bottleneck blues) and full of wry scorn for the old Golden State traditions of fakery, greed and self-indulgence. Things that set him off include useless corporate entertainment (a song on his last album includes a character who sweats to death at Disneyland in his Mickey Mouse suit, working overtime), the theft of farmers’ water for the California Aqueduct, and Southern California’s endless rows of stucco subdivisions, the splatter from the housing bubble.

But he can be just as emphatic in savoring the near-perfection of an unsmoggy day, the ancient Joshua trees lining the Pearblossom Highway, the harsh loveliness rolling past the window. We were headed to El Mirage, the site where he posed by an Airstream trailer for his first solo album. From the ’20s to the ’50s it was a magnet for white, working-class hot rodders, the kind of people who form the core of his California trilogy, along with steel-guitar players, Okies, Arkies, Mexican-American dance-band leaders, zoot-suited Pachuco hipsters and the occasional space alien.

The kinds of people Ry celebrates, in songs like “Poor Man’s Shangri-La,” are the ones nobody remembers:

Tell you ’bout a friend of mine that you don’t know

He lives way up a road that’s lost in time.

Don’t know his name, or where he’s coming from.

Only thing you know, he’s a real gone cat,

This friend of mine.

Ry talks the way his song characters do, in quick, fluid bursts that smack the ear and linger there, all strange and memorable, both sardonic and sentimental. “We’re going to El Mirage, which is still El Mirage and will always be El Mirage,” he said. “You can’t do anything with it. You can’t exploit it. You can’t figure out any way to make money on it.”

Traffic was light, and Ry’s conversation rolled as freely as the S.U.V., over wide terrain. “It’s terribly dry but beautiful,” he said as we hit the high desert. “It sure is good for the eyes, it sure is good.” He wore bright yellow shades and a broad-brimmed hat, and had brought CDs for the road: country-western guitar pickers and late-’40s Chicano dance music. He’d hoisted an iced-up cooler into the back, full of ginger beer and bottled water and a zip-lock bag of orange wedges from his own tree.

One thing that fills his head, besides a longing for someplace better than now, is cars. “Every woman I know, crazy ’bout an automobile,” he sang years ago, and it’s a rare record of his that doesn’t have wheels in it somewhere.

That’s how he met Bobby Green, who is far too young to remember those days, but an inventive old soul all the same. Mr. Green, a Los Angeles bar owner, is a member of a hot rodding club that dates back to the 1930s, when lakes like El Mirage first became meccas for racers. Soon after we arrived at the western edge of El Mirage, we met up with Mr. Green, who was preparing his custom-built “belly tanker” to run at the Bonneville Salt Flats, in Utah.

In a few minutes we were all rolling onto the lake bed.

The ride was bumpy and then less bumpy and then smooth and then real smooth: a pool table in all directions.

A Predator spy drone, out of Edwards Air Force Base, buzzed overhead, presumably checking our faces against terrorist databases.

Ry had brought me so I could witness a rare event, when the fabric of time and space splits and a piece of lost California sticks out. For the last several years, he’s been poring over archives and deciphering maps. He’s been hanging with young fellow enthusiasts like Mr. Green and writing songs and stories about the California they embody. The project has crisscrossed miles and decades, tossed fact with fiction, and led to three records — “Chávez Ravine,” “My Name Is Buddy” and “I, Flathead,” which comes with its own short novel, his first.

The book is populated by white, lunch-pail Los Angelenos who left Oklahoma and Arkansas for barebones suburbs like South Gate and Vernon. These were people who liked Merle Travis, the finger-picking country-western guitarist, and found California to be just the place to realize homely dreams of peace and quiet. They worked in factories, danced in honkytonks and built hot rods out of surplus parts to race at El Mirage.

“You had to be kind of hardcore to come out and do this,” Ry told me. “Get sand in your teeth. God knows what. It was a working class, blue-collar thing, you know what I mean.”

Mr. Green, a compact man in a porkpie hat, is a throwback to that era. He had brought his garage crew, Lucky, Logan and Tyrell, and his friend Mister Jalopy, an artist and blogger who is also an authority on vintage technology and old California and does not go by his real name. Soon we added George Calloway, who had seen our dust and driven over from the trailer homes on the lake’s edge. George is the honorary mayor of El Mirage, a chatty old man who started racing there in the 1950s, and in the ’90s moved to El Mirage for good with his wife and car collection. If you come out to race on the lake, he’ll come out to you, and tell you all about the old days. His wife calls him home with an air horn.

Mr. Green’s team set up a tarp, a flimsy oasis in the wicked heat. They rolled the car off the trailer, a polished tadpole with a roll bar custom-fit for Mr. Green’s head and shoulders. Its 1933 Ford flathead engine, a cherry-red block of steel, coughed to life and found its thunder-rumble — hot but smooth, as if running on lava.

Ry marveled. You couldn’t see his eyes, but the growl said: happy.

The belly tanker began giving Mr. Green a hard time. Short high-speed runs were followed by hours of tinkering and repairs. The rest of us drank Dr Pepper and Tecate beer and watched a towering dust devil do a slow hula out by the trailer homes.

Ry and I talked about writing.

There’s historical scholarship tucked into “I, Flathead,” from his study of postwar suburbia. But if you know “Kiss Me Deadly” and “Cry Danger,” the brutal 1950s L.A. noir films, or “Them!” the horror movie about atomic ants, you will know a lot about where he’s coming from.

In the book, a man named Kash Buk, as invented by Ry, is a mediocre musician and sometime hot rodder. At El Mirage, he meets Shakey Lavonne, a virtuous, dome-headed alien who races a space car with no tires or steering wheel. Shakey, on the run from Martian slave traders, settles for a while in Trona, a dead-end town far out in the Mojave, because its desolate rocky pinnacles remind him of his home planet. He marries a local girl, sees his share of murders and assaults, and even commits a few, but eventually finds a stable life, until the past catches up with him. Kash ends up in a trailer park closer to the city. Years later, when he is old and falling apart, he and his oxygen tank are bundled into his old Cadillac and driven out to El Mirage at night, so he can walk out on the cool sand one last time, and die.

Ry told me he had pretty much abandoned songwriting for fiction. Songs are hard, but stories keep pouring out of him. The night before we went to El Mirage, he said, he’d been up from 1 to 4, writing another.

We were both short on sleep, and left as Mr. Green and crew kept working through the rest of the blistering afternoon. Ry made the long drive home, and I left his house feeling weary and slightly scorched, not quite believing the day I’d just had. It was as though I’d been roaming the Delta with Robert Johnson, or gypsy France with Django Reinhardt.

There was more to see, but Ry had things to do, so he left me in the care of the lanky, affable Mister Jalopy — “a very interesting individual,” Ry said.

The next day Jalopy and I went to lunch at the Halfway House Cafe, a 1930s roadhouse on the old Sierra Highway, halfway between Los Angeles and Palmdale. It’s a Kash Buk kind of place, a hangout for old test pilots and desert rats, where you can get a good steak sandwich and a beer.

After lunch we walked in the desert to examine a bricked-up mine shaft and to collect sand for gold panning back at Mister Jalopy’s workshop. Watch out for snakes, he told me as he walked ahead through a gully. Turning over rocks for reptiles, I found an old, neatly torn and folded girlie picture, perfectly preserved after escaping some trucker’s wallet. I refolded it and put it back.

We headed to Chávez Ravine, once a poor Mexican-American neighborhood and now the hilltop fortress of the Los Angeles Dodgers. The view of downtown from the hillside, across to Chinatown and City Hall, was just like the one captured in 1949 by the photographer Don Normark, who stumbled across the neighborhood one day. It was a collection of shacks and vegetable plots, like a hidden farming village, and looked to him like a “poor man’s Shangri-la.” The nickname and his haunting book of photographs are all that remain — in the late ’50s Chávez Ravine was buried, literally, and the stadium built on top of it.

Ry wrote a song about how old-timers locate themselves, by a memory plumb line down through the playing field, “to the town underneath all that cement”:

Second base, right over there.

I see Grandma in her rocking chair…

And if you want to know where a local boy like me is comin’ from:

3rd base, Dodger Stadium.

3rd base, Dodger Stadium.

My last stop was Shakey’s stomping ground, the old borax mining town of Trona. It’s the worst place on earth, Mister Jalopy told me, semiseriously, citing its heat and remoteness on the edge of Death Valley, and the acrid smell from an old chemical plant. Recent newspaper coverage bore him out. The population has plunged from a steady 6,000 to 1,880 in the 2000 Census. Retirees and young people have been moving away; methamphetamine addicts, parolees and arsonists have been moving in.

If you do go to Trona, it probably won’t be for the atmosphere but for the pinnacles, otherworldly geological formations just out of town that are a magnet for movie directors. When we entered the town just before high noon, it seemed locked up, like a Western town afraid of bandits. A drive-in was open, though, and a friendly woman there called the local historical society and got us an appointment for a museum tour.

We arrived at 2, just as Marydith Haughton pulled up in her white Buick LeSabre. Mrs. Haughton is 72 and tiny. Born and raised in Trona, she had the finely furrowed skin of a desert creature, white permed curls and eyes as blue as the Mojave sky.

Walking with a cane, she inched from room to sweltering room, turning on lights. I fiddled with an air-conditioner. “Turn that sucker up,” she said. Sweat collected on her glasses. The museum was a time capsule of Trona’s good old days as a company town. Old photographs lined the walls, cases displayed mining equipment, mineral samples, glass telephone insulators. Near a chair from the old hospital hung a varsity jacket from Trona High that had belonged to Mrs. Haughton’s husband.

It was a good place, she said.

I drove out of town, past its all-dirt ball fields and all-dirt graveyard. I had a little chunk of hanksite in my pocket, a local mineral sample Mrs. Haughton had given me as a souvenir. My favorite song from “I, Flathead” was playing over and over in my head. It’s “5000 Country Music Songs,” the story of a failed country singer. He marries, leaves the city for the desert, buys an old Cadillac and a trailer home and dreams of being the next Hank Williams. He keeps mailing songs to Nashville, but they keep coming back. He has his wife’s love, but once she gets sick and dies, there’s pretty much nothing left.

“Take what you want after I’m gone,” sings Ry, to the man who has come to clear his belongings away.

It was only just a little place that we called home sweet home

It was one old house trailer

Two rusty Cadillacs

and five thousand country music songs.

A SOUNDTRACK FOR CRUISING THE DESERT FLATS

“There’s nothing to buy and no place to stay,” Ry Cooder told me when I said I wanted to explore the California of his last three albums and book.

His point was that this was a history and memory project, not a Disney attraction — that a lot had been paved over and the rest forgotten, except those bits that lived in his head and in old maps and pulp movies. I said: “Sounds like a good time. When do we leave?”

The road trip must start with music.

Ry Cooder is a musician without borders, crisscrossing the globe in dozens of albums over nearly four decades. A 34-song overview of his career has just come out on Rhino Records: “The Ry Cooder Anthology: The UFO Has Landed” and is available on iTunes ($16.99).

His last three records are a trilogy about Southern California, his home: “Chávez Ravine” (2005), “My Name Is Buddy” (2007 ) and “I, Flathead” (2008), all from Nonesuch Records (www.nonesuch.com) or iTunes. These are Cooder originals, but each contains big contributions from other artists of the day, like the bandleader Don Tosti, who wrote the 1948 hit “Pachuco Boogie” (www.arhoolie.com) and Little Willie G. of the ’60s East Los Angeles rock band Thee Midniters (www.littlewillieg.com). Lalo Guerrero, a giant of Chicano music, wrote a song, “Corrido de Boxeo,” for “Chávez Ravine” and recorded new versions of two of his classics, “Los Chucos Suaves” and “Barrio Viejo.” Ersi Arvizu, a former boxer and singer for the Sisters, an East L.A. girl group, was a FedEx driver in Arizona when Mr. Cooder tracked her down. (Go to www.myspace.com/ersiarvizu to hear clips from her new album, “Friend for Life,” produced by Mr. Cooder.) The sweetest, saddest song on “Chávez Ravine” is “3rd Base, Dodger Stadium,” sung by Bla Pahinui (www.pahinui.com), a son of the Hawaiian slack-key guitar master Gabby Pahinui.

“My Name Is Buddy” and “I, Flathead” celebrate the steel-guitar-rich, honky-tonk country-western music of the white working class. That scene begins and ends with Merle Travis, Mr. Cooder says, but also includes old names like Ray Price, Speedy West and Jimmy Bryant. Mr. Cooder’s own collection includes “The Best of Merle Travis: Sweet Temptation (1946-1953),” “Stratosphere Boogie: The Flaming Guitars of Speedy West and Jimmy Bryant (both at www.musicspace.com) and “Speedy West Featuring Jimmy Bryant: There’s Gonna Be a Party” (www.jasmine-records.co.uk).

When you’re in Los Angeles, head to Dodger Stadium with the book “Chávez Ravine, 1949” by the photographer Don Normark. Stop in at Coco’s Variety Store (2427 Riverside Drive; 323-664-7400; www.cocosvariety.com), an awesome knickknack and vintage bicycle shop run by Mister Jalopy (www.hooptyrides.blogspot.com).

The hot-rod racing season ended Nov. 16 at El Mirage, officially the El Mirage Dry Lake Off-Highway Vehicle Recreation Area (directions at www.blm.gov/ca/st/en/fo/barstow/mirage.html). But the belly tankers, coupes and streamliners will return in May. To learn more, read “The Birth of Hot Rodding: The Story of the Dry Lakes Era,” by Robert Genat, and visit the Web site of the Southern California Timing Association (www.scta-bni.org), which has organized dry-lakes races since the 1930s. The hot rodder Bobby Green has a Web site, www.oldcrowspeedshop.com, and in his day job runs theme bars with names like Bigfoot Lodge (www.bigfootlodge.com) and Saints ‘n’ Sinners Lounge (www.saintsnsinnersbar.com).

Google “Trona Pinnacles” to find directions to these geological landmarks. They are more than bizarre enough to justify a long drive beyond El Mirage. In the sleepy little town of Trona, the Searles Valley Historical Society (760-372-5222) runs the Old Guest House Museum (www1.iwvisp.com/svhs), where kindly volunteers will take you back to the days of borax mines, the magnesium monorail and the American Potash and Chemical Corporation. Open Monday through Saturday mornings, and by appointment.

On your desert trip, eat at the Halfway House Cafe (661-251-0102; www.halfwayhousecafe.com), a 1930s roadhouse on the old Sierra Highway in Canyon Country, or Trails Drive-In (84520 Trona Road in Trona; 760-372-5803). For ideas on where to stay and eat in Mr. Cooder’s hometown, go to the Santa Monica guide.

audio slide show

Lucio Fontana
Concetto spaziale, 1960

Sperone Westwater is pleased to present, for the first time in the United States, a survey of works by members of the Zero group created between the late 1950s and late 1960s. Inspired by the recent survey “ZERO: Internationale Kunstler-Avantgarde der 50er/60er Jahre,” which opened at the Museum Kunst Palast in Düsseldorf and traveled to the Musée d’Art Moderne in Saint Etienne (2006-2007), “ZERO in New York” has been assembled with the support and collaboration of most Zero artists and their respective foundations. The exhibition has been organized by David Leiber, Director of Sperone Westwater and Mattijs Visser, Founding Director of the Zero Foundation.

The Zero movement was initiated in the late 1950s by two Düsseldorf-based artists, Heinz Mack and Otto Piene. The term “Zero,” which the artists coined to describe their concept, later came to define an international movement taken up by artists across Europe. “ZERO in New York” concentrates on the movement’s artistic output between 1957 and 1966 and examines the unusually collaborative relationship that developed between groups of artists in Germany, Holland, France, Italy, Belgium, and Switzerland in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Reacting to the personally-charged expressionism of the Post-War period, Zero artists aimed to banish any trace of a personal style and instead bring elements of the non-art world into their work. Informed by new materials and technologies, and incorporating elements of light, fire, and water, Zero was characterized by an idealistic spirit of collaboration in pursuit of new concepts of light, movement, and energy. Working in an environment without galleries and contemporary art spaces, these artists came together to exhibit their work in a series of one-day-only evening exhibitions, often staged in their studios. Manifestos were often published in association with the shows, such as “Zero 1” (1958), “Zero 2” (1958), and “Zero 3” (1961). These included texts in multiple languages written by artists and curators active in the Zero circle who sought to define what they termed “The New Artistic Conception.” With its serial presentation, vibrant light structures and strong theoretical component, Zero was a progressive art movement that revolutionized Post-War art and led to the formation of the Post-War Avant-Garde. In describing the meaning and significance of the name “Zero,” Otto Piene wrote:

“From the beginning we looked upon the term [Zero] not as an expression of nihilism – or as a dada-like gag, but as a word indicating a zone of silence and of pure possibilities for a new beginning as the count-down when rockets take off – ZERO is the incommensurable zone in which the old state turns into the new.” - Otto Piene, “The Development of the Group ‘Zero’”, “Times Literary Supplement” (London), 3 September 1964

From the original German Zero group, works by Heinz Mack, Otto Piene and Gunther Uecker will be shown in “ZERO in New York.” Of particular note will be three important light sculptures by Piene that were made for his first New York exhibition in 1965. Also on view will be works by other German practitioners, including Gerhard von Graevenitz, and Adolf Luther, works by a Dutch group of artists, Henk Peeters, Jan Schoonhoven, Armando and Jan Henderikse, who came together in 1960 under the name “Nul”, in addition to work by another Dutch artist Herman de Vries. Works by Italian artists Lucio Fontana, Piero Manzoni, Enrico Castellani and Nanda Vigo will be shown, along with Belgian artist Jef Verheyen. From France, works by Arman and Francois Morellet, along with fire paintings and monochromes by Yves Klein, will be exhibited, and from Switzerland, work by Daniel Spoerri, Christian Megert and a kinetic sculpture by Jean Tinguely will be included.

A 320-page fully-illustrated catalogue will be published by MER Paper Kunsthalle on the occasion of this exhibition. Edited by Mattijs Visser, it will include essays by Catherine Millet, Editor of Art Press; Dr. Valerie Hillings, Assistant Curator at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; and texts by Otto Piene, Heinz Mack and Yves Klein. “ZERO in New York” will be the first in-depth English publication dedicated to the Zero period and its artists.

6 November 2008 through 20 December 2008

thanks to matt connors

By DAVID BROOKS
NY Times Published: November 21, 2008

Jan. 20, 2009, will be a historic day. Barack Obama (Columbia, Harvard Law) will take the oath of office as his wife, Michelle (Princeton, Harvard Law), looks on proudly. Nearby, his foreign policy advisers will stand beaming, including perhaps Hillary Clinton (Wellesley, Yale Law), Jim Steinberg (Harvard, Yale Law) and Susan Rice (Stanford, Oxford D. Phil.).

The domestic policy team will be there, too, including Jason Furman (Harvard, Harvard Ph.D.), Austan Goolsbee (Yale, M.I.T. Ph.D.), Blair Levin (Yale, Yale Law), Peter Orszag (Princeton, London School of Economics Ph.D.) and, of course, the White House Counsel Greg Craig (Harvard, Yale Law).

This truly will be an administration that looks like America, or at least that slice of America that got double 800s on their SATs. Even more than past administrations, this will be a valedictocracy — rule by those who graduate first in their high school classes. If a foreign enemy attacks the United States during the Harvard-Yale game any time over the next four years, we’re screwed.

Already the culture of the Obama administration is coming into focus. Its members are twice as smart as the poor reporters who have to cover them, three times if you include the columnists. They typically served in the Clinton administration and then, like Cincinnatus, retreated to the comforts of private life — that is, if Cincinnatus had worked at Goldman Sachs, Williams & Connolly or the Brookings Institution. So many of them send their kids to Georgetown Day School, the posh leftish private school in D.C., that they’ll be able to hold White House staff meetings in the carpool line.

And yet as much as I want to resent these overeducated Achievatrons (not to mention the incursion of a French-style government dominated by highly trained Enarchs), I find myself tremendously impressed by the Obama transition.

The fact that they can already leak one big appointee per day is testimony to an awful lot of expert staff work. Unlike past Democratic administrations, they are not just handing out jobs to the hacks approved by the favored interest groups. They’re thinking holistically — there’s a nice balance of policy wonks, governors and legislators. They’re also thinking strategically. As Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute notes, it was smart to name Tom Daschle both the head of Health and Human Services and the health czar. Splitting those duties up, as Bill Clinton did, leads to all sorts of conflicts.

Most of all, they are picking Washington insiders. Or to be more precise, they are picking the best of the Washington insiders.

Obama seems to have dispensed with the romantic and failed notion that you need inexperienced “fresh faces” to change things. After all, it was L.B.J. who passed the Civil Rights Act. Moreover, because he is so young, Obama is not bringing along an insular coterie of lifelong aides who depend upon him for their well-being.

As a result, the team he has announced so far is more impressive than any other in recent memory. One may not agree with them on everything or even most things, but a few things are indisputably true.

First, these are open-minded individuals who are persuadable by evidence. Orszag, who will probably be budget director, is trusted by Republicans and Democrats for his honest presentation of the facts.

Second, they are admired professionals. Conservative legal experts have a high regard for the probable attorney general, Eric Holder, despite the business over the Marc Rich pardon.

Third, they are not excessively partisan. Obama signaled that he means to live up to his postpartisan rhetoric by letting Joe Lieberman keep his committee chairmanship.

Fourth, they are not ideological. The economic advisers, Furman and Goolsbee, are moderate and thoughtful Democrats. Hillary Clinton at State is problematic, mostly because nobody has a role for her husband. But, as she has demonstrated in the Senate, her foreign-policy views are hardheaded and pragmatic. (It would be great to see her set of interests complemented by Samantha Power’s set of interests at the U.N.)

Finally, there are many people on this team with practical creativity. Any think tanker can come up with broad doctrines, but it is rare to find people who can give the president a list of concrete steps he can do day by day to advance American interests. Dennis Ross, who advised Obama during the campaign, is the best I’ve ever seen at this, but Rahm Emanuel also has this capacity, as does Craig and legislative liaison Phil Schiliro.

Believe me, I’m trying not to join in the vast, heaving O-phoria now sweeping the coastal haute bourgeoisie. But the personnel decisions have been superb. The events of the past two weeks should be reassuring to anybody who feared that Obama would veer to the left or would suffer self-inflicted wounds because of his inexperience. He’s off to a start that nearly justifies the hype.

johann koenig

group show at Sundays Gallery opens sunday November 23. 4949Hollywood Blvd #212.

I thought i would post this in hopes of the new Obama administration putting the solar panels back on the White House. One of Ronald Reagan’s first official acts of office included removing Jimmy Carter’s solar panels from the roof of the White House, and reversing most of Carter’s conservation and alternative energy policies. This guy was ahead of his time.

Jimmy Carter delivered this televised speech on April 18, 1977.

Tonight I want to have an unpleasant talk with you about a problem unprecedented in our history. With the exception of preventing war, this is the greatest challenge our country will face during our lifetimes. The energy crisis has not yet overwhelmed us, but it will if we do not act quickly.

It is a problem we will not solve in the next few years, and it is likely to get progressively worse through the rest of this century.

We must not be selfish or timid if we hope to have a decent world for our children and grandchildren.

We simply must balance our demand for energy with our rapidly shrinking resources. By acting now, we can control our future instead of letting the future control us.

Two days from now, I will present my energy proposals to the Congress. Its members will be my partners and they have already given me a great deal of valuable advice. Many of these proposals will be unpopular. Some will cause you to put up with inconveniences and to make sacrifices.

The most important thing about these proposals is that the alternative may be a national catastrophe. Further delay can affect our strength and our power as a nation.

Our decision about energy will test the character of the American people and the ability of the President and the Congress to govern. This difficult effort will be the “moral equivalent of war” — except that we will be uniting our efforts to build and not destroy.

I know that some of you may doubt that we face real energy shortages. The 1973 gasoline lines are gone, and our homes are warm again. But our energy problem is worse tonight than it was in 1973 or a few weeks ago in the dead of winter. It is worse because more waste has occurred, and more time has passed by without our planning for the future. And it will get worse every day until we act.

The oil and natural gas we rely on for 75 percent of our energy are running out. In spite of increased effort, domestic production has been dropping steadily at about six percent a year. Imports have doubled in the last five years. Our nation’s independence of economic and political action is becoming increasingly constrained. Unless profound changes are made to lower oil consumption, we now believe that early in the 1980s the world will be demanding more oil that it can produce.

The world now uses about 60 million barrels of oil a day and demand increases each year about 5 percent. This means that just to stay even we need the production of a new Texas every year, an Alaskan North Slope every nine months, or a new Saudi Arabia every three years. Obviously, this cannot continue.

We must look back in history to understand our energy problem. Twice in the last several hundred years there has been a transition in the way people use energy.

The first was about 200 years ago, away from wood — which had provided about 90 percent of all fuel — to coal, which was more efficient. This change became the basis of the Industrial Revolution.

The second change took place in this century, with the growing use of oil and natural gas. They were more convenient and cheaper than coal, and the supply seemed to be almost without limit. They made possible the age of automobile and airplane travel. Nearly everyone who is alive today grew up during this age and we have never known anything different.

Because we are now running out of gas and oil, we must prepare quickly for a third change, to strict conservation and to the use of coal and permanent renewable energy sources, like solar power.

The world has not prepared for the future. During the 1950s, people used twice as much oil as during the 1940s. During the 1960s, we used twice as much as during the 1950s. And in each of those decades, more oil was consumed than in all of mankind’s previous history.

World consumption of oil is still going up. If it were possible to keep it rising during the 1970s and 1980s by 5 percent a year as it has in the past, we could use up all the proven reserves of oil in the entire world by the end of the next decade.

I know that many of you have suspected that some supplies of oil and gas are being withheld. You may be right, but suspicions about oil companies cannot change the fact that we are running out of petroleum.

All of us have heard about the large oil fields on Alaska’s North Slope. In a few years when the North Slope is producing fully, its total output will be just about equal to two years’ increase in our nation’s energy demand.

Each new inventory of world oil reserves has been more disturbing than the last. World oil production can probably keep going up for another six or eight years. But some time in the 1980s it can’t go up much more. Demand will overtake production. We have no choice about that.

But we do have a choice about how we will spend the next few years. Each American uses the energy equivalent of 60 barrels of oil per person each year. Ours is the most wasteful nation on earth. We waste more energy than we import. With about the same standard of living, we use twice as much energy per person as do other countries like Germany, Japan and Sweden.

One choice is to continue doing what we have been doing before. We can drift along for a few more years.

Our consumption of oil would keep going up every year. Our cars would continue to be too large and inefficient. Three-quarters of them would continue to carry only one person — the driver — while our public transportation system continues to decline. We can delay insulating our houses, and they will continue to lose about 50 percent of their heat in waste.

We can continue using scarce oil and natural to generate electricity, and continue wasting two-thirds of their fuel value in the process.

If we do not act, then by 1985 we will be using 33 percent more energy than we do today.

We can’t substantially increase our domestic production, so we would need to import twice as much oil as we do now. Supplies will be uncertain. The cost will keep going up. Six years ago, we paid $3.7 billion for imported oil. Last year we spent $37 billion — nearly ten times as much — and this year we may spend over $45 billion.

Unless we act, we will spend more than $550 billion for imported oil by 1985 — more than $2,500 a year for every man, woman, and child in America. Along with that money we will continue losing American jobs and becoming increasingly vulnerable to supply interruptions.

Now we have a choice. But if we wait, we will live in fear of embargoes. We could endanger our freedom as a sovereign nation to act in foreign affairs. Within ten years we would not be able to import enough oil — from any country, at any acceptable price.

If we wait, and do not act, then our factories will not be able to keep our people on the job with reduced supplies of fuel. Too few of our utilities will have switched to coal, our most abundant energy source.

We will not be ready to keep our transportation system running with smaller, more efficient cars and a better network of buses, trains and public transportation.

We will feel mounting pressure to plunder the environment. We will have a crash program to build more nuclear plants, strip-mine and burn more coal, and drill more offshore wells than we will need if we begin to conserve now. Inflation will soar, production will go down, people will lose their jobs. Intense competition will build up among nations and among the different regions within our own country.

If we fail to act soon, we will face an economic, social and political crisis that will threaten our free institutions.

But we still have another choice. We can begin to prepare right now. We can decide to act while there is time.

That is the concept of the energy policy we will present on Wednesday. Our national energy plan is based on ten fundamental principles.

The first principle is that we can have an effective and comprehensive energy policy only if the government takes responsibility for it and if the people understand the seriousness of the challenge and are willing to make sacrifices.

The second principle is that healthy economic growth must continue. Only by saving energy can we maintain our standard of living and keep our people at work. An effective conservation program will create hundreds of thousands of new jobs.

The third principle is that we must protect the environment. Our energy problems have the same cause as our environmental problems — wasteful use of resources. Conservation helps us solve both at once.

The fourth principle is that we must reduce our vulnerability to potentially devastating embargoes. We can protect ourselves from uncertain supplies by reducing our demand for oil, making the most of our abundant resources such as coal, and developing a strategic petroleum reserve.

The fifth principle is that we must be fair. Our solutions must ask equal sacrifices from every region, every class of people, every interest group. Industry will have to do its part to conserve, just as the consumers will. The energy producers deserve fair treatment, but we will not let the oil companies profiteer.

The sixth principle, and the cornerstone of our policy, is to reduce the demand through conservation. Our emphasis on conservation is a clear difference between this plan and others which merely encouraged crash production efforts. Conservation is the quickest, cheapest, most practical source of energy. Conservation is the only way we can buy a barrel of oil for a few dollars. It costs about $13 to waste it.

The seventh principle is that prices should generally reflect the true replacement costs of energy. We are only cheating ourselves if we make energy artificially cheap and use more than we can really afford.

The eighth principle is that government policies must be predictable and certain. Both consumers and producers need policies they can count on so they can plan ahead. This is one reason I am working with the Congress to create a new Department of Energy, to replace more than 50 different agencies that now have some control over energy.

The ninth principle is that we must conserve the fuels that are scarcest and make the most of those that are more plentiful. We can’t continue to use oil and gas for 75 percent of our consumption when they make up seven percent of our domestic reserves. We need to shift to plentiful coal while taking care to protect the environment, and to apply stricter safety standards to nuclear energy.

The tenth principle is that we must start now to develop the new, unconventional sources of energy we will rely on in the next century.

These ten principles have guided the development of the policy I would describe to you and the Congress on Wednesday.

Our energy plan will also include a number of specific goals, to measure our progress toward a stable energy system.

These are the goals we set for 1985:

–Reduce the annual growth rate in our energy demand to less than two percent.

–Reduce gasoline consumption by ten percent below its current level.

–Cut in half the portion of United States oil which is imported, from a potential level of 16 million barrels to six million barrels a day.

–Establish a strategic petroleum reserve of one billion barrels, more than six months’ supply.

–Increase our coal production by about two thirds to more than 1 billion tons a year.

–Insulate 90 percent of American homes and all new buildings.

–Use solar energy in more than two and one-half million houses.

We will monitor our progress toward these goals year by year. Our plan will call for stricter conservation measures if we fall behind.

I cant tell you that these measures will be easy, nor will they be popular. But I think most of you realize that a policy which does not ask for changes or sacrifices would not be an effective policy.

This plan is essential to protect our jobs, our environment, our standard of living, and our future.

Whether this plan truly makes a difference will be decided not here in Washington, but in every town and every factory, in every home an don every highway and every farm.

I believe this can be a positive challenge. There is something especially American in the kinds of changes we have to make. We have been proud, through our history of being efficient people.

We have been proud of our leadership in the world. Now we have a chance again to give the world a positive example.

And we have been proud of our vision of the future. We have always wanted to give our children and grandchildren a world richer in possibilities than we’ve had. They are the ones we must provide for now. They are the ones who will suffer most if we don’t act.

I’ve given you some of the principles of the plan.

I am sure each of you will find something you don’t like about the specifics of our proposal. It will demand that we make sacrifices and changes in our lives. To some degree, the sacrifices will be painful — but so is any meaningful sacrifice. It will lead to some higher costs, and to some greater inconveniences for everyone.

But the sacrifices will be gradual, realistic and necessary. Above all, they will be fair. No one will gain an unfair advantage through this plan. No one will be asked to bear an unfair burden. We will monitor the accuracy of data from the oil and natural gas companies, so that we will know their true production, supplies, reserves, and profits.

The citizens who insist on driving large, unnecessarily powerful cars must expect to pay more for that luxury.

We can be sure that all the special interest groups in the country will attack the part of this plan that affects them directly. They will say that sacrifice is fine, as long as other people do it, but that their sacrifice is unreasonable, or unfair, or harmful to the country. If they succeed, then the burden on the ordinary citizen, who is not organized into an interest group, would be crushing.

There should be only one test for this program: whether it will help our country.

Other generation of Americans have faced and mastered great challenges. I have faith that meeting this challenge will make our own lives even richer. If you will join me so that we can work together with patriotism and courage, we will again prove that our great nation can lead the world into an age of peace, independence and freedom.

Jimmy Carter, “The President’s Proposed Energy Policy.” 18 April 1977. Vital Speeches of the Day, Vol. XXXXIII, No. 14, May 1, 1977, pp. 418-420.

Bride’s Basket with Mortar & Pestle, Sterling Ruby 2007

Man nabbed after hitting girlfriend with sandwich

Published: Today
PORT ST. LUCIE, Fla. (AP) - A man faces a domestic battery charge after allegedly hitting his girlfriend with a sandwich as she was driving on Interstate 95 on Friday. Police said the 19-year-old man became angry and hit the woman in the arm and face with a sandwich, knocking her glasses off.

The victim nearly lost control of the car because she couldn’t see the road and the man then allegedly ripped off the rear-view mirror and used it to shatter the windshield.

The man was freed on $7,500 bail.

Police haven’t said what type of sandwich was involved.

Information from: South Florida Sun-Sentinel, http://www.sun-sentinel.com

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Iowa magician, hand model sues over snipped finger

By MICHAEL J. CRUMB
Published: Yesterday
DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) - A hand model, magician and actor blames a Martha Stewart-branded lounge chair for snipping off a bit of his livelihood.

In a lawsuit filed Monday against Kmart Corp. and Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, Patrick Albanese said he was moving the Martha Stewart Everyday lounge chair on a deck in June when the front tubular legs collapsed, crushing his right index finger between one of the chair legs and a tubular bar on the base of the chair.

The lawsuit said the fingertip fell beneath the deck but was later retrieved by a relative. Albanese’s attorney, Guy Cook, said the finger tip was reattached by a surgeon.

Albanese, of the Des Moines suburb of Clive, is seeking compensation for past and future medical expenses, physical and mental pain and suffering, permanent partial disfigurement and loss of earning capacity.

The lawsuit, filed in Polk County District Court, claims that Kmart and Martha Stewart Living were negligent in failing to issue a warning that the chair was defective, for failing to inspect the chair and in improperly designing the chair. It also claims the lounge chair was not sellable because it was defective.

Representatives for Kmart and Martha Stewart Living declined to comment.

Cook said that while the injury has not ended Albanese’s work as a hand model, it has affected it while he has been recovering. Cook said the injury has had a bigger impact on Albenese’s work as a magician.

Albanese, who served as the master of ceremonies for Hollywood’s Magic Castle for 15 years, has some sensation in the fingertip but has decreased function, Cook said.

“He’s a very accomplished musician and as part of his work, he does various slight-of-hand tricks,” Cook said.

Cook said it’s also affected Albanese’s ability to play the banjo, which he does as part of his act.
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Boy allegedly hits mom with saw, offers her $5

Published: Nov 14, 2008
FORT PIERCE, Fla. (AP) - Authorities say an 11-year-old boy hit his mother in the head with a saw and then offered her $5 not to call police. The St. Lucie County Sheriff’s Office reported that the boy and his 41-year-old mother got into an argument Wednesday when she was trying to get him to take his medication.

The boy left and went to another home, where he began hitting a tree with a saw. When the mother finally caught up with the boy, authorities say he hit her in the head with the saw, causing a minor laceration. A sheriff’s report said that’s when the boy began pleading with his mother not to call police and offered her a $5 bill.

The boy is facing an aggravated battery charge.

Information from: The Stuart News, http://www.tcpalm.com

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Cat missing for over 13 years back with owners

Published: Nov 11, 2008
SANTA ROSA, Calif. (AP) - A couple recently had an unexpected reunion with an old housemate: their pet cat who went missing more than 13 years ago. George, who was last seen by Melinda Merman and Frank Walburg in 1995, was turned into an animal hospital after the manager of a mobile home park trapped the sickly feline.

A microchip implanted in George allowed him to be traced back to his owners.

Merman said after George went missing she visited animal shelters and wrote to veterinarians in search of the gray, yellow-eyed cat, who now weighs less than half what he used to.

But Merman and Walburg said the cat is now eating well and displaying some of his old behavior, like jumping at flickering light on the wall the way he used to.

Information from: The Press Democrat, http://www.pressdemo.com
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tagbanger

by George Greenough

George Greenough on satisfaction

How to ride a mat by George Greenough

George Greenrough and Paul Gross riding their mats

I hope this post somehow inspires Mr. Swallow to get his own birthday mat.

David Fishman trying the offerings at the Salumeria Rosi, a restaurant on the Upper West Side. “Good variety,” he wrote.

By SUSAN DOMINUS
Published: November 16, 2008

Everyone’s a critic, and apparently it’s never too soon to start.

That’s why David Fishman, an Upper West Sider who turned 12 last month, decided to take himself out for dinner one night last week. His parents had called him at home to say they were running late, suggesting that he grab some takeout at the usual hummus place.

Hummus, again? David thought he could do better than that.

He had recently passed by the newly opened Salumeria Rosi, a few blocks from his home, and had been intrigued by the reflective black back wall, the cuts of dried pork hanging from the ceiling, the little jars of cured olives and artichokes adorning the walls. If it was O.K. with his mom (and it turned out it was), he wanted to try that instead.

David aspires to be a food critic — he has some vague notion that he could make a living writing for the Zagat guides — and the new Italian spot on Amsterdam Avenue near 73rd Street seemed worthy of investigation.

That night, Tuesday, turned out to be one of the first that the restaurant was open to the public. David requested a menu, which the hostess handed him, and decided that it was within his budget ($25). Then he asked for a table for one and waited to see what she’d say. A year before, he had been turned away from a half-empty restaurant in Montauk and told that it did not serve children unaccompanied by adults. “I was angry, but I didn’t show it,” he said. “What can you do?”

Grown-up or not, tables were hard to come by that evening — every seat was booked, mostly by friends of the chef and owner, Cesare Casella, the Tuscan impresario behind Maremma in the West Village. Even a boldfaced name dropped by (Tony Danza, who, to the David Fishmans of the world, is just another old fogy). But the hostess decided to squeeze in the Salumeria’s first unaccompanied customer under 4 feet 8, as long as he promised to be out by 8 p.m. It was a deal.

Nobody at the restaurant seemed terribly impressed by Tony Danza, but David Fishman — now that was something. People tried not to stare, but couldn’t help themselves. Where were his parents? Was he enjoying the food? Cash or credit?

Normally passionate for seafood, David ordered a specialty of the restaurant, a prosciutto, as well as what the menu called una insalata di rucola e parmigiano. “Good variety,” he wrote in the leather-bound notebook he brought along, restaurant-critic-like. “Softish jazz music. Seem to enjoy kids but not overly.” In other words, no cloying smiles or insulting offer of grilled cheese.

An Australian couple seated beside him struck up a conversation — he had no idea how much the financial collapse here was affecting the Australian dollar! — and a young couple on the other side of his table insisted, against his polite but firm protestations, on buying him a chocolate mousse. In turn, he recommended that they try the arugula salad.

The kitchen workers were so intrigued by the young adventurous eater that they sent out a bowl of complimentary tripe stew, which he enjoyed, although, he allowed, “It wasn’t my favorite.” He was a little surprised to learn, subsequently, that tripe was prepared stomach lining. His eyes went wide. “Intestines of what?” he asked. (Somehow, that seemed to matter.)

Food is David’s life — well, food and swimming and volunteering and student council and green rooftops (his school, Fieldston, has one). But he really likes food. At 6, he won a competition at the Crumbs Bakery for the best new cupcake concept (David’s Peppermint Patty Cupcake). As a prize, he got a free cupcake every Wednesday for a year — and then, even though he wasn’t technically supposed to, for more than a year after that. Sadly, eventually all the people who worked there were replaced. “Now they don’t know anything about it,” he said.

BUT the young foodie has cultivated a new fan in Chef Casella, a burly man who generally tours his restaurants with a trademark sprig of herb in his pocket. Mr. Casella came over the evening of David’s big night out to extend a greeting, and sent him home with a gift of fine hazelnut spread. Though David was disappointed that the restaurant did not serve gelato, he got points with Mr. Casella for knowing a little something about Italian cuisine.

“He reminded me of me, when I was younger,” said Mr. Casella, who used to drive all over Europe by himself to try the best restaurants. “He is so cool, though — more confident than I am when I eat out by myself.”

Mr. Casella likewise made an impression on David. “He looked like a real meat guy,” David said. Like a butcher? “Like a butcher-slash-guy who would eat a lot of meat,” he clarified.

As independent as David is, he is not allowed to walk around much after dark by himself, so his mom swung by the restaurant to pick him up when he called. Once home, he wrote up the review, Zagat-style, in his private journal, giving the restaurant a 24 out of 25 for food, and a 23 out of 25 for décor.

“As I left,” he wrote, “I knew that soon enough this would be one of the most ‘hip’ places in the city.” If there was a weak spot, it was the service, in his opinion: 21 out of 25. In his notes, David remarked that the bread service was a little slow.

“I agree,” the chef said when presented with the critique. “We’re working on it.”

Nuts in May (aka Play for Today: Nuts in May) is a 1976 television film written and directed by Mike Leigh, originally broadcast as part of the BBC’s Play for Today series.

NOVEMBER 17–Undaunted by a concrete wall separating their respective cellblocks, male and female inmates took advantage of a design flaw in an Indiana jail to engage in late-night sexual trysts. The Greene County inmates–three men and three women–pried open metal security tiles in the ceiling of their respective dormitory-style housing units to gain access to the adjoining cellblock, according to a probable cause affidavit filed in Circuit Court. A copy of that detail-packed, and entertaining, affidavit can be found here. They were able to get into the lockup next door because the concrete wall separating the spaces did not continue to the building’s roof. As first reported by the Bloomfield Free Press, a blind spot in the Greene County jail’s security camera system kept officials from quickly spotting the illicit excursions, which began two months ago. The six inmates, pictured in the below mug shots, were charged today with felony escape. Investigators learned of the ceiling hijinks after conducting a search of the cellblocks last month. During that shakedown, the November 14 affidavit notes, investigators found letters in the female dormitory indicating that inmates “were getting through the ceiling area, and making contact with each other. This contact appears to include sexual activity.” The first female inmate approached by a sheriff’s investigator was asked “if she knew why I might want to talk to her,” wrote Detective George Dallaire. The woman, who was not charged, “asked if it had anything to do with the girls going through the ceiling.”

thesmokinggun

Henry Hobson Richardson built his largest commission in 1870, the Buffalo State Asylum for the Insane, which is composed of a pair of soaring Romanesque towers flanked by low brick pavilions.

By NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF
NY Times Published: November 14, 2008

ONE of the most cynical clichés in architecture is that poverty is good for preservation. The poor don’t bulldoze historic neighborhoods to make way for fancy new high-rises.

That assumption came to mind when I stepped off a plane here recently. Buffalo is home to some of the greatest American architecture of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with major architects like Henry Hobson Richardson, Frederick Law Olmsted, Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright building marvels here. Together they shaped one of the grandest early visions of the democratic American city.

Yet Buffalo is more commonly identified with the crumbling infrastructure, abandoned homes and dwindling jobs that have defined the Rust Belt for the past 50 years. And for decades its architecture has seemed strangely frozen in time.

Now the city is reaching a crossroads. Just as local preservationists are completing restorations on some of the city’s most important landmarks, the federal government is considering a plan that could wipe out part of a historic neighborhood. Meanwhile Mayor Byron W. Brown is being pressed to revise a proposal that would have demolished hundreds of abandoned homes.

The outcome of these plans will go far in determining the city’s prospects for economic recovery, but it could also offer a rare opportunity to re-examine the relationship between preserving the past and building a future.

Buffalo was founded on a rich tradition of architectural experimentation. The architects who worked here were among the first to break with European traditions to create an aesthetic of their own, rooted in American ideals about individualism, commerce and social mobility. And today its grass-roots preservation movement is driven not by Disney-inspired developers but by a vibrant coalition of part-time preservationists, amateur historians and third-generation residents who have made reclaiming the city’s history a deeply personal mission.

At a time when oil prices and oil dependence are forcing us to rethink the wisdom of suburban and exurban living, Buffalo could eventually offer a blueprint for repairing America’s other shrinking postindustrial cities.

Touring Buffalo’s monuments is about as close as you can get to experiencing firsthand the earliest struggles to define what an American architecture would look like.

The city’s rise began in 1825 with the opening of the Erie Canal, which opened trade with the heartland. By the end of the 19th century the city’s grain silos and steel mills had become architectural pilgrimage sites for European Modernists like Erich Mendelsohn and Bruno Taut, who saw them as the great cathedrals of Modernity. In their vast scale and technological efficiency, they reflected a triumphant America and sent a warning signal to Europe that it was fast becoming less relevant.

Yet it is the parade of celebrated architects who worked here as much as the city’s industrial achievements that makes Buffalo a living history lesson. Daniel Burnham’s 1896 Ellicott Square Building, with its mighty Italian Renaissance facade, towers over the corner of Main and Church Streets. Just a block away is Louis Sullivan’s 1895 Guarantee Building, a classic of early skyscraper design decorated in intricate floral terra-cotta tiles.

Across town, Henry Hobson Richardson built his largest commission: the 1870 Buffalo State Asylum for the Insane, composed of a pair of soaring Romanesque towers flanked by low brick pavilions. Light and air poured in through tall windows; spacious 18-foot-wide corridors were designed to promote interaction among the inmates, an idea that would be refined by Modernists in their communal housing projects decades later.

But it was Wright who made the decisive leap from an architecture that drew mainly on European stylistic precedents to one that was rooted in a growing cultural self-confidence. Wright built two of those great pillars of American architecture here, the 1904 Larkin Building and the 1905 Darwin D. Martin House.

Although torn down in 1950, the Larkin Building, designed as the headquarters of the Larkin Soap Company, remains one of the most influential designs of the 20th century. Wright invented floor-to-ceiling glass doors, double-pane windows and toilets affixed to the walls for this monument to American business. Massive, forbidding brick piers anchoring the exterior signaled a break with classical historical styles. The light-filled atrium piercing its five floors, with managers visible at their desks at the bottom, turned the traditional office hierarchy on its head.

The Martin House, a Prairie House complex of five buildings on a vast suburban lot, is the domestic counterpart to this vision. No European architect had come close to imagining such a fluid world. A composition of low brick structures, terraces, pergolas and gardens in which man and landscape were in tune, the design celebrated a democratic ideal of family life in which traditional social barriers, and the walls that reinforce them, were finally torn down.

Yet Wright’s genius lay in his ability to accomplish this feat while conveying a profound serenity. The low roof and broad cantilevered eaves both beckoned to the horizon and provided shelter. The grid of wood beams in the living room, set just below ceiling level, visually broke down the space into discrete rooms while maintaining a sense of openness. Above all this architecture represented freedom both from Europe’s suffocating traditions and from the feelings of cultural inferiority that had defined American architecture since the earliest days of the republic.

This departure from recycled European precedents is reflected in the city’s late-19th-century urban planning as well. Buffalo’s original plan from the early 19th century was loosely based on Pierre Charles L’Enfant’s 1791 plan for Washington, an Americanized version of Paris’s system of radiating boulevards. Its civic core, dominated by a mountainous City Hall, reads as an isolated fragment of a City Beautiful plan that was never fully realized.

Olmsted, as much social reformer as landscape architect, had visited John Paxson’s Birkenhead Park near Liverpool, a pioneering project designed to better the lives of the city’s working class. When he returned to New York, he expanded on that vision in his designs for Central and Prospect Parks, which he conceived as realms of psychological healing that could also break down class boundaries.

In Buffalo he realized an even grander ambition, creating a vast network of parks and parkways that he hoped would have “a civilizing effect” on the “dangerous classes” populating the American city. Flanked by rows of elm trees, the parkways were broken up by a series of gorgeous landscaped roundabouts, slowing the city’s rhythms of movement into something more majestic yet distinctly democratic.

It didn’t last of course. By the 1950s Buffalo’s economy had already embarked on its long path to disintegration. The completion in 1959 of the St. Lawrence Seaway, which created a more direct route to the Atlantic Ocean, made the Erie Canal obsolete and deprived the city of its commercial lifeline. Economic decline was exacerbated by race riots in 1967 and white flight to the suburbs. By the mid-1970s the inner city was being abandoned.

Even so, many of the city’s most revered monuments survived. Despite the destruction of some surrounding structures, the main house at the Martin complex remained intact. Richardson’s asylum closed in the mid-1970s, and though one of its wings was demolished to make room for a new hospital next door, the bulk of the building still towers over Olmsted’s park.

Today Buffalo is a collection of fragile museum pieces with a covey of local stewards struggling to preserve them as a means to help save the city.

It would not be the first place to see its history as a means of attracting tourist dollars. (Boston and New Orleans are among the obvious precedents.) What makes this historic revival so heartwarming, however, is that it is driven by genuine civic pride in the face of daunting odds.

When a group of private citizens took control of the Martin House in 1992, for example, their ambitions were relatively modest: to restore the main house, one of three structures that had not yet been demolished. As time wore on, the group began to see the entire complex as a singular vision that could not be understood unless it was fully brought back to life .

In the early 1960s its conservatory and pergola had been ripped out to make way for an unsightly apartment complex; in 1994 the group raised the money to purchase the structure, tear it down and rebuild the elements of Wright’s complex that had been destroyed. A few years ago they bought the small gardener’s cottage that anchored the northwest corner of the site as well.

The project’s overall cost soared to more than $50 million from $10 million. But most of the structural and exterior work is now complete, and now, for the first time in decades, you can fully glean the genius of Wright’s work.

Other projects have been less high profile but equally exemplary. On the October day I arrived, I met with Monica Pellegrino Faix, a representative of the Richardson Center Corporation, a local nonprofit group trying to save the asylum. The state has committed $76 million to help restore the complex, and the group is now trying to come up with potential uses for its vacant buildings, including using one for an architecture museum.

Later that day I met with a group of local activists who have been rebuilding single-family houses in some of the city’s most run-down historic neighborhoods. On Richmond Avenue, one of Olmsted’s grand decaying parkways, Harvey Garrett, a strategic planning consultant, spent several years renovating a 19th-century Victorian house before an arsonist set fire to it in 2006. He rebuilt it, and he is now one of the city’s busiest community organizers and strongest preservation voices. Dozens of houses are now being renovated along the avenue, and an entire neighborhood that was once considered crime ridden is now livable again.

In a mostly abandoned factory area not far from downtown, Douglas Swift, a developer whose family has lived in Buffalo for generations, recently completed the restoration of a former Larkin warehouse, an early example of concrete frame construction; the project, which is now an office complex, has spurred a range of new development in the area.

What we see is a more egalitarian, diverse and socially tolerant vision of the city. It is both pro-density and pro-history. These residents have come to recognize through firsthand experience that social, economic and preservation issues are all deeply intertwined.

Sadly, not everyone has been so enlightened on this issue. Preservationists raised an outcry this year when Mayor Brown unveiled his plan to demolish 5,000 houses over the next five years as part of an effort to clean up some of the city’s poorest neighborhoods. The National Trust for Historic Preservation and the mayor’s office are now trying to hammer out a compromise.

And as the preservation movement has grown, it has inevitably gotten involved in bigger, more complex urban issues. The federal Homeland Security Department has proposed an expansion of the entrance to the Peace Bridge, the city’s main border crossing into Canada. Preservationists balked. The project, which includes a vast new parking plaza for commercial trucks, would require razing five blocks of Columbus Park, a neighborhood of historic houses mostly built from 1860 through the late 1920s. A 20-foot-high berm would also be built alongside Olmsted’s Front Park, which flanks one side of the neighborhood, blocking out sublime views of Lake Erie and the Niagara River.

The National Trust, which opposes the plan, has suggested moving the new parking plaza to the Canadian side of the border — a possibility that the Canadian government says it will consider — or rerouting traffic to one of four other bridges. But those prospects appear doubtful.

Meanwhile the city has begun to take a few cautious steps into the present. Toshiko Mori, a New York architect and the former chairwoman of the architecture department at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, is putting the finishing touches on a gorgeous new visitors’ center at the Martin House. Gwathmey Siegel & Associates of New York has designed a sleek new zinc- and cast-stone-clad home for the Burchfield-Penney Art Center near the historic district of Elmwood Village, which opens next Saturday.

But how these projects will be forged into a cohesive vision for the city’s future is less certain. The best-intentioned preservationists, however determined, can accomplish only so much. Often developers co-opt the achievements of these trailblazing individuals and nonprofit groups by dolling up historic neighborhoods for private gain. The city’s rough edges are smoothed over to satisfy the hunger for more tourist dollars. Shiny new convention centers and generic boutiques follow. Yet schools, roads, bridges and electrical and power lines continue to crumble.

Buffalo is an ideal testing ground for rethinking that depressing model. Its architectural heritage embodies an America that thought boldly about the future, but believed deeply in the city as a democratic forum. What’s needed now is to revive that experimental tradition.

ny times slideshow

Four decades ago, a police raid targeting homosexuals at the establishment prompted protests. Last week, after Proposition 8 protests in the area, some demonstrators stopped in at the pub.

By Joanna Lin
LA Times November 16, 2008

The old, illuminated sign of a black and white smiling cat still beckons patrons into a small windowless bar, the site of one of the nation’s earliest gay rights protests four decades ago.

Just last week, after thousands flooded the streets of Sunset Junction rallying for the rights of same-sex couples to marry, some demonstrators rested their placards under the sign and crowded into the Silver Lake bar now called Le Barcito.

Forty-one years earlier, the Black Cat, as it was known then, offered a rare gathering place for Los Angeles gays. But it was no safe haven: Police commonly raided taverns, targeting patrons for their sexual orientation.

In 1967, a police raid at the Black Cat touched off protests that predated by two years the historic Stonewall riots in New York City. The 1969 Stonewall riots, in which gays and lesbians fought back against the police for several nights, are commonly said to have sparked the gay rights movement.

Last week in Los Angeles, the Black Cat cemented its place in history with a city designation as a historic-cultural monument.

Alexei Romanoff, who rallied outside the Black Cat in February 1967 with a few hundred demonstrators, said the designation is a reminder of the progress the gay rights movement has made — and of the work that remains.

“We were terrified at the time,” said Romanoff, 72. “It wasn’t safe to be a gay man and professing you were gay. . . . We were afraid we would get beat up and, possibly worst of all, be rejected by our own families.” The 1967 protest lasted days and came one month after a police raid at the Black Cat and nearby New Faces bar, which Romanoff had owned until a few months before the raid.

Just after midnight on New Year’s Eve, as balloons floated down from the ceiling, a trio of singers belted out “Auld Lang Syne” and patrons exchanged embraces and kisses, plainclothes and uniformed Los Angeles Police Department officers swarmed the Black Cat, beating and arresting 14 patrons and bartenders.

Two men, who had fled from the raid to New Faces, were chased and arrested there, where the owner and a bartender were also beaten.

Two of the men arrested that night, accused of lewd conduct for kissing another man, were found guilty by a jury and registered as sex offenders. The men appealed, asserting the right of equal protection under the law, but the U.S. Supreme Court did not accept their case.

“Unfortunately, the court wasn’t ready for that,” said Herb Selwyn, the attorney who appealed to the Supreme Court on the men’s behalf.

Selwyn, 83, was one of few attorneys at the time who would represent gay clients. He took the Black Cat case pro bono and prepared a pocket-sized guide to legal rights that was distributed to patrons at gay bars.

“In those days, for a lawyer to represent gays, people would think they were gay, and that frightened a lot of lawyers,” said Selwyn, who is heterosexual. “I didn’t give a damn myself.”

Early activists said they had few allies outside the gay community.

“You were dangerous by association — almost considered to be criminals,” said Mark Thompson, a Silver Lake resident who has written extensively about gay history and culture.

Bars like the Black Cat — there were an estimated 80-plus gay bars in Los Angeles in the mid- and late 1960s — were often the only places where gay people could meet publicly, he said.

Although some gay rights groups existed, it was not until after the New Year’s raids at the Black Cat and New Faces that they staged sizable protests in Los Angeles.

“We just wouldn’t put up with it,” Romanoff said. “We were putting up with being raided, with going to court and people pleading to lesser charges, and then extorting fines out of us. We were getting beat up and hurt. We knew it had to stop somewhere.”

The Black Cat demonstration was the first time Romanoff and many of his gay peers protested in public. They carried signs reading “No More Abuse of Our Dignity and Rights” and “Peace in Silver Lake.” They handed out fliers decrying police brutality and treatment of gays, and garnered supportive honks from passing cars.

But fearful of retaliation, protesters never once uttered the name of the group that brought them together — the newly formed Personal Rights in Defense and Education, or PRIDE. And fearful of police officers, who were watching the demonstration, Romanoff said protesters “didn’t dare step off the sidewalk.”

Still, Romanoff said, “there was a feeling of relief. . . . I felt for once in my life, I wasn’t lying. I wasn’t pretending to be something other than who I was.”

Amanda Ross-Ho
Untitled Still Life (Anything Goes)
2008
Hand-drilled sheet rock, latex paint, found image, Tombo marker, linen tape
21 x 15 inches
Courtesy of the the artist and Cherry and Martin, Los Angeles.
Photo by Robert Wedemeyer
Value: $3,000.00
Starting bid: $1,000.00

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NY Times By JESSE McKINLEY and KIRK JOHNSON
Published: November 14, 2008

SACRAMENTO — Less than two weeks before Election Day, the chief strategist behind a ballot measure outlawing same-sex marriage in California called an emergency meeting here.

“We’re going to lose this campaign if we don’t get more money,” the strategist, Frank Schubert, recalled telling leaders of Protect Marriage, the main group behind the ban.

The campaign issued an urgent appeal, and in a matter of days, it raised more than $5 million, including a $1 million donation from Alan C. Ashton, the grandson of a former president of the Mormon Church. The money allowed the drive to intensify a sharp-elbowed advertising campaign, and support for the measure was catapulted ahead; it ultimately won with 52 percent of the vote.

As proponents of same-sex marriage across the country planned protests on Saturday against the ban, interviews with the main forces behind the ballot measure showed how close its backers believe it came to defeat — and the extraordinary role Mormons played in helping to pass it with money, institutional support and dedicated volunteers.

“We’ve spoken out on other issues, we’ve spoken out on abortion, we’ve spoken out on those other kinds of things,” said Michael R. Otterson, the managing director of public affairs for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, as the Mormons are formally called, in Salt Lake City. “But we don’t get involved to the degree we did on this.”

The California measure, Proposition 8, was to many Mormons a kind of firewall to be held at all costs.

“California is a huge state, often seen as a bellwether — this was seen as a very, very important test,” Mr. Otterson said.

First approached by the Roman Catholic archbishop of San Francisco a few weeks after the California Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage in May, the Mormons were the last major religious group to join the campaign, and the final spice in an unusual stew that included Catholics, evangelical Christians, conservative black and Latino pastors, and myriad smaller ethnic groups with strong religious ties.

Shortly after receiving the invitation from the San Francisco Archdiocese, the Mormon leadership in Salt Lake City issued a four-paragraph decree to be read to congregations, saying “the formation of families is central to the Creator’s plan,” and urging members to become involved with the cause.

“And they sure did,” Mr. Schubert said.

Jeff Flint, another strategist with Protect Marriage, estimated that Mormons made up 80 percent to 90 percent of the early volunteers who walked door-to-door in election precincts.

The canvass work could be exacting and highly detailed. Many Mormon wards in California, not unlike Roman Catholic parishes, were assigned two ZIP codes to cover. Volunteers in one ward, according to training documents written by a Protect Marriage volunteer, obtained by people opposed to Proposition 8 and shown to The New York Times, had tasks ranging from “walkers,” assigned to knock on doors; to “sellers,” who would work with undecided voters later on; and to “closers,” who would get people to the polls on Election Day.

Suggested talking points were equally precise. If initial contact indicated a prospective voter believed God created marriage, the church volunteers were instructed to emphasize that Proposition 8 would restore the definition of marriage God intended.

But if a voter indicated human beings created marriage, Script B would roll instead, emphasizing that Proposition 8 was about marriage, not about attacking gay people, and about restoring into law an earlier ban struck down by the State Supreme Court in May.

“It is not our goal in this campaign to attack the homosexual lifestyle or to convince gays and lesbians that their behavior is wrong — the less we refer to homosexuality, the better,” one of the ward training documents said. “We are pro-marriage, not anti-gay.”

Leaders were also acutely conscious of not crossing the line from being a church-based volunteer effort to an actual political organization.

“No work will take place at the church, including no meeting there to hand out precinct walking assignments so as to not even give the appearance of politicking at the church,” one of the documents said.

By mid-October, most independent polls showed support for the proposition was growing, but it was still trailing. Opponents had brought on new media consultants in the face of the slipping poll numbers, but they were still effectively raising money, including $3.9 million at a star-studded fund-raiser held at the Beverly Hills home of Ron Burkle, the supermarket billionaire and longtime Democratic fund-raiser.

It was then that Mr. Schubert called his meeting in Sacramento. “I said, ‘As good as our stuff is, it can’t withstand that kind of funding,’ ” he recalled.

The response was a desperate e-mail message sent to 92,000 people who had registered at the group’s Web site declaring a “code blue” — an urgent plea for money to save traditional marriage from “cardiac arrest.” Mr. Schubert also sent an e-mail message to the three top religious members of his executive committee, representing Catholics, evangelicals and Mormons.

“I ask for your prayers that this e-mail will open the hearts and minds of the faithful to make a further sacrifice of their funds at this urgent moment so that God’s precious gift of marriage is preserved,” he wrote.

On Oct. 28, Mr. Ashton, the grandson of the former Mormon president David O. McKay, donated $1 million. Mr. Ashton, who made his fortune as co-founder of the WordPerfect Corporation, said he was following his personal beliefs and the direction of the church.

“I think it was just our realizing that we heard a number of stories about members of the church who had worked long hours and lobbied long and hard,” he said in a telephone interview from Orem, Utah.

In the end, Protect Marriage estimates, as much as half of the nearly $40 million raised on behalf of the measure was contributed by Mormons.

Even with the Mormons’ contributions and the strong support of other religious groups, Proposition 8 strategists said they had taken pains to distance themselves from what Mr. Flint called “more extreme elements” opposed to rights for gay men and lesbians.

To that end, the group that put the issue on the ballot rebuffed efforts by some groups to include a ban on domestic partnership rights, which are granted in California. Mr. Schubert cautioned his side not to stage protests and risk alienating voters when same-sex marriages began being performed in June.

“We could not have this as a battle between people of faith and the gays,” Mr. Schubert said. “That was a losing formula.”

But the “Yes” side also initially faced apathy from middle-of-the-road California voters who were largely unconcerned about same-sex marriage. The overall sense of the voters in the beginning of the campaign, Mr. Schubert said, was “Who cares? I’m not gay.”

To counter that, advertisements for the “Yes” campaign also used hypothetical consequences of same-sex marriage, painting the specter of churches’ losing tax exempt status or people “sued for personal beliefs” or objections to same-sex marriage, claims that were made with little explanation.

Another of the advertisements used video of an elementary school field trip to a teacher’s same-sex wedding in San Francisco to reinforce the idea that same-sex marriage would be taught to young children.

“We bet the campaign on education,” Mr. Schubert said.

The “Yes” campaign was denounced by opponents as dishonest and divisive, but the passage of Proposition 8 has led to second-guessing about the “No” campaign, too, as well as talk about a possible ballot measure to repeal the ban. Several legal challenges have been filed, and the question of the legality of the same-sex marriages performed from June to Election Day could also be settled in court.

For his part, Mr. Schubert said he is neither anti-gay — his sister is a lesbian — nor happy that some same-sex couples’ marriages are now in question. But, he said, he has no regrets about his campaign.

“They had a lot going for them,” Mr. Schubert said of his opponents. “And they couldn’t get it done.”

Mr. Otterson said it was too early to tell what the long-term implications might be for the church, but in any case, he added, none of that factored into the decision by church leaders to order a march into battle. “They felt there was only one way we could stand on such a fundamental moral issue, and they took that stand,” he said. “It was a matter of standing up for what the church believes is right.”

That said, the extent of the protests has taken many Mormons by surprise. On Friday, the church’s leadership took the unusual step of issuing a statement calling for “respect” and “civility” in the aftermath of the vote.

“Attacks on churches and intimidation of people of faith have no place in civil discourse over controversial issues,” the statement said. “People of faith have a democratic right to express their views in the public square without fear of reprisal.”

Mr. Ashton described the protests by same-sex marriage advocates as off-putting. “I think that shows colors,” Mr. Ashton said. “By their fruit, ye shall know them.”

Jesse McKinley reported from Sacramento, and Kirk Johnson from Salt Lake City.

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thanks to steve hadley of cabinessence

Repeal Prop 8: Restore marriage equality to California. Sign the pledge to build the Marriage Equality Movement

By BEN SISARIO
NY Times Published: November 12, 2008

Mitch Mitchell, the jazzy and versatile British drummer in the Jimi Hendrix Experience, died on Wednesday in a hotel in Portland, Ore. He was 62 and had recently finished a national tribute tour, Experience Hendrix.

The cause was unknown, said Bob Merlis, publicist for the tour.

Mr. Mitchell was one of two Englishmen in the Experience, the group that catapulted Hendrix to fame in the late 1960s. Along with the bassist Noel Redding, who died in 2003, Mr. Mitchell was recruited in a rush in the fall of 1966, after the journeyman Hendrix had been discovered in a New York club and whisked to London by Chas Chandler of the Animals.

Hendrix’s guitar pyrotechnics caused an immediate sensation among the British rock elite — the audience at one early gig included John Lennon, Eric Clapton, Pete Townshend, Jimmy Page, Jeff Beck and Brian Jones — and a backup band was needed for a last-minute French tour. Mr. Redding was hired first, followed a few days later by Mr. Mitchell, who was barely out of his teens but already an established session player with the Pretty Things and Georgie Fame.

Mr. Mitchell did not expect much from the job. “I’ll give it a crack,” he later remembered telling Mr. Chandler, who became one of Hendrix’s managers. “I’ll have a go for two weeks.”

But led by Hendrix’s explosive and rhapsodic style, the group revolutionized rock music and became an archetypal power trio. Its style was built around Hendrix’s improvisations, with Mr. Redding’s steady bass lines acting as an anchor and Mr. Mitchell — who was influenced by jazz players like Elvin Jones — playing a lighter, looser counterpoint to the guitar.

The group also developed a signature look that embodied the dandyish flamboyance of the British psychedelic era. The members sought out bell-bottoms and vintage clothes in British shops and teased out their hair. “For Noel, the curly Afro came naturally,” wrote Charles R. Cross in his 2005 Hendrix biography, “Room Full of Mirrors.” “Mitch had to get a permanent to achieve the same result.”

The Jimi Hendrix Experience released three albums: “Are You Experienced” (1967), “Axis: Bold as Love” (1967) and “Electric Ladyland” (1968). Mr. Mitchell continued to play with Hendrix until his death in 1970, and later played in the band Ramatam.

Born John Mitchell in London, he worked as a child actor, appearing in the BBC television show “Jennings at School.”

Survivors include his mother; wife, Dee; a daughter; and two grandchildren.

After Hendrix died Mr. Mitchell worked with the producer Eddie Kramer in completing the albums “The Cry of Love” and “Rainbow Bridge,” and he long worked with Experience Hendrix, the company founded by Hendrix’s father, in promulgating the Hendrix legend.

found on cabinessence

Dan Mirvish, who with Eitan Gorlin created an elaborate Internet hoax complete with a fake policy institute and a phony adviser to Senator John McCain.

By RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA
NY Times Published: November 12, 2008

It was among the juicier post-election recriminations: Fox News Channel quoted an unnamed McCain campaign figure as saying that Sarah Palin did not know that Africa was a continent.

Who would say such a thing? On Monday the answer popped up on a blog and popped out of the mouth of David Shuster, an MSNBC anchor. “Turns out it was Martin Eisenstadt, a McCain policy adviser, who has come forward today to identify himself as the source of the leaks,” Mr. Shuster said.

Trouble is, Martin Eisenstadt doesn’t exist. His blog does, but it’s a put-on. The think tank where he is a senior fellow — the Harding Institute for Freedom and Democracy — is just a Web site. The TV clips of him on YouTube are fakes.

And the claim of credit for the Africa anecdote is just the latest ruse by Eisenstadt, who turns out to be a very elaborate hoax that has been going on for months. MSNBC, which quickly corrected the mistake, has plenty of company in being taken in by an Eisenstadt hoax, including The New Republic and The Los Angeles Times.

Now a pair of obscure filmmakers say they created Martin Eisenstadt to help them pitch a TV show based on the character. But under the circumstances, why should anyone believe a word they say?

“That’s a really good question,” one of the two, Eitan Gorlin, said with a laugh.

(For what it’s worth, another reporter for The New York Times is an acquaintance of Mr. Gorlin and vouches for his identity, and Mr. Gorlin is indeed “Mr. Eisenstadt” in those videos. He and his partner in deception, Dan Mirvish, have entries on the Internet Movie Database, imdb.com. But still. …)

They say the blame lies not with them but with shoddiness in the traditional news media and especially the blogosphere.

“With the 24-hour news cycle they rush into anything they can find,” said Mr. Mirvish, 40.

Mr. Gorlin, 39, argued that Eisenstadt was no more of a joke than half the bloggers or political commentators on the Internet or television.

An MSNBC spokesman, Jeremy Gaines, explained the network’s misstep by saying someone in the newsroom received the Palin item in an e-mail message from a colleague and assumed it had been checked out. “It had not been vetted,” he said. “It should not have made air.”

But most of Eisenstadt’s victims have been bloggers, a reflection of the sloppy speed at which any tidbit, no matter how specious, can bounce around the Internet. And they fell for the fake material despite ample warnings online about Eisenstadt, including the work of one blogger who spent months chasing the illusion around cyberspace, trying to debunk it.

The hoax began a year ago with short videos of a parking valet character, who Mr. Gorlin and Mr. Mirvish said was the original idea for a TV series.

Soon there were videos showing him driving a car while spouting offensive, opinionated nonsense in praise of Rudolph W. Giuliani. Those videos attracted tens of thousands of Internet hits and a bit of news media attention.

When Mr. Giuliani dropped out of the presidential race, the character morphed into Eisenstadt, a parody of a blowhard cable news commentator.

Mr. Gorlin said they chose the name because “all the neocons in the Bush administration had Jewish last names and Christian first names.”

Eisenstadt became an adviser to Senator John McCain and got a blog, updated occasionally with comments claiming insider knowledge, and other bloggers began quoting and linking to it. It mixed weird-but-true items with false ones that were plausible, if just barely.

The inventors fabricated the Harding Institute, named for one of the most scorned presidents, and made Eisenstadt a senior fellow.

It didn’t hurt that a man named Michael Eisenstadt is a real expert at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and is quoted in the mainstream media. The real Mr. Eisenstadt said in an interview that he was only dimly aware of the fake one, and that his main concern was that people understood that “I had nothing to do with this.”

Before long Mr. Gorlin and Mr. Mirvish had produced a short documentary on Martin Eisenstadt, supposedly for the BBC, posted in several parts on YouTube.

In June they produced what appeared to be an interview with Eisenstadt on Iraqi television promoting construction of a casino in the Green Zone in Baghdad. Then they sent out a news release in which he apologized. Outraged Iraqi bloggers protested the casino idea.

Among the Americans who took that bait was Jonathan Stein, a reporter for Mother Jones. A few hours later Mr. Stein put up a post on the magazine’s political blog, with the title “Hoax Alert: Bizarre ‘McCain Adviser’ Too Good to Be True,” and explained how he had been fooled.

In July, after the McCain campaign compared Senator Barack Obama to Paris Hilton, the Eisenstadt blog said “the phone was burning off the hook” at McCain headquarters, with angry calls from Ms. Hilton’s grandfather and others. A Los Angeles Times political blog, among others, retold the story, citing Eisenstadt by name and linking to his blog.

Last month Eisenstadt blogged that Samuel J. Wurzelbacher, Joe the Plumber, was closely related to Charles Keating, the disgraced former savings and loan chief. It wasn’t true, but other bloggers ran with it.

Among those taken in by Monday’s confession about the Palin Africa report was The New Republic’s political blog. Later the magazine posted this atop the entry: “Oy — this would appear to be a hoax. Apologies.”

But the truth was out for all to see long before the big-name take-downs. For months sourcewatch.org has identified Martin Eisenstadt as a hoax. When Mr. Stein was the victim, he blogged that “there was enough info on the Web that I should have sussed this thing out.”

And then there is William K. Wolfrum, a blogger who has played Javert to Eisenstadt’s Valjean, tracking the hoaxster across cyberspace and repeatedly debunking his claims. Mr. Gorlin and Mr. Mirvish praised his tenacity, adding that the news media could learn something from him.

“As if there isn’t enough misinformation on this election, it was shocking to see so much time wasted on things that didn’t exist,” Mr. Wolfrum said in an interview.

And how can we know that Mr. Wolfrum is real and not part of the hoax?

Long pause. “Yeah, that’s a tough one.”

CRITICAL THOUGHT Vaughn Bell, a British psychologist, first began tracking sites with reports of mind control in 2004.

By SARAH KERSHAW
NY Times Published: November 12, 2008

FOR years they lived in solitary terror of the light beams that caused searing headaches, the technology that took control of their minds and bodies. They feared the stalkers, people whose voices shouted from the walls or screamed in their heads, “We found you” and “We want you dead.”

When people who believe such things reported them to the police, doctors or family, they said they were often told they were crazy. Sometimes they were medicated or locked in hospital wards, or fired from jobs and isolated from the outside world.

But when they found one another on the Internet, everything changed. So many others were having the same experiences.

Type “mind control” or “gang stalking” into Google, and Web sites appear that describe cases of persecution, both psychological and physical, related with the same minute details — red and white cars following victims, vandalism of their homes, snickering by those around them.

Identified by some psychologists and psychiatrists as part of an “extreme community” on the Internet that appears to encourage delusional thinking, a growing number of such Web sites are filled with stories from people who say they are victims of mind control and stalking by gangs of government agents. The sites are drawing the concern of mental health professionals and the interest of researchers in psychology and psychiatry.

Although many Internet groups that offer peer support are considered helpful to the mentally ill, some experts say Web sites that amplify reports of mind control and group stalking represent a dark side of social networking. They may reinforce the troubled thinking of the mentally ill and impede treatment.

Dr. Ralph Hoffman, a psychiatry professor at Yale who studies delusions, said a growing number of his research subjects have told him of visiting mind-control sites, and finding in them confirmation of their own experiences.

“The views of these belief systems are like a shark that has to be constantly fed,” Dr. Hoffman said. “If you don’t feed the delusion, sooner or later it will die out or diminish on its own accord. The key thing is that it needs to be repetitively reinforced.”

That is what the Web sites do, he said. Similar concerns have arisen about a proliferation of sites that describe how to commit suicide, or others that promote anorexia and bulimia, providing detailed instructions on restricting food and photographs of skeletal women meant to be “thinspiration.”

For people who regularly visit and write on message boards on the mind-control sites, the idea that others would describe the sites as promoting delusional and psychotic thinking is simply evidence of a cover-up of the truth.

“It was a big relief to find the community,” said Derrick Robinson, 55, a janitor in Cincinnati and president of Freedom from Covert Harassment and Surveillance, a group that claims several hundred regular users of its Web site. “I felt that maybe there were others, but I wasn’t real sure until I did find this community,” Mr. Robinson said.

There is no concise survey of mind-control sites or others describing gang stalking — whose users believe that groups of people are following and controlling them, as part of a test of neurological or other kinds of weapons likely conducted by the government — on the Net. But they are easy to find. Some have hundreds of postings, along with links to dozers of similar sties. One, Gangstalkingworld.com, welcomes visitors with this description: “Gang Stalking is a systemic form of control, which seeks to destroy every aspect of a Targeted Individual’s life. The target is followed around and placed under surveillance by Civilian Spies/Snitches 24/7.”

The site lists more than 71,000 visitors, and it has links to several other sites, including Harrassment101.com, which has 965 posts.

One poster to Gang Stalking World wrote in August: “It’s insane that I daily have to come home and try to figure out if my Web sites will still be up or shut down. This week they have really been playing with me, and so it was my time to play back.” The post directs readers to other gang-stalking sites should their favorite sites be shut down.

Mr. Robinson said in an interview that that he has been tortured and abused by gang stalkers and by “neurological weaponry” since leaving the Navy in 1982. “To read the stories and the similarity of the harassment techniques that were going on, to hear about the vandalism, appliance tampering and all the other things were designed to drive a person crazy, who do you go to with this?” he said. “People will say you are delusional.”

For Mr. Robinson and several other Web site users interviewed for this article — all of whom insisted they were not delusional, including one man who said he had been hospitalized in psychiatric wards — the sites provide the powerful, unfamiliar experience of being understood by others.

“By and large, most people are sane and coherent and can relate exactly what’s happening to them,” Mr. Robinson said. “They can say the things that would otherwise get them labeled as delusional.”

His group of self-described “targeted individuals” met offline in Los Angeles last month for their inaugural conference, he said, where they attended a meeting to share stories, including the humiliating experiences of being told they are insane.

Mental health experts who have closely looked at the Web sites are careful to say that there is no way to prove if someone posting on, say, Mr. Robinson’s site, Freedomfchs.com, which says its mission is to seek justice for those singled out by “organized stalking and electromagnetic torture,” is suffering from mental illness.

Vaughan Bell, a British psychologist who has researched the effect of the Internet on mental illness, first began tracking sites with reports of mind control in 2004. In 2006 he published a study concluding that there was an extensive Internet community around such beliefs, and he called 10 sites he studied “likely psychotic sites.”

The extent of the community, Dr. Bell said, poses a paradox to the traditional way delusion is defined under the diagnostic guidelines of the American Psychiatric Association, which says that if a belief is held by a person’s “culture or subculture,” it is not a delusion. The exception accounts for rituals of religious faith, for example.

Dr. Bell, whose study was published in the journal Psychopathology, said that it does not suggest all people participating in mind-control sites are delusional, and that a firm diagnosis of psychosis could only be done in person.

For people who say they are the target of mind control or gang stalking, there may be enough evidence in the scientific literature to fan their beliefs. Many sites point to MK-ULTRA, the code name for a covert C.I.A. mind-control and chemical interrogation program begun in the 1950s.

Recently the sites have linked to an article published in September in Time magazine, “The Army’s Totally Serious Mind-Control Project,” which described a $4 million contract given to the Army to develop “thought helmets” that would allow troops to communicate through brain waves on the battlefield.

And the users of some sites have found the support of Jim Guest, a Republican state representative in Missouri, who wrote last year to his fellow legislators calling for an investigation into the claims of those who say they are being tortured by mind control.

“I’ve had enough calls, some from credible people — professors — being targeted by nonlethal weapons,” Mr. Guest said in a telephone interview, adding that nothing came of his request for a legislative investigation. “They become psychologically affected by it. They have trouble sleeping at night.”

He added: “I believe there are people who have been targeted by this. With this equipment, you have to test it on somebody to see if it works.”

Dr. Bell and some other mental health professionals say that even if the users of such sites are psychotic, forging an online connection to others and being told — perhaps for the first time — “you are not crazy” could actually have a positive effect on their illnesses.

“We know, for example, that things like social support, all of these positive social aspects are very good for people’s mental illness,” Dr. Bell said. “I wouldn’t say it’s entirely and completely positive, but it can be positive.”

Some research has shown that when people with delusions undergo group cognitive therapy, the group process can be helpful in their treatment.

But the Web sites are not moderated by professionals, and many postings discuss the failure of medication and say that mental health professionals are part of the conspiracy against them.

“These people lead quietly desperate lives,” said Dr. Jeffrey A. Lieberman, chairman of the Department of Psychiatry at Columbia University. “And if they are reinforcing each other and pulling people toward something, if they are using the Internet and getting reinforcement, that’s good.”

The mind-control sites remind some experts of the accounts of those claiming to have been abducted by aliens in the 1970s and ’80s. One person’s story begat another until many insisted they had had virtually identical experiences of being taken onto space ships by silvery sloe-eyed creatures.

Some of those now posting on mind-control sites say they are being remotely “sexually stimulated” by their torturers. Some alien abductees had said similar things. Subsequent research generally showed that those who believed they had been abducted were not psychotic, but suffering from severe memory and sleep problems, or personal traumas, Dr. Bell said.

Psychiatrists and researchers say it is too soon to say whether communication on the Internet among people who may be psychotic will negatively effect their illnesses.” This is a very complex little corner,” said Dr. Ken Duckworth, the medical director for the National Alliance on Mental Illness, an advocacy group. “Some people may find it’s healing, but these are really hard questions. The Internet isn’t a cause of mental illness, it’s a complicating new variable.”

By ANDREW JACOBS
NY Times Published: November 13, 2008

BEIJING — A noxious cocktail of soot, smog and toxic chemicals is blotting out the sun, fouling the lungs of millions of people and altering weather patterns in large parts of Asia, according to a report released Thursday by the United Nations.

The byproduct of automobiles, slash-and-burn agriculture, wood-burning stoves and coal-fired power plants, these plumes of carbon dust rise over southern Africa, the Amazon basin and North America. But they are most pronounced in Asia, where so-called atmospheric brown clouds are dramatically reducing sunlight in many Chinese cities and leading to decreased crop yields in swaths of rural India, say a team of more than a dozen scientists who have been studying the problem since 2002.

But the scientists who worked on the report said the blanket of haze might be mitigating the worst effects of greenhouse gases, by absorbing solar heat or reflecting it away from the earth. Greenhouse gases, by contrast, tend to trap the warmth of the sun and lead to a rise in ocean temperatures.

“All of this points to an even greater and urgent need to take on emissions across the planet,” said Achim Steiner, executive director of the United Nations Environment Program, in Beijing, which the report identified as one of the world’s most polluted cities, and where the report was released. “The imperative to act has never been clearer.”

The brownish haze, sometimes more than a mile thick and clearly visible from airplanes, stretches from the Arabian Peninsula to the Yellow Sea. During the spring, it sweeps past North and South Korea and Japan. Sometimes the cloud drifts as far east as California.

The report identified 13 cities as brown-cloud hotspots, among them Bangkok, Cairo, New Delhi, Seoul and Tehran.

The report was issued on a day when Beijing’s own famously polluted skies were unusually clear. On Wednesday, by contrast, the capital was shrouded in a thick, throat-stinging haze that is the byproduct of heavy industry, coal-burning home heaters and the 3.5 million cars that clog the city’s roadways.

Last month, the government reintroduced some of the traffic restrictions that were imposed on Beijing during the Olympics; the rules forced private cars to stay off the road one day a week and sidelined 30 percent of government vehicles on any given day. Overall, officials say the new measures have remove 800,000 cars from the roadways.

According to the United Nations report, smog blocks from 10 percent to 25 percent of the sunlight that should be reaching the city’s streets. The report also singled out the southern city of Guangzhou, where soot and dust have dimmed natural light by 20 percent since the 1970s.

Rain can cleanse the skies, but some of the black grime that falls to earth ends up on the surface of the Himalayan glaciers that are the source of water for billions of people in China, India and Pakistan. As a result, the glaciers that feed into the Yangtze, Ganges, Indus and Yellow rivers are absorbing more sunlight and melting more rapidly, researchers say.

According to the Chinese Academy of Sciences, these glaciers have shrunk by 5 percent since the 1950s and, at the current rate of retreat, could shrink by another 75 percent by 2050.

“We used to think of this brown cloud as a regional problem, but now we realize its impact is much greater,” said Veerabhadran Ramanathan, who led the United Nations scientific panel. “When we see the smog one day and not the next, it just means it’s blown somewhere else.”

Although the clouds’ overall impact is not entirely understood, Mr. Ramanathan, a professor of climate and ocean sciences at the University of California, San Diego, said they might be affecting precipitation in parts of India and Southeast Asia, where monsoon rainfall has been decreasing in recent decades, and central China, where devastating floods have become more frequent.

He said that some studies suggest that the plumes of soot that blot out the sun have led to a 5 percent decline in the growth rate of rice harvests across Asia since the 1960s.

For those who breathe the toxic mix, the impact can be deadly. Henning Rodhe, a professor of chemical meteorology at Stockholm University, estimates that 340,000 people in China and India die each year from cardiovascular and respiratory diseases that can be traced to the emissions from coal-burning factories, diesel trucks and kitchen stoves fueled by firewood.

“The impacts on health alone is a reason to reduce these brown clouds,” he said, adding that in China, about 3.6 percent of the nation’s annual gross domestic product, or $82 billion, is lost to the health effects of pollution.

thanks to jonothan maghen

at Marc Foxx November 15 - December 20, 2008