By JULIA MOSKIN
NY Times Published: March 5, 2008

IN 1968 a Chinese-American physician wrote a rather lighthearted letter to The New England Journal of Medicine. He had experienced numbness, palpitations and weakness after eating in Chinese restaurants in the United States, and wondered whether the monosodium glutamate used by cooks here (and then rarely used by cooks in China) might be to blame.

The consequences for the restaurant business, the food industry and American consumers were immediate and enormous. MSG, a common flavor enhancer and preservative used since the 1950s, was tagged as a toxin, removed from commercial baby food and generally driven underground by a new movement toward natural, whole foods.

“It was a nightmare for my family,” said Jennifer Hsu, a graphic designer whose parents owned several Chinese restaurants in New York City in the 1970s. “Not because we used that much MSG — although of course we used some — but because it meant that Americans came into the restaurant with these suspicious, hostile feelings.”

Even now, after “Chinese restaurant syndrome” has been thoroughly debunked (virtually all studies since then confirm that monosodium glutamate in normal concentrations has no effect on the overwhelming majority of people), the ingredient has a stigma that will not go away.

But then, neither will MSG.

Cooks around the world have remained dedicated to MSG, even though they may not know it by that name. As hydrolyzed soy protein or autolyzed yeast, it adds flavor to the canned chicken broth and to the packs of onion soup mix used by American home cooks, and to the cheese Goldfish crackers and the low-fat yogurts in many lunchboxes.

It is the taste of Marmite in the United Kingdom, of Golden Mountain sauce in Thailand, of Goya Sazón on the Latin islands of the Caribbean, of Salsa Lizano in Costa Rica and of Kewpie mayonnaise in Japan.

“It’s all the same thing: glutamate,” said Dr. Nuripa Chaudhari of the University of Miami, who was part of the first research team to identify human glutamate receptors.

In September Dr. Chaudhari will take part in the University of Tokyo’s centenary celebrations honoring Prof. Kikunae Ikeda’s 1908 discovery of glutamate flavor. The Japanese company Ajinomoto turned that discovery into crystalline powder form, MSG, and patented it in 1909.

“Just like salt and sugar, it exists in nature, it tastes good at normal levels, but large amounts at high concentrations taste strange and aren’t that good for you,” Dr. Chaudhari said.

If you live in the United States and like spicy tuna rolls, Puerto Rican roast pork or Thai noodles, there is a good chance you are eating, and enjoying, MSG. And if you are the kind of cook who likes to keep a globe-trotting kitchen, well, then, some of these MSG-laden ingredients may deserve a place in your cupboard.

“I don’t cook with MSG because that’s not my training, but it definitely has its place,” said Zak Pelaccio, a New York chef whose ride to fame has been greased with Kewpie mayonnaise. One of the dishes that put him on the map was a sandwich of roasted salmon on pumpernickel bread slathered with wasabi aioli: wasabi from a tube and the mayonnaise.

In regions where meat and meaty flavors have been out of reach for most cooks, MSG has long filled the gap.

“My father called Maggi sauce la segunda venida, the second coming, because he was not a very good cook and it saved him,” said Irma Cecilia Sanchez, a home health aide from Puebla, Mexico, who was waiting in line at a taco truck on the Upper West Side. Maggi sauce is a 19th-century Swiss creation, a general flavor enhancer now made with MSG, sweeteners and extracts.

Her mother died when she was young, she said, and her father was a reluctant cook, making scrambled eggs most nights. “Huevos revueltos with Maggi sauce is still one of my favorite things, with tortillas and pico de gallo,” she added.

Maggi sauce (there are various other Maggi products, not all of which contain MSG) is extremely popular in regions as far-flung as India, Mexico, the Philippines and the Ivory Coast. One of Thailand’s favorite late-night street foods, pad kee mao, or drunkard’s noodles, relies on its sweet-salty-meaty taste; the Malaysian version is called Maggi goreng.

“It’s the kind of thing people crave late at night,” said Bee Yinn Low, who is from Penang but lives in Irvine, Calif., and writes a blog about Malaysian food at rasamalaysia.com. Maggi has a faintly similar flavor to Indonesian kecap manis, a salty-sweet-savory condiment that is one ancestor of modern tomato ketchup.

“Asia wouldn’t survive without MSG,” said Mike Crewe-Brown, a cooking teacher who recently spent three months producing a food documentary in Southeast Asia.

Even after “No MSG” signs began appearing across the United States, “most Chinese restaurants, honestly, kept right on using it,” Ms. Hsu said. “And at home most Chinese cooks will sprinkle in a little bit at the end, especially if the ingredients they had to cook with were not that great.”

Meat and MSG work beautifully together. Throughout Latin America and the Caribbean, the fallback rub for pork shoulder or flank steak is Goya Sazón: MSG and salt, cut with garlic, cumin and annatto. Accent, which is mostly MSG, was introduced in 1947 and quickly became a staple for American home cooks.

But it is in Japan that MSG has been most thoroughly integrated into popular food, through two main delivery systems: instant ramen noodle soup and mayonnaise, now popular on pizza, omelets and sushi. (Mayonnaise Kitchen, a food stall in Tokyo, serves only mayonnaise-friendly foods and lets patrons store their own bottles of Kewpie, the most popular brand.)

Japanese mayonnaise is flavored with MSG and rice vinegar, giving it an addictive roundness and tang. It is the main ingredient in dynamite sauce, a mix of mayonnaise and chili sauce that has become a staple of sushi bars here and in Japan. At Ginza in Boston, a dish called hotate hokkaiyaki — baked shellfish with dynamite sauce — has had a passionate following for more than 10 years.

If you have ever wondered what makes spicy tuna rolls so much tastier than plain tekka maki, dynamite sauce, or perhaps the MSG in it, is the answer.

In upscale restaurants, whether by tradition or by inclination, chefs are unlikely to use monosodium glutamate. “We don’t need to use Ajinomoto because we can get the ingredients that have natural umami: shiitake mushrooms, egg yolks, shellfish, masago,” said Sotohiro Kosugi, the chef of Soto in New York.

Although umami is only a bit player in Japanese cuisine, reams of breathless prose have been produced here on this elusive fifth taste, which is supposedly linked to the profoundly pure, deep-sea flavors of kelp and dried tuna.

Umami “is delicious,” Katsuhiro Utada told The New York Times in 1983, and a food-lovers’ swoon began. Mr. Utada, not coincidentally, was the president of the Ajinomoto Company — then, and now, the world’s largest producer of monosodium glutamate.

Whether umami is the fifth taste or the 50th — there is little agreement among neuroscientists — it has been positively identified as the flavor of glutamic acid, an amino acid naturally present in many savory foods, from seaweed to soppressata. Food writers lost no time adding umami to their mental glossaries. But this same crowd rarely mentions MSG, a cheap, synthetic route to the flavor of glutamate.

I keep kecap and (umami-rich) ketchup on hand, but MSG is not normally present in my kitchen. The spice drawer has never seen Accent, the canned chicken broth has a big “No MSG” stamp on the label and the hoisin, soy and fish sauces on hand are the food-writer-approved brands. Again, no MSG.

So the food I produced at home using Maggi sauce, MSG-laden bouillon cubes and Japanese mayonnaise tasted … different.

I made two versions of pad kee mao, with and without Maggi, and while both were good, the one with MSG had the kind of round flavor I’d normally associate with homemade chicken stock or some form of professional expertise.

Tasted straight, though, the sauces had the chemical, tangy aftertaste common to many processed foods.

“Too much MSG and you get that harsh, acrid taste,” said Mr. Pelaccio, who uses an empty barrel of Ajinomoto-brand MSG he found on the street as a plant stand in his Chinatown apartment. “But get it just right and that dish will sing.”

The role of MSG in food, and its effects on health, remain controversial. Linda Bartoshuk, a director of the University of Florida’s Center for Smell and Taste, who has studied the sensory effects of MSG for years, believes not only that MSG is harmful to health, but also that it has virtually no effect on the taste of food. “All this umami stuff is just marketing,” she said.

In 1995 the Food and Drug Administration issued a large-scale review by the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology, clearing glutamates as a health risk for the vast majority of consumers.

An international research review in 1987 by the World Health Organization and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations had come to the same conclusion.

“There was simply no clinical evidence for any of it,” said Marion Nestle, a professor of nutrition at New York University.

She did not even mention MSG in her recent book “What to Eat,” much of which is devoted to health concerns over food additives. “I thought the issue was settled, though I know a lot of people will never believe that,” she said.

MSG is blamed by some groups for a range of serious neurological and physiological disorders. Some studies have identified both MSG and aspartame (another Ajinomoto product) as excitotoxins, substances that overstimulate the neurotransmitters to the point of cell damage. But no large-scale clinical research has been done since the F.D.A.’s 1995 review.

Since the 1970s, MSG has sidled back onto American supermarket shelves, under assumed names: hydrolyzed proteins, yeast extracts, protein concentrates and other additives that are not labeled as MSG but, according to nutritionists and the United States Department of Agriculture, are essentially the same thing: synthetically produced glutamates.

The whey protein concentrate and liquid aminos that many Americans buy at health food stores are also, essentially, pure glutamate, Dr. Chaudhari said.

According to U.S.D.A. guidelines, “labeling is required when MSG is added as a direct ingredient.” But other glutamates — the hydrolyzed proteins, the autolyzed yeasts and the protein concentrates, which the U.S.D.A. acknowledges are related to MSG — must be identified under their own names.

Alternatively, they may also be included under certain terms, like vegetable broth or chicken broth. Thus, these ingredients are now routinely found in products like canned tuna (vegetable broth is listed as an ingredient; it contains hydrolyzed soy protein), canned soup, low-fat yogurts and ice creams, chips and virtually everything ranch-flavored or cheese-flavored.

Thus, the richest source of umami remains your local convenience store. Grab a tube of Pringles or a bologna sandwich, and glutamic acid is most likely lurking there somewhere.

Nacho-cheese-flavor Doritos, which contain five separate forms of glutamate, may be even richer in umami than the finest kombu dashi (kelp stock) in Japan.

No wonder they taste so good.

ny times

By WILLIAM YARDLEY
NY Times Published: March 4, 2008

GABRIOLA ISLAND, British Columbia — Should a fourth human foot float ashore here in the evergreen Gulf Islands off the west coast of Canada, the person who finds it would no doubt want to know the answers to three questions.
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The New York Times

Gabriola Island has become a popular vacation destination.

Is it a right foot?

Is it wearing a running shoe?

Is the shoe a size 12?

After all, for the first three feet that surfaced on the rocky coastlines of three separate islands in the Strait of Georgia over the last six months, the answer has been yes in nearly every case. The only uncertainty is what size shoe No. 3 was wearing when it was spotted by a boater on the beach of remote Valdez Island on Feb. 8. The coroner’s office, facing a bit of a news media blitz, has yet to say.

“This is the first incident in recent memory where we’ve had three such similar sets of remains come to our attention in a certain time frame and a certain geographic area,” said Jeff Dolan, assistant deputy chief coroner for the British Columbia Coroner’s Office.

Even with DNA samples obtained from Nos. 1 and 2, and with constant calls from residents suggesting whom the feet might have helped propel in the past, no identifications have been made and no causes of death determined. Nor has anyone reported finding any left feet.

“They might be aggregated somewhere else,” said Curtis Ebbesmeyer, a former professor of oceanography at the University of Washington who has made a career of tracking the routes of floating objects, including (empty) sneakers spilled from cargo ships. Mr. Ebbesmeyer said the opposite shapes of left and right shoes could make them respond differently to currents.

What is not surprising, he said, is that the feet made it ashore.

“Running shoes are quite buoyant,” said Mr. Ebbesmeyer, who is completing a book, “The Floating World,” to be published by HarperCollins. “They would tend to encase a foot and keep it floating. A body comes apart naturally; it’s called disarticulation. The head usually comes off first. The parts of the body that are protected will last the longest. The shoe usually floats soles up, so that might prevent the seabirds from pecking at it.”

The first foot was found Aug. 20 on Jedediah Island by a 12-year-old girl from Washington State who was boating with her family. The second turned up Aug. 26, here on Gabriola. The successive findings made for strange news, but the tides yielded nothing more, and attention eventually waned. Then No. 3 appeared on Valdez.

Coroners and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, which had already been investigating, ratcheted things up at that point. Still, they have no strong leads, officials say, and many details about No. 3 are being kept quiet “to preserve the integrity of the investigation,” said Constable Annie Linteau.

That has not stopped people here on Gabriola Island from drawing their own conclusions.

“The left feet are probably encased in concrete at the bottom of the strait,” said Frank Bond, an island resident for 28 years who was doing landscaping recently just a few hundred feet from the sandstone coastline where foot No. 2 was found. “And if it is a gang thing, I bet they’re going to start taking those sneakers off before they do it again.”

Murder? Not likely, said Digby Jones, 80, who learned to walk on Gabriola back when it attracted mostly fishermen, farmers and summer visitors from Victoria, Vancouver and elsewhere in British Columbia. Now the island is filling up with bed-and-breakfasts, second homes and retirees.

“The whole thing is a scam, as far as I’m concerned, all part of a big joke,” Mr. Jones said. “If they go to the mortuaries on the mainland, you’ll find some guy laughing his head off.”

Others, less skeptical, cite various small-plane crashes in which victims were never found, like the four men missing since a float plane went down in the strait awhile back. Fishermen, boaters and kayakers disappear fairly often, too. And then there are the suspicious riffraff over in Nanaimo, the rusty town on Vancouver Island that is the closest urban area to the islands by ferry. Hells Angels, gangs — nothing but trouble, islanders say. The theories seem endless.

“Oh yeah, it was a foot fetishist who was somewhere in a cave and capturing people and cutting off their right feet,” said Michele Geris, 51, a wine importer from Vancouver who visits Gabriola each summer. “Come on, give me a break.”

Ms. Geris has heard more rumors than most people. Last August, at the end of a long afternoon hike on the island with her husband, George Baugh, she spotted a shoe near the trunk of a tree, just a few yards from a tidal cove, and she knew instantly that the shoe was not empty.

“It was such a hell of a big foot,” said Ms. Geris, 51, a native of France. “My theory is that it washed onto the beach and then an animal picked it up.”

It was foot No. 2, sheathed in a white leather Reebok. Size 12.

The couple used their walking sticks to set the foot on its sole. Flies flew out. They saw the frayed threads of a sock, then bone, yellowed by time and water, like quartz. They tried to call the police but there was no cellphone reception. They decided to hike out in search of a phone signal, leaving the foot.

Ms. Geris suggested that they first knock on the door of one of the houses nearby, but her husband objected.

“He said, ‘Don’t you dare; they could be the killers,’ ” she recalled. “I said: ‘Oh yes, they’re cutting people up and then just leaving them casually in the back of the garden. Don’t be ridiculous.’’”

It all makes for an amusing mystery, but a solemn one, too.

“You have to have respect,” Ms. Geris said of the foot she found. “This belonged to somebody.”

ny times

The Belgian artist Jan De Cock’s installation in the photography galleries at MOMA will confound, even irritate, many viewers. There’s no question that it’s maddeningly hermetic, but it’s also intriguingly beautiful—like a great editorial layout blown up to billboard scale. Two galleries are filled with framed photographs and painted plywood boxes that perch high on the wall or hug the floor, most of them clustered side by side in numbered “modules” whose contents are annotated on wall labels. The information provided can’t begin to order, much less explain, the overwhelming pileup of visual information. Although De Cock’s primary focus is MOMA itself—its conservation lab, auditorium, library, and collection—the museum is at the center of a storm of images within images, many of which are no more than suggestive slices. The route from Brancusi’s sculpture “Mlle Pogany” to Everglades National Park to a woman on a bench in Sayville is full of detours and dead ends, but the trip is as exhilarating as it is exasperating.

The New Yorker
by Vince Aletti March 3, 2008♦

Feb 26, 8:02 PM (ET)

LOS ANGELES (AP) - Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa on Tuesday signed one of the nation’s toughest laws on pet sterilization, requiring most dogs and cats to be spayed or neutered by the time they are 4 months old.
The ordinance is aimed at reducing and eventually eliminating the thousands of euthanizations conducted in Los Angeles’ animal shelters every year.
“We will, sooner rather than later, become a no-kill city and this is the greatest step in that direction,” Councilman Tony Cardenas said as he held a kitten at a City Hall news conference.
Councilman Richard Alarcon, who like Cardenas is a co-author of the bill, brought his two pet Chihuahuas to the event to be neutered in a van operated by the city.
The ordinance does exempt some animals, including those that have competed in shows or sporting competitions, guide dogs, animals used by police agencies and those belonging to professional breeders.
The average pet owner, however, must have their dog or cat spayed or neutered by the time it reaches 4 months of age (as late as 6 months with a letter from a veterinarian). People with older unneutered pets and newcomers to the city with animals also have to obey the law.
First-time offenders will receive information on subsidized sterilization services and be given an additional 60 days. If they still fail to comply they could be fined $100 and ordered to serve eight hours of community service. A subsequent offense could result in a $500 fine or 40 hours of community service.
The ordinance brings the nation’s second-largest city into line with about a dozen of its neighbors that have similar laws.
Many states require animals adopted from shelters to be sterilized, and New York City requires the same for animals bought from pet shops, but restrictions such as those in Southern California are rare. A 2006 Rhode Island law requires most cats to be sterilized.
A measure similar to Los Angeles’ passed the California Assembly last year but did not gain state Senate support.
Los Angeles animal shelters took in 50,000 cats and dogs last year and euthanized approximately 15,000 at a cost of $2 million, according to city officials.
Bob Barker, the retired game-show host who famously ended every “Price is Right” show with a call for sterilizing pets, pushed for the law’s adoption and was among those at Tuesday’s news conference.
“The next time that you hear me say, ‘Help control the pet population, have your pet spayed or neutered,’ I can add, ‘It’s the law in Los Angeles,’” a jubilant Barker said.

ap news

By JOHN TIERNEY
NY Times Published: February 26, 2008

The next time you’re juggling options — which friend to see, which house to buy, which career to pursue — try asking yourself this question: What would Xiang Yu do?

Xiang Yu was a Chinese general in the third century B.C. who took his troops across the Yangtze River into enemy territory and performed an experiment in decision making. He crushed his troops’ cooking pots and burned their ships.

He explained this was to focus them on moving forward — a motivational speech that was not appreciated by many of the soldiers watching their retreat option go up in flames. But General Xiang Yu would be vindicated, both on the battlefield and in the annals of social science research.

He is one of the role models in Dan Ariely’s new book, “Predictably Irrational,” an entertaining look at human foibles like the penchant for keeping too many options open. General Xiang Yu was a rare exception to the norm, a warrior who conquered by being unpredictably rational.

Most people can’t make such a painful choice, not even the students at a bastion of rationality like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where Dr. Ariely is a professor of behavioral economics. In a series of experiments, hundreds of students could not bear to let their options vanish, even though it was obviously a dumb strategy (and they weren’t even asked to burn anything).

The experiments involved a game that eliminated the excuses we usually have for refusing to let go.. In the real world, we can always tell ourselves that it’s good to keep options open.

You don’t even know how a camera’s burst-mode flash works, but you persuade yourself to pay for the extra feature just in case. You no longer have anything in common with someone who keeps calling you, but you hate to just zap the relationship.

Your child is exhausted from after-school soccer, ballet and Chinese lessons, but you won’t let her drop the piano lessons. They could come in handy! And who knows? Maybe they will.

In the M.I.T. experiments, the students should have known better. They played a computer game that paid real cash to look for money behind three doors on the screen. (You can play it yourself, without pay, at tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com.) After they opened a door by clicking on it, each subsequent click earned a little money, with the sum varying each time.

As each player went through the 100 allotted clicks, he could switch rooms to search for higher payoffs, but each switch used up a click to open the new door. The best strategy was to quickly check out the three rooms and settle in the one with the highest rewards.

Even after students got the hang of the game by practicing it, they were flummoxed when a new visual feature was introduced. If they stayed out of any room, its door would start shrinking and eventually disappear.

They should have ignored those disappearing doors, but the students couldn’t. They wasted so many clicks rushing back to reopen doors that their earnings dropped 15 percent. Even when the penalties for switching grew stiffer — besides losing a click, the players had to pay a cash fee — the students kept losing money by frantically keeping all their doors open.

Why were they so attached to those doors? The players, like the parents of that overscheduled piano student, would probably say they were just trying to keep future options open. But that’s not the real reason, according to Dr. Ariely and his collaborator in the experiments, Jiwoong Shin, an economist who is now at Yale.

They plumbed the players’ motivations by introducing yet another twist. This time, even if a door vanished from the screen, players could make it reappear whenever they wanted. But even when they knew it would not cost anything to make the door reappear, they still kept frantically trying to prevent doors from vanishing.

Apparently they did not care so much about maintaining flexibility in the future. What really motivated them was the desire to avoid the immediate pain of watching a door close.

“Closing a door on an option is experienced as a loss, and people are willing to pay a price to avoid the emotion of loss,” Dr. Ariely says. In the experiment, the price was easy to measure in lost cash. In life, the costs are less obvious — wasted time, missed opportunities. If you are afraid to drop any project at the office, you pay for it at home.

“We may work more hours at our jobs,” Dr. Ariely writes in his book, “without realizing that the childhood of our sons and daughters is slipping away. Sometimes these doors close too slowly for us to see them vanishing.”

Dr. Ariely, one of the most prolific authors in his field, does not pretend that he is above this problem himself. When he was trying to decide between job offers from M.I.T. and Stanford, he recalls, within a week or two it was clear that he and his family would be more or less equally happy in either place. But he dragged out the process for months because he became so obsessed with weighing the options.

“I’m just as workaholic and prone to errors as anyone else,” he says.. “I have way too many projects, and it would probably be better for me and the academic community if I focused my efforts. But every time I have an idea or someone offers me a chance to collaborate, I hate to give it up.”

So what can be done? One answer, Dr. Ariely said, is to develop more social checks on overbooking. He points to marriage as an example: “In marriage, we create a situation where we promise ourselves not to keep options open. We close doors and announce to others we’ve closed doors.”

Or we can just try to do it on our own. Since conducting the door experiments, Dr. Ariely says, he has made a conscious effort to cancel projects and give away his ideas to colleagues. He urges the rest of us to resign from committees, prune holiday card lists, rethink hobbies and remember the lessons of door closers like Xiang Yu.

If the general’s tactics seem too crude, Dr. Ariely recommends another role model, Rhett Butler, for his supreme moment of unpredictable rationality at the end of his marriage. Scarlett, like the rest of us, can’t bear the pain of giving up an option, but Rhett recognizes the marriage’s futility and closes the door with astonishing elan. Frankly, he doesn’t give a damn.

ny times

pacific asia museum

nytimes

the independent uk

Metro Pictures will exhibit new ceramic sculptures by Sterling Ruby, February 21 to March 29, in the upstairs gallery. After working in ceramics for nearly 10 years, “KILN WORKS” will be Ruby’s first exhibition dedicated exclusively to works in this medium.

Swirls of vivid color, blemishes and metallic surfaces on indistinct forms resembling baskets, vessels and body parts - Ruby’s ceramic works are the result of free form building techniques that emphasize immediacy. For Ruby the kiln is an allegorical device used to denote termination of the clay’s malleability. Craft, art therapy and German “hot lava” vessels from the 1970s are referenced.

Born in 1972, Sterling Ruby graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and received his MFA from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. Running concurrently with this show is a solo exhibition at The Drawing Center from February 22 to March 27th. And upcoming is a solo show at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, May 29th to August 31st. In the past year, he participated in the Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art, the California Biennial at the Orange County Museum of Art and “Red Eye: L.A. Artists,” at the Rubell Collection in Miami.

sterling ruby at metro pictures

Neil Neches, on a No. 5 train, underneath the placard that has earned him plaudits for his proper use of the semicolon.

By Sam Roberts for The New York Times
Published: February 18, 2008
Correction Appended

It was nearly hidden on a New York City Transit public service placard exhorting subway riders not to leave their newspaper behind when they get off the train.

“Please put it in a trash can,” riders are reminded. After which Neil Neches, an erudite writer in the transit agency’s marketing and service information department, inserted a semicolon. The rest of the sentence reads, “that’s good news for everyone.”

Semicolon sightings in the city are unusual, period, much less in exhortations drafted by committees of civil servants. In literature and journalism, not to mention in advertising, the semicolon has been largely jettisoned as a pretentious anachronism.

Americans, in particular, prefer shorter sentences without, as style books advise, that distinct division between statements that are closely related but require a separation more prolonged than a conjunction and more emphatic than a comma.

“When Hemingway killed himself he put a period at the end of his life,” Kurt Vonnegut once said. “Old age is more like a semicolon.”

In terms of punctuation, semicolons signal something New Yorkers rarely do. Frank McCourt, the writer and former English teacher at Stuyvesant High School, describes the semicolon as the yellow traffic light of a “New York sentence.” In response, most New Yorkers accelerate; they don’t pause to contemplate.

Semicolons are supposed to be introduced into the curriculum of the New York City public schools in the third grade. That is where Mr. Neches, the 55-year-old New York City Transit marketing manager, learned them, before graduating from Tilden High School and Brooklyn College, where he majored in English and later received a master’s degree in creative writing.

But, whatever one’s personal feelings about semicolons, some people don’t use them because they never learned how.

In fact, when Mr. Neches was informed by a supervisor that a reporter was inquiring about who was responsible for the semicolon, he was concerned.

“I thought at first somebody was complaining,” he said.

One of the school system’s most notorious graduates, David Berkowitz, the Son of Sam serial killer who taunted police and the press with rambling handwritten notes, was, as the columnist Jimmy Breslin wrote, the only murderer he ever encountered who could wield a semicolon just as well as a revolver. (Mr. Berkowitz, by the way, is now serving an even longer sentence.)

But the rules of grammar are routinely violated on both sides of the law.

People have lost fortunes and even been put to death because of imprecise punctuation involving semicolons in legal papers. In 2004, a court in San Francisco rejected a conservative group’s challenge to a statute allowing gay marriage because the operative phrases were separated incorrectly by a semicolon instead of by the proper conjunction.

Louis Menand, an English professor at Harvard and a staff writer at The New Yorker, pronounced the subway poster’s use of the semicolon to be “impeccable.”

Lynne Truss, author of “Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation,” called it a “lovely example” of proper punctuation.

Geoffrey Nunberg, a professor of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, praised the “burgeoning of punctuational literacy in unlikely places.”

Allan M. Siegal, a longtime arbiter of New York Times style before retiring, opined, “The semicolon is correct, though I’d have used a colon, which I think would be a bit more sophisticated in that sentence.”

The linguist Noam Chomsky sniffed, “I suppose Bush would claim it’s the effect of No Child Left Behind.”

New York City Transit’s unintended agenda notwithstanding, e-mail messages and text-messaging may jeopardize the last vestiges of semicolons. They still live on, though, in emoticons, those graphic emblems of our grins, grimaces and other facial expressions.

The semicolon, befittingly, symbolizes a wink.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 19, 2008
An article in some editions on Monday about a New York City Transit employee’s deft use of the semicolon in a public service placard was less deft in its punctuation of the title of a book by Lynne Truss, who called the placard a “lovely example” of proper punctuation. The title of the book is “Eats, Shoots & Leaves” — not “Eats Shoots & Leaves.” (The subtitle of Ms. Truss’s book is “The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation.”)

ny times

Steve Lopez for LA times

I can think of two ways to look at the possibility that 138 hallowed acres near the Hollywood sign may get bulldozed and turned into a McMansion cluster:

First, why not? It isn’t as if we’ve gone out of our way to preserve the natural aesthetic anywhere else in Southern California. So let’s put an Olympic-size infinity pool or two up there, a Wolfgang Puck cafe and a drive-through laser surgery center to service the new residents, so they don’t have to get out of their Range Rovers.

And second, are they kidding?

I drove to the top of Beechwood Canyon the other day and hiked up the Hollyridge Trail to put in my own two cents. The plan was to trek across the property in question to the lone tree that survived the fires last year at the eastern edge of Cahuenga Peak. As I wrote last September, hikers record their thoughts on this or that in a small notebook under the tree, and I had something I wanted to write.

But before I made it to the Hollywood sign, I bumped into Tim Greenhall of England and Joel Wesslund of Sweden, who are in town on business and pleasure. The sign is known the world over, of course, and these two guys wanted to be able to say they were nearly close enough to touch it.

I told them that the next time they hike to the sign, they could be trespassing on Michael Ovitz’s croquet court, if not the helipad of an Arab sheik.

“I heard something about that,” Greenhall said, looking at Wesslund, who winced and took a step back. How, he wondered, could self-respecting residents of Los Angeles let such a thing happen?

While I spoke to them, Tom Edgar, a Web designer in white shorts, strolled by. He curled up to the top of the trail, just above the towering H and O, and checked out the stunning view. The sky was milky blue and the city raced down the mountain, spilling into the shimmering sea.

Edgar said he’d have to know more about where the houses would be and what they would look like. That’s not precisely clear, I told him, but I pointed out the 138-acre plot just west of the sign. He sized things up in his mind’s eye and put things in perspective:

“Every city has its landmark, and this is our Eiffel Tower.”

It would take nothing, Edgar said, to set up a website and begin “a grass-roots campaign” to save the mountain. I told him I might take him up on it.

I have to admit that when I first saw the sign many years ago, it was not love at first sight. I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, where I was dazzled by the Golden Gate Bridge and the tinkertoy city skyline. The Hollywood sign was a Polaroid oddity, more than a little cheesy and commercial.

But I now proudly show off the view of the sign from my backyard, and I enjoy sitting up on the deck when the setting sun marches closer and closer to the Griffith Observatory and the whitewashed sign as the days grow longer.

Yeah, I know the original Hollywoodland sign was a real estate promotion. But it doesn’t take much imagination to see it as a statement about human desire and frailty. About the trip we all take into the unknown. Part of what makes the sight of it so serene, even mystical, is that the letters sit on one of the last undeveloped ridges in the metropolis.

But as you may have heard, the 138 private acres in question — surrounded by public property — were purchased by a Chicago investment group in 2002 for a mere $1.675 million from the estate of Howard Hughes. Hughes had intended to put his honey cup, Ginger Rogers, up there at 1,800 feet, fixed like a queen, but she chose to do her dancing at a lower elevation.

Why napping L.A. city officials didn’t realize the land was up for grabs, and elbow those Chicago yobs out of the way, is beyond me. But it now seems like the biggest blunder since Native Americans let the Dutch have Manhattan for $24 in cloth and buttons.

The city had the 138 acres appraised for $6 million and would be willing to pay that much, but the hooligans from Chicago are playing hardball. They say the land is zoned for up to five houses and that they can get a cool $22 million for the property.

L.A. City Councilman Tom LaBonge says he’s exploring legal challenges to the owners’ claims that a 1949 lawsuit by Hughes cleared the way for development. The owners would have us believe the houses wouldn’t be close enough to the Hollywood sign to obstruct anyone’s view, but who wants to see a private driveway carving up the mountain?

“It cannot happen,” said LaBonge, who frequently leads hikers through the area, pointing out plants and wildlife.

In 1978, he said, when the Hollywood sign was crumbling, the entertainment industry stepped in to save the day with $27,000 in donations. Alice Cooper, Hugh Hefner and Gene Autry all wrote checks, and maybe this time Hollywood will step up in a bigger way, LaBonge said.

He promised to put out the call, noting that from Cahuenga Peak, you can see the Warner Bros., Disney and Universal lots.

Up by the sign, I met an equestrian show announcer named James Collins. If houses are built near there, he said, they might as well dock the Queen Elizabeth in Lake Hollywood too. As far as who should pay to preserve the space, he was on the same wavelength as LaBonge, saying those who’ve found gold in Hollywood should kick a few nuggets into the pot.

“Tom Cruise, Johnny Depp, Spielberg, David Geffen, Sherry Lansing” are good candidates, he said.

Some of those folks are already big givers, actually. Geffen and Eli Broad have their names on more than a few institutions. But I’ve got another thought. Since Chicagoans own the land, why not have a shrewd real estate man — from Chicago, no less — buy them out?

This might not endear me to my new boss, Sam Zell, but he’s said to be worth several billion. What better way to introduce himself to Southern California than to go down in L.A. history as the man who saved one of the city’s great icons?

Come on, Sam, I’ll chip in. And I’ll lead you out to the tree, which I couldn’t get to this time because a cop was there to stop me. Private property, he said.

Yeah, I know. But I need to leave this note for the owners:

“Over my dead body. Or, if I’m busy, over Tom LaBonge’s.”

la times

Works from 1961-64
Tue 26. Feb 2008 - Sat 29. Mar 2008

The Dresden and Düsseldorf art academies during the early 1960s, the popular class of Karl Otto Goetz, student friendships with Gerhard Richter, Sigmar Polke and Konrad Lueg (who would become the group Realistischer Kapitalismus in 1963) and a first, self-organised group exhibition in a Düsseldorf display window space – all in all a good start to the artistic career of Manfred Kuttner, who died last year at the age of 70. In 2007 the Tate Modern in London featured his work along with that of Anselm Reyle and Thomas Scheibitz in the exhibition The Artist’s Dining Room.

After emigrating to West Germany with his wife in 1960 to flee the repressive circumstances in the GDR, Kuttner produced a body of work with a distinctive formal vocabulary of its own in only four years, from 1961 to 1964. This was described by contemporary critics as “kinetic painting” because he brought an abstract rhythmisation to his canvasses – or to old curtains and other fabrics – in the way he applied the then newly available neon paints. He himself said that he was concerned with achieving immediacy with colour composition, and was particularly taken with Yves Klein’s use of colour. Some of Kuttner’s images do indeed have an almost magnetic visual “pull”, but he was not interested in the mechanical, fastidious precision of Op Art. His painting is more nonchalant, often reduced to simple grids, and is more reminiscent of the compositions of Mary Heilmann. Reduction and rhythmisation are frequent strategies in his paintings, as well as his drawings – some of them executed on newspaper – which are exhibited here for the first time.

In his other artistic activities, Kuttner focused on the objects of the contemporary world around him, applying neon paint to various (plastic) toys, a typewriter, the academy piano, and the chair and bicycle saddle exhibited here. This work suggests Dada and Pop Art, and is no less visually compelling.

The work that perhaps unites all his interests most strikingly is the 8mm film entitled A-Z. Kuttner’s formal approach was to expose each frame of the film as a photograph and to hand-colour a number of interjacent unexposed frames. His subject matter is street signs, advertising, private images, artworks produced by his friends – all of it arranged into a walk through Düsseldorf from his flat to his studio at the Academy. In 1965 Kuttner decided for the “A” of the film – i.e. to provide for his family by earning a regular income as an advertising graphic designer – as there were very few collectors for his work at the time. Those who did know his work, as he himself said at the time, assumed that this “newfangled neon painting” would never last for more than a year and were hesitant to buy. As it turned out, it has now lasted for more than 45 years.

link to johann konig

Mysterious creatures from the deep have been discovered in waters off the east Antarctic land mass.

Scientists from around the world cruised waters in three ships and trawled at depths of 2,000 metres.

Voyage Leader Dr Martin Riddle says during 20 days of sampling they collected thousands of animals.

He says up to 25 per cent of them are previously unknown species.

“We saw giant worms, giant crustaceans, giant spiders, glass-like tunicates,” he said.

“In other places things scraped bare and barren by iceberg scour so a huge diversity of life, very colourful, very rich, far exceeding any of our expectations.”

Dr Riddle says the scientists specialising in cold water fish, had never seen anything like it.

“They had fins in various places, they had funny dangly bits around their mouths,” he said.

“We were working on the bottom so they were all bottom dwellers so they were all evolved in different ways to live down on the sea bed in the dark so many of them had very large eyes, very strange looking fish.”

The specimens have been sent to universities and museums around the world for analysis.

link to article

Manuel Graf sets two handmade tea services and a video projection in theatrical relationship. The small sculptures are mirrored as images in the film “Qu’est que c’est la maturité”, 2008 (What is maturity) – a kind of animated Revue theater in three acts. During the first act, tea cups, sugar bowl and teapot, designed as a classical architectural ensemble, spin to a Waltz tempo under a spotlight. The images convey a lulling and sedating effect, as if in the contemplation of a musical box. The second act leads towards the absurd with artificially accelerated and overwound music. An Ikebana construction site grows from nothingness like a design for a plug-in-city from architect group ARCHIGRAM, while ripe oranges weigh on the scaffolding. They are not harvested, but left to rot and fall about. Straight away, fresh fruit is delivered and the process begins all over again. Converted into a carousel, an orange tree goes merry-go-round in the third act, as seesaws are replaced by bonbon-coloured fetishes dangling in the air: high heels on silk ribbons from today and past á la Bernard Rudofsky.

On the small stage, he lets a kind of voodoo magic occur, as tea sets, profane objects symbolic of tradition, contemplation and maturity, are charged with childish fantasy. Sounds and images possess the dead material as a creative breath does the modelled clay. In so doing, Graf plays with an ancient desire of humanity: to bestow inanimate, handmade things with life as if with a magic wand. At the same time canonising the mundane, the act of drinking tea leads to a space beyond ideologies; Arcadia, where both the childish and the mature coexist.

Grafs video works, frequently accompanied by objects, are deeply permeated by historical references and allusions. The complex iconography in his works is drawn from a great fascination for architecture, pop and fashion, as well as a profound understanding of these fields. With a light-footed, playful handwriting, Graf has developed an explicit artistic position within the theoretical discourse.

Johann König, Berlin is pleased to present the second solo gallery exhibition of the artist. Manuel Graf (*1978 in Böhl, Baden) studied at the Arts Academy of Düsseldorf. Previously, his work has been shown in the Kunstverein Göttingen as well as the Museum X, Mönchengladbach (Rheingold Collection). From then on, his work was to be seen in collective exhibitions in the Kunstverein Nürnberg and the Julia Stoschek Collection in Düsseldorf. In 2008, he will be participating in the exhibition Mode und Verzweiflung (Fashion and Desperation) at the Museumsquartier in Vienna, as well as in a group exhibition at LCCA in Riga.

manuel graf

The “magic carpet” as Tim has called it, once stood 30-feet high and nearly 200 feet wide. Tim’s property is home to a one-acre sanctuary of cacti, azaleas, kumquats, green onions and banana trees - to name just a few!
Mr. Dundon - called the “King of Compost” by Organic Gardening Magazine® - cultivated the mammoth compost pile in the backyard of his Altadena home, carefully blending household garbage, animal droppings and mulch into an organic tower of supercharged soil!
Tim has demonstrated that the management of organic material is not only fun, but also takes those who are involved into a whole new dimension of enlightenment. Dedicating his entire life to proving the marvel of mulch, this man has accomplished wonders towards the education of schools, children, their families and the community at large.

link to site

printable 11 by 17 poster from tagbanger

Steve Lopez LA Times

February 13 2008

You’d think that after fining a family $347,000 last year for trimming some overgrown trees on their property, the city of Glendale could rest on its laurels. But there is no end to the zeal of City Hall bureaucrats, who are as determined as ever to let no good deed go unpunished.

A couple of years ago, Pete Anderson and Sally Browder decided to do something about a nagging bout of guilt. Like most people in water-challenged California, they were pouring gallons of H2O into their yard, feeding a nice green lawn like every other resident of their block.

“It’s the principle of the thing,” said Browder, a recording engineer and the mother of a little girl who happens to be one of my daughter’s buddies.

“Even if I had all the money in the world,” said Anderson, a musician, endlessly running the sprinklers “would be wrong from an ecological point of view.”

So they decided to starve their lawn.

While they waited for it to die, Browder began researching drought-resistant plants and making trips to the Theodore Payne Native Plant Nursery in Sun Valley. Last August, she and Anderson removed the dead grass, ripped out the irrigation system, built a decorative dry creek bed, and paved an area along the driveway with used brick.

In rich dark soil next to that, they neatly placed incensia, sage, blue-eyed grass, monkey flowers, Pt. Reyes manzanita and woolly blue curls, taking care not to squeeze the plants too close together.

“I like it a lot,” said next-door neighbor Rachel Stull, who helped with some of the planting. “I think it adds character” on a block that otherwise looks like “a planned community.”

But a City Hall emissary, working for the same Neighborhood Services department that was involved in the infamous tree-trimming fiasco, did not share this enthusiasm. He cited Anderson and Browder on Aug. 29 for having too much paving material and too few plants.

Anderson and Browder were dumbfounded. Until they got the violation notice, they had been unaware of a city ordinance requiring that 40% of their lot be fully landscaped. They thought they’d done a pretty nice job, so when two months went by without more contact from the city, they assumed the matter had been dropped.

Reader alert: No one living in Glendale should ever assume that City Hall has backed off. If your fence, flagpole, trees or anything else is the least bit out of conformity, the city’s good soldiers will always keep coming.

Anderson says a mix-up led to a missed appointment with an inspector. And then, before the year was out, he and his wife were slapped with another, completely unrelated violation.

“Pursuant to BSC V5.1001.8.2,” said the notice, “the paint on the exterior windows, frames, sills, doors is peeling/flaking, a substandard condition.”

What next, they wondered? Would their daughter be cited for riding a tricycle on the brick pavers? They had already intended to paint the house, but it was more than a little strange having City Hall order them to.

Then came Anderson’s call to a City Hall employee who mentioned “the photos.”

“What photos?” Anderson asked.

“We took some pictures of the house,” came the response.

Anderson’s reaction?

“It really creeped me out.”

He said the man told him he had “too much brick on his setback.”

“I want to comply,” Anderson told him, “but what am I supposed to do?”

At this point, it would have been easier to move to Burbank. But Anderson and Browder, who had now been billed $148 for city inspections, were too ticked off to back off. On Jan. 31, they went to City Hall for a meeting with Suzana Delis, a Neighborhood Services administrative analyst.

Anderson brought photos he had taken of other houses in Glendale with lots of paving out front and wondered why only his house was being targeted. He said the city asked for the photos as evidence, presumably so they could bust some more hardened criminals, but he refused to turn them over.

Browder, meanwhile, said Delis wagged a finger at them, saying she wanted their yard to have “no brown, all green” within 90 days. Browder tried to argue that the drought-tolerant plants would take some time to fill in. She says Delis told her there was no such thing as drought-tolerant plants, and Browder did her honest best not to pull out someone’s hair.

Delis was out of the office Tuesday and did not call back to give me her version of events. She might have been too busy researching this crazy rumor of drought-resistant vegetation.

The upshot?

Anderson and Browder have been given until April 30 to paint any rough surfaces on their house, to remove “excess paving” and to “fully landscape with live plant materials, and maintain at all times.”

And what if they don’t?

The notice is clear on that: “Failure to make the required corrections . . . may result in criminal charges being filed against you.”

Yahoo for Glendale, the city that never disappoints.

Joy Gaines of the city’s water and power department told me what I already knew: that water availability in California is always a concern. Her department encourages residents to use drought-resistant plants, and she said she would be meeting with city officials to make sure everyone’s on the same page.

At City Hall, Sam Engel, the head of Neighborhood Services, said Anderson and Browder should have checked with City Hall before doing anything in their yard. I told him I didn’t think people should need permission to do a socially responsible thing like conserve water.

Rather than harass Anderson and Browder, I told him, the city should make them a poster family for living in harmony with the environment. All his department can do, Engel insisted, is enforce existing ordinances. If citizens want them to be changed, that’s the business of the City Council.

When Engel looked at the landscaping photo I borrowed from Anderson and Browder, he said he thought their plants were too small.

“That’s dirt,” he said of the area between the native plants. “Is it not dirt?”

Well, he’s got me. There is indeed some dirt between the plants.

Anderson kissed his wife before leaving for work Tuesday morning and suggested she do her best to keep the gendarmes at bay. The family has already decided to make a concession and dig up some of the bricks. But if that doesn’t satisfy City Hall, Anderson is prepared to do hard time.

steve lopez for la times

The big bronze artwork, stolen from its perch in Carthay Circle sometime last week, is found in a scrapyard, cut into two pieces. Two men have been arrested in the case and are suspects in other thefts.

By Andrew Blankstein, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
11:00 AM PST, February 15, 2008

A 7-foot bronze statue stolen last week from its longtime home in the Carthay Circle community of Los Angeles has been recovered, authorities said today. The sculpture of a gold miner, valued at $125,000, was found cut in two at a local scrapyard where it had been sold for $900, according to Los Angeles police.

Two men were arrested Thursday in connection with the statue’s theft and are also suspects in a string of thefts of bronze statues and sculptures in the Wilshire Area and in city of Beverly Hills, authorities said.

Sebastian Espana, 22, and Jessie Hernandez, 23, both of Los Angeles, likely face grand-theft charges in connection with art that was stolen between Jan. 29 and Feb. 12, said Det. Stephanie Lazarus of the LAPD Art Theft Detail.

The bronze miner, which weighed 512 pounds, was taken from its longtime home atop a boulder in Carthay Circle Park sometime last week. Residents of Carthay Circle had feared the statue had been stolen for scrap, like so much copper wire and plumbing around the region, as prices for metal have soared.

The theft of the large and heavy sculpture seemed bold. The miner stood in plain view at the busy intersection of San Vicente and Crescent Heights boulevards, secured to the top of a boulder. It was sculpted by Henry Lion in 1924 and 1925, along with a fountain, and commemorated 19th century settlers in California.

Police said the suspects also took a bronze bust worth $35,000 on January 29 from in front of Wilshire Boulevard business.

This month, the suspects allegedly took a bronze statue worth $30,000 from outside a business in Beverly Hills are also suspected of taking a bronze mailbox, valued at $4,000, from a Beverly Hills home. Also taken at the RExford Drive location were two bronze giraffes and a bronze sculpture of children of on a swing. Police said the giraffes are missing their tails. They did not immediately have an estimated value of the works.

A break in the case came Feb. 4 when LAPD Commercial Crimes Division detectives discovered the bronze gold miner statue at a local scrapyard. It had been cut in two at the knees.

Police placed a hold on the statue and launched an investigation, Lazarus said, eventually tracking down the suspects who sold the miner statue to the yard and then set up surveillance on the men.

Espana and Hernandez were booked for grand theft at Jail Division. Espana’s bail was set at $210,000 and Hernandez’s bail was set at $230,000.

Los Angeles Police Department detectives are working in conjunction with Beverly Hills Police Department detectives on this case. Items valued at over $130,000 have been recovered to date. Still missing, they said, is a bronze bust valued at $35,000 and one other sculpture.

Authorities said they plan to present the case against Espana and Hernandez to prosecutors next week.

Nationwide, bronze, brass and copper artworks are vanishing into scrapyards, destined for the foundry furnace.

Late last month in Brea, thieves used a cutting torch to remove a 6-foot-tall, 4-foot-wide bronze sculpture from its concrete stand in front of a business, one of three public statues stolen in the past nine month,

Authorities across the country say the high price of metals has driven the thefts, turning sculpture into scrap and returning only pennies on the dollar for thieves.

Kids lie early, often, and for all sorts of reasons—to avoid punishment, to bond with friends, to gain a sense of control. But now there’s a singular theory for one way this habit develops: They are just copying their parents.

By Po Bronson
NY Magazine Published Feb 10, 2008

In the last few years, a handful of intrepid scholars have decided it’s time to try to understand why kids lie. For a study to assess the extent of teenage dissembling, Dr. Nancy Darling, then at Penn State University, recruited a special research team of a dozen undergraduate students, all under the age of 21. Using gift certificates for free CDs as bait, Darling’s Mod Squad persuaded high-school students to spend a few hours with them in the local pizzeria.

Each student was handed a deck of 36 cards, and each card in this deck listed a topic teens sometimes lie about to their parents. Over a slice and a Coke, the teen and two researchers worked through the deck, learning what things the kid was lying to his parents about, and why.

“They began the interviews saying that parents give you everything and yes, you should tell them everything,” Darling observes. By the end of the interview, the kids saw for the first time how much they were lying and how many of the family’s rules they had broken. Darling says 98 percent of the teens reported lying to their parents.

Out of the 36 topics, the average teen was lying to his parents about twelve of them. The teens lied about what they spent their allowances on, and whether they’d started dating, and what clothes they put on away from the house. They lied about what movie they went to, and whom they went with. They lied about alcohol and drug use, and they lied about whether they were hanging out with friends their parents disapproved of. They lied about how they spent their afternoons while their parents were at work. They lied about whether chaperones were in attendance at a party or whether they rode in cars driven by drunken teens.

Being an honors student didn’t change these numbers by much; nor did being an overscheduled kid. No kid, apparently, was too busy to break a few rules. And lest you wonder if these numbers apply only to teens in State College, Pennsylvania, the teens in Darling’s sample were compared to national averages on a bevy of statistics, from academics to extracurriculars. “We had a very normal, representative sample,” Darling says.

For two decades, parents have rated “honesty” as the trait they most wanted in their children. Other traits, such as confidence or good judgment, don’t even come close. On paper, the kids are getting this message. In surveys, 98 percent said that trust and honesty were essential in a personal relationship. Depending on their ages, 96 to 98 percent said lying is morally wrong.

So when do the 98 percent who think lying is wrong become the 98 percent who lie?

It starts very young. Indeed, bright kids—those who do better on other academic indicators—are able to start lying at 2 or 3. “Lying is related to intelligence,” explains Dr. Victoria Talwar, an assistant professor at Montreal’s McGill University and a leading expert on children’s lying behavior.

Although we think of truthfulness as a young child’s paramount virtue, it turns out that lying is the more advanced skill. A child who is going to lie must recognize the truth, intellectually conceive of an alternate reality, and be able to convincingly sell that new reality to someone else. Therefore, lying demands both advanced cognitive development and social skills that honesty simply doesn’t require. “It’s a developmental milestone,” Talwar has concluded.

This puts parents in the position of being either damned or blessed, depending on how they choose to look at it. If your 4-year-old is a good liar, it’s a strong sign she’s got brains. And it’s the smart, savvy kid who’s most at risk of becoming a habitual liar.

By their 4th birthday, almost all kids will start experimenting with lying in order to avoid punishment. Because of that, they lie indiscriminately—whenever punishment seems to be a possibility. A 3-year-old will say, “I didn’t hit my sister,” even if a parent witnessed the child’s hitting her sibling.

Most parents hear their child lie and assume he’s too young to understand what lies are or that lying’s wrong. They presume their child will stop when he gets older and learns those distinctions. Talwar has found the opposite to be true—kids who grasp early the nuances between lies and truth use this knowledge to their advantage, making them more prone to lie when given the chance.

Many parenting Websites and books advise parents to just let lies go—they’ll grow out of it. The truth, according to Talwar, is that kids grow into it. In studies where children are observed in their natural environment, a 4-year-old will lie once every two hours, while a 6-year-old will lie about once every hour and a half. Few kids are exceptions.

Next: Why lying can be a symptom of bigger problems.

By the time a child reaches school age, the reasons for lying become more complex. Avoiding punishment is still a primary catalyst for lying, but lying also becomes a way to increase a child’s power and sense of control—by manipulating friends with teasing, by bragging to assert status, and by learning he can fool his parents.

Thrown into elementary school, many kids begin lying to their peers as a coping mechanism, as a way to vent frustration or get attention. Any sudden spate of lying, or dramatic increase in lying, is a danger sign: Something has changed in that child’s life, in a way that troubles him. “Lying is a symptom—often of a bigger problem behavior,” explains Talwar. “It’s a strategy to keep themselves afloat.”

In longitudinal studies, a majority of 6-year-olds who frequently lie have it socialized out of them by age 7. But if lying has become a successful strategy for handling difficult social situations, a child will stick with it. About half of all kids do—and if they’re still lying a lot at 7, then it seems likely to continue for the rest of childhood. They’re hooked.

“My son doesn’t lie,” insisted Steve, a slightly frazzled father in his mid-thirties, as he watched Nick, his eager 6-year-old, enthralled in a game of marbles with a student researcher in Talwar’s Montreal lab. Steve was quite proud of his son, describing him as easygoing and very social. He had Nick bark out an impressive series of addition problems the boy had memorized, as if that was somehow proof of Nick’s sincerity.

Steve then took his assertion down a notch. “Well, I’ve never heard him lie.” Perhaps that, too, was a little strong. “I’m sure he must lie some, but when I hear it, I’ll still be surprised.” He had brought his son to the lab after seeing an advertisement in a Montreal parenting magazine that asked, “Can Your Child Tell the Difference Between the Truth and a Lie?”

Steve was curious to find out if Nick would lie, but he wasn’t sure he wanted to know the answer. The idea of his son’s being dishonest with him was profoundly troubling.

But I knew for a fact his son did lie. Nick cheated, then he lied, and then he lied again. He did so unhesitatingly, without a single glimmer of remorse.

Nick thought he’d spent the hour playing a series of games with a couple of nice women. He had won two prizes, a cool toy car and a bag of plastic dinosaurs, and everyone said he did very well. What the first-grader didn’t know was that those games were really a battery of psychological tests, and the women were Talwar’s trained researchers working toward doctorates in child psychology.

One of Talwar’s experiments, a variation on a classic experiment called the temptation-resistance paradigm, is known in the lab as “the Peeking Game.” Through a hidden camera, I’d watched Nick play it with another one of Talwar’s students, Cindy Arruda. She told Nick they were going to play a guessing game. Nick was to sit facing the wall and try to guess the identity of a toy Arruda brought out, based on the sound it made. If he was right three times, he’d win a prize.

The first two were easy: a police car and a crying baby doll. Nick bounced in his chair with excitement when he got the answers right. Then Arruda brought out a soft, stuffed soccer ball and placed it on top of a greeting card that played music. She cracked the card, triggering it to play a music-box jingle of Beethoven’s Für Elise. Nick, of course, was stumped.

Arruda suddenly said she had to leave the room for a bit, promising to be right back. She admonished Nick not to peek at the toy while she was gone. Nick struggled not to, but at thirteen seconds, he gave in and looked.

When Arruda returned, she could barely come through the door before Nick—facing the wall again—triumphantly announced, “A soccer ball!” Arruda told Nick to wait for her to get seated. Suddenly realizing he should sound unsure of his answer, he hesitantly asked, “A soccer ball?”

Arruda said Nick was right, and when he turned to face her, he acted very pleased. Arruda asked Nick if he had peeked. “No,” he said quickly. Then a big smile spread across his face.

Without challenging him, or even a note of suspicion in her voice, Arruda asked Nick how he’d figured out the sound came from a soccer ball.

Nick cupped his chin in his hands, then said, “The music had sounded like a ball.” Then: “The ball sounded black and white.” Nick added that the music sounded like the soccer balls he played with at school: They squeaked. And the music sounded like the squeak he heard when he kicked a ball. To emphasize this, his winning point, he brushed his hand against the side of the toy ball.

Next: How parents unwittingly teach kids to lie.

This experiment was not just a test to see if children cheat and lie under temptation. It was also designed to test a child’s ability to extend a lie, offering plausible explanations and avoiding what the scientists call “leakage”—inconsistencies that reveal the lie for what it is. Nick’s whiffs at covering up his lie would be scored later by coders who watched the videotape. So Arruda accepted without question the fact that soccer balls play Beethoven when they’re kicked and gave Nick his prize. He was thrilled.

Seventy-six percent of kids Nick’s age take the chance to peek during the game, and when asked if they peeked, 95 percent lie about it.

But sometimes the researcher will read the child a short storybook before she asks about the peeking. One story read aloud is The Boy Who Cried Wolf—the version in which both the boy and the sheep get eaten because of his repeated lies. Alternatively, they read George Washington and the Cherry Tree, in which young George confesses to his father that he chopped down the prized tree with his new hatchet. The story ends with his father’s reply: “George, I’m glad that you cut down the tree after all. Hearing you tell the truth instead of a lie is better than if I had a thousand cherry trees.”

Now, which story do you think reduced lying more? When we surveyed 1,300 people, 75 percent thought The Boy Who Cried Wolf would work better. However, this famous fable actually did not cut down lying at all in Talwar’s experiments. In fact, after hearing the story, kids lied even a little more than normal. Meanwhile, hearing George Washington and the Cherry Tree—even when Washington was replaced with a nondescript character, eliminating the potential that his iconic celebrity might influence older kids—reduced lying a sizable 43 percent in kids. Although most kids lied in the control situation, the majority hearing George Washington told the truth.

The shepherd boy ends up suffering the ultimate punishment, but the fact that lies get punished is not news to children. Increasing the threat of punishment for lying only makes children hyperaware of the potential personal cost. It distracts children from learning how their lies affect others. In studies, scholars find that kids who live in threat of consistent punishment don’t lie less. Instead, they become better liars, at an earlier age—learning to get caught less often.

Ultimately, it’s not fairy tales that stop kids from lying—it’s the process of socialization. But the wisdom in The Cherry Tree applies: According to Talwar, parents need to teach kids the worth of honesty, just like George Washington’s father did, as much as they need to say that lying is wrong.

The most disturbing reason children lie is that parents teach them to. According to Talwar, they learn it from us. “We don’t explicitly tell them to lie, but they see us do it. They see us tell the telemarketer, ‘I’m just a guest here.’ They see us boast and lie to smooth social relationships.”

Consider how we expect a child to act when he opens a gift he doesn’t like. We instruct him to swallow all his honest reactions and put on a polite smile. Talwar runs an experiment where children play games to win a present, but when they finally receive the present, it’s a lousy bar of soap. After giving the kids a moment to overcome the shock, a researcher asks them how they like it. About a quarter of preschoolers can lie that they like the gift—by elementary school, about half. Telling this lie makes them extremely uncomfortable, especially when pressed to offer a few reasons why they like the bar of soap. Kids who shouted with glee when they won the Peeking Game suddenly mumble quietly and fidget.

Meanwhile, the child’s parent usually cheers when the child comes up with the white lie. “Often, the parents are proud that their kids are ‘polite’—they don’t see it as lying,” Talwar remarks. She’s regularly amazed at parents’ seeming inability to recognize that white lies are still lies.

When adults are asked to keep diaries of their own lies, they admit to about one lie per every five social interactions, which works out to one per day, on average. The vast majority of these lies are white lies, lies to protect yourself or others, like telling the guy at work who brought in his wife’s muffins that they taste great or saying, “Of course this is my natural hair color.”

Encouraged to tell so many white lies and hearing so many others, children gradually get comfortable with being disingenuous. Insincerity becomes, literally, a daily occurrence. They learn that honesty only creates conflict, and dishonesty is an easy way to avoid conflict. And while they don’t confuse white-lie situations with lying to cover their misdeeds, they bring this emotional groundwork from one circumstance to the other. It becomes easier, psychologically, to lie to a parent. So if the parent says, “Where did you get these Pokémon cards?! I told you, you’re not allowed to waste your allowance on Pokémon cards!” this may feel to the child very much like a white-lie scenario—he can make his father feel better by telling him the cards were extras from a friend.

Next: The adolescent’s need to withhold details.

Now, compare this with the way children are taught not to tattle. What grown-ups really mean by “Don’t tell” is that we want children to learn to work it out with one another first. But tattling has received some scientific interest, and researchers have spent hours observing kids at play. They’ve learned that nine out of ten times, when a kid runs up to a parent to tell, that kid is being completely honest. And while it might seem to a parent that tattling is incessant, to a child that’s not the case—because for every time a child seeks a parent for help, there are fourteen instances when he was wronged but did not run to the parent for aid. So when the frustrated child finally comes to tell the parent the truth, he hears, in effect, “Stop bringing me your problems!”

By the middle years of elementary school, a tattler is about the worst thing a kid can be called on the playground. So a child considering reporting a problem to an adult not only faces peer condemnation as a traitor but also recalls the reprimand “Work it out on your own.” Each year, the problems they deal with grow exponentially. They watch other kids cut class, vandalize walls, and shoplift. To tattle is to act like a little kid. Keeping their mouth shut is easy; they’ve been encouraged to do so since they were little.

The era of holding back information from parents has begun.

By withholding details about their lives, adolescents carve out a social domain and identity that are theirs alone, independent from their parents or other adult authority figures. To seek out a parent for help is, from a teen’s perspective, a tacit admission that he’s not mature enough to handle it alone. Having to tell parents about it can be psychologically emasculating, whether the confession is forced out of him or he volunteers it on his own. It’s essential for some things to be “none of your business.”

The big surprise in the research is when this need for autonomy is strongest. It’s not mild at 12, moderate at 15, and most powerful at 18. Darling’s scholarship shows that the objection to parental authority peaks around ages 14 to 15. In fact, this resistance is slightly stronger at age 11 than at 18. In popular culture, we think of high school as the risk years, but the psychological forces driving deception surge earlier than that.

In her study of teenage students, Darling also mailed survey questionnaires to the parents of the teenagers interviewed, and it was interesting how the two sets of data reflected on each other. First, she was struck by parents’ vivid fear of pushing their teens into outright hostile rebellion. “Many parents today believe the best way to get teens to disclose is to be more permissive and not set rules,” Darling says. Parents imagine a trade-off between being informed and being strict. Better to hear the truth and be able to help than be kept in the dark.

Darling found that permissive parents don’t actually learn more about their children’s lives. “Kids who go wild and get in trouble mostly have parents who don’t set rules or standards. Their parents are loving and accepting no matter what the kids do. But the kids take the lack of rules as a sign their parents don’t care—that their parent doesn’t really want this job of being the parent.”

Pushing a teen into rebellion by having too many rules was a sort of statistical myth. “That actually doesn’t happen,” remarks Darling. She found that most rules-heavy parents don’t actually enforce them. “It’s too much work,” says Darling. “It’s a lot harder to enforce three rules than to set twenty rules.”

A few parents managed to live up to the stereotype of the oppressive parent, with lots of psychological intrusion, but those teens weren’t rebelling. They were obedient. And depressed.

“Ironically, the type of parents who are actually most consistent in enforcing rules are the same parents who are most warm and have the most conversations with their kids,” Darling observes. They’ve set a few rules over certain key spheres of influence, and they’ve explained why the rules are there. They expect the child to obey them. Over life’s other spheres, they supported the child’s autonomy, allowing them freedom to make their own decisions.

The kids of these parents lied the least. Rather than hiding twelve areas from their parents, they might be hiding as few as five.

In the thesaurus, the antonym of honesty is lying, and the opposite of arguing is agreeing. But in the minds of teenagers, that’s not how it works. Really, to an adolescent, arguing is the opposite of lying.

Next: Will how we deal with lies matter later in life?

When Nancy Darling’s researchers interviewed the teenagers from Pennsylvania, they also asked the teens when and why they told the truth to their parents about things they knew their parents disapproved of. Occasionally they told the truth because they knew a lie wouldn’t fly—they’d be caught. Sometimes they told the truth because they just felt obligated, saying, “They’re my parents, I’m supposed to tell them.” But one important motivation that emerged was that many teens told their parents the truth when they were planning on doing something that was against the rules—in hopes their parents might give in and say it was okay. Usually, this meant an argument ensued, but it was worth it if a parent might budge.

The average Pennsylvania teen was 244 percent more likely to lie than to protest a rule. In the families where there was less deception, however, there was a much higher ratio of arguing and complaining. The argument enabled the child to speak honestly. Certain types of fighting, despite the acrimony, were ultimately signs of respect—not of disrespect.

But most parents don’t make this distinction in how they perceive arguments with their children. Dr. Tabitha Holmes of SUNY–New Paltz conducted extensive interviews asking mothers and adolescents, separately, to describe their arguments and how they felt about them. And there was a big difference.

Forty-six percent of the mothers rated their arguments as being destructive to their relationships with their teens. Being challenged was stressful, chaotic, and (in their perception) disrespectful. The more frequently they fought, and the more intense the fights were, the more the mother rated the fighting as harmful. But only 23 percent of the adolescents felt that their arguments were destructive. Far more believed that fighting strengthened their relationship with their mothers. “Their perception of the fighting was really sophisticated, far more than we anticipated for teenagers,” notes Holmes. “They saw fighting as a way to see their parents in a new way, as a result of hearing their mother’s point of view be articulated.”

What most surprised Holmes was learning that for the teens, fighting often, or having big fights, did not cause them to rate the fighting as harmful and destructive. Statistically, it made no difference at all. Certainly, there is a point in families where there is too much conflict, Holmes notes. “But we didn’t have anybody in our study with an extreme amount of conflict.” Instead, the variable that seemed to really matter was how the arguments were resolved.

It will be many years before my own children become teenagers, but having lying on my radar screen has changed the way things work around the Bronson household. No matter how small, lies no longer go unnoticed. The moments slow down, and I have a better sense of how to handle them.

Just the other day, my 6-year-old son, Luke, came home from school having learned a new phrase and a new attitude—quipping “I don’t care” snidely, and shrugging his shoulders to everything. He repeated “I don’t care” so many times I finally got frustrated and demanded to know if someone at school had taught him this dismissive phrase.

He froze. And I could suddenly intuit the debate running through his head—should he lie to his dad, or rat out his friend? Recognizing the conflict, I told him that if he learned the phrase at school, he did not have to tell me who taught him the phrase. Telling me the truth was not going to get his friends in trouble.

“Okay,” he said, relieved. “I learned it at school.” Then he told me he did care, and he gave me a hug. I haven’t heard it again.

Does how we deal with a child’s lies really matter down the road in life? The irony of lying is that it’s both normal and abnormal behavior at the same time. It’s to be expected, and yet it can’t be disregarded.

Dr. Bella DePaulo of the University of California, Santa Barbara, has devoted much of her career to adult lying. In one study, she had both college students and community members enter a private room equipped with an audiotape recorder. Promising them complete confidentiality, DePaulo’s team instructed the subjects to recall the worst lie they ever told—with all the scintillating details.

“I was fully expecting serious lies,” DePaulo remarks. “Stories of affairs kept from spouses, stories of squandering money, or being a salesperson and screwing money out of car buyers.” And she did hear those kinds of whoppers, including theft and even one murder. But to her surprise, a lot of the stories told were about when the subject was a mere child—and they were not, at first glance, lies of any great consequence. “One told of eating the icing off a cake, then telling her parents the cake came that way. Another told of stealing some coins from a sibling.” As these stories first started trickling in, DePaulo scoffed, thinking, “C’mon, that’s the worst lie you’ve ever told?” But the stories of childhood kept coming, and DePaulo had to create a category in her analysis just for them. “I had to reframe my understanding to consider what it must have been like as a child to have told this lie,” she recalls. “For young kids, their lie challenged their self-concept that they were a good child, and that they did the right thing.”

Many subjects commented on how that momentous lie early in life established a pattern that affected them thereafter. “We had some who said, ‘I told this lie, I got caught, and I felt so badly, I vowed to never do it again.’ Others said, ‘Wow, I never realized I’d be so good at deceiving my father, I can do this all the time.’ The lies they tell early on are meaningful. The way parents react can really affect lying.”

Talwar says parents often entrap their kids, putting them in positions to lie and testing their honesty unnecessarily. Last week, I put my 3½-year-old daughter in that exact situation. I noticed she had scribbled on the dining table with a washable marker. Disapprovingly, I asked, “Did you draw on the table, Thia?” In the past, she would have just answered honestly, but my tone gave away that she’d done something wrong. Immediately, I wished I could retract the question. I should have just reminded her not to write on the table, slipped newspaper under her coloring book, and washed the ink away. Instead, I had done just as Talwar had warned against.

“No, I didn’t,” my daughter said, lying to me for the first time.

For that stain, I had only myself to blame.

Additional reporting by Ashley Merryman.

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Roy Scheider, Actor in ‘Jaws,’ Dies at 75

By DAVE KEHR
NY Times Published: February 11, 2008
Roy Scheider, a stage actor with a background in the classics who became one of the leading figures in the American film renaissance of the 1970s, died on Sunday afternoon in Little Rock, Ark. He was 75 and lived in Sag Harbor, N.Y.

Mr. Scheider had suffered from multiple myeloma for several years, and died of complications from a staph infection, his wife, Brenda Siemer, said.

Mr. Scheider’s rangy figure, gaunt face and emotional openness made him particularly appealing in everyman roles, most famously as the agonized police chief of “Jaws,” Steven Spielberg’s 1975 breakthrough hit, about a New England resort town haunted by the knowledge that a killer shark is preying on the local beaches.

Mr. Scheider conveyed an accelerated metabolism in movies like “Klute” (1971), his first major film role, in which he played a threatening pimp to Jane Fonda’s New York call girl; and in William Friedkin’s “French Connection” (also 1971), as Buddy Russo, the slightly more restrained partner to Gene Hackman’s marauding police detective, Popeye Doyle. That role earned Mr. Scheider the first of two Oscar nominations.

Born in 1932 in Orange, N.J., Mr. Scheider earned his distinctive broken nose in the New Jersey Diamond Gloves Competition. He studied at Rutgers and at Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, Pa., where he graduated as a history major with the intention of going to law school. He served three years in the United States Air Force, rising to the rank of first lieutenant. When he was discharged, he returned to Franklin and Marshall to star in a production of “Richard III.”

His professional debut was as Mercutio in a 1961 New York Shakespeare Festival production of “Romeo and Juliet.” While continuing to work onstage, he made his movie debut in “The Curse of the Living Corpse” (1964), a low-budget horror film by the prolific schlockmeister Del Tenney. “He had to bend his knees to die into a moat full of quicksand up in Connecticut,” recalled Ms. Siemer, a documentary filmmaker. “He loved to demonstrate that.”

In 1977 Mr. Scheider worked with Mr. Friedkin again in “Sorcerer,” a big-budget remake of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s 1953 French thriller, “The Wages of Fear,” about transporting a dangerous load of nitroglycerine in South America.

Offered a leading role in “The Deer Hunter” (1979), Mr. Scheider had to turn it down in order to fulfill his contract with Universal for a sequel to “Jaws.” (The part went to Robert De Niro.)

“Jaws 2” failed to recapture the appeal of the first film, but Mr. Scheider bounced back, accepting the principal role in Bob Fosse’s autobiographical phantasmagoria of 1979, “All That Jazz.” Equipped with Mr. Fosse’s Mephistophelean beard and manic drive, Mr. Scheider’s character, Joe Gideon, gobbled amphetamines in an attempt to stage a new Broadway show while completing the editing of a film (and pursuing a parade of alluring young women) — a monumental act of self-abuse that leads to open-heart surgery. This won Mr. Scheider an Academy Award nomination in the best actor category. (Dustin Hoffman won that year, for “Kramer vs. Kramer.”)

In 1980, Mr. Scheider returned to his first love, the stage, where his performance in a production of Harold Pinter’s “Betrayal” opposite Blythe Danner and Raul Julia earned him the Drama League of New York award for distinguished performance. Although he continued to be active in films, notably in Robert Benton’s “Still of the Night” (1982) and John Badham’s action spectacular “Blue Thunder” (1983), he moved from leading men to character roles, including an American spy in Fred Schepisi’s “Russia House” (1990) and a calculating Mafia don in “Romeo Is Bleeding” (1993).

One of the most memorable performances of his late career was as the sinister, wisecracking Dr. Benway in David Cronenberg’s adaptation of William S. Burroughs’s “Naked Lunch” (1991).

Living in Sag Harbor, Mr. Scheider continued to appear in films and lend his voice to documentaries, becoming, Ms. Siemer said, increasingly politically active. With the poet Kathy Engle, he helped to found the Hayground School in Bridgehampton, dedicated to creating an innovative, culturally diverse learning environment for local children. At the time of his death, Mr. Scheider was involved in a project to build a film studio in Florence, Italy, for a series about the history of the Renaissance.

Besides his wife, his survivors include three children, Christian Verrier Scheider and Molly Mae Scheider, with Ms. Siemer, and Maximillia Connelly Lord, from an earlier marriage, to Cynthia Bebout; a brother, Glenn Scheider of Summit, N.J.; and two grandchildren.

By DAN BARRY
NY Times Published: February 11, 2008
PORTSMOUTH, Ohio

This Land: An Uncertain Future for a Rock With a Past
An eight-ton rock rested for generations at the bottom of the Ohio River, minding its own business as time and currents passed. It favored neither Ohio to the north nor Kentucky to the south. It just — was.

Occasionally, when water levels dropped, the boulder would break the surface long enough to receive the chiseled tattoos of mildly daring people seeking remembrance. But it stopped playing peek-a-boo nearly a century ago, leaving only ephemera in its wake, including a sepia photograph of a well-dressed woman in a frilly hat, standing in the middle of the Ohio, on this rock.

Now, because of one man’s obsessive good intention, the fabled rock sits on old tires in the municipal garage of this river city, awaiting the outcome of a border dispute that goes something like this:

Some Ohioans say the rock is an important piece of Portsmouth history and should be put on display. Some Kentuckians say the rock is an important piece of Kentucky, period, and should be returned. And some in both states say: I’ve been distracted by war, recession and a presidential campaign, so forgive me. But are we fighting over a rock?

Last month the Kentucky House of Representatives passed a resolution demanding the rock’s return to its watery bed, with one of its members suggesting that a raiding party to Portsmouth might be in order. Not to be outdone, the Ohio House of Representatives is considering a resolution that asserts the rock’s significance to Ohio, and its speaker has said he is ready to guard the boulder with his muzzle-loading shotgun.

All this has stunned Steve Shaffer, 51, the earnest local historian who rediscovered the rock, raised the rock and anticipated a more enthusiastic celebration of the rock. But at least the rock is happy, he said. “It loves to be the center of controversy.”

The boulder sat almost certainly on the Kentucky side of the river, where the shoreline remains mostly undeveloped. This is why the rock became lodged deeper in the collective consciousness of the city on the other shore: Portsmouth, now another hurting Rust Belt city, but once a center of commerce, forging steel, making shoes.

In Portsmouth and beyond, the boulder became known as Indian Head Rock, because its bottom half bore a crude etching of a round head, with two dots for eyes, another dot for a nose, and a dash for a mouth; a kind of early Charlie Brown.

The face spawned many theories of origin. An American Indian petroglyph. A river bandit’s carving to mark where loot was stored. A boatman’s crude measure to gauge fluctuating water levels. Or, as a 1908 newspaper article has it, the 1830s handiwork of a Portsmouth boy named John Book, who then grew up to fall at the Battle of Shiloh.

Whenever the rock emerged from the water, people would boat or swim out to read the names and initials engraved on its sandstone hide, and maybe add their own to this honor roll of stone. H.W.H. Oct. 50, and E.D.C. Sep 1856, and Luther, and F. Kinney, and D. Ford. Several of these surnames remain familiar in Portsmouth today.

But dam work in the early 20th century raised the water level several feet, and the celebrated boulder — often featured in newspapers and on postcards — vanished from view. And Portsmouth soon forgot its pet rock.

In the late 1960s, though, an Ohio Valley schoolboy read of the Indian Head Rock in a musty book of local history, and he never forgot it. That was Steve Shaffer. He grew up, studied historical interpretation at Ohio University, developed an interest in prehistoric rock carvings, and quietly resolved to find the rock.

He and some divers began the hunt in 2000, using clues in old newspaper accounts about the rock’s location. He remained in the boat, though; he had lost 70 percent of his hearing to Meniere’s disease, and diving could cause further damage. But when the expeditions of 2000 and 2001 found only abandoned cars and dumped refrigerators, Mr. Shaffer earned his diver’s certification and joined the search — at great risk to his hearing.

The risk paid off. In September 2002, a diving buddy rose to the surface to exclaim: That’s it! It’s got initials all over it! Mr. Shaffer immediately went down to see for himself. There, amid the river’s murk: the Indian Head Rock.

Nearly every summer after that, Mr. Shaffer dove down to pay his respects to the rock. “Just to check on it,” he said.

Then, late last summer, and almost on a whim, he and some diving friends resurrected the boulder with a harness and some barrels and air bags. They soon reported to Portsmouth’s mayor, James Kalb, that they had something to show him — and it’s bigger than a breadbox. The stunned and grateful mayor thanked them, saying a piece of Portsmouth’s past had been salvaged.

Not everyone saw it that way. Some said that once exposed to air the rock would disintegrate; it didn’t. Some said that Mr. Shaffer needed a permit from the Army Corps of Engineers to remove anything from the river; he agreed, and has applied for one after the fact.

Some said the rock should not have been disturbed because that Charlie Brown-like face was an American Indian petroglyph. In November a delegation from Kentucky — with Dr. Fred E. Coy Jr., a prehistoric carvings expert, in tow — visited the Portsmouth municipal garage and waited anxiously while the doctor conducted his examination. His expert opinion: “I can’t tell.”

No matter. Jagged verbal stones continue to be tossed from either side of the river.

Reginald Meeks, the Kentucky state representative who sponsored the resolution of condemnation, said Friday that law-enforcement officials were investigating what he described as the theft of a state antiquity. He said the rock should be returned to Kentucky, where state officials could examine it and decide its future.

“I tell you, they just played cowboy,” Mr. Meeks said, voice rising. “And came to Kentucky and stole this item.”

But Todd Book, an Ohio legislator from Portsmouth who last week introduced the resolution praising the rock’s resurrection, said Ohioans believed they were in the right.

Mr. Book — who likes to think he is related to the John Book who may have carved that face on the boulder — said the story of the rock had already become an educational tool in Ohio. Fourth graders in the region are being asked to write essays on what the state should do with the rock, he said, while high school seniors are being asked to write position papers on the following: “Why the rock should be Ohio’s and not Kentucky’s.”

Who knows how this heavy matter will be resolved. For now, though, an eight-ton chunk of sandstone, riddled with the markings of the long-dead, sits in a municipal garage near some city trucks and a lawn mower. And every so often a well-intentioned man wearing a hearing aid stops by to check on it.

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By EDWARD WYATT

NY Times Published: February 10, 2008

LOS ANGELES

FOR years Eli Broad, the billionaire philanthropist whose influence seems to waft into so many corners of this city’s cultural scene, has promised that Los Angeles will take its place among the world’s great arts capitals.

So the art world was taken aback last month when, on the eve of the opening of the Broad Contemporary Art Museum, a $56 million addition to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art for which he chose the architect and paid the bill, Mr. Broad abruptly seemed to undermine his own cause.

Rather than pledge to donate his extensive collection of contemporary art to the new institution — a move that some viewed as inevitable, given that his name was to be on the door — Mr. Broad said he had decided instead to keep it in his private foundation. Far better, he argued, to lend the 2,000-odd works to museums around the world than to risk their being largely relegated to storage in Los Angeles.

If the decision has not cast a pall over what has been billed as the museum’s breakout moment, it has certainly raised questions about its ability to execute an ambitious three-stage expansion plan that is being promoted by its director as a wholesale transformation of the institution. Suddenly the sense that Los Angeles was poised to rival New York and London as the center of contemporary art has given way to the impression that even its most prominent booster might not be fully behind the city and its largest cultural institution.

Mr. Broad says nothing could be further from the truth.

“I have total confidence in Lacma,” he said in an interview last month at his office in West Los Angeles. But he added firmly, “We did not build the collection and are not continuing to build it to have 80 percent of it in storage,” something that often happens with large collections once they are passed along to a single museum. “I’ve seen too much of that happen.”

With 58,000 square feet of new exhibition space, a total roughly twice the size of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Broad Contemporary Art Museum is the centerpiece of an extensive overhaul of the Los Angeles museum’s campus and collections that is expected to continue for much of the next decade. Given the scale of its ambitions, the museum clearly has a lot to lose from any perception that it does not fully control its own future.

“Anything that makes Lacma more of a centerpiece of L.A.’s cultural life is a great thing, and this is a real milestone in its development as an encyclopedic museum,” said Elizabeth H. Ondaatje, a former RAND Corporation researcher and an author of its 2007 report “A Vision for the Arts in Los Angeles.” “The challenge now is that it needs to get up to the next level.”

The quandary faced by the museum in both celebrating and exhibiting its independence from a prominent donor is evident when its charismatic director, Michael Govan, who took over in 2006, dismisses the importance of Mr. Broad’s decision while simultaneously admitting that he hopes he will relent to some degree.

“He has 2,000 works, so there’s plenty to go around,” Mr. Govan said recently. Both he and Mr. Broad (whose name rhymes with road) say the museum still has first choice of the most desirable pieces in Mr. Broad’s art trove: works by luminaries like Jeff Koons, Cindy Sherman, Roy Lichtenstein and Robert Rauschenberg.

And on a recent tour of the new building, Mr. Govan also revealed his continued hope that once Mr. Broad and his wife, Edythe, see the public’s reaction to the completed addition, they will turn their current loans to the new building into permanent gifts.

“This is the first step, I think,” he said.

Mr. Govan acknowledges that the museum’s identity as encyclopedic has shifted in recent years, particularly since Mr. Broad’s largess put contemporary art at the center of its geography. While it is most often described as a comprehensive museum in the vein of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, it enjoys depth in certain areas — Korean art, for example — yet has limited resources in others.

“It was never contemplated that contemporary art would be such a strong center of the museum,” Mr. Govan said. “It has added immeasurably to the identity of the institution as well as to its collection.”

That devotion to contemporary art is destined only to grow under Mr. Govan. The museum’s plans for a second and third phase of its transformation call for contemporary outdoor sculptures to dominate the grounds, with a proposed sculpture of a locomotive by Mr. Koons suspended from a crane high above the entrance.

Mr. Govan, who ran the Dia Art Foundation in New York for 12 years before landing in Los Angeles, is in many respects the perfect person to lead the museum’s transformation. At Dia he showed considerable imagination in expanding the audience for contemporary art by transforming an abandoned biscuit factory into a sprawling light-drenched space suitable for large-scale works.

But to be lured, he required some assurances about the intentions of his most prominent patron. Mr. Govan said he had read news reports that the previous director, Andrea Rich, resigned in part because of disputes with Mr. Broad, including one over hiring a curator for the new Broad contemporary art center. At the time both Mr. Broad and Ms. Rich said publicly that it was simply time for her to move on.

Mr. Govan said he had met with Mr. Broad and made clear that he expected to have control and direction over the Broad Museum, which would function as just another division. “His answer was, simply, ‘Yes,’ ” he said.

Today Mr. Govan even plays down the clout that Mr. Broad wields at the museum.

“He has no more control than the other 45 people sitting around the table at the board meeting,” Mr. Govan said. “I don’t know how many people in New York think Eli Broad is the chair, or he’s the only donor.” On the contrary, he said, Mr. Broad has never been chairman and “he’s not even the largest donor to the institution in its history,” an honor that goes to the Ahmanson Foundation, which has given some $100 million, much of it for acquiring European paintings.

Since Mr. Broad announced his big gift in 2003, “you’ve seen more investment by other people: more board members, more annual giving, more capital giving,” Mr. Govan added. “So the cliché is kind of backwards, that he’s got his hands on and he’s in charge and doing this.

“In fact, it’s just the opposite. After he made his investment, it allowed the institution to build strength, and he’s been letting the institution do its work.”

Yet few would dispute that Mr. Broad has been an outsize presence on the board for years, especially since 2001, when the museum embarked in earnest on reimagining its 20-acre campus.

Like Los Angeles itself, formed out of the haphazard conjoining of dozens of small cities and independent communities, the museum grew in disjointed fashion. Established as an independent entity in 1961, it opened a three-building Lincoln Center-like campus in 1965, designed by the Los Angeles architect William Pereira on six acres along Wilshire Boulevard.

Two more buildings were added in the 1980s, including a pavilion for Japanese art and a center for modern and contemporary art, which increased gallery space by one-third. In 1994 the museum bought the May Company building, an Art Deco landmark on the corner of Fairfax and Wilshire, expanding the campus westward and roughly doubling its size.

But the menagerie of buildings created confusion for visitors. As part of the initial plan to reorganize, the museum held an architecture competition for a new contemporary-art building and planned to separate each geographic or epochal subset of its collections.

When the designs came in, it was Mr. Broad who championed the most radical option: tearing down most of the six-building complex and replacing it with a vast new structure by Rem Koolhaas, the cerebral Dutch architect.

So persuasive was Mr. Koolhaas, supported by Mr. Broad, that only after announcing their plans did the trustees seemed to grasp that this tabula rasa approach would force the entire complex to shut down for three years and require all the money to be raised upfront, rather than in stages.

After county residents voted down a tax increase to pay for the museum expansion, Mr. Broad took matters into his own hands in 2003, pledging $50 million for one new building for contemporary art and personally lobbying the Italian architect Renzo Piano to design it.

“I went to see Renzo, and I said ‘You’ve got to do this building,’ ” he recalled.

In his characteristic dark suit and tie, his white hair perfectly trimmed and parted, Mr. Broad exudes the confidence and élan that one can imagine swaying even a seasoned star architect. He said he had offered Mr. Piano three simple reasons to take up his invitation. “One, we have the money. Two, there’s a program,” or a clear architectural goal. “And three, you only have to deal with the director and me.”

Mr. Piano one-upped Mr. Broad, saying he would design the building only if he could execute a master plan for the entire campus. The museum assented.

Phase 1 of that plan opens to members this week and to the general public on Feb. 16, with a three-day “free community weekend” running through Presidents’ Day.

In addition to the Broad Contemporary Art Museum, the first phase includes an airy solar-powered entrance pavilion, financed with a $25 million donation from — and somewhat controversially named for — the oil company BP; a central concourse connecting the campus’s westernmost structure with the 1965 buildings to the east; and a new grand staircase in the atrium of the Ahmanson Building.

Mr. Govan has also made his imprint on the design. After arriving in April 2006, he added glass to the Broad building and changed the floor color. He commissioned an installation of vintage street lamps by the artist Chris Burden in front of the entrance pavilion, and a sort of palm tree retrospective by the artist Robert Irwin.

Now, when people approach the museum, “they’re going to see one, two, three, four artworks before they even think of buying a ticket,” Mr. Govan said. “That’s a completely different dynamic of entry.”

In another sign that Mr. Govan is holding his own, a separate five-member board created for the Broad Museum has essentially been disbanded. Mr. Broad said that board was intended only to oversee a $10 million gift for acquisitions, which has now been spent, mainly on a Richard Serra sculpture that takes up half of the ground floor of the new building.

Mr. Govan insists that Mr. Broad has no influence over day-to-day decisions regarding the Broad museum. “A lot of the art installation is a surprise to him,” he said. “He had to sign off on the loans so he sort of knows what the selection, plus or minus, is, but not specifically.”

But Mr. Broad also noted that he and Mr. Govan have talked almost daily, and sometimes several times a day, during the final phase of construction and preparations for the opening. Joanne Heyler, the chief curator for the Broad Art Foundation, has been at the museum daily to oversee the installation of Mr. Broad’s art.

Phase 2 will bring more changes: a new exhibition pavilion, a 420-ton rock sculpture and the Koons train — all told, an investment of some $200 million. Phase 3 will involve the more complete renovation of the existing buildings on the eastern part of the campus.

The long-term plan is also to shore up the financial strength of the museum, whose endowment of $170 million is dwarfed by institutions like the Museum of Modern Art ($650 million last year).

Visitors will shoulder some of that burden. The daily admission fee will rise to $12 from $10, still a far cry from the $20 the Modern has charged since its expansion, and the cost of self-parking to $7 from $5. Mr. Broad said the museum hoped to boost annual attendance from its current level of 660,000 to more than one million.

Since taking over, Mr. Govan has also added several new directors, strengthening the museum’s ties with Hollywood, with the addition of players like Michael Lynton, the chief executive of Sony Pictures Entertainment.

With a new chairman, Andrew Gordon, who is in charge of West Coast operations for Goldman Sachs, the museum hopes to make inroads into wealthy segments of Los Angeles that have historically been stingy in contributing to art institutions.

To hear Mr. Broad tell it, the museum is now on a much sounder footing for the future, his own decision regarding his collection notwithstanding.

“I feel that some burden is off my shoulders,” he said. “I’m not getting any younger. And look, I don’t want to be a lone ranger in all of this.

“I’d like to make the largest gift, and I liked to help raise a lot of money. But now that we’ve got other, younger trustees of some prominence and wealth, I’m delighted that they’re very engaged. And we’ve got a great leader in Michael, so it all feels pretty good to me.”

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Michael Asher

From January 26 to April 12, Santa Monica Museum of Art presents Michael Asher, a monumental new installation by this legendary artist. The work is a conceptual history of SMMoA’s exhibitions from 1998 to the present. For the installation, Asher reconstructs all the temporary walls—44 exhibitions’ worth—built during that time period.

The exhibition’s elaborate, almost ghostly labyrinth of metal and wooden studs, which conform to the original wall constructions, reveals how the non-collecting Museum—a kunsthalle—reinvents itself with each new exhibition. SMMoA has no permanent collection. Its institutional history can therefore only be understood by looking through documents and catalogs. Asher’s installation translates the historical infrastructure and museological process into visual form, highlighting what would otherwise remain seamlessly hidden. The skeletal frameworks illuminate what art historian Miwon Kwon describes as “the temporariness of the architecture of temporary exhibitions.” With this work at SMMoA, Asher continues his artistic practice of institutional critique—uncovering the ways in which museums and galleries display and interpret art. Asher offers viewers the opportunity to ponder how these organizations actively shape and define culture.

Visitors view the installation from the front of the main gallery, as well as through a special entrance at the back of the Museum. Project Room 2 serves as a documentation room, containing floor plans for 44 exhibitions, including the position of every wall and its exhibition provenance. In addition, a tear-away pair of hand outs at the back of SMMoA allow visitors to review all exhibition floor plans while traversing the installation.

A SMMoA-published catalog will be published in February 2008. It features an essay by Miwon Kwon, Associate Professor of Art History at UCLA, and photographs of the completed installation by Grant Mudford.

Michael Asher is an internationally renowned pioneer of institutional critique and conceptual art. Since the mid-1960s Asher has explored how museums and other institutions frame the art experience for viewers and influence the cultural dialog. His interventions use elements that exist or existed at the site. Asher has been featured at such important venues as the Art Institute of Chicago; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Documenta 5 and 7, Kassel, Germany; the Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland; the Kunstverein Hamburg, Germany; Le Consortium, Dijon, France; Le Nouveau Musée, Villeurbanne, France; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, France; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Skulptur Projekte, Münster, Germany; the Van Abbemuseum Eindhoven, the Netherlands; and the 39th International Art Biennale, in Venice, Italy.

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