Frank Serpico, former police officer, lives in a one-room cabin. No TV or Internet. “This is my life now,” he said. “The woods, nature, solitude.”

By COREY KILGANNON
NY Times Published: January 22, 2010

HE looked like some sort of fur trapper, this bearded man walking through the snowy woods here in upstate New York. But then, Frank Serpico has always been known for his disguises.

Anyone who has seen the celebrated 1973 film “Serpico” knows that he often dressed up — bum, butcher, rabbi — to catch criminals. His off-duty look was never vintage cop either, with the bushy beard and the beads.

This is the man whose long and loud complaining about widespread corruption in the New York Police Department made him a pariah on the force. The patrolman shot in the face during a 1971 drug bust while screaming for backup from his fellow officers, who then failed to immediately call for an ambulance. The undaunted whistle-blower whose testimony was the centerpiece of the Knapp Commission hearings, which sparked the biggest shakeup in the history of the department.

Four decades later, Frank Serpico is still bearded, handsome and a flamboyant dresser. At 73, he seems spry enough to chase down and collar a perp; on that wintry walk through the woods, he interrogated a man carrying a sled, and followed a trail of blood drops in the snow until it disappeared. Not long before, he had sniffed out a dumper of garbage on his property and reported him to the police.

Mr. Serpico still carries the detective shield he was awarded as he left the department on a disability pension and, often, his licensed revolver, with which he takes target practice on his 50-acre property not far from this Columbia County hamlet. He also still carries bullet fragments lodged just below his brain from the drug shooting; he is deaf in his left ear, and has nerve damage in his left leg.

For many, “Serpico” conjures the face of Al Pacino, who won his first Golden Globe award for his star turn in the film. The movie — along with news reports and the best-selling biography of the same name — seared the public memory with painful images: of the honest cop bleeding in a squad car rushing to the hospital, where, over months of rehabilitation, he received cards telling him to rot in hell. Instead, Mr. Serpico took his fluffy sheepdog, Alfie, and boarded a ship to Europe; the film’s closing credits describe him as “now living somewhere in Switzerland.”

Which was true at the time. After years traveling abroad, Mr. Serpico returned to the United States around 1980 and lived as a nomad, out of a camper. He finally settled about two hours north of New York City, where he lives a monastic life in a one-room cabin he built in the woods near the Hudson River. In 1997, he spoke out after the brutal beatings of Abner Louima in a Brooklyn station house, but mostly he stays far from his old nemesis.

Now, all these years later, Mr. Serpico is working on his own version of the harrowing adventures chronicled by Peter Maas’s biography, which sold more than three million copies (royalties from the book and the movie have helped him live comfortably without working). The memoir begins with the same awful scene as the film: Serpico shot in the face during a heroin bust on Driggs Avenue in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, Feb. 3, 1971. Working title: “Before I Go.”

“It’s the rest of the story,” he said recently over lunch in the self-service cafe of a health-food store here in Harlemville. “It’s more personal. I used to think, ‘How can I write my life story? I’m still living it.’ ” Though he is healthy, he added, “I’m getting close to the line, so I figure I better get busy.”

It is, ultimately, a story of healing. He wandered in Europe and across North America, he said, because “I wanted to find my life.”

“I had gone through a near-death experience,” he explained, “and that gives you an insight into how fleeting life is, and what’s important.”

After he settled here, his journey turned inward. He eschewed what he sees as an ugly American addiction to consumerism and media brainwashing. He eats mostly vegetarian and organic food, cooking on the wood-burning stove that heats the cabin, where there is neither television nor the Internet. “This is my life now,” he said. “The woods, nature, solitude.”

Mr. Serpico relies on Chinese medicine, herbs and shiatsu. He practices meditation, the Japanese Zen flute and African drumming, and dance: ballroom, tango, swing. He takes long walks at sunrise and rescues wounded animals. He raises chickens and guinea hens. He has a girlfriend: she is French, a schoolteacher, age 50.

None of which has exorcised the demons of being Serpico.

“I still have nightmares,” he said. “I open a door a little bit and it just explodes in my face. Or I’m in a jam and I call the police, and guess who shows up? My old cop buddies who hated me.”

GROWING up the son of Italian immigrants in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, young Frank revered the local cops. He loved detective stories on the radio and dreamed of wearing the uniform. He had also cultivated a bit of worldliness from visiting Italy as a child and traveling abroad with the Army after enlisting at age 18. He joined the New York Police Department in 1959 and passionately pursued big game.

His partners and bosses resented his hippie looks and his zealousness to make arrests even while off-duty or on the turf of other officers. His intrigues with the ballet and opera rubbed against the conservative culture of the station house. He lived a bohemian life, with a small garden apartment on Perry Street in the West Village, where he was known as Paco and hid his police badge.

The street-savvy but idealistic Officer Serpico was appalled at the cliquishness and the payoffs — free meals as well as big, blatant bribes — from criminals, gamblers, numbers men and ordinary merchants whom he saw as a beat cop in Brooklyn’s 81st Precinct and later while working vice and racketeering. He refused to accept such grease, and became despised for it both inside and outside the department.

In 1967, Mr. Serpico began telling what he knew to high-ranking officials at police headquarters and City Hall. He presented names, places, dates and other information, but no action was taken. Frustrated, he and a friend on the force, David Durk, a graduate of Amherst College who had become an officer in 1963 after quitting law school, contacted a reporter for The New York Times.

The front-page story by David Burnham on April 25, 1970, pressured Mayor John V. Lindsay to form the Knapp Commission, before which Mr. Serpico testified that “the atmosphere does not yet exist in which an honest police officer can act without fear of ridicule or reprisal from fellow officers.”

The commission carried out the most extensive investigation of police wrongdoing in the city’s history and exposed a pattern of entrenched corruption and cover-up that helped usher in reform.

“It was terrifying in those days — they were really sticking their necks out,” recalled Mr. Burnham, who now works at a data-gathering and research firm. “We really shamed the city, and things really changed.”

Mr. Serpico does not exactly agree. He believes the department still does not acknowledge its internal problems because the leadership’s top priority is to avoid scandal.

“I hear from police officers all the time; they contact me,” he said. “An honest cop still can’t find a place to go and complain without fear of recrimination. The blue wall will always be there because the system supports it.”

Paul J. Browne, the chief police spokesman, dismissed Mr. Serpico’s indictment by saying, “It’s a very different department now.”

“Things have changed vastly,” Mr. Browne said, “and he is literally old enough to be the grandfather of some police officers now on duty.”

Mr. Serpico avoids the city now, but there is a part of him that has never left its station houses. Several years ago, he showed up at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in Manhattan to confront Patrick V. Murphy, the police commissioner at the time of the shooting, who was in the audience. “I’ve been carrying a bullet around in my head for 35 years and I hold you responsible,” Mr. Serpico recalled telling Mr. Murphy, who did not respond.

Michael Bosak, a 27-year veteran of the Police Department who has served as its informal historian since retiring in 1995, said that for a time he kept in touch with Mr. Serpico by e-mail, and that his messages tended to be long diatribes on various topics, seemingly unaffected by the passage of decades. “The N.Y.P.D. is a thousand times more honest than it was 40 years ago,” Mr. Bosak said. “I think he’s still in a lot of pain. Going through what he went through, it can drive you off your rocker.”

Indeed, Mr. Serpico still brims with bitterness that he was made third-grade detective, rather than the top tier of first-grade; that the department’s museum in Lower Manhattan declined his offer of his uniform and his service revolver; that its leadership never asks him to speak about corruption or reform. The Medal of Honor he was awarded — the department’s highest commendation — remains tossed “in some drawer.”

“They never even had a ceremony for me,” he said of the honorary promotion. “They handed it to me over the counter with the Medal of Honor, like a pack of cigarettes.

“The department never recognized me for standing up for what’s right,” he added, “because I violated the omertà; I spoke out.”

DURING his years in Europe, Mr. Serpico bought a farm in the Netherlands and married a Dutch woman with two young children. But after the woman died of cancer, her parents took custody of the children and Mr. Serpico sold the farm and moved back to the United States. He wandered the continent from Mexico to Canada in his camper.

In 1980, a lover had a son and brought a paternity suit. He claimed to have been “deceived and entrapped” by the woman, and then waged a lengthy and unsuccessful court fight to avoid child-support payments. He did not raise the son, Alex Serpico, and has had limited contact with him in recent years.

Mr. Serpico refused to reveal the exact location of his current home. Instead, he was interviewed in various coffee shops and restaurants where he is a regular in a few small villages north of Hudson, N.Y., just off the Taconic State Parkway. He is known to the locals as Paco, his off-duty nickname in the Village in the late 1960s.

At lunches in the Harlemville health-food store, Mr. Serpico slipped a bottle of red wine out of his bag and poured it into paper cups. Afterward, cigars.

True to his cinematic self, he always showed up in a different outfit and hat: one day as the sheepherder, the next day the prospector, then the monk. He wears an earring in each ear and a magnifying glass around his neck for fine print. He would spout esoterica and draw from his knowledge of Italian, Spanish, German, Dutch, Arabic and Russian. In a coffee shop, he might quote from Dante’s “Inferno,” or pull out his harmonica and play “Danny Boy.”

Mr. Serpico said he had played, in local productions, the Arab in Saroyan’s “The Time of Your Life,” Gonzalo in “The Tempest,” a detective in “Ten Little Indians” and Johann Most in Howard Zinn’s “Emma.”

“My acting career began on the streets of New York,” he said. “When I was a cop, I played many impressive roles, from derelict to a doctor, and my life often depended on my performance.”

Back then, as he became suspect among fellow officers, Mr. Serpico began spreading the word that he was writing a book, but only as a bluff. “I said, ‘I’m going to name names, and if anything happens to me, I got it all written down right there,’ ” he recalled. “But I never really wrote anything.”

After several frustrating attempts at collaboration with co-writers — “They just don’t get it,” he said — Mr. Serpico enrolled in a weekly workshop through an arts group in Troy, N.Y., where his classmates also do not always understand his stories. “How could they?” he said. “We have women in the class writing about their kids — they don’t know what a bag man is.”

Frank Serpico writes out the story of his life daily in longhand, at the cabin, then types the pages on a computer at the public library, using the two-finger method he honed filing arrest reports on station house typewriters, gathering the pages in a manila folder. The memoir begins on the night of the Williamsburg drug bust, his bleeding body cradled by an elderly tenant who called for assistance when his fellow officers did not, the narrator floating above and recounting the life path that led him there.

It is not unlike the opening scene of the film. He said he had never seen the full movie, but agreed to watch it with me — on my laptop, propped on a windowsill at the public library in Kinderhook, N.Y. As Pacino, near death, was rushed to Greenpoint Hospital, the real Mr. Serpico stared out the window, unable to watch — too painful, he said.

He provided a running commentary: His own wardrobe was much better than in the film, as were his police disguises. The scene in which the police commissioner hands him a gold detective shield in the hospital bed was conjured; in reality, he picked it up from a clerk at police headquarters.

Afterward, Mr. Serpico seemed spent. He looked out at the snow and trees graying in the descending darkness.

“They took the job I loved most,” he said. “I just wanted to be a cop, and they took it away from me.”

January 21, 2010 | 12:13 pm
Los Angeles Times
By David Keeps

Gerald McCabe, the industrial designer who created furniture for a host of California manufacturers and collaborated on pieces with Case Study house architect Pierre Koenig, died of a heart attack Jan. 17 in Springfield, Ore. He was 82.

Known to generations of musicians as the founder of McCabe’s Guitar Shop in Santa Monica, McCabe is equally revered by midcentury design collectors for his elegant fusion of modern lines, precision joinery and a craftsman’s eye for the beauty of wood, glass and steel.

The Leland Y. Lee photograph above, taken for the March 1965 issue of the Los Angeles Times’ Home magazine, shows McCabe’s furniture in “an airy little structure” in Highland Park.

Gerard O’Brien, owner of Reform Gallery, a Los Angeles specialist in California midcentury design, said McCabe was an inveterate tinkerer. “He indulged himself in whatever materials interested him,” O’Brien said. The gallery owner cites a table made from floating glass plates joined by curved bolts, right, as another example of McCabe’s engineering and technical skills and his influence on contemporary designers.

“I have a mechanical ability and I like to make three-dimensional objects,” McCabe said in the 1977 book “Craftsmen Lifestyle: The Gentle Revolution.” “I guess I’d be a sculptor if I weren’t so imbued with the Puritan ethic.”

McCabe created post-World War II modern furniture collections for Los Angeles firms including Brown Saltman and Glenn of California, and in the 1960s and ’70s he designed and produced his own lines under the names Erin Furniture and Orange Crate Modern. Before moving to Oregon, the longtime Venice resident also liked to repair guitars, operate a tug, race cars and live on a boat.

“I think my furniture has a lasting quality,” he said in that 1977 book. “When you come into a room, it doesn’t hit you over the head, it doesn’t fall into a category, it’s an entity by itself and it is still appealing years later.”

Indeed, in 2005, McCabe’s 1990s re-creation of the 1959 cabinet he produced for a Case Study house sold at Sotheby’s for $16,800. McCabe pieces produced in larger quantities are considerably less. At Reform, two versions of the glass cube table design are listed at $1,200 and $1,600.

Thanks to Gerry Beckley

Lesley Vance (2010)

January 23, 2010 — March 06, 2010

David Kordansky

Justen Ladda, a sculptor, revels in the chill of the unheated Lower East Side loft where he has lived for three decades. He is one of a small group of Americans who live nearly without heat by choice. Why they stick it out, and how they cope, are object lessons in creative adaptation fueled by thrift, environmentalism and a commitment to unique real estate.

By PENELOPE GREEN
NY Times Published: January 20, 2010

SERIOUS cold, Justen Ladda said, is when the sponge in the kitchen sink feels like wood or the toothpaste freezes or the refrigerator turns itself off, as it did one particularly frigid day last winter. Not that Mr. Ladda, a 56-year-old sculptor who has lived heat-free in his Lower East Side loft for three decades, is bothered by such extremes. “Winter comes and goes,” he’ll tell you blithely, adjusting his black wool scarf and watch cap. (Along with fingerless gloves, long underwear and felt slippers, they are part of Mr. Ladda’s at-home uniform when the mercury dips.)

Winifred Gallagher finds the 15-degree interior temperature of her western New York schoolhouse clarifying. More Photos »
Mr. Ladda, whose work is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, decided long ago to live without central heating. Proper temperature control, you see, would require insulating his wooden ceiling, and ruining its fine acoustics. “I know this sounds really lame, but I listen to a lot of music and it just sounds better,” he said. Also, the rent on his unimproved live-work loft is only $300, well below many people’s winter utility bills.

But beyond thrift and acoustics, what is perhaps most notable about Mr. Ladda’s chilly interior is that like, say, tepee-dwelling Mongolian reindeer herders, or perhaps some very rugged environmentalists, Mr. Ladda has come to thrive in the cold.

As Americans across the country wrestle with spouses and their thermostats over how low to go — as they join contests like Freeze Yer Buns, now in its third year, a challenge posed by Deanna Duke, a Seattle-based environmental blogger who calls herself the Crunchy Chicken, to lower the thermostat to around 55 degrees, or follow the lead of the Maine couple trying to live comfortably in a furnace-free house and blogging about it in their Cold House Journal — there are those who are living nearly without heat by choice, and doing just fine, thank you very much. Indeed, 55 degrees would qualify as sauna conditions for Mr. Ladda and others whose interiors hover around the 30- or 40-degree mark in deep winter.

Many belong to that hardy genus Artista domestica, a group unusually skilled at foraging in urban frontiers, and long-known for sacrificing “normal” creature comforts in favor of other boons like low overhead and capacious, atmospheric habitats. Why they stick it out, and how they cope, are object lessons in creative adaptation fueled by thrift, environmentalism and a commitment to unique real estate. (Denial and long underwear help, too.)

Take Jake Dibeler, a 21-year-old performance artist living in an unheated warehouse in Baltimore with five roommates and two cats. There are concrete walls, floor-to-ceiling windows and hangar-like ceilings, “which means that even if it gets warm outside,” Mr. Dibeler said, “it still takes about a month for our apartment to catch up.”

The rent is $2,200, split six ways, and it’s all worth it, he continued, because there’s a huge stage he and his friends can perform on, “a dream come true in my own home.” Space heaters are expensive and, anyway, a placebo at best, he said, but Mr. Dibeler and his friends have built a yurt in the center of the living room, “or part of a yurt, really, the frame part, which we cover with sheets and line with afghans, and then we drag the cats in. At times, we all get frustrated and pine for a real home with heat and lower ceilings. Then we remember how wonderful it is to be living with five other best friends and making art and how it will get warm eventually. We just have to suck it up and wear a bunch of layers, even if it means looking like an Olsen twin.”

Attitude, not clothing, is what thaws Daniel McCloskey and his roommates in Pittsburgh. Last year, Mr. McCloskey, 22, bought two poorly insulated turn-of-the century clapboard houses for $41,000 in the Lawrenceville neighborhood there, and turned them into a writer’s retreat he named the Cyberpunk Apocalypse Writer’s Co-op. It’s sort of like Yaddo or MacDowell — “like where?” he asked when this reporter made the comparison — but without all the amenities (maid service, picnic basket lunches or sufficient heat).

Mr. McCloskey offers monthlong residencies to emerging writers, which is to say a free room in the house at the back. There is a furnace, but his finances are low and mostly it stays off. (Mr. McCloskey, who is writing a novel, last worked as a parking attendant and a poster salesman.) A wood stove in the kitchen area can bring the temperature there up to about 50 degrees, Mr. McCloskey said, if he sees fit to fire it up. Wood is expensive, too; he relies on windfalls, like dead trees from a friend who was clearing land nearby. Electric pipe heaters keep the water supply from freezing, but not the visiting artists.

“We had an author named Terence Hawkins do a reading last month,” Mr. McCloskey recalled. “I tried to get the wood stove going, but he was just sitting there shivering. I think his opening lines were: ‘Hello, I am Terence Hawkins. I am the elderly man in a tweed jacket, and if I am shivering it is only because I am cold.’ ”

Mr. McCloskey warms himself up by spending time in coffee shops, he said — “an hour will do it” — and by maintaining an upbeat demeanor. Doesn’t his girlfriend, with whom he shares a drafty attic room, get grumpy?

“What makes her grumpy is using resources,” he said. “We’re all about staying positive.”

JOE AHEARN, 23, who lives with four roommates in a Queens warehouse (rent: $3,000), uses a space heater in his bedroom (there are five bedrooms and a basement), but the bathroom and the main living area “are pretty much a lost cause,” he said. Showering between November and March is a challenge. A music promoter whose company is called Sleep When Dead, he hosts shows in his house five out of seven nights, which raises the temperature a good 10 or 20 degrees, or so it seems. “Human beings are remarkably efficient space heaters,” Mr. Ahearn said, and he basks in the damp, warm fug that remains after a performance. Still, his most successful cold-abatement strategy has been romantic: last year he had a girlfriend, and spent most nights at her house.

Then there are those who seek out the cold for its clarifying effects. Winifred Gallagher, a behavioral science writer who lives in a warm town house on the Upper West Side, makes monthly winter pilgrimages to a century-old, “very primitive” former one-room schoolhouse in Long Eddy, N.Y. There is no water when the temperature is below freezing (she hauls it from a stream), but there is a wood-burning stove.

If it’s 20 degrees outside, as it was last week, it might be 15 indoors, so Ms. Gallagher will stoke the fire and go for a long walk; when she returns, the room can be 50 degrees, and 60 by bedtime, though it slides precipitously toward freezing as she sleeps. “The main reason why I do these winter trips,” she said, “is that when your house is 15 degrees, the only problem you have is getting warm. Focusing on survival is right up there with a Zen retreat when it comes to clearing the mind.”

And anyway, she pointed out, “we didn’t evolve to sit on a chair in a temperature-controlled environment staring at a screen all day.”

How cold is too cold? With the right equipment, humans can endure enormous temperature dips. Dr. Peter Hackett, director of the Institute for Altitude Medicine in Telluride, Colo., and a veteran expeditioner to Mount Everest and other frigid peaks, has recorded minus 50 degree temperatures outside his tent on a climb of Mount McKinley in Alaska. “It’s extremely unpleasant,” he said, but certainly survivable, albeit with the right gear: long underwear, layers of fleece, and down or synthetic puff jackets.

“Our best responses are behavioral — building a fire, putting on more clothes. But for those who choose not to heat their homes or who live in extremely cold environments, there are some physiological changes that occur,” he said, ticking them off. “Thyroid function goes up, creating more body heat, and metabolism changes, too, causing you to burn more fuel, fat especially, which generates a bit more heat.”

There are increased “vasodilations in the extremities,” he added, recorded in people who work outside. “But these adaptations are not that impressive. They are fairly limited, compared to the physiological changes we go through in adapting to altitude or the heat. Ten days of heat training for an athlete can be very effective, whereas a week of cold training doesn’t do much of anything.”

Tell that to Janet Smith, an engineer and landscape designer living in nearby Ridgway, Colo. Ms. Smith, 53, inhabits a one-room rubble-stone house built in 1894, one of three buildings she bought in 2001 for $149,000. Poetically lovely, they are also impossible to fill with heat, presenting Ms. Smith with a living choice she has embraced with gusto, throwing open windows and doors year-round, and using her own body as a solar panel when the sun shines.

“The best thing about living in a non-isothermal house” — isothermal means “constant in temperature” — “is that you’re able to walk from indoors to out of doors all the time,” she said. “What limits us is only our fear of the cold.”

At 7,000 feet, Ridgway offers some seriously scary weather, “five months of full-on winter where there is snow on the ground,” she said, with temperatures well below zero. Ms. Smith’s house is typically 10 degrees higher; she can warm herself beside her wood-burning stove, but the heat it generates goes right out the wood-slat roof.

While Ms. Smith may seem preternaturally rugged, she said anyone could live in the extremes she inhabits; it’s just a matter of the right clothing (she would like to design a line of indoor rough wear). “I don’t think people know how to dress for the cold, and that’s the first issue. What’s right for ski wear is not right for living indoors.”

She likes her LaCrosse boots and fleece pants, but the sleeves of her down jacket get in her way when she’s washing dishes, and make an annoying swishing noise, she said. (Like some other heat-eschewing folks, Ms. Smith keeps her pipes from freezing by letting the faucets drip, 15 to 30 drips a minute; any more than that causes an ice buildup and the dishes freeze in the sink. She has also rigged her toilet to run constantly.)

“My stone buildings are so beautiful, I love living in them,” she said. “There’s a whole aesthetic of living close to natural materials.”

Friends do worry, she admitted, and some romantic partners haven’t been hardy enough. Dinner parties are out, too, “but I’ve never been much of an entertainer,” she said.

Still, she added, “I’m the one, when the electricity goes out, who can keep going. We shouldn’t have to disrupt our lives because our houses are cold. I think it scares people, too. People don’t want to relate to me living in the cold.”

Mr. Ladda on the Lower East Side doesn’t entertain, either, but he occasionally has overnight guests.

“I had Japanese friends here once,” he said. “And when they left, they bowed and said solemnly, ‘We are very sorry you have to live this way.’ ”

By JENNIFER STEINHAUER
NY Times Published: January 19, 2010

OF the many horrors that lurk in the e-mail in-box of a working parent — dental reminders, Facebook invitations involving some weird farm, “thoughts” from the boss — nothing quite rivals the snack request.

Not a month goes by without someone somewhere asking me to serve up some snack for an event that one of my children will attend and that, generally speaking, will not last more than 90 minutes.

During a single week in December, I was pinged with requests to bring a little food for one play rehearsal, three religious-school events, a school administrative meeting, two soccer games and two multicultural festivals. (O.K., so multicultural day is one of my favorite events of the school year. Step away from the Sichuan dumplings, kids, Hannah’s mom is moving in! Still.)

The obligations to bring a little something to eat extend to the adult world, too — I’ve baked for PTA meetings and child-rearing seminars that I didn’t even attend. But when it comes to American boys and girls, snacks seem both mandatory and constant. Apparently, we have collectively decided as a culture that it is impossible for children to take part in any activity without simultaneously shoving something into their pie holes.

“Children used to come home, change into play clothes and go outside and play with other children,” said Joanne Ikeda, a nutritionist emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. “There were not snack machines, and the gas stations only sold gas. Now there are just so many more opportunities to snack and so many activities after school to have snacks.”

Between 1977 and 2002, the percent of the American population eating three or more snacks a day increased to 42 percent from 11 percent, according to a large study of American nutritional habits conducted by the Agriculture Department with the Department of Health and Human Services.

Further, researchers found, the percent of children surveyed who said they had eaten three meals on the previous day went down, while those who had had a snack went up more than 40 percent.

“None of this trend has reversed,” said Rhonda Sebastian, a nutritionist with the Agricultural Research Service, the unit of the Agriculture Department that participated in the survey. (The data for 2008 exists but the snacking component has not yet been analyzed.) “Food is everywhere now. It is part of everything.” I began to wonder how other parents see all this extracurricular eating, so I asked around a bit. Apparently, I am not the only one being driven crazy.

“It has all just gotten out of hand,” said Sean O’Neill, an illustrator and father of two in Chicago. Mr. O’Neill wonders why snacks must be served at every sporting event, even those taking place at 10 a.m. or an hour before lunch.

“The kids are playing baseball, they are covered in Chicago Park District dirt and then they eat a handful of fruit bites,” he said. “It’s pretty disgusting.”

Some of the moms I see around the school corridors and the soccer field told me they felt backed into a corner by the omnipresence of snacks.

Once a week, Vivian Zachary’s 6-year-old son, Joel, goes dashing for the vending machine at the gym after his gymnastics class ends at 5 p.m. “Last week it was a Fruit Roll-Up and a can of 7Up,” Ms. Zachary wrote in an e-mail message. “I’m not sure why I let this go on, and I often think that if I were a better parent, or at least more able to tolerate incessant complaining, I would let him buy the snacks but not actually consume them until after dinner. But I have already established the pattern (the ‘rule’ in Joel’s mind), so there’s no going back now.”

The spread of snacking has been abetted by parental guilt, the much-lamented death of the family dinner, over-scheduled children. Kara Nielsen, a “trendologist” at the Center for Culinary Development, a brand development company in San Francisco, cites the proliferation of activities, from soccer to chess club to tutoring sessions, that now fill children’s afternoons.

“You’ve got this desire for parents to control their kid’s diet,” Ms. Nielsen added, “and add this with this increase in activities, so it has become up to the parents to provide the snacks. And the marketers have picked up on this.”

Indeed, this nation consumed $68.1 billion in packaged snack foods in 2008, up from $60 billion in 2004, according to Packaged Facts, a consumer research group. One of the newest concepts — and among the best sellers, Ms. Nielsen said — are 100-calorie packs of cookies and other junk foods. They are targeted at parents, who are always looking for something to toss into the backpack for after-school time.

Fast-food restaurants are in on the act, and over the last two years have begun to introduce their own mini-meals, like the McDonald’s Snack Wrap. According to the Agriculture Department, American children get 40 percent of their calories from food of poor nutritional quality.

What is especially baffling where I live, in Los Angeles, is how often the kind of parental paranoia that obsesses about school ratings, vaccines and myriad imagined plagues is matched by utter disregard for the nutritional downsides of mowing down Fruit by the Foot every afternoon at 4. Rarely do I see a parent show up on the soccer field with a homemade snack, or even a bag of carrots. Oreos are the post-game snack of choice, even in sports leagues dominated by upper-income parents.

“There is definitely a big disconnect,” said Dr. Howard Taras, a pediatrics professor at the University of California, San Diego, who specializes in community and school health policies. “I think there is this natural tendency among parents to not want their child to go hungry. It is more difficult for them to think about the long-term outlook for the child.”

Ellyn Satter, a dietitian and family therapist, thinks there is little point in worrying too much about what children are eating — unless it is “pure sugar,” like juice, she said — or how much, because children self-regulate portions. The key, she said, is to end grazing. “The parents’ job is to do the what, when and where of feeding,” she said, “and it is up to the children to do the how much and whether of eating. In order to have successful family meals, you have to structure the snacks.”

Carolynne Dyner sees the purpose of snacks for her children, Quinn, who is 7, and Sadie, 5, through a fairly simple prism. “To stave off tantrums, of course,” she said. From their days caring for infants, she said, parents are conditioned to be prepared for a sudden attack of hunger. And so she keeps her car and purse amply packed with pretzels, baggies of Cinnamon Life cereal, Goldfish crackers and Clif bars.

For her children, little bites between meals have in some ways supplanted the meals themselves. “They usually need a snack midmorning and midafternoon,” explained Ms. Dyner, who lives in Beverly Hills, Calif. “There may be a third snack, and this is usually due to the fact that our kids didn’t care much for what we provided for dinner, so now it is 7:30 and they are hungry. At this point we may give them a yogurt.”

Parents who give in too many times may find that snacks are the culinary equivalent of letting your 2-year-old sleep in your bed. “People get themselves into these habits, which they later regret tremendously,” said Ms. Ikeda, the nutritionist. “We do, as parents, make mistakes and then we either have to live with them or suffer the consequences in fixing them. It gets exhausting saying ‘no’ all the time.”

On the other hand, saying ‘yes’ can be tiring, too. I am happy to serve on any refreshment committee there is. I like to bake, and am far more efficient at that than at any other classroom obligation. Just ask the parent liaison for my younger child’s classroom, whose response to my failure to properly manage a canned goods drive was only slightly less frosty than that of a rogue nation asked to cease nuclear development.

But a person can’t just bake whole-wheat banana bread and call it a day. Here was the memo I received concerning my recent snack obligation for a play practice. “Please note, we have the following allergies in mini players: Peanuts, cashews, nuts, wheat, dairy, strawberries, milk, egg whites.”

Food allergies are a real problem. But did no one ponder the idea that perhaps the solution is for children to bring their own snacks?

Or to eat no snacks at all?

De Gustibus is an occasional forum for writers to employ opinion, argument or provocation in reflections on food or drink.

via

Thanks to Nate Lentz

By LOUIS UCHITELLE
NY Times Published: January 18, 2010

The majestic steel beams of a soaring office tower beginning to rise from the ruins of the World Trade Center are a tribute to American resilience, but also a marker in the decline of yet another industry. Not an inch of imported glass went into the two lost towers, built 40 years ago. The lower floors of the new one will soon be sheathed in Chinese glass.

Gerry Hool, Carleton plant manager, says staffing will never return to the old level, mainly because more glass is imported.

The decline of glassmaking in America started gradually in the 1990s and accelerated during the Great Recession. What’s more, the big companies, like Corning and Guardian Industries, say that even as the economy improves, they are unlikely to bring domestic employment and production back to prerecession levels. Imports, for one thing, inhibit sales. And bigger profits lie abroad, so they are channeling investment and expansion to their overseas factories.

“Those who are looking through the rearview mirror, waiting for the glass industry in this country to come back, should know it isn’t going to come back, not the way it was,” Russell J. Ebeid, Guardian’s chairman, said in an interview.

With the nation’s unemployment rate hovering at 10 percent, the possibility of stemming job losses holds considerable appeal. So, in an argument likely to be repeated if unemployment persists at record high levels, some are pressing the Obama administration to offer protection for the nation’s glassworkers by raising existing tariffs on imported glass, particularly from China, as is happening on steel and tires. That action or something similar is supported by the United Steelworkers and also by many of the small manufacturers that operate more than 300 factories in this country.

They say that Chinese glassmakers are competitive in the American marketplace only because they have received giant subsidies in recent years from the Chinese government. The subsidies offset, among other things, the high cost of shipping heavy glass — auto windshields, for example — across the Pacific.

“We definitely need to put tariffs on some of the glass coming from China,” said Tim Tuttle, chairman of the glass industry department of the United Steelworkers. Overall industry employment has declined 30 percent over the last nine years, to fewer than 95,000 workers, 15,000 of them unionized.

The Obama administration shies away from identifying specific industries, like tires, steel and now glass, for special protection from imports. “The president wants to help create the economic conditions such that broad new industries can evolve consistent with his priorities, particularly in the area of clean energy,” said Jared Bernstein, chief economist to the vice president.

That caution reflects the free trade thinking of many mainstream economists and trade experts. They contend that in a global economy that has minimized tariff barriers and subsidies, each country will concentrate — if not immediately, then over the long run — on the goods and services it is best at producing, and trade them for what other countries are best at producing, thus maximizing output across the globe.

The United Steelworkers endorses free trade, but insists that in the cases of tires, steel pipe and now glass, Chinese government subsidies have undercut the market forces on which free trade depends.

Senator Sherrod Brown, Democrat of Ohio, still a big glassmaking state, takes the argument a step further. Given the deep symbolism of the new World Trade Center tower, he considers awarding the glass contracts to the lowest bidders, as the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey did last year, a blow to national pride.

“Imagine China,” he said in an interview, “building a huge structure intended to be an important national symbol and importing glass from the United States to build it. There is no way the Chinese would do that.”

Beijing Glass won in the bidding to supply the opaque, blast-resistant glass for the first 20 floors of the new tower, which is now just seven stories of steel beams, a stub along the Lower Manhattan skyline, and still dwarfed by the huge cranes putting the framework in place.

While the Steelworkers and many smaller companies seek protection, the big glassmakers generally do not. Some, with factories in China, have benefited from the subsidies, and also from the economies of scale that operating in China make possible: access to a rapidly growing market there and competitively priced exports to the United States.

In the Trade Center bidding, Guardian won as the supplier of the intricately layered glass for the upper 85 floors. It will soon make that glass at a factory in Carleton, Mich. But even as company executives described this victory in interviews this month, they sent out a news release noting a greater one.

Guardian manufactured all the glass — more than two million square feet of it — for the newly opened 160-story Burj Khalifa in Dubai, the world’s tallest building. That glass came not from America, but from Guardian’s factories in Germany and Luxembourg. The company now has 36 plants abroad, employing 9,000 people, up from 6,500 workers in 2005 and, for the first time, surpassing the number of Guardian employees in this country.

“Nearly three-quarters of our sales are outside the United States,” Mr. Ebeid said. “That has been steadily increasing since 1981, when we were totally a domestic supplier.”

Like many glass factories in the United States — those that have survived the recession — the Guardian plant in Carleton is operating at less than 85 percent of capacity, producing long strips of coated “float” glass from which windows, glassware, fiber optics, auto windshields, solar panels and other glass products are fashioned. Employment has fallen to 410 people, from 520 as the recession was getting under way in January 2008.

The work force will not return to the old level, says Gerry Hool, the plant manager. That is partly because of new efficiencies, but also because imported glass now accounts for nearly 24 percent of domestic consumption, up from 21 percent just four years ago. What’s more, the industry’s biggest customers — automakers and home builders — are not likely to raise production to the levels reached during the housing bubble and before the credit crisis.

“Maybe in better times we’ll get back to 450 workers,” Mr. Hool said.

Some pockets of strength remain. Beer and wine bottles are made in this country, at automated plants. And from two factories in the Ohio Valley, operating 24/7, the Anchor Hocking Company churns out baking dishes, drinking glasses, glass canisters, glass candleholders and glass meter covers, counting on customer service, like just-in-time delivery to Wal-Mart, to stave off imports. Anchor Hocking has no factories abroad.

But elsewhere in the Ohio Valley, dozens of companies that once made glass for the furniture industry, concentrated just to the south in the Carolinas, are gone. As furniture-making moved offshore, so did the glass that went with it: glass tabletops, for example, and glass for framed mirrors.

Colored glass is another victim. A hundred companies in the valley once made “art” glass — figurines, flower vases, lamps, perfume bottles, bowls and woven glass baskets — employing hundreds of skilled glass blowers and pressers. They are mostly gone. Many were family-owned enterprises, like Fenton Art Glass in Williamstown, W.Va., a rare survivor run by George W. Fenton, a grandson of the founder.

“We make a product that no one needs; we are purely discretionary,” Mr. Fenton said, noting that the recession devastated discretionary spending.

Employment at the Fenton plant is down to 125 people from a peak of 700 in 2000. Imports are also a problem, but Mr. Fenton, rather than fight them, has become an importer himself, reselling what he purchases abroad — a sideline that now contributes 10 percent of revenue.

“I need some relief from government to stay in business,” Mr. Fenton said, referring to the tariff proposal, “but I’m not sure it is the government’s role to keep me in business.

Photo booth: Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe in 1969.

By JANET MASLIN
NY Times Published: January 17, 2010

Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe were both born in 1946, at a time when “the iceman” and “the last of the horse-drawn wagons” could still be seen on city streets. Ms. Smith points this out at the start of her tenderly evocative memoir, “Just Kids,” but there is even stronger evidence that this book dates back a long time.

JUST KIDS

By Patti Smith

Illustrated. 279 pages. Ecco. $27.
Related
Times Topics: Patti Smith | Robert Mapplethorpe

“Just Kids” captures a moment when Ms. Smith and Mapplethorpe were young, inseparable, perfectly bohemian and completely unknown, to the point in which a touristy couple in Washington Square Park spied them in the early autumn of 1967 and argued about whether they were worth a snapshot. The woman thought they looked like artists. The man disagreed, saying dismissively, “They’re just kids.”

How hard is it for Ms. Smith to turn back the clock to this innocent time? Hard. Exactly as hard as it was for Bob Dylan to describe himself as a wide-eyed young newcomer to Greenwich Village in “Chronicles, Volume I,” a memoir that “Just Kids” deliberately resembles.

In describing the day that Mapplethorpe created his exquisitely androgynous image of her in white shirt, black pants and black jacket for the cover of her “Horses” album, she describes deliberately giving the jacket a rakish “Frank Sinatra style” fling over her shoulder. “I was full of references,” she says, invoking them explicitly throughout the book. A Patti Smith calendar would include Joan of Arc’s birthday, the day of the Guernica bombing and the day she, as a young bookstore clerk, sat among Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and Grace Slick in a bar feeling “an inexplicable sense of kinship with these people.”

Of all the artists who shaped Ms. Smith’s persona, Mr. Dylan is arguably the one she worshiped most. She describes the 19th-century poet Arthur Rimbaud, another of her heroes, as looking like the 20th-century Mr. Dylan, rather than seeing things the other way around. So it makes perfect sense for her to use a memoirist’s sleight of hand, as Mr. Dylan did, to recapture an eager, fervent and wondrously malleable young spirit. It also makes sense for her to cast off all verbal affectation and write in a strong, true voice unencumbered by the polarizing mannerisms of her poetry. This Patti Smith, like the one in Steven Sebring’s haunting 2008 documentary “Patti Smith: Dream of Life,” is a newly mesmerizing figure, not quite the one her die-hard fans used to know.

In “Just Kids” Ms. Smith writes of becoming pregnant at 19 (“I was humbled by nature”) in New Jersey, giving up her baby and heading to New York for a fresh start. Describing herself as “I, the country mouse,” she writes of heading to Brooklyn to visit friends and discovering that those friends had moved away.

In a back bedroom of their former apartment she encountered Mapplethorpe for the first time: “a sleeping youth cloaked in light,” a beautiful young man who resembled a hippie shepherd at a time when Ms. Smith had been contemptuously described as looking like “Dracula’s daughter.”

Thus fate introduced Ms. Smith and Mapplethorpe, who would become roommates, soul mates, friends, lovers and muses. Strictly speaking they were never starving artists in a garret, but the romanticism and mythmaking of “Just Kids,” and their tenancy in the tiniest room at the Chelsea Hotel, brings them pretty close to that ideal.

They went to museums able to afford only one ticket. (The one who saw the exhibition would describe it to the one who waited outside.) They went to Coney Island, able to afford only one hot dog. (Ms. Smith got the sauerkraut.) They loved the same totems and ornaments and flourishes; they valued the same things, though in different ways. “We were both praying for Robert’s soul,” Ms. Smith writes of Mapplethorpe’s frank ambition — especially when he fell under the influence of Warhol, someone she deeply mistrusted — “he to sell it and I to save it.” She goes on to suggest caustically that it was his prayers that were answered.

But much of “Just Kids” unfolds before Mapplethorpe did the taboo-busting, shock-laden photographic work for which he is best remembered. (“I admired him for it, but I could not comprehend the brutality,” Ms. Smith writes of his sadomasochistic imagery.) And it occurs before his illness. (He died of AIDS in 1989.) Of the two of them it was Ms. Smith who made her mark first. Like “Chronicles,” “Just Kids” carries its author to the verge of fame but stops right there on the brink, so that its innocence is never compromised by circumstances too surreal or hagiographic for the reader. This book achieves its aura of the sacrosanct by insisting that the later, more doomy and fraught part of Ms. Smith’s life story belongs elsewhere.

It’s possible to come away from “Just Kids” with an intact image of the title’s childlike kindred spirits who listened to Tim Hardin’s delicate love songs, wondered if they could afford the extra 10 cents for chocolate milk and treasured each geode, tambourine or silver skull they shared, never wanting what they couldn’t have or unduly caring what the future might bring. If it sometimes sounds like a fairy tale, it also conveys a heartbreakingly clear idea of why Ms. Smith is entitled to tell one.

So she enshrines her early days with Mapplethorpe this way: “We gathered our colored pencils and sheets of paper and drew like wild, feral children into the night, until, exhausted, we fell into bed.” They sound like Hansel and Gretel, living in a state of shared delight, blissfully unaware of what awaited on the path ahead.

Just Kids
By Patti Smith

January 19, 2010
Reviewed by James Parker

I’d say it’s about time that somebody did for the Catholics what Steven Beeber, in 2007’s The Heebie Jeebies at CBGB’s, did for the Jews. Punk rock, argued Beeber, especially New York punk rock, is a Jewish thing — in support of which contention he adduced the wit of Lenny Bruce, the poetics of Lou Reed, the dialectic of the Ramones (trust me, there was one), and the complex, fabricated libido of Blondie. Pace Beeber, there was another socio-religious identity at work in New York’s 1970s underculture: Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe, like Jim Carroll and Andy Warhol, were tribally Catholic. (As of course was sufferin’ Jack Kerouac, the grandaddy of them all, with his sacramental visions of homo viator.) And after reading Just Kids, Smith’s memoir of the life she and Mapplethorpe shared in pursuit of their respective vocations, you’ll be aware that this is something more than a coincidence.

Can anyone beat Patti Smith for rocking-ness? I imagine some white-haired professor or illuminatus, three hundred years hence, being asked by his curious students to summarize the brief twentieth-century cultural phenomenon known as “rock’n’roll.” “Rock’n’roll?” he says, pleased. “Well, it couldn’t be simpler, luckily for us. It begins and ends with Patti Smith’s ‘Rock’n’Roll Nigger’”. A snap of the fingers, a hologram buzzes to life — Patti mid-air in 3-D, the grave stoic head on the electrically scrawny body, one shoulder exposed, spitting “Baby was a black sheep, Baby was a whore! You know she got big, well, she’s gonna get bigg-UH!…” He beams about him. The class is agog. The case is made.

And yet Just Kids is about as un-rock’n’roll as it’s possible for a book to be while still including an appearance by Gregory Corso. (“Gregory lit a cigarette and read from my pile of abandoned poems, drifting off, making a little burn mark on the arm of the chair. I poured some of my Nescafé on it.”) The book is an act of recall in the Augustinian mode, closer to Thomas Merton’s Seven Storey Mountain or Thérèse of Lisieux’s Story of a Soul than to, I don’t know, David Lee Roth’s Crazy From The Heat. The language is solemn, every word weighed, and the mood devout, even if Smith’s saints and martyrs are a gang of heretical Romantic burnouts. Arthur Rimbaud, in particular, is a supernatural consolation to the young Patti as she struggles on the assembly lines of 1960s South Jersey. “Rimbaud held the keys to a mystical language that I devoured even as I could not fully decipher it. My unrequited love for him was as real to me as anything I had experienced. At the factory where I had labored with a hard-edged, illiterate group of women, I was harassed in his name.”

Arriving in Manhattan in the summer of 1967, penniless and refusing to take off her raincoat, Smith meets the young Robert Mapplethorpe, all charm. They bond over an eighteen-dollar Persian necklace: Smith compares it to a scapula, prompting Mapplethorpe to ask if she’s Catholic. “No,” replies Smith, “I just like Catholic things.” Mapplethorpe, an ex-altar boy, confides that he used to love swinging the censer. And so begin two decades of spiritual comradeship: Smith and Mapplethorpe, embryos in New York, fall in love. They bounce around the underground for ages, evolving away, Smith struggling with her poetry and songs, “meditations on the death of Mayakovsky and ruminations about Bob Dylan,” Mapplethorpe struggling mainly with himself. Watching Jim Morrison do his thing with the Doors one night, Smith finds herself not transported but unexpectedly sober, “in a state of cold hyperawareness.” From out of her then-anonymity she appraises Morrison; she understands him. “I felt both kinship and contempt for him.” It will be years before she discovers that she herself is a rock’n’roll star – but Just Kids is full of these auguries.

Mapplethorpe makes things, he does drawings, he pursues obsessions: occultism, gay magazines. On a slow Sunday afternoon he takes a soldering iron to the groin of a Madonna. He discovers hustling and photography at more or less the same time: the camera’s lens is freighted thereafter with his trademark heavy eroticism, flesh-worship thickly coiled. One night Smith comes home to find him in the talons of a bad LSD trip, “staring into an oval mirror, flanked by a black whip and a devil’s mask he had spray-painted months before… The devil was gaining on him, morphing his features, which like the mask were distorted and blood red.”

Smith, meanwhile, picking up confidence, picking up musicians, is working towards her own initiatory piece of blasphemy. “Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine…”: the shivering first line of 1975’s Horses (cover shot by Mapplethorpe). She calls it “a declaration of existence.” And Rimbaud and Corso and Mayakovsky, and the skittering prosody of Bob Dylan, and the drunken tremblings of Jack Kerouac, and her muttering, praying girlhood with its “small torrent of words” are all united at last in her style, her “babelogue.”

Robert Mapplethorpe died of AIDS in 1989, by which point Smith was deep into semi-retirement and her marriage to Fred “Sonic” Smith, ex-guitarist for the MC5. If one senses at moments in Just Kids her concern that a destructive acceleration had overtaken his life, and perhaps imperiled his soul, the two were nonetheless friends until the end. Passionate friends, which is really the defining image of this somber and rather lovely book: two strange Catholic children, quite un-at-home in the world, treating each other with heroic tenderness, heroic generosity.

Link to Book

Alfred Lomas of LA Gang Tours, which promises to take tourists to “high-profile gang areas.”

By RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD
NY Times Published: January 15, 2010

LOS ANGELES — The tour organizer received assurances, he says, from four gangs that they would not harass the bus when it passed through their turf. Paying customers must sign releases warning of potential danger. And after careful consideration, it was decided not to have residents shoot water guns at the bus and sell “I Got Shot in South Central” T-shirts.

Borrowing a bit from the Hollywood star tours, the grit of the streets and a dash of hype, LA Gang Tours is making its debut on Saturday, a 12-stop, two-hour journey through what its organizer calls “the history and origin of high-profile gang areas and the top crime-scene locations” of South Los Angeles. By Friday afternoon, the 56-seat coach was nearly sold out.

On the right, Los Angeles’s biggest jail, “the unofficial home to 20,000 gang members in L.A.,” as the tour Web site puts it. Over there, the police station that in 1965 served as the National Guard’s command post in the Watts riots. Visit the large swath of concrete riverbed taken over by graffiti taggers, and later, drop in at a graffiti workshop where, for the right price, a souvenir T-shirt or painting can be yours.

Alfred Lomas, 45, a former gang member and the creator of the tour ($65, lunch included), said this drive-by was about educating people on city life, while turning any profits into microloans and other initiatives aimed at providing gang members jobs.

But aside from its unusual logistical challenges — the liability waiver describes the tour as “inherently dangerous” and warns of the risk of death — the venture has also generated debate about its appropriateness. Chicago has a tour of Al Capone sites and Las Vegas has one devoted to the mob — but this gangland lore is still happening.

“Everybody says we are the gang capital of the world, and that is certainly true, no denying that,” said the Rev. Gregory Boyle, who has spent decades trying to steer people out of gangs into legitimate work. “It’s hard to gloss over that. But there are two extremes we always need to avoid. One is demonizing the gang member, and the other extreme is romanticizing the gang.”

Others fear that the tour, which initially is to be conducted monthly, may conjure up the so-called slum tours of shantytowns and impoverished areas of Rio de Janeiro and Soweto, South Africa, which bring tourists close, but not too close, to misery, with questionable benefit.

Jan Perry, the Los Angeles councilwoman who represents a large area covered by the tour and conducts her own tours for prospective business investors, said she was wary of the endeavor because its gang connotations could discourage investment.

“It should focus on deliverables, and I consider a deliverable a grocery store,” she said.

But Mr. Lomas’s supporters, including associates of the Dream Center, a Christian-based social service center where Mr. Lomas works driving a food truck for the needy, said the tour would raise awareness of needs in depressed communities.

Kevin Malone, a former general manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers who came to know Mr. Lomas through the center and is one of the financial backers of the project, said he might accept the criticism “if it was somebody other than” Mr. Lomas.

“But I know the guy’s heart,” he said. “He is not taking anything out. All he is doing is serving and giving. If that is exploitation, I hope somebody does that to me.”

In true tour-business form, LA Gang Tours has its share of hype, starting with its rather imprecise name.

The odds of seeing an actual gang member on the street at the appointed hour — Saturday morning — are low, though Mr. Lomas said four or five members will be on the bus to keep watch and offer their stories. Many of the sites, like the location of the Symbionese Liberation Army shootout in 1974, take a lot of explaining to link with contemporary gangs (Mr. Lomas’s research was done on the Internet and by talking to old-timers.)

If the gang territory highlighted seems heavy on Mr. Lomas’s old stomping grounds in the Florence district, it is because it overlaps with turf prominent in the history of gangs, including his own, Florencia 13, one of the largest and most notorious.

Mr. Lomas rejected initial plans to drive through two housing projects, a concession, he said, to critics concerned it would be insensitive.

To some, it is no wonder that, in a city known to have more street gangs than any other, as well as a close association with theme parks, somebody would come along and tap the tourism potential of gang culture.

“What the heck, market what you got,” said Celeste Fremon, who writes the criminal justice blog Witness L.A. and has studied the city’s gangs.

Although she disputed whether several of the sites had a solid gang association, she said, “if it makes money for a good cause, more power to them.”

Mr. Lomas, who wears long-sleeved shirts to conceal his old gang tattoos, including one slithering up his neck over the collar, makes no apologies for what he calls an unconventional attack on the gang problem. He has little patience for traditional gang counselors and programs that he believes have done little to curtail gang membership.

“The war on gangs in L.A. is like the Vietnam War,” he said, giving an unofficial preview tour to a reporter and photographer. “The Americans thought they had all the answers and were very arrogant in their approach, and assumed they would defeat these poor peasant people. Like that, this is actually an unconventional war and you are going to have to approach it in an unconventional way.”

Thanks to Jonathan Maghen

With songs, psychics, walkie-talkies and camouflage, a sick coyote is tracked and saved.

By Steve Lopez
Los Angeles Times
January 17, 2010

The mysterious gray, hairless animal was first spotted last summer lurking in backyard gardens, sacked out on a chaise lounge and strolling down narrow lanes.

Was it a chupacabra?

A strange dog?

The missing link?

Soon, all of Laurel Canyon was abuzz. For several weeks starting in August, they tracked the animal, with residents communicating by walkie-talkie because cellphones don’t work in the canyon. But the creature, which turned out to be a sick coyote, was too wily.

In those early days, the battalion included two animal control officers, a veterinarian and an off-duty cop who was armed with tranquilizer guns and wearing camouflage, with leaves and twigs poking out of his hat. Three animal “communicators” were consulted to learn more about the coyote’s movements and thoughts.

Yes, it’s a little different in Laurel Canyon.

Dana Miller of Montrose was one of the animal psychics called in to make contact with the elusive beast, which they were calling Rosie. Miller told me last week that she helps people find lost pets by making contact with the animals telepathically. By just looking at a picture of any animal, she said, she can talk to it.

“I personally have the ability to hear what they say.”

Hmmmm.

So what did Rosie say?

Miller kept a transcript of her conversations, which included this Q and A exchange:

“Q: Should we help?

“A: I am only one amidst a sea of many. I can’t believe anyone cares.”

Miller says she told Rosie to go into the trap and she wouldn’t be harmed.

Skip Haynes, who was involved in the search from the beginning, was the one in contact with Miller. He has a record label called Laurel Canyon Animal Co. and makes CDs for animals, such as the one titled “Songs to Make Dogs Happy.” Haynes said he uses “communicators” to tell him what music the dogs like.

Haynes said he’s a skeptic and can’t understand what the animal psychics are saying most of the time, but they’ve offered eerily canny observations about what kind of music animals like.

The person who first identified Rosie’s species wasn’t a psychic, though. It was Brenda Varvarigos of Valley Wildlife Care, a volunteer-run nonprofit that rescues and rehabilitates sick and injured native wildlife before releasing the animals back where they came from.

“I knew right away that it was a young coyote suffering from sarcoptic mange,” said Varvarigos, who was rescuing a barn owl from a swimming pool in the Valley when I called.

She said it’s common in local animals and a good example of the threat people pose to wildlife. She guesses the coyote’s mother fed her a rat that had been poisoned by a homeowner trying to exterminate rodents. So by poisoning rats and killing off the coyotes that hunt them, Varvarigos said, you may end up with more rats.

Varvarigos told residents that Rosie could be treated and returned to health if she were captured. But Varvarigos would have to lead the way, because you need a permit to go after a wild animal. They’d have to move quickly, she said, because the hairless Rosie was out and about in daylight only to stay warm, and she’d die when cold weather set in.

Through the fall, “it was almost like a military operation,” said Haynes, with neighbors manning traps and e-mails going out at every sighting.

Not everyone was committed to saving Rosie, Haynes said. Some wondered why they should bother, given how many pets are chomped by coyotes.

But Haynes was beginning to rethink his relationship with wildlife. He knew of neighbors who wanted to feed wild animals and others who wanted to shoot them on sight, and neither is the right thing to do, in his opinion.

Feeding them, as he learned from Varvarigos, can kill them in the end, because they’ll get the wrong food and lose their hunting instinct. And killing them seems absurd for people who have chosen to live in a densely wooded wildlife habitat.

“We have to learn how to live with them,” said Haynes, who found himself driving along curvy hilltops with bobcat meat, imported from Montana, for the traps. His girlfriend Rikki Poulis, a design director for the Grammy Awards, was also on patrol.

“You could say it became an obsession,” said Haynes, who recorded a song called “Coyote Girl” and played it while he drove me around.

He showed me the spots where animal control officers, the vet and the off-duty cop had stalked Rosie with tranquilizer guns. Also the spot, near the home of Laurel Canyon Assn. President Cassandra Barrere, a script supervisor, where the cop sat in a lawn chair, dressed as a bush.

“I’d go out to get the mail and see him all camouflaged,” said Barrere, who always knew when Rosie was near because her pets scampered to the window to look outside.

Rosie brought the community together, Haynes and Barrere agree.

“It was something from the heart, and the community was engaged,” said Barrere.

Weeks into the hunt, they’d caught raccoons, skunks and birds in their traps, but no Rosie. Finally, in late November, Haynes checked the trap in his garden and there she was.

Varvarigos took Rosie to the vet, where she was treated and released to Varvarigos’ rehab center in the Valley. She now occupies a sprawling outdoor pen in the Santa Monica Mountains. Her hair has grown back, she’s gained weight and she’s wary of humans, all good signs. If she can master hunting, Varvarigos said, she’ll be returned to Laurel Canyon.

And that’s pretty much the end of the story for Rosie, but I’m not done yet with the animal communicator.

At the risk of sounding self-serving, I asked Miller an important scientific question.

“Can you tell some raccoons to stay away from my yard?”

It’s possible, Miller said, but I’d have to send her a photo of the relentless, inconsiderate, lawn-digging critters.

I’ll be out there tonight with my camera.

Meanwhile, good night, Rosie, and good luck.

Ryue Nishizawa / Moriyama House from 0300TV on Vimeo.

Thanks to Nate Lentz again

A kindergarten in the shape of a oval with a perimeter of 183m,
made for 500 children. It is conceived as a single village.
The interior is an integrated space softly partitioned with furniture.
Projecting through the roof deck are three preserved zelkova trees 25m in height.

Tezuka Architecture

Thanks to Nate Lentz

By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Times Published: January 14, 2010

The official Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission — the group that aims to hold a modern version of the Pecora hearings of the 1930s, whose investigations set the stage for New Deal bank regulation — began taking testimony on Wednesday. In its first panel, the commission grilled four major financial-industry honchos. What did we learn?

Well, if you were hoping for a Perry Mason moment — a scene in which the witness blurts out: “Yes! I admit it! I did it! And I’m glad!” — the hearing was disappointing. What you got, instead, was witnesses blurting out: “Yes! I admit it! I’m clueless!”

O.K., not in so many words. But the bankers’ testimony showed a stunning failure, even now, to grasp the nature and extent of the current crisis. And that’s important: It tells us that as Congress and the administration try to reform the financial system, they should ignore advice coming from the supposed wise men of Wall Street, who have no wisdom to offer.

Consider what has happened so far: The U.S. economy is still grappling with the consequences of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression; trillions of dollars of potential income have been lost; the lives of millions have been damaged, in some cases irreparably, by mass unemployment; millions more have seen their savings wiped out; hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, will lose essential health care because of the combination of job losses and draconian cutbacks by cash-strapped state governments.

And this disaster was entirely self-inflicted. This isn’t like the stagflation of the 1970s, which had a lot to do with soaring oil prices, which were, in turn, the result of political instability in the Middle East. This time we’re in trouble entirely thanks to the dysfunctional nature of our own financial system. Everyone understands this — everyone, it seems, except the financiers themselves.

There were two moments in Wednesday’s hearing that stood out. One was when Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase declared that a financial crisis is something that “happens every five to seven years. We shouldn’t be surprised.” In short, stuff happens, and that’s just part of life.

But the truth is that the United States managed to avoid major financial crises for half a century after the Pecora hearings were held and Congress enacted major banking reforms. It was only after we forgot those lessons, and dismantled effective regulation, that our financial system went back to being dangerously unstable.

As an aside, it was also startling to hear Mr. Dimon admit that his bank never even considered the possibility of a large decline in home prices, despite widespread warnings that we were in the midst of a monstrous housing bubble.

Still, Mr. Dimon’s cluelessness paled beside that of Goldman Sachs’s Lloyd Blankfein, who compared the financial crisis to a hurricane nobody could have predicted. Phil Angelides, the commission’s chairman, was not amused: The financial crisis, he declared, wasn’t an act of God; it resulted from “acts of men and women.”

Was Mr. Blankfein just inarticulate? No. He used the same metaphor in his prepared testimony in which he urged Congress not to push too hard for financial reform: “We should resist a response … that is solely designed around protecting us from the 100-year storm.” So this giant financial crisis was just a rare accident, a freak of nature, and we shouldn’t overreact.

But there was nothing accidental about the crisis. From the late 1970s on, the American financial system, freed by deregulation and a political climate in which greed was presumed to be good, spun ever further out of control. There were ever-greater rewards — bonuses beyond the dreams of avarice — for bankers who could generate big short-term profits. And the way to raise those profits was to pile up ever more debt, both by pushing loans on the public and by taking on ever-higher leverage within the financial industry.

Sooner or later, this runaway system was bound to crash. And if we don’t make fundamental changes, it will happen all over again.

Do the bankers really not understand what happened, or are they just talking their self-interest? No matter. As I said, the important thing looking forward is to stop listening to financiers about financial reform.

Wall Street executives will tell you that the financial-reform bill the House passed last month would cripple the economy with overregulation (it’s actually quite mild). They’ll insist that the tax on bank debt just proposed by the Obama administration is a crude concession to foolish populism. They’ll warn that action to tax or otherwise rein in financial-industry compensation is destructive and unjustified.

But what do they know? The answer, as far as I can tell, is: not much.

Ooga Boogais a concept shop vital to the creative life-blood of Los Angeles. It gathers an eclectic range of products. Spearheaded by Wendy Yao, Ooga Booga fosters a vibrant community of independent producers. For Swiss Institute, Yao installs a lounge in which one may read over 300 titles — from self to professionally published. The room contains contributions by:

38th Street, Alex Klein, Alex Olson, Alice Konitz, Amy Yao, Andrea Longacre-White, Andrew Jeffrey Wright, Apartamento, Art Since Summer of ’69, Arthure Ou, Asher Penn, B’Ling, Barry Johnston, Becca Albee, Benjamin Trogdon, Black Dog Publishing, Bookworks, Brian Kennon, Claudine Auguste, Cynthia Connolly, Cynthia Leung, David Benjamin Sherry, Dexter Sinister, Dorothee Perret, Drag City, Duncan Hamilton, Ethan Swan, Eva Svennung, Fillip, Form Content, Free Association Press, FR David, Frances Stark, Gloria Pedemonte, Goodiepal, Greene Naftali, Hanne Mugaas, Harsh Patel, Ingo Giezendanner, Isabel Asha Penzlien, Jim Drain, Joseph Mosconi, JRP, K8 Hardy, Leif Goldberg, Leopard Press, Lisa Farjam, Margaret Lee, Matt Wobensmith, Megawords, Melissa Ip, Michael & Lucena Valle-Rey, Mylinh Trieu Nguyen, Nick Relph + Oliver Payne, Nieves, Oliver Payne, Ooga Booga, Paige Johnston, Peres Projects, Picturebox, Phil Chang, Poppy Books, Primary Information, RE/Search publications, Semiotext(e), Slavs and Tatars, Sumi Ink Club, Taro Nettleton, Textfield, Ugly Duckling Presse, Wendy Yao, William E. Jones, and White Columns.

Swiss Institute
Ooga Booga Reading Room
1 December — 13 February 2010

via

Taylor Pugh in the glare of the news media on Monday.

By JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr.
NY Times Published: January 12, 2010

HOUSTON — A suburban Dallas school district has suspended a 4-year-old from his prekindergarten class because he wears his hair too long and does not want his parents to cut it.

The boy, Taylor Pugh, says he likes his hair long and curly. But on Monday night, the school board in Mesquite voted unanimously to enforce its ban on Beatles haircuts, much less anything approaching coiffures of bands like Led Zeppelin. School officials say the district’s dress code serves to limit distractions in the classroom.

No exception could be made for the pint-size rebel, who sat through the hearing with his hair in a ponytail, manifestly bored.

“It’s a trade-off,” said one board member, Gary Bingham, an insurance agent, in an interview. “Do the parents value his education more than they value a 4-year-old’s decision to make his own grooming choices?”

The boy’s parents, Delton Pugh and Elizabeth Taylor, have argued that it is unfair to punish Taylor for his longish locks; it suggests, they say, that the district cares more about appearances than education.

“I don’t think it’s right to hold a child down and force him to do something,” Mr. Pugh, a tattoo artist, told The Associated Press. “It’s not hurting him or affecting his education.”

The parents rejected a compromise proposed by the board under which they would braid his hair and pin it up.

Since Nov. 24, when his principal decreed that Taylor’s hair had grown too long, the boy has been sent to the library to study alone with a teacher’s aide. “They kicked me out of that place,” Taylor told a reporter on Dec. 17. “I miss my friends.”

His parents plan to appeal the school board ruling to the state education commissioner. In the meantime, school officials said they would continue to separate Taylor from other children.

St. Francis, 2010 (detail view)
Bronze. 76-1/2 x 47 x 18 inches

The Saints
9 January - 13 February 2010

Marc Foxx

January 14 - February 27, 2010

Opening Reception Thursday 6-8

Michael Kohn

By NICHOLAS WADE
NY Times Published: January 11, 2010

Walking through the Tai forest of Ivory Coast, Klaus Zuberbühler could hear the calls of the Diana monkeys, but the babble held no meaning for him.

That was in 1990. Today, after nearly 20 years of studying animal communication, he can translate the forest’s sounds. This call means a Diana monkey has seen a leopard. That one means it has sighted another predator, the crowned eagle. “In our experience time and again, it’s a humbling experience to realize there is so much more information being passed in ways which hadn’t been noticed before,” said Dr. Zuberbühler, a psychologist at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.

Do apes and monkeys have a secret language that has not yet been decrypted? And if so, will it resolve the mystery of how the human faculty for language evolved? Biologists have approached the issue in two ways, by trying to teach human language to chimpanzees and other species, and by listening to animals in the wild.

The first approach has been propelled by people’s intense desire — perhaps reinforced by childhood exposure to the loquacious animals in cartoons — to communicate with other species. Scientists have invested enormous effort in teaching chimpanzees language, whether in the form of speech or signs. A New York Times reporter who understands sign language, Boyce Rensberger, was able in 1974 to conduct what may be the first newspaper interview with another species when he conversed with Lucy, a signing chimp. She invited him up her tree, a proposal he declined, said Mr. Rensberger, who is now at M.I.T.

But with a few exceptions, teaching animals human language has proved to be a dead end. They should speak, perhaps, but they do not. They can communicate very expressively — think how definitely dogs can make their desires known — but they do not link symbolic sounds together in sentences or have anything close to language.

Better insights have come from listening to the sounds made by animals in the wild. Vervet monkeys were found in 1980 to have specific alarm calls for their most serious predators. If the calls were recorded and played back to them, the monkeys would respond appropriately. They jumped into bushes on hearing the leopard call, scanned the ground at the snake call, and looked up when played the eagle call.

It is tempting to think of the vervet calls as words for “leopard,” “snake” or “eagle,” but that is not really so. The vervets do not combine the calls with other sounds to make new meanings. They do not modulate them, so far as is known, to convey that a leopard is 10, or 100, feet away. Their alarm calls seem less like words and more like a person saying “Ouch!” — a vocal representation of an inner mental state rather than an attempt to convey exact information.

But the calls do have specific meaning, which is a start. And the biologists who analyzed the vervet calls, Robert Seyfarth and Dorothy Cheney of the University of Pennsylvania, detected another significant element in primates’ communication when they moved on to study baboons. Baboons are very sensitive to who stands where in their society’s hierarchy. If played a recording of a superior baboon threatening an inferior, and the latter screaming in terror, baboons will pay no attention — this is business as usual in baboon affairs. But when researchers concoct a recording in which an inferior’s threat grunt precedes a superior’s scream, baboons will look in amazement toward the loudspeaker broadcasting this apparent revolution in their social order.

Baboons evidently recognize the order in which two sounds are heard, and attach different meanings to each sequence. They and other species thus seem much closer to people in their understanding of sound sequences than in their production of them. “The ability to think in sentences does not lead them to speak in sentences,” Drs. Seyfarth and Cheney wrote in their book “Baboon Metaphysics.”

Some species may be able to produce sounds in ways that are a step or two closer to human language. Dr. Zuberbühler reported last month that Campbell’s monkeys, which live in the forests of the Ivory Coast, can vary individual calls by adding suffixes, just as a speaker of English changes a verb’s present tense to past by adding an “-ed.”

The Campbell’s monkeys give a “krak” alarm call when they see a leopard. But adding an “-oo” changes it to a generic warning of predators. One context for the krak-oo sound is when they hear the leopard alarm calls of another species, the Diana monkey. The Campbell’s monkeys would evidently make good reporters since they distinguish between leopards they have observed directly (krak) and those they have heard others observe (krak-oo).

Even more remarkably, the Campbell’s monkeys can combine two calls to generate a third with a different meaning. The males have a “Boom boom” call, which means “I’m here, come to me.” When booms are followed by a series of krak-oos, the meaning is quite different, Dr. Zuberbühler says. The sequence means “Timber! Falling tree!”

Dr. Zuberbühler has observed a similar achievement among putty-nosed monkeys that combine their “pyow” call (warning of a leopard) with their “hack” call (warning of a crowned eagle) into a sequence that means “Let’s get out of here in a real hurry.”

Apes have larger brains than monkeys and might be expected to produce more calls. But if there is an elaborate code of chimpanzee communication, their human cousins have not yet cracked it. Chimps make a food call that seems to have a lot of variation, perhaps depending on the perceived quality of the food. How many different meanings can the call assume? “You would need the animals themselves to decide how many meaningful calls they can discriminate,” Dr. Zuberbühler said. Such a project, he estimates, could take a lifetime of research.

Monkeys and apes possess many of the faculties that underlie language. They hear and interpret sequences of sounds much like people do. They have good control over their vocal tract and could produce much the same range of sounds as humans. But they cannot bring it all together.

This is particularly surprising because language is so useful to a social species. Once the infrastructure of language is in place, as is almost the case with monkeys and apes, the faculty might be expected to develop very quickly by evolutionary standards. Yet monkeys have been around for 30 million years without saying a single sentence. Chimps, too, have nothing resembling language, though they shared a common ancestor with humans just five million years ago. What is it that has kept all other primates locked in the prison of their own thoughts?

Drs. Seyfarth and Cheney believe that one reason may be that they lack a “theory of mind”; the recognition that others have thoughts. Since a baboon does not know or worry about what another baboon knows, it has no urge to share its knowledge. Dr. Zuberbühler stresses an intention to communicate as the missing factor. Children from the youngest ages have a great desire to share information with others, even though they gain no immediate benefit in doing so. Not so with other primates.

“In principle, a chimp could produce all the sounds a human produces, but they don’t do so because there has been no evolutionary pressure in this direction,” Dr. Zuberbühler said. “There is nothing to talk about for a chimp because he has no interest in talking about it.” At some point in human evolution, on the other hand, people developed the desire to share thoughts, Dr. Zuberbühler notes. Luckily for them, all the underlying systems of perceiving and producing sounds were already in place as part of the primate heritage, and natural selection had only to find a way of connecting these systems with thought.

Yet it is this step that seems the most mysterious of all. Marc D. Hauser, an expert on animal communication at Harvard, sees the uninhibited interaction between different neural systems as critical to the development of language. “For whatever reason, maybe accident, our brains are promiscuous in a way that animal brains are not, and once this emerges it’s explosive,” he said.

In animal brains, by contrast, each neural system seems to be locked in place and cannot interact freely with others. “Chimps have tons to say but can’t say it,” Dr. Hauser said. Chimpanzees can read each other’s goals and intentions, and do lots of political strategizing, for which language would be very useful. But the neural systems that compute these complex social interactions have not been married to language.

Dr. Hauser is trying to find out whether animals can appreciate some of the critical aspects of language, even if they cannot produce it. He and Ansgar Endress reported last year that cotton-top tamarins can distinguish a word added in front of another word from the same word added at the end. This may seem like the syntactical ability to recognize a suffix or prefix, but Dr. Hauser thinks it is just the ability to recognize when one thing comes before another and has little to do with real syntax.

“I’m becoming pessimistic,” he said of the efforts to explore whether animals have a form of language. “I conclude that the methods we have are just impoverished and won’t get us to where we want to be as far as demonstrating anything like semantics or syntax.”

Yet, as is evident from Dr. Zuberbühler’s research, there are many seemingly meaningless sounds in the forest that convey information in ways perhaps akin to language.

Thanks to Jonathan Maghen

cube model

cube sauna

cube hammock

cube at the fair

Daniel L. Wenger Cubes

December 20, 2009. Central California, CA (USA)
by Jamie McClellan and Bob Green

1. In a 1976 Surfer Magazine article you wrote, “each individual piece of surfing equipment exhibits a different set of strengths and weaknesses.” Most would agree with you, however, your definition of surfing equipment is likely to be broader than that of most people. What are your thoughts on the respective strengths and weaknesses of mats, bellyboards/paipos, and similar surf craft?

The strengths of prone ridden surf crafts are legend. They are simpler and more direct to ride. The learning curve is lightening quick. There is no heroic standing or “ego-based style” to either blur the wave riding experience — or displace it completely. They can be ridden in virtually any kind of wave. They can be paddled with just your arms, or with arms and flippers, or just flippers. Or you can even wade out and push into waves off the bottom with your feet!

They have the widest functional range of design and the widest range of potential materials as well. Look at what Greenough accomplished with his early flexible spoon kneeboards. Just because he rode boards that didn’t need to float, a whole world of opportunities opened up for him. His first flexible boards were created 45 years ago… and they are leading edge to this very day!

More importantly, mats/bellyboards/paipos/bodyboards transcend the age and experience and talent of the rider better than any surf craft. You, me, Nat Young, Kelly Slater… who can tell the difference from the beach? It’s purely a personal experience. How bitchin’ is that?

The drawbacks are really minor. I guess heavy crowds would be the biggest. That, and finding the right pair of fins.

2. You’ve been a surfboard shaper, fin designer, experimented with hulls, made hi-tech mats and pursued paths untravelled by many surfers. I’m particularly interested in exploring your involvement with prone-specific crafts (paipos, bellyboards of any sort, hulls/longboards meant to be ridden prone/kneeling, and of course mats and such).

Like most people my age (I’m in my late 50’s) I started out on inflatable rental mats as a youngster. And, like most kids, I thought that mats were the training wheel phase of the surfing world. Real surfers stood up on surfboards! That’s why we would pump out mats rock hard and try to stand up on them. But, I distinctly remember going down to the water the very first time I rode a stand up board, and immediately thinking that I wasn’t having as much fun. But, I wrote it off as the dues of being a real surfer. It was a few years before I realized that mats and belly boards were more fun for me on most days.

Seeing George Greenough ride mats at Rincon was a revelation, because here was a guy who could take the humblest of surf craft and out-surf (depending on your perspective) everyone else in the water. And this was at a time that whenever Rincon broke, the best surfers in California were there. The water was filled with hot surfers, and George could connect all three points with his $30 dollar Hodgeman raft, blowing past name guys like they were standing still. Just amazing. It gave me the impetus to keep riding a mat through my adolescent years… when my growing sense of ego might have otherwise diverted me. I guess that’s the true definition of a role model.

Even though I was immersed in mat riding, I became the first employee at Morey Boogie back in the early 70’s! I got a ring-side seat to see that phenomenon take place. I assembled the kits that Tom was producing, and sent them out. But, I never really got into body boarding, then or now. I’m not sure why. That said, it was fascinating to see hard core surfers from all over the world instantly accept the body board as a legitimate “alternative,” when mats and paipos were generally laughed off the beach. Go figure.

I’ve always dabbled in belly boards and paipo boards, because, as a surfboard shaper, there was a natural inclination to apply what I was learning about stand up boards to prone boards. It’s been a kind of an on-again, off-again thing however, because mat surfing has always been my first love. Belly boards were an alternative I wanted to explore, to see what I could come up with.

3. How many paipos/bellyboards do you estimate you’ve made over the years?

Not that many belly boards or paipos…maybe a dozen. But, you get a lot out of one craft. I remember one time, many years ago, Spyder Wills told me he that he rode a belly board for years and years before trying something else [see the Surfer Magazine article on Spyder Wills]. I was pretty young when he said that, and it took a few years to appreciate what he meant. It takes a long time to sort out what a belly board has to offer, even though it seems so simple on the surface.

And you can learn a lot from one board because there are so many ways to ride it correctly. Individual stand up boards have a much more limited range in how they are surfed, so they can be sussed out pretty quickly. Plus belly boards lasted a long time because, before leashes, you lost them less often than standup boards. And there were no knee or heel dents to ruin the deck. Plus they work well with a bit of weight, so they didn’t need to be made fragile.

4. When was the first belly board? Who was it made for or what type of wave was it intended for?

The first board I ever shaped, in the mid-60’s, was a belly board I made for myself. It was a project for wood shop. And it wasn’t a rounded off piece of ply wood either — although that would have been fine. It was shaped out of 2″ thick slab of pine, with rocker, s-deck taper, and round rails. 4 feet long and 20 inches wide. I wanted it to look like a small surfboard. It took the whole semester to finish it!

I had no specific intent for that board, it was just something to ride. I was surfing mats and a longboard at the time, and I thought it would be interesting to combine the pleasure of surfing prone with the solid shape of a longboard. I have no idea what happened to it, but I would give anything to have it back again!

5. Can you describe a bit of your personal progression in surfcraft? Did you start, as most did, on a rental raft? And has it now come full circle?

Yes, exactly. It’s odd you would ask that, because I went for a mat surf this afternoon, and it dawned on me while I was out in the water that I’m only a few years away from 50 years of mat riding. I guess that qualifies as being full circle!

Even though I’ve been heavily involved with conventional stand up surfing as a surfer and as a shaper, riding prone has always held a fascination for me. It almost has the purity of bodysurfing, but with added planing ability. Just being down in the water and using swim fins makes it a blast. Plus you can travel so much more easily.

Belly boards and mats have influenced my stand up boards, for sure. Standing on the tail of a surfboard and weilding the nose back and forth seems stupid to me. I like the “flush” style of wave riding… with the nose down on the water, on the verge of pearling, but not quite. And taking the trim line across the wave. So I was attracted to a trimming style of stand up surfing from the beginning, because of mat riding and belly boards. Plus I’ve always been a minimalist when it came to fins on surfboards, because mats and paipos used their rails to hold in, and belly boards tended to have very small fins.

6. I believe you have also made an “El Paipo Grande.” What is the story behind this board and what are it’s dimensions and design features?

The “El Paipo Grande” was inspired by Richard Safady, a good friend and one of my favorite surfers in the water. He used to ride Greg Liddle displacement hull boards standing up. But in the 80’s, he started to ride his stand up boards on his knees. Then in the 90’s he started riding them lying down! A lot of his friends freaked. (One guy wanted to stage an intervention! Seriously.) The speed Richard could generate laying down was amazing, even on tiny waves. Roger Kelly, another really good surfer, started riding his own stand up hulls laying down around that time, and really got into it.
El Paipo Grande

We finally decided to build Roger an arm paddle board that was dedicated to being ridden laying down. The deck was scooped out a bit, and the hull was deeper throughout the back half of the board than a stand up board. It was 8′8′’ x 23 1/4″. Around 3″ thick. It turned out to be one of Roger’s two favorite boards of all time. And, El Paipo Grande is a terrible board to ride standing up… which I think is interesting. It kind of confirms that really is a belly board, not a hybrid or a compromise.

I watched Roger surf Malibu one evening after he had been riding EPG for a few months and really had it dialed in, and it was memorizing. He would paddle into waves way up the point, just like he was on a conventional stand up board, then he would pull himself so far forward that his head was maybe 18″ back from the tip of the nose. The hull in the bottom would draw the board up into the pocket, and he would just fly across these 3-4 foot waves with his head brushing the texture of the lip of the wave the whole way across. Just wailing across the point, wave after wave. No one would drop in on him, he was going too fast. And this was at Malibu!
Roger Kelly on El Paipo Grande (EPG)

7. What other bellyboards have you made?

As I mentioned earlier, I’ve made about a dozen of them over the years, and I can’t remember them all clearly. Most of them have been variations of either the classic Greenough kneeboard hull, or Greg Liddle’s hulls. The Liddle style hulls trim well, and move across walls very quickly, while the Greenough hulls want to carve off the bottom to generate speed. I’ve always tried to incorporate both those elements in belly boards.

I made a really radical Greenough hull paipo for Roger Kelly a few years ago. We called that one the “Aqua Plane 1.” It had a very deep belly under the nose, and was 5’ x 25” with a broad round tail, and around 1″ thick in the middle, and 1/4″ at the tail. The board has a 4″ nose rocker and 3/8″ tail rocker - it is almost straight flat the last 36 inches. Three fin boxes, so he could try various fin combinations. A lot of people have ridden that board, and everyone seems a bit confused by it. I rode it the day it was finished, and it seemed like it needed really good waves to get rolling.
Aqua Plane 1

I shaped the “Aqua Plane 2” for Ricky Swallow just recently. It’s 5’4’’ x 23”, and has a less radical hull. The board is 1 5/8 inches thick in the middle and 3/8″ at the tail and has a 2 3/4″ nose rocker and 1/2″ tail rocker. Ricky is still getting it dialed in, so we don’t know how good it will be. But preliminary indications are that it’s a lot more practical than Roger’s radical displacement hull. It has two fin boxes placed well off the rail — 4.5″ out from the stringer… and about that much in from the rails, and 4″ up from the tail. I haven’t ridden the board, and Ricky Swallow has only ridden it maybe 6 times, so we don’t know those numbers yet. The verdict is still out on the relative advantages and disadvantages of the two fins types shown below since the board is still so new. My educated guess is the small fins in the middle of the box will be close to ideal.

8. Have you ridden bellyboards much yourself or have you been reliant on others as test pilots. If you rode them, what’s your preference in a bellyboard and any particular surf stand out?

I think I’ve ridden every one I’ve ever made, although they were usually made for someone else. I tend to like a solid belly board in smaller, cleaner waves. Belly boards plane out with less effort than mats, and urban lifeguards generally don’t hassle you as much when you take a solid board out. They hate inflatables!

I ordered a true Hawaiian paipo, from Paul Lindbergh, about 10 years ago, and got some time in on that. It just didn’t seem right for Califonian waves. I want to ride it in Hawaii some day, to be in the right environment.

9. If you were to build a bellyboard tomorrow, what would be like? Would it be built primarily for speed or turning?

I think my next belly board will be 5′10′’ long, because that’s how tall I am. I’m going to try that approach to length in the future… make it as long as you are. And it will be a pulled-in roundtail displacement hull, similar to the 7 footers Greg Liddle made in the 70’s and 80’s… with a single fin placed up off the tail a fair bit, and designed purely for forward trimming and speed in smaller point waves.

I’ve always kind of had a counter-intuitive approach to small wave surfing. Since the short board revolution, most surfers have tried to bring small wave surfing to big waves. But I want to bring big wave surfing to small waves. I like clean tracks that flow with the grain of the wave. It feels better to me, and seems more spiritual. I want to achieve that feeling in a belly board, even in 2 foot waves.

10. All design involves compromise. How would you alter the board’s design to make it turn more easily, or conversely, be faster? Any changes required for hollow or big waves?

I like turning to generate speed on any size wave. Greg Loehr once said that in small wave surfing, you try to build up speed in order to do maneuvers, but in big waves, you do maneuvers to build up speed. That’s a keen observation, and it makes complete sense. But I like turning to build speed all the time! So I don’t see speed and maneuverability as design opposites.

I use rocker numbers and wide point placement to vary the length of the turns for a given board, stand up or belly riding. More rocker, shorter lines. Less rocker, longer lines. Wide point back, shorter lines. Wide point up, longer lines. That’s an oversimplification, but generally it’s true, in my opinion.

Bigger or hollower waves call for longer and narrower boards… but I tend to leave the hull and rails the same for all types of surf. I adjust the dimensions. People think you can’t ride big hollow waves with a displacement hull board. But you can if the outline is appropriate.

11. In 1976, you also wrote, “the wave-riding equipment most suited to your own equipment may be as simple as putting on a pair of fins and “letting your body be the foil”” Can you comment on how mats and bellyboards can also involve the body acting as a foil?

Mats and bellyboards reshape your torso. So by thinking of them as craft that “reshape your torso,” they become a form of body surfing!

4th Gear Flyer

thanks rs

COMMITMENT George Kramer, 71, at Kramer’s Hardware in Flatbush, where he knows everything about everything, including the keys.

By SAKI KNAFO
NY Published: January 9, 2010

George Kramer sat hunched on his stool behind the counter of the small hardware store on Coney Island Avenue, gazing out the window at the passing traffic. He was bundled up in a heavy sweater, a maroon wool cap folded above his ears. Toward the back of the store, beyond Mr. Kramer’s field of vision, Isaac Abraham was rifling through a cabinet. Mr. Abraham, the store’s owner for many years, knows Mr. Kramer about as well as anybody, and he was about to give a demonstration.

Quietly, he removed a faucet knob from the cabinet and hid it behind his back. Then he approached the counter and clapped it down with a flourish.

Mr. Kramer gave it a perfunctory glance. “Gerber,” he said.

“Gerber what?” asked Mr. Abraham.

“Ninety-nine, eleven fifty-one.”

Mr. Abraham turned over the package to show the catalog number: 99-1151. Mr. Kramer — George to me — is my second cousin, and he has worked at Kramer’s Hardware, in Flatbush, Brooklyn, for 58 years. He has a developmental disability, which is obvious to people who meet him, but he also has a rare and less apparent ability: Like the late Kim Peek, the inspiration for the film “Rain Man,” George, 71, has a powerful memory for dates and numbers and facts. If you tell him your birthday, he can tell you what day it will fall on two years in the future. He studies phone directories and atlases in his spare time. As one relative recently put it to me, “If you drop him in Oshkosh or anywhere, he’ll find his way home.”

On the surface, a run-down hardware shop in Flatbush might seem an odd place for a person like George to thrive. But if you set aside the sheets of pegboard and the metal cabinets and the key-making machine, what is left are hundreds and hundreds of small, obscure utilitarian objects, many almost identical to the casual observer. George can identify each nut and bolt and screw on sight, as Mr. Abraham’s test was intended to show, and he knows where, exactly, in the store it is kept. He can tell you its cost. And he can tell you the name — and often the phone number — of the company that made it.

His command of the inventory is such that Mr. Abraham has never had to invest in a computer to track it. “My reliance on him is mind-boggling,” Mr. Abraham said.

That reliance began with a favor. Thirty years ago, Mr. Abraham took over the store from George’s father, David Kramer, who was worried about his son’s future. Mr. Abraham agreed to keep George employed until George was ready to retire, and when he transferred the store to a new owner about a year ago, his successor did the same. These owners well know of George’s value to the business; still, the fact that David ensured such a secure future for his disabled son is as striking a feature of Kramer’s Hardware as George’s memory.

WHEN George was a child, his parents were told to put him in an institution. Though it’s not clear whether doctors gave him a precise diagnosis at that time, they said he would never be able to get along in society. His mother visited a couple of schools — including the Willowbrook State School on Staten Island, which later became notorious for its brutal treatment of residents — but ultimately they kept him at home. George’s younger brother, a copywriter in New Jersey, said George was eventually found to be mentally retarded but has not been examined for his disability since childhood.

In retrospect, the choice his parents made may seem like an obvious one, but it went against the prevailing wisdom of the day, and it also raised a difficult question for them: Who would support their son after they were gone?

David Kramer, whose father, Gdal, founded Kramer’s Hardware around 1930, started giving George small chores around the shop — moving the stock, taking out the garbage. According to the accounts of some of our relatives, George had been an unruly child, yet he proved an eager and reliable worker, and over time, his responsibilities multiplied.

Three decades passed and Mr. Abraham, then a young Brooklyn entrepreneur, began expressing an interest in acquiring the store. By this time — 1979 — David was thinking seriously about retirement. “He was ready to teach me the business,” Mr. Abraham recalled, “but there was a ‘but’ — and this was a big ‘but’ — he wanted to make sure that George would be secure.”

George was now 41. He handled the phones, dealt with customers and counted the cash at the end of the night, and had long ago committed to memory the catalog number for every eye bolt and corner brace and turnbuckle. David asked Mr. Abraham to hang around the shop for a few weeks, and at the end of that period he sat Mr. Abraham down and asked him a pointed question: “What about George?”

If David’s plan in requiring Mr. Abraham to spend time at the store had been to show him George’s value as an employee, it worked.

“I saw that George was an asset,” Mr. Abraham said. “In the medical terminology they might call him autistic, but I immediately called him a genius.”

Mr. Abraham promised David that he would never need to worry about his son, and he says he repeated the promise 12 years later, when David, on his deathbed, asked about George one last time.

“If I shine shoes on Broadway,” Mr. Abraham said he told him, “he’ll be shining shoes next to me.”

MR. Abraham has not had to resort to shining shoes, but his three decades owning the little neighborhood hardware store have not always been smooth. Kramer’s has narrowly survived several rough economic periods, and has contended with the arrival in Brooklyn of two huge competitors, Home Depot and Lowe’s, both of which have outlets within three miles of the store.

Through it all, George has been an ideal worker: honest (perhaps because he is incapable of lying), uncomplaining and extremely punctual.

His routine is as inflexible as a brass-plated wood screw. Every day, without fail, he arrives in the neighborhood by bus at 7 a.m., an hour before the store opens. Every day, he eats breakfast in one of two places — a restaurant called La Guadalupana Taqueria Mexicana, next to Kramer’s, or a Dunkin’ Donuts a few blocks away. And every day, regardless of which place he patronizes, he orders the same thing: a bagel with cream cheese, coffee and orange juice — “the combo.” George raises the store gates at exactly 8 a.m. Most of the customers are building superintendents, and as they trickle in, they greet him playfully: “Hey, George, did you miss me?” “How’s your girlfriend, George?” Much to their amusement, he answers straightforwardly, with little inflection. “Yes, my friend,” he might say, or “No,” or “I don’t know.”

At exactly 5 p.m., George lowers the gates and takes the bus down Coney Island Avenue to his home. He lives in one of several Brooklyn residences run by the Adult Retardates Center, a group for people with developmental disabilities that his parents helped found in the 1950s. He eats dinner with the other residents at 5:15, showers at 8 and goes to bed at exactly 11. His weekends are similarly scheduled, with visits to the Young Israel synagogue on Avenue J and to a recreational center — “the Club” — where he plays games, drinks Diet Cokes and dances with his companion of 21 years, who lives in one of the group’s other residences.

Every year George sends out dozens of birthday cards to relatives; every year he calls to make sure the card has arrived on time. At family gatherings, which he begins talking about months in advance, he insists on taking a picture of every person at the table. His photo albums contain the most comprehensive record of my family that there is — thousands of unevenly framed snapshots documenting decades of Seders and Thanksgivings.

And yet, as devoted as George is to these routines, it is difficult to say exactly why he performs them or how they affect him. He seldom makes eye contact. Hardly anyone has seen him laugh, or cry, and although he is often pronouncing things (mostly restaurants) good or bad — “Garden of Eat-In on Avenue J! That’s good!” — it is hard to know whether he is expressing genuine feelings or repeating opinions picked up from others.

Most of the time, he is quiet. When he speaks, it is often to blurt out some phrase that has no apparent relevance. Only when he is pressed does it become clear that these utterances do, in fact, have meaning. “April 5th Monday night!” he shouted out one afternoon in December, prompting a request for an explanation. “I have to go shul April 5th,” he replied. “Mommy’s yahrzeit. That’s important. But electric bulbs only. No candles in the house. That’s dangerous.”

Jews commemorate the anniversary of a person’s death, the yahrzeit, by lighting a candle or a ceremonial light bulb and reciting the mourner’s Kaddish during daily prayers. George’s mother died in 1985 and his father in 1991.

He is the only member of the family who still marks their memory this way.

TO the extent George does engage in conversation, much of that conversation centers on the past. “I’m reading a book about Ansonia clock factory on 420 13th Street,” he announced at the store one time. “Who lived there? Pop Kramer and Mom Kramer lived there.”

Another time he got into an excited discussion with a customer over the pedigree of a local apartment building. George was excited, that is. The customer, a super, didn’t quite share his enthusiasm.

“1620 Caton. Is it the big building?” asked George.

“George!” said the super. “Write down 1620 and that’s it.”

“1620 Caton Avenue,” George persisted. “I remember that building used to be Waxman brothers!”

When George declares that the Waxman brothers owned this or that building, or that so-and-so lived at this or that address, it often seems as if he is rattling off an arbitrary, inconsequential piece of trivia. But these pieces of trivia, put together, form a jigsaw-puzzle picture of a world that exists more vividly in George’s mind than perhaps anywhere else.

In the many years that George has worked at Kramer’s, Brooklyn has transformed around it: high-rises have shot up, new immigrant populations have swept in, and most of the people who grew up with him have died or moved to the suburbs. Old businesses are forever “going out,” in George’s phrase, and he announces the passing of each with a staccato shout: “Brandz for Less 1351 Coney Island Avenue is going out December 31st!” “Bargain Hunters 1605 Avenue M closed up for good!”

Amid all these closings and openings, George appears to have changed relatively little. He observes a host of customs that his parents taught him years ago, and many of the obscure facts that preoccupy him have been preoccupying him for ages. Even the store is sort of a time capsule. Almost all of its products were bought years back, from companies that no longer exist. Piled on the shelves in the rear are boxes and boxes of screws and bolts with old-fashioned labels reading “Sturdy Nut and Bolt Co., New York, N.Y.” and “Universal Screw and Bolt Co., N.Y. N.Y., U.S.A.,” relics from the city’s industrial past.

At 71, though, George is slowing down. Mr. Abraham said that he did not expect him to last in the job much longer. “How long can he do it physically?” he said. “There were times two years ago where he wasn’t very well and I was under the full assumption that he was not going to make it back.”

The business is slower, too. Perhaps because of the recession, the flow of customers is more like a trickle. The shelves are half empty, and the bottles of cleaning fluid are covered with dust. George typically spends a good part of each day sitting at the counter and leafing through hardware and restaurant supply catalogs, and occasionally reeling off facts about the various companies whose names are displayed on passing trucks (“Driscoll Foods! Clifton, New Jersey!”).

Change has arrived at Kramer’s in one other way as well. Mr. Abraham, who had long served as an unelected advocate for Brooklyn’s Hasidic community, embarked in 2008 on a campaign for City Council. He ultimately lost, to Stephen Levin, but when he began his time-consuming bid, he handed off the business to a new owner, a 36-year-old friend of the family named Moshe Meyerson.

So, what about George? Where did this transition leave him? Mr. Meyerson, noting how long George has been at Kramer’s Hardware, said, “He’s going to be there until he retires.” Given George’s age, Mr. Meyerson added, he imagined that might happen in three or four years.

When I brought up the prospect of retirement with George, he told me that he, too, had been giving it some thought. But when I asked what he might do with his time, all he said was, “I don’t know yet.”

He was facing away as he spoke, toward the store window, with its charmless view of Coney Island Avenue and the auto-body shops and apartment buildings beyond. As usual, it was impossible to know what he was thinking. Nevertheless, it seems likely that, someday soon, he will wake in the morning and have no gates to open, no customers to greet, no shovels or wrenches or Gerber faucets to sell. All of it will be gone.

But not forgotten.

Bike Wheel, 2009
Oil on canvas, 100×80cm

January 9 - February 13, 2010

Marc Foxx

Lewis Baltz “Point Realty”

Anthony Friedkin #46

Curated by Robert von Sternberg

Featuring: Lewis Baltz, Robbert Flick, Susan Rankaitis, Robert von Sternberg, Robert Heinecken, Jo Ann Callis, Anthony Friedkin, Jerry McMillan, Eileen Cowin, Jane O’Neal, Todd Walker

Opening Reception 3-5 January 9
until Feb 13, 2010

Sylvia White Gallery
1783 East Main Street
Ventura, CA 93001
8 0 5. 6 4 3. 8 3 0 0

By HOLLY BRUBACH
NY Times Published: January 7, 2010

Pittsburgh

IN the final days of a year dominated by repeated — and mostly unheeded — calls for full disclosure on the part of Wall Street banks, pharmaceutical companies, the N.F.L. and any number of other organizations, transparency arrived out of the blue from an unlikely quarter if ever there was one: the Freemasons.

Thanks go not to Dan Brown, whose latest novel, “The Lost Symbol,” focuses on the notoriously mysterious fraternal order, but to Tom Sturgeon, a career law-enforcement officer, who was installed as Right Worshipful Grand Master for Pennsylvania on Dec. 28. His ceremony, in a break with centuries-old Masonic tradition, was held at a convention center here and open to the public. “We need to make Freemasonry more contemporary,” Mr. Sturgeon told me, “to make it reflect 2010, not 1910 — or 1810.”

Nonetheless, the audience of about 1,200 people seemed to consist primarily of members and their families with a sizeable contingent of Masonic dignitaries from 13 other states and Canada. Many had come in full regalia, sporting tailcoats, purple moire or black velvet “collars,” satin aprons embroidered with esoteric symbols, white gloves, swords — all telegraphing distinctions of rank legible only to insiders.

Freemasonry in America is organized by state — there is no higher governing body — and Pennsylvania is the largest Masonic jurisdiction in the world, with a spectacular temple in Philadelphia, completed in 1873, as its headquarters. Mr. Sturgeon was sworn in reciting the same oath, or “obligation,” Benjamin Franklin recited 275 years ago when he took the same office.

If the ceremony at the convention center was any indication, it appears that not much has changed in the interim, although the torches around the altar are now electric and the musical repertoire has been updated to include “Beer Barrel Polka” and “No Man Is an Island.” Membership has been declining (currently 120,000 in Pennsylvania, down from 260,000 when Mr. Sturgeon joined in 1965) and the median age has been steadily climbing (now 68).

“Brethren, ladies and friends,” Mr. Sturgeon greeted the audience for his installation. “The 21st-century Masonic Renaissance starts today!”

The “renaissance” is Mr. Sturgeon’s agenda for reform, jump-starting a membership drive with a new strategy that permits “selective invitation,” replacing the old “To be one, ask one” policy that forbade Masons to proselytize. He also decreed a lifetime dues exemption for any Mason over 60 who brings in two new members under 30. Like other Pennsylvania grand masters before him, Mr. Sturgeon designed a necktie, to be distributed as a token of appreciation. Typically, the ties are a vehicle for the Masonic insignia; his is more in the style of Jerry Garcia, something he thinks younger guys might be more inclined to wear.

In his most radical move, Mr. Sturgeon has mandated that the ritual be published in book form. In Pennsylvania, since the order’s beginnings, each Mason has learned his obligation from another Mason, one on one. The ritual had never been written down. For the two lowest ranks of Freemasonry it lasts 30 minutes or so; for the third and highest degree it takes roughly an hour and runs to some 8,000 words. “It might take a man away from home maybe 50 nights to sit and learn it,” he said.

Though candidates will still be required to perform the ritual from memory, the printed text allows them to learn it on their own. Mr. Sturgeon assured his fellow masons that photocopying will be prohibited, that all copies will be signed out and strictly audited. Even so, this announcement met with silence, a response he had foreseen. “Many Masons will tell you that one of the great bonds of this fraternity happens when I meet with you 40 times to go over this work, and I become your mentor,” he said. “Now, that’s true. But for the greater good, we have to make a decision.”

Not a secret society but “a society with secrets” is how the protagonist of “The Lost Symbol” describes the Masons. Has that secrecy served a purpose? Is the famous Masonic bond based, at least to some extent, on shared information that nobody else knows? If that was once the case, it seems safe to say that it isn’t any longer, now that detailed accounts of the Masons’ procedures have been posted online, including YouTube videos of the secret handshake.

The drama seems to be in short supply. Any Dan Brown fans who came to the convention center in Pittsburgh expecting daggers pressed to bare chests or red wine drunk out of a skull surely left disappointed. Mr. Sturgeon says that he thought Mr. Brown made that stuff up until a friend reminded him that in one ceremony they attended for a branch of Masonry called the Scottish Rite there had indeed been a skull; he is, however, quite certain that he didn’t drink wine out of it. And if there is a pyramid with Freemasonry’s highest secrets inscribed on it, as “The Lost Symbol” purports, he has yet to hear about it.

Some Masons may regret losing the mystique — though surely not as much as the conspiracy theorists, who now have less room for speculation about the order. While it’s hard to put much store in allegations that Freemasonry is Satan worship or a plot to dominate the world when its membership has included such disparate characters as Count Basie, Daniel Boone, Winston Churchill, Paul Revere, Clark Gable, J. Edgar Hoover, Mozart, Colonel Sanders, Peter Sellers, Cy Young, Pushkin and Brad Paisley, those suspicions thrived nonetheless. The conspiracy theorists, it seems, needed the Masons’ secrecy even more than the Masons needed it themselves.