Dave Green

BUILDING BLOCKS Microscopic one-celled creatures known as diatoms are thought to be the source of a vast majority of the world’s oil.

By WILLIAM J. BROAD
NY Times Published: August 2, 2010

In 1913, as the automobile zoomed into American life, The Outing Magazine gave its readers a bit of background on what fueled the new motorcars in “The Story of Gasoline.” After a brief vignette describing the death of “old Colonel Stegosaurus Ugulatus,” the article explained that “yesterday you poured the remains of the dinosaur from a measuring-can — which, let us hope, held five gallons, full measure — into your gasoline tank.”

The idea that oil came from the terrible lizards that children love to learn about endured for many decades. The Sinclair Oil Company featured a dinosaur in its logo and in its advertisements, and outfitted its gas stations with giant replicas that bore long necks and tails. The publicity gave the term “fossil fuels” new resonance.

But the emphasis turned out to be wrong.

Today, a principal tenet of geology is that a vast majority of the world’s oil arose not from lumbering beasts on land but tiny organisms at sea. It holds that blizzards of microscopic life fell into the sunless depths over the ages, producing thick sediments that the planet’s inner heat eventually cooked into oil. It is estimated that 95 percent or more of global oil traces its genesis to the sea.

“It’s the dominant theory,” said David A. Ross, scientist emeritus at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution on Cape Cod. The idea, he added, has been verified as geologists have roamed the globe over the decades and repeatedly found that beds of marine sediments are “a good predictor” of where to discover oil.

The theory also explains offshore drilling — why there is oil in many seabeds, why it is more often near shore than in the abyss, and why, despite the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, which killed 11 crewmen and caused the worst offshore oil spill in American history, oil experts say offshore drilling may increase, rather than cease.

As land reservoirs dry up, oil geologists say, the high costs and potential risks of offshore drilling will seem less onerous and more acceptable. This, of course, is a matter of politics and economics as much as geology. Just because the oil is there doesn’t mean wells must be drilled. Many things could affect the frequency of offshore drilling, like the public interest in and commitment to the development of alternative energy sources, not only solar, wind, geothermal and other natural processes, but nuclear fission and even fusion.

Whatever the future importance of oil, offshore beds are the most likely new sources. “For most areas, offshore offers the greatest potential,” said William E. Galloway, an oil geologist at the University of Texas at Austin. “We’ve been drilling wells for a hundred years and most of those have been on land. So the volumes that remain unexplored are primarily offshore in areas that have previously been inaccessible.”

Some of the ancestral waters that made the planet’s oil still exist, like the Gulf of Mexico, while others have long vanished, like the ocean that produced the massive oil fields of the Middle East. The bodies come and go because the earth’s crust, through seemingly rigid, actually moves a great deal over geologic time, tearing apart continents and ocean basins and rearranging them like pieces of a giant jigsaw puzzle.

The secret of the oil story turned out to be understanding how the bygone oceans, ancient seas and smaller bodies of water produced complex environmental conditions that raised the prevalence of microscopic life and ensured its deep burial, producing what eventually became the earth’s main oil reservoirs.

The clues accumulated over more than a century and included discoveries from geology, chemistry and paleontology. An early indication was that petroleum discoveries were always associated with ancient beds of sedimentary rock — the kind that forms when debris rains down through water for ages and slowly grows into thick seabed layers.

A breakthrough came in the 1930s. Alfred E. Treibs, a German chemist, discovered that oil harbored the fossil remains of chlorophyll, the compound in plants that helps convert sunlight into chemical energy. The source appeared to be the tiny plants of ancient seas.

By the 1960s and 1970s, oil samples were producing many fossil molecules. One class, the hopanoids, were seen as representing the remains of ancient microbes that fed on seabed detritus. A 2009 book, “Echoes of Life: What Fossil Molecules Reveal About Earth History” (Oxford University Press), says geologists found so many fossil molecules, and in such variety, that they began using them as fingerprints to identify the family relationships among pockets of deep oil.

A separate breakthrough came as paleontologists peering at oil came to recognize a host of microfossils. Often smaller than grains of sand, the fossils nonetheless spoke volumes. Many were foraminifera, minuscule sea creatures with a bewildering array of shells. Oil geologists began using the foraminifera’s shifting appearance as a reliable guide to geologic dating.

As the clues fell into place, so did the big picture. It was the dominant view by the 1970s.

The process typically starts in warm seas ideal for the incubation of microscopic life. The sheer mass is hard to imagine. But scientists note that every drop of seawater contains more than a million tiny organisms.

Oil production begins when surface waters become so rich in microscopic life that the rain of debris outpaces decay on the seabed. The result is thickening accumulations of biologic sludge.

Dorrik Stow, a petroleum geologist at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, said the flow of nutrients into surface waters — partly from rivers and coastal regions, partly from the upwelling of bottom currents — determines the richness of the microscopic life and ultimately the oil abundance.

In his new book, “Vanished Ocean: How Tethys Reshaped the World” (Oxford University Press), Dr. Stow describes how these nutrient surges can engender “a biological orgy” of frenzied reproduction that ultimately ends in “black death.” The black mud is riddled with the remains of life, and eventually form into sedimentary rock.

The history of the Gulf of Mexico shows how many environmental factors came together to produce huge oil reserves. Perhaps most important, the big rivers and waterways of North America sent rich flows of nutrients into the ancient gulf, much as the Mississippi River does today.

Scott W. Tinker, the state geologist of Texas, said the abundant flows of mud and sediment not only fed microscopic life but also formed rocky barriers that sealed off the organic remains from the outer world. A main barrier was shale, a sedimentary rock made of clay and silt.

“The organics got buried quickly because of the heavy sediment flow,” Dr. Tinker said. “So they didn’t get biodegraded as quickly. You preserved the organic richness.”

He said the flow was so heavy that the growing accumulations keep pressing the lower sediment layers deeper into the earth, forcing them into hot zones where the organic material got transformed into oil. The process involves a long series of chemical reactions that slowly turn life molecules into inanimate crude.

“The gulf has miles and miles of sediments,” he said. “So that gets the source rocks down into the kitchen where they cook.”

The standard temperature for oil formation is between 120 and 210 degrees Fahrenheit. The earth gets increasingly warm with increasing depth, the temperature eventually rising so high that rocks melt (and occasionally remerge at the surface in volcanic eruptions).

The gulf’s environmental context also promoted oil formation. The ancient body was largely cut off from the diluting influences of the wider global sea, concentrating the nutrients and mud.

“It’s always been restricted,” said Dr. Galloway of the University of Texas. “One reason it works as a major world-class resource is that it’s been mostly isolated from the world’s oceans.”

Restrictions on watery flows turn out to have played starring roles in determining where oil formed, scientists say. The Tethys Sea — an ancient ocean that girded the equator in the Cretaceous period, some 100 million years ago, in the heyday of the dinosaurs — became a sprawling factory.

Its most productive regions centered on shorelines, coastal regions and shallow seas, said Dr. Stow of Heriot-Watt University, whose new book describes the secret life of the Tethys. He identified “broad shelf areas” as some of the best “factories for biogenic proliferation.” When the Tethys mostly closed up (its remnants include the Aral, Black, Caspian and Mediterranean Seas), its fertile southern shores formed the dozen or so nations of the Middle East that produce two-thirds of the world’s oil.

Dr. Stow called their wealth “an accident of geology.”

A similar accident took place when Africa and South America slowly pulled apart in the Cretaceous period, forming the narrow beginnings of the South Atlantic. Big rivers poured in nutrients. A biological frenzy on the western shores of the narrow ocean ended up forming the vast oil fields now being discovered and developed off Brazil in deep water.

In June, Petrobras, the Brazilian state oil company, unveiled a $224 billion, five-year investment plan to tap deepwater fields and double its petroleum output.

Many countries and oil companies are now racing to exploit the geological happenstance of deep coastal waters. Hot spots include offshore areas of Angola, Azerbaijan, Congo, Cuba, Egypt, Libya and Tanzania, while countries like Canada and Norway, which have long pursued offshore drilling, are pushing ahead with new plans. Cambridge Energy Research Associates, a consulting firm, estimates that global deepwater extraction could roughly double by 2015, the output rivaling what Saudi Arabia produces on land.

“It’s not about dinosaurs,” said Kenneth E. Peters, a petroleum geochemist at Stanford University. “Any kind of organic material can contribute, yes. But if you look at the food chain, they’re way at the top. It’s the little guys that matter.”

Thanks to Jonathan Maghen

Dave Yoder for The New York Times

The clothier Luciano Barbera in his family’s “spa for yarn,” where crates of thread rest for months. Economists fear that such small-scale artisanship cannot sustain Italy’s economy forever

By DAVID SEGAL
NY Times Published: July 31, 2010

“THIS tradition is finita,” says Luciano Barbera, as he opens the door to an underground warehouse. Dozens of large wooden boxes are stacked to the ceiling, containing nearly 80 tons of colorful thread, wound in spools and idling like sunbathers at a beach, absorbing moisture in a cavernous room kept naturally cool and humid by a creek that burbles under the floor.

“I call it a spa for yarn,” explains Mr. Barbera, a lean and regal 72-year-old, who is dressed in a style that could be described as aristo-casual: white linen button-down shirt, brown herringbone pants and brown leather shoes. He is giving a quick tour of the Carlo Barbera mill, named for his 99-year-old father, and destined to be run by two or three of Luciano’s sons.

Mr. Barbera calls wool a living fiber, and he does not mean this metaphorically. After yarn is dyed here, it rests in the spa for as long as six months, recuperating until 20 percent of its weight is water. Then the material undergoes a 15-step process, which Mr. Barbera will not detail, other than to magisterially summarize it as “the nobilization of the fabric.”

Any shortcuts, he says, would harm the fabric’s “performance.”

Wait, performance?

“Yes, performance,” he says in an accent both purring and professorial. “If your suit is not performing well, it’s like being in a car where you can feel every little bump in the road. If a suit is performing well, it’s as though you drive right over the bumps and you feel nothing.”

And thus the paradox.

As insiders of the fashion world will confirm, the bolts of wool and cashmere produced at this mill can indeed be described as high performance, among the finest in the world, sold to dozens of luxury brands like Armani, Zegna and Ralph Lauren.

The financial performance of the mill that creates this fabric, on the other hand, is far from stellar.

Like much of the Italian economy, the Carlo Barbera factory is struggling and for reasons, according to academics, that say just about everything you need to know about what ails Italy.

Since the economic crisis began, this country has regularly turned up on the informal list of Nations That Worry Europe. While its finances are not as precarious as those of Greece, Portugal or Ireland, because it is far larger — the Italian economy is the seventh largest in the world — its troubles are more frightening. As a recent report by UniCredit, a European banking group, put it, Italy is “the swing factor” in the crisis, “the largest of the vulnerable countries, and most vulnerable of the large.”

Study the numbers and you will find symptoms of distress that look a lot like those of Greece. Public sector debt amounts to roughly 118 percent of the gross domestic product, nearly identical to Greece. And like Greece, Italy is trying to ease fears in the euro zone and elsewhere with an austerity package, one intended to cut the deficit in half, to 2.7 percent of G.D.P., by 2012.

But dig a little deeper and the similarities end. The Italians, unlike the Greeks, are born savers, and much of the Italian debt is owned by the Italians. That means that unlike Greece, which will be sending a sizable percentage of its G.D.P. to foreign creditors for a generation to come, Italy is basically in hock to its own citizens.

“I know that in the States, all Mediterranean countries get lumped together,” says Carlo Altomonte, an economist with Bocconi University in Milan. “But Italy’s problem isn’t that we have a lot of debt. It’s that we don’t grow.”

Like Italy, Mr. Barbera has debt woes — he owes his creditors roughly $5.8 million and says that if his country’s financial system offered the protections of Chapter 11-style bankruptcy, he would have sought it several years ago. But he could also solve his debt problem if more orders were coming in.

Instead, orders are drying up. The Barberas have long been small, niche players, the family that high-end designers turn to when assembling their most fabulous collections. And since 1971, Luciano Barbera has also sold clothing under his own name, made with his own fabric. Today the line is sold in stores like Barney’s and Neiman Marcus, handmade suits that sell for $4,000 and a line of upmarket women’s wear, some of which you can see on Angelina Jolie in the recent film “Salt.”

But sales for Luciano Barbera clothing and Carlo Barbera fabric have drastically slowed in recent years. In the late ’90s, the mill enjoyed record annual sales of what amounts to about $15.5 million, Mr. Barbera says. Last year, the figure was half that sum.

WHEN describing the ills of his businesses, Mr. Barbera tends to focus on one issue: the “Made in Italy” label. For the last decade, he says, a growing number of clothing designers have been buying cheaper fabric in China, Bulgaria and elsewhere and slapping “Made in Italy” on garments, even if those garments are merely sewn here.

Until recently, there weren’t any rules about what “Made in Italy” actually meant, but that will change when a new law goes into effect in October. It states that if at least two stages of production — there are four stages altogether — occur in Italy, a garment is made in Italy.

To Mr. Barbera, this is an outrage, though somehow the word “outrage” doesn’t quite capture the depth of his feelings. He says the law will wreck the national brand, which has long been built on the skill of its craftspeople.

In op-ed articles and an assortment of meetings, he has crusaded against the law, clashing with a nemesis with a familiar last name: Santo Versace, the chairman of the Versace house of fashion. Mr. Versace is also a member of Italy’s Parliament and a co-sponsor of what is officially called the Reguzzoni-Versace Law.

“It’s a truffa,” says Mr. Barbera one recent afternoon, using the Italian word for scam. “And I am fighting with all my strength to make people understand that this country is destroying itself in order to advance the interests of just a few people who are unfortunately members of the most powerful caste of this country.”

But labeling is just one of many obstacles standing between Mr. Barbera and profitability. To understand why his factory, and so much of Italy, is stagnant or worse, requires a bit of geopolitical history and a look at the highly idiosyncratic business culture here. It is defined, to a large degree, by deep-seated mistrust — not just of the government, but of anyone who isn’t part of the immediate family — as well as a widespread aversion to risk and to growth that to American eyes looks almost quaint.

It has economists here worried not about a looming fiasco so much as a gradual, grinding decline.

“There is no sense of what a market economy is in this country,” says Professor Altomonte. “What you see here is an incredible fear of competition.”

THE Carlo Barbera factory is a series of glass and brick buildings beside a stream about 55 miles west of Milan. Luciano Barbera grew up here, learning the craft from his father, before heading to the University of Leeds in England.

He brought home know-how in textile engineering as well as admiration for British finery, to which he added a flair for color and pattern and which he has turned into a personal trademark. A fashion director at Neiman Marcus once called Mr. Barbera “the most elegant man in the world.” It is not uncommon for strangers to introduce themselves and ask, “How can I look like you?”

“I don’t want to generate people who all look the same,” he says, sitting in his office one recent afternoon. “I am a soloist. You can be a soloist and play in an orchestra.”

His career as a designer began, he says, almost by accident. In 1962, a photographer from Vogue snapped a photo of him in a suit made of fabric he had designed. (In the image, he is leaning against a fence, a cigar in hand, gazing at his horse, Edwan.) Several years later, a man named Murray Pearlstein, who owned LouisBoston, a menswear store, knocked at the Carlo Barbera factory, introduced himself to Luciano and told him that he wanted to sell his line of clothing to the American market.

“I said: ‘Mr. Pearlstein, I have no collection. I have only my own suits.’ He said: ‘You have talent. You should design your own collection.’ ”

At roughly 41 euros a meter ($48.75 a yard), the average price of the fabric that the Carlo Barbera factory produces today is almost double that of competitors in Biella, a town in the foothills of the Alps that has been renowned for centuries as a textiles hub. The problem is that fewer designers have been willing to pay this premium, and factories in other countries have been copying the Barberas’ methods, with results that may not be as good but that cost a small fraction of the price.

There’s a demand-side problem, too: the number of men buying bespoke suits has plunged in recent years, as the workplace becomes more casual. LouisBoston doesn’t carry Luciano Barbera any longer.

“At a certain point, he could have gone to China and opened factories there,” says Mr. Pearlstein, who is now retired. “But mentally, I don’t think there was any way he could do that because he has always been so committed to his hands-on methods.”

Mr. Barbera says he has no qualms about globalization. In his opinion, Italy can’t compete when it comes to low-skill labor and shouldn’t try.

“But I say that Italy, with its 20 million workers, can be the boutique of the world,” he says. That will never happen, he adds, if designers can buy fabric outside Italy and tag it “Made in Italy.”

While his vehemence on this subject is easy to understand, economists here say that Mr. Barbera’s small empire would be teetering even if he could rewrite the “Made in Italy” law tomorrow.

In a list of what is crushing Mr. Barbera’s balance sheet, they say, the provenance of labels is not at the top.

FIVE years ago, Francesco Giavazzi needed a taxi. Cabs are relatively scarce in Milan, especially at 5 a.m., when he wanted to head to the airport, so he called a company at 4:30 to schedule a pickup. But when he climbed into the cab half an hour later, he discovered that the meter had been running for more than 20 minutes, because the taxi driver had arrived soon after the call and started charging for his time. Allowed by the rules, but to Mr. Giavazzi, utterly unfair.

“So it was 20 euros before we started the trip to the airport,” recalls Mr. Giavazzi, who is an economics professor at Bocconi University. “I said, ‘This is impossible.’ ”

Professor Giavazzi later wrote an op-ed article denouncing this episode as another example of the toll exacted by Italy’s innumerable guilds, known by several names here, including “associazioni di categoria.” (These are different from unions, another force here, in that guilds are made up of independent players in a trade or profession who have joined to keep outsiders out and maintain standards, as opposed to representing employees in negotiations with management, as a union might.) Even baby sitters have associations in Italy.

The op-ed did not endear Professor Giavazzi to the city’s cab drivers. They pinned leaflets with his name and address at taxi stands around Milan and for the next five nights, cabs drove around his home, honking their horns.

“This is a country with a lot of rents,” says Professor Giavazzi, sitting in his office one recent afternoon, using the economists’ term for excess profits that flow to a business because of a lack of competition. “You need a notary public, it’s like 1,000 euros before you even open your mouth. If you’re a notary public in this country, you live like a king.”

For Mr. Barbera, as is true with every entrepreneur here, the prevalence and power of Italy’s guilds explains much of what is driving up costs. He says he must overspend for accountants, lawyers, truckers and other members of guilds on a list that goes on and on: “Everything has a tariff, and you have to pay.”

THE protectionist impulses of the guilds are mimicked throughout the Italian labor market. The rules are different for small companies, but in effect, people with a full-time job in a company with more than 18 workers have what amounts to tenure, even if they don’t belong to a union. This makes managers reluctant to hire, especially in a downturn. You are stuck with new employees in perpetuity, whether they’re good or not.

A sclerotic job market is a major reason that the Italian economy has been all but dormant for the past decade, growing far more slowly than its European peers. And this is a country that never had a housing bust or a major bank crisis.

So how does Italy keep going? Given the numbers, you expect it to be flat on its back. But when you visit, there are hardly any signs of despair, even in Biella, where hundreds of factories and warehouses have closed in the last decade. Why?

One answer is the black economy, say economists. Roughly one-quarter of Italy’s G.D.P. is off the books. When you inquire about the cause and persistence of this longstanding fact of life, people here say that most Italians have little sense of national identity, an obstacle to a system of national taxation. The country didn’t really begin to transcend its clannish roots and regional dialects until after World War II; even today, displays of national pride are reserved for World Cup victories and little else.

Italians, notes Professor Altomonte, are among the world’s heaviest consumers of bottled water. “Do you know why? Because the water in the tap comes from the government.”

The suspicion of Italians when it comes to extra-familial institutions explains why many here care more about protecting what they have than enhancing their wealth. Most Italians live less than a mile or two from their parents and stay there, often for financial benefits like cash and in-kind services like day care. It’s an insularity that runs all the way up to the corporate suites. The first goal of many entrepreneurs here isn’t growth, so much as keeping the business in the family. For a company to really expand, it needs capital, but that means giving up at least some control. So thousands of companies here remain stubbornly small — all of which means Italy is a haven for artisans but is in a lousy position to play the global domination game.

“The prevailing management style in this country is built around loyalty, not performance,” says Tito Boeri, scientific director at Fondazione Rodolfo Debenedetti, who has written about Italy’s dynastic capitalism.

In the eternal contest between the meticulously honed and the nationally franchised, Italy knows where it stands. As a matter of profit and loss, it doesn’t make sense to store wool in a spa and let it convalesce for six months, but the methods of Luciano Barbera were never destined for a get-rich-quick guide to manufacturing. His business will make sense only to customers, and for them, quality has a logic of its own.

And of course, the worship of growth has its limitations. The American economy is vastly more robust, but instead of family-owned bakeries, which seem to dot every hectare of Italy, we’ve got Quiznos. And for all the efficiency and horsepower in Germany, no character in a movie has ever welled up and sighed, “We’ll always have Stuttgart.”

Despite his cash flow woes, Mr. Barbera is sticking to his plan, even the plan to hand his business to his sons, which according to a national maxim is likely to end in tears.

“We say in this country that the first generation builds, the second generation maintains and the third generation destroys,” Mr. Barbera says. “But my father and I worked together, so I think we were the first generation. My sons are the second generation. So at least they will maintain.”

MR. Barbera can discuss all the quirks and pathologies of the Italian economy, but there is rarely more than five minutes between his monologues about “Made in Italy.” He is reluctant to name the fashion houses he thinks are snookering consumers, in part because they are his customers, and in part because they are acting legally.

“I’m criticizing the law,” he says. “I am not criticizing the people who buy my fabric.”

One name he is happy to mention is Santo Versace, whose purchases — his brand buys a “very small” amount of fabric, says Mr. Barbera — are eclipsed by his role in pushing the new law.

In a phone interview, Mr. Versace noted that there was no “Made in Italy” rule before the law he co-wrote, which means his rule is a huge improvement on the free-for-all that had existed. Yes, his company makes less expensive products, like jeans, in countries like Croatia and Turkey, but he said every luxury brand does the same.

“Never our top stuff,” he said, through an interpreter. “All of that is made in Italy.”

He sounded skeptical about one of Mr. Barbera’s ideas: a label that simply lays out the origins of a garment, stating where its fabric was made, where it was constructed, and so on.

“You can’t make a label too complicated,” said Mr. Versace. “You need a simplified label. Otherwise you can’t sell things.”

For now, Mr. Barbera is hoping that the European Commission will overturn the law, which it can do. Meanwhile, garments in the collection that bears his name are labeled “Entirely manufactured in Italy.”

Economists said that Mr. Barbera had a point, but they also said that worrying about this issue was like fretting about the head cold of a patient with Stage 3 cancer. They see a country with a service sector dominated by guilds, which don’t just overcharge but also raise the barriers to entry for the millions in ill-fated manufacturing jobs who might otherwise find work as, for instance, taxi drivers. They see a timid entrepreneur class. They see a political system in the thrall of the older voters who want to keep what they have, even if it dooms the nation to years of stasis.

They see a society whose best and brightest are leaving and not being replaced by immigrants, because Italy has so little upward mobility to offer.

To Professor Giavazzi, the future here doesn’t look like Greece. It looks like Argentina.

“Before World War II, Argentina was rich,” he says. “Even in 1960, the country was twice as rich as Italy.” Today, he says, you can compare the per capita income of Argentina to that of Romania. “Because it didn’t grow. A country could get rich in 1900 just by producing corn and meat, but that is not true today. But it took them 100 years to realize they were becoming poor. And that is what worries me about Italy. We’re not going to starve next week. We are just going to decline, slowly, slowly, and I’m not sure what will turn that around.”

Mr. Barbera is optimistic. He is working with a bank to allow him to pay off creditors. After lengthy negotiations with the government and workers’ representatives, he has reduced his payroll to 90 employees from 120.

Best of all, he says he thinks he has found a large group of new customers in an improbable place: China, where he has been talking to a number of distributors. Given that he has been undersold by the Chinese for years, it would be a surprising twist if Chinese consumers became fans of Mr. Barbera’s fabric and his painstaking methods.

“Water from the creek,” he says, as we leave the yarn spa. “Listen. It is the sound of music.”

The sentiment seems so sincere and romantic that it sounds as if he could be kidding. But when the line elicits a laugh, Mr. Barbera’s gentle rebuke makes it plain that he is not.

“You know,” he says, with a resilient smile, “it is a hard world for poets.”

Brian Sokol for The New York Times

Traveling on the Rohtang Pass road in northern India, can be treacherous, with various natural and animal obstacles, so India is building a tunnel.

By LYDIA POLGREEN
NY Times Published: July 31, 2010

ROHTANG PASS, India — The name of this white-knuckle pass, one of the highest in the world, means “pile of corpses” in the Tibetan language. Every year a few dozen people die trying to cross these spiky Himalayan peaks.

For six months the road is snowbound, putting at the mercy of the elements tens of thousands of Indian troops posted beyond it in this remote but strategically important region along India’s long and disputed border with China.

In the past decade, as China has furiously built up its military and civilian infrastructure on its side of the border, the Rohtang Pass on the Indian side has stood as mute testimony to India’s inability and unwillingness to master its far-flung and rugged outermost reaches.

But now, India is racing to match its rival for regional and global power, building and bolstering airstrips and army outposts, shoring up neglected roads and — finally, decades after it was first proposed — building a tunnel to bypass the deadly Rohtang Pass.

In June, work started on the ambitious project, which will take five years and require boring five miles through the Pir Panjal range. Several other tunnels, which would allow all-weather access to Ladakh, which abuts the Tibetan Plateau, are also in the works.

“What India is belatedly seeking to do is to improve its defenses by upgrading its logistics,” said Brahma Chellaney, an analyst who tracks the India-China relationship at the Center for Policy Research in New Delhi, in an e-mail. “By building new railroads, airports and highways in Tibet, China is now in a position to rapidly move additional forces to the border to potentially strike at India at a time of its choosing.”

As a result, he said, “The Sino-Indian border remains more unstable than the Pakistani-Indian frontier.”

India and China are hardly enemies, but much of the 2,521-mile border they share is disputed or ill marked. The two countries fought a brief but bloody border war in 1962, and while these days they have, on the surface, a mostly cordial relationship, it is marked by tension over border disputes and the future of Tibet and its leader, the Dalai Lama, who lives in exile in India.

China’s push to develop its infrastructure on its side of the border — including an all-weather railway to Tibet that includes the world’s highest tunnel, at 16,000 feet — is viewed with considerable suspicion in India.

For much of its history India has regarded the Himalayas as a form of protection, not a barrier to be overcome, said Rajeswari Rajagopalan, an expert in India-China relations at the Observer Research Foundation in New Delhi.

“The Indian side has been very slow to develop the border areas,” Ms. Rajagopalan said. “They believed if you improved the infrastructure it would only allow the Chinese to walk into your territory. This was very foolish and naive.”

Three hundred miles of winding road lead from the town of Manali, through the verdant Kullu Valley, to Ladakh, an alpine desert that abuts the Tibetan plateau.

Tens of thousands of Indian Army troops are stationed among Ladakh’s barren peaks, and the region borders several potential trouble spots, including Aksai Chin, a region that India claims as part of its territory but that China administers. North of Ladakh is the Siachen Glacier, a river of barren ice that India and Pakistan have fought over intermittently since the 1980s. Both countries maintain outposts on the glacier, which sits at an altitude of 20,000 feet.

During the summer, thousands of trucks, laden with supplies to last the harsh mountain winters, rumble up the two roads that lead to Ladakh, from Manali and Srinagar, the summer capital of Indian-administered Kashmir.

The road from Ladakh to Srinagar is also closed in the winter, and because of its proximity to the Line of Control that splits Kashmir between India and Pakistan, Indian officials worry that the road can easily be cut, as it was in 1999, when the two countries clashed at Kargil.

Gurmeet Kanwal, a retired brigadier who runs the Center for Land Warfare Studies, a New Delhi research institution, said India could not afford to be cut off from its most vulnerable reaches half of the year.

“As long as we have these territorial disputes you cannot rule out another border conflict,” Brigadier Kanwal said. “We would like to make sure that we can deploy our forces in the right quantities in the right places.”

The tunnel has been on the drawing board for decades, said P. K. Mahajan, the chief engineer on the $320 million project. He first became involved as a young engineer in 1988, when he helped carry out a feasibility study, five years after the project was first proposed by Indira Gandhi, then the prime minister.

“It is only now that these projects are seeing the light of day,” Mr. Mahajan said.

The challenges of building a long tunnel in the rough environment of the Pir Panjal are enormous. The Himalayas are the world’s youngest mountain range. They shift and grind, still moving, expanding and shrinking.

That makes life tough for people like Thomas Riedel, a German contractor working at the north end of the tunnel. Because no one is sure what kind of rock will be found inside the mountain, the tunnel will be built using a painstaking method of blasting and digging, rather than the tunnel-boring machines that have revolutionized tunnel construction in recent years.

“Nobody can look inside the mountain,” Mr. Riedel said. “That is where we will find problems.”

Just weeks into what will be at least five years of digging, the workers encountered their first unexpected obstacle: a foot of snow. In June.

The tunnel will sit beneath more than a mile of snow-covered rock for much of its length. Ventilation will pose a huge problem.

People who live on the other side of the Rohtang Pass say the tunnel will transform their lives.

“For six months, we are prisoners,” said Chetan Devi, a schoolteacher who lives in a town beyond the pass. “In the winter, you have to risk your life to go to Manali.”

The tunnel will turn an ordeal of several hours, even in the summer, into a brisk 20-minute trip.

Virender Sharma, the chief government official in Kyelang, the main town of the Lahaul Valley, which sits between Manali and Ladakh, said that last winter 21 people died trying to cross the Rohtang Pass on foot. People were found frozen solid, he said, “sitting with rucksacks on their backs, water bottles at their sides, but they were dead.”

Winters in the Lahaul Valley are a miserable affair, he said.

“During summer, it seems very pleasant,” Mr. Sharma said. “In the winter, there is no light. No vegetables. No mail. Nothing to do in the evening. If there is an emergency, you are practically at the mercy of God.”

For the engineers building the tunnel, it is not merely a matter of logistics, but also a matter of national pride.

“Once this tunnel is complete, it will be an engineering marvel for the whole nation,” Mr. Mahajan said.

Hari Kumar contributed reporting.

Thanks to Jonathan Maghen

Musée National D’Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou, Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris.

“Endless Column in Voulangis” (fall 1947) by Constantin Brancusi, whose blurry shots made sculptures seem alive.

By HOLLAND COTTER
NY Times Published: July 29, 2010

Art history sinks unless it keeps moving in unpredictable directions. So every now and then the Museum of Modern Art breaks its marmoreal stride to head down an unpaved byway with an idea-rich theme show.

Such shows tend to be brainy and bookish. They demand our time and concentration. As a reward they give us new ways of looking at art. So it was with “Manet and the Execution of Maximilian” four years ago. So it is with “The Original Copy: Photography of Sculpture, 1839 to Today,” which opens at the museum on Sunday.

A blockbuster the new show is not. The opposite, I’d say. If you believe that art’s job is to deliver knockout visual goods at first glance, you’ll be happier spending your MoMA time in the current Matisse exhibition. If, however, you’re in the mood to see an array of images — odd, fabulous and often unfamiliar — telling a story of how two art forms, photography and sculpture, met, married, reproduced and virtually became one, then “The Original Copy” is for you.

The show, organized by Roxana Marcoci, a curator in the museum’s photography department, starts where photography officially started, with the public debuts of the daguerreotype in France in 1839 and, soon after, the paper-print picture in England. By this time, of course, sculpture had a very ancient history. Yet almost immediately the two mediums became aligned.

Both timing and technology played a role in their merging. The age of the art museum was well under way. Through museums a burgeoning middle class gained access to art that had once been the preserve of the rich and that in the case of classical Greek sculpture, represented Europe’s cultural heritage. Members of the new art audience wanted a piece of that heritage for themselves. Through photographs they could have it.

The show’s earliest picture, an 1839 daguerreotype by Alphonse Eugène Hubert, is basically a still life, but one composed entirely of bits and pieces of Classical sculpture, including a plaster bust of the Venus de Milo. Relatively cheap to buy, such pictures could turn a shopkeeper’s home into a mini-Louvre.

The liaison between sculpture and photography had formal as well as social advantages. Early photography, with its long exposure time, required motionless subjects. If a person sitting for a portrait so much as twitched, the image was blurred. Sculpture was much easier to photograph. It didn’t twitch.

It also didn’t travel if it was monumental or fixed in place. You had to go to where it was, and daredevil photographers did. In the 1850s Charles Nègre clambered, Quasimodo style, over the roofs of Notre-Dame in Paris and took a picture of the carved angel of the Resurrection perched on the peaks.

At almost the same time another Parisian shutterbug, Maxime Du Camp, was in Egypt, where he paid a team of local workers to excavate a colossal image of the pharaoh Ramesses II expressly so he could photograph it. Under Napoleon, the French had occupied Egypt and shipped tons of ancient sculpture to Paris. Later, through photography, du Camp sent even more spectacular sculptures home.

Early photography led a double life, as a recording instrument and as an art form. For Eugène Atget it was both. The pictures he took of outdoor sculptures at Versailles in the 1920s are documentary but also fantastic. By photographing them repeatedly, in different seasons and changing light, he gives them moods and personalities, makes them actors in a visual theater.

His contemporary Auguste Rodin, was also aware of photography’s power, but as an advertising medium. He could show only limited amounts of his bulky sculpture in any one place, but he had photographs of the rest of it to bump up sales. When he agreed to pose with “The Thinker” for the young Edward Steichen in 1902, Rodin probably figured he would get promotional images out of the deal. What he got in the photograph, which Steichen made by joining two negatives, was a classic example of photography manipulating and absorbing sculpture.

Constantin Brancusi was the idealist to Rodin’s realist. He obsessively photographed his own work. It was only in photographs, he felt, that his sculpture was complete, that it matched his originating vision. In part this was because photography allowed him complete control over the display of his work as it appeared in his studio, which was itself a form of sculptural assemblage and a quasi-mystical environment. To create that environment he broke basic photographic rules. With his flash he produced blinding explosions of light on polished bronze surfaces. He shot out of focus so that certain sculptures seem to vibrate as if alive. The results are sensational: sculpture disembodied, in some extraterrestrial dimension.

Marcel Duchamp pushed the interdependence of the two mediums one radical step further by creating sculptures strictly for the camera. In the process he decisively flipped the conventional values then attached to sculpture and photography. By making a traditional, solid, high-art form dependent for its existence on a modern medium that still had only the shakiest cultural status, he introduced a new politics of art.

As to the relationship of sculpture and photography to social politics, that was an old story, and Ms. Marcoci devotes considerable space to it in the show’s largest gallery. Here we return to the 19th century in a pair of 1871 photographs by Bruno Braquehais taken as antigovernment rebels in Paris pulled down the Napoleonic monument known as the Vendôme Column during the Paris Commune.

In images that bring to mind the destruction of Saddam Hussein’s statue in Baghdad in 2003, we first see the column standing but wrapped with cables, then its crowning statue of Napoleon lying on the ground. Braquehais intended his pictures to be souvenirs of a glorious event. Instead they were used by the police to prosecute the rebels, one of whom was Gustave Courbet.

These photographs are the earliest of the dozens of depictions of ideologically loaded monuments that make up this part of the show: Soviet-era sculptures of heroic workers taken by Igor Moukhin in Russia; white supremacist monuments shot by David Goldblatt in South Africa; a Hindu processional sculpture caught by Rosalind Solomon in Calcutta; and the presidential portraits of Mount Rushmore as viewed through Lee Friedlander’s lens.

In these photographs, sculptures designed to embody quite specific ideas are simultaneously documented and altered.

Mr. Moukhin’s worker, shot in a weedy lot surrounded by run-down homes, no longer looks so heroic. The monumental Mount Rushmore in Mr. Friedlander’s picture is just a dim reflection in a window. Other photographs are more overtly critical of their tightly programmed sculptural subjects; most, however, assume a more neutral stance, letting attitudes and ideas flow free.

Free-floating is pretty much the name of the game in the rest of the show, as it becomes increasingly clear that after a long and continuing partnership with photography, sculpture can be anything, and anything can be sculpture: a wad of chewing gum, an eggbeater hung on a wall, a lunar crater transported, via photo-collage, to an American desert.

Possibly the one indisputably defining feature of art in our own time is its shape-shifting inclusiveness. All mediums — sculpture, photography, painting, performance, video, etc. — are on equal footing and can even coexist in a single artist’s work.

Distinctions between high and low, original and copy, real and virtual, classical and whatever its opposite once was, have pretty much evaporated. What’s left is a kind of cornucopian aesthetic, one vividly represented by one of the exhibition’s most recent pieces, Rachel Harrison’s 2007 “Voyage of the Beagle.”

Named for the 1839 book in which Charles Darwin detailed the exotic research expeditions that led to his writing “On the Origin of Species,” the piece is made up of dozens of portraitlike photographs, all taken by Ms. Harrison, of mannequins, stuffed animals, carved medieval saints, prehistoric grave markers, topiary figures and so on.

The range is deliberately and hilariously broad. And the images, lined up edge to edge in a solid row running across two walls, appear to be arranged in no evolutionary order, with no hidden hierarchies or even mutual connections. Is the piece primarily about sculpture? About photography? Conceptually it feels new, not quite like anything seen before, even if every component is dimly familiar, either from art history or pop culture.

But you have seen something like it before, back in the first gallery: the 1839 daguerreotype still life, with its multimedia jumble of pseudo-Classical tchotchkes and fancy period ideals. Ms. Marcoci, who is responsible for the very cool exhibition catalog (with its images in tight sequence, it’s visually much punchier than the show), seems to be steering our thoughts in that direction, which is perhaps why she has installed Ms. Harrison’s photographic sequence high on the gallery wall, as if in imitation of a sculptural frieze, a deft and original touch.

“The Original Copy: Photography of Sculpture, 1839 to Today” is on view beginning Sunday through Nov. 1 at the Museum of Modern Art, (212) 708-9400, moma.org.

Such shows tend to be brainy and bookish. They demand our time and concentration. As a reward they give us new ways of looking at art. So it was with “Manet and the Execution of Maximilian” four years ago. So it is with “The Original Copy: Photography of Sculpture, 1839 to Today,” which opens at the museum on Sunday.

A blockbuster the new show is not. The opposite, I’d say. If you believe that art’s job is to deliver knockout visual goods at first glance, you’ll be happier spending your MoMA time in the current Matisse exhibition. If, however, you’re in the mood to see an array of images — odd, fabulous and often unfamiliar — telling a story of how two art forms, photography and sculpture, met, married, reproduced and virtually became one, then “The Original Copy” is for you.

The show, organized by Roxana Marcoci, a curator in the museum’s photography department, starts where photography officially started, with the public debuts of the daguerreotype in France in 1839 and, soon after, the paper-print picture in England. By this time, of course, sculpture had a very ancient history. Yet almost immediately the two mediums became aligned.

Both timing and technology played a role in their merging. The age of the art museum was well under way. Through museums a burgeoning middle class gained access to art that had once been the preserve of the rich and that in the case of classical Greek sculpture, represented Europe’s cultural heritage. Members of the new art audience wanted a piece of that heritage for themselves. Through photographs they could have it.

The show’s earliest picture, an 1839 daguerreotype by Alphonse Eugène Hubert, is basically a still life, but one composed entirely of bits and pieces of Classical sculpture, including a plaster bust of the Venus de Milo. Relatively cheap to buy, such pictures could turn a shopkeeper’s home into a mini-Louvre.

The liaison between sculpture and photography had formal as well as social advantages. Early photography, with its long exposure time, required motionless subjects. If a person sitting for a portrait so much as twitched, the image was blurred. Sculpture was much easier to photograph. It didn’t twitch.

It also didn’t travel if it was monumental or fixed in place. You had to go to where it was, and daredevil photographers did. In the 1850s Charles Nègre clambered, Quasimodo style, over the roofs of Notre-Dame in Paris and took a picture of the carved angel of the Resurrection perched on the peaks.

At almost the same time another Parisian shutterbug, Maxime Du Camp, was in Egypt, where he paid a team of local workers to excavate a colossal image of the pharaoh Ramesses II expressly so he could photograph it. Under Napoleon, the French had occupied Egypt and shipped tons of ancient sculpture to Paris. Later, through photography, du Camp sent even more spectacular sculptures home.

Early photography led a double life, as a recording instrument and as an art form. For Eugène Atget it was both. The pictures he took of outdoor sculptures at Versailles in the 1920s are documentary but also fantastic. By photographing them repeatedly, in different seasons and changing light, he gives them moods and personalities, makes them actors in a visual theater.

His contemporary Auguste Rodin, was also aware of photography’s power, but as an advertising medium. He could show only limited amounts of his bulky sculpture in any one place, but he had photographs of the rest of it to bump up sales. When he agreed to pose with “The Thinker” for the young Edward Steichen in 1902, Rodin probably figured he would get promotional images out of the deal. What he got in the photograph, which Steichen made by joining two negatives, was a classic example of photography manipulating and absorbing sculpture.

Constantin Brancusi was the idealist to Rodin’s realist. He obsessively photographed his own work. It was only in photographs, he felt, that his sculpture was complete, that it matched his originating vision. In part this was because photography allowed him complete control over the display of his work as it appeared in his studio, which was itself a form of sculptural assemblage and a quasi-mystical environment. To create that environment he broke basic photographic rules. With his flash he produced blinding explosions of light on polished bronze surfaces. He shot out of focus so that certain sculptures seem to vibrate as if alive. The results are sensational: sculpture disembodied, in some extraterrestrial dimension.

Marcel Duchamp pushed the interdependence of the two mediums one radical step further by creating sculptures strictly for the camera. In the process he decisively flipped the conventional values then attached to sculpture and photography. By making a traditional, solid, high-art form dependent for its existence on a modern medium that still had only the shakiest cultural status, he introduced a new politics of art.

As to the relationship of sculpture and photography to social politics, that was an old story, and Ms. Marcoci devotes considerable space to it in the show’s largest gallery. Here we return to the 19th century in a pair of 1871 photographs by Bruno Braquehais taken as antigovernment rebels in Paris pulled down the Napoleonic monument known as the Vendôme Column during the Paris Commune.

In images that bring to mind the destruction of Saddam Hussein’s statue in Baghdad in 2003, we first see the column standing but wrapped with cables, then its crowning statue of Napoleon lying on the ground. Braquehais intended his pictures to be souvenirs of a glorious event. Instead they were used by the police to prosecute the rebels, one of whom was Gustave Courbet.

These photographs are the earliest of the dozens of depictions of ideologically loaded monuments that make up this part of the show: Soviet-era sculptures of heroic workers taken by Igor Moukhin in Russia; white supremacist monuments shot by David Goldblatt in South Africa; a Hindu processional sculpture caught by Rosalind Solomon in Calcutta; and the presidential portraits of Mount Rushmore as viewed through Lee Friedlander’s lens.

In these photographs, sculptures designed to embody quite specific ideas are simultaneously documented and altered.

Mr. Moukhin’s worker, shot in a weedy lot surrounded by run-down homes, no longer looks so heroic. The monumental Mount Rushmore in Mr. Friedlander’s picture is just a dim reflection in a window. Other photographs are more overtly critical of their tightly programmed sculptural subjects; most, however, assume a more neutral stance, letting attitudes and ideas flow free.

Free-floating is pretty much the name of the game in the rest of the show, as it becomes increasingly clear that after a long and continuing partnership with photography, sculpture can be anything, and anything can be sculpture: a wad of chewing gum, an eggbeater hung on a wall, a lunar crater transported, via photo-collage, to an American desert.

Possibly the one indisputably defining feature of art in our own time is its shape-shifting inclusiveness. All mediums — sculpture, photography, painting, performance, video, etc. — are on equal footing and can even coexist in a single artist’s work.

Distinctions between high and low, original and copy, real and virtual, classical and whatever its opposite once was, have pretty much evaporated. What’s left is a kind of cornucopian aesthetic, one vividly represented by one of the exhibition’s most recent pieces, Rachel Harrison’s 2007 “Voyage of the Beagle.”

Named for the 1839 book in which Charles Darwin detailed the exotic research expeditions that led to his writing “On the Origin of Species,” the piece is made up of dozens of portraitlike photographs, all taken by Ms. Harrison, of mannequins, stuffed animals, carved medieval saints, prehistoric grave markers, topiary figures and so on.

The range is deliberately and hilariously broad. And the images, lined up edge to edge in a solid row running across two walls, appear to be arranged in no evolutionary order, with no hidden hierarchies or even mutual connections. Is the piece primarily about sculpture? About photography? Conceptually it feels new, not quite like anything seen before, even if every component is dimly familiar, either from art history or pop culture.

But you have seen something like it before, back in the first gallery: the 1839 daguerreotype still life, with its multimedia jumble of pseudo-Classical tchotchkes and fancy period ideals. Ms. Marcoci, who is responsible for the very cool exhibition catalog (with its images in tight sequence, it’s visually much punchier than the show), seems to be steering our thoughts in that direction, which is perhaps why she has installed Ms. Harrison’s photographic sequence high on the gallery wall, as if in imitation of a sculptural frieze, a deft and original touch.

“The Original Copy: Photography of Sculpture, 1839 to Today” is on view beginning Sunday through Nov. 1 at the Museum of Modern Art, (212) 708-9400

MOMA

Here is your opportunity to own a piece of history. The house was designed by Raphael Soriano in 1940 for the artist Glen Lukens. This property is a historic cultural monument. Buyer to do their own investigations of property. Exterior of the house been maintained its architectural integrity, although the interior of the house is in complete disarray. Due to the condition of the house, this will be a cash sale.
3425 W 27TH ST $290,000

MLS Listing

Thanks to Bret Witke

Eros Hoagland for The New York Times

Sea Ranch, California

By Jayne Merkel
July 29, 2010
The New York Times

Not long after the wrenching end of the Vietnam War, skyscrapers with pointed tops, stony-looking concrete walls and decorative marble bases — in other words, new buildings made to look like old ones — began to rise in American cities.

These buildings were called “postmodern” because they constituted a reaction to the bold, modern, glass-and-steel ones that had been built after World War II, when it seemed that anything was possible and new technology would create a brave new world. That they rose so soon after the war was no coincidence: by the late 1960s, faith in progress had been tarnished by assassinations of public figures, the quagmire in Vietnam and riots in American cities. Social anxiety created a mood in which looking backwards seemed safer and more comforting than looking forward to an uncertain future.

Although the most visible signs of the new postmodern movement were in city centers, the first and most interesting ones actually came in houses designed by ground-breaking young architects. And while few of the houses built in the 1970s reflected postmodern ideas explicitly, these buildings had an enormous impact on architecture — and on how people thought about, and lived in, houses over the next few decades.

In 1966 the American architect Robert Venturi, who had teasingly answered Mies van der Rohe’s dictum “less is more” by declaring “less is a bore,” published “Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture,” a book calling for more decoration, symbolism, color, pattern and clever references to historic structures. Old buildings were not just worth saving, he said; they could inspire new ones.
Vanna Venturi houseRollin LaFrance for Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates, Inc. The home Robert Venturi built for his mother, Vanna Venturi, who is sitting in the doorway.

Venturi made his argument in sheet rock and wood framing as well as words. A house he built for his mother near Philadelphia “critiqued” the modern movement’s tendency to reject the past while also showing a playfulness often lost in modernist architecture. With its gabled roof and central entrance, it looks like a child’s drawing of a house, but it is not as simple as it looks. It is small, but spatially complex inside. The house looks symmetrical but, on closer inspection, isn’t. It has a traditional central staircase, but after the second floor, the staircase leads nowhere. Unlike Mies’s steel-and-glass jewel boxes, Venturi’s house is full of wit and whimsy as well as clever references to historic buildings — while still working as a house for his aging mother.

Modern architects had built many interesting houses, but these never really caught on with the general public because they looked too unusual. They were also, perhaps, too plain, subtle and modest for American tastes. During the postmodern period, however, knowledgeable, talented architects started designing houses that captured the popular imagination.
Sea Ranch, CaliforniaEros Hoagland for The New York Times Sea Ranch, Calif.

Between 1964 and 1972, the Yale School of Architecture dean Charles Moore, Joseph Esherick and Lawrence Halprin, along with Moore’s West Coast partners in the firm Moore Lyndon Turnbull Whitaker, built an influential and enormously popular group of unpainted, shed-roofed, wood-sided condominiums nestled into the landscape at Sea Ranch, California. Appearing at once modern and traditional, they made slanted roofs trendy again. Suddenly architects no longer felt they had to use the modernist flat roofs that had never made much sense outside the tropics. These rather energy-efficient, clustered houses were also part of a “back to nature” movement; they blended into the raw, hilly, oceanside terrain, instead of trying to dominate it.
Private residence, Warren, New Jersey, 1977Courtesy of Michael Graves & Associates Private residence by Michael Graves. Warren, New Jersey, 1977.

In the late 1960s and early ’70s, Michael Graves, who taught at Princeton, did a series of houses and additions inspired first by Cubist paintings and then by traditional buildings. Despite their size and limited budgets, they were aesthetically ambitious. They not only suggested intriguing alternatives to the modernist box but ways to use art and architectural history to invent new forms. Widely published, they eventually earned Graves commissions for very original and colorful public buildings, inspired by the classical past, that influenced not only architecture but furniture, fashion and product design.
Robert A.M. Stern homeGreg Premru A Robert A.M. Stern home in Chilmark, Martha’s Vineyard, Mass. (1979-1983).

Robert A.M. Stern also put his considerable knowledge of architectural history to work, beginning in the early 1970s, by designing neo-Art Deco apartments and houses in and around New York that blended old and new styles. As Stern’s reputation grew (he eventually became one of Moore’s successors as dean at Yale), his houses grew in size and became more explicitly traditional, but always knowledgeably so. Stern and other very visible, very successful architects, and many less well-known ones, made working in historic styles — or being inspired by them — acceptable practice within the profession.

And many architects trained in the 1960s and ’70s moved into old houses or pre-war apartments themselves. Their renovations showed that it was possible to be creative, modern and historically respectful at the same time. These projects showed up in magazines, creating a taste for inventively remodeled old buildings. Exposed brick interior walls became common, along with decorative moldings, daring color combinations and exposed columns.

Despite the rising crime rates and urban riots of the 1960s, a growing number of middle- and upper-middle-class residents began to move into the urban areas in the 1970s and ’80s, at least partly because of their cheap, historic housing stock. But the trendiness of the old embraced by the early postmodernists likely had something to do with it as well. Urban streets developed such cachet that they turned up in television programs like “Sesame Street,” which premiered in 1969, and the “Cosby Show,” which aired from 1984 to 1992.

But there was a limit to all this returning to the past. Not all urban neighborhoods came back to life. Some became chic, while others declined. And gentrification was not always good for the people already there, especially renters. Sadly, many older urban neighborhoods came to have less socio-economic mix than they had had at the midcentury, even if they grew wealthier.

The interest in old buildings also failed to have much influence on houses in new suburban subdivisions, where most new housing was being built. These had always aped historical styles, and fresh ideas from famous architects about how to use those styles in different ways had little impact. Home builders might add a new stained glass window or beveled glass door, like those in old urban houses, but the quality of construction, design and materials did not improve. Customers preferred specific features, like hot tubs and decks, and prized “curb appeal” and more space above all else.

But the most unfortunate development in the postmodern period was that the commercial mainstream figured out how to appropriate historic styles to its own ends. Walt Disney World, which opened in 1971, with its Main Street and Frontierland, was only the most obvious example. These cookie-cutter, sentimental simulacrums of the past, without the dirt and diversity of real history, became a tool for branding and product placement. (Though Disney did later commission hotels from Graves and Stern, whose buildings were more inventively designed.)

Even genuine historic buildings were used to create fantasy worlds. In 1986 Ralph Lauren’s flagship store opened in a beautifully restored 1897 mansion on New York’s Madison Avenue. The store made the fabulous Gilded Age, chateau-style house accessible to the everyone, and anyone with $50 to spend on a tennis shirt could leave with one. But the message the place conveyed was that all you needed was the look; you could indulge aristocratic pretensions without the obligations that privilege had once involved required.

Postmodernism reached its apotheosis around 1987, the year of Tom Wolfe’s novel “The Bonfire of the Vanities” and Oliver Stone’s movie “Wall Street,” in which Michael Douglas’ character, Gordon Gekko, uttered the line that symbolized the decade: “Greed is good.” Though it turned out not to be so good for Gekko, a desperate desire for more of everything led to out-of-control consumption that bloated home sizes, deflated savings accounts, and distorted the American economy for the next 20 years.

Postmodern design, at home and downtown, fueled a fairy tale view of history that in turn abetted this desire for getting and spending. It stimulated the economy, but its glance backward merely obscured social fissures and helped us ignore looming economic risks. The verdict on postmodernism isn’t all negative, though: It led to the preservation of numerous public buildings; it made architecture fun again, and it gave the next generation of architects something to react against, just as Venturi, Moore and Stern had done vis-a-vis modernism in the late ’60s.

Christian Hansen for The New York Times

Frankie Fidilio, one of the metal collectors in Spike TV’s new reality series “Scrappers.”

By WENDELL JAMIESON
NY Times Published: July 29, 2010

HERE’S Frankie Fidilio rolling down Avenue U in Brooklyn on the second-hottest day of the year in his blue 1986 GMC Suburban. The van has no air-conditioning, but that’s the least of its problems.

So much rust dust has accumulated in the back that this looks like the only vehicle in creation with a dirt floor. Still, that’s better than the front, where there is no floor, just the hot asphalt of Avenue U flying by beneath the soles of his sneakers. Frankie’s Newports and a copy of Playboy rest on the dashboard. The exterior is so rusty that a tetanus shot should be required just to look at it.

To Frankie and his partner, Joe Posa, that empty dirt floor is a beautiful blank canvas: soon, if all goes well, it will be covered with scrap metal: pieces of cars, plumbing, old appliances, air ducts, fences: anything that the citizens of Brooklyn no longer need or want. So they give it to Frankie, a scrapper. To him that old steel, iron, copper and aluminum might as well be gold.

Racing to fill the van gives narrative tension to Frankie’s day and also allows for all kinds of interactions with construction workers, auto mechanics, other scrappers and even little old Italian ladies. So: why not a reality show? We’ve already got “Ice Road Truckers,” and crab fishermen off Alaska and real housewives. How about Brooklyn scrappers driving around in their rusty van hoping to fill up and unload before the sun goes down?

Frankie pitched the idea and got a deal. On Tuesday night at 10 “Scrappers” will make its debut on Spike TV. In it Frankie and Joe and two other teams drive around doing their thing and cursing a lot: to themselves, to each other, even to their customers. You hope the guy who did all the bleeping for Spike got overtime. In the first two episodes there are accidents, broken windows, fences that are too long to fit in the back of the van, a dumb mistake involving bricks and a cellphone dropped in water.

Watching “Scrappers” can be confusing. What exactly is going on here? But it is hard to look away.

In person Frankie’s a bit more polished than his on-air persona, even if he’s wearing shorts and a T-shirt. His eyes twinkle beneath a sharp haircut, the curses come few and far between. He’s made some amateur movies and has a Web site. This is a man with plans. He says he always knew his livelihood would make great television and insists he’s never seen any of the “Real Housewives” shows.

“It’s a great job to make into a show about because it mixes knowledge and comedy,” he says of scrapping. “Knowledge of recycling, how to recycle and comedy — all the stuff that happens every day.”

Also there can be twists. “You’ll be surprised at what you find in my business,” he says.

Frankie is very big on the green aspect of what he does, and there’s no denying he’s a key part of the process through which society’s metallic junk finds new uses. He starts most mornings at 7 a.m. at Café #2 on Avenue U, a storefront that might as well be in Sicily — whirring espresso machine, zinc bar, Italian soft drinks, those little sugar bowls they have in Europe, a group of customers who, you are almost certain but don’t want to look too closely, had bit parts in “Prizzi’s Honor.”

Frankie is a third-generation scrapper. His grandfather told him, “You’ll never be anything without scrap.” Words to live by. He ran his own yard back in the 1990s, but there were troubles with that, he says vaguely, and now he drives his van to make enough for a new yard.

That’s the overall narrative arc of the show: Will he make enough to accomplish his dream? He already has a spot picked out, a decrepit plot just off Coney Island Creek.

Joe Posa joined Frankie’s company, Scrappers USA, to help him drum up new business. They’d been friends for years. “He’d come home and say this happened and this happened and this happened, and I wouldn’t believe him,” Joe says. “But it was true. It was a great idea for a show.”

So off we go, powered by those espressos. “Watch the hole in the floor,” he says to his front-seat passenger. Joe sits on an egg crate behind him. There are occasional crashes back there.

“Easy, Joe, be careful,” Frankie shouts after hitting a pothole.

“I’m good, I’m good,” Joe answers after a pause.

First stop: Riviera Auto Collision on Stillwell Avenue. Frankie and Joe hurl pieces of a destroyed car into the back. Then it’s off to a house on 86th Street; Frankie got a call the day before to pick up the pieces of an old trampoline there. “This is No. 1 steel cut less than four feet,” he says, looking approvingly at one piece. “Less than four feet gets me more money.” Small pieces, he explains, are easier to fit into kilns.

Then its time to hit a nearby house whose owner called Frankie for a pickup. Frankie converses with the owner’s mother in Italian through the window. She doesn’t know anything about a pickup. Frankie and Joe leave empty-handed, discussing possible reasons why the lady does not have the air-conditioning on.

“When they are old like that, they like to sweat,” Joe says, with some authority, ending the discussion.

Did we mention that it’s the second hottest day of the year?

Did we mention that the van has no air-conditioning?

At 11 a.m. the temperature outside is in the high 90s; inside the van, despite the cooling hole in the floor, it’s got to be 15 degrees hotter. The streets are so bright with heat that everyone squints.

The encounter with the Old Italian Lady Who Likes to Sweat was the low point of a day that had otherwise been running pretty smoothly. But in the first two episodes of “Scrappers,” life is rougher than an old crushed fender.

Sal Vassallo heads up another crew in the show. He’s a heavily tattooed boxer with a hot temper. In the first episode, he punches out a refrigerator that had squashed his finger. Mimmo Saldino and Dino Minni make up the third crew, two perpetually smiling foul-ups who seem to have the worst luck and the least stress about it. They call themselves “The Mad Scrappers.” Episode 2 leaves us hanging: Will they be able to unload that van load of used bricks? Stay tuned.

Camera crews spent 10 hours a day with the scrappers, two or three days a week for 10 weeks. The material was edited to 10 half-hour episodes, which will run back to back in pairs. “What surprised us was how naturally funny these guys are, and the comedy that came out of their everyday situations,” said Sharon Levy, the executive vice president for original series at Spike, who oversaw production.

For a lifelong Brooklyn resident, watching “Scrappers” is an engaging puzzle: One by one, and not always in the right order, the borough’s neighborhoods fly by outside the van windows: Park Slope, Fort Greene, Carroll Gardens, Bensonhurst. Wait — was that my old block?

The show reminds us that no matter how fancy some parts of our city become, there will always be a thriving human infrastructure making the place work. We never think about scrappers until the day we find ourselves with a pile of used trampoline parts — No. 1 steel — and no way to get rid of them.

It’s all very legal. As recyclers, if they have permission, Frankie and his crew are allowed to take scrap under the city’s peddler laws, no license required. Spike executives wouldn’t say how much the stars got paid, but made it clear: It wasn’t enough for anyone to give up scrapping.

The only tension on the second-hottest day of the year with Frankie and Joe came at the end, when they arrived at the Mystery Scrap Yard with their three-quarter-full van. It was weighed, then emptied, then weighed again. (The difference was the unloaded scrap.) They made $90. On busier (cooler?) days, they make three runs with the van full.

To be truthful, the place was not called the Mystery Scrap Yard. But the manager, while saying he was very happy for Frankie and his television show, and wished him all the luck in the world, really, announced in friendly but firm tones that he did not want to see his name, or the name of his scrap yard, or any photographs of it, in a newspaper. Ever. Get it?

Now, technically speaking, he couldn’t really stop us from using his name, nor that of his business. But he did not seem like a man who wanted to get into a discussion of the fine points of ethical journalism. And it was really, really hot out there. And he knew where we worked. So, sometimes, discretion is the better part of valor.

Let’s just say that it was a big, dusty, noisy yard, with piles of black and silvery scrap, and lots of vans coming and going, and a bending scrap handler with a giant round magnet hoisting loads of dangling, clanging metal from one pile to another. It was just like many scrap yards, including one at 2994 Cropsey Avenue, near Coney Island.

Time for another espresso at Café #2.

But Frankie was distracted. He was on his cellphone, out on the sidewalk, lining up the next day’s work; when one round of scrapping ends, the next begins. Was he arranging a pickup, or promoting his television show? Hard to tell. A Newport in his mouth, he cocked his phone on his shoulder as he shook hands goodbye.

Ken Blaze for The New York Times

The Cleveland Botanical Garden has a “learning farm.”

By JUDITH H. DOBRZYNSKI
NY Times Published: July 26, 2010

For the last quarter century, the Cleveland Botanical Garden went all out for its biennial Flower Show, the largest outdoor garden show in North America. With themed gardens harking back to the Roman empire, or an 18th-century English estate, the event would draw 25,000 to 30,000 visitors.

But in 2009, the Flower Show was postponed and then abandoned when the botanical garden could not find sponsors. This year, the garden has different plans. From Sept. 24 to 26, it is inaugurating the “RIPE! Food & Garden Festival,” which celebrates the trend of locally grown food — and is supported in part by the Cleveland Clinic and Heinen’s, a supermarket chain.

“The Flower Show may come back someday, but it’s not where people are these days,” says Natalie Ronayne, the garden’s executive director. “Food is an easier sell.”

So it is across the country. Botanical gardens are experiencing an identity crisis, with chrysanthemum contests, horticultural lectures and garden-club ladies, once their main constituency, going the way of manual lawn mowers. Among the long-term factors diminishing their traditional appeal are fewer women at home and less interest in flower-gardening among younger fickle, multitasking generations.

Forced to rethink and rebrand, gardens are appealing to visitors’ interests in nature, sustainability, cooking, health, family and the arts. Some are emphasizing their social role, erecting model green buildings, promoting wellness and staying open at night so people can mingle over cocktails like the Pollinator (green tea liqueur, soda water and Sprite). A few are even inviting in dogs (and their walkers) free or, as in Cleveland, with a canine admission charge ($2).

“We’re not just looking for gardeners anymore,” says Mary Pat Matheson, the executive director of the Atlanta Botanical Garden. “We’re looking for people who go to art museums and zoos.”

In May, the Atlanta garden opened an attraction that would fit right in at a jungle park: a “canopy walk” that twists and turns for 600 feet at a height of up to 45 feet, allowing visitors to trek through the treetops. Not far away, food enthusiasts can stop in at a new edible garden, with an outdoor kitchen frequently staffed by guest chefs creating dishes with fresh, healthy ingredients. Edible gardens are the fastest-growing trend at botanical gardens, consistently increasing attendance, experts say, along with cooking classes.

Attendance in Atlanta since May is double what it was for the same period last year.

Public gardens across the country receive about 70 million visits a year, according to the American Public Gardens Association. But experts say that because of social trends and changing demographics, attendance is at risk if gardens do not change.

They can, however, take advantage of several trends that could increase garden attendance, including concern for the environment, interest in locally grown food, efforts to reduce childhood obesity, demand for family activities and mania for interactive entertainment. Even economic pressures could help botanical gardens, as more people try to grow their own food. In 2009, 35 percent of American households had some kind of food garden, up from 31 percent in 2008, says Bruce Butterfield, research director of the National Gardening Association. Only 31 percent participated in flower gardening in 2009, about the same proportion as in the last few years.

“There’s a generation that will be less interested in gardens,” says Daniel J. Stark, executive director of the public gardens association, “but that generation is incredibly interested in what’s happening with the planet. Recently, my own two daughters, and a friend, were reading me the riot act about cutting down some trees.”

Mr. Stark’s daughters are 4 and 8.

Some tactics designed to entice nongardening Americans are not new, of course — sculpture and concerts have been around for years — but their popularity is growing. The New York Botanical Garden, for example, is drawing big crowds with its current tribute to the poet Emily Dickinson, who was also a gardener.

The new exhibition at the United States Botanic Garden in Washington features “the spectacular spud family,” with potato-related artifacts, music and bits of pop culture, especially the endurance of Mr. Potato Head.

And children’s gardens are growing more whimsical and interactive, says Sharilyn Ingram, a former president of the Royal Botanical Gardens in Canada who is now a culture professor at Brock University in Ontario. “You get to have a little more fun now,” she said.

When the Coastal Maine Botanical Garden, in Boothbay, opened its $1.7 million, two-acre children’s garden this month, it came with a chicken coop, where children can harvest eggs, and a windmill weather station.

In Wyoming, at the Cheyenne Botanic Gardens, the new children’s village has adopted sustainability as its theme. It includes a solar-powered discovery laboratory where children can make art from reused materials, a feature that helped it win the highest level of Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certification.

Teenagers in Cleveland are learning how to grow corn and zucchini on urban plots.

Because of environmental concerns, Descanso Gardens, near Los Angeles, is doing the once-unthinkable: it plans to uproot its historic — but nonnative — collection of camellias, some as tall as 30 feet, which were planted decades ago under the shade of natural woodlands. “It’s a fantasy forest,” says Brian Sullivan, the director of horticulture and garden operations.

But the fantasy cannot be sustained. Camellias require so much water that it is killing the trees — not to mention being wasteful. Descanso will relocate the camellias, even though some will be lost, and allow the woodlands to return to their native state. “We expect opposition and kudos both,” Mr. Sullivan said.

But Descanso still must reach out beyond its aging membership group, he added, so it is remaining open in the evening; offering cocktails (including the Pollinator) at a new Camellia Lounge; breaking ground on a $2.1 million art gallery whose exterior walls will be hung with vertical plant trays that will blend into a turf roof; and maintaining an edible garden dense with fruits, vegetables and herbs that are donated to a local food bank.

Food festivals are becoming a large part of the year-round programming that gardens view as important to winning repeat visitors. In January, the Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden in Coral Gables, Fla., drew some 12,000 people to its fourth International Chocolate Festival with Coffee and Tea. It was followed in April with a local food festival, and this month with a mango festival. In November comes its annual Ramble, a garden party featuring antiques and music.

Yes, Fairchild also has an orchid festival.

But showcasing flowers is clearly shrinking in importance. “Most gardens,” Ms. Ingram, the Canadian professor, said, “would feel that displaying flowers is necessary, but not sufficient.”

Thanks to Mike Abelson

Ian Martens / Lethbridge Herald

via

Thamks to Basil Katz

By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Times Published: July 25, 2010

Never say that the gods lack a sense of humor. I bet they’re still chuckling on Olympus over the decision to make the first half of 2010 — the year in which all hope of action to limit climate change died — the hottest such stretch on record.

Of course, you can’t infer trends in global temperatures from one year’s experience. But ignoring that fact has long been one of the favorite tricks of climate-change deniers: they point to an unusually warm year in the past, and say “See, the planet has been cooling, not warming, since 1998!” Actually, 2005, not 1998, was the warmest year to date — but the point is that the record-breaking temperatures we’re currently experiencing have made a nonsense argument even more nonsensical; at this point it doesn’t work even on its own terms.

But will any of the deniers say “O.K., I guess I was wrong,” and support climate action? No. And the planet will continue to cook.

So why didn’t climate-change legislation get through the Senate? Let’s talk first about what didn’t cause the failure, because there have been many attempts to blame the wrong people.

First of all, we didn’t fail to act because of legitimate doubts about the science. Every piece of valid evidence — long-term temperature averages that smooth out year-to-year fluctuations, Arctic sea ice volume, melting of glaciers, the ratio of record highs to record lows — points to a continuing, and quite possibly accelerating, rise in global temperatures.

Nor is this evidence tainted by scientific misbehavior. You’ve probably heard about the accusations leveled against climate researchers — allegations of fabricated data, the supposedly damning e-mail messages of “Climategate,” and so on. What you may not have heard, because it has received much less publicity, is that every one of these supposed scandals was eventually unmasked as a fraud concocted by opponents of climate action, then bought into by many in the news media. You don’t believe such things can happen? Think Shirley Sherrod.

Did reasonable concerns about the economic impact of climate legislation block action? No. It has always been funny, in a gallows humor sort of way, to watch conservatives who laud the limitless power and flexibility of markets turn around and insist that the economy would collapse if we were to put a price on carbon. All serious estimates suggest that we could phase in limits on greenhouse gas emissions with at most a small impact on the economy’s growth rate.

So it wasn’t the science, the scientists, or the economics that killed action on climate change. What was it?

The answer is, the usual suspects: greed and cowardice.

If you want to understand opposition to climate action, follow the money. The economy as a whole wouldn’t be significantly hurt if we put a price on carbon, but certain industries — above all, the coal and oil industries — would. And those industries have mounted a huge disinformation campaign to protect their bottom lines.

Look at the scientists who question the consensus on climate change; look at the organizations pushing fake scandals; look at the think tanks claiming that any effort to limit emissions would cripple the economy. Again and again, you’ll find that they’re on the receiving end of a pipeline of funding that starts with big energy companies, like Exxon Mobil, which has spent tens of millions of dollars promoting climate-change denial, or Koch Industries, which has been sponsoring anti-environmental organizations for two decades.

Or look at the politicians who have been most vociferously opposed to climate action. Where do they get much of their campaign money? You already know the answer.

By itself, however, greed wouldn’t have triumphed. It needed the aid of cowardice — above all, the cowardice of politicians who know how big a threat global warming poses, who supported action in the past, but who deserted their posts at the crucial moment.

There are a number of such climate cowards, but let me single out one in particular: Senator John McCain.

There was a time when Mr. McCain was considered a friend of the environment. Back in 2003 he burnished his maverick image by co-sponsoring legislation that would have created a cap-and-trade system for greenhouse gas emissions. He reaffirmed support for such a system during his presidential campaign, and things might look very different now if he had continued to back climate action once his opponent was in the White House. But he didn’t — and it’s hard to see his switch as anything other than the act of a man willing to sacrifice his principles, and humanity’s future, for the sake of a few years added to his political career.

Alas, Mr. McCain wasn’t alone; and there will be no climate bill. Greed, aided by cowardice, has triumphed. And the whole world will pay the price.

Lyle Ashton Harris for The New York Times

BOUNCE THAT Big Freedia shares the stage at Club Caesar’s with a few audience members.

ny times video

By JONATHAN DEE
NY Times Published: July 19, 2010

If “gay rapper” is an oxymoron where you come from, how to get your head around the notion of a gay rapper performing in a sports bar? What in most cities might seem plausible only as some sort of Sacha Baron Cohen-style provocation is just another weeknight in the cultural Galapagos that is New Orleans. Sometime after midnight on the sweltering Thursday before Memorial Day, the giant plasma-screen TVs at the Sports Vue bar (which “proudly airs all major Pay Per View events from the world of Boxing and Ultimate Fighting”) were all switched off, and the bar’s backroom turned into a low-lit, low-ceilinged dance club, where more than 300 people awaited a return engagement by Big Freedia, who by day runs an interior-decoration business and who is, to fans of the New Orleans variant of hip-hop music known as “bounce,” a superstar.

At 1 a.m., though, Freedia (pronounced “FREE-da”) was still a mile or so away, fulfilling a paid celebrity-hosting gig at Club Fabulous. The fabulousness of Club Fabulous, on this night at least, seemed a function mainly of its Mardi Gras-themed décor, conceived and executed by Freedia herself. Otherwise the crowd was sparse, largely straight and listless. Freedia looked weary as she leaned back against the bar with her dyed, diagonally cut bangs over one eye, holding a cordless microphone. (Freedia, who is about 6 foot 2 and very powerful-looking and dresses in a fashionable but recognizably masculine style, is genetically a man; but neither she nor anyone who knows her uses masculine pronouns to refer to her.) When “Rock Around the Clock,” one of her signature songs, came on the sound system, a few women walked over to Freedia and stood with their backs to her, but the atmosphere wasn’t quite electric enough for them to really start dancing, and the men just continued playing pool. After a while, Freedia’s D.J. and de facto manager, who goes by the name Rusty Lazer — a whippetlike 39-year-old white man with a salt-and-pepper beard — let Freedia know that it was time to move on to the next show.

The two of them had just returned from three nights at three different venues in New York, with a stop for another show in Philadelphia on their way home. These days Freedia performs five or six nights a week, often more than once a night — and increasingly, not just in New Orleans.

“Girl, I’m tired,” Lazer said as he drove them to the Sports Vue in his minivan, which was full of boxes of hand-screened Big Freedia T-shirts he sells at $10 a pop.

“Really?” Freedia said laconically. “I’m just starting to get my energy back.”

At the first sight of the commotion outside the Sports Vue, everyone’s energy level picked up. Lazer pulled the minivan into a long maze of cars parked haphazardly all up and down the grass median on Elysian Fields Avenue. Outside the metal detectors at the entrance, cops were pretending to listen to the grievances of two women who had just been thrown out of the bar. “Every night,” Lazer said fondly. While patrons were being patted down by bouncers inside the door, he and Freedia disappeared into the crowd; a few minutes later, the music stopped, and a loud, excited voice yelled into a mic a brief introduction — so brief the longest part of it was the polysyllabic participle between the words “Big” and “Freedia.”

And then something remarkable happened. The crowd — just about evenly divided between men and women — instantly segregated itself: the men were propelled as if by a centrifuge toward the room’s perimeters, and the dance floor, a platform raised just a step off the ground, was taken over entirely by women surrounding Freedia. The women did not dance with, or for, one another — they danced for Freedia, and they did so in the most sexualized way imaginable, usually with their backs to her, bent over sharply at the waist, and bouncing their hips up and down as fast as humanly possible, if not slightly faster. Others assumed more of a push-up position, with their hands on the floor, in a signature dance whose name is sometimes helpfully shortened to “p-popping.”

Freedia did “Rock Around the Clock,” which begins with a sample from the Bill Haley classic but departs pretty drastically from there, as well as her longtime club hit, “Azz Everywhere,” a title as perfectly high-concept in its way as “Snakes on a Plane.” Softspoken in person, Freedia has an onstage voice as deep and exhortatory as Chuck D’s. Her older songs sometimes had choruses that were actually sung (“I got that gin in my system/Somebody gonna be my victim”), but in her recent work, the beat is too fast to permit much more than short, repetitive chanting. Not that it mattered much in the context of the less-than-state-of-the-art sound system at the Sports Vue, where an occasional obscenity was pretty much as audible as any of the lyrics got.

A Big Freedia set generally lasts only four or five songs (which is why she can book two or three of them a night), but the energy brought to, and generated by, those songs is astounding. So, 20 cathartic minutes later, it was all over. Freedia left the stage, the men gravitated back toward the women and the sexual balance at the Sports Vue was restored. “Well,” Lazer said with a grin as he gave me a lift back to my hotel in his minivan, “I’ve lived in New Orleans a long time, and I know a lot of people, but you’ve just seen something that about 95 percent of my white friends will probably never see.”

Bounce itself has been around for about 20 years. Like most hip-hop varietals, it’s rap delivered over a sampled dance beat, but it has a few characteristics that give it a distinctively regional sound: it’s strictly party music, its beat is relentlessly fast and its rap quotient tends much less toward introspection or pure braggadocio than toward a call-and-response relationship with its audience, a dynamic borrowed in equal measure from Mardi Gras Indian chants and from the dawn of hip-hop itself. Many, if not most, bounce records announce their allegiance by sampling from one of just two sources: either Derek B.’s “Rock the Beat” or an infectious hook known as the “Triggaman,” from a 1986 Showboys record called “Drag Rap.” (That’s “drag” not as in cross-dressing but as in the theme to the old TV show “Dragnet.”) Just as the earliest New York rap records featured compulsory shout-outs to the boroughs, lots of bounce songs will demand (especially when performed live) audience acknowledgment of the city’s various neighborhoods and housing projects (“Shake it for the Fourth Ward/Work it for the Fifth Ward”), even those that have been razed. Otherwise the lyrics are mostly about sex and are so habitually obscene that they have helped keep bounce from spreading too far beyond its New Orleans borders. The success of bounce-tinged New Orleans artists like Lil Wayne and Juvenile notwithstanding, at least one New Orleans record-company executive speculates that major labels consider unadulterated bounce too hard to distribute, because it can’t be played on most radio stations or even sold in many venues.

The overwhelming majority of bounce artists are, of course, straight. But 12 years ago, a young drag queen who goes by the name Katey Red shocked the audience by taking the mic at an influential underground club near the Melpomene housing project where she grew up, and in that star-is-born moment, a subgenre of bounce took root. It is a sad understatement to say that homosexuality and hip-hop make for an unlikely fusion: hip-hop culture is one of the most unrepentantly homophobic cultures in America, surpassing even its own attitudes toward women in bigotry and smirking advocacy of violence. But New Orleans’s tolerance of unlikely fusions is legendary, and today Katey Red, along with a handful of other artists — Big Freedia (who grew up four blocks from Katey and started out as one of her background vocalists), Sissy Nobby, Chev off the Ave, Vockah Redu (who was captain of the dance team at Booker T. Washington High School) — are not just accepted mainstays of the bounce scene but its most prominent representatives outside New Orleans. Katey recently received a New Orleans consecration of sorts when she appeared as herself, unidentified, in an episode of the HBO series “Treme,” with her song “So Much Drama” playing in the background.

Some part of this subgenre’s popularity is surely due to the catchily discordant name by which it has become known: sissy bounce. The term is problematic, because the artists themselves do not care for it at all — not because they object to the word “sissy” but because they consider it disrespectful to bounce music. Even when their lyrics are at their frankest (“I’m a punk under pressure/When we finish, put my money on the dresser”), they rush to point out, correctly, that they’re just drawing from the life at hand in the same way virtually every rapper does. They have no desire to be typed within, or set apart from, bounce culture; and indeed, within New Orleans itself, they mostly are not — even as their bookings elsewhere in the country are founded increasingly on the novelty of their sexual identities.

The term “sissy bounce” is one for which a young New Orleans music writer named Alison Fensterstock takes very reluctant credit. Fensterstock is a native New Yorker who moved to New Orleans for what was supposed to be a semester in college 15 years ago, and now lives in the Ninth Ward with her husband, who D.J.’s regularly for Katey and other bounce artists. She has done as much for the promotion of bounce culture as anyone, not only by writing about it extensively for New Orleans-based publications (in one of which she offhandedly coined the fateful name) but also by spending two years assembling a museum exhibition, a comprehensive oral and photographic history of bounce and New Orleans hip-hop called “Where They At?” which has traveled all over the country. Indeed, the sissy-bounce artists themselves seem to adore her; when I met her in New Orleans, she mentioned that Katey was excited about giving her a makeover.

When it comes to locating sissy bounce’s roots, Fensterstock said, you should look deep rather than wide; that is, rather than try to place it within the current spectrum of American hip-hop, it makes much more sense to understand it as an outgrowth of New Orleans musical culture itself, which has a long tradition of gay and cross-dressing performers not just as a fringe element but as part of the musical mainstream. (Though the definitional lines aren’t as bright as they used to be, among the sissy-bounce rappers, Katey Red is the only one who performs in women’s clothing.) Bobby Marchan, a female impersonator who was a singer for Huey (Piano) Smith and later became an influential promoter, and Patsy Vidalia (born Irving Ale), the cross-dressing hostess of the Dew Drop Inn, were among the most popular entertainers and social figures in New Orleans for decades.

“As far back as the ’40s and ’50s, it was a really popular thing,” Fensterstock said. “Gay performers have been celebrated forever in New Orleans black culture. Not to mention that in New Orleans there’s the tradition of masking, mummers, carnival, all the weird identity inversion. There’s just something in the culture that’s a lot more lax about gender identity and fanciness. I don’t want to say that the black community in New Orleans is much more accepting of the average, run-of-the-mill gay Joe. But they’re definitely much more accepting of gay people who get up and perform their gayness on a stage.”

Outside New Orleans, though, booking the artists, or selling their records, remains a particular challenge. “They’re the hottest things in the club, but they just haven’t been able to get national exposure,” says Melvin Foley, who manages several sissy-bounce artists. “They have clean versions of their songs for radio, but we can’t get the radio to put them into rotation. I took Sissy Nobby and Big Freedia to New York to meet with Universal, but we couldn’t get a label deal. Their main concern was, ‘How would we market this?’ You market it like you market any other artist.”

Or not. For while it may be true that openly gay rappers will never gain much traction with rap’s mostly male demographic, men aren’t the natural market for the music anyway. As attendance at even a few shows will tell you, the eager and underserved audience for sissy bounce is clearly, overwhelmingly, women. “There’s like a safe-space thing happening,” Fensterstock says. “When Freedia or Nobby’s singing superaggressive, sexual lyrics about bad boyfriends or whatever, there’s something about being able to be the ‘I’ in the sentence. That’s not to say that women can’t like the more misogynistic music too. I like it — some of it’s good music. But it’s tough to sing along about bitches and hos when you’re a girl. When you identify with Freedia, you’re the agent of all this aggressive sexuality instead of its object.”

Though it seems insensitive to point it out, a signal event in spreading bounce’s purview was the forced dispersal of Freedia, Katey, Nobby and untold dozens of bounce artists in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. They were exiled from their New Orleans homes for many months, to Baton Rouge, Atlanta, Houston, Dallas and elsewhere; in their restlessness and homesickness, they started staging bounce shows for the locals wherever they happened to be.

Freedia found places to perform in Texas, but she jumped at the first opportunity to get back home. As she remembered: “The first club that reopened in New Orleans was Caesar’s, and they called me immediately and said let’s do a regular night with you here. So we started FEMA Fridays. It was the only club open in the city, and a lot of people had a lot of money from Katrina, the checks and stuff, so the joy inside that club — I don’t think that’ll ever come back.”

“Freedia was one of the first artists to come back after the storm and start working,” Fensterstock said, “and she worked really, really hard. Like six shows a week. If you lived here, it became impossible not to know who she was.”

Which led, unsurprisingly, to a bit of resentment within the bounce community, one that persists to this day. “A lot of the older, straight male rappers have been vocal about having problems with the whole sissy-bounce thing,” Fensterstock said, “but it’s more complicated than just homophobia. These guys have been performing and putting out records for 10 or 20 years. But Freedia’s getting so much publicity now that a lot of people who maybe have never heard of bounce before, or who haven’t thought about it since the ’90s, just think it’s all gay.”

Inaccurate (or paranoid) as that perception may be, the fact is that the notion of unabashedly gay hip-hop is like catnip to some alternative-music scenes around the country. Which puts the artists themselves in something of a bind: while sissy-bounce bookings offer them a rare chance to raise their national profiles, the last thing any of them wants is to put homosexuality at the forefront of what they do. At home, they perform in every sort of venue, before every sort of crowd: at sports bars, at Jazz Fest, at a recent museum benefit called “Sippin’ in Seersucker.” On record too, they fuse freely with other genres. Freedia, Nobby and Katey are all guest vocalists on the latest record from Galactic, a respected (and white) New Orleans funk outfit. And that is the music’s volatile essence: inside New Orleans, the genius of sissy bounce is how perfectly mainstream it is; in the world beyond, the genius of sissy bounce is how incredibly alternative it is.

Vockah Redu — who lives in Houston now, having gone there six years ago to study performing arts in college — probably chafes at the “sissy bounce” label more than anyone. “My daughter’s gonna be reading that soon,” he told me with a tight laugh. “But I’ll be able to explain it to her. It’s just stardom, and I feel like it’ll die down eventually. Right now the media’s buying it, so ‘sissy bounce’ it is.”

Two nights after the Sports Vue show, Vockah and Katey Red traveled to Austin, Tex., to perform at a garagelike space there called the Beauty Bar. This was something of a return engagement: a couple of months earlier there was a bounce showcase at what is probably the mecca of American alternative music, the South by Southwest Festival, and Katey and Vockah made such an impression — despite being just two of the seven bounce artists on the bill, the rest of whom were non-sissies — that they were invited back as part of a subsequent festival called Chaos in Tejas, mostly a collection of hardcore bands whose connection to bounce music per se would normally seem tenuous if not hostile.

Vockah came onstage at the Beauty Bar looking like a latter-day George Clinton, with an Indian wig, a long brown lab coat, purple tights and a gold top hat. Those clothes, and most of the rest of what he was wearing, were shed by the third or fourth song. Vockah has the looks and the bearing (and the dancing ability) of a star; indeed, he really needs a bigger stage than a venue like the Beauty Bar provides. He puts on a very theatrical show, featuring tightly choreographed dancing (in unison with his backup vocalists/dancers, known as the Cru), scripted patter (“Thank you,” he told the audience more than once, “for being a reflection of my gift”) and medleys and reprises rather than a straight set list. Compelling as he was, at times he seemed to lose the audience a bit; they were looking to be related to more directly. “I am not here representing New Orleans, I am not here representing bounce music, I am not here representing gay people,” he said near the end of the show. “I am an artist.” Clearly he is constructing a persona, and it is the type of persona that would go down better in front of a crowd of 20,000 than it did among the 200 heavily tattooed, overwhelmingly white alt-kids who were there for the fickle buzz provided by the authenticity of the new, of the ephemerally romanticized fringe that defines alternative music in the first place.

Katey Red, on the other hand, needs no persona: just the sight of her is a whole narrative unto itself. Fensterstock had told me a story about Katey’s irritation with the reviews of her South by Southwest show, all of which seemed to lead with the fact that she is six feet two inches tall, as if that were somehow the most remarkable thing about her. True, it is probably only the seventh- or eighth-most remarkable thing about her; still, when she came onstage wearing sky-high heels and a Mohawk wig purchased for the occasion, it was literally impossible to see the top of her behind the stage lights affixed to the ceiling, and that says a lot about the way she dominates even a cruddy little venue like the Beauty Bar.

Nothing if not old-school, she led the crowd (and her two backup singers) through a series of shout-outs to the projects and neighborhoods of New Orleans, even though very few in the audience would have any reason to know their names or to distinguish one from the other; she led them in a chant that made “Katrina” and “FEMA” into rhyming objects of the same obscene verb. She did all her best-known songs, including “Punk Under Pressure” (“I’m a ho/You know I’m a ho”) and “Stupid” (“You are so stupid/For calling us guys/Please don’t knock it till you give it a try”). She prowled the stage with the sort of constrained grace Tina Turner used to display while wearing pretty much the same shoes. Once or twice she invited audience members onstage to dance in the classic, hypersexual bounce style, and they did so — men and women — with what might be described as labored un-self-consciousness.

A few hours before the show, Katey, barefoot in a simple blue dress, made macaroni and cheese and chicken nuggets for three teenagers, two of them her children, in the kitchenette of her Austin motel room. The children were mostly silent; Katey’s demeanor, with showtime looming, was growing more combative, and they seemed to know that the smartest course was to try to make themselves invisible.

Katey now lives and identifies full time as a woman; her life and art are pretty much one, so it does not seem unusual that she doesn’t perform all that often these days. “One reason,” she said, “they ain’t paying like I want to get paid. Another reason: they changed bounce music. They made the beat faster. It’s all chop and cut, chop and cut. It’s not rapping. I don’t like that. I like to write. I like to sit down and write a song — this line goes with this line, this line goes with that line.”

There were two cheerleader batons in the motel room, though it was unclear to whom they belonged, and occasionally Katey would pick them up and twirl them.

“Ain’t no such thing as ‘sissy bounce,’ ” she said. “It’s bounce music. It’s just sissies that are doing it. I was gone for two years after Katrina — a month in Chattanooga and then 23 months in Dallas. I performed there. They loved me there. They didn’t know the songs, people in New Orleans know the songs, but it don’t matter, people in Dallas still like to shake they ass. Everybody like to shake they ass.” What’s the audience like at shows outside of New Orleans? “Pretty integrated,” Katey said. “Mostly girls, mostly a bunch of nasty hos with they shorts up they ass, trying to shake like a dog. What you laughing at?” she said to her son.

“You said, ‘People in Dallas like to shake they ass, too,’ ” her son said.

“Go get your food,” Katey said. “I made it, I ain’t going to bring it to you.” This exchange escalated, as such exchanges between parents and children will do, until it reached the point where a few hard but playful blows were exchanged.

“Would you hit your mama like that?” Katey appealed to me.

I shook my head no.

“Exactly,” she said.

The first of Freedia’s three successive New York gigs in May began with a preshow bounce dance class, which should give you some idea of how far from home Freedia and Lazer were. But “every night it got better,” Freedia said. “They was all on the Internet, posting up the pictures, like ‘If you missed last night, OMG, you missed a party.’ Each night it built, and the last night” — at a traveling dusk-to-dawn festival known as Hoodstock, held on this occasion in a raw space in the Bed-Stuy neighborhood of Brooklyn — “it was just unbelievable. Five hundred people in there. Everybody was dripping wet. The walls was dripping wet.”

Any doubt that that space, like any space in which Freedia performs, quickly belonged to the women in the crowd may be dispelled by a story Lazer laughingly told about a blog post he’d seen the day after their Hoodstock set. It consisted of two photos taken at the show, and their captions: in the first, a group of women were horizontally p-popping in what amounted to a flesh pile. “To the men,” the caption beneath it read, “we don’t need you.” The second photo depicted a woman at the same show sitting on the floor while a man prone in front of her performed a sexual act that might traditionally be described as submissive. “But we like having you around,” the caption beneath that one read.

What strikes Lazer most about the dynamic at these shows, though, is not how unexpected it is but how familiar. Long before he started D.J.-ing, he was a drummer in a series of rock bands; he is old enough to have come of age in the latter days of punk. And when he started playing shows with Freedia almost two years ago — when he started witnessing, over and over again, a same-sex group taking over the dance floor in order to perform an ecstatic act of physical aggression that is both exceptionally demanding and socially unacceptable in other contexts, at the behest of music that’s ritualized and played at seemingly impossible tempos — it all began to remind him of something.

“It’s as if punk had been reinvented for women,” he said, smiling. “I remember going to punk shows when I was 13, slam-dancing, stage-diving. It was a kind of reckless abandon, something you really couldn’t stop yourself from doing. If the girls weren’t just outright afraid of being in there, there was somebody literally shoving them out of the way. Now it’s exactly what was happening when I was young, but in reverse: the girls literally push the dudes right out of the middle. It’s just pure empowerment, physical aggression that’s not spiteful or vicious. I think it’s no accident that the slang term for a gay kid in New Orleans is ‘punk.’ It’s pretty rewarding.”

There have been, it should be said, several promi­nent, strongly voiced bounce rappers who are women. For whatever reason, though, the connection between them and an audience of straight women has never seemed as quick or as instinctive. The fact that the uninhibited ring of rump-shaking and p-popping is centered on a Freedia or a Katey doesn’t desexualize it — not by a long shot — but it does seem to take the sense of threat out of it.

“I think the girls like the gay rappers a lot because they feel safer,” Lazer said. “You can get up in the front, you can dance for Freedia, you can work it for Freedia, but at the same time, if anybody comes up on you and gives you a hard time, Freedia’s gonna be the first one —”

“To defend the girl,” Freedia agreed. We were sitting in her modest second-floor apartment in the Sixth Ward, glad to get out of the sun after a photo shoot she did for a British fashion magazine. “I just had that situation on Tuesday, at Caesar’s. I had like 20 girls in this big old circle around me, shaking it real hard. And the boys started closing them in like in a cage. I’m like, ‘Hold up, D.J., stop the music.’ I said, ‘Fellas, back it up, give me 50 feet, I need my girls to work it out where I can see them and where I have control over them.’ So all the fellas back up, but then one guy tries to put his hands on a girl. I stopped the music again, and I said, ‘Dude, I don’t need you touching on my girls because you gonna make all the boys think it’s O.K.’ ”

Lazer, by this point in the story, was nearly folded in half with laughter.

“If they feel like they can step out on that limb,” Freedia said, “I’m gonna step back on that limb with them. If you want to mess with me, I’m gonna mess back with you, but keep in mind that I have the mic in my hand and I’m gonna have the power over you at that moment.”

“And you’re huge,” said the relatively diminutive Lazer.

“And I’m a man,” said Freedia.

Thanks to Danielle Kays

Vija Celmins, Ocean with Cross

By Lori Kozlowski
The Los Angeles Times
July 24, 2010

“There’s a regular rhythm to waves that calms us,” says British author Gavin Pretor-Pinney, explaining how he came to be fascinated by the science behind the movement of the ocean. In “The Wave Watcher’s Companion: From Ocean Waves to Light Waves via Shock Waves, Stadium Waves, and All the Rest of Life’s Undulations,” he stares down the physics behind waves of all stripes (Penguin Books, July 2010). For the record:An article in Saturday’s Section A about “The Wave Watcher’s Companion” incorrectly referred to oceanographer Walter Munk as Walter Munch. The quaint book is part hard science, part friendly explanation. Pretor-Pinney talked with the Los Angeles Times about waves of sea and sand; how bees and hippos do “the wave,” and more.

You write, “There’s no such thing as a wave-free sea.” Can you explain?

There’s always movement in the sea, even if there is no wind.

As wind blows over the surface of the water, it causes tiny ripples, less than an inch in height, that roughen the surface, increasing the friction between wind and water, giving it more purchase and helping it lift the surface. In this way, the wind’s energy is transferred to the water.

The stronger the wind, the greater the area over which it blows and the longer its duration, the higher the waves will grow. But when the storm dissipates and the wind dies down, the waves that it caused roll on of their own accord. The train of waves is known as a swell, and can travel over huge distances.

In the 1950s and 1960s, the great oceanographer Walter Munch measured how far ocean waves travel from the storm that created them. He found that waves created in storms off Antarctica could be tracked right up through the Pacific to the coast of Alaska. It took about two weeks for them to make this epic 7,000-mile journey, at the end of which they were far too feeble to be detected by anything but the most sensitive recording equipment.

What are the three forms of waves?

The three kinds of waves are transverse, longitudinal and torsional waves. It kind of worried me that these sound sort of dull. So I described these waves as animals.

A transverse wave is sort of like the serpentine movements of a snake. When you send a wave down the length of your garden hose to unhitch it from the fence post, you are creating a snake wave — sorry, a transverse wave.

A longitudinal wave is more like the way an earthworm moves. The worm grips the earth around it by bunching up its body to make it thicker and sending the muscular contraction down its length to propel it forward through the ground. Here the movements of the worm are not from side to side but forward and backward. Sound waves are examples of longitudinal waves. The sound from a speaker travels towards you on account of the air molecules vibrating forwards and backwards to produce traveling regions of higher and lower air pressure.

Torsional waves move in a twisting motion. You don’t tend to come across torsional waves much — not unless you work in the drilling industry. Nor do you come across many animals that use torsional waves to get around. In fact, I found it impossible to come up with any animal at all.

What are sand waves?

The dunes of the “sand seas” of the Sahara certainly look like waves, and they even travel along gradually in the wind. But I soon found out from an aeolian geomorphologist — a dune expert, to you and me — that they result from fundamentally different physical processes than actual waves.

Talk about your trip to Hawaii.

The main reason for writing the book was to go on vacation — sorry, I mean on a research trip — to Hawaii. The swells there arrive unimpeded from the winter storms tracking across the North Pacific. I was transfixed by the immense power and beauty of the breakers along the North Shore. There, more than anywhere, you get a true understanding of the energy that waves can contain.

When the ocean swells reach the lava reefs, bunching up into peaks and peeling forwards into an explosion of white water, you can feel the energy that originated from the storm as it is finally released. This energy doesn’t disappear — energy can only change from one form to another. Some of it changes into the crashing sound of the waves — and sound is a form of wave, isn’t it? Some of it travels on through the ground as vibrations — which are known as ‘microseisms’ and are like mini seismic waves. And some ends up heating up the water and shore slightly. This heat, too, travels on as waves — infrared waves. It was a huge revelation for me to realize that ocean wave energy just keeps on traveling as other types of waves.

What about stadium waves?

We all love performing The Wave — especially when there is not much going on on the pitch. But I was intrigued to learn that a Hungarian professor had made two studies into the science of stadium waves. He told me that the critical number of people needed to get a wave started is 25. Also, the waves typically travel around the stadiums at 27 mph.

I was amazed to learn that Apis dorsata, the giant Asian honeybee, also performs The Wave. The bees do it not for fun but for defense, for they build their hives out in the open, protecting them with just a wriggling mass of bees. Hippopotamuses have been known to produce a sound version of a crowd wave. This involves the males in one group, or pod, making bellowing calls which then cause those in the next pod along the river to do the same, who then set the next pod calling. Known as chain chorusing, this wave of hippo calls can travel for several miles along the river. It is probably to do with establishing satisfactory distances between the groups.

Let’s talk about traffic.

Professor Yuki Sugiyama [who runs the Mathematical Society of Traffic Flow at Japan's Nagoya University] demonstrated that traffic jams can be a sort of wave — known as a “stop-and-go-wave.” Like stadium waves, these are not like the usual sort of waves that physicists study. But they do appear like a sort of density wave within the flow of traffic as cars join the jam at the back and others pull away at the front. Sugiyama found that the critical number of cars on the road [for these waves to form] is 40 per mile. When the weight of traffic is more than this, the flow becomes “unstable” and the natural fluctuation in our driving style is enough to cause these waves to start up. No obstruction is needed — it is just a matter of time before a traffic wave will form.

Other fun facts?

Mariners used to dangle rags and sacks filled with fish oil over the sides of their ships when the sea was particularly rough in order to calm the waves. As an extremely thin film of oil spreads over the surface of the water, it reduces the wind’s grip on the surface, and so makes the waves less likely to break onto a ship, bringing hundreds of tons of water down onto the deck.

Waves are essential to the transport systems of your body. For your heart to pump the 4,300 gallons of blood it does in any 24-hour period, it has to beat 100,000 times. Each and every one of those beats takes the form of a coordinated muscular wave.

Different states of relaxation or arousal are associated with different frequencies of brain wave: the slowest frequencies in deep sleep, the highest when concentrating hard on a difficult task. There is even a medical treatment, known as neurofeedback, in which patients are taught to change the speed of their brain waves as they play a computer game.

Sam Emerson/Sony Pictures Classics
Robert Duvall with Sissy Spacek in the film “Get Low,” directed by Aaron Schneider.

By JONAH WEINER
NY Times Published: July 23, 2010

WHEN it came time to fill the lead role in “Get Low” — which embellishes the real-life story of a septuagenarian Tennessee hermit who gave his own “funeral party” in 1938 while still alive — the options weren’t plentiful for the people behind the film. The hermit, Felix Bush, is a worn-out man who has exiled himself to a cabin for four decades, haunted by a youthful trespass. The object of nasty countywide gossip, Felix has a short fuse but comports himself with grizzled dignity. “It’s the kind of role where you want to blur the line between the legend and gravitas of the character and the legend and gravitas of the performer,” the film’s director, Aaron Schneider, said by phone. “Our list of actors was short: Our list was Robert Duvall.”

Next January Mr. Duvall will celebrate his 80th birthday. He has been a Hollywood actor for 48 years, having moved from stage to screen in 1962 as Boo Radley in “To Kill a Mockingbird.” He is among a handful of A-list actors who have neared or reached 80 while suffering little to no career slowdown. Clint Eastwood is 80. Michael Caine is 77. Morgan Freeman and Anthony Hopkins are both in their early 70s. With Gene Hackman, 80, retired, the list pretty much stops there.

Mr. Duvall’s longevity raises two intertwined questions. For one, what has he been doing right all these years? For another, is the end of his laws-of-Hollywood-physics-defying run in sight?

“It’s coming. It’s got to be,” Mr. Duvall said, addressing the second question over an Earl Grey tea at the Four Seasons hotel in Manhattan last Monday. (He’d also spoken by phone a few days earlier.) In town from Virginia, where he shares a 360-acre farm with his wife, two dogs and several horses, he wore black jeans, cowboy boots and a Texas Longhorns track jacket that hewed close to his barrel chest.

But as Mr. Duvall described several would-be projects on his “front burner,” he made clear that he’s in no hurry to bow out. There’s a postwar drama written by Billy Bob Thornton that he adores, a movie he wants to make with his longtime pal James Caan, and a reboot of the star-crossed “Man Who Killed Don Quixote,” in which Terry Gilliam has cast Mr. Duvall as the titular windmill jouster. “These are some terrific roles,” he said. “I want these projects to get off the ground.”

To answer the question of Mr. Duvall’s longevity, a good place to start is the range of characters he’s inhabited over the years. He began acting in the ’50s but was a Hollywood latecomer — he “arrived a fully formed actor,” said the British film critic Tom Shone, the author of “Blockbuster: How Hollywood Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Summer.” Mr. Duvall rose to prominence in the ’70s alongside figures like Al Pacino, Dustin Hoffman and Robert De Niro, who brought a new energy to the movies. They were not simply “movie stars, like Errol Flynn or Clark Gable,” said Bruce Beresford, who directed Mr. Duvall in 1983’s “Tender Mercies,” but also “superlative actors” who “became totally identified with whichever role they were playing.”

Mr. Duvall stood out in Robert Altman’s “Countdown” (1968) and George Lucas’s “THX 1138” (1971), but it was in Francis Ford Coppola’s “Godfather” (1972), playing cool-headed Corleone consigliere Tom Hagen, that he gave his first indelible performance. In 1979 he took a 180-degree turn and won raves playing two military men whose heads were about as cool as napalm: Bull Meechum in “The Great Santini” and Lieutenant Colonel Kilgore in “Apocalypse Now.” In “Apocalypse” Mr. Duvall’s performance “upset the moral tidiness of the film,” Mr. Shone said, complicating the “peacenik” proceedings “with this charismatic, full-throated, fantastic hawk.”

Downshifting in “Tender Mercies,” Mr. Duvall won the best actor Oscar for his restrained portrayal of Mac Sledge, a down-and-out country singer whose inner storms roil beneath but never quite break through his wistful surface. In the years since, Mr. Duvall has played a hardboiled detective, a Texas preacher, Dwight D. Eisenhower and Stalin. What unites these performances, he said, is that, “Within each character, I like to find the contradictions. Even when I played Stalin, I tried to find a vulnerable point for that guy.”

Sissy Spacek said, “He embodies the character,” describing the experience of watching Mr. Duvall at work on “Get Low,” which opens Friday, and in which she has a supporting role. (Bill Murray co-stars as an undertaker.) “Every actor has their own process, but his is seamless. He just becomes.”

That aura of seamlessness results from a technique that balances intense preparation and spontaneity. After taking a role, Mr. Duvall does his homework. To play Mac Sledge he frequented honky-tonk bars and even sang with a makeshift country band. To inhabit Euliss Dewey, a Pentecostal preacher and heartfelt ham in “The Apostle” (1997), which Mr. Duvall also wrote and directed, he spent years visiting black churches. He marinates in such research but makes no firm decisions about how to play a part until cameras roll. Mr. Beresford recalled that, during rehearsals for “Tender Mercies,” Mr. Duvall’s readings were curiously “flat and unemotional,” but that he bloomed when filming began.

“I don’t even think you need to rehearse,” Mr. Duvall said. “Take 1 is rehearsal, and you’ve got Take 2, 3, 4 and 5 if need be.”

Mr. Duvall’s unshowy acting — he had a tendency while shooting “Tender Mercies” to turn his back to the camera, Mr. Beresford said — and chameleonic gifts are artistic assets, but they’ve also been something of a commercial liability. Thanks to his ability to dissolve so fully into characters, Mr. Duvall has alternated between tremendous supporting performances and tremendous leading performances without ever moving definitively from one column to the other. “Perhaps some of the most brilliant actors are so brilliant that people don’t identify them that well,” Mr. Beresford said, contrasting Mr. Duvall with a megastar like Tom Cruise, “who is always Tom Cruise in every role, no matter how competent or capable.”

In an e-mail message Mr. Coppola said that Mr. Duvall “always brings himself to whatever role he plays.” That Mr. Duvall has occupied a gray area between supporting man and top-liner, Mr. Coppola suggested, represents a shortcoming in the distinction between categories. At a certain point, Mr. Coppola wrote, it’s “hard to say the difference between leading men and great character actors.”

Mr. Duvall said he likes parts that give him the time and space to dig in. His favorite role is the former Texas Ranger Augustus McCrae, whom he played in the six-hour CBS mini-series “Lonesome Dove.” “That’s like the Bible down in Texas,” Mr. Duvall said. “It’s not as well directed as ‘The Godfather,’ but the arc of it is incredible.”

But he also said he can find great satisfaction in a role that takes up only a sliver of screen time: “You can do a lot if it’s well-defined, or you try to expand the part and find three dimensions.” While filming his cameo opposite Viggo Mortensen in “The Road,” he recalled, “I improvised a whole scene that wasn’t in the script, and they left it in.” Mr. Duvall grinned, his eyes crinkling up mischievously at their corners. (In that scene Mr. Duvall’s character, Old Man, is looking for his son.) “I didn’t ask the director. I didn’t ask permission. I just told Viggo, ‘Get ready, I’m going to do something here.’

Brian Cronin

By SUSAN ENGEL and MARLENE SANDSTROM
NY Times Published: July 22, 2010

Williamstown, Mass.

HERE in Massachusetts, teachers and administrators are spending their summers becoming familiar with the new state law that requires schools to institute an anti-bullying curriculum, investigate acts of bullying and report the most serious cases to law enforcement officers.

This new law was passed in April after a group of South Hadley, Mass., students were indicted in the bullying of a 15-year-old girl, Phoebe Prince, who committed suicide. To the extent that it underlines the importance of the problem and demands that schools figure out how to address it, it is a move in the right direction. But legislation alone can’t create kinder communities or teach children how to get along. That will take a much deeper rethinking of what schools should do for their students.

It’s important, first, to recognize that while cellphones and the Internet have made bullying more anonymous and unsupervised, there is little evidence that children are meaner than they used to be. Indeed, there is ample research — not to mention plenty of novels and memoirs — about how children have always victimized one another in large and small ways, how often they are oblivious to the rights and feelings of others and how rarely they defend a victim.

In a 1995 study in Canada, researchers placed video cameras in a school playground and discovered that overt acts of bullying occurred at an astonishing rate of 4.5 incidents per hour. Just as interesting, children typically stood idly by and watched the mistreatment of their classmates — apparently, the inclination and ability to protect one another and to enforce a culture of tolerance does not come naturally. These are values that must be taught.

Yet, in American curriculums, a growing emphasis on standardized test scores as the primary measure of “successful” schools has crowded out what should be an essential criterion for well-educated students: a sense of responsibility for the well-being of others.

What’s more, the danger of anti-bullying laws, which have now been passed by all but six states, is that they may subtly encourage schools to address this complicated problem quickly and superficially. Many schools are buying expensive anti-bullying curriculum packages, big glossy binders that look reassuring on the bookshelf and technically place schools closer to compliance with the new laws.

But our research on child development makes it clear that there is only one way to truly combat bullying. As an essential part of the school curriculum, we have to teach children how to be good to one another, how to cooperate, how to defend someone who is being picked on and how to stand up for what is right.

To do this, teachers and administrators must first be trained to recognize just how complex children’s social interactions really are. Yes, some conflict is a normal part of growing up, and plenty of friendly, responsible children dabble in mean behavior. For these children, a little guidance can go a long way. That is why the noted teacher and author Vivian Paley once made a rule that her students couldn’t exclude anyone from their play. It took a lot of effort to make it work, but it had a powerful impact on everyone.

Other children bully because they have emotional and developmental problems, or because they come from abusive families. They require our help more than our punishment.

The kind of bullying, though, that presents the most difficulty in figuring out how and when to intervene falls between these two extremes: Sometimes children who aren’t normally bullies get caught up in a larger culture of aggression — say, a clique of preadolescent girls who form a club with the specific function of being mean to other girls. Teachers must learn the difference between various sorts of aggressive behaviors, as well as the approaches that work best for each.

Most important, educators need to make a profound commitment to turn schools into genuine communities. Children need to know that adults consider kindness and collaboration to be every bit as important as algebra and reading. In groups and one-on-one sessions, students and teachers should be having conversations about relationships every day. And, as obvious as it might sound, teachers can’t just preach kindness; they need to actually be nice to one another and to their students.

Teachers also need to structure learning activities in which children are interdependent and can learn to view individual differences as unique sources of strength. It’s vital that every student, not just the few who sign up for special projects or afterschool activities, be involved in endeavors that draw them together.

Look at Norway, where the prevention of such incidents became a major emphasis of the school system after three teenage victims of bullying committed suicide in 1983. There, everyone gets involved — teachers, janitors and bus drivers are all trained to identify instances of bullying, and taught how to intervene. Teachers regularly talk to one another about how their students interact. Children in every grade participate in weekly classroom discussions about friendship and conflict. Parents are involved in the process from the beginning.

Norway’s efforts have been tremendously effective. The incidence of bullying fell by half during the two-year period in which the programs were introduced. Stealing and cheating also declined. And the rate of bullying remains low today. Clearly, when a school and a community adopt values that are rooted in treating others with dignity and respect, children’s behavior can change.

Indeed, our analysis of successful bullying-prevention programs across the United States and abroad reveals that the key common factor is their breadth: both in terms of the people who participate and of the deep connection between specific policies and the larger social ethos of the school community.

Involving the legal system makes a strong statement that a society won’t tolerate bullying. But for laws like the one in Massachusetts to succeed, they have to be matched by an educational system that teaches children not only what’s wrong, but how to do what’s right.

Susan Engel is a senior lecturer in psychology and the director of the teaching program at Williams College, where Marlene Sandstrom is a professor of psychology.

By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Times Published: July 22, 2010

For a couple of years, it was the love that dared not speak his name. In 2008, Republican candidates hardly ever mentioned the president still sitting in the White House. After the election, the G.O.P. did its best to shout down all talk about how we got into the mess we’re in, insisting that we needed to look forward, not back. And many in the news media played along, acting as if it was somehow uncouth for Democrats even to mention the Bush era and its legacy.

The truth, however, is that the only problem Republicans ever had with George W. Bush was his low approval rating. They always loved his policies and his governing style — and they want them back. In recent weeks, G.O.P. leaders have come out for a complete return to the Bush agenda, including tax breaks for the rich and financial deregulation. They’ve even resurrected the plan to cut future Social Security benefits.

But they have a problem: how can they embrace President Bush’s policies, given his record? After all, Mr. Bush’s two signature initiatives were tax cuts and the invasion of Iraq; both, in the eyes of the public, were abject failures. Tax cuts never yielded the promised prosperity, but along with other policies — especially the unfunded war in Iraq — they converted a budget surplus into a persistent deficit. Meanwhile, the W.M.D. we invaded Iraq to eliminate turned out not to exist, and by 2008 a majority of the public believed not just that the invasion was a mistake but that the Bush administration deliberately misled the nation into war. What’s a Republican to do?

You know the answer. There’s now a concerted effort under way to rehabilitate Mr. Bush’s image on at least three fronts: the economy, the deficit and the war.

On the economy: Last week Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, declared that “there’s no evidence whatsoever that the Bush tax cuts actually diminished revenue. They increased revenue, because of the vibrancy of these tax cuts in the economy.” So now the word is that the Bush-era economy was characterized by “vibrancy.”

I guess it depends on the meaning of the word “vibrant.” The actual record of the Bush years was (i) two and half years of declining employment, followed by (ii) four and a half years of modest job growth, at a pace significantly below the eight-year average under Bill Clinton, followed by (iii) a year of economic catastrophe. In 2007, at the height of the “Bush boom,” such as it was, median household income, adjusted for inflation, was still lower than it had been in 2000.

But the Bush apologists hope that you won’t remember all that. And they also have a theory, which I’ve been hearing more and more — namely, that President Obama, though not yet in office or even elected, caused the 2008 slump. You see, people were worried in advance about his future policies, and that’s what caused the economy to tank. Seriously.

On the deficit: Republicans are now claiming that the Bush administration was actually a paragon of fiscal responsibility, and that the deficit is Mr. Obama’s fault. “The last year of the Bush administration,” said Mr. McConnell recently, “the deficit as a percentage of gross domestic product was 3.2 percent, well within the range of what most economists think is manageable. A year and a half later, it’s almost 10 percent.”

But that 3.2 percent figure, it turns out, is for fiscal 2008 — which wasn’t the last year of the Bush administration, because it ended in September of 2008. In other words, it ended just as the failure of Lehman Brothers — on Mr. Bush’s watch — was triggering a broad financial and economic collapse. This collapse caused the deficit to soar: By the first quarter of 2009 — with only a trickle of stimulus funds flowing — federal borrowing had already reached almost 9 percent of G.D.P. To some of us, this says that the economic crisis that began under Mr. Bush is responsible for the great bulk of our current deficit. But the Republican Party is having none of it.

Finally, on the war: For most Americans, the whole debate about the war is old if painful news — but not for those obsessed with refurbishing the Bush image. Karl Rove now claims that his biggest mistake was letting Democrats get away with the “shameful” claim that the Bush administration hyped the case for invading Iraq. Let the whitewashing begin!

Again, Republicans aren’t trying to rescue George W. Bush’s reputation for sentimental reasons; they’re trying to clear the way for a return to Bush policies. And this carries a message for anyone hoping that the next time Republicans are in power, they’ll behave differently. If you believe that they’ve learned something — say, about fiscal prudence or the importance of effective regulation — you’re kidding yourself. You might as well face it: they’re addicted to Bush.

Daniel Schorr in 1957 when he was a CBS foreign correspondent.

By ROBERT D. HERSHEY Jr.
NY Times Published: July 23, 2010

Daniel Schorr, whose aggressive reporting over 70 years as a respected broadcast and print journalist brought him into conflict with censors, the Nixon administration and network superiors, died Friday in Washington. He was 93.

His death was announced by National Public Radio, where he had been a commentator for two decades. A spokeswoman, Anna Christopher, said he died at a Washington hospital after a short illness. He lived in Washington.

Mr. Schorr, a protégé of Edward R. Murrow at CBS News, initially made his mark at CBS as a foreign correspondent, most notably in the Soviet Union. He opened the network’s Moscow bureau in 1955 and became well enough acquainted with the Soviet leader Nikita S. Khrushchev — whom he called “the most fascinating person I ever met” — to secure for “Face the Nation” the first television interview for which Khrushchev ever sat. (He had never even done one for Soviet television.) At the end of 1957 Mr. Schorr went home for the holidays and was denied readmission to the Soviet Union.

His 23-year career at CBS was cut short in 1976 when, in what Mr. Schorr later called “the most tumultuous experience of my career,” he obtained a copy of a suppressed House of Representatives committee report on highly dubious activities by the Central Intelligence Agency.

He showed a draft on television and discussed its contents, but when neither of CBS’s book subsidiaries was willing to publish the document, produced by the House Select Committee on Intelligence under Otis G. Pike, a New York Democrat, Mr. Schorr provided it — anonymously, he vainly hoped — to The Village Voice.

This led to threats requiring police protection, to investigations by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Congress, and to Mr. Schorr’s being relieved of reporting duty. Although editorial and public opinion subsequently swung in his favor and Mr. Schorr, who came to be seen as a beleaguered reporter defending a principle, became a popular speaker on the lecture circuit, what he called his “love-hate affair” with CBS News was ended.

A quarter-century later he mused: “Washed away by one controversial leak too many? Undone by a reporting style that proved indigestible to a network worried about affiliates and regulations? Unable to adapt myself to corporate tugs on the reins? Unwilling to exempt my own network from my investigative reporting?” His conclusion: “All of that, I guess.”

(Interviewed in 2008, Mr. Schorr still refused to identify his source for the Pike committee report.)

At 60, with no thought of retirement, Mr. Schorr endured a brief and disappointing stint as a journalism professor at the University of California, Berkeley — he found the students most interested in his celebrity — and became a freelance lecturer and writer. The Des Moines Register and Tribune engaged him to write a column, but it was apparently not provocative enough, and after two years the paper’s syndicate did not renew his contract.

Then, after he narrated some public television specials and offered twice-a-week commentaries for the Independent Television News Association, an executive of the association introduced him in 1979 to Ted Turner, the swashbuckling Southerner who was in the process of creating CNN, the first cable news network.

The two met in a hotel penthouse in Las Vegas, and after a brief discussion Mr. Schorr became the fledgling network’s first employee. He turned down a vice presidency, the position of Washington bureau chief and stock options in favor of the role of senior news analyst.

Mr. Schorr insisted on an agreement, which he drafted in the lobby after consulting his business agent and lawyer, to which Mr. Turner scrawled his signature with scarcely a glance, stating that “no demand will be made upon him that would compromise his professional ethics and responsibilities.”

The venture, initially on a shoestring, nevertheless took off, and the unlikely duo got along well, overcoming a disagreement that developed in 1981 when Mr. Turner, in an on-air editorial that ran several times, asked viewers to write Congress urging that violent movies be banned. (Mr. Schorr shared Mr. Turner’s aversion to violent entertainment but objected to his call for a ban.)

Mr. Turner defended Mr. Schorr when Senator Barry Goldwater, the Arizona Republican, whom Mr. Schorr had once offended while at CBS, wanted him fired. Goldwater had held a grudge since Mr. Schorr reported on the enthusiasm of right-wing Germans for him as he secured the 1964 presidential nomination and noted that a planned postconvention Goldwater trip mainly involved time at an American military recreation center in Berchtesgaden, site of a favorite Hitler retreat.

Eventually, however, Mr. Schorr and Mr. Turner fell out over a CNN plan to team John Connally, the former Texas governor and Nixon Treasury secretary, with Mr. Schorr as commentators at the 1984 Republican National Convention in Dallas.

It was improper, Mr. Schorr said, to mix a politician with a journalist, and he invoked for the first time the 1979 agreement allowing him to veto assignments. The network asked him to drop that right in early 1985, and when he refused, he was told to take leave until his contract expired that May. Shortly thereafter he joined NPR as a commentator, a position he held until his death.

Born in the Bronx on Aug. 31, 1916, to parents who emigrated from what is now Belarus, Daniel Louis Schorr had an unhappy childhood. In his memoir, “Staying Tuned” (Pocket Books, 2001), he said that in writing the book he had come to realize that “being poor, fat, Jewish, fatherless” had made him feel like an outsider, and that he had “achieved identity through my stories.”

He got his first scoop, which earned him $5, when he was 12. A woman fell or jumped from the roof of the apartment house where he lived, and he called the police, interviewed them about the victim and then called The Bronx Home News, which paid for news tips.

Even as a schoolboy Mr. Schorr had a specific journalistic goal. “The only thing I ever wanted to do was to become a foreign correspondent for The New York Times, not only work for The Times but to be a foreign correspondent — that was nirvana,” he said in 2008.

He covered demonstrations at the City College of New York while he was a student there, and after graduation he worked for The Jewish Daily Bulletin and, after its demise, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

Growing restive and with Europe at war, Mr. Schorr took a job with Aneta, the news agency of the Netherlands East Indies. He was drafted into the Army in 1943 and returned to Aneta, in the Netherlands, after completing his service.

His reporting there won plaudits, and Mr. Schorr, who became fluent in Dutch, made a good living with the help of freelance work for other publications and ABC radio.

But he still wanted to work for The Times. In 1952 he returned to the United States and won a three-day tryout on the paper’s city desk. On the final day he was assigned to cover the signing at City Hall of the first contracts for federal aid to help private slum-clearing efforts. He was expected to write a few paragraphs.

Tarrying afterward, however, he asked where the contracts’ effects would appear, and Robert Moses, the New York urban planning czar, offered to show him some sites.

Near Columbus Circle, Mr. Schorr learned, houses were to be demolished on land where a new development, which turned out to be Lincoln Center, would rise. Back at the office after lunching with Mr. Moses, Mr. Schorr found that his editors had not known of the project. They set him to writing a full-length article.

Impressed, The Times offered him a job but suggested he return to the Netherlands for a few weeks while details were worked out. In early February 1953 that country was devastated by a severe storm, and Mr. Schorr’s dispatches to various news organizations so impressed Edward R. Murrow of CBS, the newsman whose name has become almost a synonym for high-quality journalism, that he cabled — Mr. Schorr recalled the exact words more than a half-century later — “Would you at all consider joining the staff of CBS News with an initial assignment in Washington?”

Mr. Schorr still preferred The Times, but when he didn’t hear further, he inquired and learned the offer had been withdrawn. As Mr. Schorr told the story, an editor later sheepishly explained that the paper was concerned that too many Jewish bylines might jeopardize its coverage of the Mideast. He was told, he said, that he was the only job candidate who suffered from that policy.

Then began his broadcast career, which, in addition to his reporting on intelligence, the Soviet Union and the erection of the Berlin Wall, included coverage of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society programs and the Watergate scandal. He appeared frequently on “Face the Nation” and made a notable Nixon-era documentary about health care called “Don’t Get Sick in America.”

Despite decades of experience in the latest broadcast technology, Mr. Schorr never learned to use computers or word processors, sticking with electric typewriters into his 90s.

Mr. Schorr married when he returned to the United States at the age of 50. He and his wife, the former Lisbeth Bamberger, met on his beat when she worked at the Office of Economic Opportunity. She survives him, as do their son, Jonathan, and daughter, Lisa Kaplan, and one grandchild.

Mr. Schorr, who won three Emmys for his coverage of Watergate, long maintained that one of his proudest accomplishments was being included on President Nixon’s so-called enemies list as a result of that reporting.

“I consider my presence on the enemies list,” he said in a 2009 interview with The Gazette of Montgomery County, Md., “a greater tribute than the Emmys list.”

Thanks to Moses Berkson

Marc Abrams walks past a mural bearing his likeness on Sunset Boulevard in Silver Lake on May 6. Abrams would walk 20 to 30 miles a day, often reading the newspaper. (Mel Melcon / Los Angeles Times / May 6, 2010)

Audio slide show: Hit the ground walking

By Kate Linthicum
Los Angeles Times
July 23, 2010

Marc Abrams, a physician whose epic (and shirtless) daily walks through Silver Lake inspired documentaries, murals and magazine profiles, died Wednesday. He was 58.

His wife, Cindy, found him dead in their backyard hot tub. Police initially determined that it was a suicide, although the official cause of death is pending.

Abrams traversed 20 to 30 miles of pavement each day and wore out four pairs of shoes each year. He walked swiftly — often hunched over a newspaper — slowing only to shout hellos to friends or give medical advice to those who asked for it.

On warm days, he wore brightly colored running shorts and nothing else. His bronzed chest and well-muscled shoulders occasionally drew honks from passing cars.

“He had the greatest tan of anyone in town,” said City Councilman Tom LaBonge, who lives a few blocks from the quiet hillside home Abrams shared with his wife. Whenever LaBonge spotted Abrams striding down the sidewalk he would stop to shout, “What up, Doc?”

Abrams had many nicknames: the Walking Man, Dr. Walk and Read, Doc Walker. He was baffled by the attention, his wife said.

“He didn’t see himself as interesting,” she said. “He didn’t understand why people were so interested in his habits.”

Perhaps it was the extraordinary nature of those habits.

Aside from the walking, Abrams swam two miles every day in the lap pool behind his house, his wife said. He also performed a punishing number of push-ups, although friends say reports that he did 4,000 each day may have been exaggerated.

Although he was a lifelong exercise nut — growing up he ran track and played tennis and football — he was not equally committed to nutrition.

His freezer was packed with muffins and coffee cake, and he liked to joke that his six basic food groups were chocolate, milkshakes, coffee, pizza, cookies and cake. (His wife said he supplemented the sweets with protein shakes and a multivitamin each morning).

Abrams was born Aug. 19, 1951, and grew up in a small apartment in South Philadelphia, where his father worked at a textile factory. He studied history and music at Dickinson College in Pennsylvania and attended medical school at Stanford University.

In 1980, Abrams moved to Silver Lake with his first wife, Patricia Hishiki Abrams. She died of cancer in 1991.

The next year, a patient at Abrams’ medical office in North Hollywood introduced him to Cindy, a teacher who was visiting from out of town.

Cindy was impressed by the doctor’s intellect. Abrams was a history buff and a classical music lover who, Cindy said, knew “every note of every Gustav Mahler symphony.”

“We met and fell and love and got married,” Cindy said. “Then I found out who I married.”

She said that before moving to Silver Lake, she hadn’t known that he was such a neighborhood fixture — or that he was so set in his ways.

“He lived according to his own rules,” she said. “He used to say that people become more like themselves when they get old.”

Abrams closed his medical practice last year, giving him “more time to read, more time to walk,” she said.

His wife and a brother are Abrams’ only survivors.

Around Silver Lake on Thursday, neighbors built makeshift memorials.

On the dirt path near the Silver Lake Reservoir that Abrams circled every day, someone had placed a bouquet of lilacs and a poster-sized notice of his death. Outside Local restaurant on Sunset Boulevard, the site of a massive mural dedicated to Abrams, someone left flowers and a pair of old running shoes.

A memorial walk in his honor is planned for Sunday at noon. It begins at the intersection of Moreno Drive and West Silver Lake Drive.

Craig Stecyk’s photograph of George Greenough, the surfer and surfboard designer, around 1965.

By ROBERTA SMITH
NY Times Published: July 22, 2010

The exuberant three-gallery exhibition “Swell” is one of the Big Kahunas of the season’s group shows. Its requisite summertime theme is surfing, which runs wider and deeper than most, encompassing an array of visual material and several familiar characters, namely the American male as renegade and good buddy.

At Nyehaus gallery in Chelsea, various black-and-white photographs convey the solitude, skill and risk of surfing.
The show, which sprawls throughout the Chelsea spaces of Nyehaus, the Friedrich Petzel Gallery and Metro Pictures, spans more than half a century, from the 1950s to the present. In addition to scores of artworks it contains about two dozen surf boards, along with photographs, posters and other artifacts. Of the nearly 80 individuals whose efforts are represented here, fewer than 10 are women. This statistic reflects a significant lack of imagination, considering that a lot of the work here is merely vaguely oceanic. Nonetheless the show, which has been organized by Tim Nye of Nyehaus and Jacqueline Miro, an architect, urbanist and surfer, in concert with the staffs at Petzel and Metro Pictures, is ecumenical in other ways.

At the core of “Swell” is an excellent show that helpfully sets postwar Los Angeles art against a broader canvas of surfing, beachcombing and car and drug culture. But the key was surfing, with which art at that time shared both a rebel spirit and certain technologies borrowed from the airplane industry.

It adds both the Beat Generation assemblage of the 1950s and works by lesser-known artists to the more canonical history of the seductive high-gloss Finish Fetish sculptures and reliefs and the environmental “Light and Space” installation pieces that flourished in Los Angeles in the 1960s and ’70s. These last two movements were shown off this year in splendid isolation in “Primary Atmospheres,” a pristine show at Nyehaus and the David Zwirner Gallery; 7 of the 10 artists in that show are represented here, sometimes by the same work.

But “Swell” has more grit, broader margins, more mess. And it evokes more fully the lost innocence of the time before the art world got big and before surfing — the beautiful sport, if not game — became wildly popular and then turned professional. Unfortunately the show often loses its focus as approaches the present, adding recent works by some of the older artists and several more by younger ones — including a few from New York and Europe — that are only tangentially pertinent.

Each gallery’s presentation is different in terms of arrangement, clarity and ratio of older to newer work. A good place to start is Metro Pictures, where the past holds sway, and the historical progression is laid out in distinct segments. In the first space various forms of assemblage dominate, most forthrightly in George Herms’s 1973 “Scientific American,” a large grid of old shelves filled with all manner of detritus, including copies of the magazine for which it is named. It suggests a suite of boxes by a beachcombing Joseph Cornell.

On the opposite wall Ashley Bickerton (a serious surfer who forsook New York — and the Neo-Geo style for which he was known — for Bali in 1993) combines assemblage with his own version of finish fetish. The result is “Jack Blaylock” (2001), a hyper-real portrait of what appears to be an aging, drug-ravaged surfer rendered on a giant piece of gorgeously finished wood that is festooned with bits of driftwood and surf-tossed footwear. The Los Angeles painter Ed Moses offers a palm-treed and beaded folding screen from this year, while works from the 1960s show Tony Berlant using painted tin to more or less obliterate the lines separating collage, assemblage and quilting. Recent works by Fred Tomaselli, a Brooklyn artist who kayaks the waters of the New York region, build images from cut-up magazines, marijuana leaves and pills. Works from the ’60s by Wallace Berman and from the last decade by Robert Dean Stockwell and David Lloyd, another surfer-artist, contribute to the recycling effect, while Ed Ruscha chills everything out with a 1984 field of saffron vapors on which the words “Polynesian Sickness” float.

The overlap of art and surfing is most evident in the style and craft that permeates the second gallery at Metro, where one wall is lined with gleaming surfboards made over the last 50 years. The more austere are the work of well-known surfers who also excelled at the aerodynamic art of board shaping like Herbie Fletcher, Joel Tudor, Matt Kivlin and Donald Takayama.

The gaudier boards have been decorated by artists like Peter Alexander, Raymond Pettibon and Charles Arnoldi, although Jim Ganzer contributes a relatively sinister gray board that resembles a hammerhead shark. A 2004 board decorated by the street artist Barry McGee’s reminds us that surfing spawned a landlocked cousin, skateboarding.

Several Finish Fetish paintings, wall reliefs and sculptures from the 1960s and ’70s attest to the absorption of surf-board materials and techniques — cast fiberglass, resins, high-gloss finishes, and luminous monochromes — by art. Note the fabulous confluence of streamlined forms in various shades of red and egg-yolk yellow by DeWain Valentine, Billy Al Bengston, John McCracken and Craig Kauffman. Especially striking is a yellow surfboard from 2006, shaped by the surfer Mike Hynson with a cherry red fin in translucent resin provided by Mr. Tudor.

Things turn atmospheric in the third space at Metro, where various examples of ’60s-era Light and Space art include the glass boxes of Larry Bell, a wedge of cast polyester by Mr. Alexander, an odd canvas-on-canvas collage by Joe Goode and cast-resin reliefs and sculptures in shades of blue by Helen Pashgian, whose work was largely unknown until recently. She contributes a smoky blue sphere inset with clear polyester resin that conjures up the tube, or interior volume, of a giant wave. Recent photographs by Roe Ethridge and Catherine Opie capture real surfaces in action and on the beach.

In the upstairs space contemporary works by Mary Heilmann, Jay Batlle, Ned Evans, Blake Rayne and Thaddeus Strode harmonize one way or another with earlier pieces by Mr. McCracken, Mr. Goode and Sister Mary Corita.

At Petzel things tilt toward contemporary with appropriately watery or druggy paintings and drawings from the last decade by Bill Komoski, Jeff Lewis, Cameron Martin, Wolfgang Bloch and Robert Longo, and a 2009-10 chunk of black (oil-tinted?) ocean in cast polyester resin by Alex Weinstein. A late-’80s video by Gary Hill provides intermittent surf sounds.

Blasts from the past include an edge-to-edge drawing of waves from 1970 by Vija Celmins; a marvelous “painting” of grafted sticks from 1974 by Mr. Arnoldi that is the ultimate in driftwood elegance; surfing cartoons from the late ’60s by Robert Williams, Jim Evans and R. Crumb. A 2001 greenish flourish in painted ceramic by Ken Price, one of the more accomplished artist-surfers, evokes both a hand and a wave represents the Finish Fetish generation, as do a cluster of surfboards by Mr. Fletcher from around 1970. The three largest replicate the shapes boards used by Hawaiian kings: surfing was originally a royal sport. But the boards’ red, black and gold militaristic designs reflects the fact that G.I.’s stationed in the Pacific during World War II were among the first Americans to surf.

Mr. Bickerton is represented by a transitional non-Neo-Geo sculpture from 1993: a tall sinuous pedestal of Bali coral with a miniature tent on top. A series of color photographs by Rob Reynolds in the last two years pays tribute to the customized cars of Los Angeles in a dead-pan manner of Mr. Ruscha’s 1960s images of things L.A.

At Nyehaus, where the show is ensconced in the gallery’s somewhat decrepit town house, funkiness reigns, as does a certain documentary aesthetic. Black-and-white photographs by Bud Browne and Craig Stecyk fully convey the solitude, skill and risk of surfing. One by Mr. Stecyk, from around 1968, shows Miki Dora nonchalantly upright on a speeding board. Mr. Ganzer contributes some equally relaxed photographs of artists like Mr. Bell, Mr. Price and Laddie John Dill, who is represented at Nyehaus by a recent example of the sand and neon installation pieces he has made since the late 1960s. This work shares a darkened gallery with iridescent paintings on velvet from 1975 and 1984 by Mr. Alexander and a decidedly non-fetish-finish wall piece in banged-up aluminum by Mr. Bengston, from 1970-71.

Elsewhere five drawings by Mr. Pettibon iterate the obsession with waves signaled by his wave-covered surfboard at Metro Pictures. Peter Dayton turns the stripes typical of surfboards into a large painting on paper (2008), where they make for a slightly eccentric form of Pop-abstraction. And John Van Hamersveld’s 2003 silkscreen of his well-known poster for Bruce Brown’s 1966 surfing documentary “The Endless Summer” recalls the moment when the sport truly went global.

This exhibition demonstrates the rich and complicated entwining of art and surfing — two physically demanding disciplines with both fetishistic and mystical aspects. In general it affirms that art is always a reflection of the environment that produces it. In particular, it demonstrates once again that where postwar art is concerned, the East Coast still has much to learn about the West.

“Swell” is at Metro Pictures, 519 West 24th Street, (212) 206-7100, through July 30; and at Friedrich Petzel Gallery, 537 West 22nd Street, (212) 680-9467, and Nyehaus, 358 West 20th Street, (212) 366-4493, through Aug. 6; all in Chelsea.

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
NY Times Published: July 21, 2010

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The yang of America’s labor force is this: over a 40-year career, a man earns $431,000 more than a woman on average, according to the Center for American Progress.

The yin of America’s labor force is this: in this decade, for the first time in American history, men no longer inevitably dominate the labor force. Women were actually the majority of payroll employees for the five months that ended in March, according to one measure from the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics. That’s mostly because about three-quarters of Americans who lost their jobs in the Great Recession were men.

Now men again fill a slight majority of payroll jobs because they are more likely to work in summer jobs such as construction. America may now teeter back and forth, with men predominant in the summers and women in the winters.

With women making far-reaching gains, there’s a larger question. Are women simply better-suited than men to today’s jobs? The Atlantic raised this issue provocatively in this month’s issue with a cover story by Hanna Rosin bluntly entitled, “The End of Men.”

“What if the modern, postindustrial economy is simply more congenial to women than to men?” Ms. Rosin asked. She adds: “The postindustrial economy is indifferent to men’s size and strength. The attributes that are most valuable today — social intelligence, open communication, the ability to sit still and focus — are, at a minimum, not predominately male. In fact, the opposite may be true.”

It’s a fair question, and others also have been wondering aloud if a new age of femininity is dawning. After all, Ms. Rosin notes that Americans who use high-tech biology to try to pick a baby’s sex seek a girl more often than a boy. And women now make up 51 percent of professional and managerial positions in America, up from 26 percent in 1980.

It’s also true that while men still dominate the American power elite, they also dominate the bottom rungs of the ladder. By some counts, America’s prisoners are 90 percent male, and most estimates are that homeless people are disproportionately male.

If school performance predicts career success, then women may do even better a few decades from now, for girls clearly excel in school as never before. The National Honor Society, for top high school students, says that 64 percent of its members are girls. The Center on Education Policy cites data showing that boys lag girls in reading in every American state.

Yet count me a skeptic. My hunch is that we’re moving into greater gender balance, not a fundamentally new imbalance in the other direction. Don’t hold your breath for “the end of men.”

One reason is that women’s gains still have a catch-up quality to them. Catch-up is easier than forging ahead.

Moreover, the differences in educational performance are real but modest. In math, boys and girls are about equal. In verbal skills, 79 percent of elementary schoolgirls can read at a level deemed proficient, compared with 72 percent of boys, according to the Center on Education Policy.

At the very top, boys more than hold their own: 62 percent of kids who earn perfect 2,400 scores on the S.A.T. are boys.

Some education experts, like Richard Whitmire, author of “Why Boys Fail,” argue that the success of girls has to do in part with how schools teach children. Tweaking curriculums by exposing kids to more books full of explosions might lead boys to do better in reading — and if boys continue to lag, there’ll be more of a push for boy-friendly initiatives.

I think we exaggerate the degree to which the sexes are mired in conflict. As Henry Kissinger once said, “Nobody will ever win the battle of the sexes. There’s too much fraternizing with the enemy.” We men want our wives and daughters to encounter opportunity in the workplace, not sexual harassment; women want their husbands and sons to be in the executive suite, not jail. Nearly all of us root for fairness, not for our own sex.

The truth is that we men have typically benefited as women have gained greater equality. Those men who have lost their jobs in the recession are now more likely to have a wife who still has a job and can keep up the mortgage payments. And women have been particularly prominent in the social sector, devising new programs for the mostly male ranks of the jobless or homeless.

So forget about gender war and zero-sum games. Odds are that we men will find a way to hold our own, with the help of women. And we’ll benefit as smart and talented women belatedly have the opportunity to deploy their skills on behalf of all of humanity — including those of us with Y chromosomes.

By WILLIAM YARDLEY
NY Times Published: July 21, 2010

CAMANO ISLAND, Wash. — The “Barefoot Bandit” is not all Colton Harris-Moore has been called in his short splash of life.
Multimedia

Neighbors say his mother screamed things at him so vicious that they cringed when her words echoed through the giant evergreens that cover much of this island in Puget Sound. Classmates say he could be a bully — when he attended school.

Yet perhaps his most benign nickname is the most telling. Long before stealing boats and planes made him a marvel of elusiveness, an Internet antihero, Mr. Harris-Moore, 19, was suspected of stealing cookies and frozen pizza from the Kostelyk family, a few gravel roads from the squalor that was his home, a trailer on a dead end here, barely an hour from Seattle. The Kostelyks had waterfront property and a freezer full of food. He lived inland and had nothing.

“We called him ‘Island Boy,’ ” recalled Linda Johnson, whose mother, Maxine Kostelyk, was among Mr. Harris-Moore’s first suspected victims. “He came back over and over again — frozen pizza, cookies, ice cream. He was a tall boy, and he was growing.”

By the time he was captured on a stolen motorboat in the Bahamas last week, racing from the police with video-game gall, the 6-foot-5 Mr. Harris-Moore had become a sensation. After escaping from a juvenile halfway house here more than two years ago, he eluded the authorities across North America using his wits and his fleet (sometimes bare) feet. The police said he made makeshift homes in empty houses for days or weeks at a time and somehow taught himself to fly, mastering the art of crash-landing and walking away.

Even in the age of the search engine, Mr. Harris-Moore seemed untraceable and unknowable, part high-tech Huck Finn, part cunning criminal.

An examination of his early life and troubles suggests a picture far less cinematic. According to court and public documents and dozens of interviews, Mr. Harris-Moore was nobody’s hero, not even his own. On the contrary, whether he was hiding in the Kostelyks’ tree house, watching for delivery of the high-powered flashlight the police believe he ordered with a stolen credit card, or flying solo to the Bahamas in a stolen Cessna this month, isolated in the tiny cockpit for more than a thousand miles — Colton Harris-Moore, for much of his life, was alone and hungry.

That was true even as he was being celebrated by thousands of fans on Facebook.

“He says he’s not into any of that,” said Monique Gomez, a lawyer who briefly represented Mr. Harris-Moore in the Bahamas. “He just wants to get this behind him.”

Ms. Gomez added, “I think if he had proper direction, he wouldn’t have done what he did.”

Mr. Harris-Moore had a volatile childhood and was often in conflict with his mother, Pam Kohler. His father appears to have been absent. According to public documents, child protection officials had been referred to the family at least a dozen times by the time Mr. Harris-Moore was 15.

A social worker’s report from the time he was first arrested, at 12, drew a succinct conclusion, at least from the boy’s point of view. “Colton wants Mom to stop drinking and smoking, get a job and have food in the house,” the report said. “Mom refuses.”

When Mr. Harris-Moore was 4, someone reported Ms. Kohler after seeing “a woman grab a small child by the hair and beat his head severely,” according to a psychiatric summary 12 years later. By the time he was 10, an investigation involving “negligent treatment or maltreatment” had been initiated.

Ms. Kohler does not appear to have been prosecuted for a crime related to the complaints.

Ms. Kohler, 59, declined to be interviewed. A lawyer she has hired to handle news media inquiries and film and book proposals based on her son’s story said he had not seen allegations of abuse against Ms. Kohler in public records.

Several neighbors on Haven Place, the gravel road on the southern end of Camano Island where Mr. Harris-Moore grew up and his mother still lives, recalled often hearing mother and son screaming at each other into the night. All spoke on condition of anonymity because they said they feared Ms. Kohler.

A hand-painted sign at the end of her wooded driveway warns: “If you go past this sign you will be shot.”

Asked whether it was an empty threat, one neighbor said, “She shoots.”

The neighbor recalled a land surveyor telling how he had heard gunshots fired in his direction when he was surveying the property next door.

According to records and interviews, Mr. Harris-Moore was disciplined frequently in school. One fifth-grade classmate, Mariah Campbell, recalled other students making fun of Mr. Harris-Moore’s dirty clothing and said he could be mean to classmates.

“Because he never did his homework,” Ms. Campbell said, “he never got to go to recess or anything.”

About age 12, Mr. Harris-Moore was determined to have several psychiatric conditions, including depression, attention deficit disorder and intermittent explosive disorder, according to a later psychiatric report. He was prescribed antidepressant and antipsychotic drugs.

He dropped out of school after ninth grade.

“He never wanted to go home,” said Christa Postma, who added that she became friends with Mr. Harris-Moore in middle school “because we both got in trouble all the time.”

The crimes for which Mr. Harris-Moore has been convicted or is suspected of show an increasing focus on technology and transportation, involving the theft of laptops and mountain bikes, GPS devices and power boats. But it is hard to find anything in his past that suggests he would soon be capable of commandeering airplanes and flying them out of the country without any cockpit training, much less without getting caught.

He is suspected of taking at least five planes — including once during the Vancouver Olympics — and crash landing all of them. He walked away each time.

The skies above Puget Sound rumble with small planes going to and from its islands. Ms. Kohler has told reporters that her son could identify different models as they flew overhead. The Internet is filled with speculation that Mr. Harris-Moore taught himself to fly using simulation software on the laptops he is suspected of stealing. But there is little hard evidence of how he really learned.

“That will be the question that everybody will want to ask him when he talks, if he talks,” said Ed Wallace, a detective with the Island County sheriff’s office.

The “Barefoot Bandit” label is a relatively new nickname here, too, stemming from real footprints found at some crime scenes last year and drawings of footprints that the police believe Mr. Harris-Moore made at other scenes.

“He took the mantle and was wearing it proudly,” said Sheriff Bill Cumming of San Juan County.

Neighbors say they do have memories of Mr. Harris-Moore going barefoot at times when he was a boy. Back then, he complained to caseworkers that his mother did not press him to be more responsible. Caseworkers noted more than once that Ms. Kohler declined to follow up on the various counseling and treatment programs that were prescribed for her son.

Ms. Postma, the friend from eighth grade, who now works in quality control at a fish processor in Alaska, said that she had been in counseling, and “that really helped me.”

Several people in Mr. Harris-Moore’s neighborhood said he seemed to be on a search for parental substitutes as a boy — asking people to make him peanut butter and jelly sandwiches or watching them do basic chores, then stealing their mailboxes or computers. Some noted that even as his efforts to avoid capture escalated into spectacle, cheered on by virtual friends on the Internet, he stayed in contact with his mother.

Mr. Harris-Moore arrived back in Washington on Wednesday and was due in court Thursday. He faces one federal charge of stealing an airplane and transporting it across state lines and potentially faces dozens more charges, including burglary, theft and credit card fraud.

At the end, his mother publicly encouraged him to escape to a country that does not extradite to the United States. Instead Mr. Harris-Moore ended up in the Bahamas.

“He wasn’t really trying to get away,” said Kyle Ater, who found bare footprints drawn in chalk on the floor of his natural food store on nearby Orcas Island on the morning after the police say Mr. Harris-Moore burglarized it, destroyed the alarm system, and ate an entire blueberry cheesecake from the cooler.