NY Times Published January 6, 2010
By ANDREW C. REVKIN

The video above shows the collision of the $1.5-million dollar speedboat deployed by the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society this year to dog the Japanese whaling fleet with a Japanese security vessel. The video was provided by the Japanese Institute for Cetacean Research.

Sea Shepherd’s leader, Paul Watson, has labeled the incident a deliberate attack by Japan, but Japan’s whaling institute, which claims the whale hunt is scientific research, blamed the conservation group for what it called “illegal harassment and terrorism.”

In email exchanges with other whaling campaigners this morning, I heard mixed views, with some activists saying that such an incident was inevitable given Sea Shepherd’s tactics, which critics of the group say are aimed as much at maximizing publicity for itself as impeding the whaling.

At the same time, the media cannot afford to deploy boats to chronicle whale hunts, and governments opposed to whale kills in the global commons of the Southern Ocean aren’t doing much to track or resist such activities.

If a whale is hit by an exploding harpoon near Antarctica and the world doesn’t have a way to witness that, does it make a sound?

The artist Kenneth Noland in his studio surrounded by his geometric paintings, 1960s.

By ROBERTA SMITH
NY Times Published January 4,2010

Kenneth Noland, who painted some of the great emblems of the postwar American abstract style called Color Field painting, died Tuesday at his home in Port Clyde, Me. The cause was cancer, said his wife, Paige Rense, editor in chief of Architectural Digest. He was 85.

Born in Asheville, N.C., in 1924, he studied art at the adventurous, short-lived Black Mountain College (conveniently located just outside his hometown) from 1946 to 1948, was inspired by the stain-painting technique that Helen Frankenthaler deducted from Jackson Pollock’s drips, and had his first exhibition in New York in 1957, at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery.

Mr. Noland’s signature motif was a radiant target made of rings of pure color strained directly on raw canvas, with that canvas contributing a wonderful sense of breathing room between each band of color. The power of the colors, their often discordant interaction and the expanding and contracting rhythms of the bands of paint and the raw canvas, could be stunningly direct and vibrant. Mr. Noland’s work was championed by Clement Greenberg and other formalist art critics, but in the beginning it was also greatly admired by more wide-ranging critics, including Donald Judd.

His survivors include his daughter, Cady Noland, the Conceptual sculptor whose work has been widely influential since she emerged in the late 1980s.

In the 1960s, Color Field painting vied for dominance with Pop Art and Minimalism, ultimately losing the contest in terms of both critical stature and market share. Perhaps to his detriment, Mr. Noland was ardently loyal to his formalist principles. He bent his bands of color into bold chevron arrangements, and more delicate parallel lines and plaids, while also experimenting with shaped canvases. He sometimes achieved a light radiance that had something of Rococo. A current exhibition at the Leslie Feely Gallery on East 68th Street of shaped, almost shard-like works from the 1980s attests to his persistence and his fascination with painting’s dual existence as optical illusion and as object. In his complete reliance on color, scale and composition, Mr. Noland may have hewed closest longest to Frank Stella’s famous dictum “what you see is what you see.” When he was good, he was excellent.

SIGNAL HILL
January 7th - February 13th
Opening Reception: January 7th, 5:30-7:30 p.m.

altmansiegel

By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Times Published: January 3, 2010

Here’s what’s coming in economic news: The next employment report could show the economy adding jobs for the first time in two years. The next G.D.P. report is likely to show solid growth in late 2009. There will be lots of bullish commentary — and the calls we’re already hearing for an end to stimulus, for reversing the steps the government and the Federal Reserve took to prop up the economy, will grow even louder.

But if those calls are heeded, we’ll be repeating the great mistake of 1937, when the Fed and the Roosevelt administration decided that the Great Depression was over, that it was time for the economy to throw away its crutches. Spending was cut back, monetary policy was tightened — and the economy promptly plunged back into the depths.

This shouldn’t be happening. Both Ben Bernanke, the Fed chairman, and Christina Romer, who heads President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, are scholars of the Great Depression. Ms. Romer has warned explicitly against re-enacting the events of 1937. But those who remember the past sometimes repeat it anyway.

As you read the economic news, it will be important to remember, first of all, that blips — occasional good numbers, signifying nothing — are common even when the economy is, in fact, mired in a prolonged slump. In early 2002, for example, initial reports showed the economy growing at a 5.8 percent annual rate. But the unemployment rate kept rising for another year.

And in early 1996 preliminary reports showed the Japanese economy growing at an annual rate of more than 12 percent, leading to triumphant proclamations that “the economy has finally entered a phase of self-propelled recovery.” In fact, Japan was only halfway through its lost decade.

Such blips are often, in part, statistical illusions. But even more important, they’re usually caused by an “inventory bounce.” When the economy slumps, companies typically find themselves with large stocks of unsold goods. To work off their excess inventories, they slash production; once the excess has been disposed of, they raise production again, which shows up as a burst of growth in G.D.P. Unfortunately, growth caused by an inventory bounce is a one-shot affair unless underlying sources of demand, such as consumer spending and long-term investment, pick up.

Which brings us to the still grim fundamentals of the economic situation.

During the good years of the last decade, such as they were, growth was driven by a housing boom and a consumer spending surge. Neither is coming back. There can’t be a new housing boom while the nation is still strewn with vacant houses and apartments left behind by the previous boom, and consumers — who are $11 trillion poorer than they were before the housing bust — are in no position to return to the buy-now-save-never habits of yore.

What’s left? A boom in business investment would be really helpful right now. But it’s hard to see where such a boom would come from: industry is awash in excess capacity, and commercial rents are plunging in the face of a huge oversupply of office space.

Can exports come to the rescue? For a while, a falling U.S. trade deficit helped cushion the economic slump. But the deficit is widening again, in part because China and other surplus countries are refusing to let their currencies adjust.

So the odds are that any good economic news you hear in the near future will be a blip, not an indication that we’re on our way to sustained recovery. But will policy makers misinterpret the news and repeat the mistakes of 1937? Actually, they already are.

The Obama fiscal stimulus plan is expected to have its peak effect on G.D.P. and jobs around the middle of this year, then start fading out. That’s far too early: why withdraw support in the face of continuing mass unemployment? Congress should have enacted a second round of stimulus months ago, when it became clear that the slump was going to be deeper and longer than originally expected. But nothing was done — and the illusory good numbers we’re about to see will probably head off any further possibility of action.

Meanwhile, all the talk at the Fed is about the need for an “exit strategy” from its efforts to support the economy. One of those efforts, purchases of long-term U.S. government debt, has already come to an end. It’s widely expected that another, purchases of mortgage-backed securities, will end in a few months. This amounts to a monetary tightening, even if the Fed doesn’t raise interest rates directly — and there’s a lot of pressure on Mr. Bernanke to do that too.

Will the Fed realize, before it’s too late, that the job of fighting the slump isn’t finished? Will Congress do the same? If they don’t, 2010 will be a year that began in false economic hope and ended in grief.

Editorial
NY Times Published: January 2, 2010

Thankfully, 2009 ended better than it began. Economists talk about green shoots of recovery taking hold. Consumer confidence has improved. Equity markets have soared. But for all the progress, the American economy remains extremely vulnerable.

To understand those economic risks, it is worth considering Japan’s experience in the 1990s. A bursting housing bubble there sparked a banking crisis that was followed by a decade of economic stagnation.

The Japanese government lacked the resolve to do what was necessary. It failed to fix its banks and stopped its early fiscal stimulus before recovery had taken hold, leaving the economy all too vulnerable to outside shocks, including the Asian currency crisis and the dot-com collapse in 2001. Japan’s annual growth rate — which had averaged 4 percent since 1973 — slowed to less than 1 percent, on average, from 1992 to 2003.

President Obama’s economic advisers have learned from Japan’s experience. But they may not have learned enough. (Certainly Congress has not been paying attention.) If they are not careful, they could end up repeating some of the big mistakes that condemned Japan’s economy to a lost decade.

The green shoots are barely out of the ground and Republicans and conservative Democrats in Congress are already demanding that the administration “do something” to cut the budget gap. We worry that the political drumbeat may be too hard to resist. In 1997, after three years of tepid growth, the Japanese government stopped its stimulus: it raised a consumption tax, ended a temporary income tax cut, increased social security premiums and nipped recovery in the bud.

Japan’s other blunder was its unwillingness to fix its banks. Regulators did not force banks and indebted firms to recognize trillions of yen worth of bad loans. Banks trundled along like zombies, squandering credit to keep insolvent firms on their feet. When the Asian currency crisis hit, many undercapitalized banks toppled over.

The Obama administration has not been quite as forgiving with the banks, but it still has been nowhere near aggressive enough. The regulatory reform meant to curb bankers’ destructive risk-taking is moving at a snail’s pace through Congress. While the Treasury has forced banks to raise capital, many — including some of the largest — remain thinly capitalized and weak.

Banks have been unwilling to sell bad assets and take a loss. They remain stuffed with risky commercial and residential mortgages and consumer debt. Bankers, meanwhile, have made things worse by insisting on paying themselves huge bonuses after profiting so handsomely from the taxpayers’ tolerance and largess.

There are two big problems with that. The bankers’ taste for risk has not been in any way quenched. And the American public is, justifiably, fed up. That means if there is another bank crisis — say when the Federal Reserve takes away the punch bowl of low interest rates — it will be a lot harder to get Congress to approve another bailout, no matter how necessary.

The Obama administration has still done a far better job — up to now — in addressing the crisis than Japan’s governments did. As dismal as 2009 was, it pales when compared with what would have happened without the fiscal stimulus and the Fed’s enormous monetary boost.

The White House is now pushing another mini-stimulus plan for next year. Chances are it will need to do a lot more to push reform and boost the economy. If there is an overarching lesson from Japan’s lost decade, it is that half measures don’t pay.

“I have been a headache for the South Korean government, but I am finally carrying out my filial duty to my father.” — Choi Sung-yong

By MARTIN FACKLER
NY Times Published: January 1, 2010

CHOI SUNG-YONG remembers his father as a war hero who became a successful fishing boat captain, a reserved man who helped at orphanages and once splurged to buy his music-loving teenage son a record player, a true luxury at the time.

But all the memories are tinged with loss. In 1967, when Mr. Choi was just 15, his father’s boat failed to return from sea. The family went into mourning, assuming the boat had sunk. But three months later they were shocked to learn that Mr. Choi’s father, Choi Won-mo, was alive, but lost to them . His vessel, it turned out, had been captured by North Korea, and when the North Koreans released the crew, they kept Mr. Choi’s father.

In the more than four decades since, Mr. Choi, 57, has devoted himself to trying to find his father and the hundreds of other missing South Koreans believed to have been snatched by North Korean agents.

He toils in a tiny office here, where the walls are covered with sepia-toned photos of the missing.

“So far,” he said, “my work has been a lonely fight.”

Unlike in Japan — where the plight of fewer than 20 Japanese abductees has become something of a national obsession — the issue of the disappeared is a divisive one here, freighted with a tangle of conflicting emotions about the North and the collective suffering of South Koreans since the peninsula’s fratricidal war from 1950 to 1953.

In the early years, South Korea’s fervently anti-Communist military rulers treated families like Mr. Choi’s with suspicion, fearful that those who had disappeared were defectors lured by the same ideology that helped cleave the country. But even a shift away from authoritarianism did not help. A succession of liberal presidents who gained power in democratic elections starting in the 1990s ignored the families’ cause in pursuit of reconciliation with the North.

While South Korea’s current, conservative, president, Lee Myung-bak, has taken a tougher line on the abduction issue, the South Korean public remains far less passionate on the subject than the Japanese, who helped drive their leaders not only to sever economic ties with the North, but also to continually urge the United States not to forget the abductees in its drive to get the North to give up its nuclear weapons program.

Fed up with waiting, Mr. Choi decided years ago to take matters into his own hands. In the late 1990s, he began traveling to northern China, where he developed contacts among North Koreans to try to gather information about his father.

Over time, he built something of an underground railroad in the North by using Koreans, sometimes by paying, to help the abductees escape across the border. And slowly, he began to achieve, in a small way, what the Seoul government has so far failed to do.

SINCE 2000, Mr. Choi says, Abductees’ Family Union, which he leads, has smuggled seven South Koreans back to their country via China, including one who later returned to the North because he had started a family there. Officials at South Korea’s Ministry of Unification, which helps oversee inter-Korean relations, acknowledge that Mr. Choi has succeeded in bringing out abducted South Koreans, though they will not confirm the number.

His efforts — and his role with Abductees’ Family Union, which lobbies for the families of 505 civilians thought by the South Korean government to have been kidnapped — have earned him wide attention in the South’s media. They have also, he says, led to death threats from the North.

As a result, he is now afraid to travel to China. But he says he will press on until he finds out what happened to his father, who would be 99 years old now if still alive, or at least retrieve his remains. His father’s former crew said his father had been kept in the North because of his war record, and Mr. Choi fears he may have been executed.

“I have been a headache for the South Korean government,” Mr. Choi said. “But I am finally carrying out my filial duty to my father.”

Like his father, most of the missing are fishermen who vanished when they ventured out to sea in the 1960s and 1970s. Based on South Korean intelligence and the tales of defectors, it appears that the North had several goals in mind when it captured South Koreans. Some were put to work as laborers. Others — like at least some of the Japanese — helped train spies who had little chance to learn about other nations, given their reclusive leaders’ absolute control on news and penchant for propaganda.

The abductees, experts on the issue in the South say, were also tools for the North’s propaganda machine; North Korea still insists that South Koreans who left their country defected for a happier life.

One of those who Mr. Choi’s group smuggled out of North Korea is Choi Wook-il, who is no relation to him. A shrimp fisherman, Choi Wook-il said his boat was seized by a North Korean gunboat in 1975. He was kept in the North until three years ago, when he was led at night across a frozen river into China and freedom, he said.

Now 69, he lives with his wife in a government-provided apartment in the city of Ansan, south of Seoul.

He said that without the efforts of Choi Sung-yong, he would never have been able to return to his life. “He is the only one making efforts.”

The fisherman’s wife, Yang Jeong-ja, 67, said she thought he was dead until Choi Sung-yong one day showed her a letter her husband had written to his brother, which was smuggled out via China. He also presented a picture of her husband taken in North Korea and said he could get her husband out. Ms. Yang was skeptical, but agreed to his plan.

Her husband said that one night almost a decade ago, he got a knock on the door from a North Korean who said he had been sent by Ms. Yang to lead him to China. At first, Mr. Choi — who had been working on a pear and corn farm because his middle-school education was deemed inadequate for spy training — said he did not believe his visitor. It took nine visits until he finally agreed to leave. After they arrived in South Korea, his guide defected. The other Mr. Choi said such successes help make up for the continued pushback from many South Koreans.

He has been criticized by government officials and many people in the public for threatening the South’s engagement with the North, which most South Koreans support in some form. That stance is somewhat pragmatic; those who want to unite with the North say peace will not only allow any abductees who are alive to return home, but also reunite the thousands of families split up during the war.

Experts say it is also difficult for the families of those who were kidnapped to gain sympathy because many of their countrymen feel some bitterness about their singling out their own suffering when so many families have been separated.

“This issue has been intertwined with all the national pain,” said Lee Keum-soon, a researcher on the abductions at the Korea Institute for National Unification, a government-financed research center.

FAMILIES of abductees say they are more hopeful now. President Lee, who took office two years ago, in November called addressing the abduction issue a precondition for holding any future summit meeting with the North.

Mr. Choi has also been appointed to a group that advises the government as it continues to investigate missing persons cases to determine if more of them are possible abductees. On his wall, he proudly displays a plaque that he received in 2009 from the president proclaiming his father a patriot for having piloted a boat that clandestinely dropped off guerrilla fighters behind enemy lines during the Korean War.

“Whenever I ask a North Korean for news of my father, my heart still beats wildly,” Mr. Choi said. “I have struggled to accept that I am a child whose father will never return.”

Su-Hyun Lee contributed reporting.
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By JOHN TIERNEY
NY Times Published: December 28, 2009

For once, social scientists have discovered a flaw in the human psyche that will not be tedious to correct. You may not even need a support group. You could try on your own by starting with this simple New Year’s resolution: Have fun … now!

Then you just need the strength to cash in your gift certificates, drink that special bottle of wine, redeem your frequent flier miles and take that vacation you always promised yourself. If your resolve weakens, do not succumb to guilt or shame. Acknowledge what you are: a recovering procrastinator of pleasure.

It sounds odd, but this is actually a widespread form of procrastination — just ask the airlines and other marketers who save billions of dollars annually from gift certificates that expire unredeemed. Or the poets who have kept turning out exhortations to seize the day and gather rosebuds.

But it has taken awhile for psychologists and behavioral economists to analyze this condition. Now they have begun to explore the strange impulse to put off until tomorrow what could be enjoyed today.

Why, for instance, is it so hard to find time to visit landmarks in your own backyard? People who have moved to Chicago, Dallas and London get to fewer local landmarks during their entire first year than the typical tourist visits during a two-week stay, according to a study conducted by Suzanne B. Shu and Ayelet Gneezy, who are professors of marketing at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the University of California, San Diego, respectively. The Chicagoans in the study had visited more landmarks in other cities than in their own, and even their relatively small amount of local sightseeing was done mainly in the course of entertaining out-of-towners. Otherwise, the only time Chicagoans rushed to see the local landmarks was just before they were about to move to another city, when that deadline inspired sudden passions for taking architectural tours and going to the zoo.

When there is no immediate deadline, we’re liable to put off going to the zoo this weekend because we assume that we will be less busy next weekend — or the weekend after that, or next summer. This is the same sort of thinking that causes us to put the gift certificate in the drawer because we expect to have more time for shopping in the future.

We’re trying to do a cost-benefit analysis of the time lost versus the pleasure or money to be gained, but we’re not accurate in our estimates of “resource slack,” as it is termed by Gal Zauberman and John G. Lynch. These behavioral economists found that when people were asked to anticipate how much extra money and time they would have in the future, they realistically assumed that money would be tight, but they expected free time to magically materialize.

Hence you’re more likely to agree to a commitment next year, like giving a speech, that you would turn down if asked to find time for it in the next month. This produces what researchers call the “Yes … Damn!” effect: when the speech comes due next year, you bitterly discover you’re still as busy as ever.

Dr. Shu and Dr. Gneezy demonstrated another effect of this fallacy by giving people gift certificates good for movie tickets and French pastries. Some got certificates that expired within two to three weeks; others got certificates good for six to eight weeks.

The people who received the long-term certificates were more confident than the others that they would redeem the gifts — a logical enough assumption, given all the extra time they had. But they just kept putting it off, and ultimately they were more likely to let the gift go unredeemed than the people who had received the short-term certificates.

Once you start procrastinating pleasure, it can become a self-perpetuating process if you fixate on some imagined nirvana. The longer you wait to open that prize bottle of wine, the more special the occasion has to be.

If you’re determined to get the absolute maximum out of those frequent flier miles, you can end up wasting them, as Dr. Shu found in an experiment offering people a chance to use discount coupons in the course of buying a series of plane tickets. Once the subjects were told that they might have a chance at a free flight worth $1,000, they scorned lesser awards and hung on to their coupons so long that in the end they had to use them for much cheaper flights.

“People can become overly focused on an ideal,” Dr. Shu said. “Even if they know it’s unlikely, they get so focused on the perfect scenario that they block everything else. Or they anticipate that they’ll kick themselves later if they take second-best option and then see the best one is still available. But they don’t realize that regret can go the other way. They’ll end up with something worse and regret not taking the second-best one.”

But even if you know about all this research, how can you apply these lessons? How can you avoid the temptation to postpone pleasure? (You can offer suggestions at nytimes.com/tierneylab.) One immediate strategy, Dr. Shu said, is to cash in quickly any gift certificate you received this holiday season. “The biggest danger is that it will be forgotten and expire,” she said. “One of the best presents you can give back to the giver is to use it quickly and then tell them how much you enjoyed it. The regret from not using it will be bigger than the regret from using it on a nonperfect occasion, for you and especially for the person who gave it.”

Another tactic is to give yourself deadlines. Cash in the miles by summer, even if you can’t get a round-the-world trip out of them. Instead of waiting for a special occasion to indulge yourself, create one. Dr. Shu approvingly cites the pioneering therapeutic work of Dorothy J. Gaiter and John Brecher, who for the past decade used their Wall Street Journal column on wine to proclaim the last Saturday of February to be “Open That Bottle Night.”

But you don’t even have to wait until Feb. 27. Remember the advice offered in the movie “Sideways” to Miles, who has been holding on to a ’61 Cheval Blanc so long that it is in danger of going bad. When Miles says he is waiting for a special occasion, his friend Maya puts matters in perspective:

“The day you open a ’61 Cheval Blanc, that’s the special occasion.”

photograph by james griffioen

By P.J. Huffstutter
LA Times
December 27, 2009

Reporting from Detroit - On the city’s east side, where auto workers once assembled cars by the millions, nature is taking back the land.

Cottonwood trees grow through the collapsed roofs of homes stripped clean for scrap metal. Wild grasses carpet the rusty shells of empty factories, now home to pheasants and wild turkeys.

This green veil is proof of how far this city has fallen from its industrial heyday and, to a small group of investors, a clear sign. Detroit, they say, needs to get back to what it was before Henry Ford moved to town: farmland.

“There’s so much land available and it’s begging to be used,” said Michael Score, president of the Hantz Farms, which is buying up abandoned sections of the city’s 139-square-mile landscape and plans to transform them into a large-scale commercial farm enterprise.

“Farming is how Detroit started,” Score said, “and farming is how Detroit can be saved.”

The urban agricultural movement has grown nationwide in recent years, as recession-fueled worries prompted people to raise fruits and vegetables to feed their families and perhaps sell at local farmers’ markets.

Large gardens and small farms — usually 10 acres or less — have cropped up in thriving cities such as Berkeley, where land is tough to come by, and struggling Rust Belt communities such as Flint, Mich., which hopes to encourage green space development and residents to eat locally grown foods.

In Detroit, hundreds of backyard gardens and scores of community gardens have blossomed and helped feed students in at least 40 schools and hundreds of families.

It is the size and scope of Hantz Farms that makes the project unique. Although company officials declined to pinpoint how many acres they might use, they have been quoted as saying that they plan to farm up to 5,000 acres within the Motor City’s limits in the coming years, raising organic lettuces, trees for biofuel and a variety of other things.

The project was launched two years ago by Michigan native and financier John Hantz, who has invested an initial $30 million of his own money toward purchasing equipment and land.

It will start small. Next spring, the farm is expected to begin growing crops on about 30 acres of land, Score said.

Because it has been difficult for Hantz and his team to purchase large contiguous parcels, much of the acreage has been grouped into smaller “pods.” Each will grow different crops, depending on the condition of the soil and what buildings remain on the land, Score said.

Hantz executives envision a city where green fields and apple orchards flourish next to houses and factories, and forests thrive alongside interstates and highways. The team is still figuring out what will grow where: Tree groves could be planted where the soil is too contaminated to grow food, and empty factory buildings may be converted to house hydroponic fields to raise specialty vegetables, fruit and cooking herbs.

“People look at these abandoned houses and think, ‘No one could live there. Let’s tear it down,’ ” said Score, a former business development consultant for Michigan State University’s agricultural extension program.

“I look at it and think, maybe we could grow mushrooms inside there.”

The idea of turning this former American manufacturing capital into an agrarian paradise is not that far-fetched, at least not with history as a guide.

The city, one of the Midwest’s oldest, began as an agricultural settlement in the early 1700s with “ribbon” farms — long, narrow stretches of land — carved out along the edge of local rivers. And until its industrial boom of the early 20th century, this swath of southeastern Michigan was covered in apple and peach orchards and miles of grapevines.

In 1910, about 80% of the 396,800 acres of Wayne County was being farmed, according to research collected by Michigan State. By 1925, as the auto industry boomed, that figure fell to 47%.

Today, fewer than 21,000 acres are being farmed.

Local leaders say they are encouraged by the idea of farm jobs coming to Detroit, which could help ease the region’s grim economic situation: The Detroit-Livonia-Dearborn area had an unemployment rate of 17.7% in October, the highest in a region of 1 million residents or more, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

But local officials put the number far higher: Mayor Dave Bing recently said that nearly half of the city’s workers are either unemployed or underemployed. These officials support the effort to redevelop the estimated one-third of Detroit’s 376,000 parcels that are either vacant or abandoned.

And in a city where there are no major grocery store chains, and more than three-fourths of the residents buy their food at convenience stores or gas stations, the idea of having easy access to fresh produce is appealing.

“There is real potential for this to work, because land prices in Detroit are low and there’s a demand for local food,” said Bill Knudson, an agricultural economist at Michigan State.

“The million-dollar question is whether that local-food trend is permanent,” Knudson said. “If it is, then this plan works because you have more than a million consumers in the city and nearby areas to sell to. If not, you’re going to have a hard time getting enough acreage put together to make the costs of running a commercial operation feasible.”

City officials also remain cautious about the project. They point out that commercial farming brings with it numerous hurdles that other commercial projects don’t.

Their concerns include figuring out who would pay for cleaning pollutants out of the soil and removing utility infrastructure, such as gas and sewer lines; how to rewrite the city’s zoning laws; and how to adjust property tax rates and property values to allow for commercial farming.

“Urban farming will be part of Detroit’s long-term redevelopment plan,” Bing said in a statement.

However, he added, “as a city built primarily for manufacturing and industrial production, preparing land for widespread agricultural purposes is a process that cannot occur overnight.”

HEATING UP San Diego plans to remove fire pits like this one on Ski Beach, to save money. Opponents of the plan say part of the city’s soul will be extinguished as well.

By RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD
NY Times Published: December 27, 2009

SAN DIEGO — Families, students, newlyweds, mourners — beachgoers of all sorts — toast themselves and marshmallows around blazing fires in pits that dot beaches and shoreline parks here.

“In a city this big,” said Steve West, stoking the flames of his fire one recent evening, “this is what makes a place like this special.”

Now, throw another log on the bonfire of budget casualties. San Diego officials have decided to remove the fire pits — and, their partisans lament, a slice of the city’s soul as well — to help close a $179 million budget deficit.

When it comes to beach culture, San Diego has long prided itself on being just a little different from other towns, especially the big ones up north that hog all the attention.

You can no longer drink alcohol on the beach here (it was banned last year) or smoke (snuffed three years ago). But the fire pits, though gradually diminished from 450 in the early 1990s to 186 now, remain embedded in the sand and the local culture.

“Bonfire, surfing, I grew up doing that,” said John Johnston, 48, as he stewed over the city’s plans by a fire with a few fishing buddies.

The city, which says it spends about $121,000 a year cleaning and maintaining the pits, has also trimmed library hours, scheduled 200 layoffs and made other cuts. But the prospect of extinguishing a beloved tradition has ignited some of the loudest passion.

A Facebook cause with more than 4,000 members has emerged. A Web site, Save the Fire Pits of San Diego, is also seeking to rally the faithful. The OB Rag, a blog devoted to the city’s Ocean Beach neighborhood, is trying to galvanize residents to “adopt” the eight or so pits there, the way groups sponsor highway cleanups. And a community group in La Jolla, another section of the city, hopes to raise money to keep all the pits in place.

“What’s it going to be next?” asked Hans Baumgartner, a founder of the fire pits Web site. “They keep saying other cities have done it. We’re not other cities. We’re San Diego.”

Last year’s budget was bad, too, but an anonymous donor came through with money to keep the fire pits in place until next June. The city has received about $1,600 this time around, far short of the amount it says it needs to maintain the pits.

“There is no more low-hanging fruit here,” Stacey LoMedico, the city parks director, said of the decision to remove the pits in July.

The state parks department, suffering its own fiscal woes, also plans to remove fire rings at several beaches, though an informal tally by beachcalifornia.com shows that 29 of 108 state parks with beaches still allow them. Newport Beach, north of here in Orange County, backed off a plan last year after a public outcry similar to the one here.

But so far, the City of San Diego is not budging. Ms. LoMedico called removing the fire pits a “very tough decision” but noted that people could still bring their own grills to the beaches, something veteran roasters say is just not the same as a blaze in the 5-foot-by-5-foot, 15-inch-deep pits.

Cleaning the pits, she said, is a meticulous and labor-intensive job, in part because the sand sullied by the fires is deemed hazardous waste. Every week, a front-loader lifts the 2,000-pound pit casings, workers scrape and scrub off the sand and carry off the after-party detritus — charred wood, broken glass, partly cooked meat, trash. One longtime beach observer said he once saw a couch aflame in a pit.

The pits, Ms. LoMedico said, are simply a low priority in a city stuck in economic doldrums.

Aside from the recession, which has dampened the housing market and tourism and the tax dollars they spawn, the city is still coping with the aftershock of a mismanaged municipal pension fund in the early years of the decade that left its finances in disarray.

As the pits have dwindled, the romanticizing of them seems to grow, but even supporters admit they are not always the source of wholesome fun.

Other cities that have scaled back or gotten rid of their pits have said they present safety problems to passers-by who might trip over them or get burned by leftover embers.

Bonfire parties here can get loud and rowdy, and a few pit supporters said they suspected that the city was using the budget problems as cover for getting rid of an occasional nuisance. The matter may end up before the California Coastal Commission, a state panel with extensive powers over beach use and access that is not always friendly to municipal governments.

The commission sent a letter to San Diego officials advising that the commission might need to issue a permit for the pits to be removed; city officials plan to take up the matter with the commission’s staff members early next month.

The commission, known for lengthy study before rendering decisions, could demand hearings. Some supporters of the fire pits suggest such a public airing of the plan might expose what they consider the city’s inflated cost estimates and failure to consider alternatives to removal, like only cleaning the pits during peak use in the summer.

Regardless of the outcome, some find the whole debate disheartening.

“San Diego,” Mr. Johnston said, “is just much less fun.”

The U2 guitarist is lining up political muscle and environmentalist star power to support constructing his eco-friendly castles on a pristine ridge near Malibu. The Edge wants to carve into the top of a ridge near Malibu and build five castles that he has already named: “Clouds Rest,” “Panorama,” “Shell House,” “Blue Clouds” and “Leaves in the Wind.” What’s greener? Not building at all.

By Steve Lopez
December 23, 2009
Los Angeles Times

Just so you know, it’s not easy for me to refer to U2 guitarist David Evans as “The Edge.” Sure, there was a time when I referred to myself as S. Lo. But I quickly realized that once you’ve gone gray, it’s hard to get away with anything other than what’s on the birth certificate.

And I can’t keep a straight face when I tell you that the five eco-friendly castles Mr. Edge wants to carve into the top of a pristine ridge near Malibu already have names. There’s “Clouds Rest” and “Panorama,” “Shell House” and “Blue Clouds.” And my personal favorite, “Leaves in the Wind.”

The latter is also the name of a website (www.leavesinthewind.com) promoting the controversial project, which would sit high above the Malibu pier, with a sweeping, miles-long view of spectacular coastline. You’d think a guy from one of the greatest bands in history could come up with a name that was a bit, shall we say, edgier, for a rock ‘n’ roll compound.

The Malibu area has been buzzing since a video was added to The Edge’s website in the last several weeks, perhaps in anticipation of an upcoming California Coastal Commission hearing on the proposal. Against a gag-inducing track of New Age music, with birds tweeting in the background, fawning proponents of The Edge’s plans praise the project. His supporters include Bonny Reiss, Gov. Schwarzenegger’s former senior advisor, and, more surprisingly, Mark Massara, head of the Sierra Club’s Great Coastal Places Campaign.

“It’s going to take those visionary leaders being associated with projects like these, that are going to show how to make the California coastline a model of sustainability,” Massara says on the video, in which he all but encourages the Coastal Commission to embrace the proposal.

Clearly The Edge is lining up all the political muscle and environmentalist star power he possibly can. He’s even got a well-connected PR and lobbying firm — California Strategies — backing him up.

And that combination of clout and slick marketing is part of what riles Malibu City Councilman Jefferson Wagner. Although the compound would be outside Malibu city limits, it would require major expansion of a road within the city. Wagner is not inclined to vote in favor, and he’s not a fan of the website testimonial, which makes no mention of all the dust in the wind there’d be once the bulldozers take the mountain.

“It’s a sales-pitch video,” said Wagner, a local surfing legend who has his own nickname — Zuma Jay.

He called the video The Edge’s way of saying: “I’m doing the right thing.”

“But if he was doing the right thing,” Wagner went on, “he wouldn’t need that video, right?”

And if he were doing the right thing, why would the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy have fired off a letter to the Coastal Commission that attacks the project on one point after another, bang, bang, bang?

“Unfortunately, it is impossible to construct the five homes strung over a mile of ridgeline and 7,800 feet of water main without resulting in unavoidable significant adverse visual and ecological impacts,” says the nine-page letter, which was signed by the conservancy’s chair, Ronald P. Schafer.

“None of the five houses is consistent with the Coastal Act,” the letter went on, contending that “each would result in permanent and significant disruption of Environmentally Sensitive Habitat Area.”

There’d be a series of 1,800-foot driveways slicing up the terrain not far from Malibu Creek State Park, the letter went on, and the conservancy also worried about the possibility of more houses being erected by property owners who could tap into the water line The Edge would have to build.

The Edge, whose famous band has taken up the cause of social justice and environmental protection around the world, argues on his website that there’s really nothing to worry about.

“I hope you will agree that my partners and I have worked diligently to design homes that meet the highest environmental standards; that fit appropriately and aesthetically into this beautiful part of Southern California; and that are truly remarkable examples of the best architecture and design,” he wrote.

“Why did we go to so much effort? Because my family and I love Malibu. We’ve maintained a residence here for more than a decade, and once our new home is finished we expect to spend much of our time here.”

Ted Harris, of California Strategies, said design and construction changes have been made to further minimize impact and make the houses blend organically with their surroundings. The conservancy complaints, he said, were not surprising because the agency simply “doesn’t embrace residential development” in the mountain areas.

Perhaps that’s because, as the conservancy argued, this development would sit on a ridgeline that “is the most prominent landform along the coast between Topanga Canyon Boulevard and the Ventura County line.”

I’m awaiting a call back, by the way, from the Sierra Club’s Massara. I’d like to let him explain why a longtime champion of coastal protection is so enthusiastic about a project that raises so many questions.

Steve Hudson, district manager of the commission’s central coast office, told me he’s reviewing “potential impacts to public views, environmentally sensitive habitat areas and questions about engineering and geological issues.” Minimizing impact, Hudson added, “typically means siting residences below ridgelines.”

There’s no doubt that if this project goes ahead, the houses would blend into the landscape more neatly than most of what’s been built in Malibu over the years. And without question, there’s some hypocrisy and NIMBYism at play in a region that has already seen far too many houses erected in fire zones, not to mention the longtime resistance to sewer lines despite nasty ocean pollution.

But the truly green thing for The Edge to do would be to stay in the house he’s in, and avoid yet another ego-propelled incursion into one of the great wilderness areas of the state.

I was up on that ridge the other day with Zuma Jay, and the natural wonder was beyond words.

A lot of people are standing up for The Edge, said Zuma Jay.

“Who’s going to stand up for the mountain?”

Arthur Ou, Untitled (Pavillion); 2009; Wood, metal, cotton webbing; 8.5 x 8.5 x 8.5 feet

Through January 16 at LAXART

The solar developer BrightSource Energy has canceled one solar-energy project in the Mojave Desert, above, but is proceeding with several others.

By TODD WOODY
NY Times Published: December 21, 2009

AMBOY, Calif. — Senator Dianne Feinstein introduced legislation in Congress on Monday to protect a million acres of the Mojave Desert in California by scuttling some 13 big solar plants and wind farms planned for the region.

But before the bill to create two new Mojave national monuments has even had its first hearing, the California Democrat has largely achieved her aim. Regardless of the legislation’s fate, her opposition means that few if any power plants are likely to be built in the monument area, a complication in California’s effort to achieve its aggressive goals for renewable energy.

Developers of the projects have already postponed several proposals or abandoned them entirely. The California agency charged with planning a renewable energy transmission grid has rerouted proposed power lines to avoid the monument.

“The very existence of the monument proposal has certainly chilled development within its boundaries,” said Karen Douglas, chairwoman of the California Energy Commission.

For Mrs. Feinstein, creation of the Mojave national monuments would make good on a promise by the government a decade ago to protect desert land donated by an environmental group that had acquired the property from the Catellus Development Corporation.

“The Catellus lands were purchased with nearly $45 million in private funds and $18 million in federal funds and donated to the federal government for the purpose of conservation, and that commitment must be upheld. Period,” Mrs. Feinstein said in a statement.

The federal government made a competing commitment in 2005, though, when President George W. Bush ordered that renewable energy production be accelerated on public lands, including the Catellus holdings. The Obama administration is trying to balance conservation demands with its goal of radically increasing solar and wind generation by identifying areas suitable for large-scale projects across the West.

Mrs. Feinstein heads the Senate subcommittee that oversees the budget of the Interior Department, giving her substantial clout over that agency, which manages the government’s landholdings. Her intervention in the Mojave means it will be more difficult for California utilities to achieve a goal, set by the state, of obtaining a third of their electricity from renewable sources by 2020; projects in the monument area could have supplied a substantial portion of that power.

“This is arguably the best solar land in the world, and Senator Feinstein shouldn’t be allowed to take this land off the table without a proper and scientific environmental review,” said Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the environmentalist and a partner with a venture capital firm that invested in a solar developer called BrightSource Energy. In September, BrightSource canceled a large project in the monument area.

Union officials, power industry executives, regulators and some environmentalists have also expressed concern about the impact of the monument legislation, but few would speak publicly for fear of antagonizing one of California’s most powerful politicians.

The debate over the monument encapsulates a rising tension between two goals held by environmental groups: preservation of wild lands and ambitious efforts to combat global warming.

Not only is the desert land some of the sunniest in the country, and thus suitable for large-scale power production, it is also some of the most scenic territory in the West. The Mojave lands have sweeping vistas of an ancient landscape that is home to desert tortoises, bighorn sheep, fringe-toed lizards and other rare animals and plants.

As conflicts over building solar farms in the Mojave escalated earlier this year, Mrs. Feinstein trekked to the desert in April. The senator’s caravan, including the heads of two of the nation’s largest utilities, top energy regulators and a group of environmentalists, bumped along a dirt track and pulled up to a wind-whipped tent. Inside, executives with a Goldman Sachs-owned developer waited to make their case for building two multibillion-dollar solar power plants.

The presentation over, the entourage rolled on to the next solar project site to hear the developer’s pitch. Mrs. Feinstein gave the developers a hearing but was not moved by their arguments, according to five people present on the tour. The senator seemed concerned about the visual effect of huge solar farms on Route 66, the highway that runs through the Mojave, they said.

“When we attended the onsite desert meeting with Senator Feinstein, it was clear she was very serious about this,” said Gary Palo, vice president for development with Cogentrix Energy, a solar developer owned by Goldman Sachs. “It would make no sense for us politically or practically to go forward with those projects.”

Another project, a huge 12,000-acre solar farm by Tessera Solar, was canceled last week, and the company cited Mrs. Feinstein’s opposition.

Steven L. Kline, chief sustainability officer for Pacific Gas and Electric, called the proposed monument “prime territory” for solar development and noted that the loss of the planned solar projects would hurt his company’s efforts to comply with state renewable energy mandates. The utility was planning a solar farm in the monument area.

“In the near term, it would have a very substantial impact,” he said, emphasizing that in principle, P.G.& E. supports Mrs. Feinstein’s efforts to preserve sensitive desert lands. “Over time those projects will be built somewhere else and we’ll have benefits of the power.”

Mrs. Feinstein has long championed desert preservation, sponsoring legislation in 1994 that created Death Valley and Joshua Tree national parks and the Mojave National Preserve. Five years later, she pushed for federal money to help acquire nearly 500,000 acres owned by Catellus.

A small Southern California environmental group, the Wildlands Conservancy, had negotiated the acquisition of the Catellus property and raised tens of millions of dollars for its purchase from a major benefactor, the financier David Gelbaum, a former hedge fund manager turned philanthropist.

The Catellus holdings consist of hundreds of small parcels that form a checkerboard across the Mojave.

“The whole objective was to preserve the core of the Mojave Desert,” said David Myers, executive director of the Wildlands Conservancy. “To a large extent this land is the connective tissue that holds the desert together.”

When Mr. Myers became aware that solar and wind developers had applied to lease federal land that included the former Catellus holdings, he contacted the senator.

The legislation to protect a million acres of desert land would include 266,000 acres of the former Catellus lands. (The balance of the half-million acres of Catellus property is already protected, in various ways.) The proposed renewable energy projects would have occupied about 30,000 acres of Catellus land, according to the Bureau of Land Management.

“If all this solar development took place in the Mojave, the higher you climb the more industrialized the vistas would look,” Mr. Myers said recently as he walked past bighorn sheep tracks and scrambled up a peak overlooking the Trilobite Wilderness Area.

Mr. Myers stresses that he is not against large-scale solar power plants but prefers that they be concentrated on already disturbed farmlands. In recent months, he said, he has worked with solar developers to find alternative sites.

On Thursday, Mrs. Feinstein introduced legislation to provide a 30 percent tax credit to developers that consolidate degraded private land for solar projects. She followed that on Monday with the legislation to create the 941,00-acre Mojave Trails National Monument and the 134,00-acre Sand to Snow National Monument.

“I strongly believe that conservation, renewable energy development and recreation can and must co-exist in the California desert,” Mrs. Feinstein said in a statement. “This legislation strikes a careful balance between these sometimes competing concerns.”

Developers and environmentalists say Mrs. Feinstein has modified the monument legislation to address some of their issues. The 2.5 million acres set aside in a draft version of the monument act has been shrunk to around one million acres, allowing at least two projects to proceed. The bill also includes provisions designed to accelerate approval of renewable energy projects on federal land.

That is not likely to mollify monument opponents, including unions that were anticipating the creation of thousands of construction jobs.

“Unfortunately, Senator Feinstein wants to wall off a large part of the desert based on historical land ownership rather than science,” said Marc D. Joseph, a lawyer for California Unions for Reliable Energy. “It seems the wrong approach to where solar should go and where it shouldn’t go.”

But John White, executive director of the Center for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Technologies in Sacramento, said the monument legislation would put so much land off limits for development that it might actually spur a more vigorous state and federal effort to compensate by creating renewable energy zones. “The problem is,” he said, “if you take a million acres off the table, what are you going to replace it with?”

David Myers of the Wildlands Conservancy walks in Sleeping Beauty Valley, part of the proposed Mojave Trails National Monument, which would prohibit development on 941,000 acres of federal land. The protected areas would encompass 1 million acres containing wildlife, extinct volcanoes, sand dunes and ancient petroglyphs.

By Louis Sahagun
December 21, 2009
Los Angeles Times

Reporting from Barstow - Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) says she plans to introduce legislation today to establish two national monuments on roughly 1 million acres of Mojave Desert outback that is home to bighorn sheep and desert tortoises, extinct volcanoes, sand dunes and ancient petroglyphs.

Its centerpiece, Mojave Trails National Monument, would prohibit development on 941,000 acres of federal land and former railroad company property along a 105-mile stretch of old Route 66, between Ludlow and Needles.

The smaller Sand to Snow National Monument, about 45 miles east of Riverside, would cover about 134,000 acres of federal land between Joshua Tree National Park and the San Bernardino National Forest in San Bernardino and Riverside counties. Its diverse habitats range from desert scrub to yellow pine forests 9,000 feet above sea level.

The legislation, which had been delayed by efforts to resolve conflicts among environmentalists, off-roaders and renewable energy interests, would also designate 250,000 acres of public land near the Army’s training center at Ft. Irwin as wilderness; add 41,000 acres to the southern boundary of Death Valley National Park and add 2,900 acres to northern portions of Joshua Tree National Park.

In addition, it would designate as permanent five existing off-highway vehicle areas in San Bernardino County covering 314,000 acres.

Feinstein, author of the 1994 California Desert Protection Act, vowed to make the legislation a priority. “In the best-case scenario, this legislation could be approved by late 2010,” she said in an interview.

“This magnificent land and its lonely beauty are a significant part of our history, and we shouldn’t give it up,” Feinstein said, adding that private donors helped acquire the former railroad parcels “with the belief they would be protected from development. We have an obligation to keep them that way.”

The railroad land was purchased between 1999 and 2003 with $45 million in private donations collected by the nonprofit Wildlands Conservancy and $18 million in federal funds, then donated to the Department of the Interior.

The Bureau of Land Management is reviewing 130 applications for solar and wind-energy development in the California desert, covering more than 1 million acres of public land.

At least 19 renewable-energy projects have been suggested within the boundaries of the proposed Mojave Trails monument, according to Feinstein, who has discussed her concerns with Interior Secretary Ken Salazar.

Feinstein’s legislation would assist companies with projects currently proposed inside monument boundaries in relocating to federal energy zones being developed elsewhere. It would also permit construction of transmission lines within existing utility rights of way to facilitate the transfer of renewable energy generated in the Southern California desert and adjacent states.

Some congressional Republicans accused Feinstein of engaging in a not-in-my-back-yard campaign when her plans for legislation restricting renewable energy projects in California deserts surfaced earlier this year.

The senator countered that she “strongly” supports such projects, but only if they are built on “suitable” lands.

In an effort to avoid conflicts, BrightSource Energy Inc. and Stirling Energy Systems recently scrapped plans to build massive solar and wind farms on a panoramic stretch of the proposed Mojave Trails monument known as Sleeping Beauty Valley.

“We had a project within what we understand to be the boundaries of the monument, but we recently decided to withdraw it,” said Sean Gallagher, Stirling’s vice president of marketing strategies and regulatory issues. “We’re trying to be respectful of what Sen. Feinstein has been doing in that area of the desert.”

Environmentalists, hunters and off-road vehicle enthusiasts expressed support for Feinstein’s legislation.

Elden Hughes, an honorary vice president of the Sierra Club, described it as “good news — and darned important because it means this land would never be built on or fenced off.”

James Conkle, founder of the Route 66 Alliance, which seeks to protect the historic route linking Chicago with Southern California, said the bill would “open up the desert to more travelers, sparking interest in fascinating, out-of-the-way places like Ludlow, Amboy and Essex.”

Megan Grossglass, spokeswoman for the Off-Road Business Assn., was more cautious in her appraisal. Her group “has not had a chance to fully analyze the bill,” she said, “so we cannot give it our endorsement, but we are supportive of the balanced approach it seems to take.”

Mojave Trail, a four-hour drive from Los Angeles, includes such environmentally sensitive areas as Afton Canyon, a four-mile ribbon of green wetlands wedged between weathered rock walls, and Amboy Crater, a dormant volcano.

Then there is Sleeping Beauty Valley, a 150-square-mile expanse roughly 60 miles east of Barstow. It contains bighorn sheep, a newly discovered species of lupine that features showy purple blossoms in the spring, and unusually dark lizards that appear to have genetically adapted to the volcanic terrain.

During a tour of the area Sunday, David Myers, executive director of the Wildlands Conservancy, scrambled up a rocky hill at the base of a row of snaggletoothed mountains freckled with clumps of brittlebush.

“Heroic country, isn’t it?” he said. “Just a few months ago, there were plans to cover this entire landscape with solar and wind farms. Instead, with this legislation, we are striking a balance with the insatiable demands of population growth.”

Frances Stark, And Brrrpptzap the Subject, 2004.

14 Nov 2009 - 24 Jan 2010

Nottingham Contemporary

“Untitled” (1950)

“Black and White” (1952)

“Tondo3Colors” (1958)

“Blanco y Verde” (1966)

The Cuban-born artist Carmen Herrera. After six decades of very private painting, she sold her first artwork five years ago at the age of 89.

By DEBORAH SONTAG
NY Times Published: December 19, 2009

Under a skylight in her tin-ceilinged loft near Union Square in Manhattan, the abstract painter Carmen Herrera, 94, nursed a flute of Champagne last week, sitting regally in the wheelchair she resents.

After six decades of very private painting, Ms. Herrera sold her first artwork five years ago, at 89. Now, at a small ceremony in her honor, she was basking in the realization that her career had finally, undeniably, taken off. As cameras flashed, she extended long, Giacomettiesque fingers to accept an art foundation’s lifetime achievement award from the director of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.

Her good friend, the painter Tony Bechara, raised a glass. “We have a saying in Puerto Rico,” he said. “The bus — la guagua — always comes for those who wait.”

And the Cuban-born Ms. Herrera, laughing gustily, responded, “Well, Tony, I’ve been at the bus stop for 94 years!”

Since that first sale in 2004, collectors have avidly pursued Ms. Herrera, and her radiantly ascetic paintings have entered the permanent collections of institutions like the Museum of Modern Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and the Tate Modern. Last year, MoMA included her in a pantheon of Latin American artists on exhibition. And this summer, during a retrospective show in England, The Observer of London called Ms. Herrera the discovery of the decade, asking, “How can we have missed these beautiful compositions?”

In a word, Ms. Herrera, a nonagenarian homebound painter with arthritis, is hot. In an era when the art world idolizes, and often richly rewards, the young and the new, she embodies a different, much rarer kind of success, that of the artist long overlooked by the market, and by history, who persevered because she had no choice.

“I do it because I have to do it; it’s a compulsion that also gives me pleasure,” she said of painting. “I never in my life had any idea of money and I thought fame was a very vulgar thing. So I just worked and waited. And at the end of my life, I’m getting a lot of recognition, to my amazement and my pleasure, actually.”

Julián Zugazagoitia, the director of El Museo del Barrio in East Harlem, called Ms. Herrera “a quiet warrior of her art.”

“To bloom into full glory at 94 — whatever Carmen Herrera’s slow rise might say about the difficulties of being a woman artist, an immigrant artist or an artist ahead of her time, it is clearly a story of personal strength,” Mr. Zugazagoitia said.

A minimalist whose canvases are geometric distillations of form and color, Ms. Herrera has slowly come to the attention of a subset of art historians over the last decade. . Now she is increasingly considered an important figure by those who study her “remarkably monumental, iconic paintings,” said Edward J. Sullivan, a professor of art history at New York University.

“Those of us with a passion for either geometric art or Latin American Modernist painting now realize what a pivotal role” Ms. Herrera has played in “the development of geometric abstraction in the Americas,” Mr. Sullivan said.

Painting in relative solitude since the late 1930s, with only the occasional exhibition, Ms. Herrera was sustained, she said, by the unflinching support of her husband of 61 years, Jesse Loewenthal. An English teacher at Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan, Mr. Loewenthal was portrayed by the memoirist Frank McCourt, a colleague, as an old-world scholar in an “elegant, three-piece suit, the gold watch chain looping across his waistcoat front.”

Recognition for Ms. Herrera came a few years after her husband’s death, at 98, in 2000. “Everybody says Jesse must have orchestrated this from above,” Ms. Herrera said, shaking her head. “Yeah, right, Jesse on a cloud.” She added: “I worked really hard. Maybe it was me.”

In a series of interviews in her sparsely but artfully furnished apartment, Ms. Herrera always offered an afternoon cocktail — “Oh, don’t be abstemious!” — and an outpouring of stories about prerevolutionary Cuba, postwar Paris and the many artists she has known, from Wifredo Lam to Yves Klein to Barnett Newman.

“Ah, Wifredo,” she said, referring to Lam, the Cuban-born French painter. “All the girls were crazy about him. When we were in Havana, my phone would begin ringing: ‘Is Wifredo in town?’ I mean, come on, I wasn’t his social secretary.”

But Ms. Herrera is less expansive about her own art, discussing it with a minimalism redolent of the work. “Paintings speak for themselves,” she said. Geometry and color have been the head and the heart of her work, she added, describing a lifelong quest to pare down her paintings to their essence, like visual haiku.

Asked how she would describe to a student a painting like “Blanco y Verde” (1966) — a canvas of white interrupted by an inverted green triangle — she said, “I wouldn’t have a student.” To a sweet, inquiring child, then? “I’d give him some candy so he’d rot his teeth.”

When pressed about what looks to some like a sensual female shape in the painting, she said: “Look, to me it was white, beautiful white, and then the white was shrieking for the green, and the little triangle created a force field. People see very sexy things — dirty minds! — but to me sex is sex, and triangles are triangles.”

Born in 1915 in Havana, where her father was the founding editor of the daily newspaper El Mundo, and her mother a reporter, Ms. Herrera took art lessons as a child, attended finishing school in Paris and embarked on a Cuban university degree in architecture. In 1939, midway through her studies, she married Mr. Loewenthal and moved to New York. (They had no children.)

Although she studied at the Art Students League of New York, Ms. Herrera did not discover her artistic identity until she and her husband settled in Paris for a few years after World War II. There she joined a group of abstract artists, based at the influential Salon of New Realities, which exhibited her work along with that of Josef Albers, Jean Arp, Sonia Delaunay and others.

“I was looking for a pictorial vocabulary and I found it there,” she said. “But when we moved back to New York, this type of art” — her less-is-more formalism — “was not acceptable. Abstract Expressionism was in fashion. I couldn’t get a gallery.”

Ms. Herrera said that she also accepted, “as a handicap,” the barriers she faced as a Hispanic female artist. Beyond that, though, “her art was not easily digestible at the time,” Mr. Zugazagoitia said. “She was not doing Cuban landscapes or flowers of the tropics, the art you might have expected from a Cuban émigré who spent time in Paris. She was ahead of her time.”

Over the decades, Ms. Herrera had a solo show here and there, including a couple at museums (the Alternative Museum in 1984, El Museo del Barrio in 1998). But she never sold anything, and never needed, or aggressively sought, the affirmation of the market. “It would have been nice, but maybe corrupting,” she said.

Mr. Bechara, who befriended her in the early 1970s and is now chairman of El Museo del Barrio, said that he regularly tried to push her into the public eye, even though she “found a kind of solace in being alone.”

One day in 2004, Mr. Bechara attended a dinner with Frederico Sève, the owner of the Latin Collector Gallery in Manhattan, who was dealing with the withdrawal of an artist from a much-publicized show of female geometric painters. “Tony said to me: ‘Geometry and ladies? You need Carmen Herrera,’ “ Mr. Sève recounted. “And I said, ‘Who the hell is Carmen Herrera?’ “

The next morning, Mr. Sève arrived at his gallery to find several paintings, just delivered, that he took to be the work of the well-known Brazilian artist Lygia Clark but were in fact by Ms. Herrera. Turning over the canvases, he saw that they predated by a decade paintings in a similar style by Ms. Clark. “Wow, wow, wow,” he recalled saying. “We got a pioneer here.”

Mr. Sève quickly called Ella Fontanals-Cisneros, a collector who has an art foundation in Miami. She bought five of Ms. Herrera’s paintings. Estrellita Brodsky, another prominent collector, bought another five. Agnes Gund, president emerita of the Museum of Modern Art, also bought several, and with Mr. Bechara, donated one of Ms. Herrera’s black-and-white paintings to MoMA.

The recent exhibition in England, which is now heading to Germany, came about by happenstance after a curator stumbled across Ms. Herrera’s paintings on the Internet. Last week The Observer named that retrospective one of the year’s 10 best exhibitions, alongside a Picasso show and one devoted to the American Pop artist Ed Ruscha.

Ms. Herrera’s late-in-life success has stunned her in many ways. Her larger works now sell for $30,000, and one painting commanded $44,000 — sums unimaginable when she was, say, in her 80s. “I have more money now than I ever had in my life,” she said.

Not that she is succumbing to a life of leisure. At a long table where she peers out over East 19th Street “like a French concierge,” Ms. Herrera, because she must, continues to draw and paint. “Only my love of the straight line keeps me going,” she said.

An artist’s rendering of a second super-Earth exoplanet for which astronomers have determined the mass and radius.

By DENNIS OVERBYE
NY Times Published: December 16, 2009

Astronomers said Wednesday that they had discovered a planet composed mostly of water.

You would not want to live there. Besides the heat — 400 degrees Fahrenheit on the ocean surface — the planet is probably cloaked in a dark fog of superheated steam and other gases. But its discovery has encouraged a growing feeling among astronomers that they are on the verge of a breakthrough and getting closer to finding a planet that something could live on.

“This probably is not habitable, but it didn’t miss the habitable zone by that much,” said David Charbonneau of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, who led the team that discovered the new planet and will reports its findings on Thursday in the journal Nature.

Geoffrey W. Marcy, a planet hunter from the University of California, Berkeley, wrote in an accompanying article in Nature that the new work provided “the most watertight evidence so far for a planet that is something like our own Earth, outside our solar system.”

Only 2.7 times the size of Earth and 6.6 times as massive, the new planet takes 38 hours to circle a dim red star, GJ 1214, in the constellation Ophiuchus — about 40 light-years from here. It is one of the lightest and smallest so-called extrasolar planets yet found, part of a growing class of planets that are less than 10 times the mass of Earth.

Dr. Charbonneau’s announcement capped a week in which the list of known planets, including these “super-Earths,” grew significantly.

An international team of astronomers using telescopes in Australia and Hawaii reported in one paper that they had found three planets, including a super-Earth, orbiting 61 Virginis, a star in the constellation Virgo that is almost a clone of the Sun. It was the first time, they said, that a super-Earth had been found belonging to a star like the Sun; the other home stars have been dwarfs. And in a separate paper, they reported finding a planet somewhat larger than Jupiter at the star 23 Librae.

And in yet another paper, a subset of the same group reported finding a super-Earth and probably two bigger planets circling HD 1461, a star in Cetus.

Paul Butler of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, who was involved in all three papers, said astronomers thought that one-third to one-half of all Sun-like stars harbored such super-Earths orbiting at scorching distances much closer than Mercury is to the Sun.

In the 15 years since the first extrasolar planet was found, more than 400 have been detected. The field is getting more intense as dedicated planet-hunting instruments like the Kepler satellite from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, due to report a new batch of such planets next month, get into the game.

Alan P. Boss, a planetary theorist at the Carnegie Institution of Washington, said of the planet hunters, “Give them a couple more years and they’re going to knock your socks off.”

Dr. Charbonneau’s planet, only 1.3 million miles from its home star, is distinguished by its relative coolness — a consequence of the dimness of GJ 1214, which puts out one three-hundredth of the Sun’s energy. He and his colleagues had set out to search for planets around such stars, noting that they are more numerous and that it is easier to discern planets around them.

His planet-hunting equipment is a bank of eight telescopes called MEarth, pronounced “mirth,” on Mount Hopkins in Arizona. Each telescope is only 16 inches in diameter, no bigger than those that grace the backyard of many amateur astronomers. They monitor the light of 2,000 nearby stars, looking for the regular blips caused when a planet passes by, or transits.

In May, Zachory Berta, a first-year graduate student of Dr. Charbonneau, called the group’s attention to blips in the Ophiuchus star that seemed to be happening every 1.6 days. If he was right, Mr. Berta said, the next transit would occur at 6 a.m. on May 13.

Dr. Charbonneau was in Washington later that day preparing for a State Department dinner when he got a group e-mail message that began: “We have a winner. Congrats Zach!”

From the drop in starlight, the astronomers could calculate the diameter of the Ophiuchus planet, known now as GJ 1214b. Then they used a sensitive spectrograph on a 3.6-meter telescope in Chile to measure its gravitational tug on the star, thus deriving the planet’s mass. Using those two numbers, Dr. Charbonneau and his colleagues could calculate the density of the planet, about one-third that of Earth.

“What we probably have here is a water world,” Dr. Charbonneau said.

Dr. Charbonneau said the weight of the new planet’s presumptive atmosphere kept the water liquid rather than just boiling into space. He acknowledged that a different recipe, with more rock and a very puffy atmosphere, would also fit the data. That is unlikely, he and other planet experts say, but the steam-world theory may be soon tested.

The new planet is close enough to be studied directly by telescopes on or near Earth. Indeed, Dr. Charbonneau said his team had already applied for observing time on the Hubble Space Telescope.

“Our own TV signals,” he said, “have already passed this star.”

Thanks to Jonathan Maghen

Ban designed an elementary school built in the aftermath of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake in western China. For the gabled roof, Ban used corrugated sheets of polycarbonate on top of an insulating layer of Styrofoam that created diffused lighting through large holes. The paper-tube columns and beams were connected with wood joints.

The Paper House was the first Ban structure approved by the Japanese government to use paper tubes as a structural material in the construction of a permanent building.

The Vasarely Pavilion was Ban’s outdoor seating area meant to last one week in Aix-en-Provence, France (2006). The tension and compression of the joints and the hexagonal shape of the structure evoke the forms of geodesic dome designer Buckminster Fuller.

This chair has detachable legs made of industrial-strength paper tubes (1997). When removed for storage, the legs fit inside the continuous bent plywood seat.

Ban’s weekend residence, the Paper House in Lake Yamanaka, Yamanashi, Japan, from “Shigeru Ban: Paper in Architecture.”

Japanese architect Shigeru Ban ingeniously incorporates paper as a structural element in the schools, temporary exhibition spaces and refugee shelters he designs. You can get a sense of how striking the effect can be in the getaway, pictured above, he built for himself in 1995. It uses 110 paper tubes in an S-curve to both create walls and support the roof.
Recently, the art book company Rizzoli published “Shigeru Ban: Paper in Architecture,” a 232-page monograph on his work with a focus on his humanitarian efforts.

By: Deborah Netburn
Los Angeles Times
December 16,2009

From left, Bill Murray, John Belushi and Steve Carell. Second City, the improvisational troupe that changed the tone of comedy, commemorated its 50th anniversary with shows, parties and panel discussions.

By LARRY ROHTER
NY TimesPublished: December 15, 2009

CHICAGO — On a frigid Wednesday night in December 1959, a revolution in comedy began here, almost unobserved. In a partly refurbished Chinese laundry in a bohemian neighborhood, a small improvisational troupe calling itself the Second City took to the stage for the first time to satirize the foibles of the Eisenhower era for an audience of barely 100, with a few bentwood chairs the only props.

Since that initial Dec. 16, millions have attended Second City shows or watched the troupe’s scores of alumni on television or in films. Second City is often likened variously to a comedy factory, farm team, finishing school or “Harvard of humor,” and its graduates include Alan Arkin and Joan Rivers from the early years, Bill Murray, Chris Farley and Mike Myers from later eras and Tina Fey and Stephen Colbert more recently.

Now ensconced in larger quarters just down the street in Old Town, but with the same style of chairs still onstage, Second City commemorated its 50th anniversary over the weekend with shows, parties and panel discussions that, more than one performer said, “felt like a high school reunion.” Highlights will be broadcast as a TBS special next June and will soon be posted at the troupe’s Web site, secondcity.com. But with the entertainment industry struggling to adapt to shifting tastes and new modes of expression, the gathering also served another purpose: to underline how the conception and execution of what is considered funny has changed, thanks to Second City.

At the time of the company’s birth, the dominant style in American comedy was stand-up, often with a strong dollop of borscht-belt shtick. From the start, Second City stood in contrast to that approach: it emphasized an ensemble, not the individual performer; improvisation rather than a written routine; sketches instead of jokes; and intellectual rather than slapstick humor.

“We came from the theater, and that affects the way you act, construct your scenes and think about your audience,” Bernard Sahlins, the only surviving founder of Second City, said in an interview on Friday. In those early years, he added, when he auditioned performers, “I would sometimes ask, ‘Have you read Dostoyevsky? Who is the secretary of agriculture?,’ because I wanted us always to be playing at the top of our intelligence.”

Today few Second City sketches run as long as the 10 to 12 minutes that were not uncommon a half-century ago (audiences weaned on television are less patient), and there are more likely to be curse words and references to television than to 19th-century Russian literature. But the environment in which the troupe operates has changed even more drastically, which affects the expectations of the performers.

In those early years “comedy was not the economic commodity that it is now, and you weren’t practicing it for that reason,” said David Steinberg, who was part of a mid-1960s cast that also included Robert Klein and Fred Willard, went on to a successful stand-up career and today directs television shows. “It was a different kind of commitment then. We were all misfits, outsiders, University of Chicago dropouts, connecting as a group, a community. There was no plan, no other goal, no thought of getting a show or a series or doing anything other than this.”

Nowadays a stint with Second City is often just a stage in a larger career strategy whose trajectory has been established by the example of all those successful alumni. A Second City credential can confer so much credibility that “some people lie about it” at auditions, said Tami Sagher, an alumna who has written for “30 Rock” on NBC and “Psych” on USA and appeared in “Curb Your Enthusiasm” on HBO and the film “Knocked Up.” What transformed Second City into an institution with national reach was “Saturday Night Live.” The original cast included three Second City alumni — John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd and Gilda Radner — and ever since then, the company has been such a permanent pipeline for that NBC show, supplying about two dozen performers and even more writers, that staff members here recall Mr. Sahlins growing glum or irritated every time Lorne Michaels, executive producer of “Saturday Night Live,” came to see a revue.

But in retrospect, several of those who trod the path to “SNL,” as the show is often called, seemed to prefer the work they did at Second City. At a panel discussion Rachel Dratch, who left the show in 2006, said that she “felt freer here” in Chicago; Tim Kazurinsky, an early-’80s cast member, said “SNL” seemed “a little bit toothless” by comparison; and Horatio Sanz (on the air from 1998 to 2007) lamented that “at ‘SNL’ you have to have the joke on the first page” of a script, whereas Second City allowed the performer-writer to “do what you wanted to do, to put in a 30-year-old reference and say, ‘Deal with it.’ ”

Second City’s 50th anniversary occurs at a moment when the company’s influence and prestige may be at a peak, even as television itself seems desperate to find new forms and approaches. Alumni of the troupe represent three of the most highly praised shows on the air right now: Steve Carell in “The Office,” Mr. Colbert on “The Colbert Report” and Ms. Fey on “30 Rock.”

Ms. Fey was not part of the weekend’s events, though several other “30 Rock” actors and writers who also trained at Second City were, including Scott Adsit and Jack McBrayer. But an alumni reunion show on Saturday night included Mr. Colbert and Mr. Carell, who revived a surreal sketch in which they return to Mr. Colbert’s Southern hometown only to find themselves transformed into elderly black women named Shirley and Sarah.

The television show that probably most reflects a Second City sensibility, however, is “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” the Larry David series that has been nominated for 30 Emmys since 2000. Jeff Garlin and Shelley Berman, who play Mr. David’s manager and father, are products of the Second City system, just like Mr. Steinberg, who has directed several episodes, and various guest stars.

“ ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm’ could not exist without Second City,” Mr. Garlin said at a panel discussion on Sunday. That comedy series works from an outline, not a detailed script, to encourage improvisation. “It was always planned that way from the beginning, and that’s Second City,” he added.

Over the years Second City has also become a commercial brand — a notion that would probably have been fodder for the beatnik and hippie types who flocked to the troupe in its early years. It has national and international touring casts, has opened branches in places like Las Vegas and Detroit, has signed a deal a few years ago to provide comic troupes on Norwegian Cruise Line vessels, and organizes workshops for businesses on team building and communication skills.

In addition, thousands of people have enrolled in its courses that teach improvisation, and there is even a program in which college students receive credit for comedy studies. At one such class last week, undergraduates analyzed sketches on YouTube that ranged from Ernie Kovacs to the sitcom “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.”

Second City’s newest venture is a unit that will specialize in short-form video, with offices in Chicago and Los Angeles and an eye to developing material that can be made into series. In the 1970s and ’80s the Emmy-winning television show “SCTV,” with Martin Short, Catherine O’Hara, Harold Ramis, Eugene Levy and others largely from the Toronto branch, was an underground hit of sorts, and “finding the brass ring a second time is where my head is at,” said Andrew Alexander, Second City’s chief executive.

“For me, the growth now is in trying to get more on TV, which is a great way of promoting yourself,” he added. “We’ve gone the traditional road in developing TV shows and done pilots for everybody, but the stars never aligned, and now we are trying it a different way.”

Onstage here, however, the original Second City ethos and approach continue strong. The current revue, the troupe’s 97th, is called “Taming of the Flu” and pokes fun at political figures like Mayor Richard M. Daley of Chicago and the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy; includes a pointed skit on race and class; and has a third act that is totally improvised.

“What drew me here in the first place was a renegade, anti-establishment attitude that I connected with,” said Brad Morris, a member of that cast. “This is still a place where you can do whatever the hell you want, and if you do it right, when you leave here, you can write, act and even direct. Nobody here is ever a one-trick pony.”

A plan for the Hirshhorn calls for an inflatable structure that pokes through the building’s top and side, on the National Mall

By NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF
NY Times Published: December 14, 2009

I’ve never stepped onto the National Mall without feeling a mix of emotions — reverence, a flash of national solidarity, a feeling of loss — but pure delight has never been one of them.

That may soon change. For the last several months the newly appointed director of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Richard Koshalek, has been quietly at work on a plan to erect a 145-foot-tall inflatable meeting hall that would swell out of the top of the internal courtyard of the museum, which sits on the Mall midway between the White House and the Capitol.

Designed by the New York firm Diller Scofidio & Renfro, the translucent fabric structure, which would be installed twice a year, for May and October, and be packed away in storage the rest of the time, would transform one of the most somber buildings on the mall into a luminous pop landmark. It could be the most uplifting work of civic architecture built in the capital since I. M. Pei completed his East Building of the National Gallery of Art more than 30 years ago.

But it is what the project is intended to house, and to represent, that has the potential to shake up Washington. For decades government power brokers have dismissed much of contemporary culture as a playground for elites. Mr. Koshalek’s vision would challenge that mentality by using performing arts, film series and conferences to foster a wide-ranging public debate on cultural values.

Mr. Koshalek, who is known for his bubbly enthusiasm, has been a champion of architectural causes since his days as the director of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, in the late 1990s, when he helped lead the drive to build the Walt Disney Concert Hall. Later he worked behind the scenes with the city’s government agencies and cultural institutions to hire respected architects for their new buildings rather than the kind of politically connected firms that were then the norm.

He arrived at the Hirshhorn last April with a dual agenda: to raise the museum’s national profile and to put Washington in closer touch with creative life around it. Within weeks he was promoting his vision to legislators, museum directors and foreign cultural attachés.

Yet the museum he took over offered its own set of challenges. Completed in 1974, the building was one of the last major projects designed by Gordon Bunshaft, a pillar of American postwar Modernism. Its gray, drum-shaped exterior, propped up on four massive concrete legs, has a bunker-like appearance that seems to keep the city at a distance. The cylindrical courtyard, which is slightly off center in an obvious attempt to offset its formal purity, has the eerie stillness of a set from an Antonioni film.

And since the Hirshhorn is part of the Smithsonian Institution and stands on such sacred ground, any permanent addition would require the approval of the notoriously conservative Fine Arts Commission and the National Capital Planning Commission, a process that could take years.

The beauty of a temporary structure, Mr. Koshalek realized, is that he would only need to consult with the members of his own board. The budget would be around $5 million, a relatively paltry sum by the standards of recent museum expansions, even in today’s rough economic climate. And the design’s extreme flexibility — it can be blown up at a moment’s notice, and the interior can be easily reconfigured — could allow the museum to respond nimbly to cultural issues of the moment. (Worst case, if it turned out that people hated it, it could be packed away forever.)

The architects imagine the installation process as a performance piece in itself, something like watching event organizers blow up the balloons for the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. Two refrigerator-size air pumps would be used to inflate the baby-blue structure, which would fill the entire four-story courtyard and bulge out of the top. A smaller, globulelike form would swell out of the bottom of the building to create a public lounge overlooking the mall.

The aura of lightness — of a building that seems ready to float off into the sky — is counteracted by the structural systems that hold the addition in place. A gigantic tube of water, like an inner tube, encircles the interior of the structure to weigh it down. A series of big steel cables, tethered to the inner tube at one end and to a roof-level truss at the other, would wrap several times around the translucent form as it rises through the core of the building, making it resemble an uneven stack of donuts or an act of ritual bondage.

Most visitors would enter the structure through a short, tube-shaped corridor located at the seam between the lounge and the main courtyard space. In the current version of the design, which is still being refined, the lounge’s translucent blue skin becomes progressively more transparent at the base, so that visitors will be able to see out into the mall. The inner tube that would anchor this room’s outer edge serves as an informal bench.

The main hall, by contrast, would be slightly more formal. A temporary stage would be built over the courtyard’s off-center fountain, with up to 1,000 seats arranged in a semicircle around it. Further up, a few transparent areas in the fabric would allow visitors occasional views of people up in the galleries. (Given the height of the interior, the architects might consider adding one or two levels of balcony space, which would add richness to the design and take advantage of what is now a four-story-tall void.)

Will Mr. Koshalek’s vision succeed? It’s too soon to say. The project could become something Washington has never had: a real democratic forum for the debate of cultural issues as varied as, say, Hollywood morals and the impact of fundamentalism on the arts. It could also, of course, become a political punching bag.

The structure itself, if it is ever built, will be part of a long tradition of architects seeking to tap into the energy and accessibility of popular culture. It includes projects like Archigram’s 1969 Instant City, which was partly inspired by the cheap, ethereal structures of postwar Los Angeles, and Peter Cook’s 1968 Ideas Circus, an informal think tank enclosed underneath a big dome that could be packed up in trucks and moved from city to city.

Like those earlier models, the Hirshhorn project is informal, egalitarian and free of conventional hierarchies. It aims to provide an elastic framework for a more inclusive culture, one that is in a continual process of reinvention.

At a time when Washington is focused on practical issues of survival, from health care to the war in Afghanistan, it would also provide a sanctuary for speculating on the nature of the civilization we are building.

Masked Booby above, here for audio slideshow

By THOMAS LIN
NY Times Published: December 14, 2009

Twenty years ago, Theodore Cross traveled 16 time zones, from New York to Moscow, Irkutsk and Yakutsk, and finally to the tundra of the Kolyma Delta, in northeastern Siberia, to catch a coveted glimpse of an Arctic bird, the Ross’s gull. Mr. Cross did spot one gull, but its nest was overtaken by a parasitic jaeger before he could return with his blind and his long telephoto lens. The trip was a failure.

Two weeks later, the unexpected happened: a Ross’s gull showed up in Baltimore. Thousands of birders converged on the spot for the rare sighting.

“They call it the bird that launched 20,000 binoculars,” Mr. Cross said.

His 344-page volume, “Waterbirds” (W. W. Norton & Company), is part visual encyclopedia, part memoir of a nearly half-century pursuit of birds. In intimate portraits of birds, like tiny sandpipers and the “flying boxcar” of a bar-tailed godwit, and in personal anecdotes of his birding adventures, Mr. Cross, 85, describes how he spent the first half of his life oblivious to birds only to become one of their most ardent photographers and advocates in the second half. Now, he writes, “the memories of them help me accept the brevity of the time that lies ahead.”

Among his favorites are the roseate spoonbill, which was hunted to near extinction a century ago for pink plumes to adorn women’s hats, but has been making a comeback.

The red-tailed tropicbird of Christmas Island is known for its acrobatics. At midday Mr. Cross said, “they take to the air and engage in unbelievable pirouettes, somersaults in a deafening clatter of noise.”

The bar-tailed godwit flies 6,800 miles each year from Alaska to New Zealand without food, water or rest in what Mr. Cross calls “one of nature’s miracles.” And the semipalmated sandpiper, small enough to fit into a teacup, migrates between South America and the Arctic, “through gales and hurricanes, over mountains and ocean.”

“Birds are very much like people in some ways,” Mr. Cross said. “The reddish egret will pretend it’s leaving its nest, the way humans sometimes pretend they’ve lost interest in a boyfriend or girlfriend. But sure enough, they’re going to come back.”

The white tern is incredibly friendly. “If you visit any island in the South Pacific,” he said, “a dozen or more of these little guys will come out and greet you.”

Mr. Cross hopes someday to capture the perfect picture, which he describes as “two reddish egrets in courtship with their fantastic feathers flared up and pointed to the sky.”

By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Times Published: December 13, 2009

When I first began writing for The Times, I was naïve about many things. But my biggest misconception was this: I actually believed that influential people could be moved by evidence, that they would change their views if events completely refuted their beliefs.

And to be fair, it does happen now and then. I’ve been highly critical of Alan Greenspan over the years (since long before it was fashionable), but give the former Fed chairman credit: he has admitted that he was wrong about the ability of financial markets to police themselves.

But he’s a rare case. Just how rare was demonstrated by what happened last Friday in the House of Representatives, when — with the meltdown caused by a runaway financial system still fresh in our minds, and the mass unemployment that meltdown caused still very much in evidence — every single Republican and 27 Democrats voted against a quite modest effort to rein in Wall Street excesses.

Let’s recall how we got into our current mess.

America emerged from the Great Depression with a tightly regulated banking system. The regulations worked: the nation was spared major financial crises for almost four decades after World War II. But as the memory of the Depression faded, bankers began to chafe at the restrictions they faced. And politicians, increasingly under the influence of free-market ideology, showed a growing willingness to give bankers what they wanted.

The first big wave of deregulation took place under Ronald Reagan — and quickly led to disaster, in the form of the savings-and-loan crisis of the 1980s. Taxpayers ended up paying more than 2 percent of G.D.P., the equivalent of around $300 billion today, to clean up the mess.

But the proponents of deregulation were undaunted, and in the decade leading up to the current crisis politicians in both parties bought into the notion that New Deal-era restrictions on bankers were nothing but pointless red tape. In a memorable 2003 incident, top bank regulators staged a photo-op in which they used garden shears and a chainsaw to cut up stacks of paper representing regulations.

And the bankers — liberated both by legislation that removed traditional restrictions and by the hands-off attitude of regulators who didn’t believe in regulation — responded by dramatically loosening lending standards. The result was a credit boom and a monstrous real estate bubble, followed by the worst economic slump since the Great Depression. Ironically, the effort to contain the crisis required government intervention on a much larger scale than would have been needed to prevent the crisis in the first place: government rescues of troubled institutions, large-scale lending by the Federal Reserve to the private sector, and so on.

Given this history, you might have expected the emergence of a national consensus in favor of restoring more-effective financial regulation, so as to avoid a repeat performance. But you would have been wrong.

Talk to conservatives about the financial crisis and you enter an alternative, bizarro universe in which government bureaucrats, not greedy bankers, caused the meltdown. It’s a universe in which government-sponsored lending agencies triggered the crisis, even though private lenders actually made the vast majority of subprime loans. It’s a universe in which regulators coerced bankers into making loans to unqualified borrowers, even though only one of the top 25 subprime lenders was subject to the regulations in question.

Oh, and conservatives simply ignore the catastrophe in commercial real estate: in their universe the only bad loans were those made to poor people and members of minority groups, because bad loans to developers of shopping malls and office towers don’t fit the narrative.

In part, the prevalence of this narrative reflects the principle enunciated by Upton Sinclair: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” As Democrats have pointed out, three days before the House vote on banking reform Republican leaders met with more than 100 financial-industry lobbyists to coordinate strategies. But it also reflects the extent to which the modern Republican Party is committed to a bankrupt ideology, one that won’t let it face up to the reality of what happened to the U.S. economy.

So it’s up to the Democrats — and more specifically, since the House has passed its bill, it’s up to “centrist” Democrats in the Senate. Are they willing to learn something from the disaster that has overtaken the U.S. economy, and get behind financial reform?

Let’s hope so. For one thing is clear: if politicians refuse to learn from the history of the recent financial crisis, they will condemn all of us to repeat it.