By Tony Barboza
The Los Angeles Times
February 3, 2010

While Los Angeles city officials and hired consultants tinker with the draft of a mammoth bike plan, vocal critics in the cycling community complain it does not include enough new bike lanes and presents a mishmash of paths and routes that are unintelligible to the average cyclist.

But instead of merely nay-saying, one group of cycling advocates and bloggers known as the L.A. Bike Working Group is developing an alternative bike plan. They are starting with a network of long-distance bike routes they are comparing to a freeway system for cyclists.

Conceptual maps of the proposed Backbone Bikeway Network envision a network of long-distance routes designed to provide cyclists safe passage between different neighborhoods along heavily-traveled corridors, including Wilshire, Venice, Whittier and Sepulveda boulevards.

“The city really is more palatable when you have a straight shot through it, with less lights and less stop signs,” said Mihai Peteu, 28, who helped design the map after holding public meetings with cyclists throughout the city. “I think cyclists deserve to have something similar to the freeway system.”

It’s just an idea, Peteu said. But given a little funding to paint bike lanes, improve the pavement and create shared bike-car lanes called sharrows, such a system could give cyclists a speedier way around town.

Graphic courtesy of L.A. Bike Working Group

Anne Collier
Cut, 2009
C Print
49 11/16 x 53 inches

Through February 20, 2010

Anton Kern

Works on paper 1968 – 2008
January 22nd 2010 – March 13th 2010

Daniel Bucholz

By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Times Published: January 31, 2010

In times of crisis, good news is no news. Iceland’s meltdown made headlines; the remarkable stability of Canada’s banks, not so much.

Yet as the world’s attention shifts from financial rescue to financial reform, the quiet success stories deserve at least as much attention as the spectacular failures. We need to learn from those countries that evidently did it right. And leading that list is our neighbor to the north. Right now, Canada is a very important role model.

Yes, I know, Canada is supposed to be dull. The New Republic famously pronounced “Worthwhile Canadian Initiative” (from a Times Op-Ed column in the ’80s) the world’s most boring headline. But I’ve always considered Canada fascinating, precisely because it’s similar to the United States in many but not all ways. The point is that when Canadian and U.S. experience diverge, it’s a very good bet that policy differences, rather than differences in culture or economic structure, are responsible for that divergence.

And anyway, when it comes to banking, boring is good.

First, some background. Over the past decade the United States and Canada faced the same global environment. Both were confronted with the same flood of cheap goods and cheap money from Asia. Economists in both countries cheerfully declared that the era of severe recessions was over.

But when things fell apart, the consequences were very different here and there. In the United States, mortgage defaults soared, some major financial institutions collapsed, and others survived only thanks to huge government bailouts. In Canada, none of that happened. What did the Canadians do differently?

It wasn’t interest rate policy. Many commentators have blamed the Federal Reserve for the financial crisis, claiming that the Fed created a disastrous bubble by keeping interest rates too low for too long. But Canadian interest rates have tracked U.S. rates quite closely, so it seems that low rates aren’t enough by themselves to produce a financial crisis.

Canada’s experience also seems to refute the view, forcefully pushed by Paul Volcker, the formidable former Fed chairman, that the roots of our crisis lay in the scale and scope of our financial institutions — in the existence of banks that were “too big to fail.” For in Canada essentially all the banks are too big to fail: just five banking groups dominate the financial scene.

On the other hand, Canada’s experience does seem to support the views of people like Elizabeth Warren, the head of the Congressional panel overseeing the bank bailout, who place much of the blame for the crisis on failure to protect consumers from deceptive lending. Canada has an independent Financial Consumer Agency, and it has sharply restricted subprime-type lending.

Above all, Canada’s experience seems to support those who say that the way to keep banking safe is to keep it boring — that is, to limit the extent to which banks can take on risk. The United States used to have a boring banking system, but Reagan-era deregulation made things dangerously interesting. Canada, by contrast, has maintained a happy tedium.

More specifically, Canada has been much stricter about limiting banks’ leverage, the extent to which they can rely on borrowed funds. It has also limited the process of securitization, in which banks package and resell claims on their loans outstanding — a process that was supposed to help banks reduce their risk by spreading it, but has turned out in practice to be a way for banks to make ever-bigger wagers with other people’s money.

There’s no question that in recent years these restrictions meant fewer opportunities for bankers to come up with clever ideas than would have been available if Canada had emulated America’s deregulatory zeal. But that, it turns out, was all to the good.

So what are the chances that the United States will learn from Canada’s success?

Actually, the financial reform bill that the House of Representatives passed in December would significantly Canadianize the U.S. system. It would create an independent Consumer Financial Protection Agency, it would establish limits on leverage, and it would limit securitization by requiring that lenders hold on to some of their loans.

But prospects for a comparable bill getting the 60 votes now needed to push anything through the Senate are doubtful. Republicans are clearly dead set against any significant financial reform — not a single Republican voted for the House bill — and some Democrats are ambivalent, too.

So there’s a good chance that we’ll do nothing, or nothing much, to prevent future banking crises. But it won’t be because we don’t know what to do: we’ve got a clear example of how to keep banking safe sitting right next door.

Chumash Fish Effigy

John Peabody Harrington relentlessly studied Indian families for decades. Today, a 71-year-old woman who considered him a pest is grateful for his intense scholarship.

By Steve Chawkins
The Los Angeles Times
January 31, 2010

Everyone thought the tall, strange white man was some kind of genius. But to teenage Ernestine De Soto he was a giant pain in the neck, a nosy, “Ichabod Crane-like” character who drew her mother’s attention from its rightful place — on her.

John Peabody Harrington studied De Soto’s Chumash family for nearly 50 years, pumping her great-grandmother, her grandmother and her mother for the tiniest details of their lives. Everything fascinated him: the Chumash names of places mostly forgotten, of fish no longer caught — even, to the family’s puzzlement, of private parts never discussed in polite company. A brilliant linguist and anthropologist, Harrington had been just as relentless with countless Indian families throughout the West, but that didn’t impress the young Ernestine.

“I was just a brat to him,” she said. “He’d never speak to me if he could help it.”

Toward the end of his life, Harrington was ravaged by Parkinson’s disease, and De Soto’s mother spoon-fed the lonely old man. Sometimes De Soto’s 5-year-old daughter would tickle his feet. In a few months, he would die, poor and obscure, most of his obsessively collected notes gathering dust in barn lofts and attics. But over time his work would profoundly influence De Soto and many other Native Americans whose heritage was on the verge of vanishing.

“It’s due to his madness that we are who we are today,” said De Soto, a 71-year-old nurse who works at a Santa Barbara rest home. “We have a language. We have an identity.”

Paranoid and secretive, Harrington was a fiercely devoted researcher of California tribes. He had a particular fascination with the Chumash, recording virtually every sound and word of their language, every nuance of their belief system and daily lives. As he did with other Native Americans until his death in 1961, he furiously quizzed De Soto’s relatives for days at a time, sometimes recording their recollections on wax cylinders or scratchy aluminum disks.

At her kitchen table, De Soto vividly recalled how annoyed she was by the Smithsonian researcher’s constant questions on “everything from the hair on top of your head to how you trim your toenails.” Just as vividly, she slips into the voices of long-gone family members, telling stories that, but for Harrington, would have been lost.

From time to time, De Soto stages one-woman presentations portraying female ancestors back to her great-great-great-grandmother Maria Paula, who was born in 1769, the year Spanish explorer Gaspar de Portola trekked up the coast through Santa Barbara.

Her stories start in a Chumash beach village and culminate with the trials of a modern Chumash woman: Ernestine.

Boat-builders and astronomers, the Chumash lived in villages scattered from Malibu to Morro Bay and spoke about eight dialects that are virtually separate languages. Before Spanish colonization, there were as many as 20,000; by the end of the mission system in the 1830s, there were perhaps 3,000. Most died in epidemics.

None of this was of more than passing interest to the young Ernestine. Today, though, she’s intensely proud of her lineage in Santa Barbara’s Barbareño band of Chumash. She says her DNA is a rare strain of Haplogroup D, a genetic sequence that links her to present-day Ecuadorean tribesmen and a 10,000-year-old human tooth found in an Alaska cave. And, though no full-blood Chumash are thought to survive, De Soto was pleased to be chosen years ago as the model for an early Chumash woman in a diorama at the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History.

“As soon as I die, they’ll probably throw it in the basement,” she joked.

She also stars in the poignant documentary “Six Generations,” a museum project produced and directed by filmmaker Paul Goldsmith that traces her roots to the days when Spanish monks established missions along the California coast. Generation after generation, the stories of De Soto’s ancestors are punctuated by disaster, displacement and disease.

As De Soto uncovered them, they resonated with her.

By the time she was 24, she had five children and more hard lessons than she could count from a string of abusive men. For a few years, she drifted. At points, she was sick, broke, disowned by her family. Only in her late 30s did she start pulling her life together, taking classes at Santa Barbara City College. For one assignment, she wrote about her family — for a while, she lived in a small house with 17 relatives — and a tide of memories surged.

“It evoked feelings that were always there,” she recalled. “They were just dormant.”

Taken by a teacher to the archive of the Santa Barbara Mission, she met an earnest graduate student named John Johnson. His thesis was on Chumash marriage and family patterns, and he was intensely interested in Mary J. Yee, the last native speaker of Chumash. Yee, who had recently died, was De Soto’s mother.

The two became fast friends.

With Johnson at her side, De Soto pored over the mission’s records of births, baptisms and deaths. To learn about two of her great-uncles, she dipped into records as far afield as San Quentin. She scoured her memory for the old family stories her mother used to tell. And she dived into the microfilmed field notes of Harrington, her old nemesis.

Yee, the wife of a Chinese vegetable peddler, was a favorite source — and, later, a close friend — of Harrington’s. And while the eccentric scholar was picking her brain, Yee was inspired to take her own notes, recording family lore and drawing caricatures of her questioner. Her 42 notebooks are in the Santa Barbara museum, and De Soto finds something new each time she delves into them.

“It’s like a little girl going into the attic and opening an old trunk, pulling out all these dolls, clothes and old family things,” she said. “It’s like having a treasure.”

There’s Yee’s prayer in Chumash for her daughter, which has yet to be translated. And there are the ancient tales — one of which De Soto turned into a children’s book, “Sugar Bear,” about Chumash generosity to wayfarers.

“She’d tell me stories every night,” De Soto said.

“There were old ghost stories. She remembered the taste of acorn mush, and how my great-grandmother would grind acorns, chew them and feed them to her babies like a bird.”

Other family memories weren’t so gentle.

A devout Catholic, De Soto tries to attend Mass every day. Her refrigerator magnets are religious paintings. But growing up, she heard about a female ancestor who was flogged by a monk for running off from the mission with a Spanish soldier. She knew that at various times, her family fled rather than face mistreatment.

Even so, De Soto worked at the mission’s infirmary for six years and developed a deep fondness for the friars.

“I’d joke around with them,” she said. “I’d say: I have to leave now. Don’t beat me!”

In “Six Generations,” she narrates two centuries of mostly melancholy family history.

Great-great-grandmother Maria Ygnacia shares her home with local paisanos who return to rob her and her blind husband and rape their daughter. “This is how they repaid the favor of being allowed to live here,” De Soto says in the film, portraying Maria in a solemn monotone.

Great-grandmother Luisa Ygnacio sees her husband, a violin player for the mission’s orchestra, complain of cramps and, in the space of a morning, drop dead of cholera. Her second husband is stabbed to death in a Los Angeles saloon, and a third is found facedown in a creek, apparently killed by bandits. A 4-year-old son, one of her 15 children, dies of a rattlesnake bite.

The stories roll on, most of them sad but not unusual for the time, the place and the people. De Soto’s mother, who spoke only a Chumash dialect until she was 12, had never seen a camera and bolted in terror from a class photograph, figuring she was about to be gunned down. Lacking toys, she played with a dead owl until her parents burned the rotting carcass.

Some of the stories are verified in old newspaper accounts and mission records. Many came straight from Harrington’s notes: Delirious from a fever, Maria Juana as a young girl dreamed of marrying a wot — a chief — years before she actually did so. As she lay dying, Maria Ygnacia sent her daughter-in-law to gather spring clover for a last meal.

Such details would be poignant in any family, but for De Soto they are especially so because her people came so close to extinction.

Other Native American families feel the same way.

Her old friend Johnson, now curator of anthropology at the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History, said that over his career he has received inquiries from more than 1,000 people eager to trace their roots.

Some, he said, hope to receive federal benefits or revenues from groups with casinos, like the Santa Ynez band of Chumash. Many are driven by more profound forces.

“I’ve had people just weep with the realization that they’ve been able to identify their ancestors,” said Johnson, who has sometimes been criticized as a know-nothing outsider when a search comes up dry.

“It’s emotionally overwhelming. We can show them that their great-grandparents worked with John Harrington and that the stories they heard from some great-aunt are real. It’s validating for them,” he said.

For De Soto, it’s the kind of knowledge that has helped her deal with tough circumstances.

The mother of five grown children has seen her family raked by mental illness, alcoholism and drug abuse. She has a congenital heart condition and a respiratory ailment. She doesn’t think retirement is in the cards.

“But we’re hard-grit survivors,” she said. “What I have — it’s a legacy you can’t put a dollar value on.”

link to Six Generations, a Chumash Documentary

By BOB HERBERT
NY Times Published: January 29, 2010

I had lunch with Howard Zinn just a few weeks ago, and I’ve seldom had more fun while talking about so many matters that were unreservedly unpleasant: the sorry state of government and politics in the U.S., the tragic futility of our escalation in Afghanistan, the plight of working people in an economy rigged to benefit the rich and powerful.

Mr. Zinn could talk about all of that and more without losing his sense of humor. He was a historian with a big, engaging smile that seemed ever-present. His death this week at the age of 87 was a loss that should have drawn much more attention from a press corps that spends an inordinate amount of its time obsessing idiotically over the likes of Tiger Woods and John Edwards.

Mr. Zinn was chagrined by the present state of affairs, but undaunted. “If there is going to be change, real change,” he said, “it will have to work its way from the bottom up, from the people themselves. That’s how change happens.”

We were in a restaurant at the Warwick Hotel in Manhattan. Also there was Anthony Arnove, who had worked closely with Mr. Zinn in recent years and had collaborated on his last major project, “The People Speak.” It’s a film in which well-known performers bring to life the inspirational words of everyday citizens whose struggles led to some of the most profound changes in the nation’s history. Think of those who joined in — and in many cases became leaders of — the abolitionist movement, the labor movement, the civil rights movement, the feminist revolution, the gay rights movement, and so on.

Think of what this country would have been like if those ordinary people had never bothered to fight and sometimes die for what they believed in. Mr. Zinn refers to them as “the people who have given this country whatever liberty and democracy we have.”

Our tendency is to give these true American heroes short shrift, just as we gave Howard Zinn short shrift. In the nitwit era that we’re living through now, it’s fashionable, for example, to bad-mouth labor unions and feminists even as workers throughout the land are treated like so much trash and the culture is so riddled with sexism that most people don’t even notice it. (There’s a restaurant chain called “Hooters,” for crying out loud.)

I always wondered why Howard Zinn was considered a radical. (He called himself a radical.) He was an unbelievably decent man who felt obliged to challenge injustice and unfairness wherever he found it. What was so radical about believing that workers should get a fair shake on the job, that corporations have too much power over our lives and much too much influence with the government, that wars are so murderously destructive that alternatives to warfare should be found, that blacks and other racial and ethnic minorities should have the same rights as whites, that the interests of powerful political leaders and corporate elites are not the same as those of ordinary people who are struggling from week to week to make ends meet?

Mr. Zinn was often taken to task for peeling back the rosy veneer of much of American history to reveal sordid realities that had remained hidden for too long. When writing about Andrew Jackson in his most famous book, “A People’s History of the United States,” published in 1980, Mr. Zinn said:

“If you look through high school textbooks and elementary school textbooks in American history, you will find Jackson the frontiersman, soldier, democrat, man of the people — not Jackson the slaveholder, land speculator, executioner of dissident soldiers, exterminator of Indians.”

Radical? Hardly.

Mr. Zinn would protest peacefully for important issues he believed in — against racial segregation, for example, or against the war in Vietnam — and at times he was beaten and arrested for doing so. He was a man of exceptionally strong character who worked hard as a boy growing up in Brooklyn during the Depression. He was a bomber pilot in World War II, and his experience of the unmitigated horror of warfare served as the foundation for his lifelong quest for peaceful solutions to conflict.

He had a wonderful family, and he cherished it. He and his wife, Roslyn, known to all as Roz, were married in 1944 and were inseparable for more than six decades until her death in 2008. She was an activist, too, and Howard’s editor. “I never showed my work to anyone except her,” he said.

They had two children and five grandchildren.

Mr. Zinn was in Santa Monica this week, resting up after a grueling year of work and travel, when he suffered a heart attack and died on Wednesday. He was a treasure and an inspiration. That he was considered radical says way more about this society than it does about him.

Chuka Soba Inoue serves shoyu ramen (with soy-enhanced chicken broth) near the Tsukiji fish market.

By MATT GROSS
NY Times Published: January 31, 2010

NOT far from Waseda University in Tokyo, around the corner from a 7-Eleven, down a tidy alley, lies a ramen shop that doesn’t look like a ramen shop. In fact, Ganko, as it’s called, doesn’t look like anything at all. There’s no sign, no windows, only a raggedy black tarp set like a tent against a tiled wall, with a white animal bone dangling from a chain to signal (somehow) what lies within.

Past the tarp and through a sliding glass door is Ganko proper. Five stools are lined up along a faux-wood counter, and above it a thin space opens like a proscenium onto a small kitchen, crusted black with age and smoke but hardly dirty. The lone performer is a ramen chef. With a week’s stubble on his chin, his eyeglasses fogged with steam and a towel wrapped around his neck, he certainly looks ganko, or stubborn, and he speaks hardly a word as he methodically fills bowls with careful dollops of flavorings and fats, ladles of rich broth, noodles cooked just al dente and shaken free of excess water, a slab of roast pork, a supple sheet of seaweed, a tangle of pickled bamboo shoots. All is silent until the final moment, when the chef drizzles hot oil on top and the shreds of pale-green scallion squeal and sizzle.

From then on there is only one sound — the slurping of noodles. Oh, it’s punctuated by the occasional happy hum of a diner chewing pork or guzzling the fat-flecked broth, or even by the faint chatter of the chef’s radio, but it’s the slurps that take center stage, long and loud and enthusiastic, showing appreciation for the chef’s métier even as they cool the noodles down to edible temperature.

And when the noodles are finally gone, the bowl empty of everything but a few oleaginous blobs, each diner sets his bowl back upon the counter, mumbles “Gochiso-sama deshita” — roughly “Thank you for the meal” — pays the 700-yen fee (about $7.85 at 89 yen to the dollar) and wanders back out into the daylight world where Ganko suddenly seems like a hallucination, a Wonderland dream of noodly bliss.

Now, you might think that Ganko would be a closely held secret — a destination I managed to uncover only through bribes, threats and tearful entreaties. But you’d be wrong. I learned about Ganko out in the open, from an English-language blog, Ramenate!, started by a Columbia University graduate student working on his Ph.D. in modern Japanese literature and, more important, cataloging his near-daily bowls of noodles.

Ramenate! is hardly the only ramen blog out there. There are dozens, many in English, many more in Japanese. Together they constitute but one small corner of Tokyo’s sprawling ramen ecosystem, a realm that encompasses multilingual guidebooks, glossy magazines, databases that score shops to three decimal places (Ganko’s underrated by RamenDB.com at 76.083), comic books, TV shows, movies (like the 1985 classic “Tampopo,” in which a Stetson-wearing trucker helps a beleaguered widow learn the art of ramen) and, according to the Shinyokohama Raumen Museum (yes, there is a ramen museum), the 4,137 shops selling bowls of noodles in broth.

Still unclear? Well, combine New Yorkers’ love of pizza, hot dogs and hamburgers, throw in some Southern barbecue mania, and you’ve still only begun to approximate Tokyo’s obsession with ramen.

This ramen is definitely not the dried stuff you subsisted on in college. At the best shops, and even at lesser lights, almost everything is fresh, handmade and artisanal, from long-simmered broths and hand-cut noodles to pigs raised on red wine (for an inside-out marinade). In some quarters, regional varieties predominate: shoyu, or soy-enhanced chicken broth (like Ganko’s), is popular throughout Honshu, Japan’s main island, but tonkotsu, or pork-bone broth, from the southern island of Kyushu has developed a widespread following, while garlicky, thick-noodled miso ramen from Sapporo, in the north, has adherents too. Elsewhere, the flavors are simply at the whim of the chef, or of ever-shifting trends.

Over six days in late November, I submerged myself in Tokyo’s ramen culture, eating roughly four bowls a day at shops both fancy and spartan, modern and ganko, trying to suss out not just what makes a good bowl but also the intricacies of ordering and eating well. Above all, I wanted to know why such a simple concoction — brought from China by Confucian missionaries in the 17th century — inspired so much passion and devotion among Japanese and foreigners alike, and to thereby gain some deeper understanding of Tokyo itself.

My guide for much of this ramen adventure was Brian MacDuckston, the 31-year-old English teacher from San Francisco behind RamenAdventures.com. Tall and pale, bald and bespectacled, Mr. MacDuckston resembles a noodle himself, and his thin, lightly tattooed figure belies the amount of ramen he’s consumed. Indeed, as he told me, he’s even lost weight during the three and a half years he’s lived in Japan — a rare feat among food bloggers.

Not that he ate much ramen at first. It was only in January 2008, after months of noticing the 45-minute lines outside Mutekiya, a trendy ramen shop in the Ikebukuro neighborhood, that he finally decided to dip his chopsticks.

“It was awesome back then,” he told me. The shop had recently been on TV, and was serving a special pork-laden ramen: “A slice of pork, and then it was stewed pork, and then it was a pork meatball, and then it was a pile of ground pork too. I couldn’t comprehend it. It was delicious, of course.”

He was hooked. He began Googling best-of lists and standing in line for hours. “That’s crazy, any way you look at it,” he said. “It’s noodles and soup, and you wait two hours for it? There’s something crazy about that.” Still, it was his kind of crazy, and since he was between jobs and surviving on unemployment insurance, he started to blog.

Today, Mutekiya’s lines remain long, but Mr. MacDuckston’s tastes have matured beyond the shop’s serviceable tonkotsu broth and slightly overcooked noodles. After Mutekiya, he became a huge fan of Nagi, a mini-chain with a branch just outside the wild, neon Shibuya shopping-and-night-life zone. As Mr. MacDuckston led me there one night, I realized the quiet neighborhood was familiar — two years earlier, I’d wandered the area with friends, searching for somewhere to eat. Little did I know we’d walked right by one of Tokyo’s better ramen shops.

It was an easy mistake to make. Nagi looks more like an exclusive drinking den than a bustling noodlery. The dining room is intimate, its walls decorated with brown-paper flour sacks, and you place your order not by buying a meal ticket from a vending machine, as is often standard, but with an actual waiter, who lets you specify just how hard (or soft) you want your noodles. We asked for ours bari — wiry — and that’s how they came, thin and deliciously mochi-mochi, the Japanese analog of al dente. They were so good, in fact, that we left soup in our bowls to flavor the kaedama, the almost requisite extra helping of noodles we’d ordered.

That soup wasn’t bad either — a tonkotsu broth, simmered for days until milky and rich — and the toppings (tender roast pork, an incredibly eggy slow-cooked egg) were top-notch, but this Nagi was all about the pasta.

At the next place Mr. MacDuckston took me to, Basanova, in a not very exciting neighborhood a few train stops west of Shibuya, the broth was definitely the star. That’s because Basanova specialized in green curry ramen, a clever adaptation of Thai flavors to Japanese tastes. It was fascinating to slurp, at once vibrant with the heat of chilies and the aromas of lemon grass and kaffir lime, but at heart a classic Japanese ramen. You won’t find this in Bangkok.

LIKE Nagi, Basanova was a nice place to relax. Sure, there was a ticket vending machine, and you ate at a stainless-steel counter, but the atmosphere invited lingering with a beer or two, and the owner didn’t mind our taking plenty of pictures. He even came over to chat, explaining that because his parents came from opposite ends of Japan — hence from vastly different ramen traditions — taking the fusion-cuisine route was a natural decision.

As we left, Mr. MacDuckston and I were followed out the door by a young woman who’d been eyeing us curiously. In the street, she identified herself as Kana Nagashima, a student just returned from a decade in Singapore who had started a ramen club at her university. Her giggly enthusiasm was delightful, and she seemed as impressed with us as we were with her. Before we moved on, she and Mr. MacDuckston exchanged contact information. Talk about meeting cute.

Another fusion dynamic was at play even farther west, at an unassuming corner shop called Ivan Ramen. Ivan is the brainchild of Ivan Orkin, a 43-year-old New York City native and former cook at Lutèce who in 2003 moved to Tokyo with his Japanese wife and son and, well, needed a job. Since “ramen’s fun,” as he told me one morning before the shop opened, his path was set. He started Ivan Ramen in 2007, and despite occasional skepticism from traditionalists it became a hit. His classics — salt and soy broths of remarkable single-mindedness — and his whimsies, like a “taco” ramen or rye-flour tsukemen (noodles served dry with broth for dipping), are so popular that he has a line of dried products in Circle K convenience stores and a line of 20-odd customers outside his door.

“One of the reasons it’s an obsession is it’s truly an everyperson’s dish,” Mr. Orkin said. “Pricewise, it’s affordable for just about anybody. It comes in a bowl, and a good bowl of ramen is balanced perfectly: the soup, the noodles, the toppings, everything works together. So when you’re eating it, even though it’s all these disparate ingredients together, somehow they feel as if you’re eating one thing.”

Nowhere did I have a more balanced bowl than at Ikaruga, where I ate with Meter Chen, a fashionable Hong Kong transplant who works in the entertainment industry and who has written a Chinese-language book about ramen, and his assistant, Naoko Yokoi. As we stood in a 20-minute line out front, Mr. Chen was hopeful — he liked Ikaruga’s logo. “You know if the taste is good or not,” he said later, by the attention the owners pay to design.

Inside, Ikaruga was bright and peaceful, with ample room between tables and counter. The cooks and waiters were bright and peaceful, too, wearing black shirts buttoned to the collar and Zenned-out smiles on their faces. This was an oasis, and I understood why it had been featured in “Girl’s Noodle Club,” a guidebook to shops that defy ramen’s stereotypically macho image.

And Ikaruga’s ramen? It seems almost heretical to pick it apart, to praise separately the deep tonkotsu broth with its hint of bonito flavor, or the slices of pork, their edges caramel-sweet, the flesh tender and not too fatty, or the bite of the noodles or the egginess of the soft-cooked egg. Suffice to say, this ramen was perfect.

But perfection takes many forms. The antithesis of Ikaruga is Jiro, a small chain of ramen shops that is something of a sub-obsession for Bob, the 42-year-old American who runs the RamenTokyo.com blog. If Mr. MacDuckston is a noodle, Bob — who didn’t want his last name used — is the unabashedly meaty pork. Which is understandable considering Bob’s goal: to eat at all 33 Jiro franchises.

“It’s like the White Castle of ramen,” he said: cheap, unrefined, flouting all the apparent rules. The bowls are huge, the noodles rough cut, the broth a thick, porky trickle, the toppings a garbage heap of bean sprouts, cabbage, chopped pork and garlic, garlic, garlic. “The taste is just unbelievable,” he said. “You can’t even describe it compared to regular ramen.”

Indeed, it’s great stuff, perfect in its way. But as I tried (and failed) to finish the monster bowl, I wondered how much the 45-minute line had affected my judgment. Who waits that long and doesn’t deem the ramen great? Was I crazy, à la Mr. MacDuckston? Or just obsessed like everyone else?

After a few days in Tokyo, I’d collected several theories about ramen’s popularity. At the Shinyokohama Raumen Museum — a cavernous basement done up like a 1930s urban area, with branches of famous ramen shops — an exhibition explained that in the 1960s as Japanese cuisine became industrialized and as foreign cuisines attained “gourmet” status, ramen became a throwback to a simpler time. By the 1980s, ramen was a way for an affluent new generation to connect with its roots.

Naoko Yokoi, Meter Chen’s assistant, said there was another angle — for young people, ramen is now a demonstration of trendiness: “It’s status for them. Knowing and going to a famous ramen shop is cool.”

Bob was succinct: “On the planet Earth, who doesn’t enjoy eating noodles?”

For many of the ramen obsessives — myself included — it was all, I suspected, about the hunt. Whether they were scouring the Japanese media for leads or wandering around, nose in the air, eyes alert to suspicious lines, finding gems among Tokyo’s 4,137 ramen shops (a conservative estimate, by the way) was a laborious process that made the final first slurp that much sweeter.

Would I have loved the inky-black “burnt” miso ramen at Gogyo as much if I hadn’t gotten lost trying to find the cavelike restaurant? Would the textbook shoyu ramen served by elderly men at the Chuka Soba Inoue stand have seemed so cool if I hadn’t known that a block away tourists were overspending on sushi at the Tsukiji fish market? Would I have had such a crush on the pan-seared tsukemen at Keisuke No. 4 if Mr. MacDuckston and I hadn’t walked two miles there through the rain after everywhere else had closed?

Each step in that process brought other rewards as well. I learned better how to navigate Tokyo’s notoriously unnavigable streets. I improved my Japanese (slightly). And I began to see how ramen mania, whatever its origin, allowed strangers to connect in a city where connections can be hard to make. All I had to do was mention my quest, and I’d be besieged with recommendations, reminiscences and requests to join in, which is how, one evening, I found myself eating ramen topped with grated cheese with Sohee Park, the romantic lead from “The Ramen Girl,” a 2008 movie starring the late Brittany Murphy as an aspiring noodle chef. His verdict (and mine): “fun to try.”

“Fun to try” may not sound like much, but in Tokyo — a city that is, at times, open to all manner of experience and yet just as often closed to those who don’t know the social codes — “fun to try” goes a long way. It softens the hard, geeky edge of obsession and lets you laugh off 45-minute missteps and closed-on-Tuesday failures.

The night Mr. MacDuckston and I ate at Nagi, for example, we were wending our way through a crowded section of Shibuya when he spied a line of young people extending into the street. He approached a young woman at the end, his eyes shining with ramen lust, and asked, in Japanese, what they were waiting for.

The elevator, she said.

So on we hunted, hungry and unfazed. Somewhere out there was the next great bowl of noodles, and we would find it, even if it took all night.

THE BLOGS

RamenAdventures.com, Ramenate.com and RamenTokyo.com are wonderful, frequently updated resources, as is GoRamen.com, written by Keizo Shimamoto, who’s now an apprentice in the kitchen of Ivan Ramen. A number of other sites are either shuttered or seldom updated, but still have valuable information: ramen-otaku.blogspot.com, Rameniac.com and RamenRamenRamen.net.

The best resource for finding ramen shops is RamenDB.com, which is written entirely in Japanese. For help navigating it, check out RamenTokyo’s instructions at ramentokyo.com/2009/05/supleks-ramen-database.html.

THE SHOPS

Finding an address in Tokyo can be a challenge, even with Google Maps. For a more accurate, if slower, map system, check out DiddleFinger.com.

Ganko, 3-15-7 Nishiwaseda, Shinjuku Ward, no phone; ramen from 550 yen.

Gogyo, 1-4-36 Nishi-Azabu, Minato-ku; (81-3) 5775-5566; ramendining-gogyo.com; ramen from 850 yen.

Ivan Ramen, 3-24-7 Minamikarasuyama, Setagaya-ku; (81-3) 6750-5540; ivanramen.com; ramen from 800 yen.

Shinyokohama Raumen Museum, 2-14-21 Shinyokohama, Kohoku-ku, Yokohama City; (81-45) 471-0503; raumen.co.jp/ramen/; admission 300 yen.

Ikaruga, 1-9-12 Kudankita, Chiyoda-ku; (81-3) 3239-2622; emen.jp/ikaruga; ramen from 650 yen.

Basanova (sometimes Bassanova), 1-4-18 Hanegi, Setagaya-ku; (81-3) 3327-4649; ramen from 700 yen.

Chuka Soba Inoue, 4-9-16 Tsukiji, Chuo-ku; (81-3) 3542-0620; ramen from 600 yen.

Nagi, 1-3-1 Higashi, Shibuya-ku; (81-3) 3499-0390; n-nagi.com; ramen from 780 yen.

Keisuke No. 4, 1-1-14 Hon-Komagome, Bunkyo-ku; (81-3) 5814-5131; grandcuisine.jp/keisuke; ramen from 1,000 yen.

Mutekiya, 1-17-1 Minami-Ikebukuro, Toshima-ku; (81-3) 3982-7656; mutekiya.com; ramen from 680 yen

Jiro, multiple locations; see ramentokyo.com/2007/06/ramen-jiro.html for addresses and hours.

Thanks to Jonathan Maghen

The shadow of Neil A. Armstrong fell on Tranquility Base, where the first moon landing took place, on July 20, 1969.

By JESSE McKINLEY
NY Times Published: January 29, 2010

SAN FRANCISCO — In one small step for preservation and one giant leap of logic, the official historical commission of California voted Friday to protect two small urine collection devices, four space-sickness bags and dozens of other pieces of detritus, all currently residing nearly a quarter of a million miles from the state.

This is not a joke. I repeat, Houston, not a joke.

Saying it wanted to raise awareness of both the state’s cosmic contribution to the Apollo 11 moon mission and the potential threats from lunar interlopers, the California State Historical Resources Commission voted unanimously to designate more than 100 pieces of space trash, scientific apparatus and commemorative tokens to its list of protected resources.

Milford Wayne Donaldson, the state historic preservation officer, said the reasoning behind the first-of-its-kind designation was simple: Scores of California companies worked on the Apollo mission, and much of their handiwork remains of major historical value to the state, regardless of where it is now or what it was for used for then.

“It has a significance that goes way further than whether it came from a quarter million miles away or not,” Mr. Donaldson said. “They are all parts of the event.”

While Apollo 11 was indeed a landmark mission — during which Neil A. Armstrong became the first man to walk on the moon and he and Buzz Aldrin apparently ditched their boots — it wasn’t exactly tidy. Worried about the weight of their landing capsule, the harried lunar explorers left behind tons of trash, including empty food bags, electrical equipment and, yes, several receptacles meant for bodily waste.

There is also a collection of artifacts of historical note and emotion: Mr. Armstrong’s footprint, for example, and an American flag. Apollo 11 also left behind a mission patch from Apollo 1, in which three astronauts died in a fire, and a message from world leaders.

And while some of the garbage might seem like, well, garbage, California is just one of several states seeking protection for the items in the face of possible lunar missions by other nations as well as a budding space tourism industry.

In New Mexico, home to early Apollo test sites like the White Sands Missile Range, a similar measure is expected to be considered by the state’s cultural properties review committee in April.

Beth O’Leary, an assistant professor of anthropology at New Mexico State University and an expert in “lunar archeology,” said she had screamed with delight when she heard the news from California. But she admitted that persuading people to safeguard Apollo’s space junk was often a challenge, if only because it is on — you know — the moon.

“I don’t think anyone argues with it being a major event in the history for humanity, right up there with the invention of fire,” Ms. O’Leary said. “But people don’t tend to think of it as something we need to be protecting.”

So for the last decade, she and other historians and archeologists have been pushing for protection through their Lunar Legacy Project, which has an inventory of items left behind at Tranquility Base where the astronauts landed in July 1969, including a plaque spelling out exactly who made the mess.

“Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the Moon,” it reads. “We came in peace for all mankind.”

Mr. Donaldson said he hoped his commission’s vote might help goad the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization into placing the landing site on the World Heritage List, an international compilation of famed landmarks.

“I think there’s a threat from private companies,” Mr. Donaldson said. “And with today’s technology, they could probably pinpoint this.”

That said, Mr. Donaldson admitted that there were no “space cops” available to safeguard the state’s newest historical resource. But, like the Apollo astronauts themselves, he seemed optimistic that Friday’s vote might lead to bigger and better things.

“Hopefully,” he said, “this will take off.”

via

Members of the Indian women’s national soccer team training for the South Asian Games, which start Friday in Bangladesh.

By JENNIFER DOYLE
NY Times Published: January 28, 2010

GOA, India — When the Indian women’s national team takes the field against Sri Lanka on Friday in the South Asian Games, it will be its first soccer match in two years.

India’s national women’s team will play its first match in two years, on Friday against Sri Lanka.

India’s national soccer association had failed to schedule a friendly match for its women’s team since October 2007. And last June, FIFA, the sport’s world governing body, sent a rebuke to the All India Football Federation and, with no matches to evaluate, removed the Indian team from its world rankings.

The delisting seemed to move Indian soccer officials to action.

The team was reassembled in late November for a two-month training camp in Margao, Goa, home of one of India’s few artificial-turf fields.

While the men’s national team arrived by plane and stayed in five-star accommodations for its camp, the women’s team — a mixture of veteran and new players — traveled by train for as many as five days and was packed three to a room in a dormitory. The women had no training uniforms when they arrived and did their own laundry.

But as the women moved through their days as a unit — training in the mornings and evenings, and taking all their meals together — they developed a sense of optimism.

“We have been living like a family,” midfielder Amoolya said.

Bembem Devi, the captain, said “being in camp together feels good.”

The removal from the world rankings marked a nadir for women’s soccer in India. The national program languished even though women’s soccer has long been popular. Indian women have played soccer for more than 100 years, and the sport is played widely in schools. In the 1970s, leagues blossomed in regions with strong soccer traditions: Goa, Bengal and Manipur. Matches could draw tens of thousands of fans.

Yolanda Sousa Hammermeier, a star in the 1970s, said fans turned out “not to see the women but the football.”

In the 1980s, India competed in the independently organized world championships that predated the FIFA Women’s World Cup. India was one of Asia’s strongest teams and was optimistic about the future.

Yet, over 25 years, the women’s national program has slowly disintegrated. For players like Devi, the dream of representing her country at the World Cup or the Olympics has slipped further out of reach, even as women’s participation at the school and regional levels has increased.

The teams have few resources, and many of India’s Asian neighbors and most likely opponents are unstable, making friendly matches and international tournaments a logistical nightmare.

In 1985, at FIFA’s behest, the Indian soccer federation, which had previously run only the men’s game, took over administration of the Women’s Football Federation of India, which had been founded in 1979 by female players.

Leaders of the women’s game were replaced with inexperienced and uninterested staff. The program lost momentum and many of its best players.

Players of Sousa Hammermeier’s generation still feel betrayed and are reluctant to let their daughters play.

The team’s staff members acknowledged they face an uphill battle convincing players their national team is worth the effort.

Yet the women’s team saw important signs of change at the recent camp. One reason for the shift in spirit can be traced to a November conversation between Alberto Colaco, the president of the Indian soccer association, and Sunil Gulati, the head of the United States Soccer Federation.

Gulati, who was born in India, visited the association’s headquarters in New Delhi on his way to a tournament. While exploring how the federations might cooperate, Colaco asked for help with the women’s team.

Gulati sent Mike Dickey, the head coach of the Americans’ girls under-15 team, to the camp in Goa. Dickey led two weeks of training and ran a coaches’ clinic.

The fact that a high-level coach from FIFA’s top-ranked program had traveled to work with Indian players and training staff seemed to lift the squad.

Shahid Jabbar, the women’s head coach, said that after Dickey’s arrival, players became more aggressive on the field. “They want to show us what they are learning,” Jabbar said.

Dickey also invited Marcus Pacheco, the goalkeeping coach for the Indian men, to visit the camp.

Pacheco brought along Subhashish Roy Chowdhury, a goalie with Mahindra United in the Indian league and a national team player. Their visit signaled support from the men’s side. Pacheco was dismayed to think that the women’s goalies received little training while growing up. That problem cannot be overcome in two days, he said.

When Dickey first met the team on the training ground, they were not in uniform. No one at the soccer association had asked Nike, the team sponsor, to send gear. It took only a few phone calls to outfit the women in India’s national team training equipment.

The women were not preoccupied with the differences at the men’s camp.

After so long in the wilderness, they were happy to be together, playing the sport they love and raising their game.

“This is a turn for the better,” said Macline Mendonca, an assistant coach and former goalie.

The squad was eyeing the South Asian Games in Bangladesh with optimism.

“We feel sure to win the gold medal,” Mendonca said. The team is confident, she said. “We have to be.”

Thanks to Jonathan Maghen

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
NY Times Published: January 27, 2010

Howard Zinn, an author, teacher and political activist whose book “A People’s History of the United States” became a million-selling leftist alternative to mainstream texts, died Wednesday in Santa Monica, Calif. He was 87 and lived in Auburndale, Mass.

The cause was a heart attack, his daughter Myla Kabat-Zinn said.

Published in 1980 with little promotion and a first printing of 5,000, “A People’s History” was, fittingly, a people’s best-seller, attracting a wide audience through word of mouth and reaching 1 million sales in 2003. Although Professor Zinn was writing for a general readership, his book was taught in high schools and colleges throughout the country, and numerous companion editions were published, including “Voices of a People’s History,” a volume for young people and a graphic novel.

“A People’s History” told an openly left-wing story. Professor Zinn accused Christopher Columbus and other explorers of committing genocide, picked apart presidents from Andrew Jackson to Franklin D. Roosevelt and celebrated workers, feminists and war resisters.

Even liberal historians were uneasy with Professor Zinn, who taught for many years at Boston University. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. once said: “I know he regards me as a dangerous reactionary. And I don’t take him very seriously. He’s a polemicist, not a historian.”

In a 1998 interview with The Associated Press, Professor Zinn acknowledged that he was not trying to write an objective history, or a complete one. He called his book a response to traditional works, the first chapter, not the last, of a new kind of history.

“There’s no such thing as a whole story; every story is incomplete,” Professor Zinn said. “My idea was the orthodox viewpoint has already been done a thousand times.”

“A People’s History” had some famous admirers, including the actors Matt Damon and Ben Affleck. The two grew up near Professor Zinn, were family friends and gave the book a plug in their Academy Award-winning screenplay for “Good Will Hunting.”

Oliver Stone was a fan, as was Bruce Springsteen, whose bleak “Nebraska” album was inspired in part by “A People’s History.” The book was the basis of a 2007 documentary, “Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind,” and even showed up on “The Sopranos,” in the hand of Tony’s son, A.J.

Professor Zinn himself was an impressive-looking man, tall and rugged with wavy hair. An experienced public speaker, he was modest and engaging in person, more interested in persuasion than in confrontation.

Born in New York in 1922, Professor Zinn was the son of Jewish immigrants who as a child lived in a rundown area in Brooklyn and responded strongly to the novels of Charles Dickens. At age 17, urged on by some young Communists in his neighborhood, he attended a political rally in Times Square.

“Suddenly, I heard the sirens sound, and I looked around and saw the policemen on horses galloping into the crowd and beating people,” he told The A.P. “I couldn’t believe that.”

“And then I was hit. I turned around and I was knocked unconscious. I woke up sometime later in a doorway, with Times Square quiet again, eerie, dreamlike, as if nothing had transpired. I was ferociously indignant.”

War continued his education. Eager to help wipe out the Nazis, he joined the Army Air Corps in 1943 and even persuaded the local draft board to let him mail his own induction notice. He flew missions throughout Europe, receiving an Air Medal, but he found himself questioning what it all meant. Back home, he gathered his medals and papers, put them in a folder and wrote on top: “Never again.”

He attended New York University and Columbia University, where he received a doctorate in history. In 1956, he was offered the chairmanship of the history and social sciences department at Spelman College, an all-black women’s school in segregated Atlanta.

During the civil rights movement, Professor Zinn encouraged his students to request books from the segregated public libraries and helped coordinate sit-ins at downtown cafeterias. He also published several articles, including a rare attack on the Kennedy administration, accusing it of being too slow to protect blacks.

He was loved by students — among them a young Alice Walker, who later wrote “The Color Purple” — but not by administrators. In 1963, Spelman fired him for “insubordination.” (Professor Zinn was a critic of the school’s non-participation in the civil rights movement.) His years at Boston University were marked by opposition to the Vietnam War and by feuds with the school’s president, John Silber.

Professor Zinn retired in 1988, spending his last day of class on the picket line with students in support of an on-campus nurses’ strike. Over the years, he continued to lecture at schools and to appear at rallies and on picket lines.

Besides “A People’s History,” he wrote several books, including “The Southern Mystique,” “LaGuardia in Congress” and the memoir “You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train,” the title of a 2004 documentary about Professor Zinn that Mr. Damon narrated. He also wrote three plays.

His wife and longtime collaborator, Roslyn, died in 2008. They had two children, Myla and Jeff.

One of Professor Zinn’s last public writings was a brief essay, published last week in The Nation, about the first year of the Obama administration.

“I’ve been searching hard for a highlight,” he wrote, adding that he wasn’t disappointed because he never expected a lot from President Obama.

“I think people are dazzled by Obama’s rhetoric, and that people ought to begin to understand that Obama is going to be a mediocre president — which means, in our time, a dangerous president — unless there is some national movement to push him in a better direction.”

2008. 16mm film (black and white and color, silent), 16 min

Figure 3

Closes February 15

MOMA

A log house by Sou Fujimoto Architects.

The outside facade of House H.

By FRED A. BERNSTEIN
NY Times Published: January 22, 2010

DURING one three-week period recently Iwan Baan touched down in Amsterdam, Mexico City, Miami, New York, Milan, Rome, Tokyo, Medellín and Basel, where he photographed buildings designed by some of the world’s top architects, including Herzog & de Meuron, Rem Koolhaas and Toyo Ito. Along with Steven Holl, Thom Mayne and the Japanese firm Sanaa, they have helped turn Mr. Baan, 34, into almost certainly the most peripatetic architectural photographer in the world as well as one of the most widely published.

Just five years after he took up architectural photography, Mr. Baan is “remaking the genre,” said Charles Renfro, a partner in Diller Scofidio & Renfro, for whom he has photographed projects like the High Line and the renovated Lincoln Center. For decades magazine editors, developers and architects themselves favored a static style of photography that framed buildings as pristine objects. Mr. Baan’s work, while still showing architecture in flattering lights and from carefully chosen angles, does away with the old feeling of chilly perfection. In its place he offers untidiness, of the kind that comes from real people moving though buildings and real cities massing around them.

Mr. Baan sees buildings as backdrops for his photographs of people, he said during a recent visit to New York. Looking at a picture of the new Cooper Union building in the East Village, designed by Mr. Mayne, Mr. Baan said, “It’s about the woman shuffling down the street.” His work owes as much to Diane Arbus and Henri Cartier-Bresson as to Julius Shulman or Ezra Stoller, the pre-eminent architectural photographers of the late 20th century.

And where Shulman may be best known for exalting glass houses that hovered above Los Angeles, Mr. Baan often does the opposite, chartering helicopters to photograph buildings as small objects amid relentless urban sprawl. If Shulman and Stoller’s glorifying of pure form was an ideal match for the purist Modern architecture of their era, Mr. Baan’s conjuring of real life may be ideally suited to a time when architects like Mr. Koolhaas are creating buildings meant to absorb and reflect the messiness of 21st-century cities.

Mr. Baan, who grew up outside Amsterdam, got his first camera, an Agfa Clack, at 12 but quickly traded it in for a more sophisticated model. In the mid-1990s he studied photography at the Royal Academy of Art, in The Hague, but he didn’t plan to shoot architecture because when he tried it, he was asked for “incredibly boring” pictures, he said, “with blue sky and no people.” And he never finished school, in part, he said, because some of his professors didn’t consider his digital work “real photography.” At the end of the decade he lived in New York, where he took photos for a series of children’s books.

Like many technophiles of his generation, he was fascinated by the Internet. In 2004 he saw an exhibition of images produced by Mr. Koolhaas’s research studio, AMO, on the history of Europe, and — looking for work — he wrote a proposal for turning it into an interactive Web site. Months after he submitted it, he got a call asking if he could accompany Mr. Koolhaas to Brussels to present the idea to an official of the European Union.

That trip led to a number of collaborations with Mr. Koolhaas, including an assignment to document construction of the CCTV tower in Beijing, which involved flying to Beijing every eight weeks. He contacted the offices of Herzog & de Meuron (whose Bird’s Nest stadium was being built for the 2008 Olympics) and Steven Holl (whose Linked Hybrid, a series of residential towers connected by sky bridges, was breaking ground), asking if he could photograph their buildings there. Rather than waiting to be chosen by clients, “he chose our architecture,” Mr. Holl recalled.

Mr. Baan said he was drawn to the Chinese projects largely because the migrant construction workers who lived on site — as many as 10,000 in the case of CCTV — created entire communities for him to photograph, with the new buildings as backdrops. And he was able to capture pretty much what he saw. Nobody bothered to pose for the young man with a self-effacing manner and a hand-held Canon.

Unmarried and unattached, Mr. Baan books his own travel, negotiates his own fees by e-mail (it helps that he speaks three languages) and carries all the equipment he needs in a shoulder bag. He works for architects, their clients or magazines, including several European publications. Last year the Italian design magazine Abitare sent Mr. Baan to Norway to photograph the Knut Hamsun Center, a museum by Mr. Holl north of the Arctic Circle. Mr. Holl then purchased the rights to the photographs, which were distributed to news outlets. Given the building’s remote location, Mr. Baan’s photographs will be crucial to how it is received internationally, Mr. Holl said.

In his spare time Mr. Baan is photographing a series of little-known Richard Neutra houses in Europe for a coming show at the MARTa Herford museum in Herford, Germany. And he has flown to Africa repeatedly to photograph the work of contemporary African architects, a personal passion. He had two books out last year, one on the work of Sanaa, the Japanese firm known in New York for the New Museum of Contemporary Art, the other on the Porsche Museum in Stuttgart, Germany. He accepted the Porsche commission, he said, knowing that he would take an approach to the building at odds with the smooth, luxurious image of the cars.

Mr. Baan maintains a studio in Amsterdam — his nominal hometown — where he has developed techniques for taking panoramic photographs of the insides of architectural models. As part of the symbiosis between Mr. Baan and the architects he works with, his panoramas of their models, presented to prospective clients, have helped them win commissions. In addition to working for stars like Mr. Koolhaas he is also helping to popularize the work of young architects whose work he admires, including Sou Fujimoto, who has created some highly innovative houses in remote parts of Japan.

Mr. Baan may never put down roots, but he and a friend, the Dutch-born architect Florian Idenburg, are considering building a two-family house in Brooklyn. (Mr. Idenburg has a wife and children.) That will give Mr. Baan a place to stay and yet another building, in another throbbing city, to use as a backdrop for his startling photos.

Walead Beshty, Large Copper (FedEx® Large Box ©2005 FEDEX 139751 REV 10/05 SSCC), Standard Overnight, Los Angeles-New York trk#870069766931, trk#870069766910, trk#870069766920, January 12-13, 2010, 2010-, Copper, accrued shipping labels, 12 x 18 x 3

Nina Beier & Marie Lund , Walead Beshty, Alexandre da Cunha, Sean Edwards, Ian Law, Dan Rees, John Smith, Kerry Tribe

14 January – 13 February 2010

Wallspace

JAMES WELLING: GLASS HOUSE
January 30 – March 6, 2010

OPENING RECEPTION
Saturday, January 30
6 – 8 pm

Regen Projects

Frank Serpico, former police officer, lives in a one-room cabin. No TV or Internet. “This is my life now,” he said. “The woods, nature, solitude.”

By COREY KILGANNON
NY Times Published: January 22, 2010

HE looked like some sort of fur trapper, this bearded man walking through the snowy woods here in upstate New York. But then, Frank Serpico has always been known for his disguises.

Anyone who has seen the celebrated 1973 film “Serpico” knows that he often dressed up — bum, butcher, rabbi — to catch criminals. His off-duty look was never vintage cop either, with the bushy beard and the beads.

This is the man whose long and loud complaining about widespread corruption in the New York Police Department made him a pariah on the force. The patrolman shot in the face during a 1971 drug bust while screaming for backup from his fellow officers, who then failed to immediately call for an ambulance. The undaunted whistle-blower whose testimony was the centerpiece of the Knapp Commission hearings, which sparked the biggest shakeup in the history of the department.

Four decades later, Frank Serpico is still bearded, handsome and a flamboyant dresser. At 73, he seems spry enough to chase down and collar a perp; on that wintry walk through the woods, he interrogated a man carrying a sled, and followed a trail of blood drops in the snow until it disappeared. Not long before, he had sniffed out a dumper of garbage on his property and reported him to the police.

Mr. Serpico still carries the detective shield he was awarded as he left the department on a disability pension and, often, his licensed revolver, with which he takes target practice on his 50-acre property not far from this Columbia County hamlet. He also still carries bullet fragments lodged just below his brain from the drug shooting; he is deaf in his left ear, and has nerve damage in his left leg.

For many, “Serpico” conjures the face of Al Pacino, who won his first Golden Globe award for his star turn in the film. The movie — along with news reports and the best-selling biography of the same name — seared the public memory with painful images: of the honest cop bleeding in a squad car rushing to the hospital, where, over months of rehabilitation, he received cards telling him to rot in hell. Instead, Mr. Serpico took his fluffy sheepdog, Alfie, and boarded a ship to Europe; the film’s closing credits describe him as “now living somewhere in Switzerland.”

Which was true at the time. After years traveling abroad, Mr. Serpico returned to the United States around 1980 and lived as a nomad, out of a camper. He finally settled about two hours north of New York City, where he lives a monastic life in a one-room cabin he built in the woods near the Hudson River. In 1997, he spoke out after the brutal beatings of Abner Louima in a Brooklyn station house, but mostly he stays far from his old nemesis.

Now, all these years later, Mr. Serpico is working on his own version of the harrowing adventures chronicled by Peter Maas’s biography, which sold more than three million copies (royalties from the book and the movie have helped him live comfortably without working). The memoir begins with the same awful scene as the film: Serpico shot in the face during a heroin bust on Driggs Avenue in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, Feb. 3, 1971. Working title: “Before I Go.”

“It’s the rest of the story,” he said recently over lunch in the self-service cafe of a health-food store here in Harlemville. “It’s more personal. I used to think, ‘How can I write my life story? I’m still living it.’ ” Though he is healthy, he added, “I’m getting close to the line, so I figure I better get busy.”

It is, ultimately, a story of healing. He wandered in Europe and across North America, he said, because “I wanted to find my life.”

“I had gone through a near-death experience,” he explained, “and that gives you an insight into how fleeting life is, and what’s important.”

After he settled here, his journey turned inward. He eschewed what he sees as an ugly American addiction to consumerism and media brainwashing. He eats mostly vegetarian and organic food, cooking on the wood-burning stove that heats the cabin, where there is neither television nor the Internet. “This is my life now,” he said. “The woods, nature, solitude.”

Mr. Serpico relies on Chinese medicine, herbs and shiatsu. He practices meditation, the Japanese Zen flute and African drumming, and dance: ballroom, tango, swing. He takes long walks at sunrise and rescues wounded animals. He raises chickens and guinea hens. He has a girlfriend: she is French, a schoolteacher, age 50.

None of which has exorcised the demons of being Serpico.

“I still have nightmares,” he said. “I open a door a little bit and it just explodes in my face. Or I’m in a jam and I call the police, and guess who shows up? My old cop buddies who hated me.”

GROWING up the son of Italian immigrants in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, young Frank revered the local cops. He loved detective stories on the radio and dreamed of wearing the uniform. He had also cultivated a bit of worldliness from visiting Italy as a child and traveling abroad with the Army after enlisting at age 18. He joined the New York Police Department in 1959 and passionately pursued big game.

His partners and bosses resented his hippie looks and his zealousness to make arrests even while off-duty or on the turf of other officers. His intrigues with the ballet and opera rubbed against the conservative culture of the station house. He lived a bohemian life, with a small garden apartment on Perry Street in the West Village, where he was known as Paco and hid his police badge.

The street-savvy but idealistic Officer Serpico was appalled at the cliquishness and the payoffs — free meals as well as big, blatant bribes — from criminals, gamblers, numbers men and ordinary merchants whom he saw as a beat cop in Brooklyn’s 81st Precinct and later while working vice and racketeering. He refused to accept such grease, and became despised for it both inside and outside the department.

In 1967, Mr. Serpico began telling what he knew to high-ranking officials at police headquarters and City Hall. He presented names, places, dates and other information, but no action was taken. Frustrated, he and a friend on the force, David Durk, a graduate of Amherst College who had become an officer in 1963 after quitting law school, contacted a reporter for The New York Times.

The front-page story by David Burnham on April 25, 1970, pressured Mayor John V. Lindsay to form the Knapp Commission, before which Mr. Serpico testified that “the atmosphere does not yet exist in which an honest police officer can act without fear of ridicule or reprisal from fellow officers.”

The commission carried out the most extensive investigation of police wrongdoing in the city’s history and exposed a pattern of entrenched corruption and cover-up that helped usher in reform.

“It was terrifying in those days — they were really sticking their necks out,” recalled Mr. Burnham, who now works at a data-gathering and research firm. “We really shamed the city, and things really changed.”

Mr. Serpico does not exactly agree. He believes the department still does not acknowledge its internal problems because the leadership’s top priority is to avoid scandal.

“I hear from police officers all the time; they contact me,” he said. “An honest cop still can’t find a place to go and complain without fear of recrimination. The blue wall will always be there because the system supports it.”

Paul J. Browne, the chief police spokesman, dismissed Mr. Serpico’s indictment by saying, “It’s a very different department now.”

“Things have changed vastly,” Mr. Browne said, “and he is literally old enough to be the grandfather of some police officers now on duty.”

Mr. Serpico avoids the city now, but there is a part of him that has never left its station houses. Several years ago, he showed up at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in Manhattan to confront Patrick V. Murphy, the police commissioner at the time of the shooting, who was in the audience. “I’ve been carrying a bullet around in my head for 35 years and I hold you responsible,” Mr. Serpico recalled telling Mr. Murphy, who did not respond.

Michael Bosak, a 27-year veteran of the Police Department who has served as its informal historian since retiring in 1995, said that for a time he kept in touch with Mr. Serpico by e-mail, and that his messages tended to be long diatribes on various topics, seemingly unaffected by the passage of decades. “The N.Y.P.D. is a thousand times more honest than it was 40 years ago,” Mr. Bosak said. “I think he’s still in a lot of pain. Going through what he went through, it can drive you off your rocker.”

Indeed, Mr. Serpico still brims with bitterness that he was made third-grade detective, rather than the top tier of first-grade; that the department’s museum in Lower Manhattan declined his offer of his uniform and his service revolver; that its leadership never asks him to speak about corruption or reform. The Medal of Honor he was awarded — the department’s highest commendation — remains tossed “in some drawer.”

“They never even had a ceremony for me,” he said of the honorary promotion. “They handed it to me over the counter with the Medal of Honor, like a pack of cigarettes.

“The department never recognized me for standing up for what’s right,” he added, “because I violated the omertà; I spoke out.”

DURING his years in Europe, Mr. Serpico bought a farm in the Netherlands and married a Dutch woman with two young children. But after the woman died of cancer, her parents took custody of the children and Mr. Serpico sold the farm and moved back to the United States. He wandered the continent from Mexico to Canada in his camper.

In 1980, a lover had a son and brought a paternity suit. He claimed to have been “deceived and entrapped” by the woman, and then waged a lengthy and unsuccessful court fight to avoid child-support payments. He did not raise the son, Alex Serpico, and has had limited contact with him in recent years.

Mr. Serpico refused to reveal the exact location of his current home. Instead, he was interviewed in various coffee shops and restaurants where he is a regular in a few small villages north of Hudson, N.Y., just off the Taconic State Parkway. He is known to the locals as Paco, his off-duty nickname in the Village in the late 1960s.

At lunches in the Harlemville health-food store, Mr. Serpico slipped a bottle of red wine out of his bag and poured it into paper cups. Afterward, cigars.

True to his cinematic self, he always showed up in a different outfit and hat: one day as the sheepherder, the next day the prospector, then the monk. He wears an earring in each ear and a magnifying glass around his neck for fine print. He would spout esoterica and draw from his knowledge of Italian, Spanish, German, Dutch, Arabic and Russian. In a coffee shop, he might quote from Dante’s “Inferno,” or pull out his harmonica and play “Danny Boy.”

Mr. Serpico said he had played, in local productions, the Arab in Saroyan’s “The Time of Your Life,” Gonzalo in “The Tempest,” a detective in “Ten Little Indians” and Johann Most in Howard Zinn’s “Emma.”

“My acting career began on the streets of New York,” he said. “When I was a cop, I played many impressive roles, from derelict to a doctor, and my life often depended on my performance.”

Back then, as he became suspect among fellow officers, Mr. Serpico began spreading the word that he was writing a book, but only as a bluff. “I said, ‘I’m going to name names, and if anything happens to me, I got it all written down right there,’ ” he recalled. “But I never really wrote anything.”

After several frustrating attempts at collaboration with co-writers — “They just don’t get it,” he said — Mr. Serpico enrolled in a weekly workshop through an arts group in Troy, N.Y., where his classmates also do not always understand his stories. “How could they?” he said. “We have women in the class writing about their kids — they don’t know what a bag man is.”

Frank Serpico writes out the story of his life daily in longhand, at the cabin, then types the pages on a computer at the public library, using the two-finger method he honed filing arrest reports on station house typewriters, gathering the pages in a manila folder. The memoir begins on the night of the Williamsburg drug bust, his bleeding body cradled by an elderly tenant who called for assistance when his fellow officers did not, the narrator floating above and recounting the life path that led him there.

It is not unlike the opening scene of the film. He said he had never seen the full movie, but agreed to watch it with me — on my laptop, propped on a windowsill at the public library in Kinderhook, N.Y. As Pacino, near death, was rushed to Greenpoint Hospital, the real Mr. Serpico stared out the window, unable to watch — too painful, he said.

He provided a running commentary: His own wardrobe was much better than in the film, as were his police disguises. The scene in which the police commissioner hands him a gold detective shield in the hospital bed was conjured; in reality, he picked it up from a clerk at police headquarters.

Afterward, Mr. Serpico seemed spent. He looked out at the snow and trees graying in the descending darkness.

“They took the job I loved most,” he said. “I just wanted to be a cop, and they took it away from me.”

January 21, 2010 | 12:13 pm
Los Angeles Times
By David Keeps

Gerald McCabe, the industrial designer who created furniture for a host of California manufacturers and collaborated on pieces with Case Study house architect Pierre Koenig, died of a heart attack Jan. 17 in Springfield, Ore. He was 82.

Known to generations of musicians as the founder of McCabe’s Guitar Shop in Santa Monica, McCabe is equally revered by midcentury design collectors for his elegant fusion of modern lines, precision joinery and a craftsman’s eye for the beauty of wood, glass and steel.

The Leland Y. Lee photograph above, taken for the March 1965 issue of the Los Angeles Times’ Home magazine, shows McCabe’s furniture in “an airy little structure” in Highland Park.

Gerard O’Brien, owner of Reform Gallery, a Los Angeles specialist in California midcentury design, said McCabe was an inveterate tinkerer. “He indulged himself in whatever materials interested him,” O’Brien said. The gallery owner cites a table made from floating glass plates joined by curved bolts, right, as another example of McCabe’s engineering and technical skills and his influence on contemporary designers.

“I have a mechanical ability and I like to make three-dimensional objects,” McCabe said in the 1977 book “Craftsmen Lifestyle: The Gentle Revolution.” “I guess I’d be a sculptor if I weren’t so imbued with the Puritan ethic.”

McCabe created post-World War II modern furniture collections for Los Angeles firms including Brown Saltman and Glenn of California, and in the 1960s and ’70s he designed and produced his own lines under the names Erin Furniture and Orange Crate Modern. Before moving to Oregon, the longtime Venice resident also liked to repair guitars, operate a tug, race cars and live on a boat.

“I think my furniture has a lasting quality,” he said in that 1977 book. “When you come into a room, it doesn’t hit you over the head, it doesn’t fall into a category, it’s an entity by itself and it is still appealing years later.”

Indeed, in 2005, McCabe’s 1990s re-creation of the 1959 cabinet he produced for a Case Study house sold at Sotheby’s for $16,800. McCabe pieces produced in larger quantities are considerably less. At Reform, two versions of the glass cube table design are listed at $1,200 and $1,600.

Thanks to Gerry Beckley

Lesley Vance (2010)

January 23, 2010 — March 06, 2010

David Kordansky

Justen Ladda, a sculptor, revels in the chill of the unheated Lower East Side loft where he has lived for three decades. He is one of a small group of Americans who live nearly without heat by choice. Why they stick it out, and how they cope, are object lessons in creative adaptation fueled by thrift, environmentalism and a commitment to unique real estate.

By PENELOPE GREEN
NY Times Published: January 20, 2010

SERIOUS cold, Justen Ladda said, is when the sponge in the kitchen sink feels like wood or the toothpaste freezes or the refrigerator turns itself off, as it did one particularly frigid day last winter. Not that Mr. Ladda, a 56-year-old sculptor who has lived heat-free in his Lower East Side loft for three decades, is bothered by such extremes. “Winter comes and goes,” he’ll tell you blithely, adjusting his black wool scarf and watch cap. (Along with fingerless gloves, long underwear and felt slippers, they are part of Mr. Ladda’s at-home uniform when the mercury dips.)

Winifred Gallagher finds the 15-degree interior temperature of her western New York schoolhouse clarifying. More Photos »
Mr. Ladda, whose work is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, decided long ago to live without central heating. Proper temperature control, you see, would require insulating his wooden ceiling, and ruining its fine acoustics. “I know this sounds really lame, but I listen to a lot of music and it just sounds better,” he said. Also, the rent on his unimproved live-work loft is only $300, well below many people’s winter utility bills.

But beyond thrift and acoustics, what is perhaps most notable about Mr. Ladda’s chilly interior is that like, say, tepee-dwelling Mongolian reindeer herders, or perhaps some very rugged environmentalists, Mr. Ladda has come to thrive in the cold.

As Americans across the country wrestle with spouses and their thermostats over how low to go — as they join contests like Freeze Yer Buns, now in its third year, a challenge posed by Deanna Duke, a Seattle-based environmental blogger who calls herself the Crunchy Chicken, to lower the thermostat to around 55 degrees, or follow the lead of the Maine couple trying to live comfortably in a furnace-free house and blogging about it in their Cold House Journal — there are those who are living nearly without heat by choice, and doing just fine, thank you very much. Indeed, 55 degrees would qualify as sauna conditions for Mr. Ladda and others whose interiors hover around the 30- or 40-degree mark in deep winter.

Many belong to that hardy genus Artista domestica, a group unusually skilled at foraging in urban frontiers, and long-known for sacrificing “normal” creature comforts in favor of other boons like low overhead and capacious, atmospheric habitats. Why they stick it out, and how they cope, are object lessons in creative adaptation fueled by thrift, environmentalism and a commitment to unique real estate. (Denial and long underwear help, too.)

Take Jake Dibeler, a 21-year-old performance artist living in an unheated warehouse in Baltimore with five roommates and two cats. There are concrete walls, floor-to-ceiling windows and hangar-like ceilings, “which means that even if it gets warm outside,” Mr. Dibeler said, “it still takes about a month for our apartment to catch up.”

The rent is $2,200, split six ways, and it’s all worth it, he continued, because there’s a huge stage he and his friends can perform on, “a dream come true in my own home.” Space heaters are expensive and, anyway, a placebo at best, he said, but Mr. Dibeler and his friends have built a yurt in the center of the living room, “or part of a yurt, really, the frame part, which we cover with sheets and line with afghans, and then we drag the cats in. At times, we all get frustrated and pine for a real home with heat and lower ceilings. Then we remember how wonderful it is to be living with five other best friends and making art and how it will get warm eventually. We just have to suck it up and wear a bunch of layers, even if it means looking like an Olsen twin.”

Attitude, not clothing, is what thaws Daniel McCloskey and his roommates in Pittsburgh. Last year, Mr. McCloskey, 22, bought two poorly insulated turn-of-the century clapboard houses for $41,000 in the Lawrenceville neighborhood there, and turned them into a writer’s retreat he named the Cyberpunk Apocalypse Writer’s Co-op. It’s sort of like Yaddo or MacDowell — “like where?” he asked when this reporter made the comparison — but without all the amenities (maid service, picnic basket lunches or sufficient heat).

Mr. McCloskey offers monthlong residencies to emerging writers, which is to say a free room in the house at the back. There is a furnace, but his finances are low and mostly it stays off. (Mr. McCloskey, who is writing a novel, last worked as a parking attendant and a poster salesman.) A wood stove in the kitchen area can bring the temperature there up to about 50 degrees, Mr. McCloskey said, if he sees fit to fire it up. Wood is expensive, too; he relies on windfalls, like dead trees from a friend who was clearing land nearby. Electric pipe heaters keep the water supply from freezing, but not the visiting artists.

“We had an author named Terence Hawkins do a reading last month,” Mr. McCloskey recalled. “I tried to get the wood stove going, but he was just sitting there shivering. I think his opening lines were: ‘Hello, I am Terence Hawkins. I am the elderly man in a tweed jacket, and if I am shivering it is only because I am cold.’ ”

Mr. McCloskey warms himself up by spending time in coffee shops, he said — “an hour will do it” — and by maintaining an upbeat demeanor. Doesn’t his girlfriend, with whom he shares a drafty attic room, get grumpy?

“What makes her grumpy is using resources,” he said. “We’re all about staying positive.”

JOE AHEARN, 23, who lives with four roommates in a Queens warehouse (rent: $3,000), uses a space heater in his bedroom (there are five bedrooms and a basement), but the bathroom and the main living area “are pretty much a lost cause,” he said. Showering between November and March is a challenge. A music promoter whose company is called Sleep When Dead, he hosts shows in his house five out of seven nights, which raises the temperature a good 10 or 20 degrees, or so it seems. “Human beings are remarkably efficient space heaters,” Mr. Ahearn said, and he basks in the damp, warm fug that remains after a performance. Still, his most successful cold-abatement strategy has been romantic: last year he had a girlfriend, and spent most nights at her house.

Then there are those who seek out the cold for its clarifying effects. Winifred Gallagher, a behavioral science writer who lives in a warm town house on the Upper West Side, makes monthly winter pilgrimages to a century-old, “very primitive” former one-room schoolhouse in Long Eddy, N.Y. There is no water when the temperature is below freezing (she hauls it from a stream), but there is a wood-burning stove.

If it’s 20 degrees outside, as it was last week, it might be 15 indoors, so Ms. Gallagher will stoke the fire and go for a long walk; when she returns, the room can be 50 degrees, and 60 by bedtime, though it slides precipitously toward freezing as she sleeps. “The main reason why I do these winter trips,” she said, “is that when your house is 15 degrees, the only problem you have is getting warm. Focusing on survival is right up there with a Zen retreat when it comes to clearing the mind.”

And anyway, she pointed out, “we didn’t evolve to sit on a chair in a temperature-controlled environment staring at a screen all day.”

How cold is too cold? With the right equipment, humans can endure enormous temperature dips. Dr. Peter Hackett, director of the Institute for Altitude Medicine in Telluride, Colo., and a veteran expeditioner to Mount Everest and other frigid peaks, has recorded minus 50 degree temperatures outside his tent on a climb of Mount McKinley in Alaska. “It’s extremely unpleasant,” he said, but certainly survivable, albeit with the right gear: long underwear, layers of fleece, and down or synthetic puff jackets.

“Our best responses are behavioral — building a fire, putting on more clothes. But for those who choose not to heat their homes or who live in extremely cold environments, there are some physiological changes that occur,” he said, ticking them off. “Thyroid function goes up, creating more body heat, and metabolism changes, too, causing you to burn more fuel, fat especially, which generates a bit more heat.”

There are increased “vasodilations in the extremities,” he added, recorded in people who work outside. “But these adaptations are not that impressive. They are fairly limited, compared to the physiological changes we go through in adapting to altitude or the heat. Ten days of heat training for an athlete can be very effective, whereas a week of cold training doesn’t do much of anything.”

Tell that to Janet Smith, an engineer and landscape designer living in nearby Ridgway, Colo. Ms. Smith, 53, inhabits a one-room rubble-stone house built in 1894, one of three buildings she bought in 2001 for $149,000. Poetically lovely, they are also impossible to fill with heat, presenting Ms. Smith with a living choice she has embraced with gusto, throwing open windows and doors year-round, and using her own body as a solar panel when the sun shines.

“The best thing about living in a non-isothermal house” — isothermal means “constant in temperature” — “is that you’re able to walk from indoors to out of doors all the time,” she said. “What limits us is only our fear of the cold.”

At 7,000 feet, Ridgway offers some seriously scary weather, “five months of full-on winter where there is snow on the ground,” she said, with temperatures well below zero. Ms. Smith’s house is typically 10 degrees higher; she can warm herself beside her wood-burning stove, but the heat it generates goes right out the wood-slat roof.

While Ms. Smith may seem preternaturally rugged, she said anyone could live in the extremes she inhabits; it’s just a matter of the right clothing (she would like to design a line of indoor rough wear). “I don’t think people know how to dress for the cold, and that’s the first issue. What’s right for ski wear is not right for living indoors.”

She likes her LaCrosse boots and fleece pants, but the sleeves of her down jacket get in her way when she’s washing dishes, and make an annoying swishing noise, she said. (Like some other heat-eschewing folks, Ms. Smith keeps her pipes from freezing by letting the faucets drip, 15 to 30 drips a minute; any more than that causes an ice buildup and the dishes freeze in the sink. She has also rigged her toilet to run constantly.)

“My stone buildings are so beautiful, I love living in them,” she said. “There’s a whole aesthetic of living close to natural materials.”

Friends do worry, she admitted, and some romantic partners haven’t been hardy enough. Dinner parties are out, too, “but I’ve never been much of an entertainer,” she said.

Still, she added, “I’m the one, when the electricity goes out, who can keep going. We shouldn’t have to disrupt our lives because our houses are cold. I think it scares people, too. People don’t want to relate to me living in the cold.”

Mr. Ladda on the Lower East Side doesn’t entertain, either, but he occasionally has overnight guests.

“I had Japanese friends here once,” he said. “And when they left, they bowed and said solemnly, ‘We are very sorry you have to live this way.’ ”

By JENNIFER STEINHAUER
NY Times Published: January 19, 2010

OF the many horrors that lurk in the e-mail in-box of a working parent — dental reminders, Facebook invitations involving some weird farm, “thoughts” from the boss — nothing quite rivals the snack request.

Not a month goes by without someone somewhere asking me to serve up some snack for an event that one of my children will attend and that, generally speaking, will not last more than 90 minutes.

During a single week in December, I was pinged with requests to bring a little food for one play rehearsal, three religious-school events, a school administrative meeting, two soccer games and two multicultural festivals. (O.K., so multicultural day is one of my favorite events of the school year. Step away from the Sichuan dumplings, kids, Hannah’s mom is moving in! Still.)

The obligations to bring a little something to eat extend to the adult world, too — I’ve baked for PTA meetings and child-rearing seminars that I didn’t even attend. But when it comes to American boys and girls, snacks seem both mandatory and constant. Apparently, we have collectively decided as a culture that it is impossible for children to take part in any activity without simultaneously shoving something into their pie holes.

“Children used to come home, change into play clothes and go outside and play with other children,” said Joanne Ikeda, a nutritionist emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. “There were not snack machines, and the gas stations only sold gas. Now there are just so many more opportunities to snack and so many activities after school to have snacks.”

Between 1977 and 2002, the percent of the American population eating three or more snacks a day increased to 42 percent from 11 percent, according to a large study of American nutritional habits conducted by the Agriculture Department with the Department of Health and Human Services.

Further, researchers found, the percent of children surveyed who said they had eaten three meals on the previous day went down, while those who had had a snack went up more than 40 percent.

“None of this trend has reversed,” said Rhonda Sebastian, a nutritionist with the Agricultural Research Service, the unit of the Agriculture Department that participated in the survey. (The data for 2008 exists but the snacking component has not yet been analyzed.) “Food is everywhere now. It is part of everything.” I began to wonder how other parents see all this extracurricular eating, so I asked around a bit. Apparently, I am not the only one being driven crazy.

“It has all just gotten out of hand,” said Sean O’Neill, an illustrator and father of two in Chicago. Mr. O’Neill wonders why snacks must be served at every sporting event, even those taking place at 10 a.m. or an hour before lunch.

“The kids are playing baseball, they are covered in Chicago Park District dirt and then they eat a handful of fruit bites,” he said. “It’s pretty disgusting.”

Some of the moms I see around the school corridors and the soccer field told me they felt backed into a corner by the omnipresence of snacks.

Once a week, Vivian Zachary’s 6-year-old son, Joel, goes dashing for the vending machine at the gym after his gymnastics class ends at 5 p.m. “Last week it was a Fruit Roll-Up and a can of 7Up,” Ms. Zachary wrote in an e-mail message. “I’m not sure why I let this go on, and I often think that if I were a better parent, or at least more able to tolerate incessant complaining, I would let him buy the snacks but not actually consume them until after dinner. But I have already established the pattern (the ‘rule’ in Joel’s mind), so there’s no going back now.”

The spread of snacking has been abetted by parental guilt, the much-lamented death of the family dinner, over-scheduled children. Kara Nielsen, a “trendologist” at the Center for Culinary Development, a brand development company in San Francisco, cites the proliferation of activities, from soccer to chess club to tutoring sessions, that now fill children’s afternoons.

“You’ve got this desire for parents to control their kid’s diet,” Ms. Nielsen added, “and add this with this increase in activities, so it has become up to the parents to provide the snacks. And the marketers have picked up on this.”

Indeed, this nation consumed $68.1 billion in packaged snack foods in 2008, up from $60 billion in 2004, according to Packaged Facts, a consumer research group. One of the newest concepts — and among the best sellers, Ms. Nielsen said — are 100-calorie packs of cookies and other junk foods. They are targeted at parents, who are always looking for something to toss into the backpack for after-school time.

Fast-food restaurants are in on the act, and over the last two years have begun to introduce their own mini-meals, like the McDonald’s Snack Wrap. According to the Agriculture Department, American children get 40 percent of their calories from food of poor nutritional quality.

What is especially baffling where I live, in Los Angeles, is how often the kind of parental paranoia that obsesses about school ratings, vaccines and myriad imagined plagues is matched by utter disregard for the nutritional downsides of mowing down Fruit by the Foot every afternoon at 4. Rarely do I see a parent show up on the soccer field with a homemade snack, or even a bag of carrots. Oreos are the post-game snack of choice, even in sports leagues dominated by upper-income parents.

“There is definitely a big disconnect,” said Dr. Howard Taras, a pediatrics professor at the University of California, San Diego, who specializes in community and school health policies. “I think there is this natural tendency among parents to not want their child to go hungry. It is more difficult for them to think about the long-term outlook for the child.”

Ellyn Satter, a dietitian and family therapist, thinks there is little point in worrying too much about what children are eating — unless it is “pure sugar,” like juice, she said — or how much, because children self-regulate portions. The key, she said, is to end grazing. “The parents’ job is to do the what, when and where of feeding,” she said, “and it is up to the children to do the how much and whether of eating. In order to have successful family meals, you have to structure the snacks.”

Carolynne Dyner sees the purpose of snacks for her children, Quinn, who is 7, and Sadie, 5, through a fairly simple prism. “To stave off tantrums, of course,” she said. From their days caring for infants, she said, parents are conditioned to be prepared for a sudden attack of hunger. And so she keeps her car and purse amply packed with pretzels, baggies of Cinnamon Life cereal, Goldfish crackers and Clif bars.

For her children, little bites between meals have in some ways supplanted the meals themselves. “They usually need a snack midmorning and midafternoon,” explained Ms. Dyner, who lives in Beverly Hills, Calif. “There may be a third snack, and this is usually due to the fact that our kids didn’t care much for what we provided for dinner, so now it is 7:30 and they are hungry. At this point we may give them a yogurt.”

Parents who give in too many times may find that snacks are the culinary equivalent of letting your 2-year-old sleep in your bed. “People get themselves into these habits, which they later regret tremendously,” said Ms. Ikeda, the nutritionist. “We do, as parents, make mistakes and then we either have to live with them or suffer the consequences in fixing them. It gets exhausting saying ‘no’ all the time.”

On the other hand, saying ‘yes’ can be tiring, too. I am happy to serve on any refreshment committee there is. I like to bake, and am far more efficient at that than at any other classroom obligation. Just ask the parent liaison for my younger child’s classroom, whose response to my failure to properly manage a canned goods drive was only slightly less frosty than that of a rogue nation asked to cease nuclear development.

But a person can’t just bake whole-wheat banana bread and call it a day. Here was the memo I received concerning my recent snack obligation for a play practice. “Please note, we have the following allergies in mini players: Peanuts, cashews, nuts, wheat, dairy, strawberries, milk, egg whites.”

Food allergies are a real problem. But did no one ponder the idea that perhaps the solution is for children to bring their own snacks?

Or to eat no snacks at all?

De Gustibus is an occasional forum for writers to employ opinion, argument or provocation in reflections on food or drink.