Hulton Archive/Getty Images

The Golden Gate Bridge under construction, around 1935. The actual building of the bridge took over four years, with men sometimes perched more than 500 feet above the water in wind or fog.

By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
NY Times Published: August 23, 2010

It’s the western bookend to the Brooklyn Bridge — as iconic an American edifice as the Statue of Liberty, and a favorite spot for lovers, photographers and suicides. It’s been hailed as one of the modern wonders of the world, “perhaps the most successful combination of site and structure since the Parthenon,” a “democratic masterpiece” and a “giant harp hung in the western sky.”

Despite the many existing odes to the Golden Gate Bridge, Kevin Starr seems particularly well equipped to write a biography of that famous orange bridge. The author of more than half a dozen histories of California, Mr. Starr — a professor of history at the University of Southern California and state librarian of California emeritus — has written frequently about the myths and metaphors that festoon the Golden State, and he seems to instinctively understand the place that the Golden Gate Bridge has come to occupy in the national imagination as a symbol of American enterprise and the gateway to the Pacific.

Curiously enough, the passages in “Golden Gate” devoted to explicating the bridge’s symbolism and allure are its least persuasive: pretentious, clichéd, derivative and pompously theoretical. “In its American context, taken historically,” Mr. Starr writes, “the Bridge aligns itself with the thought of Jonathan Edwards, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and other transcendentalists in presenting an icon of transcendence: a defiance of time pointing to more elusive realities. Were Edwards, Emerson, or the Swedish theologian Emanuel Swedenborg, a mystic thinker of great importance to the formation of American thought, alive today, they would no doubt see in the Golden Gate Bridge a fusion of material and trans-material forces held in delicate equipoise.”

It is when Mr. Starr turns from interpreting the bridge to recounting the story of its construction that his narrative takes off. Though it’s a story told many times before — most notably by John van der Zee in “The Gate: The True Story of the Design and Construction of the Golden Gate Bridge” (1986) and Allen Brown in “Golden Gate: Biography of a Bridge” (1965) — Mr. Starr does an agile job of situating the tale within the larger context of San Francisco’s efforts to rebuild after the Great Earthquake of 1906 and the nation’s march from the Roaring Twenties into the slough of the Great Depression.

He reminds us that the bridge, first proposed in 1921, initially encountered vociferous opposition from a variety of interests, including ferry companies (which saw the bridge as stealing their business) and environmental groups like the Sierra Club (which argued that such an edifice would profane the natural beauty of the site). There were also protests, Mr. Starr recounts, that “the Bridge was too costly, tolls would prove insufficient to redeem taxpayer-backed bonds, the geological foundations for the south pier were inadequate.”

Arguments that a bridge was vital for San Francisco’s development as a modern metropolis and the demands of commuters from Marin County and beyond would prevail in the end, however, and the bridge would help fuel the Bay Area’s exponential growth in the decades to come.

As it turns out, the years of wrangling over the bridge’s construction would lead to a design triumph. Mr. Starr describes the original plan of the Chicago entrepreneur Joseph Strauss as “an undistinguished example of industrial design” — an “upside-down rat trap,” in one opponent’s words. The revised blueprint, devised by a team of noted engineers and architects, would result in that rare thing: a triumph of design by committee.

The self-promoting Strauss would get credit for the Golden Gate, but Mr. van der Zee wrote in his book that it was Charles Alton Ellis, a University of Illinois professor and design engineer with enormous mathematical prowess, who was really the presiding genius behind the bridge. In this volume, Mr. Starr acknowledges that “Strauss turned the design of the suspension system, which is to say, the very essence of the Bridge” over to Ellis, who together with the civil engineer Leon Moisseiff, would grapple with the daunting challenge of designing a super long suspension bridge, subject to the intense tidal actions of the strait below, as well as high winds, fog and possibly earthquakes.

Crucial contributions, Mr. Starr says, were made by other consultants as well. Othmar Hermann Ammann (the chief designer of the George Washington Bridge) helped with the assembling of the bridge’s various components. John Eberson, a leading architect of movie theaters, developed the Art Deco vocabulary for the towers. And Irving Morrow, a local architect and skilled illustrator, refined those ideas further, accentuating, in Mr. Starr’s words, “the stepped-back segments rising vertically on all sides” of the twin towers.

The actual process of building the bridge, which began in January 1933 and ended in the spring of 1937, would be herculean. Mr. Starr writes that “the construction of the anchorages involved the removal of 3.25 million cubic feet of earth and pouring of concrete into frameworks twelve stories high, the equivalent of building two skyscrapers”; and that each of the bridge’s two transverse cables was 36 3/8 inches in diameter and under “63 million pounds of pull or tension from its own weight.”

Workers were perched 500 to 600 feet above the water and faced cold winds blowing in from the ocean. “In the summer,” Mr. Starr writes, “fog banks compounded the cold and obscured vision, which was a frightening thing, given the fact that at all times the Bridge site was an orchestration of dangerous objects in constant movement: steel being swung into place; tools and construction material being accidentally dropped; superheated rivets being heated aloft on precariously perched forges, then funneled through tubes to riveters working in near darkness inside the steel cells, or, if outside, tossed from forge to riveter through the air and caught with handheld funnels.”

As for the bridge’s famous color, international orange, it was not an obvious choice. Mr. Starr reports that Ammann favored gray (as used for the George Washington Bridge), and others wanted black. While the Navy “preferred a yellow and black striping to facilitate visibility for ships entering or leaving the Gate through low-lying fog,” the Army Air Corps wanted a red-and-white color scheme more visible from the air. The reddish-orange paint was primer, used to protect the bridge against the elements, and it gradually went from being a default choice to the color of choice.

In an over-the-top burst of purple prose, Mr. Starr observes that international orange not only “unified the Bridge into one compelling statement,” but also summoned memories of “the gold of the Gold Rush that had created the Bay Area, and the gold of the Golden Horn of the Bosporus first suggested by John Frémont when he named the site in 1846 and by metaphor evoked a color-drenched city of towers, domes, and stepped-back structures rising like Constantinople from blue waters along green hillsides, their red-tiled roofs touching a sun-flooded azure sea.”

By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Times Published: August 22, 2010

We need to pinch pennies these days. Don’t you know we have a budget deficit? For months that has been the word from Republicans and conservative Democrats, who have rejected every suggestion that we do more to avoid deep cuts in public services and help the ailing economy.

But these same politicians are eager to cut checks averaging $3 million each to the richest 120,000 people in the country.

What — you haven’t heard about this proposal? Actually, you have: I’m talking about demands that we make all of the Bush tax cuts, not just those for the middle class, permanent.

Some background: Back in 2001, when the first set of Bush tax cuts was rammed through Congress, the legislation was written with a peculiar provision — namely, that the whole thing would expire, with tax rates reverting to 2000 levels, on the last day of 2010.

Why the cutoff date? In part, it was used to disguise the fiscal irresponsibility of the tax cuts: lopping off that last year reduced the headline cost of the cuts, because such costs are normally calculated over a 10-year period. It also allowed the Bush administration to pass the tax cuts using reconciliation — yes, the same procedure that Republicans denounced when it was used to enact health reform — while sidestepping rules designed to prevent the use of that procedure to increase long-run budget deficits.

Obviously, the idea was to go back at a later date and make those tax cuts permanent. But things didn’t go according to plan. And now the witching hour is upon us.

So what’s the choice now? The Obama administration wants to preserve those parts of the original tax cuts that mainly benefit the middle class — which is an expensive proposition in its own right — but to let those provisions benefiting only people with very high incomes expire on schedule. Republicans, with support from some conservative Democrats, want to keep the whole thing.

And there’s a real chance that Republicans will get what they want. That’s a demonstration, if anyone needed one, that our political culture has become not just dysfunctional but deeply corrupt.

What’s at stake here? According to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, making all of the Bush tax cuts permanent, as opposed to following the Obama proposal, would cost the federal government $680 billion in revenue over the next 10 years. For the sake of comparison, it took months of hard negotiations to get Congressional approval for a mere $26 billion in desperately needed aid to state and local governments.

And where would this $680 billion go? Nearly all of it would go to the richest 1 percent of Americans, people with incomes of more than $500,000 a year. But that’s the least of it: the policy center’s estimates say that the majority of the tax cuts would go to the richest one-tenth of 1 percent. Take a group of 1,000 randomly selected Americans, and pick the one with the highest income; he’s going to get the majority of that group’s tax break. And the average tax break for those lucky few — the poorest members of the group have annual incomes of more than $2 million, and the average member makes more than $7 million a year — would be $3 million over the course of the next decade.

How can this kind of giveaway be justified at a time when politicians claim to care about budget deficits? Well, history is repeating itself. The original campaign for the Bush tax cuts relied on deception and dishonesty. In fact, my first suspicions that we were being misled into invading Iraq were based on the resemblance between the campaign for war and the campaign for tax cuts the previous year. And sure enough, that same trademark deception and dishonesty is being deployed on behalf of tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans.

So, for example, we’re told that it’s all about helping small business; but only a tiny fraction of small-business owners would receive any tax break at all. And how many small-business owners do you know making several million a year?

Or we’re told that it’s about helping the economy recover. But it’s hard to think of a less cost-effective way to help the economy than giving money to people who already have plenty, and aren’t likely to spend a windfall.

No, this has nothing to do with sound economic policy. Instead, as I said, it’s about a dysfunctional and corrupt political culture, in which Congress won’t take action to revive the economy, pleads poverty when it comes to protecting the jobs of schoolteachers and firefighters, but declares cost no object when it comes to sparing the already wealthy even the slightest financial inconvenience.

So far, the Obama administration is standing firm against this outrage. Let’s hope that it prevails in its fight. Otherwise, it will be hard not to lose all faith in America’s future.

August Künzel

The L.A. Times sports journalist lived most of his life wanting to be a woman. He discovered too late that he wanted his wife even more

By Steve Friess
Thursday, Aug 19 2010
LA Weekly

Christine Daniels lay inert. The ash-blond hair that once framed a face envied by her peers was now an unwashed tangle hiding an inexorable melancholy. Her stomach was in sharp, constant pain and her mind was heavy with guilt. She ate, showered and dressed only when her caretaker demanded she do so, which was why she was in what seemed like a trance when she spoke.

“Do you know what today was supposed to be?” Daniels asked her doting friend, Amy LeCoe.

“What was today supposed to be?” LeCoe responded.

“It’s the day I was supposed to have my surgery.”

“How do you feel about that?”

Daniels grew even quieter, LeCoe recalls.

“Don’t tell anybody,” Daniels said. “But I don’t feel like I’m going to be Christine anymore. I feel like pulling the plug.”

The declaration wasn’t altogether unexpected, LeCoe says. By this point, in July 2008, the once-gregarious Christine Daniels, a formerly male sports writer who had shocked the nation 15 months earlier by writing in the Los Angeles Times that, going forward, she wished to be known as a woman, had been in emotional decline for months.

LeCoe knew Daniels had stopped taking feminizing hormones and ceased receiving hair-removing electrolysis treatments. Daniels’ groundbreaking L.A. Times blog on transitioning to womanhood, “Woman in Progress,” had not only stopped appearing but had mysteriously disappeared from the newspaper’s Web site and archives, leaving countless supporters and advocates worldwide without their new transgender hero.

Daniels shut out virtually every other transgender friend except LeCoe, who struck a nonjudgmental tone and persisted in demanding that Daniels let her help. Deep inside, LeCoe struggled to reconcile what it meant that the woman who had once been the role model for her own transition was crumbling. But she did her best not to let her doubts show.

“Don’t decide so quickly,” LeCoe said. “Maybe you’ll reconsider it when you feel better.”

“I have been feeling this way for a while,” Daniels gasped through tears. “I can’t do it anymore.”

“Which part can’t you do?” LeCoe asked.

More silence, then: “I had the perfect life with Lisa, and I threw it all away.”

Seventeen months later, Daniels would be found dead from carbon-monoxide poisoning in a 1997 Toyota Camry in the subterranean garage of a dreary apartment building on Sepulveda just north of National. By then, Daniels was again officially known by her male birth name, Mike Penner, though both her names were included atop the official coroner’s report. The document described how Penner had snaked a hose from the exhaust pipe into the car with the engine running, how a neighbor had pulled him from the car and attempted CPR, how death was declared at Brotman Medical Center and how a suicide note had been found in the apartment.

The death of 52-year-old Penner would become as big a news story as her coming out as transgender in the pages of a major American newspaper, and as disturbing and perplexing as Daniels’ decision in the fall of 2008 to return to life as a male.

What drove Penner’s decision to take his life? News organizations and bloggers noted sadly that Daniels’ gender confusion had had a tragic end, and the L.A. Times itself would write a lengthy story months after her death that also suggested it was Daniels’ sense of being torn between two worlds that contributed to her decision to commit suicide.

But it wasn’t like that.

The parts of the Penner saga that the public knows — from Christine Daniels’ dramatic public coming out to Mike Penner’s desperately sad suicide — spanned 31 months. But the story actually began much earlier.

In many ways, Penner’s path was standard-issue for those born male who have an inexplicable yet ultimately undeniable desire to be female. He would sneak into his mother’s closet in their Anaheim home to try on shoes and dabble with her makeup, then scrub it off shamefully before vowing never to do it again. Then, of course, he would do it again, a new helping of guilt raining down on his Catholic soul.

These were the 1960s and early ’70s, a prehistoric era even for gays and lesbians, let alone those compelled to experiment with the trappings of the opposite gender. It wasn’t until the late 1980s, in fact, that gender-identity disorder was recognized as legitimate by the American Psychiatric Association.

Penner’s story parts ways with most of his counterparts because of the man he became. By all accounts, Penner was infatuated by sports out of genuine enthusiasm, not as some means of defying this yearning or bolstering his masculinity. He grew to a slim, athletic 6 feet 3 and was known as an avid soccer player who channeled this fascination and his innate writing ability into a career as a sports journalist.

He arrived at the L.A. Times in 1983, around the same time as sportswriter Rick Reilly, a future columnist for Sports Illustrated and ESPN magazine. Penner went on to cover several Olympics and World Cups, as well as pro baseball and football.

While covering the U.S. Open tennis tournament in New York in 1984, Penner met fellow sportswriter Lisa Dillman, then with the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. He helped her get her job at the L.A. Times and they wed in 1987.

Dillman has never spoken on the record about her husband’s transition, and Penner never answered the media’s questions about their relationship. Daniels also never wrote of it in her blog on transgenderism, according to those who read it when it was available online.

The L.A. Times, in its March story about Penner, indicated that it was unclear when Dillman learned about her husband’s interest in cross-dressing. This much is known: In May 2005, when Penner traveled to Port Angeles, Washington, to a transgender retreat known as Esprit, he told new friends that Lisa was aware of where he was.

Reilly, in an ESPN column in January eulogizing his friend, wrote that Daniels told him she used to keep a dress, wig and pearls in a toolbox behind the couple’s bed board.

Claire Winter, a transgender friend and mentor who lives in Seattle, says Daniels “had struck an arrangement with Lisa that she’d explore these things. I’m pretty sure Lisa knew what she was doing.”

Other friends of Daniels’ have similar understandings. “Lisa was not kept in the dark about this,” says Susan Horn, who had met Daniels at an L.A. clothing store for transgender women. “Christine would talk about how Lisa insisted Christine park her car in the alley and go out the back gate and into the car if she dressed at home before going out.”

The first known sighting of Christine Daniels by the transgender group that became her clique was in 2004 at Countessa’s Closet, a small shop of roughly 1,000 square feet nestled in a dumpy Studio City strip mall that is routinely cited by male-to-female transgender Angelenos as their first major step in experimenting with a public transition.

The proprietor, Countessa (she goes by one name), is a woman who has developed a niche providing a refuge where those exploring their gender identity may try on clothes, take makeup-application lessons from the owner and meet one another.

Countessa recalls a shy, gawky blond man with bright blue eyes, browsing in slacks and a work shirt one afternoon.

“This is like a real ladies’ shop,” Penner said to Countessa.

“Of course it is,” she replied. “Do you know what you’re looking for?”

“No, not exactly.”

“Is it for you or is it somebody else?”

“It’s for me.”

With that verbal admission, the journalist who dwelled in the macho universe of a major metro sports department and pro-sports locker rooms began a process of explicitly moving toward the identity he always felt buried within. Like many transgender people who later became friends, Penner would slip over to the shop after work or on weekends and shuck “male mode” garb for wigs, dresses, jewelry and shoes. Within those confines, Daniels became legendary for taking so much time in the bathroom to fix herself up — so much so that a friend made a framed sign and hung it on the door, mocking her by warning others that if the potty was unavailable for long periods, Daniels was the culprit.

“Countessa’s retreat has been called a sanctuary,” Daniels wrote in a November 2005 card that the proprietor framed for display. “You need to know why. Once inside, you have the feeling that nothing bad can happen to you. … Christina has never felt better or looked better.” (Among certain friends, Daniels called herself Christina.)

Such stores, which exist in most major cities, not only spare a man the embarrassment of trying on women’s clothes in mainstream stores but also are a source of garments in the larger sizes that transgender women usually require.

This is where Daniels met Horn, and “Diana,” who asked the Weekly not to use her real name because she’s not openly transgender at work. The duo later took Daniels to Metropolitan Community Church, which became Daniels’ spiritual home. Daniels also learned at Countessa’s about a support group for transitioning people at the L.A. Gender Center, which is where she met LeCoe.

In August 2005, Horn and Daniels shared a milestone moment for any transgender person: the first time Daniels went out in public in her transgender persona. They met at Countessa’s to get dressed and then headed to Sisley, an Italian restaurant in Encino.

“We drove over to this mall and I kept telling her, ‘Nobody’s gonna bother us, even if they recognize us as being transsexual,’ ” says Horn, an L.A. paralegal who lost her family and her career as a lawyer when she transitioned.

“We sat down at the restaurant. A very cute waiter came over and said, ‘Can I help you, ladies?’ As soon as those words left his mouth, you could feel Christine relax. She was just ecstatic.” After dinner, Daniels used a women’s public restroom for the first time — at a movie theater where they saw The 40-Year-Old Virgin.

The friendship with Horn was rocky, though. For a long time, Daniels did not let on to her friends that she was a noted sports columnist. Horn figured it out in June 2006 when she read a piece by Penner about the World Cup in Germany in which he had noted that someone’s “pores were as big as a garage.” That seemed an odd observation for a typical male sportswriter to make, Horn said, so she pieced together a few other clues and perkily confronted Daniels.

“Next time I saw her, I said, ‘I know who you are!’ and she was terrified,” Horn said. “I thought she’d get a good giggle out of it. She was angry at me for weeks.”

Still, Daniels accompanied Horn to her first ear piercing.

Daniels also began helping others with their transitions. She counseled Diana’s upset wife when she learned of her husband’s transgenderism. After Horn and Diana took Daniels to Metropolitan Community Church, Daniels began floating the idea of forming a group that would call itself the Social Butterflies, transgender women who have regular outings at trans-friendly restaurants.

And that was all before she became famous.

By late 2006, Mike Penner could no longer keep Christine Daniels out of Dillman’s range. The reason was hormones.

After a couple of years of socializing at Countessa’s, praying at Metropolitan Community Church, undergoing individual and group therapy and attending conferences around the country, Daniels was emerging fast and furiously. Presenting as Mike, in fact, had become tormenting. When the time came for Daniels to revert to male mode toward the end of outings or visits at Countessa’s, Diana recalls, a devastating mood swing would occur. “He’d be lying on the floor crying,” she says.

Mike was reserved, even shy. As Christine, he transformed into an extroverted, emotional person. LeCoe recalls that at church, Daniels would sob on cue when the Rev. Neil Thomas would declare, “God loves you the way you are, he accepts you the way you are, your status has nothing to do with your salvations.”

Reilly, in his eulogy column, described the jarring difference thus: “Christine was the opposite: gregarious, 100 mph talker, always looking to cover an event, to be seen, the Funmeter pegged, the curls bouncing. She was flirty, always lightly grabbing your arm when she talked, covering her mouth when she laughed, which seemed like all the time.”

Penner moved out of the suburban Orange County home he shared with Dillman around New Year’s 2007. The couple knew hormone therapy would prompt physical changes Dillman could not ignore, so Penner moved into a 700-square-foot apartment at the end of a circuitous and dank hallway in L.A.’s fortress-like, nondescript Westwood Villa Apartments.

LeCoe lunched with Daniels at a Japanese restaurant just before New Year’s and heard about the couple’s final Christmas together, in which “they exchanged practical presents that would be useful for life alone,” LeCoe says, adding that Daniels seemed convinced that Dillman eventually would come around and embrace her.

In the months that followed, Daniels became consumed by her transition, speaking endlessly about her desire to have sex-reassignment surgery.

The handful of American surgeons who perform sex-change operations follow a Standards of Care model requiring male-to-female patients to undergo a rigorous regimen of hormones and electrolysis to remove hair from not only the face but also the genital area. Surgery must be approved by at least two psychiatrists who can vouch for mental stability and, most importantly, the patient must live publicly as the target gender for at least a year.

Daniels’ friends found her eagerness at once heartening and worrisome.

In late February 2007, Penner sat down with his boss, Los Angeles Times Sports Editor Randy Harvey, who noticed that the writer’s hair and nails were longer. Penner broke the news of his transition.

By all accounts, Harvey was exceedingly gracious, dissuading Penner when he suggested a move to the entertainment section of the paper. Harvey also told Penner something that Daniels’ transgender friends had been arguing: A male sports columnist at one of the nation’s biggest newspapers cannot transition on the job and change bylines without making news. Harvey persuaded Penner to write about the transition.

“Other people have second-guessed me, and certainly I have second-guessed if that was the right thing to do, to encourage Mike to write that column,” Harvey says. “Would things ultimately have turned out differently? I don’t know. I thought it was the right thing at the time.”

So write it, Daniels did. The piece that appeared in the L.A. Times on April 26, 2007, cleverly headlined “Old Mike, New Christine,” was a landmark. It was a breezy declaration that after 23 years writing as Mike Penner, he would take a break and return to live — and write — as Christine Daniels.

In an eloquent 826-word column, Penner summed up the typical journey of those who accept what they always sensed, that they were born into a body of the wrong sex, and that with this acceptance comes a duty to change: “I am a transsexual sportswriter. It has taken more than 40 years, a million tears and hundreds of hours of soul-wrenching therapy for me to work up the courage to type those words.”

The piece was an instant Web sensation; a team of transgender friends screened Daniels’ e-mails and tabulated that more than 1,000 came in within the first 48 hours. Just seven were negative, says Winter, Daniels’ friend in Seattle. Overnight, Daniels became one of the most famous transgender people in a culture that has precious few transgender celebrities.

Supporters tried to prepare her for her newfound celebrity.

In advance of April 26, Daniels found herself on the phone and exchanging e-mails nonstop with several prominent transgender advocates trying to coach her. The fear was that Daniels could find herself becoming another Susan Stanton — the Largo, Florida, city manager fired that March after transitioning on the job.

Stanton was appearing on Larry King Live and other shows, seemingly unprepared for and discomfited by certain invasive questions. Winter says the transgender community worried that Daniels could be similarly vulnerable.

“The people who are just starting really don’t know what’s ahead, don’t know what’s coming at them,” Winter says. “They’re just trying to analyze how they’re feeling. To do that in a fishbowl is unimaginable.”

Stanton says she chatted with Daniels, too, although she says she wasn’t sure how to advise the sportswriter because their circumstances were so different. Stanton had lost her job but retained the support of her wife and son; Daniels was embraced by the Times in a way activists viewed as a model to be venerated but was no longer living with Dillman.

“Christine told me she felt so bad for me compared to what she had on her side,” recalls Stanton, now city manager in Lake Worth, Florida, and subject of the HBO documentary Her Name Was Steven. “And I remember thinking, ‘You know, I’m envious, but I think over time my relationship with my family is going to be more sustaining.’ ”

Daniels heard from so many voices in those weeks that four days before her piece appeared, she lashed out. In an e-mail to Winter, she griped that she felt “overwhelmed by everything and everyone. I feel as if I am being used as a pawn by the trans community (and maybe the Times as well). I have been close to tears many times. … I am flat-out exhausted.”

And this was still only the beginning.

The initial surge of public and professional support was thrilling for Daniels. She started writing the “Woman in Progress” blog and found herself in high demand giving speeches to transgender and GLBT groups. She gave interviews and was being venerated by friends, supporters and advocates.

“I think that all of a sudden, the transgender community — me included — latched on to her for strength,” LeCoe says. “Once she was out, boy, was she out. I think it was a pretty wild ride for her, and I think she probably enjoyed some of it, yes.”

At the Times, too, there was a noticeable shift. The night before Penner’s column appeared, Harvey and another editor phoned 45 L.A. Times staff members to tell them, so they would not be caught off-guard.

Harvey said not one person expressed discomfort.

Daniels seemed to revel in that acceptance. Says Harvey: “Mike seldom came to the office, and when he did, he kept to himself. He had friends, but he was shy and he didn’t seek out conversation.

“As Christine, she would come to the office and openly engage people in conversation,” Harvey says. “It was the same underlying sweetness about Christine that was also evident with Mike, but there was a difference.”

Dillman, however, was noticeably scarce in the newsroom, he says. “She was not comfortable being there when Christine was there.”

Daniels’ perhaps overly optimistic outlook was summed up in a June 2007 interview with Queercents.com, a finance Web site. She was asked, “Money can buy hormones and a closet full of fabulous shoes, but does it buy happiness?”

Her e-mailed response contained a formula: “Hormones + legal name change + setting the stage for a new life = happiness, no doubt about that.”

Daniels’ simplistic expectations could sound familiar to anyone who has gone through a divorce. In the first several months, many people often feel a wave of euphoria from the newfound freedom, the realization of fantasy and the ability to be positive and eagerly anticipate the future. Inevitably, however, the euphoria gives way to reality — and sometimes that reality includes sadness over the loss of a soul mate.

But in the spring of 2007, Daniels was still riding the wave. A fellow sportswriter recruited Daniels to co-coach the soccer team of his young daughter, LeCoe says. Friends invited Daniels to attend their wedding, an event she blogged about. And Reilly, then still at Sports Illustrated, wrote a glowing piece in July that seemed to set the tone in the sports-journalism world about what an enlightening thrill it was to meet Daniels.

On July 19, 2007, after weeks of placing the legally required notices in local newspapers announcing the intent to change names, Michael Daniel Penner became Christine Michelle Daniels, as decreed by the Superior Court of California. The origin of most of that name is obvious: Michael begat Michelle, Daniel begat Daniels. Christine was an homage to Christine Jorgensen, the World War II veteran famous for having had what is believed to be the first male-to-female sex-reassignment surgery.

July 19 was significant for another reason. It was the day Daniels’ divorce attorney filed her first response to Dillman’s divorce filing. Dillman had submitted the papers on May 23, Daniels’ first day at the Times in her female persona.

“The fact that Lisa responded to Christine’s transition announcement as quickly as she did by filing for divorce — all of which was understandable — was a huge blow,” Winter says. It was only the tip of the iceberg.

Behind the scenes, Daniels’ transition was marred by a series of blowout arguments with Dillman and Dillman’s parents, Daniels’ friends tell the Weekly.

“It was particularly tragic because Christine had been very close to Lisa’s family,” Winter says. “The family felt like Mike did something to their daughter. How could he do this to her? There were definitely confrontations, a lot of them.”

Daniels went to great lengths to shield Dillman from scrutiny. But Dillman avoided Daniels. LeCoe said Dillman told Daniels, “I don’t even want to see you around the office unless I absolutely have to, and then I want to be as far away as possible. I don’t want to be associated with it. I don’t ever want to see you that way.”

Daniels was crushed by Dillman’s distance.

The same week as the divorce filing, Daniels suffered another blow. She covered a press conference for the L.A. arrival of British soccer superstar David Beckham. Also at the event was Paul Oberjuerge, a writer for the San Bernardino County Sun — and someone who didn’t get Reilly’s virtual memo to leave Daniels alone.

Oberjuerge took the opportunity to assess Daniels’ transition. “She looks like a guy in a dress, pretty much,” he wrote on the paper’s Web site. “Except anyone paying any attention isn’t going to be fooled — as some people are by veteran transvestites. Maybe this is cruel, but there were women in that room who were born women in body, as well as soul. And the difference between them and Christine was, in my mind, fairly stark. It seemed almost as we’re all going along with someone’s dress-up role-playing. …”

The words greatly upset Daniels. Even an online outpouring of outrage on her behalf, which prompted The Sun to remove the post, didn’t seem to make it better, because Oberjuerge had cut to the heart of one of the biggest issues for male-to-female transsexuals: whether they “pass.”

“Christine probably had a fragile side that was in some ways quite feminine and in some ways quite attractive,” LeCoe says. “She had a winsome side; she got her feelings hurt easily.” (Oberjuerge, no longer with The Sun, did not respond to the Weekly’s requests for comment.)

That setback notwithstanding, life remained largely upbeat for Daniels in the summer and fall of 2007. That September, she and Winter met well-known sex-change surgeon Dr. Marcie Bowers at a transgender conference in Atlanta known as Southern Comfort and, shortly thereafter, the friends had appointments to have sex-change surgeries on the same day in July 2008, at Bowers’ Colorado clinic.

“That was something we were really excited about,” Winter says. “Christine was so enthused by the female sex marker on her driver’s license. It’s a symbol of cultural acceptance.”

Bowers recalls her first meeting with Daniels, about whom she had heard a great deal. She sums up her impressions: “For as good as she looked, she seemed a little bit shy and insecure. But she was a lovely woman and seemed to have herself together.”

In truth, the euphoria wave was cresting.

The first outward indication was a big one. Friends say it was a catalyst in her downfall. Others say it was merely a manifestation of Daniels’ rising inner turmoil. The occasion was a disastrous photo shoot intended for Vanity Fair.

Shortly after Daniels’ 50th birthday, in October, she went to the L.A. studio of photographer Robert Maxwell. Accounts of what occurred there vary so starkly that they are hard to reconcile.

Maxwell was unreachable by the Weekly but told the L.A. Times in March that he intended to shoot Daniels in a “conservative, classy-type look.” He claimed that she was unstable and weepy, bawling that she was ugly.

“I was trying to say all the right things,” Maxwell told the Times. “How do you tell someone who looks like a man, ‘You’re a beautiful woman’? I don’t know.” Vanity Fair reporter Evan Wright backed up Maxwell, telling the Times he feared Daniels was suicidal and pulled the plug on the piece because Wright, too, was unsure how to cover Daniels without disparaging her “fantasy conception … [of] who she is.”

This account infuriates Daniels’ transgender confidantes. The sportswriter had told more than a half-dozen friends a very different version: that Maxwell’s aim was to sex her up and that he pushed her to pose in provocative ways.

She had told her friends that, far from Wright calling off the piece, Daniels had to fight him to stop the project from moving forward. Winter and others, in fact, say they helped Daniels draft a letter demanding that Vanity Fair kill the piece.

Daniels described the event this way in an e-mail to Winter and other friends that week: “They promised me, and I quote, ‘This will be done YOUR way, you will be happy and look beautiful.’ It was a total debacle, probably the worst experience of my transition. [The] photographer apparently wanted to portray me as a man in a dress, my worst fear, as I expressed numerous times. I was in tears by the end of it and a wreck for three days afterward. I felt betrayed, totally abused, and very, very vulnerable and exposed and alone in the world.”

Then things began to snowball.

The Vanity Fair fiasco exposed a growing rift between Daniels and some in the transgender community over how she was portraying transsexuality in her blog. They felt she was focusing too much on appearances, setting herself up for exactly the sort of treatment she said she received from Maxwell.

Daniels had a falling-out via e-mail with Stanton, the fired city manager in Florida. “She was writing a blog about how great it is to dress and color her hair and wear makeup and it was kind of very tranny,” Stanton says. “I was really nervous about this. A lot of people are saying, ‘Oh, you look so gorgeous.’ Then other people will say, ‘My goodness, look at this pervert on the TV. That’s nothing but a man in drag.’

“It’s not about that,” Stanton tells the Weekly. “It’s about being true to who we are.”

Daniels didn’t take kindly to the critique, e-mailing back to end the friendship. “I think what I’m doing is correct. If you’ve got a problem with it, it’s your problem. … I’m a real woman who loves makeup and clothes, shoes. A woman, not a trans-anything who needs to quote-unquote represent some undefined community. For the first time in my life, I’m being true to myself, and my true self loves makeup, clothes, shoes.”

As 2007 came to a close, Daniels began dealing similarly with many in the transgender activist community, friends say. She said she felt used by the trans community.

She also was increasingly despondent that the situation with Dillman was not improving.

Winter explains: “So many people were placing her in heroine status, she was starting to feel pressure to live up to her instant reputation. She would say, ‘I’m here for a purpose, I should be doing better than I am. Why am I so depressed or lonely?’

“She was really riding a huge crest, but eventually the party settles down and people get back to work, and life gets back to some semblance of normalcy,” Winter says. “What you’re left with once the confetti settles is realizing you’ve lost a lot of friends and you’re lonely.”

Daniels began to withdraw.

She canceled a speech in January 2008 to a Denver transgender conference called Gold Rush and didn’t appear in March when she was nominated for a GLAAD Media Award in Los Angeles.

Dr. Bowers knew something was gravely wrong in January when her office contacted Daniels about moving the July 2008 surgery date by a week because of a scheduling conflict. Daniels became disproportionately upset and refused to take further calls from the clinic.

“We were surprised by the degree of disappointment — it was just a week,” Dr. Bowers says. “We tried to scramble a few ways to say, ‘Look, we can do this, we can do this.’ I don’t usually call patients at home to apologize, but I did in this case. I sensed something was off.”

More alarming to LeCoe, at Easter, Daniels dropped out at the last minute from plans to see a passion play at her church, and her attendance at church fell sharply.

Daniels told people she was too busy caring for her mother, who was in the throes of rapidly accelerating dementia and died that spring. (Penner’s father died when he was 12.)

At the L.A. Times, Harvey sensed a shift. He called Daniels to joke with her about something and she became offended. “I thought, ‘Okay, there’s a change here,’ ” he says. “That’s when I began to think she doesn’t seem as happy as she was.”

In April 2008, Daniels took medical leave from the Times, complaining of severe abdominal pain and telling co-workers her mother’s decline and death were taking a tremendous psychological toll.

Daniels would never return to the paper. Her final byline appeared on April 4, 2008, less than a year after her first.

By May, LeCoe had realized the extent of Daniels’ physical and emotional problems. It wasn’t easy to find out. Daniels cut off friends such as Winter largely by not returning calls and e-mails. LeCoe and Diana were more relentless about stopping by her apartment, a turn of good fortune for Daniels, as LeCoe would become her primary caretaker.

“I became aware that Christine was really, really ill in May, when she was having a lot of stomach problems,” LeCoe says. “They were taking a toll on her digestive tract. She was constipated, had ulcers that caused her a lot of pain digesting food. She would say, ‘I think I’m dying.’”

Daniels was hospitalized in June 2008. Doctors determined that the stress of so many traumas — the devastating Vanity Fair shoot, the paranoia over being used by other transgender people for their causes, an acute loneliness that followed the post-coming-out euphoria, the death of her mother, and Dillman’s continuing distance — was manifesting as abdominal pain.

In the hospital, Daniels was diagnosed as severely depressed. Doctors prescribed a regimen of powerful psychotropic drugs that included the antipsychotic Zyprexa and the antidepressant Elavil. LeCoe remembers those drugs because she monitored Daniels to ensure she took them.

Daniels moved in with LeCoe for the summer, and it was in LeCoe’s living room that the last phase began in the dismantling of Christine Daniels. The reporter tore up several spiral-bound journals that she had kept while in transgender therapy, gave away her clothes and jewelry to friends and stopped doing anything to feminize herself.

And then the ultimate step: Daniels ordered LeCoe and others to start calling her Mike again.

LeCoe says it felt like the reverse of what the wife of a male-to-female transsexual sees during the transition. Christine morphed back into Mike by shucking the hormones, allowing patchy facial hair to return and her breasts to deflate.

“It broke my heart, but I couldn’t judge her,” LeCoe says. “That would have been hypocritical.”

De-transitioning is so unusual that there are no solid data about it. Psychiatrists who treat transgender people say it happens in less than 5 percent of cases.

Transgender activists say “going back” is inaccurate. People who choose to abandon transition are simply giving in to overwhelming stress and grief over what they lost from their previous life.

Certainly Penner’s decision to stop taking the feminizing hormones played a role in his deteriorating life, but the extent can’t be known. No studies have been conducted to determine whether withdrawal from the hormones can cause depression, but mental-health professionals who work with transgender people say patients who have stopped taking the drugs report feelings of distress.

“When they start taking hormones, they begin to express changes in their psyche — they’re more able to focus, more able to feel empathy, concern for others,” says Antioco Carrillo, a counselor with many transgender clients at the nonprofit Community Counseling Center in Las Vegas. “Once they go through the process, when they have stopped it, they go back to being depressed because it contradicts what they experienced. I don’t know if it’s the medication, but it is about the worldview.”

Bowers believes Penner put one foot in the grave by abandoning the transition. “If we had done surgery, it probably would have saved her life. Now she died as an unhappy soul who never got a chance to align her body and soul, and that’s the greatest tragedy about her.”

Although many issues were at play at this point, one stood out: Penner repeatedly told friends his return to a male lifestyle was a last-ditch effort to reunite with his wife in some way.

“I questioned whether or not there was any hope there, and I told Mike that, and Mike seemed intellectually to understand that,” LeCoe says. “It’s like, ‘Oh, yeah, nothing’s promised.’ But there was that hope that if Christine was gone and never coming back, then just maybe.

“There was at least a time when Mike would say, ‘I’d settle for being her close friend. I’ll settle for anything.’ ”

Penner’s byline returned to the L.A. Times in October 2008 without any public notification, and his divorce from Dillman became final on October 24. Penner and Dillman began to lunch together occasionally after that, but it was always awkward, LeCoe says.

Friends say Mike Penner 2.0 was sullen, visibly depressed and quiet, the opposite of Christine Daniels. And occasionally, there were mixed signals, like the time Diana suggested they go to a play in Malibu and Penner asked if maybe he ought to go as Christine. (He did not.)

At one point that fall, LeCoe accidentally called him “Christine,” then quickly apologized. “No, that’s okay,” Penner told her. “One of the best years of my life was spent being Christine. But I’m never going back.”

Late in 2008, Penner went back to Metropolitan Community Church. It was the last time the Rev. Thomas saw him. The two stole away for a brief, private chat after the service, and Penner surprised the pastor.

“He looked at me and he said, ‘Don’t you ever believe that I’ve given up being Christine,’ ” Thomas recalls. “I knew exactly what he meant. Everything about his body, everything about his fabric, everything that made him human was still screaming, that had been screaming for 40 years, that got to the point of Mike transitioning to Christine.

“But he hoped returning to Mike could possibly lead to reconciliation with Lisa. He loved Lisa, there was no doubt about it.”

That it took Penner as long as it did — until November 27, 2009 — to kill himself is, in retrospect, surprising. LeCoe and Diana spent the summer of 2009 contending with what were clearly attempts at drug overdoses and Penner’s constant talk of ending it all. Nobody knows how consistently Penner was taking his antidepressant medication, but the wild mood swings and suicidal chatter increased.

Penner was hospitalized twice in 2009, once in a psychiatric hospital after his brother, L.A. Times copy editor John Penner, learned he had made suicidal comments. LeCoe met and bonded with John Penner at that point. He told LeCoe he had never seen his brother happier than in the heyday of his life as Christine.

Two days before his death, Penner called LeCoe and asked if she could help him obtain a gun. LeCoe asked why and Penner said, “I’m at my rope’s end here.”

LeCoe refused to discuss the matter further and reminded Penner she had already repeatedly refused to assist in Penner’s self-destructive plans. She and Diana insisted on taking Penner out for dinner that night, and when they arrived the mood seemed deceptively lighter.

“You’ve already given me your answer — we won’t discuss that anymore,” Penner told LeCoe. “I will obey your rules. Let’s not discuss it. I’m hungry.”

On Thanksgiving, Penner sent what would seem like a valedictory e-mail to LeCoe and Diana: “I want to thank you for your friendship. It’s meant the world to me.”

The next night, he put on a blue long-sleeved shirt, black jeans and black-and-white Adidas sneakers, got in his Camry in the garage beneath his apartment and breathed carbon monoxide until he died.

It was a year to the day after his divorce had been finalized.

“Christine died of a broken heart,” Diana says. “She wasn’t confused about whether she was meant to be a woman. Any other reading of the situation is disrespectful to her memory.”

Mike Penner and Christine Daniels had separate funerals. Penner was laid to rest in Orange County in an event closed to media but populated by dozens of journalist colleagues. A group of Daniels’ transgender friends tried to attend but were turned away at the door for not being on the guest list, a concept the Rev. Thomas says hearkened back to the darkest days of the 1980s, when gay friends and even lovers of someone who had died of AIDS were similarly refused.

“That is why we decided to do a memorial service here at MCC for the folks who needed closure,” Thomas says of the second, far more public remembrance of Daniels, covered extensively by the local gay media.

Amy LeCoe was the sole transgender friend of Mike Penner’s who was invited to the Orange County funeral. The eulogies acknowledged the existence of Christine, and speakers noted that both Mike and Christine were consistently kind, loving people.

As LeCoe was leaving, Penner’s brother John stopped her to hug her; he said he doubted Penner would have lived as long as he did were it not for her care.

And then, something startling occurred. As she walked by Dillman, who had never met any of Penner’s transgender friends, the ex-wife halted another conversation to greet LeCoe.

“I know what you did for Mike and I just want to thank you,” Dillman said. She gripped LeCoe’s hand with what LeCoe describes as a “very warm, two-handed handshake.”

“You’re really welcome,” LeCoe replied. “I’m sorry I couldn’t do more.”

The two women cried together for a moment, then LeCoe walked on.

Thanks to Danielle Kays

Andrew Bettles for The New York Times (Shoes provided by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.)

By NICHOLAS SCHMIDLE
NY Times Published: August 19, 2010

A shopkeeper in Italy placed an order with a Chinese sneaker factory in Putian for 3,000 pairs of white Nike Tiempo indoor soccer shoes. It was early February, and the shopkeeper wanted the Tiempos pronto. Neither he nor Lin, the factory manager, were authorized to make Nikes. They would have no blueprints or instructions to follow. But Lin didn’t mind. He was used to working from scratch. A week later, Lin, who asked that I only use his first name, received a pair of authentic Tiempos, took them apart, studied their stitching and molding, drew up his own design and oversaw the production of 3,000 Nike clones. A month later, he shipped the shoes to Italy. “He’ll order more when there’s none left,” Lin told me recently, with confidence.

Lin has spent most of his adult life making sneakers, though he only entered the counterfeit business about five years ago. “What we make depends on the order,” Lin said. “But if someone wants Nikes, we’ll make them Nikes.” Putian, a “nest” for counterfeit-sneaker manufacturing, as one China-based intellectual-property lawyer put it, is in the south­eastern Chinese province of Fujian, just across the strait from Taiwan. In the late 1980s, multinational companies from all industries started outsourcing production to factories in the coastal provinces of Fujian, Guangdong and Zhejiang. Industries tended to cluster in specific cities and sub­regions. For Putian, it was sneakers. By the mid-1990s, a new brand of factory, specializing in fakes, began copying authentic Nike, Adidas, Puma and Reebok shoes. Counterfeiters played a low-budget game of industrial espionage, bribing employees at the licensed factories to lift samples or copy blueprints. Shoes were even chucked over a factory wall, according to a worker at one of Nike’s Putian factories. It wasn’t unusual for counterfeit models to show up in stores before the real ones did.

“There’s no way to get inside anymore,” Lin told me, describing the enhanced security measures at the licensed factories: guards, cameras and secondary outer walls. “Now we just go to a shop that sells the real shoes, buy a pair from the store and duplicate them.” Counterfeits come in varying levels of quality depending on their intended market. Shoes from Putian are designed primarily for export, and in corporate-footwear and intellectual-property-rights circles, Putian has become synonymous with high-end fakes, shoes so sophisticated that it is difficult to distinguish the real ones from the counterfeits.

In the last fiscal year, U.S. Customs and Border Protection seized more than $260 million worth of counterfeit goods. The goods included counterfeit Snuggies, DVDs, brake pads, computer parts and baby formula. But for four years, counterfeit footwear has topped the seizure list of the customs service; in the last fiscal year it accounted for nearly 40 percent of total seizures. (Electronics made up the second-largest share in that year, with about 12 percent of the total.) The customs service doesn’t break down seizures by brand, but demand for the fake reflects demand for the real, and Nike is widely considered to be the most counterfeited brand. One Nike employee estimated that there was one fake Nike item for every two authentic ones. But Peter Koehler, Nike’s global counsel for brand and litigation, told me that “counting the number of counterfeits is frankly impossible.”

The factory is off-white, five stories tall and fronted by a brown metal gate. It was a seasonable summer afternoon when I visited. Lin is 32, with a wispy mustache and a disarming smirk. He met me outside the factory and took me through the gate. We scaled two flights of aluminum stairs and entered a production floor echoing with the grinding and hissing noises of industrial labor. A few dozen workers stuffed shoe tongues with padding, brushed glue onto foot molds and ran laces through nearly finished sneakers. Nike and Adidas boxes were stacked in one corner, a pile of Asics uppers in another. On this particular day, the factory was churning out hundreds of trail runners.

A help-wanted notice on the wall beside the gated entrance sought individuals with stitching skills for all shifts; the bulletin made no mention that the work was illegal. Such things are often just assumed in Putian. Managing a fake-shoe factory puts Lin in the middle of a multibillion-dollar transnational enterprise that produces, distributes and sells counterfeits. Of course, like coca farmers in Bolivia and opium croppers in Afghanistan, Lin doesn’t make the big money; that’s for the networks running importation and distribution. Last year, for example, the F.B.I. arrested several people of Balkan origin in New York and New Jersey for their suspected roles in “the importation of large amounts of cocaine, heroin, marijuana, oxycodone, anabolic steroids, over a million pills of Ecstasy and counterfeit sneakers.” Dean Phillips, the chief of the F.B.I.’s Asian/African Criminal Enterprise Unit, describes counterfeiting as a “smart play” for criminals. The profits are high while the penalties are low. An Interpol analyst added: “If they get caught with a container of counterfeit sneakers, they lose their goods and get a mark on their customs records. But if they get caught with three kilos of coke, they’re going down for four to six years. That’s why you diversify.”

In September 2007, police officers in New York City seized 291,699 pairs of fake Nikes from two warehouses in Brooklyn. The early-­morning raids were part of a simultaneous crackdown on a counterfeiting ring with tentacles in China, New York and at least six other American states. Employing undercover agents and wiretapping, the joint operation — run by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the New York State Police, the Niagara Falls Police Department and the New York Police Department — exposed a scheme in which counterfeit Nikes arrived from China, were stored in Brooklyn and then shipped, often via UPS, to stores in Buffalo, Rochester, Pittsburgh, Dallas, Milwaukee, Chicago, Newark, Pawtucket, R.I., and Indian­apolis. Lev J. Kubiak, an immigration agent involved in the case, said the total street value of the seized goods (had they been legitimately trademarked) “turned out to be just over $31 million.” Establishing provenance on the sneakers proved difficult. “Naturally the importation docs were not truthful,” an immigration spokeswoman wrote in an e-mail message, when I asked her where the shoes originated. “But probably in or near Putian.”

After touring the assembly line, Lin and I walked up another flight of stairs to the roof of the factory. A mild breeze blew off the creek that snaked behind the building. Half-constructed high-rise apartments, ensconced in scaffolding and green mesh, stood beside towering cranes. The pace of development in Putian, a secondary provincial city with a population of about three million, was dizzying. A cluster of unfinished apartment buildings visible from my hotel window seemed to be a floor higher every morning.

We sat in Lin’s rooftop office around a small table topped with a chessboard-size tea-making contraption. Lin proceeded to sweep the excess water off the tea table with a paint brush and then make a pot of green tea while recounting the transaction with the Italian shopkeeper earlier this year. After pouring cups for my translator and me, Lin excused himself and ran downstairs. He returned with three samples, including a single fake Nike Tiempo, the first of the batch, which was sent to the Italian buyer to make sure it met his standards. Scribbled on the side of the shoe in navy blue pen was a date and the man’s signature. While looking the shoes over myself, I noticed the label on the inside of the tongue read “Made in Vietnam.” That was all part of the subterfuge, Lin said, adding that there are “different levels of counterfeit. Some are low quality and don’t look anything like the originals. But some are high quality and look just like the real ones. The only way to tell the difference between the real ones and ours is by the smell of the glue.” He took back the shoe, buried his nose in the footbed and inhaled.

National Intellectual Property Rights Coordination Center is the anticounterfeiting headquarters in the United States. Situated among short stacks of concrete office buildings in Arlington, Va., the center brings together representatives from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Customs and Border Protection, the Food and Drug Administration, the F.B.I., the Patent and Trademark Office, the United States Postal Service, the Defense Criminal Investigative Service, the Naval Criminal Investigative Service and other government agencies. J. Scott Ballman, an immigration agent with short, sandy hair and a Tennessee accent, is the center’s deputy director. Since joining customs in the early 1980s, Ballman has tracked the evolution of law enforcement’s response to intellectual-property violators as closely as anyone. (Customs split after 9/11 into Customs and Border Protection, which handles interdiction, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which deals with investigations.) He worked on what he says was the first undercover intellectual-property case for the customs service when he and a team of agents investigated and ultimately arrested a group in Miami for assembling counterfeit watches in 1985. “Most production of this stuff has since been pushed out of the United States,” he told me.

In 1998, the National Security Council studied the impact of intellectual-­property crimes and concluded that federal law-enforcement efforts lacked coordination. An executive order soon followed, sketching out the role of the National Intellectual Property Rights Coordination Center. Two years later a makeshift office opened in Washington, but after 9/11, chasing counterfeit goods lost priority. Ballman said: “Resources and focus changed overnight. Agents were detailed elsewhere and moved away from thinking about I.P. to counterterrorism and weapons of mass destruction.”

The Obama administration has made intellectual property more of a focus. “Our single greatest asset is the innovation and the ingenuity and creativity of the American people,” President Obama said in a speech in March. “But it’s only a competitive advantage if our companies know that someone else can’t just steal that idea and duplicate it with cheaper inputs and labor.” To implement his intellectual-property strategy, Obama appointed an intellectual-property-enforcement coordinator, while Immigration and Customs Enforcement invigorated the property-rights coordination center.

Can such efforts make a difference? “You’re not going to arrest your way out of this,” Bob Barchiesi, president of the International Anticounterfeiting Coalition, told me in a despairing tone this past spring. As long as there is a demand, he insisted, there will be supply. He had just returned from a trip to China, the point of origin for nearly 80 percent of all goods seized by Customs and Border Protection in the previous fiscal year. One day, Barchiesi observed a factory raid where counterfeit jeans were seized by the Chinese authorities. The factory, its employees and all its equipment remained in place. Barchiesi called the raid a “propaganda show.”

Efforts to have intellectual-property rights honored in China are not new. Soon after Gilbert Stuart completed his Athenaeum portrait of George Washington in 1796, the one that’s reproduced today on the front of every $1 bill, a Philadelphia ship captain named John Swords set sail for southeast China. Once in Canton, in modern-day Guangdong province, Swords ordered 100 unauthorized replicas of the Washington portrait, which were painted on glass. (Two replicas had somehow already made their way to China and served as the template.) Stuart was furious when he learned of Swords’s activities and, in 1801, he sued Swords in a Pennsylvania court and won. The damage was probably done, however. Even more than a century later, Antiques Magazine observed, “a good many portraits of George Washington painted on glass are knocking about the country.”

But China’s counterfeiting dynamic is more complicated than foreign goods being copied in places like Putian. Chinese sneaker brands, for instance, are also counterfeited. And the domestic debate about ensuring intellectual-property rights dates to at least the middle of the 19th century, said Mark Cohen, who moved to Beijing in 2004 to be the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s first permanent intellectual-property representative at the American Embassy. (He has since become co-chairman of the American Chamber of Commerce’s intellectual-property committee.) One initiative of the Taiping Rebellion during the 1850s, Cohen told me, was to “draft a patent law to encourage Chinese innovation.” Over a cappuccino one morning at an upscale cafe in Beijing, Cohen criticized the notion of Chinese government negligence, which he called overly simplistic. “People come to this environment with certain assumptions that all this counterfeiting must mean that there’s no one enforcing,” he said. “But there’s loads of people enforcing! There’s enough I.P. officials” — at least several hundred thousand by his estimate — “to make a small European country.”

Numbers don’t necessarily spell efficiency, of course. Joe Simone, an intellectual-property lawyer with Baker & McKenzie in China, said: “This is police work, but [the Chinese government] isn’t putting enough police on it. Ninety-nine percent of the enforcement work is nothing but bureaucrats.” He questioned whether the current enforcement system was effective. Lin, the counterfeiter from Putian, told me about instances in which local authorities had searched his factory or even forced him to close in daytime, leaving him to run the factory at night. But production always goes on.

Beijing’s top intellectual-property officials, meanwhile, seem to disagree over what even constitutes counterfeiting. Last year, a debate occurred between the heads of the State Intellectual Property Office and the National Copyright Administration. The dispute revolved around shanzhai, a term that translates literally into “mountain fortress”; in contemporary usage, it connotes counterfeiting that you should take pride in. There are shanzhai iPhones and shanzhai Porsches.

In February 2009, a reporter asked Tian Lipu, the commissioner of the State Intellectual Property Office, whether shanzhai was something to be esteemed. “I am an intellectual-property-rights worker,” Tian curtly replied. “Using other people’s intellectual property without authorization is against the law.” Chinese culture, he added, was not about imitating and plagiarizing others. But one month later, Liu Binjie, from the National Copyright Administration, drew a distinction between shanzhai and counterfeiting. “Shanzhai shows the cultural creativity of the common people,” Liu said. “It fits a market need, and people like it. We have to guide shanzhai culture and regulate it.” Soon after that, the mayor of Shenzhen, an industrial city near Hong Kong, reportedly urged local businessmen to ignore lofty debates about what is and isn’t defined as counterfeiting and to “not worry about the problem of fighting against plagiarism” and “just focus on doing business.”

This contradictory political environment parallels — or perhaps fosters — a seemingly confused corporate response. There is no doubt that, as with Washington’s Athenaeum portrait, there are today a “good many” fake sneakers “knocking about” China, the United States, Italy and the rest of the world. But none of the major footwear companies I contacted ventured an estimate of the scale of their counterfeiting problems. For them, it’s something better not discussed. Peter Humphrey, the founder of a risk consultancy firm in Beijing called ChinaWhys, suggested this could be for one of two reasons: a wariness of “upsetting the Chinese authorities” or being “afraid to admit publicly too loud” that they have a counterfeiting problem. “Because when word gets around the consumer market,” Humphrey said, “then everyone starts wondering if their shoes are real or not.”

How do counterfeit products translate to the bottom line of the legitimate company? Is each fake Nike or Adidas tennis shoe a lost sale? A senior employee at a major athletic-footwear company, speaking on condition of anonymity, reflected on counterfeiting as a simple fact of industrial life: “Does it cut into our business? Probably not. Is it frustrating? . . . Of course. But we put it as a form of flattery, I guess.”

It could also be a form of industrial training. In Putian, Lin told me of his real ambitions. “Making counterfeit shoes is a transitional choice,” he said. “We are developing our own brand now. In the longer term we want to make all our own brands, to make our own reputation.” Lin’s goals seemed in line with China’s de facto counterfeiting policy: to discourage it as a matter of law, but also to hope, as a matter of laissez-faire industrial-development policy, that the skills being acquired will eventually result in strong legitimate businesses.

Putian’s counterfeit-sneaker industry operates in the open. Just type “Putian Nike” into any Internet search engine, and hundreds of results immediately turn up, directing you to Putian-based Web sites selling fake shoes. (Putian’s counterfeit-sneaker business has become so renowned that Alibaba.com, an online marketplace, offers a page warning buyers to exercise caution when dealing with suppliers from Putian.) “People who make the product and sell the product are no longer secret,” says Harley Lewin, an intellectual-property lawyer at the firm McCarter & English. “Where sellers in the past were unwilling to disclose who they were, these days it’s a piece of cake” to find them.

Student Street in downtown Putian is a leafy, two-lane road lined with stores stocked with nothing but fake tennis shoes. I spent an afternoon browsing their wares. Like the products inside, the stores varied in quality. One resembled an Urban Outfitters — exposed brick and ductwork, sunlight beaming through a windowed facade, down-tempo electronica playing in the background — but the majority of the stores appeared to value enterprise over aesthetics, with storefronts made of metal shutters left ajar to indicate they were open for business. I ducked into one and discovered a single room with two opposing walls covered in sneakers shrink-wrapped in clear plastic: Air Jordans, the latest LeBron James models, Vibram FiveFingers and more. It was like a Foot Locker for fakes.

I pulled a pair of black Nike Frees from the rack, spun them in my hands, folded the sole back and forth, tugged at the stitching and sniffed the glue; every budding aficionado has their tasting routine. (I never could detect the smell of “bad” glue.) The shoes, which cost about $12 at the Student Street shops, seemed indistinguishable from the pair my wife bought for $85 in the United States. “I don’t know if I could tell a [fake] shoe right off the bat,” Ballman, the deputy director of the National Intellectual Property Rights Coordination Center, told me. If someone who specialized in intellectual-property-rights enforcement most of his career wasn’t sure he could tell the difference, how could I? (Ballman said the key was that fake shoes have a “heavy” glue smell.) As one Chinese salesman selling counterfeits in Beijing told me: “The shoes are original. It’s just the brands that are fake.”

“Are you looking to buy or sell?” a tall, 30-something woman with bangs asked as I examined the Nike Frees. Her husband sat behind her, facing a large desktop-computer monitor. Their young daughter sat at another computer, wearing a headset and playing video games. The shop doubled as a wholesaler. The woman later confided that she and her husband ran a small factory as well as the store. They were on the lookout for ways to get their sneakers to market and for sales agents who could sell their shoes in the West. “We can give a discount if you order in bulk,” she said.

I asked how long it would take to make 2,000 pairs. “Once you send us the model, about a month,” she said. Her husband spoke up and assured me that the shoes “would be the highest quality,” adding, “we’ll use all the same materials. All the best materials are available in Putian.” (Lin, however, disputed that and said that using the same materials would quickly drive the price up.)

“How would I get 2,000 pairs of counterfeits past customs agents in the United States?” I asked.

“They won’t come from Putian,” he said. Or at least the documents wouldn’t indicate that. “We usually ship through Hong Kong on our way to America. Don’t worry. We do this all the time.”

A week later, I flew to Hong Kong to meet with a private detective named Ted Kavowras. Kavowras runs Panoramic Consulting, an investigative firm employing 30 people in China and Hong Kong. (He is also the China and Hong Kong ambassador for the World Association of Detectives.) His forte is investigating counterfeit factories and distribution networks. “Until seven years ago, to export from China was much more complex, because you didn’t have the Internet and didn’t have that window into the world,” he told me one evening over Diet Cokes and skewers of grilled octopus at a small Japanese restaurant near his office. “So most of the exports that came out of China had to go through these state-owned shipping companies. It was all pretty centralized. Now it’s pretty much a free-for-all.”

Kavowras is a pear-shaped 48-year-old with pasty skin and a brash demeanor. The night after we met for Japanese food, he showed up at a fancy steakhouse wearing a black velour Fila tracksuit. (“What? I’m from Brooklyn,” he said with a shoulder shrug and pursed lips.) Kavowras grew up in New York City and joined the New York Police Department soon after graduating from high school. Three years later he retired on disability. He ended up working “a lot of law-enforcement stuff,” including security-­guard duties, but he found it unrewarding. “When you’re not the real thing, you’re not the real thing,” he said. Kavowras then worked in production with The New York Times but quit after five years and moved to Asia. In 1994, Pinkerton offered him a job in Guangzhou, China. “I was at the right place at the right time with the right skill set,” he said. Five years later, Kavowras formed Panoramic.

Kavowras estimates that he works about 800 cases a year, encompassing everything from sneakers to watches to industrial mining pumps. In 2002, New Balance hired him to nose around a factory run by one of its former licensees in China, a Taiwanese businessman named Horace Chang. According to press reports, Chang had more or less gone rogue. Though he had been previously contracted by New Balance to make and distribute sneakers, relations turned bad, and New Balance canceled the contract. But Chang continued making shoes that bore the New Balance trademark without permission. New Balance asked Kavowras to get inside Chang’s operation and report back. “I use a wonderful investigative methodology that works like a dream,” Kavowras said when I asked him how a former street cop from Brooklyn goes undercover in China. “Drug dealers have to deal drugs, and counterfeiters have to sell their goods. When I show up at a counterfeit factory, I look like a pretty girl on prom night. I look like a big buyer who they can export a lot of goods to.” Chang eventually quit making counterfeit New Balance shoes.

If there’s one commonality throughout the counterfeit world, it’s deception. Along the top of a file cabinet in Kavowras’s office, located at the end of a hallway on an upper floor of a quiet building, was a row of putty heads that a Hollywood makeup artist had designed so that Kavowras and his staff could experiment with disguises: hats, sunglasses, beards and mustaches, fake teeth. “I’m the only working actor who’s not waiting tables on the weekend,” Kavowras joked. A half-dozen fax machines were programmed to display the country codes and phone numbers of the overseas companies that Kavowras and his colleagues pretended to represent. Each employee kept a tray stacked with various business cards to corroborate their multiple identities. “The bigger the lie, the more they believe,” said Kavowras, who also rents four shell offices around Hong Kong where he meets “targets.”

Kavowras crossed the office to a shelf piled with purses and backpacks embedded with hidden cameras. I asked him how the recession had affected the detective business. “Business definitely slowed down last year,” he said. Corporate brand-protection budgets were slashed, and Kavowras’s caseload dropped. “But we’ve been twice as busy this year. Whatever companies avoided last year came back to haunt them this year. You can’t run away from these issues. Some people say, ‘Oh, it’s just China, we don’t really have a market in China.’ But if it’s in China, it’s going to get out. It’s going to wash up on beaches all over the world.”

Where did he see the counterfeit industry going next?

“It’s a constant battle,” he said.

“Like ‘the War on Drugs’-kind of constant battle?” I asked.

“That’s different,” he said. Kavowras popped in a set of fake teeth and smiled. “I see the battle staying the same, just the battleground changing. More and more industrial work is shifting to Vietnam. Cambodia too, though it’s still a bit messy there. It’s going to become more international.” And that, in all likelihood, will mean more agents, more detectives and more money spent to pursue fake sneakers that no one is quite sure they can identify.

Thanks to Nate Lentz

Randy Harris for The New York Times

Five months after a storm sent the Hudson surging over the garden of Joan Dye Gussow, theplot reflects changes she had long wanted to make.

By ANNE RAVER
NY Times Published: August 18, 2010

EARLY one morning a couple of weeks ago, I helped Joan Dye Gussow, 81, lug three bags of topsoil to the riverbank, before it became too hot and humid to work in her garden, which sweeps down from her house to the Hudson River.

It was hard to get a grip on the heavy plastic bag, but Ms. Gussow, a nutritionist and matriarch of the eat-locally-think-globally food movement, is amazingly sturdy for an octogenarian, and she marched me down the wide clover path toward the river.

“It likes being walked on,” she said of the white clover, as we trudged past her tomato cages full of ripening San Marzanos and Sungolds, self-seeded rainbow chard, sweet potatoes, newly planted peas, Malabar spinach and many other vegetables that make up Ms. Gussow’s year-round food supply.

More than 35 years before Fritz Haeg started his Edible Estates: Attack on the Front Lawn project in 2005 — his effort to turn the country’s lawns into vegetable patches — Ms. Gussow and her husband, Alan, an artist, were already in that mode. They laid down trash, kitchen waste and weeds, covered with newspapers and salt hay (killing the grass and making compost at the same time) on the front lawn of their Victorian in Congers, N.Y. Their goal: to grow food for themselves and their two young sons, Adam and Seth.

They farmed that lawn for more than two decades before moving here, to do the same thing, in 1995.

Ms. Gussow had gone back to school in 1969 to earn a doctorate in nutrition at Columbia University, at a time when nutrition was all about vitamins and chemistry, not how food was grown and where it came from. She began connecting the dots between what Americans were eating and how that food — be it factory-farmed chicken or Twinkies — was produced.

She created a legendary course, Nutritional Ecology, which she still teaches today, with a former student, Toni Liquori, who as director of School Food Focus, a nationwide program, works with school districts to buy more healthful, locally grown food.

Because Ms. Gussow dared to talk about energy use, pollution, diabetes and obesity as the true costs of food, she was initially viewed as a maverick crank, but her connections inspired the work of people like Michael Pollan, whose book “In Defense of Food,” echoes many of her revelations.

“She has been a powerful influence on the food movement,” said Mr. Pollan, adding that he admires her “clarity of thinking” and her ability to cut through complex issues to the simple truth: “We all know nutrients are important,” he said. “But Joan says, ‘Eat food.’ That’s the kernel of ‘In Defense of Food.’ ”

Ms. Gussow’s thinking, like Mr. Pollan’s, has always been grounded in the garden.

That muggy morning, as temperatures headed for the high 90s, we dumped the bags of soil near the boardwalk, where, only a few feet away, mallards were paddling peacefully in the quiet water. It was hard to imagine that in March a storm had brought the river surging over the boardwalk, tearing up its boards and pilings, ripping raised beds out of the ground as it moved toward the house, burying the long narrow garden — 36 by 100 feet — under two feet of water.

You can read the story on Ms. Gussow’s Web site, joansgarden.org: “I found myself quite numb — not hysterical as I might have expected. I think it’s age,” she wrote, after sloshing about in her rubber boots the morning after. “There’s absolutely nothing I could have done to prevent it.”

The day of the storm, March 13, had been a momentous one: she had finished the revisions to her new book, “Growing Older: A Chronicle of Death, Life and Vegetables,” published by Chelsea Green, and due out in November. And for the first time in her long writing life — she has written, co-written or edited five books — she was about to get an advance.

The morning after, finding herself blocked by the debris of what used to be raised beds and the boardwalk, she went inside to call Dave Avdoyan, the landscaper who had built the boxes for those beds, as well as a low stone wall on the north side of the garden, which in recent years had blocked river water rising in a storm. Now it, too, was submerged.

She figured her plants, including her beloved fruit trees and azaleas, were a total loss. But Mr. Avdoyan surveyed the wreckage, looked over the fence at the empty lot next door, which had better drainage and wasn’t as flooded, and proposed a radical solution: using the lot as a staging area and trucking in enough fill to raise her bathtub of a garden two feet.

Now, looking about at her ebullient plants, many resurrected from the flood, Ms. Gussow said: “I’m not religious and I’m not superstitious, but I really feel that Mother Nature took care of me. This was the first time in 100 years this lot was open. The owner took down the house in January, and was not going to rebuild until April.”

And she had the advance to pay what ended up costing $10,000 for the materials and labor. “It feels like a gift to me,” she said. “This amazing event occurred, and gave me the opportunity to do something I’d been wanting to do for years.”

Over the next few weeks, friends from the city picked up lumber, and a neighbor stacked bricks and pavers from the paths on the boardwalk. Former students helped move hundreds of plants, stashing them in the driveway, on the deck, any corner they could find. Mr. Avdoyan and a helper rebuilt the boardwalk and friends replaced the filter cloth behind the rocks to keep soil from washing out with the river.

Then, on March 30, a high tide flooded the garden again.

Another week went by, and finally, Mr. Avdoyan set to work with his Caterpillar, forklifting plants like the still-blooming peach tree, the low ilex hedges and the azaleas right out of the ground, and trundling them over to the empty lot, where they were set in mounds of donated soil and compost.

After Mr. Avdoyan trucked in 200 yards of fill, a crew of 17 staff members from Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture, in Pocantico Hills, N.Y., came down to spread 30 yards of soil and compost from McEnroe Organic Farm, in Millerton, N.Y., donated by Helena Durst. Then they laid down pavers and bricks for walkways that now lie flush with the vegetable beds.

“I’m so happy the wood is gone — it wasn’t pretty,” Ms. Gussow said, referring to the planting boxes, as we walked down the cross paths, admiring her crops.

“It was a lot of work,” she said, recalling how she singlehandedly repotted hundreds of plants, including precious lily bulbs.

I loved the soft, wide path of white clover, which rarely has to be mowed, and made a mental note to plant one in my own garden. Ditto for the perennial arugula, which was thriving beneath the trifoliate orange tree given to her by Barbara Kingsolver, who also lives off the land. The arugula, which returns year after year, was given to her by Larry Bogdanow, an architect and gardener, at the Just Food benefit held at Sotheby’s on April 25, where 300 locavores toasted and roasted Ms. Gussow, as the mother of their movement.

Other flood victims were thriving here as well: The kiwi vines, lifted out of their root-bound urns by the flood, are now climbing their trellis. The peach tree, relocated in a sunnier spot, bore 75 peaches in late June.

I had been in this garden in 2001, when Ms. Gussow’s first memoir, “This Organic Life: Confessions of a Suburban Homesteader,” was published. That book chronicled the constant floods and the battles with woodchucks and neighbors that she and Alan had begun waging six years earlier, when they moved into their 150-year-old house, a former Odd Fellows Hall that sat right on the street. But its backyard faced east, toward the sunrise, and ran right to the river. The house turned out to be so rotten they had to demolish it and rebuild. Alan had only two and a half years to enjoy it before he died of cancer, in May 1997.

“Growing Older” picks up that story, beginning with Ms. Gussow’s revelation that, to her surprise, she did not miss her husband, or even grieve for him.

“I kept experiencing it as a strange liberation from things I hadn’t known I was imprisoned by,” she writes. Such honesty is characteristic of Ms. Gussow, whether she is discussing intimate relationships or the one the United States has with oil.

In a recent speech before the Society of Nutrition Education in Reno, Nev., she did not mince words. “Your children’s children will never see an iceberg,” she told the audience. “They will never see a glacier. There will be no penguins, no polar bears.”

And here we stood in her garden, which was simmering in a week of high humidity, with no rain. The morning news had told of wildfires burning up the forests in Russia, and of hundreds of people dying from the heat.

We came inside, because it was too hot to work, to make a breakfast of those luscious Marzanos, simmered in a little oil and cumin, and eggs.

“If we work out there in that sunshine, we would die,” Ms. Gussow said, pulling the label off the little plastic bag that had held the cumin, so she could use it again for something else. (Is cumin good for you? I asked. “I have no idea,” she replied. “I tend not to eat for that reason.”)

Her hero is Bill McKibben, the environmental activist whose latest book, “Eaarth,” will be a key text in her course at Columbia this fall.

She summed up his message: “It’s too late to live on Earth. We have to figure out how to live on this new planet. It’s not the planet we grew up on.”

Every year, she tries to prepare her students for the despair they inevitably feel as they consume the readings she has compiled on the world’s population, poverty, hunger, pollution, disease, loss of habitat and farmland, melting ice caps, oil spills and the like.

“All you can do is say: ‘You can’t be optimistic about the state of the world — what you can be is open-minded. You’re going to look for solutions, and you’re going to make your own life mean something. You can no longer think that accumulating money or the biggest house is the answer,’ ” she said.

She is encouraged by all the young people going into agriculture.

“In this unreal world of electronic communication, they want to do something real, with their hands,” she said. “It’s very creative and very intellectually challenging, despite what people think.”

Ms. Gussow figures she has a good 20 years, at least, to garden in this watery paradise. But time is finite.

“Would I be down to 15 springs before the pawpaw tree I planted as a seed finally began to bear?” she writes in “Growing Older.”

She is already at work on her next book. It’s called “Starting Over at 81.”

How to Keep the Crops In and the Woodchucks Out

HERE are some tips for vegetable gardeners from Joan Dye Gussow.

Make your own sweet-potato slips by suspending a sweet potato, speared with toothpicks, over a glass jar filled with water. It should form roots in a week or so and begin sprouting from the top. If it doesn’t, turn it upside down; roots will grow from the bottom and the top will sprout. When sprouts have leaves, snap the shoots off at the base and root in a glass of water.

Keep woodchucks, rabbits and other varmints out of the broccoli and cabbage patch by placing a piece of construction wire, curved in a hoop, over the plants, along the length of the bed. Add a layer of chicken wire. The mini-hoop house offers support as plants like brussels sprouts grow, and critters cannot get to tempting crops.

Use 16-inch-square pavers, edged with brick, to make a path two feet across, wide enough for walking or rolling a wheelbarrow. The path gives a crisp look to the crops in the beds on either side, which, in Ms. Gussow’s new garden, are now flush with it, not raised and edged with wood.

Ms. Gussow used to start her own chilies, eggplants and tomatoes from seed, but now she orders plants from Cross Country Nurseries (908-996-4646, chileplants.com), in Rosemont, N.J. The company ships live plants nationwide from April through June, and fresh chilies from September to frost.

To preserve chard, de-stem the leaves, then roll them up to julienne and lightly sauté. Put cupfuls on a tray and freeze. Place frozen cupfuls in a plastic bag, and stash in the freezer, to be used as needed.

The floral-and-tough look of Julia Louis- Dreyfus as Elaine Benes on “Seinfeld” is this summer’s downtown inspiration.

By WILLIAM VAN METER
NY Times Published: August 18, 2010

ON a recent August night, young women in stilettos teetered precariously through the cobblestone streets of the meatpacking district in Manhattan. Appropriately for the neighborhood, they were squeezed into minidresses that were as snug as sausage casings. But a few blocks south, far away from the blare of Hummer limousine horns, at the fashionable opening of the Algus Greenspon Gallery on Morton Street, a more demure look prevailed.

Like a modest Robert Palmer-girl army, the women mingled in floor-length print dresses and brown lace-up boots with their hair in messy secretary buns. The genesis of the look could have been those unforgettable images of fundamentalist Mormon women that dominated the news a couple of years back. But if you squinted, what you saw was a sea of Elaines. Listen and you could almost hear the funky slap bass that played as segue music on “Seinfeld.” Could it be that the stars have somehow aligned to make Elaine Benes the summer’s downtown fashion muse?

Over the years, Elaine has stood out as a beacon of a faded era, in long floral skirts, blazers with padded shoulders and granny shoes with socks. Just about every inch of her skin was covered as if she were photosensitive. Unlike other 1990s series with a more easily imitable style (see “Melrose Place”), “Seinfeld” was decidedly anti-fashion. But now, if you happen upon an old episode, Elaine just looks cool — and of-the-moment.

“She was definitely feminine,” said Julia Louis-Dreyfus, who played Elaine, Jerry’s headstrong foil, from 1990 to 1998, “but she didn’t have girlfriends. She was one of the guys. It wasn’t about trying to look sexy. It was about looking like a girl who pushes people around.”

Ms. Louis-Dreyfus often collaborated with Charmaine Simmons, the “Seinfeld” costume designer, to create Elaine’s look. The floral dresses and skirts were her trademark, and on one recently broadcast rerun, she is a vision in a full-on floral clown suit (complete with a pie collar), worn with a denim vest.

“The other part of it, too, was the shirts Elaine wore,” Ms. Louis-Dreyfus said. “They were often very lacey or had a lace inset or a demure collar and were worn underneath something tough, like a leather coat or denim jacket. For a long time, actually, the jacket was mine. It was a Ralph Lauren cowboy jacket with fringe. I have that somewhere. I wonder where that is? That was a lot of the look. And also cowboy boots.”

“At the time, I thought people were wearing this look,” she added. “Either that or just me and my four friends were. That is a possibility.”

Large brooches figured heavily into the formula, as well.

“There are certain trends you can’t imagine rearing their heads, but then, there they are,” Anne Slowey, the fashion news director of Elle, said of the Elaine look, which she calls “Upper West Side grunge.” “You see someone like Chloë Sevigny wearing it, and you’re like, ‘Oh wait, I want to do that, too.’ The Chloë Sevigny version is shorter and cuter. It’s a flirtier, cleaned-up version, but it is derivative. Who would ever think Elaine from ‘Seinfeld’ would be a style icon?”

Ms. Sevigny does not own a television and is not overly familiar with the show. “I remember her hair with the poof at the front,” she said, “but I don’t think too many girls are doing that.” But she has noticed the return of the floral skirt. “The girls are doing it on the street,” she said, “but it’s not ankle length. It’s more midcalf.”

Still, Ms. Sevigny’s new resort collection for Opening Ceremony, heavy on mix-and match patterns — some with lace embellishments, even one with a Peter Pan collar — is the perfect, if inadvertent, modern take on Elaine.

“Girls like the floral,” Ms. Sevigny said. “A little femininity and delicacy. Pair it with a heavy boot. It works!”

The Elaine look incorporates so many styles — early American settler, gypsy, business casual, pious zealot — that it was likely only a matter of time before one of them provided inspiration for designers. Indeed, the recent resort collections featured more calico than an alley of cats, and a chic Elaine specter hovered over lines as diverse as Prada and Rebecca Taylor, each with a multitude of prim prints.

For Lyz Olko, a designer of the punk-chic label Obesity and Speed, the layered floral/tough girl Elaine look is nostalgic. “My entire wardrobe consists of floral, denim and black leather,” she said. Recently Ms. Olko, a self-proclaimed pack rat, retrieved many of her ’90s dresses from storage to wear again. (“I was also into floral print rompers,” she noted, “but I’ve retired them.”) On a recent thrifting excursion, she emptied an entire rack of floral dresses into her cart.

“I went into Screaming Mimi’s the other day,” she said of the venerable vintage shop in NoLIta, “and it was all dresses you would see in Arizona.”

This June, Lauren Boyle, an editor at the subversive online fashion magazine Dis, explicitly pitted floral against tough in a much-talked-about feature, pairing Laura Ashley-clad models with punks, goths and ravers. The prairie girls looked more sinister. (“I have a history with Laura Ashley,” Ms. Boyle said of her inspiration. “My bedroom was decorated in it growing up, from hat boxes to wallpaper.”)

Jaime Perlman, the art director of British Vogue, actually calls some of the vintage pieces in her wardrobe “Elaine dresses.” “She contrasted the androgyny of her men’s jackets with that big hairdo,” Ms. Perlman said. “It looked so effortless. Elaine embodies both this season’s trends of the early ’90s and the working woman.”

How does one explain the head-to-toe Elaine fashion renaissance? It’s not as if it is a result of a TBS “Seinfeld” marathon projected on the wall of the Jane Hotel. Most of the Jane habitués are too young to realize whom they are referencing. One theory was offered by the fashion stylist Mel Ottenberg. “The look doesn’t come from outer space,” he said. “Girls who were obsessed with micro-minis are now so anti-that, and they’re embarrassed at what they were wearing two years ago. This is a more covered-up look and looking like you have a brain. Elaine had a job. She worked at J. Peterman. She was a go-getter.”

Of course, the wild-card element in Elaine’s look was that Ms. Louis-Dreyfus was pregnant twice during the years the show was shot. “Nowadays pregnant women wear tight-fitting tops,” she said. “That was not the look when I was pregnant. It was all about being blousy. But we didn’t work my pregnancy into the story lines of ‘Seinfeld.’ I had my big vat of sponges.”

Ms. Louis-Dreyfus said that toward the end of the series, her character’s look took on a slimmer, darker palette. “It cooled down, but I still wouldn’t call it subtle,” she said.

Her personal style evolved, also.

“God, fashion is so strange,” she said. “I’m glad I don’t dress like that anymore. On the other hand, maybe I will again since everyone’s doing it.”

At least Elaine’s dancing hasn’t caught on.

Chang W. Lee/The New York Times

By MATT RICHTEL
NY Times Published: August 15, 2010

GLEN CANYON NATIONAL RECREATION AREA, Utah — Todd Braver emerges from a tent nestled against the canyon wall. He has a slight tan, except for a slim pale band around his wrist.

For the first time in three days in the wilderness, Mr. Braver is not wearing his watch. “I forgot,” he says.

It is a small thing, the kind of change many vacationers notice in themselves as they unwind and lose track of time. But for Mr. Braver and his companions, these moments lead to a question: What is happening to our brains?

Mr. Braver, a psychology professor at Washington University in St. Louis, was one of five neuroscientists on an unusual journey. They spent a week in late May in this remote area of southern Utah, rafting the San Juan River, camping on the soft banks and hiking the tributary canyons.

It was a primitive trip with a sophisticated goal: to understand how heavy use of digital devices and other technology changes how we think and behave, and how a retreat into nature might reverse those effects.

Cellphones do not work here, e-mail is inaccessible and laptops have been left behind. It is a trip into the heart of silence — increasingly rare now that people can get online even in far-flung vacation spots.

As they head down the tight curves the San Juan has carved from ancient sandstone, the travelers will, not surprisingly, unwind, sleep better and lose the nagging feeling to check for a phone in the pocket. But the significance of such changes is a matter of debate for them.

Some of the scientists say a vacation like this hardly warrants much scrutiny. But the trip’s organizer, David Strayer, a psychology professor at the University of Utah, says that studying what happens when we step away from our devices and rest our brains — in particular, how attention, memory and learning are affected — is important science.

“Attention is the holy grail,” Mr. Strayer says.

“Everything that you’re conscious of, everything you let in, everything you remember and you forget, depends on it.”

Echoing other researchers, Mr. Strayer says that understanding how attention works could help in the treatment of a host of maladies, like attention deficit disorder, schizophrenia and depression. And he says that on a day-to-day basis, too much digital stimulation can “take people who would be functioning O.K. and put them in a range where they’re not psychologically healthy.”

The quest to understand the impact on the brain of heavy technology use — at a time when such use is exploding — is still in its early stages. To Mr. Strayer, it is no less significant than when scientists investigated the effects of consuming too much meat or alcohol.

But stepping away is easier for some than others. The trip begins with a strong defense of digital connectedness, a debate that revolves around one particularly important e-mail.

On the Road

The five scientists on the trip can be loosely divided into two groups: the believers and the skeptics.

The believers are Mr. Strayer and Paul Atchley, 40, a professor at the University of Kansas who studies teenagers’ compulsive use of cellphones. They argue that heavy technology use can inhibit deep thought and cause anxiety, and that getting out into nature can help. They take pains in their own lives to regularly log off.

The skeptics use their digital gadgets without reservation. They are not convinced that anything lasting will come of the trip — personally or scientifically.

This group includes the fast-talking Mr. Braver, 41, a brain imaging expert; Steven Yantis, 54, the tall and contemplative chairman of the psychological and brain sciences department at Johns Hopkins, who studies how people switch between tasks; and Art Kramer, 57, a white-bearded professor at the University of Illinois who has gained attention for his studies of the neurological benefits of exercise.

Also on the trip are a reporter and a photographer, and Richard Boyer, a quiet outdoorsman and accomplished landscape painter, who helps Mr. Strayer lead the journey.

Among the bright academic lights in the group, Mr. Kramer is the most prominent. At the time of the trip he was about to take over a $300,000-a-year position as director of the Beckman Institute, a leading research center at the University of Illinois with around 1,000 scientists and staff workers and tens of millions of dollars in grant financing.

He is also intense personally — someone who has been challenging himself since early in life; he says he left home when he was a teenager, became an amateur boxer and, later, flew airplanes, rock-climbed and smashed his knee in a “high-speed skiing accident.”

They are driving six hours from Salt Lake City to the river, and they stop at a camping store for last-minute supplies. Mr. Kramer waits out front, checking e-mail on his BlackBerry Curve. This sets off a debate between the believers and skeptics.

Back in the car, Mr. Kramer says he checked his phone because he was waiting for important news: whether his lab has received a $25 million grant from the military to apply neuroscience to the study of ergonomics. He has instructed his staff to send a text message to an emergency satellite phone the group will carry with them.

Mr. Atchley says he doesn’t understand why Mr. Kramer would bother. “The grant will still be there when you get back,” he says.

“Of course you’d want to know about a $25 million grant,” Mr. Kramer responds. Pressed by Mr. Atchley on the significance of knowing immediately, he adds: “They would expect me to get right back to them.”

It is a debate that has become increasingly common as technology has redefined the notion of what is “urgent.” How soon do people need to get information and respond to it? The believers in the group say the drumbeat of incoming data has created a false sense of urgency that can affect people’s ability to focus.

In his case, Mr. Kramer says there have been few side effects: the only time he could recall being overly distracted by technology was when he became too immersed in writing a paper, and was late to pick up his teenage daughter.

“As academics, we live on computers,” he says.

The scenery has turned spartan as they drop down into a red-rock desert. The group stops for gas in Green River, where Mr. Kramer checks his e-mail again. Mr. Strayer quips that he shows signs of addiction.

“Some people think only others have the problem,” Mr. Strayer says. But he concedes of Mr. Kramer, whom he likes and under whom he earned his doctorate: “He’s under a lot of pressure.”

On the River

They awaken at the Recapture Lodge, a rustic two-story motel surrounded by cottonwood trees. There are no phones in the rooms, but there is wireless Internet access, installed a few years ago because, the proprietor says, people could not stand to be without it.

Mr. Kramer still has not received any news on the grant. He stuffs his laptop into a backpack and stores it at the motel office.

Hours later, the group arrives at the raft launching site, Mexican Hat, named for a sombrero-shaped rock outcropping. The travelers assemble and pack the rafts, loading food for five days, beer, water jugs, a portable toilet, tents and sleeping bags, kitchen and first aid supplies. Then they’re off.

A short distance downstream they see it: a narrow steel bridge 150 feet above the river — after which there is no longer any cellphone coverage.

“It’s the end of civilization,” Mr. Atchley jokes.

Late in the afternoon, they make camp on the banks. They eat pork chops, the Big Dipper brilliant above, the thousand-foot canyon walls narrowing their view of the heavens. A few bats dart and dive, seeking bugs drawn to the flashlights.

The men drink Tecate beer and talk about the brain. They are thinking about a seminal study from the University of Michigan that showed people can better learn after walking in the woods than after walking a busy street.

The study indicates that learning centers in the brain become taxed when asked to process information, even during the relatively passive experience of taking in an urban setting. By extension, some scientists believe heavy multitasking fatigues the brain, draining it of the ability to focus.

Mr. Strayer, the trip leader, argues that nature can refresh the brain. “Our senses change. They kind of recalibrate — you notice sounds, like these crickets chirping; you hear the river, the sounds, the smells, you become more connected to the physical environment, the earth, rather than the artificial environment.”

“That’s why they call it vacation. It’s restorative,” Mr. Braver says. He wonders if there’s any science behind the nature idea. “Part of being a good scientist is being skeptical.”

Mr. Braver accepts the Michigan research but wants to understand precisely what happens inside the brain. And he wonders: Why don’t brains adapt to the heavy stimulation, turning us into ever-stronger multitaskers?

“Right,” says Mr. Kramer, the skeptic. “Why wouldn’t the circuits be exercised, in a sense, and we’d get stronger?”

Ideas Start to Flow

Scientists have long thought about how new forms of media affect attention — from the printing press to the television. But the modern study of attention emerged in the early 1980s with the spread of machines that allowed researchers to see changes in blood flow and electrical activity in the brain. Newer machines have let them pinpoint the parts of the brain that light up when people switch from one task to another, or when they are paying attention to music or a movie.

This has become such a sizzling field of research that two years ago the National Institutes of Health established a division to support studies of the parts of the brain involved with focus.

Now, Mr. Yantis says, “we can study the brain and the mind together in a rigorous scientific way, rather than a Freudian sit-back-and-think-about-it way.”

This trip is more about rowing while thinking. Mr. Braver and Mr. Yantis sit in a red kayak in calm waters, passing a goose and her two goslings on the banks. The skeptics are talking about how to study the toll taken by constant interruption from e-mail and other digital bursts.

Behavioral studies have shown that performance suffers when people multitask. These researchers are wondering whether attention and focus can take a hit when people merely anticipate the arrival of more digital stimulation.

“The expectation of e-mail seems to be taking up our working memory,” Mr. Yantis says.

Working memory is a precious resource in the brain. The scientists hypothesize that a fraction of brain power is tied up in anticipating e-mail and other new information — and that they might be able to prove it using imaging.

“To the extent you have less working memory, you have less space for storing and integrating ideas and therefore less to do the reasoning you need to do,” says Mr. Kramer, floating nearby.

Over the course of the next few days, the rafters find themselves darting in and out of such scientific conversations. Two scientists packing their tents discuss which imaging techniques may best show the effects of digital overload on the brain. The full group tosses around ways to measure the release of brain chemicals into the bloodstream. A pair paddling the big raft talk about how to apply neuroeconomics — measuring how the brain values information — to understand compulsive texting by teenagers.

The conversations blur, with periods of silence and awed looks at surroundings — the circling hawks, the bighorn sheep. There are moments, too, when the men experience intense focus during physical challenges, like rafting the rapids or hiking narrow canyon walls.

This is the rhythm of the trip: As the river flows, so do the ideas.

“There’s a real mental freedom in knowing no one or nothing can interrupt you,” Mr. Braver says. He echoes the others in noting that the trip is in many ways more effective than work retreats set in hotels, often involving hundreds of people who shuffle through quick meetings, wielding BlackBerrys. “It’s why I got into science, to talk about ideas.”

‘Third-Day Syndrome’

“Time is slowing down,” Mr. Kramer says. He has been moving quickly his whole life, since he left home at 15, and has elevated himself to a position of great influence. It’s the second day on the river, and he has finished packing his tent. He’s the first of the morning to do so, but he feels no urgency.

He has not read any of the research papers he brought. And the $25 million e-mail? “I was never worried about it. I haven’t thought about it,” he says, as if the very idea were silly.

Mr. Kramer says the group has become more reflective, quieter, more focused on the surroundings. “If I looked around like this at work, people would think I was goofing off,” he says.

The others are more relaxed too. Mr. Braver decides against coffee, bypassing his usual ritual. The next day, he neglects to put on his watch, though he cautions against reading too much into it. “I sometimes forget to put my watch on at home, but in fairness, I usually have my phone with me and it has a clock on it.”

Mr. Strayer, the believer, says the travelers are experiencing a stage of relaxation he calls “third-day syndrome.” Its symptoms may be unsurprising. But even the more skeptical of the scientists say something is happening to their brains that reinforces their scientific discussions — something that could be important to helping people cope in a world of constant electronic noise.

“If we can find out that people are walking around fatigued and not realizing their cognitive potential,” Mr. Braver says, then pauses and adds: “What can we do to get us back to our full potential?”

What he is getting at is something the scientists won’t put a fine point on until the last few minutes of the trip: they have ideas on how to answer this question.

Heading Home

Later that night, back at the Recapture Lodge, Mr. Kramer reclaims his laptop from the front desk. At first, he says he’ll wait to log on until he showers and rests. Then he decides to have a quick peek. He has received 216 e-mail messages, but nothing about the military grant.

“The $25 million saga continues,” he says, and logs off.

The next morning, he and Mr. Braver sit in the back of the car, heading to the airport, the pair of skeptics sharing beef jerky and a perspective. The trip didn’t transform them, but it did get them to change the way they think about their research — and themselves.

Mr. Braver says that when he retrieved his phone the night before, it dawned on him how much he turns to it in tiny moments of boredom: “Sometimes I do use it as an excuse to be antisocial.”

When he gets back to St. Louis, he says, he plans to focus more on understanding what happens to the brain as it rests. He wants to use imaging technology to see whether the effect of nature on the brain can be measured and whether there are other ways to reproduce it, say, through meditation.

Mr. Kramer says he wants to look at whether the benefits to the brain — the clearer thoughts, for example — come from the experience of being in nature, the exertion of hiking and rafting, or a combination.

Mr. Atchley says he can see new ways to understand why teenagers decide to text even in dangerous situations, like driving. Perhaps the addictiveness of digital stimulation leads to poor decision-making. Mr. Yantis says a late-night conversation beneath stars and circling bats gave him new ways to think about his research into how and why people are distracted by irrelevant streams of information.

Even without knowing exactly how the trip affected their brains, the scientists are prepared to recommend a little downtime as a path to uncluttered thinking. As Mr. Kramer puts it: “How many years did we prescribe aspirin without knowing the exact mechanism?”

As they near the airport, Mr. Kramer also mentions a personal discovery: “I have a colleague who says that I’m being very impolite when I pull out a computer during meetings. I say: ‘I can listen.’ ”

“Maybe I’m not listening so well. Maybe I can work at being more engaged.”

TRAILER #2: Temporal Collections… In the General Vicinity of Inner & Outer Space from R.T. on Vimeo.

closes September 12

By ALICE RAWSTHORN
NY Times Published: August 15, 2010

LONDON — The Rev. Samuel Henshall was not a lucky man. His hopes of academic glory in late 18th century Oxford were scuppered when his scholarly essays flopped, and he failed to bag a professorship. He began a new career in the church only to be dogged by legal tussles over money, or the lack of it. Once he was taken to court by a brewery to which he owed £420 — a hefty beer bill for the time.

But his boozing wasn’t entirely wasteful, because it inspired Mr. Henshall’s sole success. He invented a contraption to extract corks from wine bottles, the corkscrew, which was patented by the industrialist Matthew Boulton in 1795. Despite his failure to pay his share of the patenting expenses and a flood of complaints from rival inventors (one of whom dismissed him as a “piratical screwmaker”) Mr. Henshall is still credited as the corkscrew’s designer. Several of his early models were buried with him.

A modern version of his invention is displayed together with a paper clip, clothespin, rubber band, egg carton, shipping container and 30 other useful and familiar objects in “Hidden Heroes: The Genius of Everyday Things,” an exhibition opening Friday at the Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein, Germany.

“They’re the sort of products that every designer dreams of making — very simple, very ingenious items that we use on a daily basis,” said Jochen Eisenbrand, who curated the exhibition. “They’ve continued to exist for decades without changing very much, because they haven’t needed to.”

Some of the objects in the show were devised by amateur inventors like the hapless Mr. Henshall. One is the glass preserving jar, a forerunner of the tin can, which was dreamed up in 1809 by a Paris chef, Nicolas Appert, as the winning entry of a competition launched by Napoleon Bonaparte to improve the French Army’s food. Another is the clothes hanger, which dates back to 1903 when Albert J. Parkhouse arrived for work at a lampshade frame factory in Jackson, Michigan, only to find that all of the coat hooks were taken. He made something to hang his coat on by bending a piece of wire into an elongated triangle and twisting the ends into a hook.

Other “Hidden Heroes” stemmed from sudden flashes of inspiration. The German pharmacist Maximilian Negwer hit upon his 1907 idea of cushioning wax ear plugs with cotton wool when reading Homer’s “The Odyssey.” Untangling burrs from his dog’s fur after an Alpine hunting trip prompted the Swiss engineer George de Mestral to develop Velcro fabric fastener in the 1940s and 1950s.

Air bubble film, or bubble wrap, was conceived in the 1950s after a Swiss inventor, Marc Chavannes, noticed how the clouds seemed to cushion an airplane as it descended, and realized that a similar effect could be achieved in packaging by sealing air inside plastic film. An American scientist, Art Fry, dreamed up the Post-it note in the late 1970s when singing in a church choir. He couldn’t find the right page in his hymn book because the paper bookmark kept slipping out.

The exhibition also shows how some familiar objects are industrialized versions of homemade devices that evolved over centuries. The baby pacifier dates back to the scraps of cloth filled with sugar, which soothed agitated babies in the 1500s. The design of the rubber condom was based on the cloth bags and animal intestines that had historically been used as makeshift contraceptives.

Intriguing though the stories behind these “Hidden Heroes” are, many of them have been told before. (Although to the Vitra Design Museum’s credit it has unearthed patent drawings, industrial films and early advertising campaigns to document how they were designed, manufactured and marketed.) Similar objects featured in 2004’s “Humble Masterpieces” exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and “Super Normal,” a 2006 show organized by the British designer Jasper Morrison and his Japanese counterpart, Naoto Fukasawa. Some re-emerged last year in “Design Real,” an exhibition curated by the German designer, Konstantin Grcic, at the Serpentine Gallery in London.

Why do we find them so fascinating? The stories help, obviously, especially the ones with “it could have been you” sub-plots. Take the German housewife, Melitta Bentz, who made a fortune by inventing the coffee filter in 1908, after experimenting with blotting paper from her son’s school exercise book.

It’s equally tantalizing to be able to think of familiar things, especially useful and inexpensive ones, as being unexpectedly interesting. “We all find these objects irresistible because they give us a sense of adventure and discovery,” said Paola Antonelli, senior curator of architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art, who organized “Humble Masterpieces.” “It is a great worldwide treasure hunt, which is open to everyone with no need for star designers or erudite curators.”

The modesty of the “Hidden Heroes” is particularly appealing at a time when we’ve become bored by the brashness of what’s been called “Design-with-a-capital-D.” (Remember the lamp mounted on an 18-karat-gold-plated Kalashnikov AK-47 assault rifle by the French designer, Philippe Starck? That was the peak/nadir of “Design.”) Designers, the thoughtful ones, at least, are increasingly absorbed by the ontology of objects, or the abstract qualities that define them, rather than aesthetics.

It’s also easy to see why we should treasure economy, pragmatism and longevity in a deepening environmental crisis. Though one object in both “Hidden Heroes” and “Humble Masterpieces” doesn’t quite fit that picture. It’s the incandescent lightbulb, which embodies the utilitarian virtues of cheapness, practicality, simplicity and so on, except when it comes to energy. Only 15 percent of the electricity it consumes is used to create light; the rest disappears as heat.

The lightbulb industry has spent a fortune developing energy-efficient alternatives, but so far none has matched the warm, soulful light that makes the incandescent bulb so special. And unless one succeeds, it won’t qualify as a design “hero,” hidden or otherwise.

John Lurie in 1984. Photograph by Sylvia Plachy.

By Tad Friend
August 16, 2010
The New Yorker

ABSTRACT: DOWNTOWN CHRONICLES
about John Lurie. From 1984 to 1989, everyone in downtown New York wanted to be John Lurie. Or sleep with him. Or punch him in the face. Lurie, the star of the Jim Jarmusch films “Stranger Than Paradise” and “Down by Law” and the saxophone-playing leader of the jazz-punk group the Lounge Lizards, was intensely charismatic. He wore a Borsalino fedora and old suits and painted expressionist album covers and picked up girls at the Mudd Club and snorted coke at the Palladium. In the nineties, he let his acting career go, but “Fishing with John,” his tongue-in-cheek cable show showcased his ingenuity and candor. A year and a half ago, however, at the age of fifty-six, Lurie disappeared. What happened first was that Lurie was stricken with a mysterious disease that confined him to his SoHo apartment for six years. Then, in 2008, he and his closest friend, a younger artist named John Perry, had an explosive rupture, and Lurie went into hiding in the belief that Perry intended to kill him. This was a reasonable point of view, as Perry was stalking him. In October, Lurie began living incognito in a rented house in Palm Springs, California. Perry and Lurie got to know each other in the early nineties, at the SoHo restaurant Lucky Strike. In the fall of 2008, Perry asked Lurie to pose for him for an instructional TV pilot called “The Drawing Show.” A few hours in, Lurie was clearly ill, wincing and slumping in his chair. Sometime after 10:30 P.M., Lurie left and then he collapsed in the hallway. In the days that followed, Perry called Time Warner Cable and discovered that Lurie had ordered a pay-per-view boxing match shortly after he left the shoot. Lurie e-mailed Perry to say, “I suffered agony for you—it was met with disappointment and derision.” Perry, stung, began speed-dialing Lurie’s apartment, and then he appeared downstairs at his apartment building. That night, Lurie moved out to the Bowery Hotel and in the morning he sent Perry an e-mail saying that his threats amounted to extortion. Perry promptly filed a police complaint against Lurie, making up a claim that Lurie had threatened to hit him with a baseball bat. That afternoon, Lurie filed a police complaint against Perry for harassment. Both men were avowedly heterosexual, but Lurie felt that Perry’s behavior suggested a rebuffed lover. In February of 2009, Lurie moved to Flea’s house in Big Sur to paint. Mentions Lurie’s assistant, Nesrin Wolf, and “Good Morning America”’s Bill Stanton. A number of Lurie’s friends now felt that Perry was his default topic, and paranoia his default mode. Neither man wants to apologize unilaterally—or, really, at all. However, Perry did tell the writer, “I regret the whole thing, it was silly and cruel.” The protracted duet has become a kind of living performance piece, but neither man is able to see it as art: Perry because he views himself solely as a painter, and Lurie because he never before associated art with a fear of death.

Sorry The New Yorker doesn’t allow articles to be posted in full.
I highly recommend picking up this weeks copy for this article alone. (August 16, 2010)

Bruno S. in Werner Herzog’s “Enigma of Kaspar Hauser.”

By DOUGLAS MARTIN
NY Times Published: August 14, 2010

He wrote songs and sang them on the streets of Berlin. One told of a poor boy who grows up wishing for a little horse. The horse arrives years later pulling his mother’s hearse.

The man who sang it in a croaky voice, accompanying himself on the accordion and glockenspiel, was known as Bruno S. He was a street musician, a painter of pictures, a forklift operator in a steel mill and, at one time, a mental patient. But, perhaps most remarkably, he was the lead actor in a movie that won the Grand Jury Prize at the Cannes International Film Festival in 1975.

His full name, which he seldom used, was Bruno Schleinstein. He died Wednesday at the age of 78 in Berlin, according to the German Press Agency, quoting his friend the artist Klaus Theuerkauf.

Werner Herzog, one of the innovators of postwar German cinema, twice in the 1970s cast Bruno to play pretty much himself — a damaged but somehow transcendent character.

The first of those films, the one that won at Cannes, was “The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser” (1974), based on a true story. In the film the character played by Bruno appears in a square in 19th-century Nuremburg. He cannot speak and can barely stand, having apparently been kept in a kind of dungeon. The only clue to his identity is a paper giving his name as Kaspar and asking that he be taken into service as a soldier.

Kaspar is taught to speak and to read and write, and then, in a fashion as mysterious as his appearance, he is murdered.

Bruno’s acting moved Richard Eder of The New York Times to write: “Kaspar’s extraordinary face, his eyes strained wide to see better, his whole posture suggesting a man trying to swallow, trying to grasp a world of strangeness, is the film’s central image.”

As he learns to speak, Kaspar finds much of society repulsive. “Every man is a wolf to me,” he says. He has no ego: “Nothing lives less in me than my life.”

“The story of Kaspar is more fascinating than the story of Jesus Christ,” Anaïs Nin was quoted as saying in an advertisement for the film.

Bruno Schleinstein was born on June 2, 1932, most likely in Berlin. Some accounts say his mother, a prostitute, had beaten him so badly when he was 3 that he became temporarily deaf. This led to his placement in a mental hospital, where he was the subject of Nazi experiments on mentally disabled children.

Nobody visited him, not even relatives he knew. He spent 23 years in institutions, including jails and homeless shelters. When on his own, he broke into cars for a warm place to sleep.

As an adult he held various jobs, including forklift driver, and began to sing in courtyards around Berlin in the oral tradition that inspired Brecht’s “Threepenny Opera.”

He didn’t sing songs, Bruno said; he transmitted them. One song, “Thoughts Are Free,” concerned the impossibility of finding refuge even in one’s thoughts.

Mr. Herzog first glimpsed Bruno in a 1970 documentary about street musicians.

“I instantly knew he could be the leading character in ‘Kaspar Hauser,’ ” Mr. Herzog said in an interview with NPR in 2006. Bruno did not want his name known, and so Mr. Herzog began calling him “the unknown soldier of cinema.” During filming, Mr. Herzog said, Bruno would have moments of “utter despair” and start talking, sometimes screaming, in the middle of a shot and continue in that way for two hours.

Bruno’s second film, “Stroszek” (1977), was based on his life; Mr. Herzog had written the script expressly for him. Some scenes were shot in Bruno’s own apartment. In the film, Bruno, a prostitute he befriends and his aging landlord move to the mythical Railroad Flats, Wis., where they live in a trailer.

In the film, Bruno, who refers to himself in the third person, has sharp comments about America. “Bruno is still being pushed around,” he says, “not physically but spiritually; here they hurt you with a smile.”

Bruno said in interviews that he had never wanted to be a movie star, and in time the benefits of fame faded, other than the occasional free haircut by a friendly barber.

“Everybody threw him away,” Bruno said of himself.

He continued to carve out a life with his music and artwork, some of which was compelling enough to be exhibited at shows of so-called outsider art, including one in New York. When playing for street audiences, he never asked for money. Sometimes a friend would pass a hat for him. He drew a small pension. He apparently had no survivors.

In 2002, the German filmmaker Miron Zownir made a documentary called “Bruno S. — Estrangement Is Death.” In it, Bruno seems to answer the many who worried that he had been exploited by Mr. Herzog.

“I have my pride, and I can think,” he said, “and my thinking is clever.”

Early 80′s Peter Shire

more here

Sue Ogrocki/Reuters

Scottie Pippen spent 11 of his 17 seasons in Chicago, 10 with Michael Jordan, and won six championships.

By HARVEY ARATON
NY Times Published: August 12, 2010

On the eve of Scottie Pippen’s induction into basketball’s highest society, Phil Jackson recalled him as “the ultimate team player.” Quite the homage from Jackson, the former Chicago Bulls coach who once watched incredulously as Pippen sat down with 1.8 seconds left in a deadlocked playoff game against the Knicks and refused to get up.

It was 1994 — Game 3 of the Eastern Conference semifinals — and Pippen wanted the ball for the last shot because Michael Jordan, on a baseball sabbatical, was not around to take it. Jackson instead nominated Toni Kukoc, a European legend but an N.B.A. rookie, who made the winning jumper.

“A lot of people thought the 1.8-second ‘denial’ would define Scottie’s career,” Jackson wrote in an e-mail. Instead, Pippen’s entry into the Naismith Memorial Hall of Fame Friday night for his 17-year, six-championship career will be the final answer to those who argued he never, ever, would live down the episode of Sitting Bull.

“It was a learning moment in his life,” Jackson wrote. “He came back as a leader of teams for another decade.”

In the Bulls’ locker room that night, Bill Cartwright, the veteran center, stood up and said, “Scottie, how could you?” In a telephone interview, Cartwright said: “My thing for Pip was that with Michael gone, it was his team, his time to lead. And when things are at their worst, you’ve got to be at your best.”

Pippen apologized, Cartwright said, and played brilliantly as the Bulls evened the series and took a one-point lead into the final seconds of Game 5 in New York. With the jump-shooter Hubert Davis squaring up in the area of the key, the 6-foot-8 Pippen emerged from the lane, extending the long arm of an eight-time all-league defender, who took on the toughest assignments, position be damned.

Davis rushed the shot and missed it, but Pippen grazed his fingertips well after the release. A referee named Hue Hollins awarded Davis free throws that would live in infamy almost everywhere outside New York. The Knicks survived and took the series in seven games, leaving the Air-less Bulls, a surprise 55-victory team that season, crestfallen but certain they were much more than their reputation as a subordinate band of Jordanaires.

“If we had won that game and then the series and gone on to win the title that year, the whole legacy of Michael would have been different,” said Jerry Reinsdorf, the Bulls’ owner, who recently hired Pippen as an organizational ambassador. “But because Michael had left and came back and then we won again, he was given all the credit, and sometimes it was unfair, especially to Scottie.”

As the years passed, Pippen was acknowledged as a valued member of the so-called supporting cast but was, in a larger sense, undervalued as merely the largest moon in orbit of the planet Michael. But to judge Pippen’s legacy against the league’s most lethal weapon and its first corporately supported powerhouse was always beside the point or missing it entirely, said Don Dyer, who coached Pippen at the University of Central Arkansas.

Nobody recruited Pippen when he graduated from high school, Dyer said, not even the junior colleges. “His high school coach had played for me in college,” he said. “He called me and said, ‘I have no idea if he can play at your level, but I’d appreciate it if you gave him a look.’ Scottie’s brother brought him over; he was maybe 6-2, 145 pounds, an athlete but not really what you’d call a basketball player.”

Pippen was the youngest of 12 children and grew up in a two-room house in rural Hamburg, Ark. His father, Preston, a mill worker, was disabled by a stroke and became unable to work when Pippen was a teenager. Dyer got him into school on a Pell grant and put him to work as the team manager until a position on the team opened during the season.

He cleaned lockers, handed out towels. “And now he’s going into the Hall of Fame — and that’s amazing,” said Dyer, who will attend the ceremony in Springfield, Mass., at the invitation of Pippen.

Preps to pros, rarely has an N.B.A. great emerged from such humble beginnings. Far from the clichéd Jordan comparisons, there lies the essence of the Scottie Pippen story.

According to Jerry Krause, the former general manager who traded for Pippen in a prearranged draft-day deal with Seattle, it was a sight to behold, watching Jordan punish the rail-thin and raw Pippen in practice.

“One of the smartest things Doug Collins did was match them up,” Krause said, referring to the Bulls’ coach before Jackson. “And I mean Michael just killed Scottie, beat the hell out of him. But it was the best thing that could have happened to Scottie, winding up with Michael in Chicago. He had to get stronger. He had to learn to compete.”

Jordan prepped him for bully opponents like the Pistons and later the Knicks, who focused on Pippen as a player who could be physically and verbally whipped. They were only encouraged to push harder, taunt louder, when he begged off a 1990 conference finals game against the Pistons with a migraine.

“He had that label put on him; he definitely was a target of ours,” said John Starks, the former Knick who introduced himself to Pippen during the conference semifinals in 1992 by clotheslining him, knocking him silly — accidentally, of course, Starks said — on a fast break at Madison Square Garden.

“I think part of it was because he didn’t show his emotions and he’d get that frown on his face,” Starks added. “But to his credit, he stood up. He showed in ’94 he could step up on his own. He’ll always live in Michael’s shadow, but, hey, they were a great Batman and Robin duo.”

Robin fought some battles independent of Batman, feuding with Bulls management over money, dealing with a gun possession charge and conducting messy and litigious business affairs well after his playing days.

Was an involvement in the purchase of a Gulfstream II jet in 2002 that bled Pippen of several million dollars a symbolic statement that he, like Jordan, believed he could fly?

Maybe he couldn’t, not like Jordan, but Jackson said Jordan would now admit that without Pippen he might have been the LeBron James of his day, searching for a championship fit in some other city.

“When Michael came back from the Barcelona Olympics, he came into our coach’s office and said that Scottie was the best player on the team,” Jackson said.

A debatable statement, but suffice to say that Pippen is the most credentialed player of an estimable 2010 Hall of Fame individual class that includes Karl Malone, Dennis and Gus Johnson (no relation) posthumously, the women’s star Cynthia Cooper, and Bob Hurley Sr., a New Jersey high school coaching legend.

Just Pippen’s luck, the Hall will also induct two gold-medal winning Olympic teams from 1960 and 1992, meaning that he will get in twice but that Jordan is also expected back after his own individual induction last year.

No worries. Jordan is also Pippen’s planned presenter. Viewed in its proper context, it could be no other way.

thanks kit kat

T.C. Worley for The New York Times

Purple martins in Tony Lau’s Otsego, Minn.

By KATE MURPHY
NY Times Published: August 11, 2010

AFTER a long day at work, Chuck Abare, 63, a computer designer, likes to sit on the porch of his two-story ranch house on the outskirts of Huntsville, Ala., drink a gin and tonic, and watch the antics of the purple martins winging around his backyard.

Glossy aerial acrobats with forked tails, purple martins are a type of swallow, and the only species of bird entirely dependent on humans for housing. Every spring, Mr. Abare said, they show up to nest in the bulbous chandelier-like birdhouses he made several years ago out of plywood and hollowed-out gourds, and mounted on 12-foot poles.

“Purple martins are addicting,” said Mr. Abare, who built two standard birdhouses for them as well, to accommodate a total of 104 nests. “When the birds start to fledge, I’ll have maybe 300 at a time chitchatting and flying around. It gets pretty noisy, but I never get tired of them.”

Sales figures from companies that make housing for purple martins, like S&K Manufacturing in Missouri, suggest that Mr. Abare is not alone in his enthusiasm. The company, one of the largest suppliers of martin housing, reports that sales of houses and gourds have increased annually by nearly 40 percent for the last five years.

The Purple Martin Conservation Association, a nonprofit organization based in Erie, Pa., has seen evidence of growing interest as well, with a big upswing in participation in its online forums since its Web site was introduced in 2003. (The first year, the site had 30 active users; today, 3,000 people post questions and comments on 15,000 topics related to attracting and caring for purple martins.) And a number of rival organizations, like the Purple Martin Society of North America and the Purple Martin Preservation Alliance, have emerged, as have countless blogs and videos on YouTube devoted to purple martins.

This spike in interest coincides with the increased popularity of bird-watching in general — the number of bird-watchers in the United States is now estimated to be somewhere between 48 million and 69 million, according to sources ranging from the United States Fish and Wildlife Service to the journal Environmental Conservation.

Those who act as purple martin “landlords,” however, are often far more than mere observers. Many interact with their tenants, inspecting nests and tending to baby birds. Some monitor the birds with video or “nest cams” and intervene to protect them if necessary.

David Bonter, an ornithologist at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., said this is one reason the species, which had been dwindling in number, has seen a comeback in recent years.

“Purple martins, like all aerial insectivore populations, have not been doing well, partly due to pesticides poisoning their food supply, so it’s good that more people are getting involved in helping them,” Dr. Bonter said.

Their dependence on humans began centuries ago, according to the Audubon Society, when American Indians put out hollowed gourds for them, probably because the birds are voracious insectivores that provided pest control and also chased off vultures picking at drying meat and hides.

Purple martins winter in the Amazon basin in South America and return to nest in North America from late February through August. They are found mostly in the Eastern half of the United States, but also in parts of Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, California, Oregon and Washington. This time of year, they can be seen teaching their fledglings how to catch bugs in midair and fattening up for their journey south.

MARTINS like to nest up high, where they are safe from predators like snakes and raccoons, and can spy and swoop down on insects. The best place to put their housing is in a clearing, 10 to 15 feet off the ground, far enough from trees or shrubs so they have an unimpeded flyway.

Mr. Abare put a nest cam in one of his gourds so he can watch the eggs hatch and chart the nestlings’ progress. Every four or five days, he inspects the nests in person, using ropes and pulleys to lower the gourd racks and birdhouses to the ground like flags on a flagpole.

The various rooms of the birdhouses are numbered, as are the gourds. Mr. Abare opens the hatches on each compartment, calling out status reports to his wife, Betty, 63, who jots them down in a notebook. He also takes pictures, which he posts on his Web site, chuckspurplemartinpage.com.

Like Mr. Abare, Larry Melcher, 47, a pipe fitter, keeps meticulous records of the goings-on inside the 58 purple martin nesting cavities in the birdhouse and two gourd racks he keeps on 10-foot poles behind his tidy brick house outside Louisville, Ky. When a baby falls out of a nest, he can figure out where it belongs from his spreadsheets. He also cleans and replaces nesting material in compartments that have become infested with blood-sucking mites, which can kill baby birds.

“Unlike other birds, martins don’t care if you touch their babies,” Mr. Melcher said. “It’s like they know you’re there to help.”

Friends and neighbors often attend his weekly nest checks, and more than 2,000 people have watched the video of him returning a baby martin to its nest, which he posted on YouTube.

As well as being up high, purple martins like to be within a few miles of water, where there are plenty of bugs. Pat Lynch, 75, of Rochester said the yard of her clapboard home on Lake Ontario would be unbearable during the spring and summer were it not for her purple martin colony “scarfing up” all the biting flies and insects. Ms. Lynch, a retired nurse, watches her martins, which she calls “sky sweepers,” from a swing on her patio. She also has a nest cam that relays the action inside one of the compartments in her two 12-room birdhouses. “It’s better than TV,” she said.

Some purple martin fans will go to great lengths for that entertainment. When Tony Lau, 44, a frozen-dairy manager for a Target store near Minneapolis, had trouble drawing martins to nest in his birdhouse four years ago, he borrowed a neighbor’s Bobcat mini bulldozer and dug a 75-foot-long pond in his backyard.

“I was reading online about other people getting all these martins, and I got sort of competitive about it,” he said. “I decided to do everything I could to get them here.”

Mr. Lau now has 35 pairs of purple martins nesting in his birdhouse and assorted gourds. He is hoping for 100 pairs next year, he said, because martins that successfully reproduce at a site usually return and bring friends.

But he knows he’ll have to be on guard against what he and other purple martin lovers consider the birds’ archenemies: European starlings and English house sparrows. These non-native birds, introduced to the United States in the late 1800s, will evict martins from their nests, poke holes in their eggs and kill nestlings. As Mr. Melcher put it, “It makes your blood boil.”

He and Mr. Abare kill English sparrows with an air rifle; Ms. Lynch traps and drowns them. Specially sized half-moon openings in the birdhouses and gourds usually keep out starlings, they said, so they don’t have to exterminate them.

“I hate to talk about killing birds,” Mr. Melcher said. “But once I saw how they steal nests and kill babies — it’s like someone walking into your home and telling you to get out, and murdering your kids.”

Even so, others prefer just to shoo them away. Laura Joseph, 67, a retired school administrator, said she manually removes sparrows from the 164 nesting cavities in the birdhouses and gourds she put on poles in the lot next to her Greek revival home in Austin, Tex. “I asked neighbors to sign up, and we have 34 volunteers who check the nests every day and take out the sparrows,” Ms. Joseph said. “We make their lives as uncomfortable as possible, so they won’t get established.”

Frequent monitoring and intervention may increase the number of purple martins that fledge, said Dr. Bonter of Cornell. Still, he added, “You don’t really have to do more than put up housing in an appropriate spot to have a successful colony.”

But for purple martin landlords like Kathy Freeze, 47, a computer systems analyst with a 45-nest colony in Licking, Mo., near Springfield, interacting with the birds is a large part of the appeal.

“You get a profound sense of accomplishment at the end of the season, when all the young nestlings are fledging,” she said. “And you know that you have contributed to a great conservation effort.”

Bird Housing, Specs and Sources

PURPLE MARTIN housing can look like anything from a Chinese pagoda to a Ferris wheel with gondolas. But structures with multiple, spacious compartments are the most effective at attracting the birds.

Whether you choose to go with houses or gourds, they should be painted white to reflect the sun, which will keep nesting birds cooler; there should also be half-moon-shaped openings (about 1 3/16 by 2 3/4 inches) to keep out starlings. Most hands-on martin landlords say they prefer housing that can be raised and lowered with a winch or a rope-and-pulley system, so they don’t have to climb a ladder to check on their tenants.

If you want to build the housing yourself, plans are available online. So is ready-made housing.

Sources include the Purple Martin Conservation Association (purplemartin.org), a nonprofit organization that offers information on caring for the birds; S&K Manufacturing, a Missouri company specializing in purple martin housing and accessories (skmfg.com); the Backyard Bird Company (backyardbird.com), which sells a selection of housing for purple martins and other birds; and Purple Martin Majesty (purplemartinmajesty.com), which sells and ships gourd racks nationwide, and offers installation services in the Houston area.

Gary Meszaros/Photo Researchers

OH, MY The star-nosed mole, to humans, “is disturbing because it looks like the animal has no face,” a neuroscientist says. More Photos »

By NATALIE ANGIER
NY Times Published: August 9, 2010

A friend recently sent around an e-mail with the subject line “lost cat bulletin.” Open the message and — gack! — there was a head-on shot of a star-nosed mole, its “Dawn of the Dead” digging claws in full view and its hallmark nasal boutonniere of 22 highly sensitive feelers looking like fresh bits of sirloin being extruded through a meat grinder.

“I don’t think anyone would come near that cat, much less steal it,” tittered one respondent. Another participant, unfamiliar with the mole, wondered whether this was a “Photoshop project gone bad,” while a third simply wrote, “Ugh.”

We see images of jaguars, impalas and falcons and we praise their regal beauty and name our muscle cars for them. We watch a conga line of permanently tuxedoed penguins, and our hearts melt faster than the ice sheet beneath those adorable waddling feet. Even creatures phylogenetically far removed from ourselves can have an otherworldly appeal: jellyfish, octopus, praying mantis, horseshoe crab.

Yet there are some animals that few would choose as wallpaper for a Web browser — that, to the contrary, will often provoke in a human viewer a reflexive retraction of the nostrils accompanied by a guttural or adenoidal vocalization: ugh, yuck, ew.

Let’s not pussyfoot. They are, by our standards, ugly animals — maybe cute ugly, more often just ugly ugly. And though the science of ugliness lags behind investigations into the evolution of beauty and the metrics of a supermodel’s face, a few researchers are taking a crack at understanding why we find certain animals unsightly even when they don’t threaten us with venom or compete for our food.

Among the all-star uglies are the star-nosed mole, whose mug in close-up, said Nancy Kanwisher, a neuroscientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, “is disturbing because it looks like the animal has no face,” or as if its face has been blown away. The blobfish, by contrast, is practically all face — a pale, gelatinous deep-sea creature whose large-lipped, sad-sack expression seems to be melting toward the floor.

“It looks like if you handled it,” said Geoffrey Miller, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of New Mexico, “at the very least you’d get some kind of rash.”

We have the male proboscis monkey and the male elephant seal, with their pendulous, vaguely salacious Jimmy Durantes, and the woolly bat and the vampire bat, their squashed snub noses accentuating their razor-toothed gapes. The warthog’s trapezoidal skull is straight out of Picasso’s “Guernica,” while the warthog’s kin, the babirusa, gives new meaning to the word skulduggery: On occasion, one of its two pairs of curving tusks will grow up and around and pierce right into its skull.

Don’t forget the gargoyles of our own creation, purebred cats and dogs that are stump-limbed, hairless and wrinkled, with buggy eyes and concave snouts, and ears as big as a jack rabbit’s or curled at the tips like rotini. We love them, we do, our dear little mutants, not in spite of their ugliness, but because of it.

As scientists see it, a comparative consideration of what we find freakish or unsettling in other species offers a fresh perspective on how we extract large amounts of visual information from a millisecond’s glance, and then spin, atomize and anthropomorphize that assessment into a revealing saga of ourselves.

“No one would find the star-nosed mole ugly if its star were iridescent blue,” said Denis Dutton, professor of the philosophy of art at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. “But the resemblance of the pinkish nose to human flesh subverts our expectations and becomes a perverse violation of whatever values we have about what constitutes normal or healthy human skin.”

Conservation researchers argue that only by being aware of our aesthetic prejudices can we set them aside when deciding which species cry out to be studied and saved. Reporting recently in the journal Conservation Biology, Morgan J. Trimble, a research fellow at the University of Pretoria in South Africa, and her colleagues examined the scientific literature for roughly 2,000 animal species in southern Africa, and uncovered evidence that scientists, like the rest of us, may be biased toward the beefcakes and beauty queens.

Assessing the publication database for the years 1994 through 2008, the researchers found 1,855 papers about chimpanzees, 1,241 on leopards and 562 about lions — but only 14 for that mammalian equivalent of the blobfish, the African manatee.

“The manatee was the least studied large mammal,” Ms. Trimble said. Speculating on a possible reason for the disparity, she said, “Most scientists are in it for the love of what they do, and a lot of them are interested in big, furry cute things.”

Or little cute things. Humans and other mammals seem to have an innate baby schema, an attraction to infant cues like large, wide-set eyes, a button nose and a mouth set low in the face, and the universality of these cues explains why mother dogs have been known to nurse kittens, lionesses to take care of antelope kids.

On a first pass, then, “ugliness would be the deviation from these qualities,” said David Perrett, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. Tiny, close-set eyes, prominent snout, no forehead to speak of: it sure sounds like a pig.

A helpless baby grows into a healthy, fertile youth, which in humans is visually characterized by clarity of shape, sleekness of form and visibility of musculature, said Wendy Steiner of the University of Pennsylvania, who is author of “Venus in Exile” and “The Real, Real Thing,” to be published this fall. “An animal with saggy skin, whiskers and no neck will look like some old guy who’s lost it,” she joked.

The more readily we can analogize between a particular animal body part and our own, the more likely we are to cry ugly. “We may not find an elephant’s trunk ugly because it’s so remote,” Dr. Dutton said. “But the proboscis on a proboscis monkey is close enough to our own that we apply human standards to it.” You can keep your rhinoplasty, though: the male monkey’s bulbous proboscis lends his mating vocalizations resonant oomph.

People are also keenly, even obsessively vigilant for signs of ill health in others. “That means anything that looks seriously asymmetrical when it should be symmetrical, that looks rough and irregular when it should be smooth, that looks like there might be parasites on the skin or worms under the skin, jaundice or pallor,” Dr. Miller said. “Anything mottled is considered unattractive. Patchy hair is considered unattractive.” We distinguish between the signs of an acquired illness and those of an innate abnormality. Splotches, bumps and greasy verdigris skin mean “possibly infectious illness,” while asymmetry and exaggerated, stunted or incomplete features hint of a congenital problem.

If we can’t help staring, well, life is nasty and brutish, but maybe a good gander at the troubles of others will keep it from being too short. “Deformities provide a lot of information about what can go wrong, and by contrast what good function is,” Dr. Miller said. “This is not just about physical deformities. People who seem crazy are also highly attention-grabbing.”

And as long as we’ve been gawking and rubbernecking, we’ve felt guilty about the urge. In his book “The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution,” Dr. Dutton recounts a passage from Plato in which a man passing by a pile of corpses at the feet of an executioner wants desperately to look, tries to resist and then finally relents, scolding his “evil” eyes to “Take your fill of the beautiful sight!”

The appeal of ugly animals is that neither they nor their mothers will care if you stare, and if you own a pet that others find shocking or ugly, you probably won’t mind if others stare, too.

Joan Miller, vice president of the Cat Fanciers’ Association Inc., said she found the hairless Sphynx cat, with its “huge ears” and only “a minor amount of wrinkling,” to be “absolutely marvelous looking” and “strong as an ox,” although she conceded it sometimes needed to wear a sweater.

Classical beauty is easy, but a taste for the difficult, the unconventional, the ugly, has often been seen as a mark of sophistication, a passport into the rarefied world of the artistic vanguard. “Beauty can be present by its violation,” Dr. Steiner said, and the pinwheel appendages of the star-nosed mole are the rosy fingers of dawn.

By ANDY NEWMAN and RAY RIVERA
NY Times Published: August 9, 2010

It has been a long time since flight attendant was a glamorous job title. The hours are long. Passengers with feelings of entitlement bump up against new no-frills policies. Babies scream. Security precautions grate but must be enforced. Airlines demand lightning-quick turnarounds, so attendants herd passengers and collect trash with the grim speed of an Indy pit crew. Everyone, it seems, is in a bad mood.

On Monday, on the tarmac at Kennedy International Airport, a JetBlue attendant named Steven Slater decided he had had enough, the authorities said.

After a dispute with a passenger who stood to fetch luggage too soon on a full flight just in from Pittsburgh, Mr. Slater, 38 and a career flight attendant, got on the public-address intercom and let loose a string of invective.

Then, the authorities said, he pulled the lever that activates the emergency-evacuation chute and slid down, making a dramatic exit not only from the plane but, one imagines, also from his airline career.

On his way out the door, he paused to grab a beer from the beverage cart. Then he ran to the employee parking lot and drove off, the authorities said.

He was arrested at his home in Belle Harbor, Queens, a few miles from the airport, and charged with felony counts of criminal mischief and reckless endangerment.

“When they hit that emergency chute, it drops down quickly within seconds,” a law enforcement official said. “If someone was on the ground and it came down without warning, someone could be injured or killed.”

In a statement, JetBlue said it was working with the Federal Aviation Administration and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey to investigate the episode. “At no time was the security or safety of our customers or crew members at risk,” the company said.

According to his online profiles, Mr. Slater has been the leader of JetBlue’s uniform redesign committee and a member of the airline’s in-flight values committee. Neighbors in California, where Mr. Slater grew up, said he had recently been caring for his dying mother, a retired flight attendant, and had done the same for his father, a pilot.

The contretemps on Monday unfolded as JetBlue Flight 1052, an Embraer 190, landed at Kennedy around noon — on time — and pulled up to the gate, said another law enforcement official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the investigation was continuing.

The official offered the following account:

One passenger stood up to retrieve belongings from the overhead compartment before the crew had given permission. Mr. Slater instructed the person to remain seated. The passenger defied him. Mr. Slater reached the passenger just as the person was pulling down the luggage, which struck Mr. Slater in the head.

Mr. Slater asked for an apology. The passenger instead cursed at him. Mr. Slater got on the plane’s public-address system and cursed out the passenger for all to hear. Then, after declaring that 20 years in the airline industry was enough, he blurted out, “It’s been great!” He activated the inflatable evacuation slide at a service exit and left the world of flight attending behind.

In short order, his gray two-story house on Beach 128th Street in the Rockaways, just off the ocean, was swarmed by detectives and uniformed officers from New York City and the Port Authority. “It was like there was a hostage in there,” said Curt Krakowski, who was working on the deck of a house across the street.

Mr. Slater, Mr. Krakowski said, “had a smile on his face when the cops brought him out, like, ‘Yeah, big deal.’ ” Mr. Slater was taken to a Port Authority police building at the airport and was expected to be held overnight.

One person familiar with the investigation said JetBlue took more than 20 minutes to notify the Port Authority police, allowing Mr. Slater time to get home. A spokesman for the airline declined to comment when asked about the delay, and a Port Authority spokesman said, “In matters of criminality, the Port Authority Police Department should be notified immediately.”

The episode is the latest round in what is seen as an increasingly hostile relationship between airlines and passengers.

A few weeks ago, an Air France flight attendant was arrested for stealing the wallets of first-class passengers. Last year, a Canadian singer parodied United Airlines on YouTube in a series of songs about how the airline broke his guitar.

A new study by the International Air Transport Association found an increase in instances of disgruntled passengers and violence on planes, with the chief cause being passengers who refuse to obey safety orders. By the same token, frequent-flier blogs echo with tales of “flight attendant rage.”

While JetBlue’s flight attendants are not unionized, a spokeswoman for the Association of Flight Attendants, Corey Caldwell, said anxieties were common on planes. “Anyone who has traveled since Sept. 11 understands that being in the cabin is stressful these days,” Ms. Caldwell said.

The portrait of Mr. Slater that emerges from interviews with neighbors and friends and from profiles on MySpace, Facebook and LinkedIn shows a man with decidedly mixed feelings about his job.

Photographs show him in the mountains of El Yunque National Forest in Puerto Rico and sitting behind the wheel of a convertible. “Steven Slater has visited 22 percent of the countries in the world!” the MySpace page announces.

Yes, and Pittsburgh, too. “Chances are I am flying 35,000 feet somewhere over the rainbow on my way to some semifabulous JetBlue Airways destination!” the MySpace page says. “Truly, some are better than others. But I am enjoying being back in the skies and seeing them all.”

A former roommate, John Rochelle, said Mr. Slater was seldom home and used his house primarily as a crash pad. When Mr. Slater was not working, Mr. Rochelle said, he was usually in Thousand Oaks, Calif., a Los Angeles suburb, caring for his sick mother.

A neighbor there, Ron Franz, said Mr. Slater also cared for his father as he was dying from Lou Gehrig’s disease. Mr. Franz, 72, was hard-pressed to explain Mr. Slater’s actions on Monday. “It could be the pressure of his mother’s illness, because that’s not the type of behavior or conduct that Steve exhibits,” he said. “He’s a very conscientious, responsible individual.”

But a former flight attendant, Janet Bavasso, who lives next door to Mr. Slater in Queens, found nothing mysterious at all.

“Enough is enough — good for him,” Ms. Bavasso said. “If he would have called me, I would have picked him up.”

Reporting was contributed by Cate Doty, Christine Negroni, Tim Stelloh and Matthew L. Wald.

Organized by Walead Beshty
Through August 21, 2010

Twentieth Century debates over the “politics of representation,” the autonomy of art, or art’s capacity for “critique” still linger like disgruntled spirits on the hunt for living bodies to inhabit. At first, contemporary art looks vaguely amenable to such interpretations: appropriated/pop imagery, collage, the monochrome, automaticism, the aleatory etc. are no less common now than they were when such ideas were a breath of fresh air. But seen through a contemporary lens, the meanings of these strategies are less certain, less overt, as though much contemporary art beckons to these anachronisms only to misdirect them. How better to display ambivalence for such battles than to invite them in only to step gently to the side, behaving, in the terminology of language acquisition, like a false friend?

Theodor Adorno referred to a phenomenon similar to this as “late style,” where “conventions find expression as the naked representation of themselves,” turning, “emptiness outward”. Late style was a perversity, an ambivalence directed at analysis, a “dredg(ing) up of the past in the anguish of the present as sacrifices to the future,” (and it was Adorno who punned museum into mausoleum, art works reduced to memento mori in its halls). Melancholy aside, Los Angeles is a city whose character is akin to his notion of late style, offering a hollowness that questions our expectations of civic cohesion, even its physical appearance as a flat smear of beige semi-disposable low-flung boxes extending from mountains to ocean seems to mock the traditional idea of the metropolis. In truth, it is a city born after the industrial revolution that projects the image of a “soft” city of “soft” labor and “soft” products: pictures, services, cultural capital, and flexible workforces. This is probably why its affectless architecture often incites derision from those whose affinities lie with older conceptions of urban life, who prefer gears and pulleys to govern the operation and appearance of their machines, and granite and marble to anchor their cities to the earth.

In most Los Angeles social circles, when one speaks of the “industry” they are referring to the Entertainment Industry (a.k.a. the “Picture Industry”). Pictures have a knack for supplanting the concrete, sliding as though self-lubricating around the globe, like poltergeists, they haunt the world they represent like vague recollections, inhabiting concrete forms briefly until slipping off to another host, a billboard here, a magazine page there, creating momentary associations, and chance resonances. And what to make of the application of the term industry, with the heaviness of factories and smoke stacks encircling it, to the production of ephemeral pictures whose power is synonymous with their lightness? It could be said that it is the seemingly invisible and ephemeral aspects—the means of distribution, the contextual frame, the vicissitudes of taste, and an object’s ability to “pass”—which serve as the most robust material of the contemporary work, an embrace of convention that produces an endless sequence of provisional “meanings”. Perhaps the only solution available to us is to allow pictures to be concrete, to reclaim their moments of heaviness, instead of pretending that they are endlessly able to float listlessly in the breeze.

- Walead Beshty, Los Angeles, June 2010

Regen Projects