Thomas Demand for the Ny Times. Oval office built primarily of cardboard and colored paper

mary heilman in the ny times magazine today, along with karen kilimnik and others

Juan Mele
Irregular Frame No. 2
1946

November 9, 2008 - February 8, 2009
Oranges and Sardines: Conversations on Abstract Painting with Mark Grotjahn, Wade Guyton, Mary Heilmann, Amy Sillman, Charline von Heyl, and Christopher Wool

Oranges and Sardines examines how art can illuminate art, exploring the impact of approaching art through the eyes and minds of artists. Six contemporary abstract painters—Mark Grotjahn, Wade Guyton, Mary Heilmann, Amy Sillman, Charline von Heyl, and Christopher Wool—select one of their own recent paintings as well as works by other artists who have been significant in their thinking about their work. Six separate and generous galleries will present their choices in a constellation of diverse works to include Paul Klee, Felix Gonzales-Torres, Francis Bacon, David Hockney, Willem de Kooning, Philip Guston, Eva Hesse, Pablo Picasso, and Dieter Roth, and artists less well known to the public. The artists’ choices have developed through many conversations with curator Gary Garrels about the issues of their work, their studio processes, their appraisals of art history, and the status of contemporary art. Throughout this process, a distinct distillation of choices has developed for each artist that is wide ranging but very specific—works that are figurative as well as abstract have been chosen, sculptures and some works on paper have been selected in addition to painting; and historical as well as more contemporary works will be juxtaposed. Shown together, these works will engage in a “conversation” with each other, provoking fresh insights into artists who are well known and opening consideration of artists that may be more obscure.
About the Exhibition

The title for the exhibition is borrowed from American poet Frank O’Hara’s poem Why I Am Not a Painter, which reflects on the elusiveness of the creative process, often resulting in a finished work that bears no resemblance to its initial inspiration. Oranges and Sardines hopes to offer manifold examples of abstraction’s inventive potential and will suggest varied reasons why it remains vital and essential to contemporary art. Similarly, the works of the six artists who have developed the exhibition may be viewed with more complex appreciation and more insightful understanding.

Oranges and Sardines will be accompanied by a catalogue that will include an introductory essay by the curator and extended interviews with each of the artists. All the works in the exhibition will be reproduced in full-page color, and additional works will be reproduced in tandem with artists’ interviews.

hammer museum

At the Armory Center for the Arts
Saturday, November 9, 8:30 p.m. - midnight

Los Angeles-artist Dave Muller has long explored the visual potency of music, from the spines of records to Three-Day Weekends. His paintings, drawings, and events have emphasized the visual quality and strange communities that come out of music. Inspired by the Martha Rosler Library, the Armory Center for the Arts asked Dave to display legendary Musical Library: over 6,000 records, 6,000 CDs, hundreds of books, dozens of instruments and over 168,000 mp3s that Dave has set up as a short wave radio station. For this exhibition, Muller has helped in sundry ways to make the library a place for people to gather, look, and listen. To help this along, Dave will DJ from his extensive collection for a dance party extravaganza, aptly titled The Dave Muller Dance Party.

Event is free and open to the public.

Armory Center for the Arts • 145 North Raymond Ave. • Pasadena • CA • 91103 • (626) 792-5101
www.armoryarts.org

A scene from “Me and My Brother,” directed by Robert Frank.

By MANOHLA DARGIS
NY Times Published: November 6, 2008

“ ‘I told you to wait in the car,’ say people in America, so Robert sneaks around,” Jack Kerouac writes in the introduction to “The Americans,” Robert Frank’s tender and unflinching photographic portrait of this country and its people. Mr. Frank, who turns 84 on Sunday, took his photographs during an on-and-off road trip, at times with his young family in tow, pressing pedal to the metal from New York to New Mexico, Montana to Texas, from 1955 to 1956. Bankrolled by Guggenheim fellowship money, he captured a tremulous diversity — immortalized by his image of a spectrally white baby in the arms of a black nurse — at the very instant it was sending shock waves across the country.

The project, he wrote in a Guggenheim proposal, would be what “one naturalized American finds to see in the United States that signifies the kind of civilization born here and spreading elsewhere.” The “finds to see” is telling. The images in “The Americans,” first published in 1958, have the deceptively casual quality of snapshots, despite their compositional harmony and occasional purposefully skewed framing. “I speak of the things that are there, anywhere and everywhere — easily found, not easily selected and interpreted. A small catalog comes to the mind’s eye: a town at night, a parking lot, a supermarket, a highway, the man who owns three cars and the man who owns none.” A newly transplanted Swiss Jew, Mr. Frank was pitching himself as a poet of the American quotidian.

The restlessness and the poetry permeate the must-see 10-program retrospective, “Mapping a Journey: The Films & Videos of Robert Frank,” that opened on Friday at the Anthology Film Archives. The retrospective, which makes an argument for Mr. Frank as one of the most important and influential American independent filmmakers of the last half-century, includes somewhat familiar titles like “Pull My Daisy” (1959), a foundational work of the New American Cinema movement, and rarities like his notorious 1972 backstage document of the Rolling Stones’ “Exile on Main Street” tour, a fascinating, often chilling look at the rock star apparatus at its most grotesque and banal. (The film’s title includes the word “Blues” but is too smutty to print in full here.)

The somewhat reclusive Mr. Frank has not always seemed especially interested in sharing his work or his thoughts about his work. He refused to be interviewed for the excellent 2003 essay collection “Frank Films: The Film and Video Work of Robert Frank” (Scalo), as if insulted by the idea of such close attention. But he appears to have settled into a more expansive, perhaps autumnal mood. The German publisher Steidl recently released nine of his early films on DVD in three welcome if ridiculously expensive boxed sets (each more than $80 a pop). A book of his photographs taken in Paris in the 1950s was published in May, and in January the National Gallery of Art marks the 50th anniversary of “The Americans” with a touring exhibition.

Shortly after publication of “The Americans,” Mr. Frank joined forces with Kerouac again on the artist’s second-most-famous work, the experimental short film “Pull My Daisy.” Directed with Alfred Leslie and narrated (scatted) by Kerouac in playful bebop, spoken verse rhythms, the film is something of a domestic drama about a railway brakeman and his wife (the painter Larry Rivers and a luminously young Delphine Seyrig) who over the course of one chaotic evening navigate between opposed shores (family versus freedom) while juggling a bishop, two church ladies and the husband’s friends (Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso and Peter Orlovsky). The film was first shown by Cinema 16 in November 1959 on a double bill with another New York tone poem and American classic, John Cassavetes’s debut feature, “Shadows.”

At the end of “Pull My Daisy” the husband and his friends pile out the door, leaving the wife behind. For years I resented the film for abandoning her, but there is poignancy in leaving, too, as Mr. Frank’s own story as an exile, a permanently displaced person, suggests. The critic Amy Taubin has described “The Americans” as a road movie, an observation that underscores the rootless, searching quality of so many of his images, still and moving. This sensibility is even there in a lovely, understated 2002 short video, “Paper Route,” that finds him riding shotgun with a newspaper delivery man through Mr. Frank’s adopted hometown of Mabou, Nova Scotia. For 23 minutes he keeps his eye on this world’s barren beauty through a cracked windshield, which is about as perfect a metaphor for his persistence of vision as I can imagine.

“Mapping a Journey” runs through Nov. 16 at Anthology Film Archives, 32-34 Second Avenue, at Second Street, East Village, (212) 505-5181, anthologyfilmarchives.org.

sign petition to end tax exempt status for lobbying fear mongering haters,

By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Times Published: November 7, 2008

Tuesday, Nov. 4, 2008, is a date that will live in fame (the opposite of infamy) forever. If the election of our first African-American president didn’t stir you, if it didn’t leave you teary-eyed and proud of your country, there’s something wrong with you.

But will the election also mark a turning point in the actual substance of policy? Can Barack Obama really usher in a new era of progressive policies? Yes, he can.

Right now, many commentators are urging Mr. Obama to think small. Some make the case on political grounds: America, they say, is still a conservative country, and voters will punish Democrats if they move to the left. Others say that the financial and economic crisis leaves no room for action on, say, health care reform.

Let’s hope that Mr. Obama has the good sense to ignore this advice.

About the political argument: Anyone who doubts that we’ve had a major political realignment should look at what’s happened to Congress. After the 2004 election, there were many declarations that we’d entered a long-term, perhaps permanent era of Republican dominance. Since then, Democrats have won back-to-back victories, picking up at least 12 Senate seats and more than 50 House seats. They now have bigger majorities in both houses than the G.O.P. ever achieved in its 12-year reign.

Bear in mind, also, that this year’s presidential election was a clear referendum on political philosophies — and the progressive philosophy won.

Maybe the best way to highlight the importance of that fact is to contrast this year’s campaign with what happened four years ago. In 2004, President Bush concealed his real agenda. He basically ran as the nation’s defender against gay married terrorists, leaving even his supporters nonplussed when he announced, soon after the election was over, that his first priority was Social Security privatization. That wasn’t what people thought they had been voting for, and the privatization campaign quickly devolved from juggernaut to farce.

This year, however, Mr. Obama ran on a platform of guaranteed health care and tax breaks for the middle class, paid for with higher taxes on the affluent. John McCain denounced his opponent as a socialist and a “redistributor,” but America voted for him anyway. That’s a real mandate.

What about the argument that the economic crisis will make a progressive agenda unaffordable?

Well, there’s no question that fighting the crisis will cost a lot of money. Rescuing the financial system will probably require large outlays beyond the funds already disbursed. And on top of that, we badly need a program of increased government spending to support output and employment. Could next year’s federal budget deficit reach $1 trillion? Yes.

But standard textbook economics says that it’s O.K., in fact appropriate, to run temporary deficits in the face of a depressed economy. Meanwhile, one or two years of red ink, while it would add modestly to future federal interest expenses, shouldn’t stand in the way of a health care plan that, even if quickly enacted into law, probably wouldn’t take effect until 2011.

Beyond that, the response to the economic crisis is, in itself, a chance to advance the progressive agenda.

Now, the Obama administration shouldn’t emulate the Bush administration’s habit of turning anything and everything into an argument for its preferred policies. (Recession? The economy needs help — let’s cut taxes on rich people! Recovery? Tax cuts for rich people work — let’s do some more!)

But it would be fair for the new administration to point out how conservative ideology, the belief that greed is always good, helped create this crisis. What F.D.R. said in his second inaugural address — “We have always known that heedless self-interest was bad morals; we know now that it is bad economics” — has never rung truer.

And right now happens to be one of those times when the converse is also true, and good morals are good economics. Helping the neediest in a time of crisis, through expanded health and unemployment benefits, is the morally right thing to do; it’s also a far more effective form of economic stimulus than cutting the capital gains tax. Providing aid to beleaguered state and local governments, so that they can sustain essential public services, is important for those who depend on those services; it’s also a way to avoid job losses and limit the depth of the economy’s slump.

So a serious progressive agenda — call it a new New Deal — isn’t just economically possible, it’s exactly what the economy needs.

The bottom line, then, is that Barack Obama shouldn’t listen to the people trying to scare him into being a do-nothing president. He has the political mandate; he has good economics on his side. You might say that the only thing he has to fear is fear itself.

In the city’s back alleys, subbasements, and skyscrapers, Japan’s bartenders have perfected the fine art of mixology. For a slideshow of images from this story, click here. And check out an annotated map of Tokyo showing where to taste the best of the city’s cocktail revolution.

By Hugh Garvey

Photography by Tony Law
Bon Apetit September 2008

I’m hungover in Tokyo, trying to remember how many drinks I had the night before. Does the beer at the yakitori place count? The backlit shelves of shrunken liquor bottles in my hotel mini bar give me flashbacks. Did I actually finish that precisely mixed Sidecar? Below the airplane bottles is a shelf of elegantly proportioned highballs and lowballs. That was cask-strength Scotch bottled specially for Ginza; 110 proof. Suntory time, indeed. Midway through a weeklong high-end bar crawl, I’m learning that this city takes its drinking very seriously. In Tokyo, the mini bars actually look like miniature bars.

My friend Shinji Nohara calls up from the lobby. He was out with me until two in the morning, yet claims he feels tip-top. When he says we should go for tempura, I know he’s lying. A fried-food lunch is international code for “I’m hungover.” Two bottles of Kirin and a hundred dollars’ worth of fried fish later, we feel better and plan that evening’s tour: First, the place that only serves drinks in Baccarat crystal, then the spot that specializes in shochu infused with seasonal fruit, then the lounge presided over by an up-and-coming female bartender. Followed by the inevitable tempura lunch. Such are the hazards of researching a story about a city of countless hidden speakeasies, impossibly artistic mixology, and infinite drinks. Welcome to Tokyo, cocktail capital of the world.

I’m here because I’ve heard from professional foodies, itinerant bartenders, and other bibulous travelers that Tokyo was besting New York and London at the cocktail game. Mixologists from Sydney to San Juan were returning from pilgrimages and breathlessly describing their experiences as epiphanic. Bartenders were attending traveling seminars to learn Japanese technique. So, armed with a sheaf of recommendations and my friend Shinji as translator and guide, I hit the streets, subbasements, and skyscrapers of Tokyo to experience this cocktail revolution firsthand.

In that sparkling, sprawling metropolis of 12.8 million people, there is as structured and codified a drinking culture as any in the world: At izakayas (Japanese pubs), salarymen are allowed to criticize their managers under the cover of alcohol. Sake and shochu are sold in vending machines on street corners. And as the evening draws to a close, it’s not uncommon to see salarymen stumbling for the trains and taxis. Drinking is a culturally accepted form of extreme relaxation in an otherwise excessively civilized city.

I fill up with a defensive meal of yakitori beneath the Yurakucho Station train tracks and watch the city transition out of its workday and into its nightlife. Here, on the edge of Ginza, salarymen eat grilled chicken and drink beer before heading home or out for the night. Here is where mixology first took hold in the cafés nearly 100 years ago, and where legendary Tokyo bartender Kazuo Uyeda practices his craft today. To get to Tender Bar, you take an elevator to the fifth floor of an office building. If you see a salon with geishas getting their hair coiffed, you’re on the right floor.

Uyeda is slim and dapper in his white dinner jacket and wire-rimmed aviators. He has invented some of Japan’s cocktail canon: the Pure Love, made with gin, framboise, lime juice, and ginger ale, and the Shungyo, made of sake, vodka, green tea liqueur, and salted cherry blossom. Both were invented in the early ’80s, when in America a Margarita made with fresh lime and real tequila was still a rarity. As his assistant bartenders prepare for the evening rush by hand-carving ice cubes, Uyeda tells me how, over the decades, Japanese bartenders preserved the American art of the cocktail while American bartenders neglected it. “The difference is that American bartenders aren’t thinking enough about the customer,” he says.

It’s a bold statement, but compared to how Uyeda thinks about the art of bartending, it’s true. Uyeda says that his approach to cocktail-making is grounded in the Japanese tea ceremony. It is an “adoration of the beautiful among the sordid facts of everyday existence. It inculcates purity and harmony, the mystery of mutual charity, the romanticism of the social order.” Which is a pretty accurate description of how it feels to be in his elegant little bar, having white-jacketed bartenders mix perfect drinks while men in slim suits and women in wrap dresses and beehive hairdos chat quietly over cocktails with names like M-30 Rain and Tokio.

I learned about Uyeda through the online writings of Stanislav Vadrna, a Slovakian bartender who apprenticed under Uyeda. Vadrna teaches classes in Japanese bartending and has become a missionary of sorts, preaching the gospel of the “hard shake,” Uyeda’s signature technique, which purportedly produces a drink a full ten degrees colder than a standard shake does.

To see the hard shake in action, I order a gimlet and witness for the first time a precision that will be repeated at all the bars I visit in Tokyo: Uyeda lines up the bottles on the bar, labels facing the customer. With a single, quick twist he opens them and fills the shaker, which he shakes in a rapid-fire serpentine fashion that decelerates to a slow trot and then a standstill. “The gin is broken out,” Uyeda says, “then comes back together, smoother, softer.” Indeed, the drink contains a profusion of fine ice shards, and the acid from the lime and the alcohol in the gin have both mellowed. It’s a bit light for my taste. Not a bad thing, given the night I have ahead of me.

Outside, Tokyo is in full swing, the streets crowded with students and salarymen. Two geishas gently help a drunken patron into a taxi, while the driver patiently waits, behaving as if the impeccable white lace doilies in the backseat aren’t in peril. We turn off onto a side street, into an office building, and head two stories underground to Little Smith, where more white-jacketed bartenders stand behind a striking oval-shape, hand-hewn wooden bar. I say “omakase” to one, who smiles instantly. The phrase is usually spoken to sushi chefs when you want them to devise a special tasting menu. It means “I trust you.” He instantly earns my trust by muddling Ukrainian chile-pepper vodka and a whole cooked tomato into an artisanal Bloody Mary.

Then it’s on to Star Bar Ginza, where I have seven of the best drinks of my trip. Hidetsugu Ueno, the head bartender there, is so obsessive about his craft that he even makes his own bar snacks. He cures his own Japanese version of Spanish-style jamón in the mountains of the Akita Prefecture because he finds the traditional stuff too salty to serve with single malt Scotch. And Ueno’s care with the bar snacks is just the beginning: When he stirs a Martini (and it will most definitely be stirred, not shaken), he uses a combination of chilled and room-temperature gin to achieve the proper viscosity. He shakes certain cocktails in a soft-sided plastic container to keep the ice from chipping too much. His ever-evolving drink menu is beyond seasonal: In winter it might be Champagne mixed with pomelo, but only during that citrus fruit’s fleeting two-week season. In summer, rum is paired with ripe Okinawa mango.

It’s autumn, so we have pear gin and tonics. And then fresh grape Tom Collinses. And then Gaja grappa. And then Madeira from 1968. “My birth year,” says Ueno. We have Sidecars, which are perfectly balanced. He carves us a perfectly spherical ice diamond with no fewer than 14 facets. And over the ice goes Scotch. My final memory of the night is Shinji shaking my hand, expressing his eternal gratitude for showing him something so transcendent in his hometown. I don’t know which of the drinks is talking, but I do know it’s breakfast time in the U.S. and bedtime in Tokyo.

I blame a bar back in New York for the headache I have here in Tokyo the next day. At Angel’s Share in Manhattan’s East Village, I first became fascinated with Japanese-style bartending. The bartenders were Japanese and wore bow ties and crisp white shirts and shook textbook-perfect classic cocktails in gleaming vintage shakers. It was the coolest, old-schoolest, Jazz Age mixological marvel I’d ever seen. Influential bartenders, like Sasha Petraske of the New York neo-speakeasy Milk & Honey, credit Angel’s Share as inspiration.

To put this all in perspective—and to take a much-needed break—I visit Tokyo’s Meiji Jingu shrine, on the edge of the Harujuku neighborhood, home to fashion boutiques and Tokyo’s wild teenage street style. On the path leading to the shrine, I pass through a canyon of alcohol. On one side of the path is a 20-foot wall of sake barrels. Across from that is a rack of 50 barrels of exceptional Bordeaux. These are offerings to the temple spirits and a symbol of the Japanese tradition of cross-cultural exchange. This tradition was first ushered in by Emperor Meiji in the late 19th century, the era in which the Savile Row suit became the standard uniform of the Japanese salaryman and French food became all the rage.

The Meiji period also just happened to coincide with the golden age of the cocktail in Europe and America. During the Meiji period, the first cocktails were served in Tokyo in Ginza cafés like Café Printemps and Café Lion, which employed bartenders who’d learned the craft at the luxury hotels of Asia. They made the Bamboo and the Million Dollar and the Singapore Sling, cocktails served at The Grand Hotel in Yokohama and Raffles Hotel Singapore. Tokyo café society embraced these cocktails and the Japanese fascination with cocktails was born.

On my last night in Tokyo, at Peter, a bar at the top of the brand-new Peninsula Tokyo hotel, I realize that the city’s most skilled bartenders are modern-day practitioners of the Meiji-era tradition: taking the West and East and fusing the two with the utmost respect. I’m there with Shinji and he can barely read the names of the drinks, which are written in a form of the kanji script usually reserved for writing haiku. “I haven’t had to read this since grade school,” he says. We order drinks that are inspired by and named for the seasons.

The walls of Peter are computerized. Guests appear to walk amid the Tokyo skyline that is projected onto the wall; as it morphs electronically, digitized leaves follow in the wake of diners heading to their tables. Shinji and I debate where to go next: Tokyo Kaikan, where the late, great Mr. Martini schooled Kazuo Uyeda? To the Imperial Hotel, where the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed bar is perfectly preserved? We think better of it. We’ve had enough for the night, and decide to toast the city. And here’s where all the revelations of a cocktail tour of Tokyo cease to surprise. It comes down to the drink at hand and to living in the moment. And whether you’re in an old izakaya, in a Ginza cocktail bar, or at the top of the newest luxury skyscraper hotel, that toast would still be “Kanpai.”

1. New York Bar at the Park Hyatt Tokyo
Fifty-two stories above the Shinjuku neighborhood, this bar serves up a stunning skyline view and solid drinks, but no bar counter. In the evening there’s live jazz and a cover charge. Kobe hamburgers, fries, and other menu items can be ordered from the New York Grill restaurant.
3-7-1-2 Nishi-Shinjuku, 52nd Floor, Shinjuku-ku; 011-81-3-5322-1234
2. The Peak Bar at the Park Hyatt Tokyo
At the more intimate and subdued Peak Bar, 11 floors below New York Bar, you can actually watch a bartender mix up drinks behind the little counter.
3-7-1-2 Nishi-Shinjuku, 41st Floor, Shinjuku-ku; 011-81-3-5322-1234
3. Peter at The Peninsula Tokyo
The penthouse bar at the brand-new Peninsula Tokyo hotel in Marunouchi is space-age groovy and has an incredible view. The short drink list features cocktails that lean toward the sweet and subtle.
1-8-1 Yurakucho, Chiyoda-ku; 011-81-3-6270-2763
4. Shoto-Club
At this tiny spot near Shinjuku, young bartenders sport slicked-back hair and plaid vests. Edith Piaf plays on the sound system, and the drinks (like the persimmon Champagne cocktail) are seasonal and perfect.
Kazama Building B1F, 37-12 Udagawacho, Shibuya-ku; 011-81-3-3465-1932
5. Star Bar Ginza
An ideal bar: dark brown leather banquettes, an extensive Scotch selection, precise technique, and a friendly staff.
Sankosha Building B1F, 1-5-13 Ginza, Chuo-ku; 011-81-3-3535-8005
6. Little Smith
It’s amazing to find such an elegant and modern space two stories below street level. A Barbarella meets Casablanca scene. Young, hip bartenders. Young, well-heeled crowd.
KN Building B2F, 6-4-12 Ginza, Chuo-ku; 011-81-3-5568-1993
7. Tender Bar
At this old-school Tokyo speakeasy on the fifth floor of a nondescript office building, master mixologist Kazuo Uyeda practices his art. Order a gimlet or other fruit-based cocktail to watch the famed “hard shake” in action.
Nogakudo Building, 6-5-15 Ginza, Chuo-ku; 011-81-3-3571-8343
8. Bar Wodka Tonic
There’s another branch in flashy Roppongi Hills, but this spot in the Nishi-Azabu neighborhood is the real deal. Even when you sit at a far-off booth, the bartenders come out and take your order, ensuring an incredible drink.
Tamura Building B1, 2-25-11 Nishi-Azabu, Minato-ku; 011-81-3-3400-5474
9. Higashiya
Go upstairs at this Daikanyama teahouse and patisserie for tea or seasonal infused shochus; in fall, get the apple and persimmon shochu. Here, the modern tea ceremony and a minimalist modern mixology coexist.
1-13-12 Aobadai, Meguro-ku; 011-81-3-5428-1717

The recent spread of electronic billboards has brought a backlash in Los Angeles, which long ago lost control of a proliferation of outdoor signs there.

By REBECCA CATHCART
NY Times Published: November 5, 2008

LOS ANGELES — The night sky above Polly Osborne’s home — and the bedroom she shares with her husband — began to glow several months ago, when a digital billboard went up at an intersection behind her tree-lined street in Westwood.

“We started noticing that we were having false sunrises,” Ms. Osborne said, describing arcs of light that slid from magenta to green to white as the billboard’s images changed.

She and her husband, Tim Curnen, are not alone. Throughout Los Angeles in recent months, people have complained that bright LED screens are shining across their neighborhoods, intruding into their homes and distracting drivers on the city’s roads.

Long before electronic signs began showing up here about a year ago, Los Angeles had lost control of its proliferation of billboards. No one really knows how many there are (most estimates range from 10,000 to 11,000), and regulations that do exist have often been ignored.

“We don’t even have a basic inventory of billboards, where they are, if they are legal,” said City Councilman Bill Rosendahl, whose district includes some of the city’s most billboard-packed streets.

That disorganization has left Los Angeles ill prepared to control the wave of digital signs sweeping outdoor advertising, said Kevin E. Fry, president of Scenic America, a nonprofit group that works to reduce outdoor signage.

“The digital billboard issue is everywhere,” Mr. Fry said, “but Los Angeles is the worst example.”

Legal entanglements dating back years have hampered the city’s ability to regulate outdoor signs. In 2002, the Council passed an ordinance prohibiting new billboards and ordering an inventory of existing ones. But billboard companies challenged the ordinance in court. In 2006 and 2007, the city settled lawsuits with three of the largest billboard companies: CBS Outdoor, Clear Channel Outdoor and Regency.

Under the settlements, CBS and Clear Channel were allowed to convert as many as 850 print billboards to electronic ones. The 50 or so billboards converted since then all have valid permits, making them legal, but city officials say that given the terms of the settlements, the permits had to be granted without adequate public review.

“It was probably a mistake to approve that legal settlement as it was,” said Eric Garcetti, the Council’s president.

So in the next few weeks, Mr. Garcetti said, the Council will vote on an emergency moratorium that would halt billboard conversions and new billboard construction for six months. The lawmakers, now convinced that the settlements were a bad idea and that they will find support for more stringent review in existing state environmental law, would use that time to strengthen their 2002 ordinance.

Officials of CBS Outdoor and Regency did not respond to telephone calls seeking comment. Tony Alwin, senior vice president of Clear Channel Outdoor, said in a statement only that “we are aware of the various actions being considered by the City of Los Angeles and look forward to working with them at the appropriate time.”

Two weeks ago, meanwhile, the Council summoned Hector Buitrago, chief of code enforcement for the city’s Building and Safety Department, so he could report on the billboard inventory that the old ordinance had ordered.

When Mr. Buitrago said calmly that a complete inventory did not exist, the members peppered him with questions, some demanding a full one within weeks. He listened, hands in his lap, then said such a list would take months.

Later, in an e-mail message to a reporter, Mr. Buitrago said his department had no resources for such a “time-consuming endeavor.”

“We have no authorized positions, and no valid ordinance to allow” the inventory, since the 2002 statute provided no adequate financing for it, he said.

The newly proposed ordinance, Mr. Buitrago explained, “will include the fee that companies will have to pay to finance” an inventory and inspection program.

With no official billboard inventory, residents have started cobbling together one of their own. On a recent Saturday, Dennis Hathaway, president of the Coalition to Ban Billboard Blight, stood with 25 other people on the corner of a busy intersection in the Mar Vista section, just west of Interstate 405. They held anti-billboard signs.

The group had spent the morning walking the streets of Mr. Rosendahl’s district, logging the billboards on forms he had obtained from the building department. Four billboards, one digital, loomed above them.

“The billboards that swallowed L.A.!” yelled Ingrid Mueller, 65, waving her sign toward oncoming traffic.

Another protester, David Ewing, 60, described his street as “a billboard jungle,” and added, “Every day more and more billboards convert to digital.”

Then a naysayer strode up. “These signs are modern art, beautiful!” said Mike Millman, 60. “They’re like the Sistine Chapel,” he added, head thrown back and palms to the sky.

Ms. Mueller gasped. Others backed away.

Even as some public officials take steps to curb commercial billboards, others are looking at the possibility of adding to them as a revenue source. In August, with budget problems hounding California, the director of the California Department of Transportation, Will Kempton, asked the federal transportation secretary, Mary E. Peters, to allow commercial leasing of the state’s 692 digital highway signs.

Federal law limits use of those signs to Amber Alerts and other public information. But allowing private companies to convert them to “state-of-the-art technology” and pay for advertising space, Mr. Kempton wrote, would “provide a steady income source” for the state.

Mr. Kempton has heard nothing from the federal Transportation Department, and calls seeking comment from the department were not returned Wednesday.

By JILL SANTOPIETRO
NY Times Published: November 4, 2008

ON an island in the Napo River in Ecuador’s Amazonian rain forest, in a tin-roofed hut on stilts, live some of the world’s most unusual chocolate entrepreneurs.

César and Magdalena Dahua grow cacao, along with pineapples, vanilla, avocados, cassava, coffee, oranges and plantains. As they hack off the football-shaped fruit of the cacao trees, their three youngest daughters run barefoot nearby. The girls stop to suck the sticky white pulp that envelops the cacao beans in the pods. It tastes like Sour Patch candies.

For Quechua people like the Dahuas, cacao has always been a treat — the pulp a tart candy and the purple bean, when ground to a paste and mixed with hot water and a little sugar, a rustic hot chocolate.

But mostly, the beans were a commodity, sold for about 20 cents a pound to men who would bring them to the port of Guayaquil. From there they would be shipped around the world to be turned into mass-produced chocolate. Every once in a while the Quechua might even taste it.

But the Quechua grew tired of making such a meager living from so highly valued a product. With the help of volunteers they eliminated the middlemen and created their own chocolate. Now Kallari bars (pronounced kai-YAH-ri) — named for the cooperative they formed — are being sold throughout the United States. People in the chocolate industry said they knew of no other cacao farmers who were making and marketing their own chocolate.

The cooperative uses an unusual blend of cacaos that grow on the Quechua land — fruity Cacao Amazónico, nutty Criollo, Forastero Amazónico, Tipo Trinitario and, most important, a rare variety that flourishes around their homes, Cacao Nacional.

“They have a certain smell and taste that is herbal, flowery but also savory, like black pepper,” Tomas Keme, a Swiss chocolate expert who consults for Kallari, said of the Cacao Nacional beans. “It’s the same taste I find in a Californian cabernet.”

The chocolate is smooth, rich and straightforward. The 2.47-ounce bars, in 75 and 85 percent cacao, sell for as much as $5.99 at Whole Foods.

To become chocolate makers the Quechua first had to decide to be more than just farmers. But they didn’t have the knowledge or experience.

“We wanted change,” said Carlos Pozo, Kallari’s marketing director, “but we didn’t have the capital or anyone who would trust us.”

Then in 1997 they met Judy Logback, a lanky Kansan with wild blond hair who was volunteering for a foundation promoting biodiversity in Ecuador.

“I didn’t show up with a plan,” Ms. Logback said. “I asked them what they wanted.” Mr. Pozo and others said they wanted to sell directly at markets and learn how to grow better, more desirable cacao. They wanted to find a way to survive and thrive as they faced pressure from companies that sought to log their hardwood trees, drill on their land for oil and mine for gold.

Ms. Logback first helped them take their beans over 250 miles to Guayaquil.

“We received threats that the intermediaries would rob or hijack our trucks,” Mr. Pozo said. “In the first years, Kallari was so united that the intermediaries realized they could not break through this union.”

They watched their profits from cacao more than double as they got 48 cents a pound in Guayaquil.

Four years later, they established Kallari, which in Quechua means both “to begin” and “the early times.” The name seemed fitting, Mr. Pozo said: “In the present, we are valuing our past.” With Ms. Logback’s help, the cooperative now includes about 850 families.

“Judy really sacrificed a lot for us,” said Elías Alvarado, Kallari’s director of production and natural resources. “The people in the communities really love her for what she has done.”

As their confidence grew, they decided to sell their cacao directly to big league chocolate makers. They e-mailed makers in North America, attracting the interest of Robert Steinberg, a founder of Scharffen Berger chocolate in Berkeley, Calif. But Dr. Steinberg said that before he could use the beans they needed to be properly fermented, a process that brings out fruit and floral flavors and reduces astringency.

Ms. Logback hired Dr. Jorge Ruiz, who had worked for a cacao cooperative on the coast, to teach the Quechua fermentation. Before his arrival, the Quechua had only fermented their beans inadvertently, when they piled them up before drying. Mr. Ruiz taught them to create fermentation boxes and to monitor temperatures.

In October 2004, Dr. Steinberg made a chocolate bar with Kallari beans and helped them present it at the Terra Madre conference of the Slow Food group in Turin, Italy. Later that year they met officials from the Swiss chocolate company Felchlin, who agreed to pay them 94 cents a pound for their beans.

Inspired by their success, Ms. Logback and Mr. Pozo told Kallari elders that they should start making chocolate.

“They all thought we were crazy,” Mr. Pozo said. “We don’t know anything about this market, what kind of people would buy it, how to make it.”

Chocolate making has always been less common in cacao producing countries than it has been in Europe, where the technology to create chocolate bars was developed and where such a luxury could be more easily afforded.

With a formula from Dr. Steinberg, who died in September, and heavy bushels of cacao, they traveled 12 hours by bus to a shabby community-owned factory in the Andean hill town of Salinas de Guaranda. There they made the first Kallari bars.

“I was confused a bit by what I believed to be chocolate,” said Mr. Alvarado, who had eaten only cheap commercial milk chocolate before he tried the Kallari bars. “Now I realize after all these years that I was eating something that wasn’t really chocolate.”

By tasting it, they could understand their role in the finished product. They improved their farming practices and bean fermentation. Over 500 families received organic status, which was not difficult since most never had the money for fertilizers or other chemicals.

It was difficult, though, to perfect their chocolate production at such a crude facility. In the spring of 2007, Stephen McDonnell, the founder and chief executive of the Applegate Farms organic food company, and his wife, Jill, met Kallari members through their daughter Nora, who visited the Napo region with her seventh-grade class.

With Kallari’s permission and $250,000, Mr. McDonnell established the Kallari Chocolate Company, which lists him as the owner for liability and insurance reasons. All of the profits, though, go back to the Kallari cooperative.

Mr. McDonnell hired Mr. Keme to teach the collective about bean quality and techniques of Swiss chocolate making. He also hired a larger, more efficient chocolate factory in Quito, the capital of Ecuador, to produce the bars based on standards set by Mr. Keme and Mr. Pozo. (The chocolate made in Salinas, less refined and slightly acidic, is sold in some health food stores as Kallari’s Sacha Bar.) Mr. McDonnell asked the farmers to focus on their farming and to master the fermentation of their beans, which the company now buys from Kallari for as much as $1.95 a pound, an astronomical price for the average cacao farmer cooperative.

(Paradoxically, Kallari does not have Fair Trade certification, since it would cost 10 cents per pound of beans and it seemed unfair for Kallari to pay a fee for its own beans.)

Mr. McDonnell has taken a chance, but he says he is not concerned.

“The Kallari people have pride in their farms,” he said, “and are transferring that pride into their bar.”

Plans for their own chocolate factory are in the works and Mr. McDonnell hopes that within three to five years a board of Kallari directors can assume most of his duties.

Kallari farmers also hope to diversify to continue living sustainably off their land. They are planting balsa trees, which grow rapidly, to sell to windmill makers and they want to promote agritourism.

“There was a dream that seemed impossible,” Mr. Pozo said. “Now we believe there are so many possibilities open to us.”

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
NY Times Published: November 4, 2008

And so it came to pass that on Nov. 4, 2008, shortly after 11 p.m. Eastern time, the American Civil War ended, as a black man — Barack Hussein Obama — won enough electoral votes to become president of the United States.

A civil war that, in many ways, began at Bull Run, Virginia, on July 21, 1861, ended 147 years later via a ballot box in the very same state. For nothing more symbolically illustrated the final chapter of America’s Civil War than the fact that the Commonwealth of Virginia — the state that once exalted slavery and whose secession from the Union in 1861 gave the Confederacy both strategic weight and its commanding general — voted Democratic, thus assuring that Barack Obama would become the 44th president of the United States.

This moment was necessary, for despite a century of civil rights legislation, judicial interventions and social activism — despite Brown v. Board of Education, Martin Luther King’s I-have-a-dream crusade and the 1964 Civil Rights Act — the Civil War could never truly be said to have ended until America’s white majority actually elected an African-American as president.

That is what happened Tuesday night and that is why we awake this morning to a different country. The struggle for equal rights is far from over, but we start afresh now from a whole new baseline. Let every child and every citizen and every new immigrant know that from this day forward everything really is possible in America.

How did Obama pull it off? To be sure, it probably took a once-in-a-century economic crisis to get enough white people to vote for a black man. And to be sure, Obama’s better organization, calm manner, mellifluous speaking style and unthreatening message of “change” all served him well.

But there also may have been something of a “Buffett effect” that countered the supposed “Bradley effect” — white voters telling pollsters they’d vote for Obama but then voting for the white guy. The Buffett effect was just the opposite. It was white conservatives telling the guys in the men’s grill at the country club that they were voting for John McCain, but then quietly going into the booth and voting for Obama, even though they knew it would mean higher taxes.

Why? Some did it because they sensed how inspired and hopeful their kids were about an Obama presidency, and they not only didn’t want to dash those hopes, they secretly wanted to share them. Others intuitively embraced Warren Buffett’s view that if you are rich and successful today, it is first and foremost because you were lucky enough to be born in America at this time — and never forget that. So, we need to get back to fixing our country — we need a president who can unify us for nation-building at home.

And somewhere they also knew that after the abysmal performance of the Bush team, there had to be consequences for the Republican Party. Electing McCain now would have, in some way, meant rewarding incompetence. It would have made a mockery of accountability in government and unleashed a wave of cynicism in America that would have been deeply corrosive.

Obama will always be our first black president. But can he be one of our few great presidents? He is going to have his chance because our greatest presidents are those who assumed the office at some of our darkest hours and at the bottom of some of our deepest holes.

“Taking office at a time of crisis doesn’t guarantee greatness, but it can be an occasion for it,” argued the Harvard University political philosopher Michael Sandel. “That was certainly the case with Lincoln, F.D.R. and Truman.” Part of F.D.R.’s greatness, though, “was that he gradually wove a new governing political philosophy — the New Deal — out of the rubble and political disarray of the economic depression he inherited.” Obama will need to do the same, but these things take time.

“F.D.R. did not run on the New Deal in 1932,” said Sandel. “He ran on balancing the budget. Like Obama, he did not take office with a clearly articulated governing philosophy. He arrived with a confident, activist spirit and experimented. Not until 1936 did we have a presidential campaign about the New Deal. What Obama’s equivalent will be, even he doesn’t know. It will emerge as he grapples with the economy, energy and America’s role in the world. These challenges are so great that he will only succeed if he is able to articulate a new politics of the common good.”

Bush & Co. did not believe that government could be an instrument of the common good. They neutered their cabinet secretaries and appointed hacks to big jobs. For them, pursuit of the common good was all about pursuit of individual self-interest. Voters rebelled against that. But there was also a rebellion against a traditional Democratic version of the common good — that it is simply the sum of all interest groups clamoring for their share.

“In this election, the American public rejected these narrow notions of the common good,” argued Sandel. “Most people now accept that unfettered markets don’t serve the public good. Markets generate abundance, but they can also breed excessive insecurity and risk. Even before the financial meltdown, we’ve seen a massive shift of risk from corporations to the individual. Obama will have to reinvent government as an instrument of the common good — to regulate markets, to protect citizens against the risks of unemployment and ill health, to invest in energy independence.”

But a new politics of the common good can’t be only about government and markets. “It must also be about a new patriotism — about what it means to be a citizen,” said Sandel. “This is the deepest chord Obama’s campaign evoked. The biggest applause line in his stump speech was the one that said every American will have a chance to go to college provided he or she performs a period of national service — in the military, in the Peace Corps or in the community. Obama’s campaign tapped a dormant civic idealism, a hunger among Americans to serve a cause greater than themselves, a yearning to be citizens again.”

None of this will be easy. But my gut tells me that of all the changes that will be ushered in by an Obama presidency, breaking with our racial past may turn out to be the least of them. There is just so much work to be done. The Civil War is over. Let reconstruction begin.

Diego Maradona has struggled with drugs, alcohol and obesity in recent years, left. Argentina now hopes that he can lead the team back to victory.

By DAN ROSENHECK
NY Times Published: November 3, 2008

BUENOS AIRES — “Soccer has a god. That god is Argentine, and his name is Diego Armando Maradona,” proclaims the Web site of the Church of Maradona, an online fan club of Argentina’s unrivaled athletic icon that claims some 20,000 members.

But this month, Diego Maradona, the country’s 48-year-old sporting titan, will try his hand at an all-too-earthly task: coaching Argentina’s men’s national soccer team, which has failed to reach the semifinals of the World Cup since “El Diego” himself starred for it in 1986 and 1990.

After retiring 11 years ago, Maradona has remained in the spotlight primarily as the country’s leading real-life soap opera star, waging a series of well-publicized battles with drugs, obesity, the news media and past lovers. Now, the hopes and dreams of 40 million soccer-mad Argentines will rest on the shoulders — much-slimmed after a stomach-stapling operation in 2005 — of a man who, in the words of the local newspaper columnist Horacio Pagani, will be “the least prepared manager in the history of international soccer.”

Given Argentina’s string of disappointing World Cup performances, the country certainly seems as if it could use a supernatural savior. The team was sent home by Romania in the round of 16 in 1994, by the Netherlands in the quarterfinals in 1998, and by Germany in the quarterfinals in 2006. In 2002, Argentina failed to qualify for the knockout stage.

But handing Maradona the reins represents a profound, if not reckless, leap of faith. His managing résumé is thin and checkered. In 1994 and 1995, he piloted two Argentine club teams to just three wins in 23 games, and he was once forced to call the shots from the stands because a suspension for ephedrine use prevented him from sitting on the bench. Moreover, his personal track record hardly suggests he is fit to keep a 23-man team playing in lockstep. As recently as March 2007, rumors of his death circulated wildly while he was hospitalized for alcohol-related hepatitis.

The controversial selection became official Tuesday, when the executive committee of Argentina’s national soccer federation met. But that group serves as little more than a rubber stamp for the decisions of the organization’s president, Julio Grondona, and his pick of Maradona is considered a fait accompli.

Grondona, who also serves as a vice president of FIFA, the game’s international governing body, is widely thought to run the national sport as a personal fief. During his 29 years in office, he has been accused of using his influence over referees, the news media, and the distribution of revenues to guarantee obedience from the club presidents who elect him — and to advance his business interests. The courts have ordered some 50 searches of his offices during his presidency, but few formal proceedings have ever been filed against him, and he has never been found guilty of a crime.

The leading candidate for the coaching job, which became available after Alfio Basile resigned in October, was Carlos Bianchi. As the manager of Boca Juniors — Argentina’s most popular club, for whom Maradona played from 1981 to 1982 and from 1995 to 1997 — Bianchi won four domestic titles, three continental titles and two intercontinental titles. But his poor relationship with Grondona appears to have disqualified him for the post.

Sergio Batista, who coached Argentina’s under-23 team to the Olympic gold medal in Beijing, was also passed over.

Maradona has, predictably, brushed off concerns about his readiness, noting that he spent two decades on the national team.

“Soccer hasn’t changed,” he told reporters in Argentina. “I don’t think anything will surprise me.”

The choice of Maradona is sure to increase the international profile of the Argentine team, which will probably increase its revenues. Tickets for his first match in charge, on Nov. 19 against Scotland in Glasgow, have sold briskly.

Public opinion, while divided, seems to lean against the choice: an Internet poll conducted by Clarín, Argentina’s largest newspaper, found that 74 percent of nearly 50,000 voters were opposed. Purists were particularly appalled, arguing that Maradona’s indubitable star power was no substitute for the years on the bench accumulated by other candidates, and that his postretirement antics put the country’s image at risk.

“He was a great player, but nothing more,” said Oscar Pereira, a union employee in the stands at a local league game on Friday night.

“We need someone more serious. You see him running around with Hugo Chávez talking about Che Guevara.”

Moreover, accusations of cronyism against Grondona are flying more freely than ever. “Whatever money they make off Maradona, Grondona and his friends will keep it for themselves,” said Raúl Gámez, a former president of the club Vélez Sársfield and one of Grondona’s most outspoken critics.

But Maradona’s stature among Argentines still leaves many believing he deserves a shot — or at the very least, that his all-too-public campaign for the position forced Grondona’s hand.

“We’ve had a lot of experienced managers, and they haven’t always done well,” said Alejandro Fabbri, a broadcaster for the TyC Sports network. “If Maradona wanted the job, he should get it.

“He’s the greatest Argentine player ever. At least they won’t be able to say he never got the chance.”

To compensate for Maradona’s lack of training, Grondona has also appointed a team of veteran tacticians to support Maradona, led by Carlos Bilardo, who managed Maradona on Argentina’s 1986 World Cup championship team. With capable assistants, Maradona’s devotees say, he will be able to focus on providing the players with his special brand of leadership and inspiration.

“He’s the biggest name there is,” said Pereira’s son, Nahuel, who accompanied him to the game. “He’ll pass on some of his magic to them.”

While Argentines disagree over the merits of the decision, they share a concern for Maradona’s well-being in his new role — perhaps a concern greater than their worries about the direction of the team as a whole. Will Maradona the deity survive Maradona the manager?

“I told him he was too big for this job,” Pagani said. “Right now, everyone loves him. Once he starts making decisions for the team, he’ll be held to account. He’s risking his legend. But he said that he wanted to do it.”

By GARDINER HARRIS
NY Times Magazine Published: October 31, 2008

In the belly of an industrial district south of Lyon, France, just past a sulfurous oil refinery and a synthetic vanilla plant, sits a run-down, eight-story factory that makes aspirin, the first pharmaceutical blockbuster. The Lyon factory is the last of its kind. No other major facility in Europe or the United States makes generic aspirin anymore. The market has been taken over by low-cost Chinese producers. Even Bayer, the German company that created aspirin in the 1890s and has fought for more than a century to distinguish its product as the most trustworthy one, now has backup supplies from China.

The Lyon plant is owned by a French chemical giant named Rhodia that has been making aspirin since 1908 and still accounts for more than 25 percent of the world’s aspirin market. But now a century after its entry into the business, the company intends to quit making aspirin altogether. The plant was last renovated in 1992, and it would need an upgrade to continue operating, an investment the company can no longer justify in what has become a cutthroat business. In fact, Rhodia is closing another factory about 40 miles to the south. This one makes the painkiller acetaminophen, which is found in Tylenol. It, too, is the last such facility in Western Europe.

In some ways, this is a nonevent. European factories close; Chinese ones open. Consumers like their commodities cheap, in the case of aspirin as with everything else. China now produces about two-thirds of all aspirin and is poised to become the world’s sole global supplier in the not-too-distant future. But are the Chinese factories safe? Who knows? The U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the European Medicines Agency and other competent government regulators rarely, if ever, inspect them. (By contrast, Rhodia’s plant was last inspected by the F.D.A. in July and is routinely inspected by one country or another.) Companies that import Chinese pharmaceutical ingredients, including aspirin, are required to test the supplies before using them, and some send private inspectors to China to ensure that suppliers use adequate controls. No pharmaceutical maker wants its name to become synonymous with disaster, and the vast majority of drugs that are consumed in the United States are safe. But some industry executives told me that price sensitivity in the generics industry makes it more difficult to fully vet their low-cost suppliers.

In China, where thousands of drug manufacturers sell products in the local markets, profit margins are razor thin, and counterfeiting and contamination are common. In 2002, the Pharmaceutical Association, a Chinese trade group, estimated that as much as 8 percent of over-the-counter drugs sold in China are counterfeit. Contaminated products extend beyond drugs, as was made tragically clear this fall when four Chinese babies died and 53,000 were sickened by melamine, a toxic chemical illegally added to watered-down baby formula to artificially increase the protein count and fool quality tests.

Though no melamine-tainted baby formula from China was found in the United States, it has shown up in other countries. This is the latest in a series of food- and drug-safety scandals. China has in recent years exported poisonous toothpaste, deadly dog food, toys made with lead paint and tainted fish. In one infamous example this spring, Chinese manufacturers substituted a cheap fake for the dried pig intestines used to make the drug heparin, which is given to dialysis and surgery patients to prevent blood clotting. As deaths among those taking the drug mounted, the F.D.A. discovered the taint and banned the contaminated drug. In the end, 81 people may have died from allergic reactions, and tens of thousands around the world were exposed to danger. F.D.A. officials admitted that the agency should never have approved the Chinese-made heparin for sale in the United States; the agency, it turned out, had never inspected the Chinese plant making it.

Concerns about Chinese drugs have become so intense that just three weeks ago, the Health and Human Services secretary, Michael O. Leavitt, announced that the F.D.A. would open an office in Beijing by the end of the year and offices in Shanghai and Guangzhou next year. The agency still plans to send inspectors to China from the U.S., but the offices will provide “an infrastructure that will make those people more effective,” Leavitt said at the time of the announcement.

China’s leap to one of the biggest suppliers of pharmaceutical ingredients in the world happened over the last decade, as the Chinese government subsidized the construction of manufacturing plants that have undercut prices everywhere. Generic drug makers in the United States, where price competition is fierce, were the first to seek cheaper drug ingredients in China. Last year, generic drug applications to the F.D.A. listed 1,154 plants providing active pharmaceutical ingredients: 43 percent of them were in China, and another 39 percent were in India. Only 13 percent were in the United States. Branded drug makers, with their fatter profit margins, resisted buying ingredients from China for years, but with their businesses now suffering, even major pharmaceutical companies like AstraZeneca, Bayer, Baxter and Pfizer have announced deals to outsource manufacturing to China.

I have been writing about the drug industry for more than a decade, but I have rarely written about a subject that both branded and generic drug makers wanted to discuss less. Nearly all of the industry executives who spoke for this article did so anonymously. Even the Generic Pharmaceutical Association, a normally loquacious trade group, was largely silent on the issue. Not one of them, it seems, wants to talk too much about the difficulty of regulating factories across several times zones, 6,000 miles and a vast linguistic and cultural divide.

The F.D.A. regulates more than $1 trillion worth of consumer goods, which amounts to about 25 cents of every consumer dollar spent in this country. This includes $466 billion in food sales, $275 billion in drugs, $60 billion in cosmetics and $18 billion in vitamin supplements. The agency is responsible for monitoring a third of all imported goods, from eggplant to eyeliner, microwave ovens to monoclonal antibodies, slaughterhouses to cellphones. But with fewer than 500 import inspectors and computer systems so old that repairmen must be called out of retirement to fix them, the agency is increasingly beset by a sense of futility.

Even the F.D.A.’s staunchest defenders now acknowledge that something is terribly wrong. Among them is Peter Barton Hutt, who served as the agency’s general counsel during the Nixon administration and is widely considered the dean of the F.D.A. bar in Washington. I’ve interviewed Hutt dozens of times over the years, and he has always defended the F.D.A. No more. “This is a fundamentally broken agency,” Hutt told me earlier this year, “and it needs to be repaired.”

The breakdown is not simply about money. This summer 1,442 people around the country were sickened by tainted tomatoes — or possibly jalepeño peppers. Such scares have become familiar, and the inability to quickly find the sources of contamination has been one of the agency’s signal failures. A 2002 law requires produce processors and distributors to keep track of where food goes and comes from, but the government has yet to mandate standardized record-keeping. As a result, in response to a scare, investigators must pour over a blizzard of contradictory packing slips and incompatible computer programs as they race to save people.

To ensure the safety of imported drugs, the F.D.A. relies almost entirely on its own inspections of foreign plants. This was not much of a problem 30 years ago, when most medical products consumed in the United States were made here and F.D.A. inspectors could drive around to plants in their district. Most of those plants have since moved abroad, and now decades can pass between inspections. Testifying before Congress in April, Dr. Janet Woodcock, director of the F.D.A.’s drug center, spoke with rare frankness about the ability of the agency to do its job abroad. “The F.D.A. of the last century is not configured to regulate this century’s globalized pharmaceutical industry,” she testified.

Other current and former F.D.A. officials I talked to echoed Woodcock’s warning. Tim Wells, who was a field investigator and then a compliance officer for 24 years at the F.D.A., now does private audits of drug plants and sees the holes in the agency’s safety net. “A company I recently visited abroad hasn’t been inspected for 10 years,” he told me.

Besides being more frequent, domestic inspections are unannounced and more intense. And when inspectors find dangerous conditions at domestic plants, they generally return promptly to ensure that those conditions get fixed. Not so in foreign plants. In a report released Oct. 22, government auditors reported that between 2002 and 2007, F.D.A. inspectors found dangerous conditions in 15 foreign plants. Only one of those plants was reinspected within two years, the auditors found. In every other case, the agency took foreign managers at their word that promised changes were made.

The record is particularly bad in China. Over the past six years, the F.D.A. has managed to inspect annually an average of just 15 of the 714 Chinese drug plants that export to the United States. At its present pace, the F.D.A. would need more than 50 years to visit all of these Chinese plants. By contrast, the F.D.A. inspects domestic drug plants every 2.7 years.

Inspectors volunteer for the grueling overseas assignments, and, it turns out, they don’t much like traveling to parts of Asia. “I went to Taiwan once, and after initially spending a night in a very nice hotel, I was transferred several hours by car to a hotel closer to the plant,” recalls DeVaughn Edwards, who worked as an F.D.A. inspector for 14 years until he left in 2006. “The bed consisted of two mattresses on the floor. There was no lock on the door. You had to hope that no one came in. It was dark; there were no amenities, no TV that worked. There was a shared restroom down the hall. It was only one night there, but it was enough to make you not want to revisit the plant or spend too much time there.”

When inspectors do go to China, their reports sometimes read like a bureaucratic rendering of Mark Twain’s “Innocents Abroad.” During a 2001 trip, for example, two F.D.A. inspectors visited a plant that was exporting acetaminophen to the United States. The plant had never been inspected. “The F.D.A. inspection team was met at the hotel in Wenzhou by representatives from Wenzhou No. 3 Pharmaceutical Factory and . . . transported by public ferry and then company vehicle to the manufacturing facility on Dong Tou Island off the coast of Wenzhou,” their report states. “There is no street address or plot number, and the address of the facility is given only by the county and province.”

Once the team arrived in what seemed like the middle of nowhere, the inspectors learned the drug was being manufactured at another plant — one that once had a similar name but had recently changed it. “In fact,” the report continues, “inspection found that there were initially three separate and independent firms operating under the names Wenzhou No. 1 Pharmaceutical Factory, Wenzhou No. 2 Pharmaceutical Factory and Wenzhou No. 3 Pharmaceutical Factory. The location of Wenzhou No. 1 Pharmaceutical Factory was also determined by the F.D.A. inspection team during the visit to Wenzhou, and it was learned that the firm is operating under a new Chinese name; however, the English translation of that name was not available.” So the two inspectors flew back to the

United States — at taxpayers’ expense — never having inspected a thing.

The F.D.A.’s apparent inability to keep names straight is no trivial matter. One reason the agency failed to inspect the Changzhou plant that produced deadly heparin, for instance, was that someone mixed up the facility’s name and concluded that the plant had already been inspected. Chinese plant names, a vestige of its once strictly controlled economy, are often very similar, and translations can vary. For instance, there are 57 separate drug master files — the basic F.D.A. record of a plant’s name, location and approved product — with “Shanghai” in the name. Some are obvious repeats, like the ones for “Shanghai No. 6 Pharmaceutical Factory” and “Shanghai Number 6 Pharmaceutical Factory.” But others could be separate plants. Or maybe not. It’s just too hard to tell.

Compounding the problem is the F.D.A.’s antiquated technology. Its computer systems are so awful that officials have no way of knowing which names, or which plants, are real. To determine which factories need to be inspected, agency investigators must consult two incompatible databases, one of which lists 3,000 foreign drug plants exporting to the United States and the other 6,800. Which number is right? Nobody really knows. Officials have told House investigators that their best guess for the number of foreign drug plants exporting to the United States is 2,967, while the Government Accountability Office recently guessed 3,249. Neither can the agency tell in many cases when the plants were last inspected (or, more important, which have never been inspected), where they are located or what products they make.

The combined ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach receive about 45 percent of all ship-borne trade that comes to the United States, or some 5.2 million containers a year. When I visited one day in May, giant cranes were unloading and loading more than 30 ships, each bearing about 2,500 containers. Some 40 to 50 of those containers — a tiny fraction of the total — were trucked to a gigantic warehouse about a half-mile from the ports. There the F.D.A. and Customs and Border Protection cracked open shipping containers that they considered suspicious and then emptied the containers into a large examination area in front of the bays, arranging the boxes and crates as if they were pathologists lining up organs from an autopsy.

Just about every crate I saw contained some kind of food product. One crate came from Indonesia, and its manifest said it contained products with chicken inside. Indonesia plus chicken suggests avian flu to F.D.A. officials. So they decided to take a look. The crate turned out to contain chicken seasoning, but no actual chicken. Still, the cans were sent off for testing. Deeper into the guts of the container were glass jars of sambal terasi, a hot sauce. They would probably be sent back because the F.D.A. requires makers of low-acid foods in jars or cans to register with the agency.

The labels on high-end olives from Italy were lacking the required nutritional information, so back to Italy they went. Jars of jam made of figs and tangerines indicated they were produced close to Ukraine, so an F.D.A. inspector said that he wanted to sample the product for radioactive fallout from the 1986 Chernobyl disaster.

As I wandered through this cornucopia, I realized that I had seen similar products at specialty grocery stores all over New York. My brother is a gourmet chef, and I bet an F.D.A. inspection of his kitchen cabinets would net a sizable seizure of improperly labeled food of suspicious provenance. The F.D.A., after all, inspects less than 1 percent of all imports.

This year, 18.2 million shipments of food, devices, cosmetics and drugs are expected to enter more than 300 U.S. ports; the F.D.A. had 454 investigators in 2007 — one and a half per port — to scrutinize them. Theirs is an almost hopeless task, made even more frustrating by the inability of one part of the F.D.A. to share even its most basic information with another. Inspectors in Los Angeles, for instance, have no way of knowing which Chinese drug or device imports really ought to be reviewed because they do not have access to records of F.D.A. plant inspections. If the agents knew, for example, that an F.D.A. inspector had found significant problems at a particular facility, they could be sure to check for the maker’s name on a shipping manifest. But they have no way of knowing where to focus their attention. “Our current nonautomated approach to entry screening cannot continue,” Woodcock of the F.D.A. told Congress. “We need to be able to assure that both the product and site of manufacture are acceptable before a drug gets into our country.”

I met Yusuf K. Hamied in the lobby of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, where he likes to stay when visiting New York City from his home in Mumbai. He greeted me warmly and turned quickly to the matter at hand. “Let’s go eat,” he said, steering me to a nearby Chinese restaurant where the maître d’ greeted him by name and showed us to a quiet table.

Hamied is the chairman and managing director of Cipla, the giant Indian generic drug manufacturer. A small man with thinning white hair and well-tailored suits, Hamied has become something of an international public-health hero. In September 2000, Hamied walked into an international meeting on AIDS and other diseases and promised to sell a cocktail of AIDS drugs for about $600 per patient per year, a fraction of the price then being offered by large drug makers. “Friends,” he told the crowd, “I represent the needs and aspirations of the third world. I represent the capabilities of the third world, and above all I represent an opportunity.”

Until Hamied’s announcement, most leaders and even many charitable organizations had dismissed the possibility of treating impoverished Africans and Asians who were infected with H.I.V. Drug combinations that kept the infection at bay cost upward of $15,000 per year, a price even those in rich nations strained to bear. But by defying Western companies that held the patents on the medicines, Hamied, whose offer was later lowered to $350 and then to $80, changed everything.

Hamied certainly saved many lives and, in doing so, demonstrated just how cheaply effective drugs could be made. Today, as more and more drug makers are seeking out Chinese and Indian manufacturers, the prices for all kinds of generic drugs have dropped. A result has been lower prices in industrial nations as well as the developing world. The A.A.R.P. announced earlier this year that the prices of 185 widely used generic drugs dropped nearly 10 percent last year while those of the 220 most commonly used brand-name drugs rose 7 percent.

If not for the low prices from Chinese and Indian producers, millions of people around the world would likely go untreated. And in the United States, buying generic drugs produced abroad is one way to tamp down the exploding health care costs confronting companies and individuals. But there is a hazard: without proper regulation, some of those drugs could be either ineffective or dangerous. A 2006 study found that more than half of anti-malarial drugs sold in Southeast Asia contained no active ingredients. The World Health Organization has estimated that as much as 10 percent of pharmaceuticals sold worldwide are counterfeit or contaminated. In some poor countries, the share is more than 30 percent.

At lunch, Hamied said that his plants are inspected routinely, and he provided an extensive schedule of inspections. Indeed, international drug buyers say that getting a few days to audit a Cipla facility can be difficult because, as a crucial supplier to dozens of companies across the world, the Indian drug maker hosts a never-ending stream of inspectors and auditors. But like everyone else, Cipla acquires an increasing share of its drug ingredients from plants in China. “Yes, I’ve heard all those stories about problems in Chinese plants,” Hamied said. But he added that he trusted his Chinese partners.

Many international drug buyers said that they are far more comfortable buying from Indian companies than Chinese ones. Language is one reason, but another is that corruption is not as endemic in India. “We haven’t had the problems with the Indians that we’ve had with the Chinese,” says William F. Haddad, chairman and chief executive of Biogenerics. “There’s something missing in China, and it has a lot to do with corruption.”

But a few weeks after my lunch with Hamied, the U.S. Justice Department announced that it had opened a criminal investigation of Ranbaxy, the largest Indian drug maker, with $390 million in annual sales in the United States. In a motion filed in federal court in Maryland, the Justice Department accused Ranbaxy of “a pattern of systemic fraudulent conduct,” including filing fabricated drug data to the F.D.A. and using drug ingredients from unapproved and uninspected plants. AIDS drugs purchased by the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief were among the medicines implicated, the Justice Department charged. Leaders of a House committee sent the F.D.A. a letter in July saying that court documents showed that the agency’s officials knew of the allegations for 18 months but did nothing. In September, the F.D.A. banned imports of more than 30 generic drugs made by Ranbaxy, citing violations that could lead to contamination and allergic reactions.

It was a hot day in June, but Dr. Andrew von Eschenbach, the commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, was dressed as usual in a dark suit and tie with a monogrammed white dress shirt. His gold cuff links and the yellow “Livestrong” wristband from his “good friend” Lance Armstrong were visible. He was clearly excited.

I was following von Eschenbach on a visit to the John F. Kennedy airport international mail facility. When I visited the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach in May, the agency agreed only at the last minute to send along its district director. Now I was getting an unusual ride-along with the agency’s commissioner. In the intervening weeks, the agency went from defending its oversight of the nation’s drug supply as effective to agreeing that the agency was overwhelmed. The reason for the change? A bipartisan chorus on Capitol Hill had been denouncing the agency’s failings — while at last promising more money.

We were herded into “the cage,” a 30-foot-by-20-foot area where customs and F.D.A. inspectors do their work. There are two to three F.D.A. inspectors assigned to police the flood of illegal drug shipments among the nearly 1.3 million pieces of foreign mail that flow through J.F.K. every day. Mail workers pull packages from countries that customs has decided are risky and dump them into “the cage.”

Officer James Ng of Customs and Border Protection started the tour by putting a package from China through an X-ray machine. The pictures showed row upon row of vials. “When it looks like this, it’s usually anabolic steroids inside,” Ng said. He opened the box, put on a pair of half-glasses and took out one of the vials, which was filled with a white crystalline powder. “It says it’s testosterone,” Ng said and then handed the vial to von Eschenbach.

“It’s an incredible example,” von Eschenbach said, his eyes bright. “It’s a steroid from China, but the label is written in Spanish.”

Customs seizes any steroids and narcotics they find, but they give other drugs to F.D.A. inspectors, who laboriously fill out handwritten forms and send letters to intended recipients. If the recipient swears that the drugs are for his or her own personal use, the F.D.A. often releases the detained package. It takes an hour or two to process each package, “an obstacle that makes their job functionally impossible,” according to a 2003 Congressional investigation. Thousands of packages can pile up waiting for F.D.A. review, and the agency often releases packages without any investigation for lack of staff.

Even when there are inspectors on the job, they cannot be sure every ingredient in a medicine is safe. The F.D.A. confines nearly all of its regulations and much of its inspection oversight to the active part of most pills, which generally constitutes between 1 percent and 10 percent of a pill’s volume. Much of a pill is fillers, binders, coatings, colorants and lubricants that are almost entirely unregulated.

The syrup in which cough and fever medicines are delivered has figured in at least eight mass poisonings around the world in the past two decades, with three of the four most recent cases originating in China. Hundreds died in Panama in 2006, at least 88 children in Haiti died in 1995 and 1996 and some 30 infants died in India in 1998 — all from toxic syrup. In 1937, 107 people in the United States died because of similar toxic syrup. In fact, it was this incident that led to the creation of the modern F.D.A. But plants making fillers and other nondrug ingredients of pills and syrups are rarely, if ever, inspected by the F.D.A. or any other regulatory agency.

Providing money to finance the agency has been an issue through both Democratic and Republican administrations. The situation grew so dire in the early 1990s that drug makers, alarmed that it was taking up to three years for the F.D.A. to approve new drugs, agreed to pay fees to speed review times. But the companies put strict limits on how that fee money could be spent, and Congress went along with these limits. The parts of the agency that are not financed by fees, like the inspectorate and those charged with overseeing the safety of already approved medicines, began to whither. Indeed, the number of personnel financed by Congressional appropriations remained unchanged at the F.D.A. between 1992 and 2007. Since 1990, the volume of U.S. imports has increased by more than 900 percent.

Several independent assessments of the F.D.A. have called attention to the agency’s poor organization and shortage of funds — and to the hazard those shortfalls pose to the nation’s supply of food and medicinal drugs. A board of scientific advisers to the F.D.A. released a report last year that concluded that nothing less than the lives of U.S. citizens were at stake.

In February of this year, the president asked Congress to provide the F.D.A. with $1.77 billion for 2009, which included an increase of $50.7 million over the prior year that was not enough to cover even normal salary increases. Over the ensuing months, von Eschenbach endured withering criticism from Congressional Democrats and Republicans. Repeated scandals involving tainted drugs and food led them to conclude that the F.D.A. needed to conduct far more foreign inspections. House Democrats held more than a dozen hearings to highlight the agency’s shortcomings and to urge the administration to propose greater expenditures.

Eventually, after a bruising interrogation by Representative John D. Dingell, the Michigan Democrat who is the chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee, von Eschenbach asked Congress in May for $275 million to ensure the safety of imported foods, drugs and medical devices. In June, Leavitt, the Health and Human Services secretary, urged speedy action by Congress, which soon gave the agency an emergency infusion of $150 million for this year and another $150 million for next.

This could be the moment to make a difference at the F.D.A. There is strong bipartisan support on Capitol Hill to beef up the agency and prevent another heparin scare. Come January, there will be a new administration in Washington, and no matter who wins the presidential election, change is likely: neither Barack Obama nor John McCain is apt to be as philosophically opposed to regulation as the Bush administration has been. Under Bush, the emphasis was on encouraging companies to hire private inspectors, which the F.D.A. has tried to do for some time with little success. That ethos has already changed in Congress. As Representative Joe Barton, the Texas Republican who is the ranking member on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, said recently, when it comes to reforming the agency to increase foreign drug inspections, “there isn’t any daylight between Republicans and Democrats.”

Unlike reforming Social Security or health insurance generally, fixing the F.D.A. won’t mean allocating enormous sums or necessitate reconceiving the system. It just requires some money and will. There are already legislative changes in the works. Bills now circulating on Capitol Hill would require food, medical- device and drug makers to pay annual registration fees to the F.D.A. Those fees would be used to allow as many inspections of foreign firms as domestic ones.

There also seems to be agreement that our regulatory agencies can’t rely on China to police its own factories. The Chinese have lurched between vows of reform and disregard for American concerns about the quality of the country’s products. When melamine was first found in Chinese-made pet food, Chinese government officials denied that the taint originated in their country and then, when that claim was disproved, said melamine would not hurt pets. During the heparin scare, Chinese officials admitted the contamination but insisted it wasn’t lethal. Last year, however, the Chinese government executed the former head of the agency entrusted with oversight of food and drug industries. He was found to have approved untested medicine in exchange for cash. The punishment shocked many at the F.D.A. but also led some to imagine that the Chinese were signaling a broader crackdown on unsafe foods and drugs, a hope that so far remains unrealized.

More inspectors will certainly help, but even regular inspections of Chinese plants cannot ensure safety. Inspectors can be hoodwinked; tests can be fooled. “No matter how many F.D.A. inspections they do,” says Senator Sherrod Brown, Democrat of Ohio, “our safety is still at risk if the pressure continues to cut costs.” Brown has introduced a bill to require labels disclosing the source country of key drug ingredients. Some lawmakers have gone as far as to suggest a ban on all drugs made with Chinese ingredients, but China has become such a crucial supplier that a ban would lead to the collapse of the U.S. health care system. And our dependence is only growing: when PricewaterhouseCoopers cited the best place for pharmaceutical outsourcing in the world in an October report to drug companies, its pick was China.

Gardiner Harris, a correspondent in The New York Times’s Washington bureau, reports on public health

Catherine Opie , Miggi & Ilene, Los Angeles, California, 1995.

For those voting in California, please support the right for same sex couples to marry, and vote NO on Proposition 8- which would overturn this fundamental right by writing discrimination into California’s constitution. It’s a straight up civil rights issue, so if you know people voting in California, friends, relatives, co-workers, please spread the good word! More info here.
no on prop 8

posted on ready4thehouse

November 7 - 9, 2008
Joshua Tree

Hannah Greely, Jonathan Hernandez, Patrick Jackson
Alice Konitz, Joel Kyack, Ann Magnuson
Thom Merrick, Yoshua Okon, Jack Pierson, Ry Rocklen
Julia Scher, Marnie Weber and the Spirit Girls
Wonder Valley Institute of Contemporary Art
Amy & Wendy Yao’s Art Swap Meet

Come spend the weekend in the high desert on November 7 - 9, 2008!

Events include a Friday Night Inaugural Opening of the Wonder Valley Institute
of Contemporary Art, and a Saturday night Dinner and performance by Marnie
Webber and the Spirit Girls at the Palms in lovely Wonder Valley.

*Project descriptions, and a program of events will be available at the HDTS HQ in Downtown
Joshua Tree next to Coyote Corner on Park Dr. Saturday and Sunday from 11:00 AM to 4:00 PM

To get to HDTS from Los Angeles:
(approx. 2+ hours)
Take the 10 east
Drive approx 1.5 hours (to the windmill fields)
Exit on Hwy 62 (29 Palms Hwy)
Take 62 (29 Palms Hwy) east towards 29 Palms.
The sites are located between Yucca Valley and Wonder Valley - An updated map will be posted before the
next event, and directions to the HDTS HQ will be listed on the home page.

WARNING TO ATTENDEES
The High Desert Test Sites is a multi-site event in the high desert. Attendance
is at your own risk. By attending the HDTS, you agree to assume sole responsibility
for any risk and to release anyone associated with the HDTS, the CB08, and
LA> cause while in the desert.

These Projects are affiliated with the 2008 California Biennial, organized by the Orange
County Museum of Art. CB08 is produced in tandem
with LA>

Special thanks to Andrea Zittel, Alex Wetzel and Shaun Regen as well as Cesar Garcia, Aram Moshayedi, Daniel Pelt, and the USC Public
Art Studies Department.

For more information on High Desert Test Sites, visit www.highdeserttestsites.com

Mark Gold, left, and Jonathan have squared off over food for 20 years.

Mark Gold tries to save sea creatures; his brother Jonathan delights in eating them. It can be an unpalatable topic at the dinner table.

By Joe Mozingo
LA Times November 1, 2008

Mark Gold, the esteemed marine scientist and president of Heal the Bay, knew it was only a matter of time before his older brother, Jonathan Gold, the equally esteemed Pulitzer Prize-winning food critic, would pick up a set of chopsticks and commit the ultimate act of fraternal betrayal.

“From his perspective, if you’ve already eaten Jamaican goat penis, what’s wrong with whale?” Mark asked.

Jonathan — reached on his cellphone this week while eating puffer fish at Dae Bok in Koreatown — first corrected his ever-tut-tutting brother:

“It was Vietnamese goat penis.”

Look, he added, he doesn’t promote eating whale. And it’s not as if the whale was harpooned in Santa Monica Bay.

He happened to be in South Korea, coming out of a whale museum, when, perhaps ironically, he came upon a row of whale restaurants. A man whose curious palate once led him to eat a live prawn as it glared back at him, antennae spiraling in fear, he knew he had to try. In his words: “It was there.”

And, he concluded, it was delectable.

Two prominent personalities in their own circles, Jonathan, 48, and Mark, 45, for years have been sparring, in good humor, about their differing gustatory predilections. But the whale eating, which Jonathan wrote about Oct. 16 in his widely read column in the L.A. Weekly, raised the ante in a most public way.

“A couple minutes later, a waitress returns with a platter of whale yuk hwe,” he wrote. “The vividly red meat has been cut into thin strips and tossed with sesame oil and slivered Korean pear, and I am surprised to discover that whale is delicious, leaner than beef, with a rich, mineral taste and a haunting, almost waxy aftertaste that I can’t quite place.

“I am already anticipating the nasty glare I will inevitably get from my marine-scientist brother, Mark, who as the leader of Heal the Bay has dedicated his life to pretty much the opposite of this.”

You can envision Jonathan chuckling aloud as he typed that last sentence — much as he envisioned the “blankness” glazing the prawn’s eyes as it succumbed to blunt trauma in his mouth.

“I wonder where the line is,” Mark said this week as he drove from a meeting with Santa Monica officials over cleaning up the beach. “When does cannibalism come up as a food choice when you’re on the whale route?”

Mark first ripped Jonathan’s column in a letter to the Weekly, saying, “Bro — now you’ve crossed the line. For far too long, you have been chowing down on every marine critter I’ve spent my life protecting, from shark’s fin soup to live prawns to bluefin to wild-caught sturgeon (largely freshwater). What did I do to you in our childhood to justify this ichthyocide?”

He then blogged about it Tuesday on the Heal the Bay website. Jonathan responded by ridiculing Mark’s gustatorily challenged taste buds: “The purity of my diet cannot be said to approach your daily menu of beef, diet root beer and pre-shredded cheese.”

It’s like a Cain-and-Abel comedy for the environmentally minded Westside set — the only people who would actually know what Jonathan is talking about when he says in his defense: “After all, I’m not eating an omelet of least tern eggs garnished with Palos Verdes blue butterflies.”

Jonathan, Mark and their middle brother Josh have been jousting since they were boys growing up in a $280-a-month rental in the humble southeast corner of Beverly Hills. Their dad was a probation officer, their mom a librarian at Dorsey High School.

“Everything was fair game at the dinner table,” said Mark. “It was a very verbal household.”

Verbal, but hardly gourmet. Hamburger Helper was a staple.

“Mark’s palate was so tender that he insisted, when he had the Kraft macaroni dinner, on having it without the cheese,” Jonathan said, mocking him. “The cheese was too zesty.”

Jonathan was a music geek in high school, all-state in cello and bass. He went to UCLA, joined a punk band and reveled in the punk scene that thrived in L.A. in the late 1970s and early ’80s. Taking the bus to his job as a copy editor downtown, he got the foodie bug when he attempted to eat at every single restaurant on Pico Boulevard. He became a music critic for the Weekly, then a food critic famous for celebrating hole-in-the-wall ethnic joints all over town. He did stints at Los Angeles and Gourmet magazines, writing about some of the most expensive restaurants in the country.

He maintains the look of a shipwrecked baron, with scraggly red hair and the stately girth of someone who can speak with authority about the variegated joys of pork fat.

Mark would fit better in a Dockers commercial. He was always the studious one. He also went to UCLA, and got a bachelor’s, a master’s and a doctorate before he left. He joined Heal the Bay in 1988 and became executive director in 1994.

All three brothers followed their own paths, to notable success. Josh is a Madison Avenue ad executive. Mark is one of the most prominent environmentalists in Southern California. And Jonathan last year became the first food critic ever to win the Pulitzer.

In California, John’s and Mark’s families, with five children between them, often get together for birthdays and dinners.

But the brothers have squared off over food for 20 years.

Mark says that when he eats seafood, he tries to follow the recommendations of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch list, which rates each fishery on its sustainability and the environmental effects of the harvest.

Jonathan counters that he mostly eats seafood that is low on the food chain and not in danger of extinction. On Mark’s blog, he wrote: “If you have spent the last 20 years of your life trying to protect sardines, mackerel and sea cucumber, Heal the Bay is in worse shape than I thought.”

Of course, his upcoming article on Gourmet’s website on a live octopus dish he tasted in South Korea is not going to help the familial discourse along.

“They bring you a plate of tentacles,” he said. “These tentacles still have an electrical thing going on. It looks like a plate of writhing worms. . . . It’s disconcerting. They crawl up your chopstick.”

Undaunted, he grabbed one of the wriggling arms and took a bite.

“The suckers are still active, so they adhere to the top of your mouth,” he said.

Mozingo is a Times staff writer.

Lawrence Halprin
(b. New York, N.Y. 1916)

Lawrence Halprin was born in New York City in 1916. He attended Cornell University, the University of Wisconsin, and Harvard University from which he graduated in 1942 with a Bachelors in Landscape Architecture. Following an apprenticeship with Thomas Church during which he helped develop the contemporary California garden concept, Halprin opened his own office in 1949. Since 1976 he has been a partner with Sue Yung Li Ikeda.

Halprin worked at a series of scales from sculptural fountains to urban renewal schemes to regional planning. He created landscapes available to all segments of society and generated on the basis of final user needs.

Halprin considered the design process as important as the end result. He analyzed user needs to create diagrams and designs. He developed a design methodology involving client and user in which their desires were synthesized into a final design statement. The organic, free flowing, romantic people spaces that Halprin created owe everything to the lessons of nature and the needs of the twentieth century user.

thanks to Nate Lentz

ricky swallow (above) and carter mull closes november 7 at marc foxx

amanda ross ho (above) closes november 1 at cherry and martin

ReTales: Ryan Conder, Owner of South Willard
Racked Los Angeles Wednesday, October 29, 2008, by Keri Pina

Ryan Conder opened South Willard five years ago with his ex-girlfriend, Danielle Kays. Since then, the two have been ignoring L.A. Fashion Week and doing their buys in Paris. Conder handles all the merchandising and maintains the store website. (Go for the clothes, stay for the blog.) He intentionally only carries about five or six designers—Raf Simons, Patrik Ervell, Band of Outsiders, Raf by Raf Simons, A.P.C., Dries Van Noten for fall/winter ‘08: “I really wanted to present it as a collection, not individual pieces. I really believe in the designers I carry.”

Why this store, here on West 3rd?
I feel like this location is central to all of L.A. AOC Winebar is two doors down and it’s one of the best restaurants in the city. There are a lot of ma-and-pa shops here, which is really refreshing. I think the fact that there is no parking saves the neighborhood from chains moving in. As long as there is no parking, I’ll stay.

What’s been flying off the racks?
These chunky Dries Van Noten sweaters, knit in Belgium. We’re already sold out of one style.

What are you most excited about in-store right now that maybe isn’t flying off the racks?
Coats, because it’s so hot. We have really good wool winter overcoats. When the time comes to sell them because it’s actually cold, in January or February, we already have our spring merchandise.

You have $100 to spend anywhere in L.A.—where do you go?
I do the Hollywood Farmers Market every week. It’s the greatest thing in L.A.

Make that $1,000.
Sam Kaufman on Beverly has really good ceramics. I could spend it there really quickly.

Some men are wearing leggings. Thoughts?
It just doesn’t look comfortable. Like I’ve seen a lot of guys wearing tight shorts. When I wear shorts, it’s because it’s hot. So them being so tight, it just doesn’t look comfortable, but to each his own.

When it comes to dating, do you have a fashion deal breaker?
A monogrammed bag. Anyone who needs to wear her identity on a handbag scares me. I like people who dress inconspicuously, who like what they like and dress as an individual. If you buy into ads, that’s just kind of sad.

racked los angeles

By DAN FOST
NY Times Published: October 29, 2008

NEIL YOUNG wants fuel-efficient cars, and as a politically active rock star, he wants everyone else to have them, too. But Mr. Young is not ready to give up his love of big cars, and he doesn’t think many other drivers are, either.

So Mr. Young, the iconoclastic godfather of grunge, has assembled a team to turn a nearly 20-foot-long, 5,000-pound 1959 Lincoln Continental into a vehicle that will run on natural gas, electricity or some other form of clean energy. His aim is to win the Progressive Insurance Automotive X Prize, a $10 million challenge to develop a vehicle that can get 100 miles per gallon or better by 2009.

He’s calling the project Linc Volt and he picked that Lincoln from his collection because it was his “favorite of the craziest and most out-there designs that American automobile manufacturers had come up with,” Mr. Young said. “I thought it would be a good poster child for the latest in technology.”

Mr. Young, 62, is a longtime tinkerer. He holds several patents, mostly having to do with model trains, and he once owned part of the model train maker Lionel. “I’m a transportation freak,” he said. “I like transportation devices. I like mechanical devices.”

But more to the point, he said: “I’m just a curious guy. It seems funny to me that we can’t get better mileage than we’re getting.”

His ingenuity is right at home in the hills above Silicon Valley, where he lives. He said he had been intrigued watching his techie neighbors at work, not only on computers but now also on electric cars, like the Tesla. Musically, he has criticized the quality of digital music, but he appeared at a Sun Microsystems event this year to praise Sun’s Java software, which he said had made it possible for him to release huge volumes of archival footage and recordings on high-definition Blu-ray discs.

“Music and mathematics, they go together,” he said. “It’s all harmonic, really.”

His own ride these days is a 1982 Mercedes coupe diesel that runs on vegetable oil he buys from a restaurant in Pacifica, Calif. “That’s a good source of fuel,” he said. “It’s working for me. It’s clean, and it doesn’t smell bad.”

But the diesel, he said, “is a Band-Aid.” The goal, he said, is to get cars to run on even cleaner fuels — electric batteries or natural gas.

That’s where Linc Volt comes in. Mr. Young teamed up with Johnathan Goodwin, owner of SAE Energy in Wichita, Kan., who was deemed a “motorhead messiah” by the business magazine Fast Company for his modifications of big cars into high-mileage, high-horsepower, clean-burning vehicles. He is currently refitting a Jeep for Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger of California.

One of Mr. Goodwin’s partners, Uli Kruger, is another important part of Mr. Young’s team. Mr. Kruger, a German who lives in Australia, achieved renown for his experiments mixing different fuels. With Linc Volt, Mr. Kruger said, “What we have will be a very interesting concept that has never been done before. We’ll be running a rotary engine with natural gas.”

Until now, natural gas vehicles have run on piston engines, with poor fuel efficiency. Mr. Goodwin said the Linc Volt team was “enhancing the range and efficiency with another fuel source, which we call the slog.” They run water through a process of hydrogen fracturing, and capture it in the exhaust and use it again. That means instead of using a massive tank of natural gas that can go only 500 miles before refueling, they will use a much smaller tank and travel 1,000 miles.

Mr. Kruger called the project “an in-your-face approach.”

“If we can get a thing like that to be fuel efficient — the quintessential gas guzzler — imagine what we can do with a smaller car,” he said.

Mr. Goodwin and Mr. Kruger say that Mr. Young is very much hands-on. “There have been times where Neil will get out of a concert at midnight or 1 a.m., charter a $60,000 flight and come here to work on the project,” Mr. Goodwin said. “We’re talking turning wrenches.” Mr. Young is not a natural mechanic, Mr. Goodwin said, but “his desire to learn is what you see in a teenager.”

Mr. Young estimates the project will cost less than half a million dollars, at least to get to the end of the first stage of producing a road-ready vehicle.

Merely trying to produce a 100-miles-per-gallon vehicle is challenging enough, but the Goodwin-Young team intends to win the Automotive X Prize. More than 100 teams around the country, from well-financed electric-car startups to a high school science class, have expressed interest in competing for the prize, which is run by the same foundation that in 2004 awarded $10 million to the first team to send a piloted civilian aircraft to the edge of space. Even the big automakers may enter, although none have yet done so.

Creating the car is only one step toward winning the prize, however. The winner must also compete in two long-distance stage races in various cities around the country, and must demonstrate a capacity to produce more than 10,000 of the vehicles a year. “Our goal here is reducing our dependence on foreign oil, and you can’t do that with one-off vehicles that die in the backyard,” said Don Foley, executive director of the X Prize Foundation.

Mr. Young said he didn’t see the production requirement as too steep a hurdle for his project. He figures once he and his team come up with a workable way to refit existing cars, they will be able to sell it at dealerships across the country.

Mr. Young at times shrugs off the competitive aspect of the project. “We’re not in the race against other contestants; we’re in a race against time,” he said at the Sun Microsystems event in May. “We’re not in this to win the X Prize. I am focused on a goal, and it’s an audacious goal: to eliminate roadside refueling.”

In addition, Mr. Young said he would share whatever his team comes up with, so that others could build on their work. His Shakey Pictures is producing a documentary on the project, and he’s putting much of the video online as the project moves along, both at lincvolt.com and on a YouTube channel, youtube.com/lincvolt, he has set up. He said the car would also be linked to the Internet, so its vital statistics could be piped online in real time during each test drive.

“It’s a reality car show,” Mr. Young said. People will be able to see what mileage the car is getting, how it’s doing at different altitudes, how much battery life is left and how the generators are working.

“Lots of people will be able to pick up data from the Web site, and maybe learn from it and put it in their own projects,” he said. “The idea is to share the knowledge over the Internet and share the experience.”

“If we break down, they’ll see us break down. It’s an inclusive approach, rather than a secretive approach.”

Mr. Young said the information should run two ways. “We’re going to have an innovation gallery,” he said. “People can submit ideas, talk about them and vote which ones are best.”

The videos already on the site have an engaging, informal quality. Mr. Young, wearing sunglasses in the garage and sipping a beer, seems less like a rock star than an aging, paunchy mechanic, while Mr. Kruger and Mr. Goodwin have the lean look of guitar heroes.

Yet Mr. Young has the stage presence to carry the videos. In one, Mr. Goodwin and Mr. Kruger gave the geeky details of what kind of fuel they tried, and how they patched an engine leak, and then Mr. Young added a poetic touch, describing a test ride through Wichita in which the big white Lincoln moved stealthily on its near silent electric motor.

“It’s fantastic, it’s very eerie, very ghost-y,” he said, “this beautiful, white, huge car moving down the road and not making a sound.”

Image: Moyra Davey, “Nyro”, 2003, Chromogenic color print, 10″ x 8″

The World Is All That Is the Case

Photographs by:
Dan Asher, Darren Bader, Walead Beshty, Robert Buck, Phil Chang, Anne Collier, Moyra Davey, Nancy de Holl, Shannon Ebner, Paul Elliman, Techching Hsieh, Craig Kalpakjian, Matt Keegan, Soo Kim, Alex Klein, Justine Kurland, Miranda Lichtenstein, Arthur Ou, Katrin Pesch, Matthew Porter, Adam Putnam, Michael Queenland, Michael Rashkow, Lisa Tan, Erika Vogt, James Welling, Hannah Whitaker, and Mark Wyse

November 6-December 20, 2008
Reception: Thursday, November 6, 6-8pm

Hudson Franklin
508 West 26th Street, #318
New York, NY 10001
212-741-1189

link to Hudson Franklin

Hunter S. Thompson shooting a gun down at the Big Sur secret spot, maybe before it was even a spot.

found on secret forts

An Army Corps of Engineers biologist who took part in a kayak trip to show the waterway is navigable may face dismissal for her actions.

Los Angeles Times Opinion
By Heather Wylie
October 30, 2008

A kayak trip I took this summer may cost me my job.

I am a civilian biologist working for the Army Corps of Engineers. On my personal time, I joined a trip down the Los Angeles River to protest actions by my own agency to undermine the Clean Water Act.

My superiors scoured the Internet for proof and found two photos of me on a blog. Claiming that my “participation undermined [its] authority,” the corps has proposed suspending me for 30 days, a punishment one step below termination. More than two months after advocating this penalty, it has yet to make a decision.

In July, a dozen kayakers took a three-day journey down the 52-mile L.A. River; I joined them for 20 miles. The purpose of our regatta was to show that the entire river is “navigable-in-fact” — a classification that is crucial to preventing the rollback of Clean Water Act protections throughout the watershed — and to highlight similar threats facing waterways across the nation.

More than 30 years after its enactment, the Clean Water Act is now in legal turmoil. A 2006 U.S. Supreme Court decision, Rapanos vs. United States, first muddied the waters. The court held that to continue to regulate pollution under the Clean Water Act, the government has to prove there is a “significant nexus” between the wetlands in question and “navigable-in-fact” waters.

The term “navigable-in-fact” comes from 140 years’ worth of court rulings. Waterways that have or can generate interstate or foreign commerce through boating (including seasonal, hazardous or solely recreational use) are navigable-in-fact and thus subject to the provisions of the Clean Water Act. So our kayak trip was meant to underscore that the L.A. River — and all the streams that feed into it — deserve protection under that law.

Last year, in response to the court ruling, the corps and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency put together a document spelling out new, more restrictive methods for analyzing which waters will continue to be subject to the law. With a big assist from the Bush administration, developers and industry successfully lobbied the agencies to use the new guidebook as an opportunity to push the majority of our nation’s streams and wetlands out of reach of the Clean Water Act.

In the view of many, the restrictive standards cripple the Clean Water Act. In a memo released by Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Beverly Hills), the top EPA enforcement official complained that the change has blocked the majority of Clean Water Act prosecutions.

Fortunately, the corps’ shenanigans and the attention our protest and that of others drew to the issue triggered an unusual countermove: The EPA permanently stripped the corps of any further responsibility for determining the status of the L.A. River and Arizona’s Santa Cruz River.

Still, scores of other watersheds across the nation remain in jeopardy. A navigability analysis of the Gila River in Arizona has just been completed, designating only 6.9 miles as navigable-in-fact. This has enormous implications; the Gila River flows hundreds of miles across the width of Arizona, and its watershed covers vast areas of the state. The analysis focuses on a small section of the Gila near the site of a proposed development where lobbyists are pushing for relaxation of environmental protections. In response, the corps has proposed removing Clean Water Act coverage from several creeks at the site. If the EPA doesn’t overturn it by Tuesday, these rollbacks will become final and set a detrimental precedent.

Legislation to restore the Clean Water Act and protect our rivers from being polluted, or our wetlands from being drained for development, is still pending in Congress. It needs to be a top priority.

I picked up a paddle to make a point about protecting the integrity of our waters, including the much-abused L.A. River, and to protest the leadership of my own agency. The Army Corps of Engineers, all the way down to the Los Angeles District, has chosen to subvert the Clean Water Act, which the agency — like myself — has sworn to uphold. To me, protecting our waters, our greatest public-trust resource, is not just our job; it is our patriotic duty.

As a federal employee, I did not forfeit my 1st Amendment rights to speak out or to petition my government to redress wrongs — on my own time. To my surprise, my demonstration about the Clean Water Act has turned into a fight about the extent to which public servants will be allowed to serve the public, our true employers, while off-duty. I stand by my actions, and I have not put my paddle away.

Heather Wylie is a biologist with the regulatory division of the L.A. District of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The opinions expressed are her own and do not reflect the official views of the corps.

The myth of Persephone, retold for 21st-century Los Angeles
by Margaret Weatherford

Dramatized by Robyn Palmer and Fred Thompson

Music by the Chapin Sisters

Paintings by Mary Weatherford

Produced by Mary & Margaret Weatherford and Jodie Berry

Thursday, October 30 at 8 p.m.

Cottage Home, 410 Cottage Home St., Chinatown, Los Angeles, 90012 (323)276-1205