Masked Booby above, here for audio slideshow

By THOMAS LIN
NY Times Published: December 14, 2009

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Times Published: December 13, 2009

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Robert von Sternberg, “Columbia Ice Field” (2009)

Forty years ago Robert von Sternberg glimpsed the enormous diversity of artistic photography in the greater Los Angeles area and while acting as a guest curator for the Downey Museum of Art in 1969 set out to create an exhibition, entitled “Continuum”, that would illustrate that specific diversity within a continuum. This exhibition at the Sylvia White Gallery follows the trajectory of some of the original participants but also includes newer members that have also dedicated their lives to careers in art often as university educators and prominent artists using photographic materials to share their vision.

Lewis Baltz, Robbert Flick, Susan Rankaitis, Robert von Sternberg, Robert Heinecken, Jo Ann Callis, Anthony Friedkin, Jerry McMillan, Eileen Cowin, Jane O’Neal, Todd Walker

Opening Reception January 9, 3-5pm,

January 6- February 13 , 2010

Sylvia White Gallery
1783 East Main Street
Ventura, California 93001
Gallery Hours: Wednesday - Saturday Noon-5PM
805.643.8300

By David Foster Wallace
December 14, 2009
The New Yorker

Once when I was a little boy I received as a gift a toy cement mixer. It was made of wood except for its wheels—axles—which, as I remember, were thin metal rods. I’m ninety per cent sure it was a Christmas gift. I liked it the same way a boy that age likes toy dump trucks, ambulances, tractor-trailers, and whatnot. There are little boys who like trains and little boys who like vehicles—I liked the latter.

It was (“it” meaning the cement mixer) the same overlarge miniature as many other toy vehicles—about the size of a breadbox. It weighed three or four pounds. It was a simple toy—no batteries. It had a colored rope, with a yellow handle, and you held the handle and walked pulling the cement mixer behind you—rather like a wagon, although it was nowhere near the size of a wagon. For Christmas, I’m positive it was. It was when I was the age where you can, as they say, “hear voices” without worrying that something is wrong with you. I “heard voices” all the time as a small child. I was either five or six, I believe. (I’m not very good with numbers.)

I liked the cement mixer and played with it as much as or more than I played with the other toy vehicles I owned. At some point, several weeks or months after Christmas, however, my biological parents led me to believe that it was a magic and/or highly unusual cement mixer. Probably my mother told me this in a moment of adult boredom or whimsy, and then my father came home from work and joined in, also in a whimsical way. The magic—which my mother likely reported to me from her vantage on our living room’s sofa, while watching me pull the cement mixer around the room by its rope, idly asking me if I was aware that it had magical properties, no doubt making sport of me in the bored half-cruel way that adults sometimes do with small children, playfully telling them things that they pass off to themselves as “tall tales” or “childlike inventions,” unaware of the impact those tales may have (since magic is a serious reality for small children), though, conversely, if my parents believed that the cement mixer’s magic was real, I do not understand why they waited weeks or months before telling me of it. They were a delightful but often impenetrable puzzle to me; I no more knew their minds and motives than a pencil knows what it is being used for. Now I have lost the thread. The “magic” was that, unbeknown to me, as I happily pulled the cement mixer behind me, the mixer’s main cylinder or drum—the thing that, in a real cement mixer, mixes the cement; I do not know the actual word for it—rotated, went around and around on its horizontal axis, just as the drum on a real cement mixer does. It did this, my mother said, only when the mixer was being pulled by me and only, she stressed, when I wasn’t looking. She insisted on this part, and my father later backed her up: the magic was not just that the drum of a solid wood object without batteries rotated but that it did so only when unobserved, stopping whenever observed. If, while pulling, I turned to look, my parents sombrely maintained, the drum magically ceased its rotation. How was this? I never, even for a moment, doubted what they’d told me. This is why it is that adults and even parents can, unwittingly, be cruel: they cannot imagine doubt’s complete absence. They have forgotten.

The point was that months were henceforward spent by me trying to devise ways to catch the drum rotating. Evidence bore out what they had told me: turning my head obviously and unsubtly around always stopped the rotation of the drum. I also tried sudden whirls. I tried having someone else pull the cement mixer. I tried incremental turns of the head while pulling (“incremental” meaning turning my head at roughly the rate of a clock’s minute hand). I tried peering through a keyhole as someone else pulled the cement mixer. Even turning my head at the rate of the hour hand. I never doubted—it didn’t occur to me. The magic was that the mixer seemed always to know. I tried mirrors—first pulling the cement mixer straight toward a mirror, then through rooms that had mirrors at the periphery of my vision, then past mirrors hidden such that there was little chance that the cement mixer could even “know” that there was a mirror in the room. My strategies became very involved. I was in kindergarten and home half the day. The seriousness with which I tried must have caused my parents no little anguish of conscience. My father had not yet even received tenure; we were barely middle class, and lived in a rented house whose carpets were old and thin—the mixer made a noise as I pulled it. I begged my mother to take photographs as I pulled the mixer, staring with fraudulent intensity straight ahead. I placed a piece of masking tape on the drum and reasoned that if the tape appeared in one photo and not in the other this would provide proof of the drum’s rotation. (Video cameras had not yet been invented.)

During Talk Time, before bed, my father sometimes told me stories of his own childhood adventures. He, an intellectual, had been, according to his stories, the sort of child who set traps for the Tooth Fairy (pyramids of tin cans at the door and windows of his room, string tied from his finger to the tooth below his pillow so that he would wake when the Fairy tried to take the tooth) and other “mythical” figures of childhood, such as Santa Claus. (Talk Time meant fifteen minutes of direct conversation—not stories or songs—with a parent as I lay tucked into bed. Four nights per week Talk Time was with my mother and three nights with my father. They were very organized about it.) I was, at this age, unfamiliar with Matthew 4:7, and my father, a devout atheist, was in no way alluding to Matthew 4:7 or using the tales of his fruitless childhood traps as parables or advice against my trying to “test” or “defeat” the magic of the cement mixer. In retrospect, I believe that my father was charmed by my attempts to “trap” the mixer’s drum rotating because he saw them as evidence that I was a chip off the block of ad-hoc intellectual mania for empirical verification. In fact, nothing could have been farther from the truth. As an adult, I realize that the reason I spent so much time trying to “catch” the drum rotating was that I wanted to verify that I could not. If I had ever been successful in outsmarting the magic, I would have been crushed. I know this now. My father’s tales of snares for the Easter Bunny or strings for the Tooth Fairy often made me feel sad, and when I cried over them sometimes my parents guiltily believed that I was crying over my frustration at not being able to catch sight of the rotating drum. I’m positive that this caused them anguish. In fact, I was crying with sadness, imagining how devastated my father would have felt as a child had he been successful in trapping the Tooth Fairy. I was not, at the time, aware that this was why the Talk Time stories made me sad. What I remember feeling was an incredible temptation to ask my father a question as he delightedly described these traps, and at the same time a huge and consuming but amorphous and nameless fear that prevented my asking the question. The conflict between the temptation and my inability to ask the question (owing to a fear of ever seeing pain on my father’s pink, cheerful, placid face) caused me to weep with an intensity that must have caused my parents—who saw me as an eccentric and delicate child—no little guilt over their “cruel” invention of the cement mixer’s magic. Under various pretexts, they bought me an exceptional number of toys and games in the months following that Christmas, trying to distract me from what they saw as a traumatic obsession with the toy cement mixer and its “magic.”

The toy cement mixer is the origin of the religious feeling that has informed most of my adult life. The question, which I (sadly) never did ask, was what my father proposed to do with the Tooth Fairy if he were ever successful in catching it. Possibly, though, another cause for the sadness was that I realized, on some level, that my parents, when they watched me trying to devise schemes for observing the drum’s rotation, were wholly wrong about what they were seeing—that the world they saw and suffered over was wholly different from the childhood world in which I existed. I wept for them far more than any of the three of us knew at the time.

I, of course, never “caught” the drum of the cement mixer rotating. (The chassis and cab of the cement mixer were painted the intense orange of real public-works vehicles; the drum was painted in alternating stripes of the orange and a deep green, and I often envisioned the hypnotic swirl of the stripes as the drum rotated unobserved by me. I should have included this fact earlier, I realize.) I pulled the cement mixer around so much that my mother, after giving up on trying guiltily to distract me with other toys, banished me to the basement with the cement mixer so that its wheels would not wear further grooves in the living-room carpet. I never found a way to observe the drum’s rotation without stopping that rotation. It never once occurred to me that my parents might have been putting me on. Nor did it ever bother me that the striped drum itself was glued or nailed to the orange chassis of the cement mixer and could not be rotated (or even budged) by hand. Such is the power of the word “magic.” The same power accounts for why the “voices” I heard as a child never worried me or caused me to fear that something was wrong with me. And, in fact, the free rotation of an unpowered and securely fastened drum was not the “magic” that drove me. The magic was the way it knew to stop the instant I tried to see it. The magic was how it could not, not ever, be trapped or outsmarted. Though my obsession with the toy cement mixer had ended by the next Christmas, I have never forgotten it, or the feeling in my chest and midsection whenever yet another, even more involved attempt to trap the toy’s magic met with failure—a mix of crushing disappointment and ecstatic reverence. This was the year, at five or six, that I learned the meaning of “reverence,” which, as I understand it, is the natural attitude to take toward magical, unverifiable phenomena, the same way that “respect” and “obedience” describe the attitude one takes toward observable physical phenomena, such as gravity or money.

Among the qualities that made my parents see me as eccentric and mysterious was religion, for, without any prompting or even understanding, I was a religious child—meaning I was interested in religion and filled with feelings and concerns that we use the word “religious” to describe. (I’m not putting any of this well. I am not and never have been an intellectual. I am not articulate, and the subjects that I am trying to describe and discuss are beyond my abilities. I am trying, however, the best I can, and will go back over this as carefully as possible when I am finished, and will make changes and corrections whenever I can see a way to make what I’m discussing clearer or more interesting without fabricating anything.) My parents were intellectuals and devout atheists, but they were tolerant and largehearted, and when I began to ask “religious” questions and to express interest in “religious” themes they freely allowed me to seek out religiously oriented people with whom I could discuss these themes, and even to attend church services and Mass with the families of other children from school and our neighborhood who were religious. If you consider the usual meaning of “atheism,” which, as I understand it, is a kind of anti-religious religion, which worships reason, skepticism, intellect, empirical proof, human autonomy, and self-determination, my parents’ open tolerance of my religious interests and my regular attendance of services with the family next door (by this time my father had tenure, and we had our own home in a middle-class neighborhood with a highly rated school system) was exceptional—the sort of nonjudgmental, respectful attitude that religion itself (as I see it) tries to promulgate in its followers.

None of this occurred to me at the time; nor did the connection between my feelings for the “magic” toy cement mixer and, later, my interest in and reverence for the “magic” of religion become apparent to me until years later, when I was in the second year of seminary, during my first adult crisis of faith. The fact that the most powerful and significant connections in our lives are (at the time) invisible to us seems to me a compelling argument for religious reverence rather than skeptical empiricism as a response to life’s meaning. It is difficult to stay on what feels like the “track” of this discussion in an orderly, logical way. Some of the adults my parents allowed me to approach with religious questions and issues included teachers, a religion professor whom my father knew and respected from an interdepartmental university committee they had served on together, and the father and mother of the family next door, who were both deacons (a type of élite lay minister) in the church two blocks from our home. I will forgo a description of the issues, questions, and themes that my parents allowed me to discuss with these religious adults; they were entirely unexceptional and universal and average, the sorts of questions that everyone eventually confronts in his own time and his own individual way.

My surfeit of religious interest also had to do with the frequency and tenor of the “voices” I regularly heard as a child (meaning up until roughly age thirteen, as I recall it). The major reason that I was never frightened about the voices or worried about what “hearing voices” indicated about my possible mental health involved the fact that the childhood “voices” (there were two of them, each distinct in timbre and personality) never spoke of anything that wasn’t good, happy, and reassuring. I will mention these voices only in passing, because they are both not directly vital to this and also very hard to describe or convey adequately to anyone else. I should emphasize that, although “make-believe” and “invisible friends” are customary parts of childhood, these voices were—or appeared to me as—entirely real and autonomous phenomena, unlike the voices of any “real” adults in my experience, and with manners of speech and accent that nothing in my childhood experience had exposed me to or prepared me in any way to “make up” or combine from outside sources. (I realized just now that another reason that I do not propose to discuss these childhood “voices” at length is that I tend to fall into attempts to argue that the voices were “real,” when in fact it is a matter of indifference to me whether they were truly “real” or not or whether any other person can be forced to admit that they were not “hallucinations” or “fantasies.” Indeed, one of the voices’ favorite topics consisted in their assuring me that it was of no importance whether I believed they were “real” or simply parts of myself, since—as one of the voices in particular liked to stress—there was nothing in the whole world as “real” as I was. I should concede that in some ways I regarded—or “counted on”—the voices as another set of parents (meaning, I think, that I loved them and trusted them and yet respected or “revered” them: in short, I was not their equal), and yet also as fellow-children: meaning that I had no doubt that they and I lived in the very same world and that they “understood” me in a way that biological adults were incapable of.) (Probably one reason that I fall automatically into the urge to “argue for” the voices’ “reality” is that my “real” parents, though they were wholly tolerant of my believing in the voices, obviously viewed them as the same sort of “invisible friend” fantasies I mentioned above.)

At any rate, the best analogy for the experience of hearing these childhood “voices” of mine is that it was like going around with your own private masseur, who spent all his time giving you back—and shoulder—rubs (which my biological mother also used to do whenever I was sick in bed, using rubbing alcohol and baby powder and also changing the pillowcases, so that they were clean and cool; the experience of the voices was analogous to the feeling of turning a pillow over to the cool side). Sometimes the experience of the voices was ecstatic, sometimes so much so that it was almost too intense for me—as when you first bite into an apple or a confection that tastes so delicious and causes such a flood of oral juices that there is a moment of intense pain in your mouth and glands—particularly in the late afternoons of spring and summer, when the sunlight on sunny days achieved moments of immanence and became the color of beaten gold and was itself (the light, as if it were taste) so delicious that it was almost too much to stand, and I would lie on the pile of large pillows in our living room and roll back and forth in an agony of delight and tell my mother, who always read on the couch, that I felt so good and full and ecstatic that I could hardly bear it, and I remember her pursing her lips, trying not to laugh, and saying in the driest possible voice that she found it hard to feel too much sympathy or concern for this problem and was confident that I could survive this level of ecstasy, and that I probably didn’t need to be rushed to the emergency room, and at such moments my love and affection for my mother’s dry humor and love became, stacked atop the original ecstasy, so intense that I almost had to stifle a scream of pleasure as I rolled ecstatically between the pillows and the books on the floor. I do not have any real idea what my mother—an exceptional, truly lovable woman—made of having a child who sometimes suffered actual fits of ecstasy; and I do not know whether she herself had them. Nevertheless, the experience of the real but unobservable and unexplainable “voices” and the ecstatic feelings they often aroused doubtless contributed to my reverence for magic and my faith that magic not only permeated the everyday world but did so in a way that was thoroughly benign and altruistic and wished me well. I was never the sort of child who believed in “monsters under the bed” or vampires, or who needed a night-light in his bedroom; on the contrary, my father (who clearly “enjoyed” me and my eccentricities) once laughingly told my mother that he thought I might suffer from a type of benign psychosis called “antiparanoia,” in which I seemed to believe that I was the object of an intricate universal conspiracy to make me so happy I could hardly stand it.

The specific instance traceable as the origin of my religious impulse after my interest in the cement mixer passed (to my parents’ great relief) involved a nineteen-fifties war movie that my father and I watched together on television one Sunday afternoon with the curtains drawn to prevent the sunlight from making it hard to see the screen of our black-and-white television. Watching television together was one of my father’s and my favorite and most frequent activities (my mother disliked television), and usually took place on the couch, with my father, who read during the commercials, sitting at one end and me lying down, with my head on a pillow on my father’s knees. (One of my strongest sensory memories of childhood is the feel of my father’s knees against my head and the joking way he sometimes rested his book on my head when the commercial interruption occurred.) The movie in question’s subject was the First World War and it starred an actor who was much lauded for his roles in war movies. At this point my memory diverges sharply from my father’s, as evidenced by a disturbing conversation we had during my second year at seminary. My father apparently remembers that the film’s hero, a beloved lieutenant, dies when he throws himself on an enemy grenade that has been lobbed into his platoon’s trench (“platoon” meaning a small military grouping of infantrymen with close ties from being constant comrades in arms). According to my father, a platoon is usually commanded by a lieutenant. Whereas I remember clearly that the hero, played by an actor who was noted for his portrayal of conflict and trauma, suffers private anguish over the moral question of killing in combat and the whole religious conundrum of a “just war” and “justified killing,” and finally undergoes a total psychological breakdown when his own comrade successfully lobs a grenade into a crowded enemy trench and leaps screaming (the hero does, fairly early in the film) into the enemy’s trench and falls on the grenade and dies saving the enemy platoon, and that much of the rest of the film (albeit constantly interrupted by commercials when I saw it) depicts the hero’s platoon struggling to interpret the action of their formerly beloved lieutenant, with many of them bitterly denouncing him as a traitor, many others holding that battle fatigue and a traumatic letter from “Stateside” received earlier in the film exculpated his act as a kind of temporary insanity, and only one shy, idealistic recruit (played by an actor I have never seen in another movie of that era) secretly believing that the lieutenant’s act of dying for the enemy was actually heroic and deserved to be recorded and dramatized for posterity (the shy, anonymous recruit is the narrator, in “voice-overs” at the film’s beginning and end), and I never forgot the movie (whose title both my father and I missed because we didn’t turn on the television until after the movie had begun, which is not the same as “forgetting” the title, which my father jokingly claims is what we both did) or the impact of the lieutenant’s act, which I, too (like the shy, idealistic narrator), regarded as not only “heroic” but also beautiful in a way that was almost too intense to bear, especially as I lay across my father’s knees. ♦

Piet Hein Eek new work for 2010

Tevyn East, who was in the car when it hit the coyote, bends down to take a look at the fur poking through the fender

What Mr. East spotted as he bent down to inspect the damage to his car - the body of the coyote poking out through the radiator

The animal’s head can be seen as rescuers took apart the front fender to save it after it was struck by the car at 75mph

The toughest coyote ever rests in a cage after its ordeal - which it survived with just some scrapes to its paw

Meet the wiliest of all coyotes: Hit by a car at 75mph, embedded in the fender, road for 600 miles - and SURVIVED!
When a brother and sister struck a coyote at 75mph they assumed they had killed the animal and drove on.
They didn’t realize this was the toughest creature ever to survive a hit-and-run.
Eight hours, two fuel stops, and 600 miles later they found the wild animal embedded in their front fender - and very much alive.
Daniel and Tevyn East were driving at night along Interstate 80 near the Nevada-Utah border when they noticed a pack of coyotes near the roadside on October 12.
When one of the animals ran in front of the car, the impact sounded fatal so the siblings thought there no point in stopping.
‘Right off the bat, we knew it was bad,’ Daniel explained. ‘We thought the story was over.’
After the incident around 1am, they continued their 600 mile drive to North San Juan - even stopping for fuel at least twice.
But it was only when they finally reached their destination at 9am did they take time to examine what damage they may have sustained.
At first it looked as though it was going to be quite gruesome.
‘[Daniel] saw fur and the body inside the grill,’ Tevyn East said. ‘I was trying to keep some distance. Our assumption was it was part of the coyote - it didn’t register it was the whole animal.’
Daniel East got a broom to try and pry the remains out of the bumper and got the shock of his life.
‘It flinched,’ Tevyn East said. ‘It was a huge surprise - he got a little freaked out.’

Thanks to Danielle Kays and Damaris Dragonis

Notebook Pages, 2009, Ten Chromogenic prints, 13 x 10.29 inches each

Blank Field, 2009, Chromogenic print, 63 x 48 inches; Ampersand, 2009, Chromogenic print, 63 x 48 inches; Writing Staff for Middle Ground, 2009, Chromogenic print, 63 x 48 inches;

through December 19 at Wallspace

“Hommage à Jasper Johns”, 2009
mirror foil, plastic foil, plastic,
spray paint, metal
200 x 142 cm

“Wind”
November 27th 2009 - January 30th 2010

Daniel Buchholz

By PATRICK McGEEHAN
NY Times Published: December 6, 2009

At a glance, the far corner of the main floor of J&R Music looks familiar to anybody old enough to have scratched a record by accident. There are cardboard boxes filled with albums by the likes of Miles Davis and the Beach Boys that could be stacked in any musty attic in America.

But this is no music morgue; it is more like a life-support unit for an entertainment medium that has managed to avoid extinction, despite numerous predictions to the contrary. The bins above the boxes hold new records — freshly pressed albums of classic rock as well as vinyl versions of the latest releases from hip-hop icons like 50 Cent and Diddy and new pop stars like Norah Jones and Lady Gaga.

And with the curious resurgence of vinyl, a parallel revival has emerged: The turntable, once thought to have taken up obsolescence with reel-to-reel and eight-track tape players, has been reborn.

J&R Music, at 23 Park Row southeast of City Hall Park, now carries 21 different turntables at prices ranging from $85 to $875. Some are traditional analog record players; others are designed to connect to computers for converting music to digital files.

Rachelle Friedman, the co-owner of J&R, said the store is selling more vinyl and turntables than it has in at least a decade, fueled largely by growing demand from members of the iPod generation.

“It’s all these kids that are really ramping up their vinyl collections,” Ms. Friedman said. “New customers are discovering the quality of the sound. They’re discovering liner notes and graphics.” In many instances, the vinyl album of today is thicker and sounds better than those during vinyl’s heyday in the 1960s and 1970s.

Sales of vinyl albums have been climbing steadily for several years, tromping on the notion that the rebound was just a fad. Through late November, more than 2.1 million vinyl records had been sold in 2009, an increase of more than 35 percent in a year, according to Nielsen Soundscan. That total, though it represents less than 1 percent of all album sales, including CDs and digital downloads, is the highest for vinyl records in any year since Nielsen began tracking them in 1991.

Sales of CDs, meanwhile, have been falling fast, displaced by the downloading of digital files of songs from services like iTunes. Sales of albums on CD, which generally cost half as much as their vinyl counterparts, have dropped almost 20 percent this year, according to Nielsen.

With overall sales down, numerous big music-store chains like Tower Records, Virgin Megastore and HMV have pulled out of Manhattan, leaving music sales largely to online merchants and the few small, die-hard record shops scattered about Greenwich Village and Brooklyn.

One exception has been Best Buy, a national electronics chain that recently opened its sixth store in Manhattan. A year ago, the chain started stocking vinyl albums in about 50 of its stores, including one on the Upper East Side. Their presence, with their alluring cover art, still has the power to stun.

“Some individuals come into our store and they stop in their tracks,” said Andre Sam, a sales representative at Best Buy’s store on East 86th Street. “They don’t expect to see this. You can see them reminiscing as they start looking at the album covers.”

Last week, that store and a new Best Buy on Union Square installed departments, dubbed Club Beats, where customers can test out turntables and other equipment that DJs use to mix music. “They can spin, they can mix, they can scratch, whatever they want to do,” Mr. Sam said.

He suggested that video games deserved some credit for the resurgence of interest in vinyl albums and turntables. Popular games like Guitar Hero and Rockband have introduced young customers to classic rock and pop artists like the Beatles and Metallica, while DJ Hero has inspired some to try their hands at mixing music for real.

Not all of the turntables in these stores are designed to do anything so old-school as spinning actual records. A few models are still made for that purpose, many of them with cables that connect to computers so that the music can be transferred to portable devices. But others simply allow their users to simulate the manipulation of records while the songs they are mixing are being fed from iPods.

Interest from younger listeners is what convinced music industry executives that vinyl had staying power this time around. As more record labels added vinyl versions of new releases, the industry had to scramble to find places to press discs, said Mike Jbara, president and chief executive of the sales and distribution division of Warner Music Group.

“It is absolutely easy to say vinyl doesn’t make sense when you look at convenience, portability, all those things,” Mr. Jbara said. “But all the really great stuff in our lives comes from a root of passion or love.”

via

By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Times Published: December 6, 2009

Maybe I’m naïve, but I’m feeling optimistic about the climate talks starting in Copenhagen on Monday. President Obama now plans to address the conference on its last day, which suggests that the White House expects real progress. It’s also encouraging to see developing countries — including China, the world’s largest emitter of carbon dioxide — agreeing, at least in principle, that they need to be part of the solution.

Of course, if things go well in Copenhagen, the usual suspects will go wild. We’ll hear cries that the whole notion of global warming is a hoax perpetrated by a vast scientific conspiracy, as demonstrated by stolen e-mail messages that show — well, actually all they show is that scientists are human, but never mind. We’ll also, however, hear cries that climate-change policies will destroy jobs and growth.

The truth, however, is that cutting greenhouse gas emissions is affordable as well as essential. Serious studies say that we can achieve sharp reductions in emissions with only a small impact on the economy’s growth. And the depressed economy is no reason to wait — on the contrary, an agreement in Copenhagen would probably help the economy recover.

Why should you believe that cutting emissions is affordable? First, because financial incentives work.

Action on climate, if it happens, will take the form of “cap and trade”: businesses won’t be told what to produce or how, but they will have to buy permits to cover their emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. So they’ll be able to increase their profits if they can burn less carbon — and there’s every reason to believe that they’ll be clever and creative about finding ways to do just that.

As a recent study by McKinsey & Company showed, there are many ways to reduce emissions at relatively low cost: improved insulation; more efficient appliances; more fuel-efficient cars and trucks; greater use of solar, wind and nuclear power; and much, much more. And you can be sure that given the right incentives, people would find many tricks the study missed.

The truth is that conservatives who predict economic doom if we try to fight climate change are betraying their own principles. They claim to believe that capitalism is infinitely adaptable, that the magic of the marketplace can deal with any problem. But for some reason they insist that cap and trade — a system specifically designed to bring the power of market incentives to bear on environmental problems — can’t work.

Well, they’re wrong — again. For we’ve been here before.

The acid rain controversy of the 1980s was in many respects a dress rehearsal for today’s fight over climate change. Then as now, right-wing ideologues denied the science. Then as now, industry groups claimed that any attempt to limit emissions would inflict grievous economic harm.

But in 1990 the United States went ahead anyway with a cap-and-trade system for sulfur dioxide. And guess what. It worked, delivering a sharp reduction in pollution at lower-than-predicted cost.

Curbing greenhouse gases will be a much bigger and more complex task — but we’re likely to be surprised at how easy it is once we get started.

The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that by 2050 the emissions limits in recent proposed legislation would reduce real G.D.P. by between 1 percent and 3.5 percent from what it would otherwise have been. If we split the difference, that says that emissions limits would slow the economy’s annual growth over the next 40 years by around one-twentieth of a percentage point — from 2.37 percent to 2.32 percent.

That’s not much. Yet if the acid rain experience is any guide, the true cost is likely to be even lower.

Still, should we be starting a project like this when the economy is depressed? Yes, we should — in fact, this is an especially good time to act, because the prospect of climate-change legislation could spur more investment spending.

Consider, for example, the case of investment in office buildings. Right now, with vacancy rates soaring and rents plunging, there’s not much reason to start new buildings. But suppose that a corporation that already owns buildings learns that over the next few years there will be growing incentives to make those buildings more energy-efficient. Then it might well decide to start the retrofitting now, when construction workers are easy to find and material prices are low.

The same logic would apply to many parts of the economy, so that climate change legislation would probably mean more investment over all. And more investment spending is exactly what the economy needs.

So let’s hope my optimism about Copenhagen is justified. A deal there would save the planet at a price we can easily afford — and it would actually help us in our current economic predicament.

Alfred Lomas walks into the Los Angeles River basin below the 6th Street bridge. The tours will make a stop here, to show the tagging scene.

By Scott Gold
Los Angeles Times
December 5, 2009

A group of civic activists, united by faith and a belief that the poor economy in the interior of Los Angeles is a social injustice, is preparing to offer bus tours of some of the grittiest pockets of the city, including decayed public housing, sites of deadly shootouts and streets ravaged by racial unrest.

After a VIP preview last weekend, L.A. Gang Tours expects to open to the public in January, giving tourists a look at the cradle of the nation’s gang culture — the birthplace of many of the city’s gangs, including Crips and Bloods, Florencia 13 and 18th Street.

“This is ground zero for a lot of the bad in this city. It could be ground zero for a lot of the good too,” said Alfred Lomas, a former Florencia member who has become a leading gang intervention worker in South Los Angeles and is spearheading the tours. “This is true community empowerment.”

The nonprofit group plans to offer two-hour tours at an initial cost of $65 per adult, with profits funneled back into the community through jobs, “franchised” tours in new areas and micro-loans to inner-city entrepreneurs. Early routes will focus largely on South L.A., with forays through Watts and Florence-Firestone.

The concept appears to have no equal in L.A. — for good reason, some might argue. It seems to echo, more than anything, the “slum tours” of such sites as India’s Dharavi township and Rio de Janeiro’s favelas. Those operations have been lauded as innovative economic tools and mechanisms for humanizing poverty — and also attacked as exploitative and voyeuristic.

The L.A. tour comes after months of planning, and is offered in a spirit of education and public service. Lomas, who will lead tours at first, plans to talk about important chapters in the development of the city’s core, such as how racist housing restrictions shaped ethnic enclaves and the formation of gangs.

Other aspects may raise eyebrows. Selling shirts painted on the spot by a graffiti “tagger” is one thing. But one backer said he also hopes to stage dance-offs between locals; tourists would pick a winner and fork over a cash prize. It wasn’t long ago that organizers decided against a plan to have kids shoot tourists with water pistols, followed by the sale of T-shirts that read: “I Got Shot in South-Central.”

“It’s going to be fascinating — but really controversial,” said Francisco Ortega, a field staffer with the Los Angeles Human Relations Commission and a respected mediator and neighborhood advisor in South L.A. Ortega said there could be great value in “sensitizing people, connecting them to the reality of what’s on the ground.”

“But the other side is that it could come across like a zoo or something,” Ortega said. “You’re being carted about: ‘Look at that cholo over there!’ It could be perceived as demeaning for the people who are living in these conditions. I don’t know how they’re going to manage those perceptions.”

City Councilwoman Jan Perry said she has offered bus tours of South L.A. herself — but those were for real estate leaders she was trying to persuade to invest in the neighborhood. She said South L.A. could benefit from an effort to demonstrate “the potential of the community.” But she said some aspects of this kind of tourism could go too far.

“It’s not right to put people on display,” she said.

“It depends on their intent and how they balance it,” said Councilman Bernard C. Parks.

Organizers, however, say they’ve been careful to plan tours that are respectful and neither glorify gangs nor exploit the poor.

“What matters to me is that kids get fed and families get help,” Lomas said.

The organization is bolstered by business leaders and gang experts who are contributing start-up capital and advice.

Several are connected to the Dream Center, the L.A. church ministry where Lomas directs a food bank. Lomas credits the organization with helping him to turn his life around.

Kevin Malone, a former Dodgers general manager, sits on the board of the Dream Center’s charitable arm and has become one of Lomas’ chief supporters. Malone said he has become involved in human-rights causes, such as combating human trafficking. He said the possibility of introducing self-sustaining economic development into the city’s poorest neighborhoods is no less of a human rights issue.

“I believe in this,” he said.

Other backers include Ron Noblet, a leading gang expert and an early proponent of using gang intervention to augment traditional police tactics. Noblet dismissed any potential for criticism or controversy.

“There will be a lot of people who will be delighted if he fails,” Noblet said of Lomas. “But there is clarity in the dream.”

Another backer is Terry Jensen, an owner of Seattle-based Duninger Corp., which has subsidiaries in engineering and real estate investment. Jensen is the inventor of the “Jakpak,” a jacket that turns into a tent with a built-in sleeping bag. It was designed for the homeless and communities hit by natural disasters.

Jensen, also a minister, has allowed Lomas to use his accountants and marketers. The team, he said, believes the tours could generate $1 million in profit in the first year, and that it would compete for customers with operators of celebrity-home tours in Hollywood.

“I think this will be a destination tour,” Jensen said. “I think people will come to Los Angeles to take this tour.”

Jensen acknowledged that customers will have to sign a watertight legal waiver. He said that’s why it’s important to spread the word through affected neighborhoods that the tour is coming — and, eventually, generating jobs, grants and loans. For example, Jensen said he’d like to see some early profits send a graffiti “tagger” to art school.

“We all know that the day somebody gets hurt, it’s over,” he said. “We’re counting on the fact that the gangs aren’t going to mess in their own beds.”

There is another reason to spread the gospel: Lomas hopes to use the tours to foster peace on the streets.

In recent weeks, The Times was granted access to a series of “sit-downs” — meetings — seeking understandings between gangs that have historically warred: Florencia, 18th Street and Grape Street, the dominant gang in the Jordan Downs public housing development.

Other gangs are being added to the talks and will shape tour routes down the road. Lomas, for instance, hopes to include the South L.A. bus stop where five children and three adults were shot in gang crossfire last year, but needs the local gangs to sign off, giving him “safe passage.”

One “sit-down” took place in a Jordan Downs apartment that serves as the hub of the small nonprofit empire of Fred “Scorpio” Smith. The 38-year-old Smith said he joined Grape Street when he was 11 and recently completed a 13-year prison term on drug charges. Influential in Jordan Downs, he now runs a charitable organization, including a program for kids who have dropped out or have been kicked out of local schools.

A small group, led by Lomas, went to the apartment seeking approval to run the tour through Jordan Downs. At first, Smith sounded skeptical.

“A tour?” he asked incredulously. “Of the ‘hood?”

Lomas offered to hire two teens from the housing development as part-time tour employees.

“I’m not saying you have to stop shooting each other,” Lomas said. “Just allow me a certain time in the day. . . . Just let the bus go through.”

“Safe passage is a guarantee,” Smith said.

Lomas and Smith discussed a host of delicate issues: tension between African Americans and Latinos; a recent skirmish between Florencia and Grape Street. They discussed building a phone tree to open new lines of communication between their neighborhoods.

But the long-term goal, Lomas explained, is economic viability.

“People around the world have stereotyped us,” Lomas said. “I’m talking about sustainable change. But it won’t work unless we have unity.”

“The people on the ground doing the work,” Smith replied. “That’s cool. That’d be cool.”

IKO IKO

Sunday, December 6, 2009 7PM

The Sycophancy of the Contemporary Artist and
the Impossibility of Reaching Out to Mark E. Smith

Artist Frances Stark discusses Mark E. Smith,
legendary vocalist for The Fall.

The talk will be followed by a DJ set of related music by Jan Tumlir.

Mandrake
2692 S La Cienega Blvd Los Angeles, CA 90034
(between Venice Blvd and Washington Blvd)

Oslo Editions

via

By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Times Published: December 3, 2009

Health care reform hangs in the balance. Its fate rests with a handful of “centrist” senators — senators who claim to be mainly worried about whether the proposed legislation is fiscally responsible.

But if they’re really concerned with fiscal responsibility, they shouldn’t be worried about what would happen if health reform passes. They should, instead, be worried about what would happen if it doesn’t pass. For America can’t get control of its budget without controlling health care costs — and this is our last, best chance to deal with these costs in a rational way.

Some background: Long-term fiscal projections for the United States paint a grim picture. Unless there are major policy changes, expenditure will consistently grow faster than revenue, eventually leading to a debt crisis.

What’s behind these projections? An aging population, which will raise the cost of Social Security, is part of the story. But the main driver of future deficits is the ever-rising cost of Medicare and Medicaid. If health care costs rise in the future as they have in the past, fiscal catastrophe awaits.

You might think, given this picture, that extending coverage to those who would otherwise be uninsured would exacerbate the problem. But you’d be wrong, for two reasons.

First, the uninsured in America are, on average, relatively young and healthy; covering them wouldn’t raise overall health care costs very much.

Second, the proposed health care reform links the expansion of coverage to serious cost-control measures for Medicare. Think of it as a grand bargain: coverage for (almost) everyone, tied to an effort to ensure that health care dollars are well spent.

Are we talking about real savings, or just window dressing? Well, the health care economists I respect are seriously impressed by the cost-control measures in the Senate bill, which include efforts to improve incentives for cost-effective care, the use of medical research to guide doctors toward treatments that actually work, and more. This is “the best effort anyone has made,” says Jonathan Gruber of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. A letter signed by 23 prominent health care experts — including Mark McClellan, who headed Medicare under the Bush administration — declares that the bill’s cost-control measures “will reduce long-term deficits.”

The fact that we’re seeing the first really serious attempt to control health care costs as part of a bill that tries to cover the uninsured seems to confirm what would-be reformers have been saying for years: The path to cost control runs through universality. We can only tackle out-of-control costs as part of a deal that also provides Americans with the security of guaranteed health care.

That observation in itself should make anyone concerned with fiscal responsibility support this reform. Over the next decade, the Congressional Budget Office has concluded, the proposed legislation would reduce, not increase, the budget deficit. And by giving us a chance, finally, to rein in the ever-growing spending of Medicare, it would greatly improve our long-run fiscal prospects.

But there’s another reason failure to pass reform would be devastating — namely, the nature of the opposition.

The Republican campaign against health care reform has rested in part on the traditional arguments, arguments that go back to the days when Ronald Reagan was trying to scare Americans into opposing Medicare — denunciations of “socialized medicine,” claims that universal health coverage is the road to tyranny, etc.

But in the closing rounds of the health care fight, the G.O.P. has focused more and more on an effort to demonize cost-control efforts. The Senate bill would impose “draconian cuts” on Medicare, says Senator John McCain, who proposed much deeper cuts just last year as part of his presidential campaign. “If you’re a senior and you’re on Medicare, you better be afraid of this bill,” says Senator Tom Coburn.

If these tactics work, and health reform fails, think of the message this would convey: It would signal that any effort to deal with the biggest budget problem we face will be successfully played by political opponents as an attack on older Americans. It would be a long time before anyone was willing to take on the challenge again; remember that after the failure of the Clinton effort, it was 16 years before the next try at health reform.

That’s why anyone who is truly concerned about fiscal policy should be anxious to see health reform succeed. If it fails, the demagogues will have won, and we probably won’t deal with our biggest fiscal problem until we’re forced into action by a nasty debt crisis.

So to the centrists still sitting on the fence over health reform: If you care about fiscal responsibility, you better be afraid of what will happen if reform fails.

Talia Chetrit

Thanks to Arthur Ou

thanks to bret witke

want to live in texas?

Story time. Their classroom is a 325-acre section of state parkland called the Hemlock Trail, plus a long-empty farmhouse.

By LIZ LEYDEN
NY Times Published: November 29, 2009

SARATOGA SPRINGS, N.Y. — Fat, cold droplets splashed from the sky as the students struggled into their uniforms: rain pants, boots, mittens and hats. Once buttoned and bundled, they scattered toward favorite spaces: a crab apple tree made for climbing, a cluster of bushes forming a secret nook under a willow tree, a sandbox growing muddier by the minute.

They planted garlic bulbs, discovered a worm. The rain continued to fall. It was 8:30 a.m. on a recent Wednesday, and the Waldorf School’s “forest kindergarten” was officially in session.

Schools around the country have been planting gardens and planning ever more elaborate field trips in hopes of reconnecting children with nature. The forest kindergarten at the Waldorf School of Saratoga Springs is one of a handful in the United States that are taking that concept to another level: its 23 pupils, ages 3 ½ to 6, spend three hours each day outside regardless of the weather. This in a place where winter is marked by snowdrifts and temperatures that regularly dip below freezing.

The new forest kindergarten, which opened here in September, is an extreme version of the outdoor learning taught at more than 100 Waldorf schools, all but a handful of them private, scattered throughout the United States. They are based on the teachings of the Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner and emphasize the arts and the natural world, with no formal academic curriculum until first grade.

“I loved the idea of her being outside every day,” said Kim Lytle, whose 3-year-old, aptly named Forest, is the youngest in the class. “If you have the proper gear, I think it’s a really healthy thing to experience the elements and brave the world — and not just on a sunny day.”

The children’s “classroom” is 325 acres of state parkland known as the Hemlock Trail, and a long-empty farmhouse, which the state has licensed Waldorf to use for the year. The school also has regular indoor classes at its main building.

On this day in the fledgling program, whose tuition is about $7,000, the rain did not taper off, yet the kindergartners remained outside until lunch. Circle time — songs and dancing — took place in the center of a field, behind a farmhouse, followed by a snack of apples and pineapple chunks at picnic tables. The children cut bittersweet vine to make wreaths, splashed in puddles, and, in the sandbox, did some imaginary cooking.

“We’re making something that’s cheesy,” said one girl.

“It’s cookies,” said a boy.

Max Perez, nearly 5, carried a bucket to the swampy edges of the field and scooped up some water. He and the others mixed the sand into gobs of glorious mud. After an hour, Max paused, peering out from his wet hat, and asked, “Is it raining today?”

In some ways, the program is not unlike other kindergartens. Signs declaring a peanut-free zone are taped throughout the farmhouse. There are bruised feelings and scuffles and potty jokes. But the biggest challenge is one not found in traditional classrooms: ticks, lots of them.

Though virtually unknown in the United States, forest kindergartens are increasingly common in Scandinavia and other European countries like Germany and Austria.

Sigrid D’Aleo and Carly Lynn, two Waldorf teachers, proposed adding one in Saratoga Springs because, over the years, they had seen students at their best when outdoors.

“Their large motor skills developed, they worked out their social issues in a better way, they had more imaginative play,” Ms. D’Aleo said. “Children’s senses are so overtaxed in these modern times, so here, it is very healthy for them.”

Richard Louv, author of “Last Child in the Woods,” a book arguing that children have suffered from diminished time outside, said he had heard similar things from educators around the country.

“It helps us use all our senses at the same time,” he said. “It seems to be the optimum state of learning, when everything is coming at us in lots of different ways.”

Alane Chinian, regional director of the New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation, said of the Waldorf school’s use of the Hemlock Trail: “We are delighted to have them there. It expands our mission and furthers the park’s goals of providing nature education to children.”

Here in Saratoga Springs, the children crossed into the forest at midmorning, greeted by the rich smell of earth and leaves. A fallen branch had created an arch to climb through as if they were entering a hidden place straight out of a storybook.

Trails had been worn through the thickets. An old stone wall ran through the center of the trees toward huge tepees the children had built from sticks and vines.

Everywhere, there were things to discover. A branch balanced on a split tree trunk became a seesaw. A teacher sawed thick stumps into logs the children used to bridge bogs. A pit became a monster house, complete with boys standing in the rain shouting warnings: “You don’t want to come over here! You’ll get smushed!”

Piper Whalen, 5, turned toward her own treasure: an enormous fallen tree. She climbed on and lifted her arms. “I’m riding a roller coaster,” she said. “Come on and ride with me.”

The raindrops continued to fall until, finally, it poured, hard enough to splash though the canopy of trees. The children were delighted.

“It’s wet!” exclaimed one.

“My hair is getting a drink of water!” another said.

Piper began to laugh. She stuck out her tongue and turned her face toward the sky.

“Top Hat Trick”, 2009, Oil on canvas, 96 x 66 in

art basel miami at canada

thanks to matt connors

By PATRICK HEALY
NY Times Published: November 25, 2009

“CULTIVATE the appearance of contrition,” the character Jack Lawson, a lawyer, tells a white client accused of raping a black woman in “Race,” a new play opening on Broadway next Sunday. As uttered with don’t-waste-my-time iciness by the actor James Spader, the clipped and merciless directive telegraphs not only that this is dialogue by David Mamet, but also that it is set in the kind of up-for-grabs moral universe that Spader characters have been occupying in Hollywood for years.

The sexy sleazes he played in the mid-1980s, most notably the preppy Steff in “Pretty in Pink,” gave way to the twisted and perverse protagonists of “sex, lies, and videotape” (1989), “Crash” (1996) and his latest major film, “Secretary,” in 2002. Then came Alan Shore, the outrageously sardonic, ethically cynical lawyer on both “The Practice” and “Boston Legal” on ABC. In that role Mr. Spader’s instincts for dark, enigmatic characters grounded an entire performance, one that won him three Emmys.

His Jack Lawson is like Alan Shore on Paxil — calmer and focused but no less brazen. And if Lawson does not represent especially new ground in Mr. Spader’s oeuvre, this latest incarnation of a slick lawyer, who at first appears more ruthless than anyone else onstage, taps into his many discomfiting talents. After two decades of personifying the creepy id in our collective imagination, Mr. Spader is finally on intimate view as audiences come face to face with the snake in the room.

“I’m most drawn to characters who are compelling and repellant at the same time, very often right at the same moment, and who are frightening and funny all at once,” Mr. Spader said over tea recently near the theater district.

“Mamet writes these characters better than anyone,” he continued, in his measured and highly enunciated speaking style. “And after decades away from theater work I was excited by the central ideas in ‘Race,’ where each character is both a protagonist and an antagonist. There are no heroes in this story.”

Inhabiting a leading Mamet man who has never been portrayed by another actor is particularly exciting for Mr. Spader, whose career has reached something of a turning point. After “Boston Legal” ended last December, he found himself uncertain about what to do next. In February he will turn 50 — an age that is hard to fathom for those who remember him as the seductively handsome drug dealer Rip in “Less Than Zero.” His physique is no longer trim, and his eyesight has long been poor. But with “Race,” he is tackling the challenges that theater affords, and also imposing his exacting and sometimes unusual work habits on a new cast.

“We’re all amazed by how ferocious and smart James has been in thrusting himself into Mamet’s world,” said Kerry Washington, who tangles with Mr. Spader as the young black legal assistant in his firm. “He doesn’t take a single second of his behavior onstage for granted. If James doesn’t feel that it’s right for his character to get out of a chair at a particular moment, he’ll say, ‘We have to figure out how to get out of the chair in a way that’s honest.’ ”

Researching and rehearsing a role until he enters a zone of concentration is a Spader trademark, several colleagues say. Susan Sarandon, who played a working-class waitress in a torrid affair with the younger, wealthier Mr. Spader in “White Palace,” said that before shooting their first make-out scene, he proposed that they dance in his trailer so they could become better acquainted. Holly Hunter, his co-star in “Crash,” said Mr. Spader would “invite us all over to his place to prepare for ‘Crash’ by watching a mini-festival of movies” like “Vanishing Point,” the cult classic about explosive car chases.

Maggie Gyllenhaal, who played the socially awkward assistant to Mr. Spader’s character, the eccentric and mysterious Mr. Grey, in “Secretary,” said he immersed himself in the character almost beyond recognition. He was often as formal off-screen as Mr. Grey was on camera, said Ms. Gyllenhaal, who did not know his phone number, rarely if ever saw him off the set and was unsure if he had children. (He has two older sons with his former wife, Victoria Kheel, and a toddler with his girlfriend, Leslie Stefanson.)

“One day he was sitting on a couch and said really loudly, with a Mr. Grey tone, ‘Who should I speak to about having a very expensive box of chocolates put in my room?’ ” Ms. Gyllenhaal said. “And a couple of days later, I got a knock on the door of my trailer, which I shared with James, separated by a little wall. It was a production assistant who said, ‘James would like to see you.’ Now James was literally five feet from me, but this assistant was sent. So I went down my little steps, and up his little steps, and — in a very serious tone — he invited me in for a chocolate before we did an intense sexy scene together.

“What he was doing was open-hearted, supportive, loving,” she added, “but also pretty unusual.”

Mr. Spader said that he had no fixed approach to acting — “I’ve spent my life striving against any kind of ideology” — but added that he believes in exploring the nuances of his scripts and characters.

That “appreciation for detail and minutiae,” as Mr. Spader describes his affection for acting, helped secure his most sustained professional success so far, “Boston Legal,” which ran for five seasons. Its creator, David E. Kelley, said that Mr. Spader’s line readings, facial expressions, physical gestures and courtroom pauses were “perfect in their fine detail.”

The two men bonded over his character Alan Shore. “Every once in a while,” Mr. Kelley said, “James would call me and say, ‘Remember in the early shows when Alan would throw evidence away and blithely break the rules? I miss that guy a bit.’ And I would say yeah, I did too. Of course, we both had such a love for the character that we wanted to protect him.”

For Mr. Spader, characters who explore their macabre impulses — the car accident fetishist in “Crash,” the sadomasochistic spanker in “Secretary” — are enticing because he finds them different from himself.

“I don’t have much interest in spilling myself onto the screen or the stage or on television,” he said. “It’s fun to explore behavior that you can’t explore in your own life, so you fool around with it in acting.”

The son of two teachers, Mr. Spader grew up in a yachting town in Massachusetts and attended Phillips Academy in Andover. At 17 he dropped out, a decision that he would explain only by citing “dwindling attendance.” He moved to New York City, where his sister had an empty living room floor for him to crash on.

He picked up manual-labor jobs — as a meat-truck driver he once went back to Andover to party with his old friends — and began to pursue acting, which he had enjoyed since performing in plays in grammar school. He enrolled in an acting school named for Michael Chekhov, the Russian émigré actor whose technique emphasized movement, improvisation and imagination. Mr. Spader also performed in several pieces at the Actors Studio, though he declined an invitation to audition there.

Soon Hollywood was calling. Agents and actors had taken notice of him in New York, and his early, small performances demonstrated both sensitivity and pathos. His good looks, wavy dirty-blond hair and blue eyes also drew casting directors, and he landed roles as troubled teenagers.

His seemingly innocent face hardly proved an obstacle to Mr. Spader’s growing desire, in the late ’80s, to land more emotionally complex roles. He made his break-out performance as a sexual voyeur in Steven Soderbergh’s “sex, lies, and videotape,” for which Mr. Spader won the best actor award at the Cannes Film Festival. He became sought after to play men in romantically or sexually dysfunctional relationships in films like “Bad Influence” and “White Palace.”

“In our movie he had to play somebody who was very vulnerable and inhibited, and those aren’t at the top of the list of really attractive qualities,” Ms. Sarandon said.

After watching “sex, lies, and videotape,” the director Mike Nichols decided to cast Mr. Spader in “Wolf” (1994) as a young corporate climber who is turned into a werewolf. Janet Maslin, reviewing the film for The New York Times, credited Mr. Spader with “still turning the business of being despicable into a fine art.” Mr. Nichols said in an interview that he had been impressed by Mr. Spader’s “hunger to play parts that don’t allow you to coast.”

“He needs moments in a script to chew on,” he added. “He starts out in ‘Wolf’ as this slightly supercilious guy, but as the lupine characteristics began to encroach, he found actual human characteristics involving hearing and smelling and awareness that he made recognizable in the beast.”

Mr. Spader also seems not to have the actor’s gene for needing to be liked.

“I’m very selfish about my work,” he said. “I’ve always made the decisions, in terms of what I did in the business, without any real regard with how it was going to be received by others.”

While he had no formal audition for “Race” — Mr. Mamet (who is also directing) offered him the part over lunch — Mr. Spader said he was confident that he could “bring the art of great, unvarnished conversation to life, which is what ‘Race’ is about.” (Mr. Mamet, in trademark fashion, declined to be interviewed.) Just as exciting, Mr. Spader said, was unwinding another knotty character on a new proving ground, Broadway.

“When doing theater, you have to find great satisfaction in the small things,” he said. “There’s going to be a repetition and a redundancy night after night, but it’s the small variations in those moments — a word, a tone of voice, the smallest sense of enlightenment that can happen in an instant onstage — that will be the most rewarding.”

Incredible collection of ceramics at Sam Maloof’s House. Top two images are Stan Bitters. The Ceramic Sailboats I could not find out any information on, and they were glued down to the shelf. Today is the last day of the Mexican Folk Art Sale.

Maloof Foundation Annual Mexican Folk Art Weekend
Saturday & Sunday
November 28 & 29, 2009

Maloof Foundation

Images via Kelly Breslin

Until December 19 at Dependance (Belgium)

By DAVID BROOKS
NY Times Published: November 26, 2009

Like many of you, I went to elementary school, high school and college. I took such and such classes, earned such and such grades, and amassed such and such degrees.

But on the night of Feb. 2, 1975, I turned on WMMR in Philadelphia and became mesmerized by a concert the radio station was broadcasting. The concert was by a group I’d never heard of — Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band. Thus began a part of my second education.

We don’t usually think of this second education. For reasons having to do with the peculiarities of our civilization, we pay a great deal of attention to our scholastic educations, which are formal and supervised, and we devote much less public thought to our emotional educations, which are unsupervised and haphazard. This is odd, since our emotional educations are much more important to our long-term happiness and the quality of our lives.

In any case, over the next few decades Springsteen would become one of the professors in my second education. In album after album he assigned a new course in my emotional curriculum.

This second education doesn’t work the way the scholastic education works. In a normal schoolroom, information walks through the front door and announces itself by light of day. It’s direct. The teacher describes the material to be covered, and then everybody works through it.

The knowledge transmitted in an emotional education, on the other hand, comes indirectly, seeping through the cracks of the windowpanes, from under the floorboards and through the vents. It’s generally a byproduct of the search for pleasure, and the learning is indirect and unconscious.

From that first night in the winter of 1975, I wanted the thrill that Springsteen was offering. His manager, Jon Landau, says that each style of music elicits its own set of responses. Rock, when done right, is jolting and exhilarating.

Once I got a taste of that emotional uplift, I was hooked. The uplifting experiences alone were bound to open the mind for learning.

I followed Springsteen into his world. Once again, it wasn’t the explicit characters that mattered most. Springsteen sings about teenage couples out on a desperate lark, workers struggling as the mills close down, and drifters on the wrong side of the law. These stories don’t directly touch my life, and as far as I know he’s never written a song about a middle-age pundit who interviews politicians by day and makes mind-numbingly repetitive school lunches at night.

What mattered most, as with any artist, were the assumptions behind the stories. His tales take place in a distinct universe, a distinct map of reality. In Springsteen’s universe, life’s “losers” always retain their dignity. Their choices have immense moral consequences, and are seen on an epic and anthemic scale.

There are certain prominent neighborhoods on his map — one called defeat, another called exaltation, another called nostalgia. Certain emotional chords — stoicism, for one — are common, while others are absent. “There is no sarcasm in his writing,” Landau says, “and not a lot of irony.”

I find I can’t really describe what this landscape feels like, especially in newspaper prose. But I do believe his narrative tone, the mental map, has worked its way into my head, influencing the way I organize the buzzing confusion of reality, shaping the unconscious categories through which I perceive events. Just as being from New York or rural Georgia gives you a perspective from which to see the world, so spending time in Springsteen’s universe inculcates its own preconscious viewpoint.

Then there is the man himself. Like other parts of the emotional education, it is hard to bring the knowledge to consciousness, but I do think important lessons are communicated by that embarrassed half-giggle he falls into when talking about himself. I do think a message is conveyed in the way he continually situates himself within a tradition — de-emphasizing his own individual contributions, stressing instead the R&B groups, the gospel and folk singers whose work comes out through him.

I’m not claiming my second education has been exemplary or advanced. I’m describing it because I have only become aware of it retrospectively, and society pays too much attention to the first education and not enough to the second.

In fact, we all gather our own emotional faculty — artists, friends, family and teams. Each refines and develops the inner instrument with a million strings.

Last week, my kids attended their first Springsteen concert in Baltimore. At one point, I looked over at my 15-year-old daughter. She had her hands clapped to her cheeks and a look of slack-jawed, joyous astonishment on her face. She couldn’t believe what she was seeing — 10,000 people in a state of utter abandon, with Springsteen surrendering himself to them in the center of the arena.

It begins again.

via cabinessence