Robert Mapplethorpe “American Flag” 1977

South Willard will be closed July 3rd through the 5th for the holiday.

A Ludwig Mies van der Rohe floor plan for a 860/880 Lake Shore Drive apartment building in Chicago, 1951.

By JAYNE MERKEL
NY Times: June 1, 2010

We tend to think of the decades immediately following World War II as a time of exuberance and growth, with soldiers returning home by the millions, going off to college on the G.I. Bill and lining up at the marriage bureaus.

But when it came to their houses, it was a time of common sense and a belief that less truly could be more. During the Depression and the war, Americans had learned to live with less, and that restraint, in combination with the postwar confidence in the future, made small, efficient housing positively stylish.

As we find ourselves in an era of diminishing resources, could “less” become “more” again? If so, the mid-20th-century building boom might provide some inspiration.

Economic austerity was only one of the catalysts for the trend toward efficient living. The phrase “less is more” was actually first uttered by a German, the architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who like other people associated with the Bauhaus emigrated to the United States before World War II and took up posts at American architecture schools. These designers, including Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer, came to exert enormous influence on the course of American architecture, but none more so than Mies.

Mies’ signature phrase means that less decoration, properly deployed, has more impact than a lot. Elegance, he believed, did not derive from abundance. Like other modern architects, he employed metal, glass and laminated wood — materials that we take for granted today but that in the 1940s symbolized the future. Mies’ sophisticated presentation masked the fact that the spaces he designed were small and efficient, rather than big and often empty.

The apartments in the elegant towers Mies built on Chicago’s Lake Shore Drive, for example, were smaller — two-bedroom units under 1,000 square feet — than those in their older neighbors along the city’s Gold Coast. But they were popular because of their airy glass walls, the views they afforded and the elegance of the buildings’ details and proportions, the architectural equivalent of the abstract art so popular at the time.

Tom Wolfe’s “From Bauhaus to Our House” aside, the trend toward “less” was not entirely foreign. In the 1930s Frank Lloyd Wright started building more modest and efficient houses — usually around 1,200 square feet — than the sprawling two-story ones he had designed in the 1890s and the early 20th century.

Even the consciously trend-setting Museum of Modern Art promoted restraint in the early postwar years. In 1945, it held an exhibition entitled “Tomorrow’s Small House: Models and Plans,” and the pioneering model houses that Marcel Breuer and Gregory Ain erected in the museum garden were small and sparsely detailed.

The “Case Study Houses” commissioned from talented modern architects by California Arts & Architecture magazine between 1945 and 1962 were yet another homegrown influence on the “less is more” trend. Aesthetic effect came from the landscape, new materials and forthright detailing. In his Case Study House, Ralph Rapson may have mispredicted just how the mechanical revolution would impact everyday life — few American families acquired helicopters, though most eventually got clothes dryers — but his belief that self-sufficiency was both desirable and inevitable was widely shared.

“Less is more” wasn’t for everyone; modernism was popular mainly with the so-called “Progressives,” the professionals and intellectuals who commissioned modern houses. But these trend-setters were not alone in assuming there would be fewer servants in the future and that modern conveniences would make housework easier to do, especially in smaller quarters.

The popularity of simpler living made it possible for one American developer, William Levitt, to realize the prewar dream of the European modern architects to use industrialization for housing. During the war, Levitt had become an expert in mass-producing homes for shipyard workers in Virginia. When it ended, Levitt and his sons created a prototype 750-square-foot, one-floor house—with a living room, kitchen/dining area, two small bedrooms, a bathroom and an unfinished “expansion attic”—to fit on a 60 x 100 foot lot. Set on concrete slabs like those at the shipyards, the new houses were built quickly and cheaply on a sort of assembly line, with pre-cut lumber and nails shipped from the Levitts’ factories in California.

Eventually, the Levitts built 140,000 houses, clustered in Levittowns on Long Island and near Philadelphia for some of the 16 million returning veterans. In the 1950s, the houses grew slightly, to 800 square feet, and came equipped with carports and built-in 12.5-inch Admiral TVs. Clearly no one considered multiple televisions, or that they would be frequently replaced.

The Levittown houses were concentrated on the East Coast, but they influenced suburban development throughout the United States, though elsewhere houses were built manually, as they would be after the postwar building boom. The standard two-bedroom house with an expandable attic became the norm for more than a decade, even as family size mushrooomed.

But like much of American society, the middle-class home began to grow over time. The average size of an American house in 1950 was 983 square feet. Slowly, though, both more square footage and more amenities became part of the American dream, so that by 2004 the average home topped 2,300 square feet.

What does all that space bring? Small, out-of-the-way bedrooms like those in the Levittown houses’ “expandable attics” can be used when children are at home or guests arrive, and the open plan of their main living spaces has become the kitchen/family room that is the center of the American home today. But many of the “must-have” elements in 2010, like formal living and dining rooms, are redundant. In an era of economic austerity and a seemingly permanent energy crisis, can “less is more” become popular again?

Sadly, many of the small, architect-designed houses of the postwar period have been demolished to make way for McMansions. But those that remain, and those we know about from blueprints and photographs, have much to teach us — about the efficient use of space for storage, integrated indoor and outdoor space and the way careful design can facilitate natural ventilation. When you think about how many rooms you actually use, it seems obvious that various ideas from that optimistic era could make the next decade a happier, saner one than the overstuffed times we’ve just lived through.

Bernhard Willhelm women’s collection A/W 2010-2011 from Bernhard Willhelm on Vimeo.

By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Times Published: July 1, 2010

When I was young and naïve, I believed that important people took positions based on careful consideration of the options. Now I know better. Much of what Serious People believe rests on prejudices, not analysis. And these prejudices are subject to fads and fashions.

Which brings me to the subject of today’s column. For the last few months, I and others have watched, with amazement and horror, the emergence of a consensus in policy circles in favor of immediate fiscal austerity. That is, somehow it has become conventional wisdom that now is the time to slash spending, despite the fact that the world’s major economies remain deeply depressed.

This conventional wisdom isn’t based on either evidence or careful analysis. Instead, it rests on what we might charitably call sheer speculation, and less charitably call figments of the policy elite’s imagination — specifically, on belief in what I’ve come to think of as the invisible bond vigilante and the confidence fairy.

Bond vigilantes are investors who pull the plug on governments they perceive as unable or unwilling to pay their debts. Now there’s no question that countries can suffer crises of confidence (see Greece, debt of). But what the advocates of austerity claim is that (a) the bond vigilantes are about to attack America, and (b) spending anything more on stimulus will set them off.

What reason do we have to believe that any of this is true? Yes, America has long-run budget problems, but what we do on stimulus over the next couple of years has almost no bearing on our ability to deal with these long-run problems. As Douglas Elmendorf, the director of the Congressional Budget Office, recently put it, “There is no intrinsic contradiction between providing additional fiscal stimulus today, while the unemployment rate is high and many factories and offices are underused, and imposing fiscal restraint several years from now, when output and employment will probably be close to their potential.”

Nonetheless, every few months we’re told that the bond vigilantes have arrived, and we must impose austerity now now now to appease them. Three months ago, a slight uptick in long-term interest rates was greeted with near hysteria: “Debt Fears Send Rates Up,” was the headline at The Wall Street Journal, although there was no actual evidence of such fears, and Alan Greenspan pronounced the rise a “canary in the mine.”

Since then, long-term rates have plunged again. Far from fleeing U.S. government debt, investors evidently see it as their safest bet in a stumbling economy. Yet the advocates of austerity still assure us that bond vigilantes will attack any day now if we don’t slash spending immediately.

But don’t worry: spending cuts may hurt, but the confidence fairy will take away the pain. “The idea that austerity measures could trigger stagnation is incorrect,” declared Jean-Claude Trichet, the president of the European Central Bank, in a recent interview. Why? Because “confidence-inspiring policies will foster and not hamper economic recovery.”

What’s the evidence for the belief that fiscal contraction is actually expansionary, because it improves confidence? (By the way, this is precisely the doctrine expounded by Herbert Hoover in 1932.) Well, there have been historical cases of spending cuts and tax increases followed by economic growth. But as far as I can tell, every one of those examples proves, on closer examination, to be a case in which the negative effects of austerity were offset by other factors, factors not likely to be relevant today. For example, Ireland’s era of austerity-with-growth in the 1980s depended on a drastic move from trade deficit to trade surplus, which isn’t a strategy everyone can pursue at the same time.

And current examples of austerity are anything but encouraging. Ireland has been a good soldier in this crisis, grimly implementing savage spending cuts. Its reward has been a Depression-level slump — and financial markets continue to treat it as a serious default risk. Other good soldiers, like Latvia and Estonia, have done even worse — and all three nations have, believe it or not, had worse slumps in output and employment than Iceland, which was forced by the sheer scale of its financial crisis to adopt less orthodox policies.

So the next time you hear serious-sounding people explaining the need for fiscal austerity, try to parse their argument. Almost surely, you’ll discover that what sounds like hardheaded realism actually rests on a foundation of fantasy, on the belief that invisible vigilantes will punish us if we’re bad and the confidence fairy will reward us if we’re good. And real-world policy — policy that will blight the lives of millions of working families — is being built on that foundation.

Diageo’s cooperage at Carsebridge, Scotland, in 2008. Photograph by Mike Wilkinson

By JULIA WERDIGIER
NY Times Published: July 1, 2010

LONDON — Diageo, the maker of Johnnie Walker whiskey, found an innovative way to plug a gaping deficit in its pension plan: put aside 2 million barrels of maturing whiskey from its distilleries in Scotland.

Diageo said Thursday it would transfer ownership of £430 million, or $645 million, worth of whiskey to a pension funding partnership. Diageo employees would not receive their pensions in whiskey rather than cash, but the move does give them a guarantee that they would not walk away empty-handed should the company default.

“A pension funding partnership will be formed, which will hold maturing whiskey spirit as assets,” Diageo, which also makes Guinness stout and Smirnoff vodka, said in a statement.

As part of the deal, Diageo agreed to pay the pension partnership £25 million a year as it sells the recently distilled whiskey once it matures after three years and replaces it with new stock. The agreement would expire after 15 years, at which point Diageo would buy back the whiskey, which comes from distilleries such Oban on the west coast of Scotland.

Companies are searching for new ways to reduce their pension deficits, which increase as people live longer. The British supermarket chain J Sainsbury said earlier this year it would transfer property into a pension vehicle, while Whitbread agreed to hand over a share in its portfolio of restaurants and hotels. The investment firm Man Group moved some hedge fund assets into a trust as a security for its British pension plan in March.

“We’re seeing a huge growth in the use of non-cash funding,” Marc Hommel, leader of the pensions practice at PricewaterhouseCoopers in London, said. “There are big pension deficits and sponsors are cash-strapped. These mechanisms provide security for the pension plans in exchange for less cash.”

Diageo’s pension deficit was £862 million at the beginning of April. The company also said it transferred £197 million to the pension plan. Diageo expects the new pension arrangements to be “broadly cash flow neutral” and not to have any impact on the value of its net assets, it said.

Overduin and Kite

The owner of the Lloyd Wright-designed house wants to demolish it and build a Mediterranean-style home more fitting to the area. (Stefano Paltera / For The Times / June 19, 2010)

By Corina Knoll, Los Angeles Times
July 1, 2010

It had been the dream of a local surgeon: a gray, spaceship-like structure with floor-to-ceiling windows and a facade that jutted out toward the Pacific Ocean.

“I don’t want a big square house like that one,” Dr. Louis Moore reportedly told the architect, pointing to a neighbor’s home during a drive around Palos Verdes Estates. And so, in 1958, an avant-garde, five-bedroom home with angular appendages was completed on the cliff above Malaga Cove.

Now the current owner wants to build his own dream house. But unlike Moore, Mark Paullin envisions something that echoes the Mediterranean aesthetic that abounds in the affluent coastal community.

However, Paullin’s plans to raze the Moore house have been in limbo since preservationists demanded the city explore the building’s historic value. It was Lloyd Wright — the son of Frank Lloyd Wright — who had listened to Moore’s demands and designed the futuristic residence. Although the younger Wright never received the same acclaim as his father, historians say his work deserves protection.

But Paullin, who grew up in the area and still surfs the local breaks, said the home has long been viewed by residents as an oddity, not a landmark. And although he had heard of Lloyd Wright, he didn’t know the significance of the architect’s work. Before he bought the property in 2004 for about $2.5 million, Paullin inquired about restrictions on demolishing the home with both the city and the homeowners association. Neither had previously stood in the way of bulldozing a building because of its lineage.

“I thought that I’d be welcome to build a home that would be more in keeping with the neighborhood,” said Paullin, who owns a manufacturing company. “I’m not a developer; I’m not trying to get rich. I’m just a regular guy from the area. We didn’t just walk in and say, ‘Let’s knock this thing down and build ourselves a McMansion.’ I bought it to build my own home.”

Paullin, 60, and his wife, Barbara, moved out of the house about three years ago, thinking their plans would be approved and construction would soon begin. The Moore house, they felt, was poorly designed. It had rooms with low ceilings that failed to take advantage of the view and natural lighting. It suffered from mildew, poor drainage and was not earthquake safe. The Paullins’ new home would be energy-efficient, have spacious rooms that opened to the sea and allow for an expansive backyard featuring a garden and a pool big enough for their four children and friends.

The first blueprint was rejected because it would block neighbors’ views. In the exclusive, cliff-side community where one pays for the majestic ocean view, Paullin believes the proposal “stirred the hornet’s nest a bit” and led to someone tipping off the Los Angeles Conservancy that a piece of noted architecture was about to be lost.

Hundreds of letters opposing the demolition have since been mailed to city officials who then ordered a study to assess the historical value of the Moore house.

“I think people in general are just tired of seeing perfectly functional, historic treasures needlessly destroyed,” said Michael Buhler, director of advocacy at the conservancy.

Buhler said the scenario could have been prevented if Palos Verdes Estates had preservation laws, which are lacking in more than half of the cities in L.A. County.

A wealthy community of 13,500, Palos Verdes Estates is made up of a maze of roads overlooking the Pacific. Most of the homes are multi-level, rectangular and feature red tile roofs. All exterior alterations must be approved by the city as well as a committee that reviews the aesthetics of proposed buildings.

Paullin has offered to donate the Moore house to several organizations, and even offered to pay the moving costs. None have agreed.

Some residents believe Paullin has been put in an unfair position.

“That house has always been a laughingstock, it’s almost an embarrassment,” said Pat Vancura, 64,who lives on Paullin’s block. “In all the years the house was there, no one raised a flag, no one came and discussed it and said ‘Let’s try to get a historic designation for this.’ Now Mark’s stuck with a house he paid full price for that he can’t do anything with.”

City officials say they’ve found themselves in new territory, having never before dealt with protests over historic property, and need to tread carefully.

“We’re simply doing what we’re required to by our process and by state law,” said Allan Rigg, director of city planning. “We’re not subjecting him to anything that’s outside of those two requirements.”

Architecture critic and author Alan Hess said Lloyd Wright’s contributions have often been diminished because of his father’s imposing shadow. “His whole life, he never received the recognition he deserved,” Hess said. “His father had a more dominating persona and people went to him because they wanted a Frank Lloyd Wright house. Lloyd Wright really was much more considerate of his clients and their lifestyle.”

For Eric Lloyd Wright, 80, the home will always remind him of a time when he and his father worked side by side. A third-generation architect, he helped craft the Moore house and still marvels over his father’s design.

“It is, I think, one of his best,” he said. “It will be a great loss if that house is removed and another large box is put in its place.”

Francesco Tonelli for The New York Times

By MARK BITTMAN
NY Times Published: June 29, 2010

THERE, in all of their Fourth of July glory, are 101 grilling ideas begging to be tried. A vast majority take less time to prepare and grill than it takes to watch your coals turn white. (If you use gas, they’re still almost as fast as heating up the grill.) Some of them feature ingredients like corn, eggplant and tomatoes, which will be better a month from now, at least in the Northeast. But there are also suggestions for foods in season right now that not everybody thinks of putting on the grill. Please note that salt and pepper are (usually) understood.

Vegetables and Fruits

1. A winter dish, summer style: Brush thick slices of fennel bulbs with olive oil and grill over not-too-high heat. Cut oranges in half and grill, cut-side down. Put fennel on a bed of arugula or watercress, squeeze grilled oranges over top. Garnish with fennel fronds.

2. Best grilled artichokes: Cut artichokes in half, scoop out the choke, parboil until tender. Grill, cut-side down, until lightly browned; grill a couple of halved lemons, too. Combine the juice from the grilled lemons with melted butter and spoon over the artichokes. Finish with parsley.

3. Tahini tofu steaks. Thin tahini with lots of lemon juice and some minced garlic. Cut a brick of firm tofu into four slabs and brush with sesame oil. Grill over a moderate fire, turning a few times, until marked and crisp outside and custardy inside. On the last turn, baste with the tahini sauce. Serve on thick tomato slices with a drizzle of soy sauce and chopped basil, Thai if possible.

4. Spice-rubbed carrots: Roll peeled carrots in cumin, salt, pepper and brown sugar. Char, then move them away from direct heat and cover the grill until carrots are tender.

5. Grill bread; grind in a food processor to make coarse bread crumbs. (You can add garlic and/or parsley and/or Parmesan, or not.) Grill asparagus until tender. Top with bread crumbs and olive oil.

6. Brush slices of beet with olive oil and grill slowly until tender and lightly browned. Top each slice with a little goat cheese and some salad greens.

7. For perfectly ripe tomatoes only: Grill tomatoes, any size, until hot and lightly charred but not bursting. Drizzle with olive oil, sprinkle with salt and pepper, and serve with fresh mozzarella (or, even better, burrata) and grilled bread.

8. Halve and grill radicchio (or Belgian endives); drizzle cut sides with honey or plain vinaigrette, pesto or parsley pesto. Or just brush with oil and finish with a little grilled prosciutto.

9. Grilled guacamole: Halve and pit avocados; lightly char them, then scoop out the flesh. Grill halved red onion, too. Chop, combine, add tomatoes, lime, garlic and spices if you like.

10. Grill corn. Serve with mayo with minced garlic, pimentón and parsley.

11. Grill more corn. Serve with curry-powder-laced yogurt and minced onion.

12. Grill corn again. Serve with coconut milk, cilantro and mint.

13. Root vegetable of your choice: Slice celeriac — or jicama, big potatoes, daikon or yams — and grill slowly, until very tender and browned. Drizzle with olive oil or melted butter and sprinkle with chopped rosemary or sage and olive oil.

14. Choose another root. Slice it, but this time char lightly and leave it crunchy. Chop and toss with chopped cilantro, a pinch of cayenne and juice of grilled lime.

15. Rub thick zucchini slices with a mixture of fresh or dried dill, yogurt, olive oil and lemon. (Or use pesto or parsley pesto.) Grill slowly.

16. More shopping than cooking: Grill an array of radishes on little skewers, four to six each. Serve with butter, salt and bread.

17. Halve Belgian endives. Brush with olive oil, sprinkle with salt and pepper and grill over moderate-to-low heat, turning once or twice, until soft and browned. Finish cut-side up and sprinkle with grated Parmesan; close the grill to melt cheese.

18. Lightly char whole or halved heads of baby bok choy; drizzle with soy sauce and top with chopped scallions.

19. Peel and thickly slice a not overly ripe mango. Brush very lightly with neutral oil and grill just until softened; sprinkle with cilantro and/or mint and lime juice (you might as well grill the lime first, too).

20. Grill pineapple (or anything, really, from pork to tofu to eggplant). Make a sauce of half-cup peanut butter, a tablespoon (or more) soy sauce, a dash (or more) sriracha chili sauce, a handful of basil or mint and enough warm water to thin. (I’m tempted to say, “Throw away the pineapple and eat the sauce,” but the combination is sensational.)

21. Waldorf salad revisited, sort of: Grill cut apples until browned but not mushy; grill chunks of Napa or savoy cabbage, also left crisp; grill halved red onion. Chop or shred all together with blue cheese, walnuts and a little yogurt.

22. Cut a slit in as many ripe figs as you like; stuff with herbed goat cheese (or cream cheese mixed with chopped nuts) and grill slowly. Appetizer or dessert? Your call.

23. Grill red, orange and/or yellow peppers; toss with olives, capers, balsamic vinegar and olive oil.

24. Quick grilled pickle: Rapidly char thick slices of cucumber; toss with salt, vinegar and sugar; let sit for 15 minutes, then drain.

25. Charred salsa verde. Toss whole husked tomatillos, scallions and jalapeños in olive oil and grill until charred. Remove the blackened skin from the chilies and chop or blend everything with diced avocado, lime juice and cilantro. Eat with chips or top grilled chicken with it.

Meat

26. Mideast lamb chops: Shoulder cuts are the best and the cheapest; just don’t burn them. Marinate them briefly in yogurt, lemon, cardamom and mint. Serve with lemon and parsley.

27. Midwest pork chops: Again, shoulder; again, don’t burn. Marinate briefly in spicy mustard, chopped garlic and apple cider.

28. Six-minute steak (or maybe four): Salt skirt steak and grill it, quickly. Top with queso fresco, thinly sliced red onion (you could grill it first, if you like) and the juice of grilled lime.

29. Six-minute steak, plus a little marinating time: Soak skirt steak in a mixture of soy, lime juice, garlic, ginger and sugar (or mirin) before grilling. (The time it takes to heat the grill is long enough.)

30. Smear chicken leg quarters (or thighs) with a paste of garlic, chopped rosemary (thyme, too, if you like), olive oil and the juice of grilled lemon. Grill away from heat, covered; crisp briefly over high heat.

31. Steak au poivre: Sirloin strip is ideal. Press lots of cracked black pepper into both sides, sprinkle with salt and grill over fairly high heat, about three to four minutes on each side. Slice quarter-inch thick before serving.

32. Crisp (and better) duck à l’orange: Score the skin of duck breasts and press rosemary leaves, salt and pepper into both sides. Grill skin-side down over low-ish heat until crackly, then turn and grill briefly. Serve with grilled orange halves.

33. Smear hanger, skirt, flatiron or other steak with mustard. Grill and serve with grilled shallots.

34. Brush chicken thighs — boned or not — with basil, parsley or cilantro pesto. Boneless and skinless thighs can be grilled over direct heat; thighs with skin should be started away from heat.

35. Fast lamb leg: Use steaks cut from the leg, and rub them with a mix of warm spices: cumin, coriander, cinnamon and turmeric. Grill quickly, serve hot.

36. Spread flank steak or butterflied lamb leg with garlic, parsley and lemon zest. Roll and tie, or fold. (Or grill without further fuss, adding more paste occasionally.)

37. Moist grilled chicken breast? Yes: Pound chicken breast thin, top with chopped tomato, basil and Parmesan; roll and skewer and grill over not-high heat until just done.

38. Call it grilled chicken Parm: Pound breast thin, top one side with sliced tomato, mozzarella and Parmesan; fold in half, seal with a toothpick or skewer and grill for a few minutes on each side.

39. Pork (or veal) saltimbocca: Pound pork or veal cutlets thin; top with ham (prosciutto preferably) and cheese (maybe Gruyère). Roll, cook on skewers and serve with pickles.

40. Slice pork shoulder thin. Fry lots of sesame seeds, minced garlic, fresh minced chili in sesame oil; off heat, stir in some soy sauce. Grill the pork fast over high heat, smearing with the sesame paste right after flipping. Serve with lettuce leaves and cilantro, basil and/or mint for wrapping.

41. Bacon-wrapped hot dog. You know you want one.

Fish and Shellfish

42. Grill thick onion slices; purée in a blender with olive oil and lemon juice. Grill scallops for about four minutes; serve with the vinaigrette.

43. Salmon tartare with grilled stuff: Lightly grill radishes, scallions, lime halves and, if you like, plantain disks. Serve the plantains under, and the other things next to, chopped raw salmon (preferably wild) seasoned with salt and pepper.

44. Grill sardines or mackerel; serve with a squeeze of grilled lemon, grapefruit or both.

45. Stuff whole gutted trout with slices of lemon and chopped marjoram or oregano. Wrapping in bacon is optional. One per person is best.

46. Not so easy, but so impressive: Stuff squid bodies with chopped chorizo (optional), garlic-toasted bread crumbs, lemon zest and parsley. Close with toothpicks. Char quickly over a very hot fire.

47. Shrimp, Part 1: Rub with chili powder and salt, and grill quickly. Finish with cilantro and the juice of grilled lime halves.

48. Shrimp, Part 2: Rub with olive oil, salt and cumin. Finish with the juice of grilled lemon halves; garnish with chopped marjoram, if you have it, parsley if you don’t.

49. Shrimp, Part 3: Rub with curry powder. Drizzle with warm coconut milk and chopped mint, basil and/or cilantro.

50. Grilled tuna niçoise: Brush tuna with olive oil and grill; keep it rare. (You might grill some new potatoes while you’re at it.) Serve with more olive oil, lemon juice, cherry tomatoes, olives, grilled red onion and parsley. Green beans and hard-cooked eggs are optional.

51. Grilled clams on the half shell: Get them shucked (or cook in the microwave or on the grill until opened); top with bread crumbs, parsley, lemon, minced cooked bacon (optional). Grill until topping is hot.

52. You think you don’t like bluefish? Grill it, then drizzle with a mixture of chopped fennel fronds (or crushed fennel seeds), melted butter and the juice of grilled grapefruit or orange.

53. White fillets with spice: Mix salt, sugar, chili powder and paprika. Rub on sturdy white fish fillets (make sure the grill grates are clean and well oiled).

54. Buy shucked oysters. Top with juice of grilled lemon. Period. (You could grill shallots, mince and make a grilled mignonette, but this is better.)

55. Grill soft-shell crabs, brushing with melted butter and Tabasco. A little charring of the claw tips isn’t a bad thing.

56. Simmer octopus tentacles until tender (this may take a couple of hours); cool. Grill; cut into attractive little rounds and drizzle with lemon and olive oil.

57. Grill wild salmon (preferably king or sockeye) until not-well-done. Toss diced cucumbers with fresh dill, olive oil and lemon juice. Serve salmon hot, slaw cold.

Kebabs

58. Shrimp and chorizo. Serve with lemon or a little vinaigrette.

59. Lamb and carrots. In last few minutes, brush with miso thinned with a tiny bit of mirin (or sherry, wine or water).

60. Lamb and onions. Brush with a mixture of cumin and olive oil as they sizzle. You can add bell peppers, too, but somehow the stark minimalism of this is pleasing.

61. Odd, but good: Strawberries and cherry tomatoes, finished with basil-laced balsamic vinegar.

62. The New Yawk special: Italian sausage, peppers and onions.

63. The California special: Figs, with chunks of good bacon.

64. Kebab or hero? Your choice: Cut brussels sprouts in half; grill slowly on skewers, with chunks of sausage. Both slowly crisp as they cook.

65. Bread salad on a stick: Cubes of bread, black olives and cherry tomatoes. Don’t grill too long, and drizzle with basil or thyme or parsley vinaigrette.

66. Peaches, plums, strawberries and watermelon. Finish with a sprinkle of salt and perhaps a drizzle of balsamic vinegar.

67. Cubes of mango and chunks of white fish; brush with a mixture of soy, fish sauce, sriracha chili sauce and chopped mint or cilantro. Serve with a mai tai.

68. Go Hawaiian or Italian: Wrap pineapple or melon in prosciutto. Grill briefly.

Salads

69. Grilled coleslaw: Lightly char wedges of green and red cabbage and carrots. Let cool, then shred and toss with a little mayo, vinegar, salt and sugar.

70. Grill halved new potatoes or fingerlings (microwave or parboil first for a few minutes to get a head start), red onions and scallions. Chop as necessary and toss with chopped celery, parsley, mustard and cider (or other) vinegar. I make this annually.

71. Toss grilled Lacinato kale leaves with a little Caesar salad dressing (or olive oil, lemon and Parmesan) and grilled croutons.

72. Char iceberg wedges and cherry tomatoes (skewer these first). Top with blue cheese dressing.

73. Lightly grill ripe figs; brush with balsamic. Chop and toss with arugula and blue cheese. Sprinkle with olive oil.

74. Steak salad with almost no steak: Halve endives or radicchio; brush with oil and grill. Sprinkle with bits of blue cheese and bits of charred steak.

75. Ratatouille: Grill chunks of zucchini, yellow squash, mushrooms, eggplant, onion and tomatoes (or use cherry tomatoes), all until lightly browned and perfectly tender. Toss with fresh marjoram or oregano, thyme, basil and olive oil.

Burgers

76. Greek salad burger: Ground lamb with grated feta, chopped calamatas and a little oregano. Top with tomato, red onion and cucumber.

77. The pickled onions make it: Soak sliced red onions in diluted vinegar and salt while you prepare everything else. Combine ground lamb with grated carrots and cumin; grill, then top with onions.

78. Asian burger: Grind pork, combine with grated daikon and a little soy sauce. Brush with hoisin or miso and top with sliced-and-salted cucumbers.

79. Grind beef, combine with crumbled blue cheese and chopped toasted walnuts. Top, if it doesn’t sound too effete, with sliced grilled pear.

80. A chicken or turkey burger worth eating: Cook and chop bacon; mix with ground chicken (or turkey) and grill.

81. Another: Grind turkey, combine with chopped basil, shove a cube of mozzarella into the center, grill until well done (the cheese will melt). Top with tomato and more basil.

82. Grind salmon (actually, it’s better if you grind half and chop half) and combine with chopped scallions and soy sauce. Grill medium-rare, top with mayo spiked with ginger, soy and/or lime.

83. Philly cheesesteak burger: Grind beef and grill with mushrooms and onions; top with aged provolone.

Sandwiches and Breads

84. Actual grilled cheese: Use good bread, good cheese, tomato slices and maybe a little mustard; brush with melted butter or olive oil and grill with a weight on top.

85. Glorified grilled cheese: Use grilled pineapple, grilled ham, cheese, pickles and mayo; grill with a weight on top.

86. Grill bell peppers until blackened and collapsed; cover, cool and peel. Grill eggplant planks, brushed with olive oil (or pesto if you have it), until very tender. Make a sandwich with balsamic vinegar, mozzarella and basil. This is also good with strip or skirt steak: grill meat until medium-rare, then slice and salt.

87. Grilled quesadilla (simple): Fill a flour tortilla with queso fresco, Monterey Jack or Cheddar; add chicken, shrimp and/or tomato. Fold and grill until cheese melts.

88. Grilled quesadilla (not as simple): Grill and strip corn from the cob; grill red-onion slices and chop them. Combine both with chili powder and bind with a tiny bit of mayo or yogurt. Put between two flour tortillas with cheese and grill. Serve with grilled lime wedges.

89. A different kind of Cuban sandwich: Grill pork steaks (best from the shoulder, about half-inch thick). Put on baguette spread with well-seasoned mashed black beans, queso fresco, chopped red onion (grilled or not), cilantro and lime juice.

90. Grill pork steaks as above; grill red onions. Slice the meat, chop the onions, toss with thinly sliced apples and roll in lavash bread or stuff in pita with yogurt-dill dressing. You can use the meat as an accent, or as the dominant ingredient.

91. Grill sweet Italian sausage and some figs. Combine on a toasted hot dog bun; mustard is optional.

92. Grill split kielbasa or chorizo (the Spanish type). Serve in buns, filled with chopped Manchego and mayo spiked with pimentón. Some chopped dried apricots would be good, too.

Desserts

93. An idea whose time has come: Halve and grill peaches, nectarines or apricots. Brush with barbecue sauce or, if you want to be sophisticated, a mixture of bourbon, sugar and mint, or simple syrup laced with basil.

94. An idea whose time will come in September: Halve and grill pears or apples. When they’re done, drizzle with yogurt, honey and a pinch of cardamom.

95. Grilled fruit salad, and why not? Toss grilled watermelon (really good), peaches, plums, pineapple and kiwi with honey, a little salt, lemon juice and tarragon (not much), chervil, basil or mint (or a combo).

96. Cut grapefruit in half. Sprinkle with brown sugar; grill, cut-side down. You might top this with chopped pistachios or a little honey.

97. Grilled shortbread or poundcake (store-bought is totally fine) topped with grilled fruit sauce, strawberries in sugar, yogurt, ice cream, whatever.

98. Grilled angel food cake or poundcake (again, store-bought is fine) topped with Nutella, chocolate sauce, sorbet, etc.

99. Grilled s’mores: Put graham crackers (or other good quality flat cookie) on foil, top with marshmallows and chocolate and another cracker. Grill until the chocolate and marshmallow begin to melt.

100. Cut bananas into thick rounds (like scallops almost), char quickly and serve with caramel sauce, brown sugar, vanilla ice cream, Nutella … whatever.

101. Actually, this is a drink: Skewer green olives, then char them a bit. These would be a good garnish for shrimp, chorizo or anything else. But instead, make yourself a fantastic dirty martini.

Wallace Berman

“In its initial vogue, these works spoke directly to a new kind of artistic decorum—less aggressive than pop, less ideological than Minimalism, and less maidenly than post-painterly abstraction. It had a kind of gallantry—the cool courtesy of a well-born rake. California Minimalism created a gracious, social space in it’s glow and reflection; it treated us amicably, made us more beautiful by gathering us into it’s dance. It still does this today, so I am not amazed by the renewed interest in this work. I am still amazed, however, that my beach-bum pals could have created such a capacious and courtly art, although beach bums, I suppose, have dreams like everybody else,” Dave Hickey in his essay about Primary Atmospheres.

Billy Al Bengston, Peter Alexander, Charles Arnoldi, Natalie Arnoldi, Jay Batlle, Barrett Becker , Larry Bell, Tony Berlant, Wallace Berman, Susanne Melanie Berry, Ashley Bickerton, Sandow Birk, Wolfgang Bloch, Esteban Bojorquez, Olaf Breuning, Ben Brough, Vija Celmins, Bruce Conner, Ron Davis, Peter Dayton, Gregory de la Haba, Laddie John Dill, Phillip Dvorak, Roe Ethridge, Jim Evans, Ned Evans, Jeremy Everett, Herbie Fletcher, Llyn Foulkes, Sally Gall, Jim Ganzer, Chris Gentile, Joe Goode, Micheal Halsband, Mary Heilmann, George Herms, Jay Mark Johnson, Craig Kauffman, Ed Kienholz, Kristin Jai Klosterman, Bill Komoski, Jeff Lewis, David Lloyd, Robert Longo, Cameron Martin, Sister Mary Corita, John McCracken, Andy Moses, Ed Moses, Steve Olson, Catherine Opie, Claudia Parducci, Helen Pashgian, Raymond Pettibon, Ken Price, Blake Rayne, Rob Reynolds, Ed Ruscha, Dirk Skreber, Craig Stecyk. Thaddeus Strode, Robert Dean Stockwell, Fred Tomaselli, DeWain Valentine, John Van Hamersveld, Alex Weinstein, Chris Wilder, Timothy Williams, Brian Wills, Norton Wisdom, Johannes Wohnseifer

June 30 – August 6, 2010

Friedrich Petzel

From left, Jet Li, Dolph Lundgren and Sylvester Stallone in “The Expendables,” to be released on Aug. 13. “I would sure like to bring the genre back a little bit,” Mr. Stallone said of action films.

By MICHAEL CIEPLY
NY Times Published: June 28, 2010

LOS ANGELES — If ever a film, cinematically speaking, had nothing to lose, it would be “The Expendables.”

Its genre, hard action, peaked in the 1980s. And the dozen or so bruisers in its ensemble cast are even older, on average, than the women in “Sex and the City 2.”

“You’re pretty well limited as to how gullible people are,” said the film’s director and star, Sylvester Stallone.

Mr. Stallone, who is 63, was referring to what he called “the age factor,” and his own return to an action role, this time as Barney Ross, a mercenary who shoots to kill but will do it by hand if he must.

Yet “The Expendables,” a relatively high-budget production from the usually low-budget operators Nu Image and Millennium Films, is beginning to look like a potential late-summer winner for Lionsgate, which is to release it on Aug. 13, after a big promotional push at the Comic-Con International fan convention in late July.

An early press screening at Lionsgate’s Santa Monica headquarters last week drew a full house and whoops in all the right places as Mr. Stallone led his hired guns on a mission to a drug-infested island.

Stuff explodes. Men die. Cigars are smoked in (short) contemplative moments in a movie whose script is credited to David Callaham and Mr. Stallone, but that owes much to precedents like “The Professionals,” “The Wild Bunch” and “The Dirty Dozen.”

The cast matches older stars, like Mr. Stallone, Mickey Rourke, Dolph Lundgren, Eric Roberts and, in a dual cameo, Bruce Willis and Arnold Schwarzenegger — all over 50 — with some slightly younger ones.

Those include the martial arts expert Jet Li, along with the fight- and wrestling-circuit champions Randy Couture and Steve Austin, and a National Football League veteran, Terry Crews, all in their 40s. At 37, the British tough-guy Jason Statham, whose credits include “Crank” and “Revolver,” is the baby.

In a complicated bit of deal-making, “The Expendables” was wrangled from Warner Brothers, where the film, then called “Barrow,” was born about six years ago in a pitch by Mr. Callaham, who was working with the producers Basil Iwanyk of Thunder Road Pictures and Guymon Casady of Management 360.

The idea was to make an old-fashioned action movie about soldiers of fortune, “back when ‘mercenary’ wasn’t such a dirty word” because of private contractors’ dealings in Iraq, Mr. Iwanyk said.

In the 1980s and early ’90s, Warner was something of an action factory, churning out dozens of heavily armed hits like the “Lethal Weapon” series, along with the Stallone vehicles “Assassins,” “The Specialist” and “Demolition Man.”

As the studio turned toward fantasies like “Harry Potter” and rebooted superheroes like Batman in “The Dark Knight,” however, it lost interest in simple grit, and let “The Expendables” go to Nu Image and Millennium with Mr. Stallone, whose idea from the beginning was to make a throwback.

“I would sure like to bring the genre back a little bit, so some young guys could pick up the banner,” Mr. Stallone said in a telephone interview last week.

Asked what had killed classic action films like his “Rambo” and “Rocky” series —which each eked out a respectable performance with retro-style sequels in the past few years — Mr. Stallone answered in a word: “technology.”

When stars could “Velcro their muscles on, it was over,” he said.

A lithe but loopy Tobey Maguire could play a perfectly credible Spider-Man, as computer-generated effects made up for the raw athleticism that Mr. Stallone, Mr. Schwarzenegger and others brought to their trademark roles. Meanwhile, attitudes changed, as Matt Damon, the self-doubting, Mini-Cooper-driving hero of the “Bourne” films, set the standard for a new and less violent kind of hero.

Until, perhaps, “The Expendables.”

The film was rated R last week “for strong action and bloody violence throughout.” That is no surprise to Mr. Stallone, who used a stunt crew of about 75 and a budget of about $80 million to shoot the movie in Louisiana and Brazil. It is about the kind of men who drop in on the bad guys from a plane with hidden machine guns in the front and a “Global Wildlife Conservancy” logo on the side.

Computer-generated imagery was used sparingly, for instance when an elaborate government building had to be toppled. “You won’t believe this, but Brazil would not let us destroy their palace,” Mr. Stallone said.

But the pyrotechnics were real, he said, as were bits of debris that fell within two or three yards of the director’s station.

Rounding up the cast, Mr. Stallone said, was not especially difficult, except for Jean-Claude Van Damme, who declined a role that was eventually taken by Mr. Lundgren. “He told me, you should be trying to save people in South Central,” Mr. Stallone recalled of a conversation with Mr. Van Damme.

“I knew I’d lost him.”

Whether Mr. Schwarzenegger’s brief appearance, in which he swaps lines with both Mr. Stallone and Mr. Willis, portends a return to the screen when his term as California governor ends in January is anyone’s guess. “He gets asked every couple of weeks” about his plans, said Aaron McLear, a spokesman for Mr. Schwarzenegger.

Mr. Stallone said he would like next to play the mobster John Gotti in a father-and-son story, and has been spending time with John Gotti Jr., trying to get a film started.

As for younger stars, Mr. Stallone sees more sweaty action ahead, as they tire of posing in front of a green screen to create digital effects.

“Taylor Lautner, all of these guys want to step up,” he said.

“Given the opportunity to return to Vietnam, down and dirty, they’d be way up for it.”

Jason Meadows, Artemis, 2004

June 26 – October 17

Museum fo Contemporary Art Chicago

June 25, 2010
The Los Angeles Times
By: Patrick Goldstein

If I only had time to ask one question of Levon Helm, the laconic heart and soul of the Band, it would probably be — so what the hell happened between you and Robbie Robertson?

As anyone who has followed the brief, meteoric career of one of our most original and influential rock bands — not to mention Bob Dylan’s best backup band ever — could tell you, Helm and Band co-founder Robertson had a nasty falling out, the bitterness and bad feelings of which have continued to today, long past the group’s 1976 breakup chronicled in Martin Scorsese’s “The Last Waltz.”

Levonhelm Of course, I’m a journalist, not a documentarian, but it still bugs me that Jacob Hatley, the director of “Ain’t in It for My Health: A Film About Levon Helm,” which plays Friday at 9:45 p.m. at the Los Angeles Film Festival, never got around to putting the question to Helm. If he did, he certainly never offers us any evidence of it. That proves to be the one gaping hole in what is an otherwise incredibly likable, not to mention intimate portrait of an aging rock icon who, despite some nasty battle scars and health scares, is still making wonderful music well into his 70s. (If you miss the movie and want to see Helm in person, he’ll be at the Greek Theater in L.A. on Aug. 15.)

Even though the Band made quintessentially heartland American music, everyone in the group was Canadian except for Helm, a small-town Arkansas boy whose early life provided much of the down-home authenticity for Robertson’s songwriting, not to mention the Cotton Belt grit that you hear in songs such as “The Night We Drove Dixie Down.” In the film, Helm is still a classic, if hippie-ish good old boy, with as much connection to the earth as any Delta bluesman. If he looks happy when he’s singing, he looks even happier when he’s driving a tractor through a friend’s corn field in Woodstock, N.Y., where Helm has made his home for years.

We’re lucky to still have Helm around. He got throat cancer in the late 1990s, underwent radiation therapy and lost his voice. The voice has slowly come back, but when we hear him sing now, it’s more of a raspy drawl, stronger some days and perilously weak on others. Helm clearly gave Hatley full access, so we see him everywhere — smoking pot after a show with a starry-eyed Billy Bob Thornton (who’s clearly a smitten fan, just like the rest of us), hanging out around the house, deciding against going to L.A. for the Grammys (he won anyway) and even going to the throat doctor when his voice gives out in the middle of a concert tour.

Helm is what you’d call indomitable. He’s a little frail and it worries you that with his medical history he’s still smoking and drinking up a storm, but it’s nice to see him making some rent money performing at his now traditional Midnight Rambles in Woodstock, which look like so much fun that you want to book a flight to upstate New York tomorrow. It’s clear that Helm, like so many musicians of his generation, is bitter about the way the industry treated him, not to mention the way things turned out with the Band, which lost two of its members to drugs and drink, while Robertson ended up with pretty much all of the publishing royalty dough as the group’s primary songwriter.

Hatley puts a Band biographer on camera to walk us through some of the particulars, and we get to see some astounding vintage footage of the group performing “The Weight” in their Woodstock rehearsal space, their celestial harmonies made all the more poignant by the way Hatley juxtaposes it with a Helm trip to the throat doctor. I still wish the filmmaker had managed to get Levon to open up a little more about the demons and divisions that clearly still haunt him. But Helm is clearly not a man prone to confessions. So I’ll happily settle for what we get from “Ain’t in It for My Health,” which like many of the great songs Helm performed with the Band, nicely balances the bitter with the sweet.

Labor activist Jim Keady says Indonesians who make team jerseys for the company are living in poverty. (John M. Glionna / Los Angeles Times)

By John M. Glionna, Los Angeles Times
June 28, 2010

Reporting from Jakarta, Indonesia —

Like any die-hard sports fan, Jim Keady eagerly anticipated soccer’s World Cup.

But he isn’t at home watching the matches. Instead, the 38-year-old New Jersey native has been in Indonesia, talking to the workers who make the Nike jerseys worn by nine of the teams in the tournament.

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For years, the former professional goalie has waged a one-man campaign to highlight Nike’s labor practices, complaining that the company pays Indonesian workers low wages to stitch together the uniforms that have made the company the world’s most successful sports garment manufacturer.

Sitting at an outdoor coffeehouse here, Keady produced several Nike jerseys in Cup team colors. “These jerseys are real wealth you can touch,” he said. “They’re making Nike and the players rich while the workers who make them continue to grind out lives of abject poverty.”

Keady’s campaign goes back to 1997 when, as a soccer coach for St. John’s University in New York, he questioned the school’s plans to sign a $3.5-million endorsement deal with Nike.

The devout Catholic insisted that the contract would be hypocritical for a Christian university. “I was told to drop the issue or get out,” he said. “So I resigned in protest.”

The showdown prompted Keady to launch Team Sweat, a nonprofit dedicated to persuading Nike to change its business practices.

Keady said that major sports events such as the World Cup offer an opportunity to reach a wider audience.

“Right now, the eyes of the world are on the World Cup,” he said. “Now is the time to get out my message.”

Nike and its contractors employ 800,000 workers in 1,000 factories across 52 countries. Indonesia is the firm’s third-largest manufacturing site after China and Vietnam, Keady said.

A company spokesman said issues such as salary for workers in its disparate production chain are best dealt with “by negotiations between workers, labor representatives, the employer and the government.”

Erin Dobson, Nike’s senior manager for global public affairs, said the company has participated in efforts to improve overall worker welfare. “We believe there is ample room for innovation in this area,” she said, “and that progress must occur throughout the industry, and at the governmental level, not only in Nike’s supply chain.”

She said Nike’s code of conduct mandates that the company pay the minimum legal wage in each country, which in Indonesia is $122 a month, one of Asia’s lowest.

Keady says that if Nike raised the price of its shoes by $2.50 a pair and gave that money to workers, it would help lift most out of poverty. Nike calls that a simplistic solution that does not take into account complicated country factors.

In 2000, the towering, redheaded Keady moved to Indonesia and lived on the same salary as a Nike worker, which at the time was about $1.25 a day, staying in a 9-by-9-foot home in a community where 10 families share bathroom and kitchen facilities.

He lost 25 pounds in one month and returned to the U.S. to tell of his experiences. “I thought it would be a 10-week tour, but I’ve been on the road ever since,” he said.

Often, his campaign resembles activist Michael Moore’s documentary “Roger & Me” and Keady has recorded his exploits, producing a short film called “Behind the Swoosh.” He also unsuccessfully tried to meet with Phil Knight, Nike chairman and former chief executive, and has sought the support of athletes promoting Nike, including Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods and soccer star Mia Hamm.

But he spends most of his time interviewing workers who don’t make enough money in a week to buy a Nike jersey. Although he hasn’t had time to watch the World Cup games, many of the workers have.

“Despite their low wages, they still have immense pride in their work,” he said. “They’re overjoyed at the fact that many of these World cup players are wearing jerseys made in Indonesia.”

Keady told the story of one Nike factory worker.

“He said that one day, he’d like to be able to buy a pair of Nike sneakers that he helps make,” the activist recalled. “After 19 years of factory work, he wanted to be able to bring home the product so he could show his daughter what Daddy does. That just floored me.”

By GAIL COLLINS
NY Times Published: June 25, 2010

What a run she’s been on. This week — with the big financial reform package edging toward completion, and the House approving a major campaign finance reform bill — was a reminder of what an incredibly productive speaker she’s become.

Last winter, when Washington was backing away from the whole health care deal after the Republicans won Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat, Pelosi was uncowed. “We’ll go through the gate. If the gate’s closed, we’ll go over the fence. If the fence is too high, we’ll pole vault in,” she said. “If that doesn’t work, we’ll parachute in. But we’re going to get health care reform passed for the American people.”

I sort of like the image of Nancy Pelosi parachuting in. Would she wear her high heels? Probably not, but her hair would still look as if it had been blow-dried by a stylist on the way out of the airplane.

She’s a 70-year-old perpetual motion machine who seems, in her public appearances, both ultra-programmed and ultra-intense. Many Americans were first introduced to her when the new speaker sat behind President Bush at his State of the Union speech in 2007, blinking so ferociously that she seemed to be sending out Morse code distress calls from the back of the podium.

In conversation, she’s a runaway train. Talking about global warming in an interview last week, she warned: “You don’t want me to go into the melting of the polar cap and the glaciers and the great rivers of Southeast Asia and the water supply in Tibet and the encroachment of the Gobi Desert and the sandstorms in Beijing and the rise of sea level in all of our maritime areas in the world and. … I would just recommend you go to Alaska to see what is happening.”

The Republicans have turned Pelosi into the Demon Grandmother — in ads, a satanic figure in the flames of deficit spending, or a 50-foot monster smashing houses with her big-government feet. (She seems utterly indifferent to the endless public pummeling — although she did express some dismay, in an interview with The Times’s Mark Leibovich, that people had been speculating that she might have had a face-lift.)

But even the public that likes the legislation she’s been churning out tends to underestimate her.

Maybe that’s because she came up through the ranks of the California Democratic Party, and then the House, with a reputation as a prodigious fund-raiser. It’s an idea Pelosi herself isn’t comfortable with. She rejects the description of her early party-building activities as being about raising money. “I wasn’t a fund-raiser. I was like a small businesswoman,” she protested.

She is, at any rate, a person who combines the high ideals of politics with a sure grasp of the very practical realities. Some progressives will never forgive Pelosi for caving in to the anti-abortion forces during the health care negotiations or for giving the National Rifle Association an exemption in the new campaign finance legislation. But the real world has limits, and one of them is that there will never be a major bill to emerge from the House of Representatives that doesn’t have something regrettable in it.

Pelosi has actually been very good on ethics. Under her watch in the House, earmarks are fewer and more transparent. Travel rules are tighter. She fought for the creation of a new in-house watchdog, the Office of Congressional Ethics, pushing it over the wire by one vote. Since then, the aggressive ethics office has won the rancor of investigated members of Congress and the hearts of good-government groups.

“She bit the bullet,” said Sarah Dufendach, the vice president for legislative affairs at Common Cause. “That was a very heavy lift, to get the House to do that. I give her really high marks for that.”

Of all the good deeds for which people get punished in Washington, pushing ethics has to be at the top of the list. Your own members resent it, and the public doesn’t really give you any credit. It’s not likely that people will go to the polls in November and vote Democratic because the House, although still deeply, deeply imperfect, is run with a higher ethical standard than it was before Pelosi got control.

She has been around a long time and must have known that from the start. But she pushed anyway. Pelosi is an idealist working in the practical now. She genuinely sees her party as a vehicle for good and her pragmatism is not the least bit cynical. She is the most powerful woman in the country, the most fearless person on Capitol Hill and on track to be one of the most productive speakers in history.

I don’t know about you, but that kind of knocks me out.

S.Olafs/European Pressphoto Agency

Jon Gnarr mocked politics, and picked up protest votes.

By SALLY McGRANE
NY Times Published: June 25, 2010

REYKJAVIK, Iceland — A polar bear display for the zoo. Free towels at public swimming pools. A “drug-free Parliament by 2020.” Iceland’s Best Party, founded in December by a comedian, Jon Gnarr, to satirize his country’s political system, ran a campaign that was one big joke. Or was it?

Last month, in the depressed aftermath of the country’s financial collapse, the Best Party emerged as the biggest winner in Reykjavik’s elections, with 34.7 percent of the vote, and Mr. Gnarr — who also promised a classroom of kindergartners he would build a Disneyland at the airport — is now the fourth mayor in four years of a city that is home to more than a third of the island’s 320,000 people.

In his acceptance speech he tried to calm the fears of the other 65.3 percent. “No one has to be afraid of the Best Party,” he said, “because it is the best party. If it wasn’t, it would be called the Worst Party or the Bad Party. We would never work with a party like that.”

With his party having won 6 of the City Council’s 15 seats, Mr. Gnarr needed a coalition partner, but ruled out any party whose members had not seen all five seasons of “The Wire.”

A sandy-haired 43-year-old, Mr. Gnarr is best known here for playing a television and film character named Georg Bjarnfredarson, a nasty, bald, middle-aged, Swedish-educated Marxist whose childhood was ruined by a militant feminist mother.

While his career may have given him visibility, few here doubt what actually propelled him into office. “It’s a protest vote,” said Gunnar Helgi Kristinsson, a political science professor at the University of Iceland.

In one of the first signs of Europe’s financial troubles, Iceland’s banks crashed in 2008, plunging the country into crisis. In April, voters were further upset by a report that detailed extreme negligence, cronyism and incompetence at the highest levels of government. They were ready for someone, anyone, other than the usual suspects, Professor Kristinsson said.

“People know Jon Gnarr is a good comedian, but they don’t know anything about his politics,” he said. “And even as a comedian, you never know if he’s serious or if he’s joking.”

But as Mr. Gnarr settles into the mayor’s office, he does not seem to be kidding at all.

The Best Party, whose members include a who’s who of Iceland’s punk rock scene, formed a coalition with the center-left Social Democrats (despite Mr. Gnarr’s suspicion that party leaders had assigned an underling to watch “The Wire” and take notes). With that, Mr. Gnarr took office last week, hoping to serve out a full, four-year term, and the new government granted free admission to swimming pools for everyone under 18. Its plans include turning Reykjavik, with its plentiful supply of geothermal energy, into a hub for electric cars.

“Just because something is funny doesn’t mean it isn’t serious,” said Mr. Gnarr, whose foreign relations experience includes a radio show in which he regularly crank-called the White House, the C.I.A., the F.B.I. and police stations in the Bronx to see if they had found his lost wallet.

THE polar bear idea, for example, was not totally facetious. As a result of global warming, a handful of polar bears have swum to Iceland in recent years and been shot. Better, Mr. Gnarr said, to capture them and put them in the zoo.

The free towels? That evolved from an idea to attract more tourists by attaining spa status for the city’s public pools, which have seawater and sulfur baths. For accreditation under certain European Union rules, however, a spa has to offer free towels, so that became a campaign slogan.

Mr. Gnarr, born in Reykjavik as Jon Gunnar Kristinsson to a policeman and a kitchen worker, was not a model child. At 11, he decided school was useless to his future as a circus clown or pirate and refused to learn any more. At 13, he stopped going to class and joined Reykjavik’s punk scene. At 14, he was sent to a boarding school for troubled teenagers and stayed until he was 16, when he left school for good.

Back in Reykjavik, he worked odd jobs, rented rooms, joined activist groups like Greenpeace and considered himself an anarchist (he still does). He also wrote poetry and traveled with the Sugarcubes, Bjork’s first band. He said he hated music but was a good singer, and began his career with humorous songs punctuated by monologues.

“I didn’t have many job options,” he said. “It was a way of making a living and still having fun.” His wife, Johanna Johannsdottir, a massage therapist, is Bjork’s best friend.

Mr. Gnarr said his idea for the Best Party was born of the profound distress and moral confusion after the banking collapse, when Icelanders fiercely debated their obligation to repay ruined British and Dutch depositors.

Practically speaking, Mr. Gnarr said he had no qualms. “Why should I repay money I never spent?” he asked, a common sentiment here. But on a deeper level, he had misgivings.

“I consider myself a very moral person,” he said. “Suddenly, I felt like a character in a Beckett play, where you have moral obligations towards something you have no possibility of understanding. It was like ‘Waiting for Godot’ — I was in limbo.”

LAST winter, he opened a Best Party Web site and started writing surreal “political” articles. “I got such good reactions to it,” Mr. Gnarr said, “and I started sensing the need for this — a breath of fresh air, a new interaction.”

The campaign released a popular video set to Tina Turner’s “The Best,” in which Mr. Gnarr posed with a stuffed polar bear and petted a rock, while joining his supporters in singing about the Best Party.

“A lot of us are singers,” said Ottarr Proppe, the third-ranking member of the Best Party, who was with the cult rock band HAM and the punk band Rass. Mr. Proppe now sits on the city’s executive board, where he will be deciding matters like how much money to allocate for roads. “Making a video was very easy,” he said.

At a recent budget meeting, Mr. Proppe, who has a wild red beard, ran his hand through his bleached-blond hair as he studied the fiscal report from behind tinted, gold-rimmed glasses. His old band mate S. Bjorn Blondal quizzed the city’s comptroller. Heida Helgadottir, who ran the campaign and is now assistant to the mayor, wore a diaphanous minidress and typed notes.

Mr. Gnarr, who comes across as thoughtful and reserved, did not speak often. When he did he had the whole room, including the strait-laced Social Democrat, in stitches. Still, he is not just playing a cutup; friends describe his move to politics as a spiritual awakening. He agreed.

“Of all the projects I’ve been involved with, this one has given me the most satisfaction, the greatest sense of contentment.”

“Sun and Rocks,” a 1918 image of geologic upheaval, was transformed in 1950, with a cruciform star, into a scene of mystical visitation.

By HOLLAND COTTER
NY Times Published: June 24, 2010

Summer, which can be hard in the city, could be heaven to the painter Charles Burchfield, the 20th-century mystic of American light. Because he spent most of his time in a leafy suburb of Buffalo, to him the season meant trees aureoled in noonday sunshine, afterglow skies as cool as the song of a thrush and gardens pulsing with the music of crickets in moonlight.

Yet he was never at ease. Even with nature he was tense and agonized. Early on, Burchfield concluded, as God once had, that Paradise meant no people, and he rarely painted any. He also learned that Hell was a society of one: himself. A natural ecstatic, he was also a chronic depressive: not a passive shut-down case, but a lamenter and yearner. “Oh God — How to get back there!” he wrote in his journal, “there” being childhood, innocence, home.

A mood-swing dynamic seems pronounced in the survey called “Heat Waves in a Swamp: The Paintings of Charles Burchfield” at the Whitney Museum of American Art, maybe in part because the show was organized by Robert Gober, the contemporary American artist whose own work mines the neurotic underside of the American psyche. Yet even while emphasizing certain aspects of Burchfield’s career, Mr. Gober gives us nothing but Burchfield himself. The peaks and valleys are all right there in the art.

Born in Ohio in 1893, Burchfield, as early as he could remember, was acutely responsive to nature, in part as a substitute for a lost religious faith. His father, the son of a Methodist minister, had angrily renounced orthodoxy. And when later Burchfield’s mother felt shut out from a local congregation, he rejected religion completely.

He spent four years in art school in Cleveland, absorbed in the thinking of the artist and philosopher Arthur Wesley Dow (1857-1922), who taught that nature should be depicted not realistically but as graphic patterns. In 1916 Burchfield left for New York City with a scholarship to study at the National Academy of Design, but once there he balked and dropped out after a single afternoon. He managed to land a solo show in a bookstore-gallery in Manhattan before heading, desperately homesick, back to Ohio.

By then he was already doing interesting things.

He had settled on watercolor — technically demanding, almost entirely about luminosity — as his primary medium and on landscape, both observed and imagined, as his subject. He was pulling aesthetic stimuli from everywhere: childhood nature books, Japanese prints, Chinese scrolls, Arthur Rackham’s Wagner illustrations, Léon Bakst’s sets for the Ballets Russes, and painting by Romantic artists like William Blake and, surely, Samuel Palmer.

In 1917, which Burchfield would call his “golden year,” this eclectic mélange generated some of his best-known images.

In one titled “The Insect Chorus” the vegetative world becomes a keyed-up anthropomorphic force, with trees rendered as jazzy swirls of bumblebee yellow and black, and the buzz of cicadas notated as clusters of dotted lines.

The same natural energy becomes crushing and funereal in “Church Bells Ringing, Rainy Winter Night,” a picture of a steeple looming like a great bug-eyed bird over a squat town as black rain pours down. To Burchfield, at that point simultaneously agnostic and terrified of damnation, the painting expressed the dread that religion instilled in him.

It also incorporated one of his most distinctive conceptual innovations, a lexicon of some two dozen semiabstract designs meant to symbolize negative emotions. These “conventions for abstract thought,” as he called them, include a gaping mouth to stand for “dangerous brooding,” a pair of blank eyes for “imbecility” and two black whirlpools to represent fear.

He planted these elements in his paintings — the fear symbol dominates the church picture — to give his decorative patterns an expressive personal subtext. Mr. Gober has installed the initial 1917 drawings of these forms at the very beginning of the show, as if to suggest that the art that follows should be read in their light. Much of it can be, but not all.

In 1921 Burchfield moved to Buffalo, married and worked as a designer in a wallpaper company, transferring his nature imagery to a commercial medium. Meanwhile his career as an artist was building, with gallery solos leading, in 1930, to a show of his “golden year” paintings at the fledgling Museum of Modern Art.

Feeling trapped in a job that left him little energy for painting, Burchfield quit commercial work in 1929 only to land in a different trap. He was now painting full time, but the pictures people wanted were of American industry and small-town life, popular subjects during the Great Depression. It was hard for him to say no. Magazine commissions kept coming, and they were turning him into a celebrity.

Again the art he really cared about seemed out of reach or only peripherally in his life — mainly through his habit, which had the character of a compulsion, of drawing wild, sensuous semiabstract designs on stray scraps of paper: telephone notes, shopping lists, card-game score sheets. He dismissively called the sketches “doodles” but pasted thousands of them into albums for safekeeping.

Then in 1944, after his first career retrospective at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, he decided to do what he had always longed to do, get back to the beginning, to where he had started in his art. He retrieved paintings from around 1917 and began to study and change them. He enlarged their surfaces by adding strips of paper, then reworked and expanded the original images.

One small painting, “The Sphinx and the Milky Way,” became an entirely new work at three times its original size, a rapturously spooky fairy-tale version of van Gogh’s “Starry Night.” A gnarly little 1918 image of geologic upheaval called “Sun and Rocks” was transformed in 1950, after the addition of a cruciform star, into a scene of mystical visitation.

By that point Burchfield had made his peace with religion, joined a church and returned, refreshed, to the subjects he loved: nature and light. As a consequence the work in the show’s final section, which Mr. Gober has labeled “Great Art and Death,” has a mood of holiday euphoria.

In “Clover Field in June” (1947) sunlight falls like a snow of gold pollen over a world seen from the perspective of a bee on a flower. In “Midsummer in the Woods” (1951-59) a fir tree levitates in a misted clearing. And in “The Four Seasons” (1949-1960) winter, spring, summer and fall recede sequentially into the distance like a succession of brilliantly colored stage flats.

“The Four Seasons” is equal parts Christmas card (Burchfield designed many), Gothic altarpiece and “Fantasia” outtake. It’s kitsch or something close, though the continuing presence of the old codes for fear and brooding indicate a charge of disturbance that faith didn’t touch. In “Early Spring,” left unfinished at Burchfield’s death in 1967, a tree bristles with thorns or spikes. Nature is in tatters; scrawled at the bottom of the picture in the artist’s hand are the words “very dark pit.”

So right to the end it’s hard to know exactly what to do with this doubter-believer and his confessing, witnessing art. Mr. Gober, in collaboration with the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles and the Burchfield-Penney Art Center in Buffalo, presents him with sober, tender attachment. (And tenderness is necessary; some of the paintings look shockingly fragile and faded.)

Burchfield’s intensities are not for all tastes. But this summer if you’re looking for visionary company in the city, someone who has a deep investment in the way light falls, who loves the world with a romantic’s anxiety and avidity, and who will now and then excuse himself to go to “some secret place to think about God,” he’s the artist for you.

“Heat Waves in a Swamp: The Paintings of Charles Burchfield” remains through Oct. 17 at the Whitney Museum of American Art

By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Times Published: June 24, 2010

Last weekend China announced a change in its currency policy, a move clearly intended to head off pressure from the United States and other countries at this weekend’s G-20 summit meeting. Unfortunately, the new policy doesn’t address the real issue, which is that China has been promoting its exports at the rest of the world’s expense.

In fact, far from representing a step in the right direction, the Chinese announcement was an exercise in bad faith — an attempt to exploit U.S. restraint. To keep the rhetorical temperature down, the Obama administration has used diplomatic language in its efforts to persuade the Chinese government to end its bad behavior. Now the Chinese have responded by seizing on the form of American language to avoid dealing with the substance of American complaints. In short, they’re playing games.

To understand what’s going on, we need to get back to the basics of the situation.

China’s exchange-rate policy is neither complicated nor unprecedented, except for its sheer scale. It’s a classic example of a government keeping the foreign-currency value of its money artificially low by selling its own currency and buying foreign currency. This policy is especially effective in China’s case because there are legal restrictions on the movement of funds both into and out of the country, allowing government intervention to dominate the currency market.

And the proof that China is, in fact, keeping the value of its currency, the renminbi, artificially low is precisely the fact that the central bank is accumulating so many dollars, euros and other foreign assets — more than $2 trillion worth so far. There have been all sorts of calculations purporting to show that the renminbi isn’t really undervalued, or at least not by much. But if the renminbi isn’t deeply undervalued, why has China had to buy around $1 billion a day of foreign currency to keep it from rising?

The effect of this currency undervaluation is twofold: it makes Chinese goods artificially cheap to foreigners, while making foreign goods artificially expensive to the Chinese. That is, it’s as if China were simultaneously subsidizing its exports and placing a protective tariff on its imports.

This policy is very damaging at a time when much of the world economy remains deeply depressed. In normal times, you could argue that Chinese purchases of U.S. bonds, while distorting trade, were at least supplying us with cheap credit — and you could argue that it wasn’t China’s fault that we used that credit to inflate a vast, destructive housing bubble. But right now we’re awash in cheap credit; what’s lacking is sufficient demand for goods and services to generate the jobs we need. And China, by running an artificial trade surplus, is aggravating that problem.

This does not, by the way, mean that China gains from its currency policy. The undervalued renminbi is good for politically influential export companies. But these companies hoard cash rather than passing on the benefits to their workers, hence the recent wave of strikes. Meanwhile, the weak renminbi creates inflationary pressures and diverts a huge fraction of China’s national income into the purchase of foreign assets with a very low rate of return.

So where does last week’s policy announcement fit into all this? Well, China has allowed the renminbi to rise — but barely. As of Thursday, the currency was only about half a percent higher than its typical level before the announcement. And all indications are that watching the future movement of the renminbi will be like watching paint dry: Chinese officials are still making statements denying that a rise in their currency will do anything to reduce trade imbalances, and prices in the forward market, in which traders agree to exchange currencies at various points in the future, suggest a rise of only about 2 percent in the renminbi by the end of this year. This is basically a joke.

What the Chinese have done, they claim, to increase the “flexibility” of their exchange rate: it’s moving around more from day to day than it did in the past, sometimes up, sometimes down.

Of course, Chinese policy makers know perfectly well that although U.S. officials have indeed called for more currency flexibility, that was just a diplomatic euphemism for what America, and the world, wants (and has the right to demand): a much stronger renminbi. Having the currency bob up or down slightly makes no difference to the fundamentals.

So what comes next? China’s government is clearly trying to string the rest of us along, putting off action until something — it’s hard to say what — comes up.

That’s not acceptable. China needs to stop giving us the runaround and deliver real change. And if it refuses, it’s time to talk about trade sanctions.

through June 26

Michael Benevento

Derk Bergquists

COMMUNITY In an ecosystem known as a cold seep, which thrives on the Gulf of Mexico seabed, tube worms that could be centuries old thrive among corals, crabs, brittle stars and other creatures.

By WILLIAM J. BROAD
NY Times Published: June 21, 2010

The deep seabed was once considered a biological desert. Life, the logic went, was synonymous with light and photosynthesis. The sun powered the planet’s food chains, and only a few scavengers could ply the preternaturally dark abyss.

Then, in 1977, oceanographers working in the deep Pacific stumbled on bizarre ecosystems lush with clams, mussels and big tube worms — a cornucopia of abyssal life built on microbes that thrived in hot, mineral-rich waters welling up from volcanic cracks, feeding on the chemicals that leached into the seawater and serving as the basis for whole chains of life that got along just fine without sunlight.

In 1984, scientists found that the heat was not necessary. In exploring the depths of the Gulf of Mexico, they discovered sunless habitats powered by a new form of nourishment. The microbes that founded the food chain lived not on hot minerals but on cold petrochemicals seeping up from the icy seabed.

Today, scientists have identified roughly one hundred sites in the gulf where cold-seep communities of clams, mussels and tube worms flourish in the sunless depths. And they have accumulated evidence of many more — hundreds by some estimates, thousands by others — most especially in the gulf’s deep, unexplored waters.

“It wouldn’t surprise me if there were 2,000 communities, from suburbs to cities,” said Ian R. MacDonald, an oceanographer at Florida State University who studies the dark ecosystems.

The world’s richest known concentration of these remarkable communities is in the Gulf of Mexico. The life forms include tube worms up to eight feet long. Some of the creatures appear old enough, scientists say, to predate the arrival of Columbus in the New World.

Now, by horrific accident, these cold communities have become the subject of a quiet debate among scientists. The gulf is, of course, the site of the giant oil spill that began April 20 with the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon drill rig. The question is what the oil pouring into the gulf means for these deep, dark habitats.

Seep researchers have voiced strong concern about the threat to the dark ecosystems. The spill is a concentrated surge, they note, in contrast to the slow, diffuse, chronic seepage of petrochemicals across much of the gulf’s northern slope. Many factors, like the density of oil in undersea plumes, the size of resulting oxygen drops and the potential toxicity of oil dispersants — all unknowns — could grow into threats that outweigh any possible benefits and damage or even destroy the dark ecosystems.

Last year, scientists discovered a community roughly five miles from where the BP well, a mile deep, subsequently blew out. Its inhabitants include mussels and tube worms. So it seems that researchers will have some answers sooner rather than later.

“There’s lots of uncertainty,” said Charles R. Fisher, a professor of biology at Pennsylvania State University, who is leading a federal study of the dark habitats and who observed the nearby community. “Our best hope is that the impact is neutral or a minor problem.”

A few scientists say the gushing oil — despite its clear harm to pelicans, turtles and other forms of coastal life — might ultimately represent a subtle boon to the creatures of the cold seeps and even to the wider food chain.

“The gulf is such a great fishery because it’s fed organic matter from oil,” said Roger Sassen, a specialist on the cold seeps who recently retired from Texas A&M University. “It’s preadapted to crude oil. The image of this spill being a complete disaster is not true.” His stance seems to be a minority view.

Over roughly two decades, the federal government has spent at least $30 million uncovering and investigating the creatures of the cold seeps, a fair amount of money for basic ocean research. Washington has provided this money in an effort to ensure that oil development does no harm to the unusual ecosystems. Now, the nation’s worst oil spill at sea — with tens of millions of gallons spewing to date — has thrown that goal into doubt.

The agency behind the exploration and surveying of the cold seeps is none other than the much-criticized Minerals Management Service of the Department of the Interior — not its oil regulators but a separate environmental arm, which long ago began hiring oceanographers, geologists, ecologists and marine biologists to investigate the gulf seabed and eventually pushed through regulations meant to protect the newly discovered ecosystems.

The minerals service is joining with other federal agencies to study whether the BP spill is harming the dark habitats. Scientists say ships may go to sea as soon as July, sending tethered robots down to the icy seabed to examine the seep communities and take samples for analysis.

It is a bittersweet moment for scientists like Dr. MacDonald of Florida State University, who has devoted his career to documenting the ecosystem’s richness and complexity. In an interview, he said the sheer difficulty of trying to fathom the ecological impacts of the spill had left some of his colleagues dejected.

“Once, we had this career studying obscure animals down there,” he said. “And now, it’s looking at this — probably for the rest of my career. It becomes this huge unknown.”

Inky darkness, icy temperatures and crushing pressures conspire to make studying the deep oceans arduous and remarkably costly. Humans are estimated to have glimpsed perhaps a millionth of the ocean floor.

By contrast, people looking at the surface of the gulf have known about the seeping oil for centuries. Spanish records dating from the 16th century note floating oil.

In the early 1980s, scientists investigating the oil seeps wondered if nearby creatures on the seabed might suffer chronic harm from pollution and serve as models for petrochemical risk. They lowered nets about a half mile down and pulled up, to their surprise, riots of healthy animals.

“We report the discovery of dense biological communities associated with regions of oil and gas seepage,” six oceanographers at Texas A&M wrote in the journal Nature in September 1985.

The animals included snails, crabs, eels, clams and tube worms more than six feet long. The founding microbes of the food chain turned out to feed on seabed emissions of methane and hydrogen sulfide — a highly toxic chemical for land animals that has the odor of rotten eggs.

Plants derive energy from sunlight and make living tissue in a process known as photosynthesis. The corresponding method among the microbes of the dark abyss is known as chemosynthesis.

The minerals service proceeded to finance wide expeditions. It issued thick reports in 1988, 1992 and 2002. By then, scientists had discovered dozens of seep communities and found some of their inhabitants to be extraordinarily old.

In the journal Nature, Dr. Fisher of Pennsylvania State University and two colleagues reported that gulf tube worms could live more than 250 years — making them among the oldest animals on the planet.

The latest expeditions have looked at seep communities as deep as 1.7 miles — far down the continental slope toward the gulf’s nether regions. In an interview, Dr. Fisher said investigations of the deeper communities suggested that tube worm species there grew slower and lived longer.

How long? “It’s likely they can live a lot longer,” he answered. “I’m uncomfortable with an exact number, but we’re talking centuries — four, five or six centuries.”

Over the years, scientists have found that the deep microbes not only eat exotic chemicals but also make carbonate (a building block of seashells) that forms a hard crust on the normally gooey seabed. The carbonate crusts can grow thick enough, they say, to reduce the flow of gas and oil through the seep communities and form attachment points for a variety of other sea creatures, especially deep corals and other filter feeders like brittle stars.

By probing the gulf’s deep waters with sound and other imaging technologies, scientists have found evidence for the existence on the northern continental slope of roughly 8,000 regions of hard crust — all, they say, potentially home to old or new seep communities.

On its Web site, the minerals service freely admits “a management conflict” between encouraging oil development and protecting the dark ecosystems. It issued regulations in 1989 and has periodically toughened the rules, most recently in January.

Now, in the wake of the oil disaster, many seep researchers have voiced strong concern about the threat to the dark ecosystems. Dr. Fisher said that thick oil could coat the respiratory structures of the animals and cause them to suffocate, and that high concentrations might otherwise prove toxic.

Samantha B. Joye, a cold-seep scientist at the University of Georgia, told a House science subcommittee on June 9 that the BP blowout represented “an unprecedented perturbation to the Gulf of Mexico system.”

She expressed particular concern about the dispersants that BP is injecting a mile down into the spewing oil — in a largely successful effort to reduce the flow reaching the surface.

Dr. Joye said the surge of oil into subsurface waters could feed microbes that consume oxygen. If their numbers explode, she said, the result could be a spike in oxygen consumption so large that its deep levels drop precipitously.

The dark ecosystems, she noted, “can tolerate reduced oxygen concentrations.” But she cautioned that the BP spill will challenge their tolerance “beyond any previous insult.”

Now, oceanographers are preparing to dive deep to see how the dark communities are holding up. The lessons for oil precautions and regulatory care, they say, could have application not only for creatures in the inky depths of the Gulf of Mexico but also around the world.

“Everywhere they looked, they’ve found them,” said Norman L. Guinasso Jr., director of Geochemical and Environmental Research at Texas A&M. He cited discoveries of seep communities off Angola, Indonesia and Trinidad.

In exploring the gulf, Dr. Guinasso said, scientists are struggling to fathom the strengths and vulnerabilities of some of the planet’s oldest and most novel creatures. “People,” he said, “are still learning.”

thanks to danielle and phil