ABITARE – 04.06.2010
By: Edward Franken

The wheel of fortune
Every morning, two lives touch where a white drum grazes traffic on an LA freeway.
I saw her again. I thought I recognised those white knuckles clutching the wheel as if a lifetime’s concentration and rage was coming together round the black leather steering wheel. I felt the tenseness of those muscles, the slightly bent arms, the outward-raised elbows, the cold electric shock moving upwards from her shoulders into her neck, the straight back almost rammed into the seat. I’d been watching her for several days, always just a few seconds. The first time was when I hurried out of my room after hearing noises on the stairs, thinking maybe someone wanted to enter Timmy’s room. Timmy was nice to everyone, but he was weak, too fragile, and never closed the door of his new home. He was lonely and could never get used to everything being so clean. Someone might call by to give him something. He had it going and always managed to get some painkillers, which he mixed with wine. When he first arrived, the staff tried to persuade him that he couldn’t bring in all the junk-filled shopping carts he’d been pushing around for years between Fourth and Sixth. Timmy went mad, he fell onto the sidewalk and cut his calf muscle on a piece of broken glass. The center’s entire staff was paralysed. Some were kids fresh from college who never imagined something like that could happen on their first day. Timmy roared that they couldn’t stop a Nam veteran from holding on to his memories. I knew very well this wasn’t true. For years Timmy had got by on a social security number that wasn’t his – he’d probably stolen it from some drunk under the freeway overpass where they hung out during the winter. And then he showed up at the center. I turned away because I didn’t want him to recognise me. He saw me when I looked good, on the top of my game, when no one could touch me, and now I’m here. He got out of the patrol car. He went up to Timmy. He sat down and folded his legs, like he was doing yoga. The fabric of his uniform pants clung to his leg muscles, shining in the sunlight. He spoke slowly to Timmy, trying to calm him down. Timmy let a nurse bandage his leg while he went on talking, nodding his head. His partner called someone on the police radio. For a while everyone just stood there in the morning sunshine.

I looked at the white wall that reflected the sun onto the asphalt, pretending I was studying a column of ants marching out of a crack in the wall. Then a van showed up and took away Timmy’s shopping carts. He talked to the driver. It was a cousin of his who had a garage nearby and would keep Timmy’s stuff there, so he could get to it whenever he wanted. He discovered me that day, by chance. There wasn’t supposed to be a patrol car there, they had arranged everything pretty well, but then two trucks collided a block away and he was on duty. Now I’m here after a few years inside. The case fell under county jurisdiction; otherwise things would have turned out worse. While I was inside they paid me to keep my mouth shut, but when I was released I was no use to them any more. The one who had the hidden microphones was found in a car trunk three weeks later. He was so bloated they couldn’t squeeze him into the casket. The first time I saw her was through the window on the stair landing. Nobody wanted to get into the room where Timmy was snoring on his unmade bed. There were just two nurses who had gone up there to smoke a cigarette. They looked at me angrily because now I had something on them. I turned round to get away from their hatred, and that was when I saw her. She had taken the downtown exit in her black BMW. The sun was shining through the window, so I could see her clearly. I noticed her white hands immediately. The window was open and her light brown hair was blowing in the breeze. She was wearing dark glasses with slender frames and I was struck by her mouth. Her thin lips were closed and she seemed to be smiling. Now I go out on the landing every day, early in the morning, just to catch a glimpse of her. She looks so focused and alert, always choosing the right moment to change lanes, slow down, join the stream of traffic from Santa Ana, and take the 101. She remembers me about how I used to be worried about every detail, about being perfect.

Now I am sure I know her. He doesn’t ask me anything. I don’t have to prove anything to him, like whether I’m good-looking or competent or know how to do my job. He’s there every morning. He seems to be watching me, smiling at me, as if he knows who I am. I’ve had it up to here. They wanted to get rid of me because they said I was only there because I was Creeley’s lover. But it was not true; they deliberately spread the rumour because they wanted me out. In every meeting they asked me twice as many questions as they did the others. All my routines, everything I did was scrutinised by committees and other departments. But I never put a foot wrong, except for getting the job by mistake because the senator’s son had been involved in a hunting accident on the day of the interview. I came from nowhere; a hairdresser’s daughter from Arizona who didn’t even know who her father was but ended up studying law with all those kids from well-off families. When I first met the D.A. he asked me to bring him a coffee. But now, after the case last year, the job is mine and they can’t touch me anymore. Now those four shitheads from Santa Barbara, with their plastic wives, their golf, their horses, their French wines, have to eat my shit. It’s a strange-looking place. Until last year it was covered in scaffolding, then they took it down and you could see a kind of white shell. I like the way it sparkles. When I see it I know I’m almost there, under five minutes barring traffic jams and accidents. I like drifting slowly right out of the Santa Monica lane, looking in the mirror to see if there’s anyone coming up behind me. It’s like time has been suspended for a few moments. There he is, he’s still there. I like his face; I can see from here that he’s got really dark eyes. It’s like he’s staring at me. I’m past the building now; the shell is in my rear-view mirror. I’m just about there. They say Los Angeles is huge, but to me it’s small.

If I stray from my normal route I get lost, it all looks the same to me, too many palm-trees. Everything is close by; home, work, the place where I first realised that I could make it and that I could stop busting my ass for a bunch of incompetents, and all this only a stone’s throw from the white shell. It was a fluke, sheer good luck. I just happened to be on duty the night they nabbed that shipment from the port and we put them all inside and reconstructed the entire network. I still remember Graham’s face when he saw my signature on the first of the warrants and nearly choked on his coffee, the fat bastard. No one said anything, not one word, meek as lambs. There was a snooty, good-looking guy, always dressed like a king, who tried to make me feel inferior. He really got up my nose. He would never cut me any slack, I asked for fifteen and he got six, just because Rosentein defended him. If it hadn’t been for the wire-tapping, I’d still be dealing with foreclosures. And look at me now. Who knows what’s inside that white building? I’m going to find out now.

Thanks to Nate Lentz

Arbitare

By DAVID BROOKS
NY Times Published: April 5, 2010

According to recent polls, 60 percent of Americans think the country is heading in the wrong direction. The same percentage believe that the U.S. is in long-term decline. The political system is dysfunctional. A fiscal crisis looks unavoidable. There are plenty of reasons to be gloomy.

But if you want to read about them, stop right here. This column is a great luscious orgy of optimism. Because the fact is, despite all the problems, America’s future is exceedingly bright.

Over the next 40 years, demographers estimate that the U.S. population will surge by an additional 100 million people, to 400 million over all. The population will be enterprising and relatively young. In 2050, only a quarter will be over 60, compared with 31 percent in China and 41 percent in Japan.

In his book, “The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050,” über-geographer Joel Kotkin sketches out how this growth will change the national landscape. Extrapolating from current trends, he describes an archipelago of vibrant suburban town centers, villages and urban cores.

The initial wave of suburbanization was sprawling and featureless. Tom Wolfe once observed that you only knew you were in a new town when you began to see a new set of 7-Elevens. But humans need meaningful places, so developers have been filling in with neo-downtowns — suburban gathering spots where people can dine, work, go to the movies and enjoy public space.

Over the next 40 years, Kotkin argues, urban downtowns will continue their modest (and perpetually overhyped) revival, but the real action will be out in the compact, self-sufficient suburban villages. Many of these places will be in the sunbelt — the drive to move there remains strong — but Kotkin also points to surging low-cost hubs on the Plains, like Fargo, Dubuque, Iowa City, Sioux Falls, and Boise.

The demographic growth is driven partly by fertility. The American fertility rate is 50 percent higher than Russia, Germany or Japan, and much higher than China. Americans born between 1968 and 1979 are more family-oriented than the boomers before them, and are having larger families.

In addition, the U.S. remains a magnet for immigrants. Global attitudes about immigration are diverging, and the U.S. is among the best at assimilating them (while China is exceptionally poor). As a result, half the world’s skilled immigrants come to the U.S. As Kotkin notes, between 1990 and 2005, immigrants started a quarter of the new venture-backed public companies.

The United States already measures at the top or close to the top of nearly every global measure of economic competitiveness. A comprehensive 2008 Rand Corporation study found that the U.S. leads the world in scientific and technological development. The U.S. now accounts for a third of the world’s research-and-development spending. Partly as a result, the average American worker is nearly 10 times more productive than the average Chinese worker, a gap that will close but not go away in our lifetimes.

This produces a lot of dynamism. As Stephen J. Rose points out in his book “Rebound: Why America Will Emerge Stronger From the Financial Crisis,” the number of Americans earning between $35,000 and $70,000 declined by 12 percent between 1980 and 2008. But that’s largely because the number earning over $105,000 increased by 14 percent. Over the past 10 years, 60 percent of American adults made more than $100,000 in at least one or two of those years, and 40 percent had incomes that high for at least three.

As the world gets richer, demand will rise for the sorts of products Americans are great at providing — emotional experiences. Educated Americans grow up in a culture of moral materialism; they have their sensibilities honed by complicated shows like “The Sopranos,” “The Wire” and “Mad Men,” and they go on to create companies like Apple, with identities coated in moral and psychological meaning, which affluent consumers crave.

As the rising generation leads an economic revival, it will also participate in a communal one. We are living in a global age of social entrepreneurship.

In 1964, there were 15,000 foundations in the U.S. By 2001, there were 61,000. In 2007, total private giving passed $300 billion. Participation in organizations like City Year, Teach for America, and College Summit surges every year. Suburbanization helps. For every 10 percent reduction in population density, the odds that people will join a local club rise by 15 percent. The culture of service is now entrenched and widespread.

In sum, the U.S. is on the verge of a demographic, economic and social revival, built on its historic strengths. The U.S. has always been good at disruptive change. It’s always excelled at decentralized community-building. It’s always had that moral materialism that creates meaning-rich products. Surely a country with this much going for it is not going to wait around passively and let a rotten political culture drag it down.

Through April 10, 2010

Richardson

By STEPHANIE CLIFFORD
NY Times Published: April 4, 2010

LOS ANGELES — Jordan Yospe had some notes on the script for “The 28th Amendment,” a thriller about a president and a rogue Special Forces agent on the run. Some of the White House scenes were not detailed enough, Mr. Yospe thought. And, he suggested, the heroes should stop for a snack while they were on the lam.

“There’s no fast-food scene at all, but they have to eat,” he said.

Mr. Yospe was not a screenwriter, not a producer, not even a studio executive. No, Mr. Yospe was a lawyer with the firm Manatt, Phelps & Phillips. He was meeting with the writer-producer Roberto Orci, who co-wrote “Transformers” and “Star Trek,” to talk about how to include brands in “The 28th Amendment.”

In the past, studio executives made deals to include products in films. Now, with the help of people like Mr. Yospe, writers and producers themselves are cutting the deals often before the movie is cast or the script is fully shaped, like “The 28th Amendment,” which Warner Brothers has agreed to distribute.

Now, having Campbell’s Soup or Chrysler associated with your project can be nearly as important to your pitch as signing Tom Cruise.

“The cost of movies is going up, and that really drives almost everything,” said Jack Epps, the co-writer of “Top Gun” who is chairman of the writing division at University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts. “If you want to catch an executive’s attention right now, it’s not just selling the script, but you’re showing them how to create a brand.”

For the moviegoer, the shift will mean that advertising will become more integral to the movie. The change may not be obvious at first, but the devil is going to wear a lot more Prada.

Manufacturers can stipulate that a clothing label must be tried on “in a positive manner,” or candy or hamburgers have to be eaten “judiciously.” A liquor company might sponsor a film only if there is no underage drinking or if the bar where its product is served is chic rather than seedy.

The more intricately a film involves a product, the more a brand pays for the appearance, offering fees ranging from a few hundred thousand dollars to several million a film.

Writers say this helps them work in brands gracefully, rather than finding out later that studio executives have jammed in products at the last minute. “The pressure to integrate is always there,” Mr. Orci said. “It’s got to be done realistically.”

So writers are taking charge. In the 2009 film “Up in the Air,” Jason Reitman, the writer and director, wanted a real hotel brand for his frequent-flying character.

As a Hilton HHonors Diamond V.I.P. member himself, Mr. Reitman urged the studio to make a deal with Hilton, which offered free lodging for the crew, sets and promotions of the film on everything from key cards to in-room televisions to toll-free hold messages. Hilton worked with the production company to make sure everything from staff uniforms to hotel shuttles was portrayed correctly.

Deals like that mean lower-budget movies like “Up in the Air” can be made. They also mean movie viewers are increasingly paying to see more elaborately constructed advertising.

That is one reason that screenwriters’ groups like Writers Guild of America-West have objected to the practice, and some writers are worried about further product placement.

“I think it’s lazy writing,” said Mary Gallagher, a screenwriter and instructor at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.

Product placement certainly is not new — the Lumière brothers agreed to include Lever Brothers’ Sunlight soap in the 1896 film “Washing Day in Switzerland.”

But it has become far more aggressive on television, where Mr. Yospe cut his teeth, wedging brands into shows like “Survivor” and “The Apprentice” while he was general counsel at Mark Burnett Productions.

“People were blaming me personally for ‘Apprentice,’ destroying television with so many brands,” he said. Where the original “Apprentice” contestants were selling lemonade, he said, by the second season, they were producing M&M’s candy. “You start running out of things creatively to do if you have no resources, no money,” he said.

While Mr. Yospe often writes dialogue, in the meeting with Mr. Orci, he was suggesting types of advertisers to include. (Mr. Orci’s father, Roberto Orci, who is president of the advertising agency Acento, and his staff joined the meeting to discuss how brands might help market the movie.)

“You’ve written Gray has a Dodge Ram,” Mr. Yospe began, discussing a character. “Does it have to be a Dodge?’

“What’s wrong with Dodge? What have you got against Dodge?” said Mr. Orci, a soft-spoken 36-year-old.

The group began debating. In the script, Gray is described as “soldier-fit” but with “psychic damage.” Could someone like that drive, say, a Lincoln Navigator?

“That’s a mom’s car,” moaned Genesis Capunitan, an Acento executive.

Once Mr. Yospe gets clearance from the writer-producers, Mr. Orci and Alex Kurtzman, he will strike a few types of deals.

One is a straight payment, which usually runs in the mid-six to mid-seven figures, Mr. Yospe said. The second is a barter arrangement, where, say, a hotel puts up the cast and crew in exchange for being featured in the film. In the third kind, companies help market the film, as Hilton and American Airlines did for “Up in the Air.”

Mr. Yospe, who takes a percentage of the integration fees, said he was happy to work with studios, and he provided a direct path to writer-producers that a studio might not get. “Major talent like Bob Orci has it in his contract that he doesn’t have to do that sort of stuff,” Mr. Yospe said.

Indeed, Mr. Orci had mixed reactions to Mr. Yospe’s suggestions. Involving a fast-food restaurant was difficult — would a missing American president order a triple Whopper with cheese without attracting attention? One of Mr. Yospe’s ideas, though, he thought was strong.

On Page 16 of the draft, Lt. Col. Madigan Gray, the special forces officer, flirts with his girlfriend, Anna, at the bar where she works. In the next scene, the two are in bed. “It’s love,” the script says. “This woman is Gray’s anchor to emotionality he keeps locked down.”

Which is why he’s not thrilled to say, the script continues, “I’m going away again.”

Where the writers saw an anchor to emotionality, Mr. Yospe saw a selling opportunity. Could they add a brand-name trinket that Anna gives Gray as a good-luck charm, something like a bottle opener from her bar, he asked. They could charge even more if Gray used the keepsake later on.

“That’s cool,” Mr. Orci said, nodding. “If they can have that trinket in bars with the movie’s name on it? That’s smooth.”

“And it adds a little emotion,” Mr. Yospe said.

“Look at you!” said Mr. Orci, chuckling.

“Look at me,” Mr. Yospe said.

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
NY Times Published: April 3, 2010

Here’s my fun fact for the day, provided courtesy of Robert Litan, who directs research at the Kauffman Foundation, which specializes in promoting innovation in America: “Between 1980 and 2005, virtually all net new jobs created in the U.S. were created by firms that were 5 years old or less,” said Litan. “That is about 40 million jobs. That means the established firms created no new net jobs during that period.”

Message: If we want to bring down unemployment in a sustainable way, neither rescuing General Motors nor funding more road construction will do it. We need to create a big bushel of new companies — fast. We’ve got to get more Americans working again for their own dignity — and to generate the rising incomes and wealth we need to pay for existing entitlements, as well as all the new investments we’ll need to make. It was just reported that Social Security this year will pay out more in benefits than it receives in payroll taxes — a red line we were not expected to cross until at least 2016.

But you cannot say this often enough: Good-paying jobs don’t come from bailouts. They come from start-ups. And where do start-ups come from? They come from smart, creative, inspired risk-takers. How do we get more of those? There are only two ways: grow more by improving our schools or import more by recruiting talented immigrants. Surely, we need to do both, and we need to start by breaking the deadlock in Congress over immigration, so we can develop a much more strategic approach to attracting more of the world’s creative risk-takers. “Roughly 25 percent of successful high-tech start-ups over the last decade were founded or co-founded by immigrants,” said Litan. Think Sergey Brin, the Russian-born co-founder of Google, or Vinod Khosla, the India-born co-founder of Sun Microsystems.

That is no surprise. After all, Craig Mundie, the chief research and strategy officer of Microsoft, asks: What made America this incredible engine of prosperity? It was immigration, plus free markets. Because we were so open to immigration — and immigrants are by definition high-aspiring risk-takers, ready to leave their native lands in search of greater opportunities — “we as a country accumulated a disproportionate share of the world’s high-I.Q. risk-takers.”

In addition, because of our vibrant and meritocratic university system, the best foreign students who wanted the best education also came here, and many of them also stayed. In its heyday, our unique system also attracted a disproportionate share of high-I.Q. risk-takers to high government service. So when you put all this together, with our free markets and democracy, it made it easy here for creative, high-I.Q. risk-takers to raise capital for their ideas and commercialize them. In short, America had a very powerful, self-reinforcing engine for growing innovative new companies.

“When you get this happy coincidence of high-I.Q. risk-takers in government and a society that is biased toward high-I.Q. risk-takers, you get these above-average returns as a country,” argued Mundie. “What is common to Singapore, Israel and America? They were all built by high-I.Q. risk-takers and all thrived — but only in the U.S. did it happen at a large scale and with global diversity, so you had this really rich cross-section.”

What is worrisome about America today is the combination of cutbacks in higher education, restrictions on immigration and a toxic public space that dissuades talented people from going into government. Together, all of these trends are slowly eating away at our differentiated edge in attracting and enabling the world’s biggest mass of smart, creative risk-takers.

It isn’t drastic, but it is a decline — at a time when technology is allowing other countries to leverage and empower more of their own high-I.Q. risk-takers. If we don’t reverse this trend, over time, “we could lose our most important competitive edge — the only edge from which sustainable advantage accrues” — having the world’s biggest and most diverse pool of high-I.Q. risk-takers, said Mundie. “If we don’t have that competitive edge, our standard of living will eventually revert to the global mean.”

Right now we have thousands of foreign students in America and one million engineers, scientists and other highly skilled workers here on H-1B temporary visas, which require them to return home when the visas expire. That’s nuts. “We ought to have a ‘job-creators visa’ for people already here,” said Litan. “And once you’ve hired, say, 5 or 10 American nonfamily members, you should get a green card.”

We need health care, financial reform and education reform. But we also need to be thinking just as seriously and urgently about what are the ingredients that foster entrepreneurship — how new businesses are catalyzed, inspired and enabled and how we enlist more people to do that — so no one ever says about America what that officer says to Tom Cruise in “Top Gun”: “Son, your ego’s writing checks your body can’t cash.”

By STEVEN GREENHOUSE
NY Times Published: April 2, 2010

With job openings scarce for young people, the number of unpaid internships has climbed in recent years, leading federal and state regulators to worry that more employers are illegally using such internships for free labor.

Convinced that many unpaid internships violate minimum wage laws, officials in Oregon, California and other states have begun investigations and fined employers. Last year, M. Patricia Smith, then New York’s labor commissioner, ordered investigations into several firms’ internships. Now, as the federal Labor Department’s top law enforcement official, she and the wage and hour division are stepping up enforcement nationwide.

Many regulators say that violations are widespread, but that it is unusually hard to mount a major enforcement effort because interns are often afraid to file complaints. Many fear they will become known as troublemakers in their chosen field, endangering their chances with a potential future employer.

The Labor Department says it is cracking down on firms that fail to pay interns properly and expanding efforts to educate companies, colleges and students on the law regarding internships.

“If you’re a for-profit employer or you want to pursue an internship with a for-profit employer, there aren’t going to be many circumstances where you can have an internship and not be paid and still be in compliance with the law,” said Nancy J. Leppink, the acting director of the department’s wage and hour division.

Ms. Leppink said many employers failed to pay even though their internships did not comply with the six federal legal criteria that must be satisfied for internships to be unpaid. Among those criteria are that the internship should be similar to the training given in a vocational school or academic institution, that the intern does not displace regular paid workers and that the employer “derives no immediate advantage” from the intern’s activities — in other words, it’s largely a benevolent contribution to the intern.

No one keeps official count of how many paid and unpaid internships there are, but Lance Choy, director of the Career Development Center at Stanford University, sees definitive evidence that the number of unpaid internships is mushrooming — fueled by employers’ desire to hold down costs and students’ eagerness to gain experience for their résumés. Employers posted 643 unpaid internships on Stanford’s job board this academic year, more than triple the 174 posted two years ago.

In 2008, the National Association of Colleges and Employers found that 83 percent of graduating students had held internships, up from 9 percent in 1992. This means hundreds of thousands of students hold internships each year; some experts estimate that one-fourth to one-half are unpaid.

In California, officials have issued guidance letters advising employers whether they are breaking the law, while Oregon regulators have unearthed numerous abuses.

“We’ve had cases where unpaid interns really were displacing workers and where they weren’t being supervised in an educational capacity,” said Bob Estabrook, spokesman for Oregon’s labor department. His department recently handled complaints involving two individuals at a solar panel company who received $3,350 in back pay after claiming that they were wrongly treated as unpaid interns.

Many students said they had held internships that involved noneducational menial work. To be sure, many internships involve some unskilled work, but when the jobs are mostly drudgery, regulators say, it is clearly illegal not to pay interns.

One Ivy League student said she spent an unpaid three-month internship at a magazine packaging and shipping 20 or 40 apparel samples a day back to fashion houses that had provided them for photo shoots.

At Little Airplane, a Manhattan children’s film company, an N.Y.U. student who hoped to work in animation during her unpaid internship said she was instead assigned to the facilities department and ordered to wipe the door handles each day to minimize the spread of swine flu.

Tone Thyne, a senior producer at Little Airplane, said its internships were usually highly educational and often led to good jobs.

Concerned about the effect on their future job prospects, some unpaid interns declined to give their names or to name their employers when they described their experiences in interviews.

While many colleges are accepting more moderate- and low-income students to increase economic mobility, many students and administrators complain that the growth in unpaid internships undercuts that effort by favoring well-to-do and well-connected students, speeding their climb up the career ladder.

Many less affluent students say they cannot afford to spend their summers at unpaid internships, and in any case, they often do not have an uncle or family golf buddy who can connect them to a prestigious internship.

Brittany Berckes, an Amherst senior who interned at a cable news station that she declined to identify, said her parents were not delighted that she worked a summer unpaid.

“Some of my friends can’t take these internships and spend a summer without making any money because they have to help pay for their own tuition or help their families with finances,” she said. “That makes them less competitive candidates for jobs after graduation.”

Of course, many internships — paid or unpaid — serve as valuable steppingstones that help young people land future jobs. “Internships have become the gateway into the white-collar work force,” said Ross Perlin, a Stanford graduate and onetime unpaid intern who is writing a book on the subject. “Employers increasingly want experience for entry-level jobs, and many students see the only way to get that is through unpaid internships.”

Trudy Steinfeld, director of N.Y.U.’s Office of Career Services, said she increasingly had to ride herd on employers to make sure their unpaid internships were educational. She recently confronted a midsize law firm that promised one student an educational $10-an-hour internship. The student complained that the firm was not paying him and was requiring him to make coffee and sweep out bathrooms.

Ms. Steinfeld said some industries, most notably film, were known for unpaid internships, but she said other industries were embracing the practice, seeing its advantages.

“A few famous banks have called and said, ‘We’d like to do this,’ ” Ms. Steinfeld said. “I said, ‘No way. You will not list on this campus.’ ”

Dana John, an N.Y.U. senior, spent an unpaid summer at a company that books musical talent, spending much of her days photocopying, filing and responding to routine e-mail messages for her boss.

“It would have been nice to be paid, but at this point, it’s so expected of me to do this for free,” she said. “If you want to be in the music industry that’s the way it works. If you want to get your foot in the door somehow, this is the easiest way to do it. You suck it up.”

The rules for unpaid interns are less strict for non-profit groups like charities because people are allowed to do volunteer work for non-profits.

California and some other states require that interns receive college credit as a condition of being unpaid. But federal regulators say that receiving college credit does not necessarily free companies from paying interns, especially when the internship involves little training and mainly benefits the employer.

Many employers say the Labor Department’s six criteria need updating because they are based on a Supreme Court decision from 1947, when many apprenticeships were for blue-collar production work.

Camille A. Olson, a lawyer based in Chicago who represents many employers, said: “One criterion that is hard to meet and needs updating is that the intern not perform any work to the immediate advantage of the employer. In my experience, many employers agreed to hire interns because there is very strong mutual advantage to both the worker and the employer. There should be a mutual benefit test.”

Kathyrn Edwards, a researcher at the Economic Policy Institute and co-author of a new study on internships, told of a female intern who brought a sexual harassment complaint that was dismissed because the intern was not an employee.

“A serious problem surrounding unpaid interns is they are often not considered employees and therefore are not protected by employment discrimination laws,” she said.

I do not see how permitting open homosexuality in these communities enhances their prospects of success in battle. Indeed, I believe repealing “don’t ask, don’t tell” will weaken the warrior culture at a time when we have a fight on our hands.
—General Merrill A. McPeak, former Air Force Chief of Staff, on the Op-Ed page of the Times.

The New Yorker
by Paul Rudnick
March 22, 2010

My name is Marine Corporal Roger T., and I am one gay soldier who agrees wholeheartedly with General McPeak, although I think that he doesn’t go far enough. Because my staying closeted, in fact, makes me a better soldier, through what I term sublimation. For example: Right before heading out into a firefight with Iraqi insurgents, I always imagine myself at the beach with Merrill A. McPeak, both of us in helmets, camouflage-print Speedos, combat boots, and sunglasses. I picture myself rubbing sunblock all over the luscious, leathery hide of General McPeak, and the adrenaline rockets through my veins, and by the time I leave the Green Zone I’m ready to kill anything that moves, and then make savage, passionate love to its corpse. I’m at what I like to call my sensual, combat-ready McPeak.

As a gay man, I naturally spend much of my time debating casting issues involving the musical theatre, although, thankfully, I can’t share such thoughts with my unit. Instead, when I spot a potential suicide bomber, I think of him as someone who insists that Tyne Daly was the greatest Mama Rose of all time, even better than Merman. This makes me so enraged, and my aim grows so steady, that I can pick off the bomber with a single well-flung grenade, while shouting to myself, “Tyne was appealing, but she didn’t have a shred of Angela Lansbury’s esprit, or Patti LuPone’s thwarted fury! Anyone who ranks Tyne over Patti deserves to die! ” It’s called valor.

General McPeak speaks movingly of unit cohesion. He says, “We know, or ought to, that warriors are inspired by male bonding, by comradeship, by the knowledge that they survive only through relying on each other. To undermine cohesion is to endanger everyone.” To which I say, Sing it, sister. I love male bonding more than anything, and I live for unit cohesion. Just the sound of the words makes me tingle with manly aggression. Whenever I see my unit, or anyone’s unit, all I want to do is cohere. I embrace my unit, with both hands, and I draw it to me, again and again, in a vigorous manly embrace, often until the guy on the top bunk says, “Roger, calm down. That Vogue is from two months ago.”

If I were to serve openly as a homosexual, nothing would be the same. Slaughtering terrorists just wouldn’t feel special. It would be, like, Yeah, so today I detonated a bunker filled with snipers, and then I texted my boyfriend, and I agreed that we should only use cerulean for an accent wall. Big whoop. But now, when I have to be more coded and paranoid, every time I strap on my body armor and hoist my M16 I can think, Hey, Mr. Jihad, how about a brunch date with my rocket launcher? I’m not an openly gay soldier; I’m a secret gay soldier, and that makes me fierce! I’m Project Gunway!

General McPeak also notes that “to prepare warriors for a life of hardship, the military must remain a kind of adventure, apart from the civilian world, and full of strange customs.” It’s heaven. I like to think of the military as the most exciting video game, or a sweeps-week episode of “Survivor,” or a big butch drama club, where you get to shoot the parents and friends who don’t applaud hard enough. That’s why soldiers like to give one another stirring nicknames, like Maverick or Big Dog or Little Miss Bazooka. Scourging the enemy is a grand adventure, like climbing Mt. Everest with your buddies, and then hitting the sauna and joshing about whether someone named Merrill is really a dude you can count on.

I’ve been so inspired by General McPeak’s words that I’ve had a vision of a truly masculine, all-man military extravaganza. Why can’t we talk to all our enemies, maybe at the U.N., and agree that, from now on, war will be like the original Olympic Games, fought by only the manliest combatants, in the nude. Wouldn’t that be the ultimate expression of camaraderie and adventure and unit cohesion? In a nude war, I’d be proud to have my buddies’ backs, and their fronts.

I know that some people might be wondering, What place would women have in such a man’s war? And my answer is that, just like openly gay males, the ladies should stay home, while we defend them. For once, let’s blast through all the politically correct nonsense, and have a real war, with platoon after platoon of hot, disciplined, gung-ho guys charging directly at the penises and scrotums of the opposing forces. I’d be proud to serve in that Army, and to take my place beside Merrill and the other two or three elderly fellows who still oppose allowing gays to serve openly. Naked old men with guns—now you’re talking. ♦

“Not a Solitary Sign or Inscription to Even

Suggest an Ending”

April 4th-May 8th, 2010

opening and performance

Sunday, April 4th, 6-8pm

Overduin and Kite

Breaking Conventions: Michael Maltzan designs a house for a nontraditional household.

By Clifford A. Pearson
Architectural Record

“As a same-sex couple, we FELT that the old nomenclature of residential space didn’t apply to us,” states Lari Pittman, who, with his partner, Roy Dowell, challenged Michael Maltzan, FAIA, to explore the architectural ramifications of nontraditional relationships. For example, they wanted no doors or partitions between rooms. Instead, they asked Maltzan to “disrupt and dismantle the hierarchy of spaces” found in other houses and rethink conventions of privacy.

Pittman and Dowell, both respected painters and teachers, lived in a 1,200-square-foot Richard Neutra—designed house on the northern edge of Los Angeles and needed more space. Although small, their 1952 house — designed for Neutra’s secretary, Dorothy Serulnic, and her husband, George — sits on a 6-acre site that Neutra planned so it could be subdivided into three parcels. Since purchasing the entire property in 1997, Pittman and Dowell had built a small pavilion and cactus garden on the second parcel and saw how the site’s various pieces all worked together. So instead of just building a bigger house on the third parcel and using the Serulnic residence as a guesthouse, they approached the new building as an integral part of a larger composition.

Maltzan responded with a design that at first blush seems to contradict Neutra’s — introverted and opaque rather than outward-looking and transparent, polygonal rather than orthogonal. But the more you get to know his house, the more you see how it picks up Neutra’s ideas and gives them a new spin. While Maltzan certainly uses contrast as one means of relating the new to the old, his strategy is more sophisticated than simply doing the opposite of what Neutra did.

“The new house had to work with the entire environment, not just the Neutra house,” explains Maltzan. A driveway winds its way up the site with the existing home at the top, so he used that processional element to help generate an asymmetrical, spiraling geometry connecting the new building to both the cactus garden and the old residence. To anchor the dynamic composition, the architect focused certain elements — such as an internal courtyard and an oval skylight in the master bathroom — on an imposing stone-pine tree in the Neutra house’s backyard. And since the old residence looks down onto its new sibling, Maltzan designed the roof of his building as an additional facade that clearly expresses the floor plan inside.

Neutra layered space in his house, taking visitors from a relatively enclosed entry to an open living room that flows directly onto a backyard overlooking a valley and the city beyond. Maltzan reinterprets this concept, layering spaces, but in a pinwheel manner that opens each room onto the next and the jagged court in the center. Instead of unfolding in a linear progression, his plan takes visitors on a spiraling journey that offers surprising views through the house, into the court, and out to the valley. “I thought of the house as a perspective machine generating views across and through the building,” says the architect. Indeed, the house presents visitors with an almost cinematic experience, as it frames a series of shots both outside and in and offers a number of unexpected moments — such as the view of the stone pine through the oval-shaped skylight in the bathroom, and the way a wall in the library turns into a bladelike edge as you turn the corner into the bedroom.

By slicing and dissecting his seven-sided structure into a series of triangles and polygons, Maltzan creates a geometry that challenges conventional notions of household order. As soon as you enter, you can look into the master bathroom on one side or to the living room in front. From the living room, you can walk out to a covered balcony overlooking the valley or up one step to the courtyard. The bedroom on the other side of the court faces the living room with floor-to-ceiling glass (though shades can be pulled down). A galley kitchen occupies an interstitial space between the dining room and a library. Noting that the Serulnic house broke many rules when it was built, Pittman says that living in it for many years “radicalized us.”

Built on a concrete slab with hidden steel columns and laminated-wood beams, the new, 2,500-square-foot house cost $1.5 million. A conventional structural system and simple materials (plaster exterior, concrete pavers in the courtyard, and Scandinavian oak floorboards) kept expenses down. Although green-design strategies didn’t play a major role in the project, Maltzan carefully oriented the house to catch prevailing breezes and specified double-layered, UV-protected glass to reduce solar loads.

On paper, Maltzan’s design seems a bit like a mathematical conceit and an odd response to the Neutra house. But in person, it feels remarkably comfortable — more sunlit and extroverted than you might imagine, and more connected to California’s heritage of Modern architecture than it appears at first. For all its radical notions of subverting residential norms, it has an easy charm, welcoming to many types of people. Maltzan, who lives with his wife and two children in a 1920s bungalow and has never built a house for himself, says that for the first time in his career he could imagine taking up residence in one of his designs.

Thanks to Nate Lentz

Architectural Record

The New Yorker
by Nick Paumgarten
APRIL 5, 2010

SCENE: A conference room in the theatre district. Jonathan Demme, a filmmaker, is seated at a long table, facing a laptop. He is wearing an Argyle sweater and bluejeans. On the laptop’s screen is a pixellated moving image of Neil Young, who is wearing a white panama hat and a loose white button-down shirt. He and Demme are communicating via Skype. Young seems bemused, not only in the way he usually does but also in the way that inexperienced users of Skype often do in the opening moments of a call.
NEIL YOUNG: Can you hear me? Yo, yo!
JONATHAN DEMME: I can see you. Can you see us, buddy?
N.Y.: Hello?
J.D.: Hello, hello.
N.Y.: I can’t see you guys.
J.D.: Why not?
N.Y.: I don’t know.
J.D.: You’re outdoors.
(Young’s expression brightens. He waves at the screen. Contact.)
N.Y.: You guys are very silhouetted. It’s very spooky.
J.D.: Dude, you look good. What the heck. Where are you?
N.Y.: I’m right here.
J.D.: Is there a pool right over your right shoulder?
N.Y.: A pool?
J.D.: A swimming pool. Because it looks like there oughta be one there.
N.Y.: Well, it is pretty nice here in California. (Young is at home, on his ranch, south of San Francisco.) Actually, I’m in one of my play areas. Where my computer is. And my trains are back there. (In the background, there is a covered pavilion. Behind Young are mounds made of what appears to be driftwood.) Those are a bunch of mountains. It’s a mountain range. If I turn some lights on, you might be able to see it. I’ll make an adjustment. (Young gets up, strolls into the background, and flips a switch. Nothing changes. But the viewer realizes, while waiting for Young to shuffle back to his laptop, that the driftwood mounds are train-set mountains. The background is a giant model-train set.) So, whatchou guys doing?
J.D.: Well, we’re on the tenth floor of 311 West Forty-third Street. That’s where we’re rehearsing this Beth Henley play that I’m directing. We’re on a twenty-minute break.
(A discussion ensues—this Skype chat has been condensed for the benefit of the audience—about “Neil Young Trunk Show,” a film that Demme has just released, which documents a concert that Young and his band gave two years ago, near Philadelphia. It is Demme’s second Neil Young concert film.)
N.Y.: The picture is Jonathan’s. Once again, he’s done what he does, and all of a sudden there it is. He’s made an interesting document of the show, but there’s more to it than just the show, apparently. There’s something else in there, and I love it. (He bobs back and forth, only occasionally glancing up. He picks at bits of lint on his shirt and pants, as one might during a regular phone call.)

J.D.: Neil, you bring a little extra to the party—you trust the camera. You know that the camera loves you, and you’re so at ease with it. You know how to play it.
N.Y.: When you’re there, Jon, and your crew is there, I don’t worry about anything. I just forget about it. I’m going, “I don’t know if they’re on my nose hairs or my butt, and I don’t give a shit, to tell you the truth, because I know they’re professional, and it’ll look beautiful.” (Young sits up straighter and leers at the screen.) It wasn’t an entirely great performance. It was a struggle at times. The struggle to get the beat right on “No Hidden Path” was a long one, and so finally we had to settle for playing it differently. I played it faster than I normally do. Not that it would’ve been longer if I’d played it at the right tempo, but . . . (His performance of “No Hidden Path,” a Hendrixy guitar extravaganza, takes up twenty minutes of the eighty-two-minute film.) That’s the test, the audience test. “How long are these guys gonna play?” It doesn’t matter how long it is, because it’s only convention that dictates how long a song should be. We don’t have to play by those rules. We aren’t competing in that arena. We just play. It goes on for a long time. It’s like jazz, or fusion. I don’t know what the hell it is. It’s what we do, and the older we get the more we do it.
(In the film, a camera mounted on the drums captures Young as he plays the last, distorted notes of a long jam in “No Hidden Path.” Behind him, in the front row, members of the audience look as though they had been robbed of their belongings in the main plaza of a foreign city. Demme has said in the past that he believes no concert film should ever include shots of the audience.)
J.D.: As long as there is a musician in the foreground, it’s O.K. to show the audience.
N.Y.: Yeah, but generally we hate the fucking audience. They disturb the whole thing. (On the laptop screen, Young waves his arms back and forth in the air, in the manner of an enthusiastic concertgoer.) They’ve got people who do that. They have people who wave their hands back and forth in the background. That’s what they do. It doesn’t matter what the music is. It’s a way to make a living, I guess. (Demme looks up at the clock and exchanges a glance with an assistant.) I remember we did a tour, and they had these cranes out in the audience, flying around, casting cones of light down on the audience, so that everyone in the audience had these halos on their heads. I walked out onstage and said to myself, “This is fucked up. I might not even play. This is so wrong.” All night long I was thinking, Why do I have to see people? I’ve never seen them before. I hate looking at them.
(Young faces the camera—eye contact, of a kind. On the laptop, his image breaks apart, and his voice burbles. There is something warm and archaic about Skype’s flaws. A Skype call can feel like a telegram. “It’s so fragile,” Demme says. “It’s sweet.” )
J.D.: Neil, I’d better leave, because Beth Henley and four wonderful actresses are waiting for me downstairs.
N.Y.: You always have a way of doing that. You have four wonderful actresses waiting for you downstairs. That’s tough. Get down there, Jonathan.
J.D.: It’s nice being here with you, even like this, Neil.
N.Y.: Take care.
J.D.: Aloha.
N.Y.: Love you.
J.D.: Love you, man.
N.Y.: Yep.
(The panama hat fills the screen, and then disappears.) ♦

Crime, padlocks and broken windows are now common in Hemet’s Willowalk neighborhood, which was once populated with young families throwing block parties.

By Alana Semuels
LA Times March 30, 2010

Reporting from Hemet – The gated community in Hemet doesn’t seem like the best place for Eddie and Maria Lopez to raise their family anymore.

Vandals knocked out the streetlight in front of the Lopezes’ five-bedroom home and then took advantage of the darkness to try to steal a van. Cars are parked four deep in the driveway next door, where a handful of men rent rooms. And up and down their block of handsome single-family homes are padlocked doors, orange “no trespassing signs” and broken front windows.

It wasn’t what the Lopezes pictured when they agreed to pay $440,000 for their 5,000-square-foot house in 2006.

The 427-home Willowalk tract, built by developer D.R. Horton, featured eight distinct “villages” within its block walls. Along with spacious homes, Willowalk boasted four lakes, a community pool and clubhouse. Fanciful street names such as Pink Savory Way and Bee Balm Road added to the bucolic image.

Young families seemed to occupy every house, throwing block parties and holiday get-togethers, and distributing a newsletter about the neighborhood, Eddie Lopez recalled.

“We loved how everything was family-oriented — all our kids would run around together,” said Lopez, a 41-year-old construction supervisor and father of seven. “Now everybody’s gone.”

Home foreclosures have devastated neighborhoods throughout the country, but the transformation from suburban paradise to blighted community has been especially stark in places like Willowalk — isolated developments on the far fringes of metropolitan areas that found ready buyers when home prices were soaring but then saw an exodus as values crashed.

Vacant homes are sprinkled throughout Willowalk, betrayed by foot-high grass. Others are rented, including some to families that use government Section 8 vouchers to live in homes with granite countertops and vaulted ceilings.

When the development opened in 2006, buyers were drawn to the area by advertising describing it as a “gated lakeshore community.” Now, many in Hemet call Willowalk the “gated ghetto,” said John Occhi, a local real estate agent.

There are dozens of places like Willowalk, and they are turning into America’s newest slums, says Christopher Leinberger, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution. With home values at a fraction of their peak, he said, it no longer makes sense to live so far from the commercial centers where jobs are concentrated.

“We built too much of the wrong product in the wrong locations,” Leinberger said.

Thanks to overbuilding, demographic changes and shifts in preferences, by 2030 there could be 25 million more suburban homes on large lots than are needed, said Arthur C. Nelson of the University of Utah. Nelson believes that as baby boomers age and as younger generations buy real estate, the population will abandon remote McMansions for smaller homes closer to shops, jobs and the other necessities of life.

Whatever their number, the presence of unwanted or abandoned homes stands to be a burden on local governments for years to come, as cash-strapped cities and counties have to spend precious resources to patrol the neighborhoods and clean unkempt yards and abandoned houses.

“There are cities saying to us, ‘I used to have eight code enforcement officers, and now I have one,’ ” said Bill Higgins, a staff attorney for the League of California Cities.

About 80 California municipalities are striking back, enforcing ordinances that fine lenders up to $1,000 a day for not maintaining properties that have been foreclosed, Higgins said. But most cities don’t have the resources to force absentee owners or renters to keep up their properties.

In Hemet, city officials have simply boarded up homes in some troubled neighborhoods. Plywood covers the windows of dozens of apartments on Valley View Drive; resident David Hall says it keeps prostitutes and drug dealers out.

Willowalk presents a different challenge. The development promised a Tiffany neighborhood for what was then something closer to a Target price.

“Leave the world behind as you unwind by our picturesque lakes,” cooed one advertisement, which touted “intimate botanical gardens and walking trails, tranquil lakes” and other attractions.

At first, the reality matched the come-ons.

Maria Lopez, a stay-at-home mother, recalls gazing at the mountains in the distance as her children played with groups of neighbors their own age. The community pool was just a few blocks away, and she says she used to let her older children, ages 13 and 14, go there by themselves.

Now she accompanies her children to the pool — though it has been closed of late — because the people who now hang out there “have no class,” she said, and she sits out front with her children if they play in the yard.

“My next-door neighbors — there are so many people living there, I don’t know who they are,” she said.

Walking through the development, there is not much evidence of the well-kept yards and friendly families Maria Lopez fondly recalls.

Many of the people answering a knock say they are renters, and won’t open their doors more than a crack to see who is on their doorstep. Red-and-white “for sale” signs dot the neighborhood, clashing with the golds and browns of the homes. The contrast between occupied and empty houses is evident on one block, where high grass in weedy clumps gives way to a neatly mowed lawn with handwritten signs pleading “Please do not let your dog poop on our yard.”

Homeowner Norma Hernandez, one of the few people outside on a recent sunny afternoon, can point out which families are permanent on her block.

“Rented, owned, rented, rented, rented,” she said, gesturing at the gargantuan houses across the street, one after another. “It’s bad,” she said, shaking her head.

Nacho Gomez is paid by absentee owners to look after their rental properties. Currently, he’s taking care of 17.

Doing a check of the homes on a recent Thursday, he left his van’s engine running as he inspected a shattered window in one property.

“A lot of them can’t pay the rent, and they leave the house a mess,” Gomez said, referring to tenants.

He has had to fix holes punched in walls and replace refrigerators, dishwashers and other appliances — even ovens — stolen by renters on their way out.

Those tenants appear to be the exception, and the renters provide at least one benefit: Without them, there would be even more vacant homes. Even so, their presence has fundamentally changed the character of what was once sold as an exclusive community.

The Willowalk Homeowners Assn. is trying to recapture some of the community’s lost spirit. In recent months, it launched a trash committee — members pick up rubbish in the park — and started a neighborhood watch group to keep an eye on residents’ homes.

But it wasn’t enough for Angelica Stewart and her family, who are leaving the $318,000 home they bought in 2006. To Stewart, living in a gated community is absurd when drug busts are a regular occurrence.

“It’s not worth it for us to live in this neighborhood,” she said.

The Lopez family plans to stick it out, knowing they can’t sell their house for anywhere near the $440,000 they paid for it. Based on comparable prices in the neighborhood, the place is probably worth about $170,000 now, and maybe less. They’re petitioning their bank for a loan modification.

Despite the financial loss and the fact that Eddie Lopez’s hours at work were cut because of the construction slowdown, the family holds out for a brighter future.

They’re hoping that Willowalk will someday become the idyllic neighborhood they once knew, nearly as perfect as advertisements had promised.

“When we moved in, everybody was homeowners, now everybody’s renting them out,” Eddie Lopez said. “But I have to stay. There’s nothing I can do.”

The Pritzker winners Kazuyo Sejima, left, and Ryue Nishizawa at their Rolex Learning Center in Lausanne, Switzerland.

By ROBIN POGREBIN
NY Times Published: March 28, 2010

Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa, partners in the Japanese architectural firm Sanaa, have won the 2010 Pritzker Architecture Prize, the profession’s highest honor.

“They explore like few others the phenomenal properties of continuous space, lightness, transparency and materiality to create a subtle synthesis,” the jury citation said. “Sejima and Nishizawa’s architecture stands in direct contrast with the bombastic and rhetorical. Instead, they seek the essential qualities of architecture that result in a much appreciated straightforwardness, economy of means and restraint in their work.”

The pair’s buildings include the acclaimed New Museum in New York, a sculptural stack of rectilinear boxes on the Bowery, which was completed in 2007. The first Sanaa project in the United States was a glass pavilion for the Toledo Museum of Art, completed in 2006. It holds the museum’s collection of glass artworks, reflecting that city’s history as a major center of glass production.

In The New York Times, the critic Nicolai Ouroussoff said that the pavilion — which featured an elegant maze of curved glass walls — “can reawaken” the “belief in the power of glass to enchant.”

The jury citation highlighted those projects as well as two in Japan: the O-Museum in Nagano and the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa. The pair formed their firm in 1995.

“I have been exploring how I can make architecture that feels open,” Ms. Sejima said in a prepared statement after winning the prize, “which I feel is important for a new generation of architecture.”

Mr. Nishizawa said: “Every time I finish a building I revel in possibilities and at the same time reflect on what has happened. Each project becomes my motivation for the next new project. In the same way this wonderful prize has given me a dynamic energy that I have never felt before.”

Although their work has been concentrated in Japan, Mr. Nishizawa and Ms. Sejima have designed projects in Germany, Britain, Spain, France, the Netherlands and the United States. Among their most recent projects is the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology’s Rolex Learning Center in Lausanne.

The firm’s first British project was the Serpentine Pavilion in Kensington Gardens, London, the ninth such commission in the Serpentine’s pavilions series. In Lens, in northern France, the firm is designing a 300,000-square-foot branch of the Louvre.

This is the third time in the prize’s history that two architects have been awarded the Pritzker. The first was in 1988 with Oscar Niemeyer of Brazil and Gordon Bunshaft; the second in 2001, with the Swiss architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron.

The award ceremony will be on May 17 on Ellis Island in New York.

By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Times Published: March 28, 2010

Health reform is the law of the land. Next up: financial reform. But will it happen? The White House is optimistic, because it believes that Republicans won’t want to be cast as allies of Wall Street. I’m not so sure. The key question is how many senators believe that they can get away with claiming that war is peace, slavery is freedom, and regulating big banks is doing those big banks a favor.

Some background: we used to have a workable system for avoiding financial crises, resting on a combination of government guarantees and regulation. On one side, bank deposits were insured, preventing a recurrence of the immense bank runs that were a central cause of the Great Depression. On the other side, banks were tightly regulated, so that they didn’t take advantage of government guarantees by running excessive risks.

From 1980 or so onward, however, that system gradually broke down, partly because of bank deregulation, but mainly because of the rise of “shadow banking”: institutions and practices — like financing long-term investments with overnight borrowing — that recreated the risks of old-fashioned banking but weren’t covered either by guarantees or by regulation. The result, by 2007, was a financial system as vulnerable to severe crisis as the system of 1930. And the crisis came.

Now what? We have already, in effect, recreated New Deal-type guarantees: as the financial system plunged into crisis, the government stepped in to rescue troubled financial companies, so as to avoid a complete collapse. And you should bear in mind that the biggest bailouts took place under a conservative Republican administration, which claimed to believe deeply in free markets. There’s every reason to believe that this will be the rule from now on: when push comes to shove, no matter who is in power, the financial sector will be bailed out. In effect, debts of shadow banks, like deposits at conventional banks, now have a government guarantee.

The only question now is whether the financial industry will pay a price for this privilege, whether Wall Street will be obliged to behave responsibly in return for government backing. And who could be against that?

Well, how about John Boehner, the House minority leader? Recently Mr. Boehner gave a talk to bankers in which he encouraged them to balk efforts by Congress to impose stricter regulation. “Don’t let those little punk staffers take advantage of you, and stand up for yourselves,” he urged — where by “taking advantage” he meant imposing some conditions on the industry in return for government backing.

Barney Frank, the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, promptly had “Little Punk Staffer” buttons made up and distributed to Congressional aides.

But Mr. Boehner isn’t the problem: Mr. Frank has already shepherded fairly strong financial reform through the House. Instead, the question is what will happen in the Senate.

In the Senate, the legislation on the table was crafted by Senator Chris Dodd of Connecticut. It’s significantly weaker than the Frank bill, and needs to be made stronger, a topic I’ll discuss in future columns. But no bill will become law if Senate Republicans stand in the way of reform.

But won’t opponents of reform fear being cast as allies of the bad guys (which they are)? Maybe not. Back in January, Frank Luntz, the G.O.P. strategist, circulated a memo on how to oppose financial reform. His key idea was that Republicans should claim that up is down — that reform legislation is a “big bank bailout bill,” rather than a set of restrictions on the banks.

Sure enough, a few days ago Senator Richard Shelby of Alabama, in a letter attacking the Dodd bill, claimed that an essential part of reform — tougher oversight of large, systemically important financial companies — is actually a bailout, because “The market will view these firms as being ‘too big to fail’ and implicitly backed by the government.” Um, senator, the market already views those firms as having implicit government backing, because they do: whatever people like Mr. Shelby may say now, in any future crisis those firms will be rescued, whichever party is in power.

The only question is whether we’re going to regulate bankers so that they don’t abuse the privilege of government backing. And it’s that regulation — not future bailouts — that reform opponents are trying to block.

So it’s the punks versus the plutocrats — those who want to rein in runaway banks, and bankers who want the freedom to put the economy at risk, freedom enhanced by the knowledge that taxpayers will bail them out in a crisis. Whatever they say, the fact is that people like Mr. Shelby are on the side of the plutocrats; the American people should be on the side of the punks, who are trying to protect their interests.

Chicago, 1964

San Francisco, 1973

Through April 17, 2010

Gitterman

By DAVID ELKIND
NY Times Published: March 26, 2010

Medford, Mass.

RECESS is no longer child’s play. Schools around the country, concerned about bullying and arguments over the use of the equipment, are increasingly hiring “recess coaches” to oversee students’ free time. Playworks, a nonprofit training company that has placed coaches at 170 schools from Boston to Los Angeles, is now expanding thanks to an $18 million grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

Critics have suggested that such coaching is yet another example of the over-scheduling and over-programming of our children. And, as someone whose scholarly work has consistently reinforced the idea that young people need unstructured imagination time, I’d probably have been opposed to recess coaches in the past. But childhood has changed so radically in recent years that I think the trend makes sense, at least at some schools and with some students.

Children today are growing up in a world vastly different from the one their parents knew. As the writer Richard Louv has persuasively chronicled, our young people are more aware of threats to the global environment than they are of the natural world in their own backyards.

A Nielsen study last year found that children aged 6 to 11 spent more than 28 hours a week using computers, cellphones, televisions and other electronic devices. A University of Michigan study found that from 1979 to 1999, children on the whole lost 12 hours of free time a week, including eight hours of unstructured play and outdoor activities. One can only assume that the figure has increased over the last decade, as many schools have eliminated recess in favor of more time for academics.

One consequence of these changes is the disappearance of what child-development experts call “the culture of childhood.” This culture, which is to be found all over the world, was best documented in its English-language form by the British folklorists Peter and Iona Opie in the 1950s. They cataloged the songs, riddles, jibes and incantations (“step on a crack, break your mother’s back”) that were passed on by oral tradition. Games like marbles, hopscotch and hide and seek date back hundreds of years. The children of each generation adapted these games to their own circumstances.

Yet this culture has disappeared almost overnight, and not just in America. For example, in the 1970s a Japanese photographer, Keiki Haginoya, undertook what was to be a lifelong project to compile a photo documentary of children’s play on the streets of Tokyo. He gave up the project in 1996, noting that the spontaneous play and laughter that once filled the city’s streets, alleys and vacant lots had utterly vanished.

For children in past eras, participating in the culture of childhood was a socializing process. They learned to settle their own quarrels, to make and break their own rules, and to respect the rights of others. They learned that friends could be mean as well as kind, and that life was not always fair.

Now that most children no longer participate in this free-form experience — play dates arranged by parents are no substitute — their peer socialization has suffered. One tangible result of this lack of socialization is the increase in bullying, teasing and discrimination that we see in all too many of our schools.

Bullying has always been with us, but it did not become prevalent enough to catch the attention of researchers until the 1970s, just as TV and then computers were moving childhood indoors. It is now recognized as a serious problem in all the advanced countries. The National Education Association estimates that in the United States, 160,000 children miss school every day because they fear attacks or intimidation by other students. Massachusetts is considering anti-bullying legislation.

While correlation is not necessarily causation, it seems clear that there is a link among the rise of television and computer games, the decline in peer-to-peer socialization and the increase of bullying in our schools. I am not a Luddite — I think that the way in which computers have made our students much more aware of the everyday lives of children in other countries is wonderful, and that they will revolutionize education as the new, tech-savvy generation of teachers moves into the schools. But we should also recognize what is being lost.

We have to adapt to childhood as it is today, not as we knew it or would like it to be. The question isn’t whether recess coaches are good or bad — they seem to be with us to stay — but whether they help students form the age-old bonds of childhood. To the extent that the coaches focus on play, give children freedom of choice about what they want to do, and stay out of the way as much as possible, they are likely a good influence.

In any case, recess coaching is a vastly better solution than eliminating recess in favor of more academics. Not only does recess aid personal development, but studies have found that children who are most physically fit tend to score highest on tests of reading, math and science.

Friedrich Fröbel, the inventor of kindergarten, said that children need to “learn the language of things” before they learn the language of words. Today we might paraphrase that axiom to say that children need to learn the real social world before they learn the virtual one.

“Curious George Saves the Day: The Art of Margret and H. A. Rey” is on view through Aug. 1 at the Jewish Museum

By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN
NY Times Published: March 25, 2010

You don’t really think about Curious George saving the day, as the title of the new exhibition at the Jewish Museum puts it. A “good little monkey,” he is called in the classic series of picture books by Margret and H. A. Rey, but he was no savior. He was a mischief maker, an innocent, born in the jungle and lured into the strange world of humans.

He imitates gestures, examines objects. He sees a hat, he puts it on his head; he sees a seagull and is determined to fly himself; he sees a telephone and dials, accidentally summoning the fire department; he sees house painters and decides to paint.

His misadventures, particularly in the early books, are ignited by impulse and inquiry, the consequences of wanting to see and to know, and the books’ charm is that they don’t condemn this curiosity; they relish it. Reality’s hard knocks — the chases, the falls, the breaking of limbs and objects — are ultimately taken care of by the nameless man in the yellow hat, who never seems to learn that you don’t leave such a childlike creature alone with a new bike, saying, “Keep close to the house while I am gone.”

But as the exhibition points out, at least outside of the books’ frames, Curious George really did save the day, and more than once. In early September 1939, just after World War II began, the Reys — a husband-and-wife team of German Jews living in Paris — sought refuge at Château Feuga, an old castle owned by some friends in southern France.

At such a time, Hans A. Rey wrote in a letter, “it feels ridiculous to be thinking about children’s books.” But that is what they were doing, prolifically, including a book about a monkey named Fifi, who later became known as Curious George.

When suspicious villagers reported the strange couple in the old castle to the authorities, gendarmes searched the place for expected bomb-making material, but the studio with pictures of the mischievous monkey convinced them of the Reys’ innocence.

Apparently, Fifi/George served much the same function when, in more serious straits in June 1940, his creators fled Paris on bicycles Hans Rey built from parts. As Louise Borden described in her 2005 picture book, “The Journey That Saved Curious George,” they left two days before the Nazis entered Paris and rode 75 miles in three days. Their four-month journey on bicycle, train and boat led them to Lisbon, then to Rio de Janeiro and New York, the drawings offering proof of their occupations when they sought American visas.

Surely Curious George could not have more deftly escaped the elevator operator, the firefighters, the farmers, the cook and the zookeepers who at one time or another pursued him through a series of seven books selling almost 30 million copies (thus saving the day for the Reys again).

Yet there is something curious here, in the sense of peculiar: a meaning that, the exhibition tells us, prevented the Reys’ British publisher from following the American example in naming the monkey. The suggestion of “strange George” would have also seemed a tasteless allusion to George VI, then the British king (which is why the character became known as Zozo in Britain).

At first, the peculiarity is not apparent. The material for this show was gathered by the museum’s curator Claudia J. Nahson, who combed through the extensive archives left by the Reys to the de Grummond Children’s Literature Collection at the University of Southern Mississippi. It is an enticing, appealing, intelligent show, for which Ms. Nahson has included personal memorabilia (including a wedding invitation sent out in 1935, soon after Hans Augusto Reyersbach shortened his last name to Rey, and Margarete Waldstein shortened her first name to Margret; Hans depicted himself as an artist’s palette, and Margret, a photographer, as a camera).

There are letters (including some fascinating prewar correspondence with the French publisher Jacques Schiffrin, who tested out one of the Reys’ early books on his son, André) and watercolors of George at his best, along with little-known characters from other books (like Raffy the giraffe, on whose neck a George-like monkey rides to sunlit safety above the clouds). In all, there are about 80 drawings and watercolors, along with photographs Margret took of Paris in the 1930s.

The exhibition is also true to its pictorial subject. It playfully expands some drawings into full-scale sets (you enter the first gallery through a portal resembling the entrance to a French hotel in one of the Reys’ prewar books), creates a children’s reading room (with pillows shaped like Georgian creatures) and features a gallery of the Reys’ later work, whose sets evoke the places they ultimately considered home: first Greenwich Village, then Cambridge, Mass.

And the peculiarity of the Curious George books? Like the Babar tales (which also grew out of the milieu of 1930s Paris) they have an almost colonial-era vision of the uncultivated naïf at large in the imperial world. But George is far more childish. One appeal of these volumes is their almost manic celebration of innocent desire.

“Little monkeys sometimes forget,” we read of the warnings he regularly violates. Seeing something interesting, George, of course, “could not resist.” He lifts a lid on a pot of spaghetti, plays tricks on his bicycle, races down a fire escape, climbs a tree in a natural history museum. His curiosity is clever, but consequences are never foreseen: he seems to be a fearless 5-year-old.

Yet his romps began at a place and time —Europe in 1939 — when consequences were all, when almost nothing about the world could be relied on, and when curiosity had to take second place to survival. One reason the Jewish Museum has created this exhibition (and why the new Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco will later show it) is that the Reys were not only Jewish, but they also had lives whose trajectory was a consequence of their identity.

But was their work also linked to that identity and their experience? Though the show points out the analogies we might make between the Reys’ adventures and Curious George’s, ultimately, of course, those suggestions are fairly trivial. There is simply nothing in these books that gives a clue of the dark times in which the first of them was conceived or the second one written, nor of the personal facts that led to the Reys’ escape. There is nothing in any of the documents here — and Ms. Nahson said there was nothing in any of the material she examined, either — that indicated the Reys gave much thought to their Jewish origins; nor is there much to suggest an awareness of the wider world in which they were moving.

There is a letter here from 1939, written by Hans Rey from the Château Feuga, where the couple had taken temporary shelter; he expresses concern about the war, but notes that “life goes on, the editors edit, the artists draw, even during wartime.”

And yes, it does indeed go on, if you can find shelter, though generally, artists and editors have been deeply affected by their experiences. That letter to Schiffrin, in fact, went unanswered for months, since the editor had been drafted into the French Army; he later had to flee for his life as well.

But Curious George and his world seem almost to have been a refuge in which historical forces were held at bay by a focus on the timeless innocence of childhood, sensed in the artificial world of this strangely tailless monkey.

We know that both the Reys must have enjoyed adventure and exoticism. Hans had moved from Hamburg to Rio de Janeiro as early as 1924, and sold bathtubs and sinks along the Brazilian Amazon. Margret, eight years his junior, went to Rio in 1935; the two were soon married (their families had known each other in Hamburg) and opened Rio’s first advertising agency. Their belated honeymoon in Paris in 1936 turned into a four-year residence. They had taken their two pet marmosets on the voyage, but both had perished.

You can sense George’s jungle origins in these facts, along with the almost restless enterprise the monkey displayed. But where is the rest of the world? In the books, it is present mainly by its absence. In the first Curious George book, the exhibition notes, “the ship’s arrival with the yellow-hatted man and George happily displaying their identification papers, stands in contrast to the Reys’ plight at the time.” The drawing was created “when they were struggling to secure the necessary papers to leave France.”

There is also a fair number of H. A. Rey’s journals on display here — miniature notebook/calendars — but their main function seems to have been to keep track of expenses in difficult times. The ones selected for display are, presumably, among the most interesting, but their comments are cryptic and unrevealing. It is almost as if there were very little inner life to account for.

The duo must have been terrific together; Margret Rey explained how she would often act out George’s gestures as her husband drew. The man in the yellow hat, the exhibition explains, was like Hans Rey, even smoking a pipe. Was George, then, a sort of joint cocoon for them, shaping a world secure enough to exist independent of the forces that gave them chase?

The show points out that George’s later stories may reflect some of his creators’ experiences of America, invoking Hollywood, rocket ships, newspapers — the bustle of American commercial and social life. Somehow, the trials of the past must have been subsumed into these books and (judging from the exhibition) other volumes less well known. And whatever darkness they had experienced was displaced by the “disarming innocence,” “buoyant colors” and “unstinting optimism” the show correctly notes that we find in the artwork.

For me, this simplicity makes the books less interesting than those of other children’s book writers and illustrators of their era — from Robert McCloskey to Maurice Sendak — but it is still no small achievement to capture the thrills and risks of curious innocence even if they couldn’t capture the real human world surrounding them.

The Reys never had any children themselves, though many young readers may have pledged familial allegiance. Later in life, we read, Margret Rey told of a little boy who came to meet them, thinking they were the parents of Curious George. With “disappointment written all over his face,” the boy said, “I thought you were monkeys too.”

Not quite, of course — any more than the world in which George moved was the world the Reys knew, all too well.

By DAVID POGUE
NY Times Published: March 24, 2010

For a little $1 iPhone app, Line2 sure has the potential to shake up an entire industry.

It can save you money. It can make calls where AT&T’s signal is weak, like indoors. It can turn an iPod Touch into a full-blown cellphone.

And it can ruin the sleep of cellphone executives everywhere.

Line2 gives your iPhone a second phone number — a second phone line, complete with its own contacts list, voice mail, and so on. The company behind it, Toktumi (get it?), imagines that you’ll distribute the Line2 number to business contacts, and your regular iPhone number to friends and family. Your second line can be an 800 number, if you wish, or you can transfer an existing number.

To that end, Toktumi offers, on its Web site, a raft of Google Voice-ish features that are intended to help a small businesses look bigger: call screening, Do Not Disturb hours and voice mail messages sent to you as e-mail. You can create an “automated attendant” —“Press 1 for sales,” “Press 2 for accounting,” and so on — that routes incoming calls to other phone numbers. Or, if you’re pretending to be a bigger business than you are, route them all to yourself.

The Line2 app is a carbon copy, a visual clone, of the iPhone’s own phone software. The dialing pad, your iPhone Contacts list, your recent calls list and visual voice mail all look just like the iPhone’s.

(Let’s pause for a moment here to blink, dumbfounded, at that point. Apple’s rules prohibit App Store programs that look or work too much like the iPhone’s own built-in apps. For example, Apple rejected the Google Voice app because, as Apple explained to the Federal Communications Commission, it works “by replacing the iPhone’s core mobile telephone functionality and Apple user interface with its own user interface for telephone calls.” That is exactly what Line2 does. Oh well—the Jobs works in mysterious ways.)

So you have a second line on your iPhone. But that’s not the best part.

Line2 also turns the iPhone into a dual-mode phone. That is, it can make and receive calls either using either the AT&T airwaves as usual, or — now this is the best part — over the Internet. Any time you’re in a wireless hot spot, Line2 places its calls over Wi-Fi instead of AT&T’s network.

That’s a game-changer. Where, after all, is cellphone reception generally the worst? Right — indoors. In your house or your office building, precisely where you have Wi-Fi. Line2 in Wi-Fi means rock-solid, confident reception indoors.

Line2 also runs on the iPod Touch. When you’re in a Wi-Fi hot spot, your Touch is now a full-blown cellphone, and you don’t owe AT&T a penny.

But wait, there’s more.

Turns out Wi-Fi calls don’t use up any AT&T minutes. You can talk all day long, without ever worrying about going over your monthly allotment of minutes. Wi-Fi calls are free forever.

Well, not quite free; Line2 service costs $15 a month (after a 30-day free trial).

But here’s one of those cases where spending more could save you money. If you’re in a Wi-Fi hot spot most of the time (at work, for example), that’s an awful lot of calling you can do in Wi-Fi — probably enough to downgrade your AT&T plan to one that gives you fewer minutes. If you’re on the 900-minute or unlimited plan ($90 or $100 a month), for example, you might be able to get away with the 450-minute plan ($70). Even with Line2’s fee, you’re saving $5 or $15 a month.

Line2 also lets you call overseas phone numbers for Skype-like rates: 2 to 5 cents a minute to most countries. (A full table of rates is available at toktumi.com.) As a handy globetrotters’ bonus, calls home to numbers in the United States from overseas hot spots are free.

All of these benefits come to you when you’re in a Wi-Fi hot spot, because your calls are carried by the Internet instead of by AT&T. Interestingly enough, though, Line2 can also make Internet calls even when you’re not in a hot spot.

It can, at your option, place calls over AT&T’s 3G data network, where it’s available. Every iPhone plan includes unlimited use of this 3G network — it’s how your iPhone sends e-mail and surfs the Web. So once again, Line2 calls don’t use up any of your monthly voice minutes.

Unfortunately, voice connections on the 3G network aren’t as strong and reliable as the voice or Wi-Fi methods. Cellular data networks aren’t made for seamless handoffs from cell tower to tower as you drive, for example — there’s not much need for it if you’re just doing e-mail and Web — so dropped calls are more likely. Fortunately, if you’re on a 3G data-network call and you walk into a hot spot, Line2 switches to the more reliable Wi-Fi network seamlessly, in midcall.

Whenever you do have an Internet connection — either Wi-Fi or a strong 3G area —you’re in for a startling treat. If you and your calling partner are both Line2 subscribers, Line2 kicks you into superhigh audio-quality mode (16-bit mode, as the techies call it).

Your calling partners sound as if they’re speaking right into the mike at an FM radio station. It’s almost too clear; you hear the other person’s breathing, lip smacks, clothing rustling and so on. After years of suffering through awful cellphone audio, it’s quite a revelation to hear what you’ve been missing.

Now, this all sounds wonderful, and Line2 generally is wonderful. But there’s room for improvement.

First, as you’ve no doubt already concluded, understanding Line2 is complicated. You have three different ways to make calls, each with pros and cons.

You miss a certain degree of refinement, too. The dialing pad doesn’t make touch-tone sounds as you tap the keys. There’s no Favorites list within the Line2 app. You can’t get or send text messages on your Line2 line. (The company says it will fix all this soon.)

There’s a faint hiss on Line2 calls, as if you’re on a long-distance call in 1970. The company says that it deliberately introduces this “comfort noise” to reassure you that you’re still connected, but it’s unnecessary. And sometimes there’s a voice delay of a half-second or so (of course, you sometimes get that on regular cellphone calls, too).

Finally, a note about incoming calls. If the Line2 app is open at the time, you’re connected via Wi-Fi, if available. If it’s not running, the call comes in through AT&T, so you lose the benefits of Wi-Fi calling. In short, until Apple blesses the iPhone with multitasking software, you have to leave Line2 open whenever you put the phone to sleep. That’s awkward.

Still, Line2 is the first app that can receive incoming calls via either Wi-Fi or cellular voice, so you get the call even if the app isn’t running. That’s one of several advantages that distinguish it from other voice-over-Internet apps like Skype and TruPhone.

Another example: If you’re on a Wi-Fi call using those other programs, and someone calls your regular iPhone number, your first call is unceremoniously disconnected. Line2, on the other hand, offers you the chance to decline the incoming call without losing your Wi-Fi call.

Those rival apps also lack Line2’s call-management features, visual voice mail and conference calling with up to 20 other people. And Line2 is the only app that gives you a choice of call methods for incoming and outgoing calls.

All of this should rattle cell industry executives, because let’s face it: the Internet tends to make things free. Cell carriers go through life hoping nobody notices the cellephant in the room: that once everybody starts making free calls over the Internet, it’s Game Over for the dollars-for-minutes model.

Line2, however, brings us one big step closer to that very future. It’s going to be a wild ride.

Thanks to Jonathan Maghen

Sunday, March 28,2010, 01:00 PM

Former SAH/SCC President Tony Denzer will be back in Los Angeles for a special tour of Gregory Ain’s residence for A. O. Beckman and two of the apartments in the Dunsmuir Flats project. Denzer, now professor of architecture at University of Wyoming, and author of Gregory Ain: The Modern Home as Social Commentary (Rizzoli, 2008), will speak on Ain’s inspirations, vision, and projects. Light refreshments and a book signing will follow the presentation at the Beckman house. A tour at Dunsmuir Flats will wrap up the afternoon.

Gregory Ain (1908-88) left Richard Neutra’s office in 1935 and designed several important structures as a young man. With strong influences from Neutra, Rudolph Schindler, and Frank Lloyd Wright, he was interested in “cubist” techniques and mathematical “games” to produce three-dimensional forms. Asymmetry, diagonal relationships, overlapping and interlocking elements, and spiral movement mark his finished works. Ain’s considerable contribution to Southern California modernism might be summed up by his own statement that he had found “a house could be quite playful, with a kind of starkness, a very gentle sternness, not at all like the Bauhaus sternness.”

The Beckman House (1938), designed for pharmacist A.O. Beckman, was more lavish than Ain’s other pre-war houses at 2,100 square feet (plus a two-car garage). At $9,250, it was one of his few residences to include a maid’s quarters. One story in front and two stories in back, the Beckman house reveals the influence of Schindler. It features a pinwheel-shaped plan to define multiple courtyards, including a “children’s garden.” The unusual saw-tooth plan of the four-unit Dunsmuir Flats (1937), for client “Shy” Kaplan, gives each apartment a private garden and private entrance. Virtually every room in the complex receives daylight from three sides. Ain, himself, said of the Dunsmuir Flats, “I tell you in all modesty I think the plan of that was superb.”

‘A Very Gentle Sternness’: Ain in the ’30s: Sunday, March 28, 2010; 1-4PM; $30 for SAH/SCC members; $45 for nonmembers; registration-see order form on Page 8, call 800.972.4722, or go to SAH/SCC

By DAVID W. DUNLAP
NY Times Published March 23, 2010

Bill Cunningham is probably the most honest photojournalist in New York. But he can also be pretty deceptive.

Not that he tries to be. Rather, in his pursuit of a singular, joyful mission — documenting daily the interesting clothes that women and men can and (this is important) do wear — Mr. Cunningham makes it all look easy.

That’s deceiving because he may be, at 81, the hardest working reporter in New York. He’s also among the most private, despite the fact that he can easily be spied in public, wearing a blue worker’s smock and bicycling fearlessly through city streets. His personal life is so understated and ascetic as to seem anonymous. His aversion to the spotlight is itself the stuff of fashion legend.

So the miracle of “Bill Cunningham New York,” a new 88-minute documentary about the photographer of “On the Street” and “Evening Hours,” is that its subject agreed to participate in the first place. The film, which is to open the New Directors/New Films series on Wednesday at the Museum of Modern Art, took 10 years to make. The first eight were spent trying to get Mr. Cunningham to cooperate. “It started in 2000,” said Richard Press, who directed the film. Philip Gefter, to whom Mr. Press is married, produced it. “Philip and I approached Bill. He just pooh-poohed the idea. He couldn’t entertain it. He said, ‘Why me? There’s no subject here.’”

At the time, Mr. Press was supporting his filmmaking as a freelance art director at The Times. He had worked with and admired Mr. Cunningham. Mr. Gefter was a picture editor at the newspaper. (Full disclosure as a Times employee: I adore Bill Cunningham, not only because of his work but because he calls me “young fellow.” I’m 57.)

Despite Mr. Cunningham’s reluctance, Mr. Press was able to shoot footage of the photographer at work during Fashion Week in 2001. He cobbled that together for a short video homage shown in 2008 when Mr. Cunningham was honored by the Citizens Committee for New York City and declined to give a speech at the event.

Fortunately for posterity, Mr. Cunningham enjoyed what he saw. “He felt like I got him, that I got the spirit of him,” Mr. Press said. At the same event, Mr. Press and Mr. Gefter began talking with Times executives about co-producing a documentary.

Filming began in earnest during Fashion Week, 2008. The crew consisted entirely of Mr. Press, Mr. Gefter and Tony Cenicola, another Times photographer. They used a small, consumer-grade, high-definition Canon. And they were obliged at times to keep negotiating with their still-reluctant subject.

“It was always a dance getting his cooperation, even during filming,” Mr. Press said. “We tried to approach it as he would approach it. We tried to be as discreet and invisible as possible, because we knew we could never interrupt his work.”

Eventually, their respectful tenacity was rewarded with ever greater access to Mr. Cunningham’s inner circle and his personal realm — a cramped studio in Carnegie Hall that comes with few modern amenities. Like a private bathroom.

This is a man who seems to be moderate in everything except his pursuit of fashion and his consumption of film; a photographer who won’t put down his camera even when he’s the guest of honor (“You think I’m going to miss a good picture?”) and won’t pick up his camera just because Catherine Deneuve is passing by. “She wasn’t wearing anything interesting,” he explains.

Just seeing Mr. Cunningham not raise camera to eye is enough to strike dread into the heart of a fashion editor, Anna Wintour notes. Yet he has no interest in being the arbiter he certainly could be; just the chronicler.

“It isn’t what I think, it’s what I see,” Mr. Cunningham says. “I let the street speak to me. You’ve got to stay on the street and let the street tell you what it is.”

He’s not especially curious about his own bio-pic, though he respects Mr. Press and Mr. Gefter for having gone to the trouble of making it. When I asked him last week whether he planned to see it, Mr. Cunningham answered: “Run for the hills! Up into the mountains with a bag of lentils!”

With that, he was off — not to the hills but back to the street.