John Altoon, Untitled (1965)

Through April 02, 2012

Norton Simon as part of Pacific Standard Time

Wooding from 1982 with father and sister

01 Magazine Issue 7
by Jabari Jordan-Walker

When I was approached about developing an interview that involved a theme loosely constructed around the concept of documentation, curator Andy Beach along with his weblogs Reference Library and Stork Bites Man immediately came to mind. As a unique case within an excessively large cloud of blogs out there, Andy Beach curates content that proclaims a sense of selflessness that is shown particularly well through the cataloging of his experiences in fatherhood.

By not only taking form through the context of a single theme, Beach is able to provide his readership with inspiring content that is refreshing, honest, and doesn’t beg you to perceive him as a personality bound to the Internet’s ever-useless popularity contest.

Jabari: A photo you’ve published simply titled Wooding from 1982 is a reflection on you with your sister and dad in the family tool crib. Can you talk a little about what life was like growing up a Beach?

Andy: Ha. There were a lot of jokes: “Sandy Beach”, “Son of a Beach”, etc. I had a good, small-town Michigan life; lots of bike riding, playing in the yard, throwing rocks and watching semi trucks go by. Freedom. I look back at that photograph that my Mom must have taken and my Dad is about the age I am now. And in that photo, my sister and I are the ages of my own daughters now. This is in the basement of the same house where my Dad and his friends built an addition to add two bedrooms for our growing family. He liked his workbench area and enjoyed his particular way of arranging and displaying his things. But he knew how to use those tools and often did. I don’t feel as grown-up as my parents seemed then. I still feel like I’m trying to figure things out.

When I was in the middle of second grade, we moved from this house on the outside of town to a house in the middle of our small town. In the new place, the three kids each had their own rooms and I remember we often switched rooms and re-arranged the furniture in our living room. It seemed like the whole family was trying to settle in and figure it out, but never did

Did you study any facet of design or art formally in school?

Barely.

I ended up attending five different colleges and switched my studies from engineering to graphic design, yet still graduated in only four and a half years. I ended up with a BFA but no real art education. I thought I knew exactly what I wanted and needed out of an education, so I did what I could do get through it quickly. I tried to learn without making any mistakes. I was wrong, of course. That way of working makes it very hard to be creative and expressive and honest. Learning from missteps and failures and then adjusting, not abandoning, when things go wrong is how you grow.

I remember being obsessed with The Zone System in photography classes; I kept trying to capture and reproduce what I saw with the naked eye. I wasn’t trying to make art or even trying to make a “good” photo, I just wanted the photograph to look like what I saw with my eyes. It is kind of pointless exercise, but it still fascinates and frustrates me — the way people take pictures of their goods for eBay and in the way architectural spaces are (mis)represented in magazines, it is a kind of documentation that drives me wild.

I catch a sense that your inspirations are centered on both utilitarianism and the playful moments within the everyday. Explain how these ideas influence your praxis and theories in art and design?

I don’t think I’ve ever been all that interested in the fantastic. I like projects with a purpose. Whatever process I have definitely comes from being a keen observer and wanting to find a solution to a problem, but never without humor. You’re right; I like to find the playful moments within something dry or even boring. I feel free to think and inspired when I’m driving long stretches of highway between Pennsylvania and Michigan. Focused on the road and the limited landscape is a perfect structure for finding or creating playful moments.

Stork Bites Man is quite unique in being a blog that features content that within its intimacy is the certainty that it will evolve over time. How did the blog come about and as your children grow older what would you like to see come out of its existence?

Absolutely. I started the blog to keep track of things, but Stork Bites Man quickly became more about experience and emotion. There are still a lot of objects, but often those are just a symbol of something else that’s on my mind. Or a reminder of something my daughters did or said. The blog has become a place to share experiences and ideas rather than things.

The idea of a reference library refers to a place where things are documented, archived, and researched on site. How is the concept of a reference library reflected within your blogging methodology?

Well that was the whole point at the very beginning. I started Reference Library because I was looking for a way to organize the thousands of images on my computer. It could have just as easily ended up as a flickr account or a well-organized iPhoto library. I liked the idea of tagging and making it somewhat public. A week later I had visitors and it became a Blog. I wanted it to be a tool; an archive of images I could go back to again and again for research. It naturally evolved into something else, and just like Stork Bites Man, Reference Library is more about experiences than objects. It may look like an image or object blog to most people; the tags are only rough chunks of meaning. For me these things are very personal and have significance beyond what it is shown on the blog. I can go back in the archive to certain weeks or individual posts and be reminded of something funny my daughter said, the house we almost bought, or the fire I almost started. It is still a tool, but for me it’s more about processing my own ideas than being an “inspiration” resource.

Before having the luxury to document your interests and memorable activities through various web-based narratives, how would you compile the artifacts that you felt needed to be revisited?

That’s why I had to start the blog. I was keeping three-ring binders but it was such a static archive. I couldn’t do anything with them. I wasn’t able to compile or archive anything in a satisfying way. I needed a structure. “To find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now.” Jason Fulford shared that quote with me and it’s a perfect fit for how the blog works and for what I need to do to make it keep working.

Do you try to maintain a physical reference library at home?

I try. But I am not as organized as you might expect. There are piles and piles. And stacks of books on top of the piles. My grandma was a hoarder. It’s in my blood.

eBay plays a big role in your hunt for objects and clothing, can you name a few of your most memorable finds?

Years before I started the blog, I was outbid on a chair (a “Domus” dining chair by Ilmari Tapiovaara). I contacted the high bidder hoping he might change his/her mind and let me have it. Turns out it was the artist Robert Gober. I always thought that was funny. I still know his eBay name and sometimes check out what he’s bidding on.

In May 2007, I came across a listing for a beautifully weird birdhouse made by Stan Bitters. I didn’t know anything about him or his work but I liked the object and wondered why it was five hundred dollars. Someone else got it and I ended up posting it on Reference Library. A reader from California saw it on my blog and loved it too. He contacted Stan Bitters and then started to carry the birdhouses in his shop, South Willard. So that’s how I met Ryan Conder, who became a fast friend. (We did the Shrimp Shop together at his shop in 2009.)

http://referencelibrary.blogspot.com/2007/05/stan-bitters-birdhouse.html

http://referencelibrary.blogspot.com/2009/11/announcing-shrimp-shop.html

One of the favorite things I actually won is a weird, folky painting of the Apollo 11 astronauts, the “Heroes of Technology”. The seller listed it as “prison art” but no one really knows where it came from. I put in a bid for what I was willing to pay and ended up winning it for much less, which is the way you hope that eBay will always work.

Can you explain your relationship to curating?

It’s an uneasy one. I want things to be a certain way; my way. It’s a selfish and arrogant belief that I can make something better. I always liked the slogan for the giant corporation BASF: “We don’t make a lot of the products you buy. We make a lot of the products you buy better.” I have been fortunate to be involved with projects where someone has let me try to do that. I’m more comfortable as an editor or gatherer, than a creator.

Do you feel the term curator can be adjusted in order to include the growing ideation of the “blogger”?

Unfortunately, yeah. Every blogger with a good eye is not a curator, no matter how many pop-up shops he’s done. The other day I was introduced to someone as “a curator” and it made me uneasy. I have worked with real curators, wickedly smart visual and performing arts curators, and I am not part of that club. I tend to explain things by saying: “I have a blog”.

I enjoyed the “Kinder” supplement you curated in Apartamento #04, what were some of your goals when it came to deciding what to feature in the section?

Thank you. I looked at it like a problem that needed a solution, not like a curatorial intervention. (I don’t make the kids section. I make the kids section better.) My goals were also selfish. I had talked to Geoff McFetridge a year or so earlier about some of the furniture and things he had made for his daughter. I thought it was a great idea for a book or something, so when “Kinder” came up it was a perfect opportunity to get Geoff to share some of those things. I really wanted Andy Rementer to make a coloring book. I loved Enzo Mari; can we talk to Enzo Mari? Yes. I loved the workshops and art-making parties Jordi Ferreiro had done, so I wanted to include him. It all came together very easily. I had the lineup in my head in about 30 seconds. I knew what would be good: things I couldn’t do myself. I think I kind of live vicariously through these “curatorial” projects.

Have you ever considered doing a print publication or book of your own?

All the time.

I found your mini-exhibition project with Kiosk also very interesting. Can you explain how the Reference Library shop developed?

Yes; it was my mailman’s fault. My wife had ordered some things from KIOSK for my birthday, but they got lost in the mail. When we stopped by the shop to pick up replacements, I met Alisa who owns/runs KIOSK and we started chatting. Almost every Reference Library project has started the same way: someone says “we should do something together sometime.” She was just starting her Mini-Exhibition series; a few months later I was on the schedule to open a shop on Black Friday (the traditionally brutal day-after-Thanksgiving shopping day).

What have you got planned for the future?

We’re expecting a new baby boy at the end of November! I plan to finish some projects this fall then take a long break from the Internet and being a blogger/curator/whatever.

Last words?

Too Blessed 2 Be Stressed!

Reference Library

Stork Bites Man

Nancy Campbell/IFC Films

Spalding Gray

By RON ROSENBAUM
NY Times Published: October 28, 2011

In “Swimming to Cambodia” — the monologue that made Spalding Gray (relatively) famous, about the time he spent in Thailand playing a small role in “The Killing Fields,” the film about the Cambodian genocide — Gray tells a strange, disconcerting story about the death of Thomas Merton. Merton, the Trappist monk celebrated for his devotion to an eloquently spiritualized silence, was “a hero of mine because he knew how to shut up,” Gray, the compulsive verbalizer, tells us.

As Gray describes Merton’s death, “the Trappists sent him to Southeast Asia to research Buddhism. He stepped out of a bathtub, touched an electric fan and died instantly.”

This account, as it happens, dramatizes the conflict found throughout Gray’s extensive journals: between his own relentless search for transcendence (“perfect moments” and the like) and the often shocking absurdity of worldly contingency of the sort that will, eventually, tragically, short-circuit him too.

Absurd contradictions were Gray’s métier. One of the offhand, heartbreaking epigrams to be found in these journals goes like this: “The worst fear is that I’ll learn to be happy at last and then get real sad when I see what I’ve missed.” Better to be miserable! No wonder he called one of his monologues “Terrors of Pleasure.”

It’s distressing to read, the way happiness generates sadness and terror in Gray’s psyche, because his work could be the source of so much pleasure to his audiences. Even offstage: one friend tells the editor Nell Casey — who has done an admirable job knitting together a selection of Gray’s journal entries with interviews and her own thoughtful take — that Gray was so seductive a storyteller that just sitting around a downtown loft, hearing him recount the mundane details of his day, could “torture you with pleasure.”

He made a career, invented a performance genre out of this narrative prowess. But the dark side, the journals reveal, was just how much Gray himself was tortured with, well, self-torture.

He’d make light of it in his monologues. One story line of the journals is the way he evolved the radical form of these performances. They were nurtured at first by Elizabeth LeCompte and the postmodern theater troupe that centered on the Performing Garage (later the Wooster Group) in SoHo, but they were, in many respects, premodern. Stripped to the minimum of voice and story, Homeric in that respect, Gray’s odysseys were performed on a bare stage with a bare wooden desk and chair, no props except a water pitcher and glass. Then Gray, this über-WASP figure who looked as if he’d stepped out of the L. L. Bean catalog with his plaid shirt and pale, ghostly New England transcendentalist mien, would sit down, open a notebook and begin talking.

“Get me out of here!” was my first thought when a friend dragged me to one of Gray’s pre-“Cambodia” monologues. But then, in a funny, charming, self-­deprecatory way he’d start telling rambling, digressive, but observant and intelligent stories that would bare his soul and crack you up, with a repertoire of subtle facial gestures, pauses, double takes and the like, a kabuki that said: “Yeah, I know I’m kind of a jerk, but the fact that I know it makes me a meta-jerk, and admit it, you’re laughing because you recognize yourself. I speak for the metaphysical jerk in all of us.”

Or that’s how I interpreted it. In some ways it was ancient, Gray as the Homer of small things. In some ways it spoke to the moment, with a light touch of philosophical and spiritual consciousness that disclosed itself now and then. It had that artful quality of seeming artless, but somehow he had found the sweet spot where remorse and laughter meet, and it was like attending a therapy session on laughing gas.

Looking backward, he spoke for a generation of people who had learned to doubt everything conventional but couldn’t find sure satisfaction in the unconventional, even as they (and Gray) turned to Eastern spirituality as an alternative to Western tradition.

And looking forward, he helped inspire (for better and worse) a generation of memoirists, most of whom lacked his self-deprecatory humor and, instead of finding the large in the small, found their smallness in the melodramatic, self-congratulatory accounts of their tribulations.

Then again, even Gray didn’t always pull it off. As he reports in his journals, his girlfriend Renée Shafransky (who later became his first wife and his collaborator) summed up this difficulty thus: “She said I was confessional but not honest.”

This is an important distinction, one Gray struggled with often as he sought to embody his persona onstage. He confessed to things in such a disarming way that you’d forgive him, but we learn in the journals he often couldn’t forgive himself.

One problem in assessing the ­confession-honesty divide in this book is that it has been distilled from what Casey estimates are 5,000 pages of writings and journals and that his family — especially his second wife, Kathleen Russo, who has custody of them — reserved the right to remove passages they felt would be hurtful or violate privacies. Understandable, but it leaves us not entirely sure in what ways this Spalding Gray is more or less “real” than the man onstage, or whether there’s a somewhat different creature behind both. He would probably relish the mystery, and not be able to solve it himself.

He certainly was aware of the ways confessing his infidelities, for instance, hurt others, without giving him the feeling of absolution he sought, though he doesn’t seem to have realized that compulsively recounting his affairs and longings for others to those he loved and betrayed wasn’t the best way of being honest. Or indeed to have considered whether honesty of this sort is the highest virtue.

But in some ways the journals help us understand Gray’s obsessive confessional impulse and his haphazard snatching at spiritual consolation. Religion played an inordinately important role in shaping this sensibility from the beginning.

We learn that his mother’s devout Christian Science — a faith that all one had to do was recognize the perfect love that pervaded existence (every moment a perfect moment) — did not prevent her nervous breakdowns and an eventual car-exhaust suicide when Spalding was away, acting, in Texas. All of which bequeathed him a lifelong sense of guilt for not being with her at the end.

And then he plunges into downtown avant-garde New York culture and partakes of what might be called salad-bar Buddhism, a little from here, a little from there, which doesn’t seem to supply much comfort. The confessional impulse is Catholic, the ineradicable guilt sounds Jewish, the stew he makes from them all his own.

Nonetheless he becomes one of America’s great talkers and theatrical raconteurs. Mark Twain, Oscar Levant, Jean Shepherd, Fran Lebowitz, Richard Pryor are his peers. He made holding an audience in the palm of his hand seem effortless, yet his journals reveal how much he rehearsed and revised, how dedicated to acting as much as spontaneity he was — to acting as if it were all spontaneous. The persona he created became beloved — almost too beloved, in a way that sometimes trivialized him into a Seinfeldian curmudgeon — and he jetted all over the world replicating it.

And just when he seemed to have transcended all that guilt and unhappiness over happiness, through family (particularly his love for his two sons and stepdaughter with Russo), one of those absurd contingencies struck the way it struck Merton.

Gray had spent years working on a novel called “Impossible Vacation,” largely about his inability to take a vacation. When he finally did, when he and his family were invited to enjoy the pleasures of a friend’s Irish estate, one night on a lonely road, a speeding veterinary van (of all things) smashed into their car.

He suffers a broken hip, leaving him with a permanent limp, but more awful, a serious head injury that drove skull fragments into his brain and seems to have, over time, exacerbated his lifelong ­depression.

The final sections of the journals are particularly painful to read as Gray struggles to maintain his life while undergoing endless rounds of antidepressive treatments including a week in a locked ward and electroshock, none of which had much effect. He can’t stop obsessing over his decision to move to a larger house isolated from the Sag Harbor Village home where he used to be able to stroll out the door into the streets and entertain his neighbors with stories.

Finally, on a wintry night in 2004, he disappeared. Two months later his body was found on a New York City shoreline, the assumption being that he had jumped to his death from the Staten Island Ferry.

These final pages radiate some of the unbearable sadness of the end of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” Gray comes across as a genuinely noble, striving, seeking soul, felled by a malignant fate. Again, prophetically it seems, toward the close of “Swimming to Cambodia,” he tells a story of Sri Rama Krishna, “the last great poor Indian guru”: one who “was seen as a holy man and not as a psychotic. At last a naked sadhu ran out of the jungle, stuck a sharp stone between Sri Rama’s eyes and he saw Nothing.”

The big question Spalding Gray left behind, I believe, is the one raised by “Swimming to Cambodia,” and revisited several times in the journals: Is there a way to engage with genocide in art? While there is a miniaturist’s perfectionism, a minimalist’s grace and modesty, about the other monologues, what are we to make of his applying the method he used to evoke the minor trials of a downtown performance artist, with this material — the murder of millions of Cambodians by their fellow Cambodians, by once peaceful Buddhists turned insane, bloodthirsty Maoists? Even at two removes — a monologue about a minor actor in a film about a major human cataclysm — is it somehow inappropriate for him to tiptoe tipsily (the hash, the Thai whores) around the edges of the abyss as he does, recognizing our divide from it? Or has he found, somehow, a perversely respectful way of approaching the horrific tragedy? Rather than attempting to gaze directly at it, he allows that black hole to cast its malignant shadow over every quotidian act, but conspicuously avoids all but the bare facts — perhaps a rare act of artistic humility that doesn’t diminish but redeems the meta-Conradian horror at its heart?

Having read, and written about, more than my share of Holocaust literature and assimilated the arguments about the perils of its representation, I think a case can be made that Gray did the right thing. He knows the genocide is there but pays about as much direct attention to it as we did as a nation when it happened — or afterward, when (as Gray points out) we temporarily allied ourselves with the Khmer Rouge genocidaires protecting Pol Pot in the jungles. Gray performs a service in recounting the bare facts for many who might otherwise be unaware.

In its own way his monologue is as full of awe and tact, and illuminating about the way we fear to face the full extent of the horror because any response is inadequate. As one of the few responses of art to one of the dismally unusual genocides of the bloody century — auto-genocide: a people who slaughtered their own, not another, people — at the very least it serves as a critique of our superficiality. Gray’s work deserves to last and perhaps in his final dive off the Staten Island Ferry, he was, in his own way, finally bridging that divide, swimming to Cambodia.

THE JOURNALS OF SPALDING GRAY

Edited by Nell Casey

Illustrated. 340 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $28.95.
Related

Harry Adams, Elementary School, 1958

Post War Los Angeles African-American Photography
Through December 10, 2011

Cal State Nothridge Gallery as part of Pacific Standard Time

Thanks to Jim Sweeters

Canary Islands

Rebel sniper. Libya, April 2011.

NY Times Published: October 28, 2011
By DAVID GONZALEZ

Guillermo Cervera knows there is a certain risk lurking behind each assignment. In Libya, it came from the attack that claimed the lives of Tim Hetherington and Chris Hondros, who were by his side when they were felled in Misurata. In Chad, it was from a brief — though harrowing — detention, where he was threatened with torture.

Over the last few years, he has developed his own ritual for coping with the stress and trauma that accompany those assignments.

“In between conflicts, I go and photograph surfing,” he said. “I’ve always been scared by colleagues who are obsessed with war. I did not want to be like that. So I go make photos of something beautiful.”

It is a kind of therapy, though not without danger.

“If you don’t go into the surf, nothing is going to happen,” he said during a brief stay in New York this month. “You’ve got to be like a little fish, and stay calm in the water while there are crazy things going on around you.”

The sea and conflict have are in his bloodlines. He is a descendant of the Spanish admiral who lost to the United States in the Spanish-American War. His father is a former member of the Spanish Navy-turned-arms dealer. His mother used to tell him how she would float in the surf when she was pregnant with him.

Mr. Cervera is wiry and lean, looking younger than his 43 years, even if his skin has a weather-worn look. Growing up in Madrid, he first discovered the joy of photography when he discovered a box filled with Playboy magazines his father had brought back from a sojourn in the United States.

“They were beautiful color pictures, and I looked at them when my father wasn’t home,” he said. “Then my father learned what I was doing and he emptied the box of Playboys and replaced them with National Geographic.”

It was in those old magazines that he first glimpsed pictures of surfing that left him awestruck.

“I dreamed about those pictures at night,” he said. “I wanted to do that.”

Though he picked up surfing a while later, Mr. Cervera did not immediately go into photography. Instead, he came to the United States to study aerospace engineering. While in college, he discovered that photography had a calming effect on him. Restless by nature, he would emerge relaxed after hours in the darkroom.

He had returned to Madrid and was not doing much of anything in the early 1990s when a writer friend suggested they go to Bosnia to cover the conflict. He sold his motorcycle and headed off with his cameras. He and his friend hitched a ride on an armored vehicle into Mostar, where a local family gave them shelter that first night.

“The city was under siege, it was a country at war,” he recalled. “The city was destroyed. All you noticed at night were the explosions.”

He and his friend stayed for two weeks, before returning to Spain. Mr. Cervera soon found himself headed back to the war.

“I was fascinated by it,” he said. “How could human beings in Europe, with all our resources, resort to such insanity. I wanted to understand that.”

The violence affected him deeply, however. Within four months he returned to Spain and forgot about photojournalism. Instead, he opened a studio and did lucrative advertising work, doing well enough after several years that he closed up shop and planned a year-long surfing sabbatical in the Canary Islands. He stayed for seven years.

“I made beautiful surfing pictures,” he said. “But photojournalism still called out to me.”

In 2008 he went to Sri Lanka, then Chad, and ultimately, Afghanistan. This year, he was in Libya, working alongside Mr. Hetherington and Mr. Hondros. Their deaths traumatized him, he said, coming only eight months after his mother’s passing. So, once he left Libya, he went to Sumatra, and then the Azores, to photograph surfers.

There is a certain healing symbolism to his pursuit of the perfect wave.

“The water envelops you, it cleanses you,” he said. “It cleans my spirit. And that was what I needed after Libya.”

But he emphasizes that his surfing photos are not a mere diversion. He considers it just as much part of his professional life as his conflict work. Both require concentration and skill, and an ability to react quickly in the face of unexpected danger.

“Both help keep me refreshed,” he said. “I do the surfing pictures as something therapeutic. But I see my war photos as therapeutic for my surfing work, too. I value both equally.”

Link to Images

Thanks to Basil Katz

By KATIE J.M. BAKER
NY Times Published: October 26, 2011

This month, Townies goes out of town, to the other side of the continent — Los Angeles.

I first saw the sign in December 2008, during my last winter break of college. I had just driven six hours down the California coast after pulling an all-nighter in the library, and had to blink a few times before I realized that the eyesore splayed over Ventura Boulevard from one shopping center to the other wasn’t an exhaustion-induced mirage.

It was painted in garish shades of green and gold and red, like a Tex-Mex holiday card. Chunky cut-out leaves flanked the pièce de résistance, an assertion even more absurd than the sign’s design: “Encino Commons: The Valley’s Miracle Mile.”

I grew up in Encino, a suburb in the San Fernando Valley best known as the setting for the Razzie-Award-winning “Encino Man,” and the 1982 Frank Zappa hit “Valley Girl.” It’s about 20 miles northwest of the original Miracle Mile on Wilshire Boulevard, which is studded with historic Art Deco buildings, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the La Brea Tar Pits. In contrast, Encino’s Miracle Mile boasts a CVS Pharmacy, a Starbucks, a Verizon Wireless outpost and the dubiously named Plaza de Oro.

The most miraculous event that ever occurred in Encino was when a fledgling restaurant managed to stay open for more than a year.

I remembered Zappa as I drove under the sign that night. “Encino is, like, so bitchin’,” Moon Unit quips on her father’s track. “There’s, like, the Galleria, and, like, all these, like, really great shoe stores, I, like, love going into, like, clothing stores and stuff, I like to buy the neatest miniskirts and stuff.” The sign, I thought, wasn’t actually all that ludicrous. It celebrated Encino’s most treasured commodity: expendable stuff. The most miraculous event that ever occurred at the Encino Commons shopping center was when a fledgling restaurant managed to stay open for more than a year. Even though I had moved away four years earlier, it embarrassed me.

People choose to live in Encino for a variety of reasons — chiefly because they can own more land there for considerably less money than over the hill — but few move there expecting a culturally enriching environment. Why couldn’t we just quietly acknowledge our inferiority, taking solace in our swimming pools and parking spots? Why did we have to pretend Encino was something it wasn’t?
Hannah K. Lee

That winter break, bored in the Valley, I couldn’t stop thinking about the sign. I wondered if other Encino residents were as mortified by the “miraculous” tag as I was. A quick search through the November 2008 Encino Neighborhood Council’s minutes confirmed that the sign’s tacky paint job had barely dried before the council members filed a complaint against the Encino Commons Signage Committee for putting it up without first giving sufficient notice.

“The sign’s actual purpose is to benefit nearby businesses,” the minutes read. “It is a marketing tool. It did not take into account what the community would like to see represented.”

“Duh,” I thought to myself, in Valley-Girl speak. No community wants to be represented by a delusional sign dedicated to shopping.

But I was shocked to discover that my outraged neighbors weren’t bitter Valleyites who wished they had enough money to live in Beverly Hills. Instead, they were loyal residents — some of whom were second- and even third-generation Encino-dwellers — who wanted the neighborhood to be defined not by Encino Commons’ lackluster shopping opportunities, but by Encino’s surprisingly fascinating history, and by their steadfast belief that it has always been a serene refuge from the commotion over the hill.

I had never made any attempt to learn my neighborhood’s history; I just assumed it didn’t have one. But, as it turns out, the saga of the entire San Fernando Valley began there. In 1769, the Spanish governor of Baja California, Gaspar de Portolá, landed and led a mission up the coast, passing through an American Indian village inhabited by the Tongva people near present-day Encino. The area was dotted with oak trees — encinos, in Spanish — so his expedition proclaimed the entire San Fernando Valley “El Valle de Santa Catalina de Bononia de los Encinos.”

Almost a century later, a rancher named Vicente de la Osa built one of the most important trading posts in the area for the hundreds of thousands of gold miners pouring into California. Mr. de la Osa’s adobe ranch still stands in Los Encinos State Historic Park — a park I didn’t even know existed, although it’s less than a mile from my house.

Back then, people saw the Valley as a place to escape to, not from. Mr. de la Osa helped establish Encino’s Eden-esque reputation by taking out swanky advertisements in the Los Angeles Star encouraging travelers to bypass cheaper outposts and stay at his ranch, where, according to Major Horace Bell in “Reminiscences of a Ranger,” visitors could “refresh the inner man” by enjoying the large vineyards, abundant fruit trees and fresh springs. Edgar Rice Burroughs (author of the Tarzan books) called the area “the playground of Los Angeles,” and wrote articles about how the community was a place to live life “free from conventionalities and restrictions of cities, yet with all the comforts and luxuries to which we have been accustomed.”

Back then, people saw the Valley as a place to escape to, not from.

Celebrities bought property in the area; Clark Gable grew oranges in his Encino garden, and Mickey Rooney tanned by the pool. At the library, I found a 1948 Encino Sun Valley Motor Inn postcard that proudly declared, “stars come to rest at beautiful Sun Valley, 15 minutes to Hollywood.”

My research triggered a long-forgotten memory of driving down Ventura Boulevard with my family on the way from our old house in North Hollywood to our new one in Encino. My father pointed out all of the new restaurants we could eat at and the 31 Flavors that I could walk to all by myself. I had liked Encino then — I’d forgotten that.

I wasn’t allowed to explore North Hollywood alone because we lived close to what my mother called a “gang neighborhood,” and our garage had been broken into numerous times. But in Encino, my friends and I could spend unsupervised afternoons debating the merits of various Jamba Juice smoothies and riding up and down the outdoor escalator, spying on high school boys treating their after-school carpools to frozen yogurt. I decorated the walls of my new bedroom with ads from teen magazines I bought down the street at CVS; foamy-mustached Got Milk stars, bobble-faced Hard Candy cartoon girls, photos of celebrities my friends thought were hot.

But the strip malls got old after a year or two, around the same time I stopped thinking a varied selection of tabloids made for fulfilling reading (or sophisticated room décor). We ate at all of the restaurants; none of them were very good. My painstakingly created shrine to teenage consumer culture began to disgust me, but I never redecorated; I was too busy moving on to better things.

In 1930, Encino had just 935 residents. But soon after World War II, property developers and chain franchises began to infiltrate the area. In 1956, a city planning consultant was one of the first to publicly comment on the new stores lining Ventura Boulevard, calling recent changes “violently ugly and blighting to the residential areas fringing it … this makes for monotony not only of view but of inhabitants.”

By the 1980s, tension between Encino’s commercial and residential interests had reached a breaking point. Even The New York Times reported on the issue, quoting Gerald Silver, who is now president of the Homeowners of Encino: “Now Ventura Boulevard is beginning to look like Third Avenue in New York … We did not know we were moving to Manhattan when we moved to Encino.” Homeowner activists fought against mega-movie theaters and the demolishing of houses to make way for parking lots. “I cry every night,” one resident told a local paper. “This was an elegant neighborhood. Now it’s a nightmare.”

It wasn’t until I went away to college that my Valley apathy blossomed into resentment. I couldn’t wait to get to Berkeley and lose myself in the anonymity of 20,000 undergraduates who had no idea who I was or where I came from. But, as luck would have it, all of the close friends I made at college were from the “real” Los Angeles.

“Encino is not L.A.,” they’d snicker whenever I told someone I lived in Los Angeles, before clarifying that they lived in the “city,” as if I lived in Bakersfield instead of 15 minutes away — in the hills, no less! They didn’t mean to hurt my feelings, but their withering disdain for Encino made me think less of myself. It was one thing for me to make fun of my Valley Girl tendencies, but it stung when others teased me for talking so quickly, or twirling my hair when I was nervous. When home for breaks, I’d tell my new friends to bypass the freeway — by far the fastest route — and take one of the twisty, scenic canyon roads instead, in hopes that they wouldn’t notice passing from the legitimate L.A. to the land of strip malls and Frappuccino-slurping, platform-sandal-clomping teenage girls.

In retrospect, this was pathetic. I was like a balding man with a comb-over, or one of those women who wear bright prints to distract from their pear-shaped bottoms. Some things are impossible to disguise.

My first serious college boyfriend was from Westwood, down the street from U.C.L.A. I’ll always remember one fight we had. It was summer, which meant that it was constantly 15 degrees hotter in the Valley than in the city. It was one of the rare occasions we were at my house instead of his — he never wanted to trek to my place, even though it was larger and offered more privacy — and we decided to rent a movie. The closest Blockbuster with the DVD we wanted was in Northridge, an area northwest of my house that makes Encino look kind of like Paris. I groaned about how far away it was, and was embarrassed when — in the middle of the day, without traffic — it took us only about 10 minutes to get there.

“You’re ridiculous,” my boyfriend said. “Why do you pretend you don’t live in the Valley?”

“I don’t, really,” I insisted. “This isn’t close to my house at all!”

“Are you kidding? You’re way closer to Northridge than you are to the city,” he laughed.

Something in me snapped then, and I jumped out of the car before he could see that I’d started to cry. I stood in the middle of the strip mall, letting the fast food restaurants and unclaimed parking spots and discount plus-size clothing stores blur together, while he peered out at me, bewildered, from the still-running car.

I had spent so much time distancing myself from the Valley in my head that it was difficult for me to accept actual, geographic dimensions. It wasn’t fair. The only miracle I could imagine happening in Encino was me escaping it.

In the November 2008 Neighborhood Council meeting, the members debated what to do about the sign. According to the minutes, the president and executive director of Encino Commons were invited to attend the meeting, but declined. Some council members wanted the sign taken down completely, while others had minor suggestions, such as extracting all text from the sign and replacing it with a graphic of an oak tree, or adding the year Encino was established. Still others wanted to replace the “Miracle Mile” moniker with “Business District,” to make it clear that the sign was representative of commerce, not the community.

The council members left the meeting full of (slightly bitter) hope, resolving to “voice strong opposition and force change.” This rebellion, I realized, was not a matter of Encino Shame, but of Encino Pride. How could I have been so mistaken? The issue wasn’t that Encino was less than miraculous. The residents just didn’t want their neighborhood to be remembered as a soulless strip mall.

In early 2009, it seemed as if the Neighborhood Council had won — notes from a February meeting stated that the “Valley’s Miracle Mile” wording and some surrounding foliage would be removed, and that the council was ready to vote to take down the entire sign if Encino Commons failed to comply.

But now, almost three years later, the sign is still up and very much intact. Louis Krokover, the Encino Neighborhood Council’s president, told me in an e-mail that council members are still looking into the matter, “for the good of the community.”

“I get about three to five calls per week asking what is going on with that ugly sign and why the community had no say in the design and matter,” he wrote. The council seems to have given up and moved on to other issues; most recently, the slated closing, due to budget cuts, of Los Encinos State Historic Park. Or maybe — like me and my decoupaged Teen-Dream walls — they just got used to it.

Last month, I decided to pay a visit to one of the Encino landmarks I discovered while researching the sign: a 1,000-year-old oak tree stump that stands only a block from my house. “When the famed Lang oak tree of Encino was but a sapling, the Mayan Empire was crumbling and Vikings were sacking English sea towns,” The Los Angeles Times once wrote of the tree, which was recognized as the oldest in the city until it was destroyed by El Niño in 1998. When I lived in Encino, I had no clue that the tree ever existed — it was just a weird block of wood that I sometimes passed on my way to the pharmacy. Still, I thought I’d stop by the remnants to see if I felt any of that fleeting Encino pride.

The dusty stump was strewn with trash. A Jetta drove by, blasting Top 40 at full volume. It was hot, so I got back in my car and drove away.

Am I proud to call Encino my hometown? Not exactly. But sometimes, to entertain myself while running errands for my parents under the Miracle Mile sign, I imagine that the balding men running out of their double-parked Mercedes-Benzes to pick up their children’s allergy prescriptions are actually defiant homeowners marching down Ventura, protest signs in hand. I wonder if the orange trees growing in my parents’ backyard are descended from those of Clark Gable’s estate. I stand in my cul-de-sac at night and feel the chill of Tongva ghosts brushing past my goose-bumped skin. Those are the times when I feel more resentful of Encino’s reputation than I do of Encino itself.

“The Center”, 2011
glass, botanical healing water, water, wood

November 12 – December 10

Taka Ishii

Mark Grotjahn, Untitled (Blue Face Grotjahn), 2005, Oil on linen, 61 x 49 inches, 154.9 x 124.5 cm.

By Jori Finkel, Los Angeles Times
October 25, 2011

An acclaimed Los Angeles artist who has sued a prominent local collector to enforce the California “resale royalty” law could get his day in court long before the plaintiffs in class-action suits filed last week against Christie’s and Sotheby’s.

Artist Mark Grotjahn has sued collector Dean Valentine to recover a 5% royalty for three artworks that Valentine resold. The case, which has been quietly working its way through the courts for nearly a year, now has a trial date in March.

Grotjahn, who shows with the galleries Blum & Poe in Los Angeles and Gagosian in London, has works in major museums. His last L.A. show was described by Times critic Christopher Knight as “sumptuous and mesmerizing — one of the most beautiful painting shows in recent memory.”

A media and Internet entrepreneur who was previously president of the UPN television network, Valentine serves as a trustee at the Hammer Museum. He has a reputation for discovering artists early, before the masses catch on.

Just five years ago, Valentine would have been described as one of Grotjahn’s most ardent and active supporters. Now the two are no longer speaking.

Grotjahn said he’s been paid his 5% royalty by collectors more than a dozen times. “When they first started selling my stuff at auction, I’d have my dealers ask collectors for the royalty. A lot of people would hem and haw — I wouldn’t say they gave the money happily, but they paid, I think out of respect for me. At this point as far as I know, I only have one person who has refused to pay, and that’s Dean.”

“I think Dean’s made $3 million off of buying and selling my work, so this is a really lame thing to do,” Grotjahn added, noting that Valentine had bought some of his early works for less than $10,000. His paintings, including one that Valentine resold, have since topped $1 million.

Valentine says that he is not paying the fee as a matter of principle. “As a California resident I don’t believe I should be disadvantaged in collecting or reselling art. I’m being treated unfairly. I’m a big believer that there should be some kind of national royalty here, like in France, but I don’t see any reason why I should have to pay in a situation when other collectors do not.”

He declined to comment on how much money he has made by reselling Grotjahn’s work. “This is not about impoverished artists versus rich collectors, which is how a lot of people will try to frame it,” he said. “This is about a law that is incredibly poorly written and discriminatory.”

The law that pits Grotjahn against Valentine was signed by Gov. Jerry Brown in 1976, when the contemporary art market was still in its infancy. Robert Rauschenberg, frustrated at seeing collectors profit from flipping his work at auction, helped lobby for its passage. Similar legislation was defeated in New York; California is the only state with a resale royalty for visual artists.

The California Resale Royalty Act specifies that artists whose work is resold are entitled to 5% of the sales price if the transaction takes place in California or the seller resides in the state and that certain other conditions are met. The percentage applies to sales amounts (not profits) exceeding $1,000. The resold work must be “an original painting, sculpture, or drawing, or an original work of art in glass.”

Grotjahn filed suit against Valentine last October in California state court under the name “Baby Moose Drawings Inc.” — the artist has used “baby moose” in place of a signature on his paintings. According to the complaint, Valentine failed to pay Grotjahn the full 5% fee on three occasions. The biggest sale in dispute took place in 2008 at the New York auction house Phillips de Pury and Co., when Valentine sold an untitled oil on linen painting from 2005 known as “Blue Face Grotjahn” for $1,217,000, including premium.

Earlier this year, Valentine’s lawyers were able to move the case to federal court on the grounds that the law interferes with the Copyright Act of 1976 — an argument that many expect Christie’s and Sotheby’s to revisit should the class-action suits go forward.

But the argument didn’t fly with U.S. District Court Judge Jacqueline J. Nguyen. She found that the Royalty Act “does not infringe on the exclusive rights delineated in the Copyright Act,” providing a “qualitatively different” right than copyright holders receive. She sent the case back to state court.

A trial has been set for March 6, and Grotjahn’s attorney, Lonnie Blanchard, says he is optimistic. “The statute says: If you sell, you pay. And at this point in our case its constitutionality has been upheld.”

“It’s such a funny thing to me that there’s controversy about this,” he added. “We are so used to having royalties go to musicians and movie stars when their things are being replayed.”

Valentine’s Washington, D.C.-based attorney Josh Kaufman is working to avoid a trial. He has filed a motion for summary judgment, asking the judge to decide the case based on interpretation of the law.

“Our position at this point is very simple,” he said. “As we spelled out in the proceedings, Mr. Valentine didn’t sell any of the works [directly], he used a third party. And the language of the law is clear: Whether at an auction or gallery, when a third party sells the work, it’s incumbent on them to collect the fees and distribute them.”

Kaufman said there has been “very little litigation around the statue. There may have been trial level lawsuits between people, but nothing that’s gone up to appellate court that’s made or changed the law.”

Blanchard says there is a lack of case law in part because artists have a hard time tracking when resales occur. “If a work is sold at auction it’s a public record, but sometimes work is sold between collectors, or collectors and galleries, and the artist has no way of knowing about it,” he said.

Then there’s that many artists, who depend on collectors, galleries and even auction houses in the delicate ecosystem of the art world, are simply afraid to rock the boat.

Or else they can’t afford to. The artists who could benefit the most from a 5% royalty have not, historically, been the ones to aggressively pursue their fees. The irony is not lost on Grotjahn.

“This law is not enforced,” says Grotjahn. “To collect your money, you have to get a lawyer. It’s a pain in the neck and it’s expensive. Most artists don’t have the money to do this.”

Through December 3, 2011

Richard Telles

Jim Wilson/The New York Times

While other schools in the region brag about their wired classrooms, the Waldorf school embraces a simple, retro look — blackboards with colorful chalk, bookshelves with encyclopedias, wooden desks filled with workbooks and No. 2 pencils.

By MATT RICHTEL
NY Times Published: October 22, 2011

LOS ALTOS, Calif. — The chief technology officer of eBay sends his children to a nine-classroom school here. So do employees of Silicon Valley giants like Google, Apple, Yahoo and Hewlett-Packard.

But the school’s chief teaching tools are anything but high-tech: pens and paper, knitting needles and, occasionally, mud. Not a computer to be found. No screens at all. They are not allowed in the classroom, and the school even frowns on their use at home.

Schools nationwide have rushed to supply their classrooms with computers, and many policy makers say it is foolish to do otherwise. But the contrarian point of view can be found at the epicenter of the tech economy, where some parents and educators have a message: computers and schools don’t mix.

This is the Waldorf School of the Peninsula, one of around 160 Waldorf schools in the country that subscribe to a teaching philosophy focused on physical activity and learning through creative, hands-on tasks. Those who endorse this approach say computers inhibit creative thinking, movement, human interaction and attention spans.

The Waldorf method is nearly a century old, but its foothold here among the digerati puts into sharp relief an intensifying debate about the role of computers in education.

“I fundamentally reject the notion you need technology aids in grammar school,” said Alan Eagle, 50, whose daughter, Andie, is one of the 196 children at the Waldorf elementary school; his son William, 13, is at the nearby middle school. “The idea that an app on an iPad can better teach my kids to read or do arithmetic, that’s ridiculous.”

Mr. Eagle knows a bit about technology. He holds a computer science degree from Dartmouth and works in executive communications at Google, where he has written speeches for the chairman, Eric E. Schmidt. He uses an iPad and a smartphone. But he says his daughter, a fifth grader, “doesn’t know how to use Google,” and his son is just learning. (Starting in eighth grade, the school endorses the limited use of gadgets.)

Three-quarters of the students here have parents with a strong high-tech connection. Mr. Eagle, like other parents, sees no contradiction. Technology, he says, has its time and place: “If I worked at Miramax and made good, artsy, rated R movies, I wouldn’t want my kids to see them until they were 17.”

While other schools in the region brag about their wired classrooms, the Waldorf school embraces a simple, retro look — blackboards with colorful chalk, bookshelves with encyclopedias, wooden desks filled with workbooks and No. 2 pencils.

On a recent Tuesday, Andie Eagle and her fifth-grade classmates refreshed their knitting skills, crisscrossing wooden needles around balls of yarn, making fabric swatches. It’s an activity the school says helps develop problem-solving, patterning, math skills and coordination. The long-term goal: make socks.

Down the hall, a teacher drilled third-graders on multiplication by asking them to pretend to turn their bodies into lightning bolts. She asked them a math problem — four times five — and, in unison, they shouted “20” and zapped their fingers at the number on the blackboard. A roomful of human calculators.

In second grade, students standing in a circle learned language skills by repeating verses after the teacher, while simultaneously playing catch with bean bags. It’s an exercise aimed at synchronizing body and brain. Here, as in other classes, the day can start with a recitation or verse about God that reflects a nondenominational emphasis on the divine.

Andie’s teacher, Cathy Waheed, who is a former computer engineer, tries to make learning both irresistible and highly tactile. Last year she taught fractions by having the children cut up food — apples, quesadillas, cake — into quarters, halves and sixteenths.

“For three weeks, we ate our way through fractions,” she said. “When I made enough fractional pieces of cake to feed everyone, do you think I had their attention?”

Some education experts say that the push to equip classrooms with computers is unwarranted because studies do not clearly show that this leads to better test scores or other measurable gains.

Is learning through cake fractions and knitting any better? The Waldorf advocates make it tough to compare, partly because as private schools they administer no standardized tests in elementary grades. And they would be the first to admit that their early-grade students may not score well on such tests because, they say, they don’t drill them on a standardized math and reading curriculum.

When asked for evidence of the schools’ effectiveness, the Association of Waldorf Schools of North America points to research by an affiliated group showing that 94 percent of students graduating from Waldorf high schools in the United States between 1994 and 2004 attended college, with many heading to prestigious institutions like Oberlin, Berkeley and Vassar.

Of course, that figure may not be surprising, given that these are students from families that value education highly enough to seek out a selective private school, and usually have the means to pay for it. And it is difficult to separate the effects of the low-tech instructional methods from other factors. For example, parents of students at the Los Altos school say it attracts great teachers who go through extensive training in the Waldorf approach, creating a strong sense of mission that can be lacking in other schools.

Absent clear evidence, the debate comes down to subjectivity, parental choice and a difference of opinion over a single world: engagement. Advocates for equipping schools with technology say computers can hold students’ attention and, in fact, that young people who have been weaned on electronic devices will not tune in without them.

Ann Flynn, director of education technology for the National School Boards Association, which represents school boards nationwide, said computers were essential. “If schools have access to the tools and can afford them, but are not using the tools, they are cheating our children,” Ms. Flynn said.

Paul Thomas, a former teacher and an associate professor of education at Furman University, who has written 12 books about public educational methods, disagreed, saying that “a spare approach to technology in the classroom will always benefit learning.”

“Teaching is a human experience,” he said. “Technology is a distraction when we need literacy, numeracy and critical thinking.”

And Waldorf parents argue that real engagement comes from great teachers with interesting lesson plans.

“Engagement is about human contact, the contact with the teacher, the contact with their peers,” said Pierre Laurent, 50, who works at a high-tech start-up and formerly worked at Intel and Microsoft. He has three children in Waldorf schools, which so impressed the family that his wife, Monica, joined one as a teacher in 2006.

And where advocates for stocking classrooms with technology say children need computer time to compete in the modern world, Waldorf parents counter: what’s the rush, given how easy it is to pick up those skills?

“It’s supereasy. It’s like learning to use toothpaste,” Mr. Eagle said. “At Google and all these places, we make technology as brain-dead easy to use as possible. There’s no reason why kids can’t figure it out when they get older.”

There are also plenty of high-tech parents at a Waldorf school in San Francisco and just north of it at the Greenwood School in Mill Valley, which doesn’t have Waldorf accreditation but is inspired by its principles.

California has some 40 Waldorf schools, giving it a disproportionate share — perhaps because the movement is growing roots here, said Lucy Wurtz, who, along with her husband, Brad, helped found the Waldorf high school in Los Altos in 2007. Mr. Wurtz is chief executive of Power Assure, which helps computer data centers reduce their energy load.

The Waldorf experience does not come cheap: annual tuition at the Silicon Valley schools is $17,750 for kindergarten through eighth grade and $24,400 for high school, though Ms. Wurtz said financial assistance was available. She says the typical Waldorf parent, who has a range of elite private and public schools to choose from, tends to be liberal and highly educated, with strong views about education; they also have a knowledge that when they are ready to teach their children about technology they have ample access and expertise at home.

The students, meanwhile, say they don’t pine for technology, nor have they gone completely cold turkey. Andie Eagle and her fifth-grade classmates say they occasionally watch movies. One girl, whose father works as an Apple engineer, says he sometimes asks her to test games he is debugging. One boy plays with flight-simulator programs on weekends.

The students say they can become frustrated when their parents and relatives get so wrapped up in phones and other devices. Aurad Kamkar, 11, said he recently went to visit cousins and found himself sitting around with five of them playing with their gadgets, not paying attention to him or each other. He started waving his arms at them: “I said: ‘Hello guys, I’m here.’ ”

Finn Heilig, 10, whose father works at Google, says he liked learning with pen and paper — rather than on a computer — because he could monitor his progress over the years.

“You can look back and see how sloppy your handwriting was in first grade. You can’t do that with computers ’cause all the letters are the same,” Finn said. “Besides, if you learn to write on paper, you can still write if water spills on the computer or the power goes out.”

Gary Lincoff, left, and Dennis Aita, seated, led a mushroom-hunting foray at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx last Saturday.Alan Zale for The New York Times

By ANDY NEWMAN
NY Times Published: October 21, 2011

In midsummer, the prized black trumpet sounded its horn from the forest floor in the Bronx. The coral-pink Merulius, never before seen east of Ohio, turned up in a park in Queens.

Then came the near-hurricane, and clusters of aptly named Phallus rubicundus, the giant stinkhorn, rudely reared their slimy heads from piles of wood mulch in Prospect Park. In Harlem, gray-brown umbrellas sprouted stalactite-like from a couple’s apartment ceiling.

Now, in the drenched autumn of what is already the fourth wettest year ever recorded in New York City, the creamy-white giant puffballs have reached the size of human skulls. And in Central Park, beside the lawns carpeted with amber honey mushroom, dense frills of delectable hen-of-the-woods explode from oak trunks by the bushelful, tempting those who would bend the city ban on foraging in parks (it mentions only “vegetation,” and mushrooms, after all, are not plants) and mocking the foodies who pay $35 a pound and up at the gourmet grocer nearby.

In and around the city, seemingly from every nook, cranny and sidewalk crack, in cemeteries and street-tree pits and median strips, months of biblical rains have yielded a prodigious harvest of mushrooms in a riot of rainbow colors and in every possible shape, size, texture and degree of edibility – savory, poisonous, even psychotropic.

“It’s that kind of year that people will talk about in the future: ‘Remember 2011, the year the hen took over New York?’ ” said Gary Lincoff, author of “The Complete Mushroom Hunter” and an instructor of a mushroom-identification class at the New York Botanical Garden. “Two years ago, I found one hen-of-the-woods in Central Park. This year I’m finding two or three clumps per tree.”

New Yorkers who seldom pay attention to nature have taken note, too. “A group of grotesque white mushrooms growing in a planter on 88th Street between Riverside Drive and West End Avenue are attracting large crowds,” the blog West Side Rag reported last month in a piece that read like a “War of the Worlds” dispatch.

In some quarters, the mushroom visitors have been less than welcome. After the August earthquake cracked open the roof of his building in Kensington, Brooklyn, and Tropical Storm Irene brought gallons of rain into his top-floor apartment, Ryan Meisheid, 29, found off-white mini-toadstools sprouting from the ceiling. He got out the bleach. “Mushrooms inside my apartment where they should not be growing equals bad,” he said.

In Harlem, in an apartment plagued with leaks, Nicole Press, a stage manager, was getting a massage from her husband one night when something in the corner up above caught her eye.
Inky caps growing at the ceiling joint of a leaky apartment in Harlem in September.Nicole PressInky caps growing at the ceiling joint of a leaky apartment in Harlem in September.

“In the shadows of the candle I just saw this dark thing,” she said. Four cone-headed mushrooms protruded where wall met ceiling; they had not been there in the morning. Mr. Lincoff identified them, from a photograph Ms. Press had sent in, as inky caps. They make a great soup stock, he said. Alternatively, he said, “if you put it on a plate, it’ll disintegrate and turn into a muck, and you can use it to paint a picture.”

Even in a normal year, Mr. Lincoff said, “The city is a phenomenal place to go mushrooming.” A continuing survey by the New York Mycological Society has turned up over 500 different mushrooms in the city, more than 200 in Central Park alone.

The key is New York’s mix of wild and cultivated nature. “The city has 20 different oak species, some introduced, some native, and they all support different kinds of mushrooms,” he said.

Mushroom spores, Mr. Lincoff said, are all around us, floating on the air. All they need is moisture and a little bit of food to set down rootlike mycelia and send up fruiting bodies, as the above-ground portions of the mushroom are known. Lots of things can qualify as food. Last year, Mr. Lincoff said, he got a call when oyster mushrooms shot up between the floor tiles of a radiation center at a Brooklyn hospital. “They somehow imagined mushrooms and radiation go together and thought maybe the mushrooms were indicating a radiation leak,” he recalled. The mushrooms had simply been eating the glue that held the tiles.

While some edible mushrooms are so distinctive that even a novice can pick them without fear — giant puffballs, or chicken-of-the-woods, a yellow-orange explosion that appears on logs (and does, indeed, taste like chicken) — mycologists recommend that amateurs not eat questionable specimens without confirming their identity using a guidebook and spore prints. This includes the varyingly hallucinogenic species known to grow in the New York area, most of which are legal to possess.

At the mycological society’s weekly show-and-tell at a community center in TriBeCa on Monday, members nibbled on gin-marinated nuggets of a nutty fungus known as aborted pinkgill and gathered at a table laid with specimens resembling, among other things, clumps of orange hair, purulent pink-red pimples, delicate petrified bone, giant rusty amoeba crawling across a branch, and tiny bird’s nests complete with tinier eggs.
One hunter on the foray at Woodlawn found a rooting collybia.Alan Zale for The New York TimesRooting collybia, found at Woodlawn Cemetery.

Mr. Lincoff bestowed “best in show” honors on a crabmeat-like bearded hedgehog, occasionally spotted in very expensive restaurants. One member, Ethan Crenson, waved around a rotting oyster mushroom the size of a hand fan he had found in Prospect Park that afternoon. “There were four or five others like it,” he said.

Two days before, Mr. Lincoff had been one of the leaders of the mycological society’s annual hunt in Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, a majestic 400-acre haven of dignified decay. On a crisp morning, two dozen seekers fanned out like grownups at an Easter egg hunt, lifting low-hanging branches and peering around the corners of mausoleums.

Beneath a juniper tree, Mr. Lincoff found a small knife. “Here’s a good sign,” he said. “That’s not the sign of a murderer. That’s a sign of a mushroom hunter who left his knife here.”

A professor from New Zealand brought over a handful of firm-fleshed tawny mushrooms, their undersides tinged corpsy blue. “You’ve found the jackpot,” Mr. Lincoff said: the fall’s first specimens of blewit, a choice edible “more like an entree than a side dish.”

Afterwards, on a picnic table near the cemetery entrance, Athena Kokoronis, a choreographer who has worked with Mr. Lincoff on a ballet about mushrooms, set down a paper shopping bag bulging with hen-of-the-woods. She explained her foraging technique.

“Every time I saw a large tree, I danced around the entire tree, and then went on to the next one.”
She stepped away to demonstrate and – “Oh! I think I just stepped on a mushroom.”

By DAVID BROOKS
NY Times Published: October 20, 2011

Daniel Kahneman spent part of his childhood in Nazi-occupied Paris. Like the other Jews, he had to wear a Star of David on the outside of his clothing. One evening, when he was about 7 years old, he stayed late at a friend’s house, past the 6 p.m. curfew.

He turned his sweater inside out to hide the star and tried to sneak home. A German SS trooper approached him on the street, picked him up and gave him a long, emotional hug. The soldier displayed a photo of his own son, spoke passionately about how much he missed him and gave Kahneman some money as a sentimental present. The whole time Kahneman was terrified that the SS trooper might notice the yellow star peeking out from inside his sweater.

Kahneman finally made it home, convinced that people are complicated and bizarre. He went on to become one of the world’s most influential psychologists and to win the Nobel in economic science.

Kahneman doesn’t actually tell that childhood story in his forthcoming book. “Thinking, Fast and Slow” is an intellectual memoir, not a personal one. The book is, nonetheless, sure to be a major intellectual event (look for an excerpt in The Times Magazine this Sunday) because it superbly encapsulates Kahneman’s research, and the vast tide of work that has been sparked by it.

I’d like to use this column not to summarize the book but to describe why I think Kahneman and his research partner, the late Amos Tversky, will be remembered hundreds of years from now, and how their work helped instigate a cultural shift that is already producing astounding results.

Before Kahneman and Tversky, people who thought about social problems and human behavior tended to assume that we are mostly rational agents. They assumed that people have control over the most important parts of their own thinking. They assumed that people are basically sensible utility-maximizers and that when they depart from reason it’s because some passion like fear or love has distorted their judgment.

Kahneman and Tversky conducted experiments. They proved that actual human behavior often deviates from the old models and that the flaws are not just in the passions but in the machinery of cognition. They demonstrated that people rely on unconscious biases and rules of thumb to navigate the world, for good and ill. Many of these biases have become famous: priming, framing, loss-aversion.

Kahneman reports on some delightful recent illustrations from other researchers. Pro golfers putt more accurately from all distances when putting for par than when putting for birdie because they fear the bogie more than they desire the birdie. Israeli parole boards grant parole to about 35 percent of the prisoners they see, except when they hear a case in the hour just after mealtime. In those cases, they grant parole 65 percent of the time. Shoppers will buy many more cans of soup if you put a sign atop the display that reads “Limit 12 per customer.”

Kahneman and Tversky were not given to broad claims. But the work they and others did led to the reappreciation of several old big ideas:

We are dual process thinkers. We have two interrelated systems running in our heads. One is slow, deliberate and arduous (our conscious reasoning). The other is fast, associative, automatic and supple (our unconscious pattern recognition). There is now a complex debate over the relative strengths and weaknesses of these two systems. In popular terms, think of it as the debate between “Moneyball” (look at the data) and “Blink” (go with your intuition).

We are not blank slates. All humans seem to share similar sets of biases. There is such a thing as universal human nature. The trick is to understand the universals and how tightly or loosely they tie us down.

We are players in a game we don’t understand. Most of our own thinking is below awareness. Fifty years ago, people may have assumed we are captains of our own ships, but, in fact, our behavior is often aroused by context in ways we can’t see. Our biases frequently cause us to want the wrong things. Our perceptions and memories are slippery, especially about our own mental states. Our free will is bounded. We have much less control over ourselves than we thought.

This research yielded a different vision of human nature and a different set of debates. The work of Kahneman and Tversky was a crucial pivot point in the way we see ourselves.

They also figured out ways to navigate around our shortcomings. Kahneman champions the idea of “adversarial collaboration” — when studying something, work with people you disagree with. Tversky had a wise maxim: “Let us take what the terrain gives.” Don’t overreach. Understand what your circumstances are offering.

Many people are exploring the inner wilderness. Kahneman and Tversky are like the Lewis and Clark of the mind.

Untitled, 1961
Mirrored glass, wood, paint
12 x 12 x 5 in.

October 22-November 26, 20

Frank Lloyd

By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Times Published: October 20, 2011

Last month President Obama finally unveiled a serious economic stimulus plan — far short of what I’d like to see, but a step in the right direction. Republicans, predictably, have blocked it. But the new plan, combined with the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations, seems to have shifted the national conversation. We are, suddenly, focused on what we should have been talking about all along: jobs.

So what is the G.O.P. jobs plan? The answer, in large part, is to allow more pollution. So what you need to know is that weakening environmental regulations would do little to create jobs and would make us both poorer and sicker.

Now it would be wrong to say that all Republicans see increased pollution as the answer to unemployment. Herman Cain says that the unemployed are responsible for their own plight — a claim that, at Tuesday’s presidential debate, was met with wild applause.

Both Rick Perry and Mitt Romney have, however, put weakened environmental protection at the core of their economic proposals, as have Senate Republicans. Mr. Perry has put out a specific number — 1.2 million jobs — that appears to be based on a study released by the American Petroleum Institute, a trade association, claiming favorable employment effects from removing restrictions on oil and gas extraction. The same study lies behind the claims of Senate Republicans.

But does this oil-industry-backed study actually make a serious case for weaker environmental protection as a job-creation strategy? No.

Part of the problem is that the study relies heavily on an assumed “multiplier” effect, in which every new job in energy leads indirectly to the creation of 2.5 jobs elsewhere. Republicans, you may recall, were scornful of claims that government aid that helps avoid layoffs of schoolteachers also indirectly helps save jobs in the private sector. But I guess the laws of economics change when it’s an oil company rather than a school district doing the hiring.

Moreover, even if you take the study’s claims at face value, it offers little reason to believe that dirtier air and water can solve our current employment crisis. All the big numbers in the report are projections for late this decade. The report predicts fewer than 200,000 jobs next year, and fewer than 700,000 even by 2015.

You might want to compare these numbers with a couple of other numbers: the 14 million Americans currently unemployed, and the one million to two million jobs that independent estimates suggest the Obama plan would create, not in the distant future, but in 2012.

More pollution, then, isn’t the route to full employment. But is there a longer-term economic case for less environmental protection? No. Serious economic analysis actually says that we need more protection, not less.

The important thing to understand is that the case for pollution control isn’t based on some kind of aesthetic distaste for industrial society. Pollution does real, measurable damage, especially to human health.

And policy makers should take that damage into account. We need more politicians like the courageous governor who supported environmental controls on a coal-fired power plant, despite warnings that the plant might be closed, because “I will not create jobs or hold jobs that kill people.”

Actually, that was Mitt Romney, back in 2003 — the same politician who now demands that we use more coal.

How big are these damages? A new study by researchers at Yale and Middlebury College brings together data from a variety of sources to put a dollar value on the environmental damage various industries inflict. The estimates are far from comprehensive, since they only consider air pollution, and they make no effort to address longer-term issues such as climate change. Even so, the results are stunning.

For it turns out that there are a number of industries inflicting environmental damage that’s worth more than the sum of the wages they pay and the profits they earn — which means, in effect, that they destroy value rather than create it. High on the list, by the way, is coal-fired electricity generation, which the Mitt Romney-that-was used to stand up to.

As the study’s authors say, finding that an industry inflicts large environmental damage compared with its apparent economic return doesn’t necessarily mean that the industry should be shut down. What it means, instead, is that “the regulated levels of emissions from the industry are too high.” That is, environmental regulations aren’t strict enough.

Republicans, of course, have strong incentives to claim otherwise: the big value-destroying industries are concentrated in the energy and natural resources sector, which overwhelmingly donates to the G.O.P. But the reality is that more pollution wouldn’t solve our jobs problem. All it would do is make us poorer and sicker.

Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

For a traditional French omelet, Mr. Pépin cracks the eggs on the cutting board, not the rim of the mixing bowl, then beats them energetically to blend the whites and yolks. He agitates the pan, keeping the eggs in motion so that they do not brown, even with the burners at full blast.

By JEFF GORDINIER
Published: October 18, 2011

WHEN Jacques Pépin slices a baguette, there is a distinct sound that seems to be imbued with six decades of experience in the kitchen.

The knife goes through, and you hear a little schloomp.

By contrast, many amateur cooks keep their knives far too dull, he said, and have a habit of crunching the blade downward on the crust, like a handheld cider press, which only squishes the white interior of a baguette into a fluff-less layer.

“Instead of going down and forward, people press down like this,” Mr. Pépin said, standing at his kitchen counter last week. “That way, you have to reinflate each piece with a little pump.” Then he demonstrated a faulty technique that I recognized, with silent embarrassment, as my own.

I had traveled to Mr. Pépin’s house in this Connecticut town, just east of New Haven, to talk about all the little details that go into the precision and majesty of that little schloomp. In other words, our topic was technique.

This month marks the arrival of “Essential Pépin” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $40), a cookbook that gathers together hit recipes from the arc of his career, from his childhood deprivation in France during World War II and his teenage apprenticeship in an array of French restaurants to his eventual ascent to fame as one of the first chefs who went on television to teach Americans to cook.

The book, his 26th, comes with an instructional DVD, coincides with the start of a new 26-episode TV series of the same name, and overflows with more than 700 recipes.

At the root of each one lies a deep-tissue database of skills that can’t be picked up by flipping a few pages. In case anyone needed a reminder about the importance of technique, Mr. Pépin himself had hand-painted tiles in his kitchen with mantralike slogans: “Great cooking favors the prepared hands” was one. “A great chef is first a great technician” was another.

“All the great chefs I know — Thomas Keller, Jean-Georges Vongerichten — they are technicians first,” said Mr. Pépin, 75.

Some of them, in fact, picked up that technique from Mr. Pépin himself. Tom Colicchio, the chef behind Craft and other restaurants, remembers receiving Mr. Pépin’s standard-setting 1976 book, “La Technique,” as a gift from his father when he was a budding 15-year-old cook in New Jersey. “It changed the way I looked at food and thought about food,” Mr. Colicchio said. “You felt like someone was looking over your shoulder teaching you how to do these techniques.”

He set aside books full of recipes and focused on teaching his fingers the true tricks of the trade, honing his knife skills and simmering chicken bones to make stock. Looking back, Mr. Colicchio compares it to playing the guitar: learning to play one song doesn’t mean you’ve mastered your instrument. “Once you learn the technique, then you can be a creative cook,” he said.

And yet in this age of exploding gastronomic consciousness, with entire television channels devoted to cooking, people seem all too eager to sidestep the rigorous monotony of basic manual dexterity in order to leap right into expressions of creativity.

That can grate on Mr. Pépin, especially when he finds himself teaching a room full of students who are restless to get ahead to the superstar-chef part. (He is a dean at the French Culinary Institute in Manhattan.)

“You have no choice as a professional chef: you have to repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat until it becomes part of yourself,” he said. “I certainly don’t cook the same way I did 40 years ago, but the technique remains. And that’s what the student needs to learn: the technique.”

To that end, my morning lesson with Mr. Pépin didn’t begin with food. It began with knives. A cook should have knives, he said, that glide with quick, delicate ease through the skin and pulp of a ripe tomato.

“People always ask me, ‘What is the best knife?’ ” he said. “I say, ‘A sharp one.’ ”

I thought about when I had last sharpened the knives in my kitchen. Then I remembered: never. In the course of two decades of delusionally casting myself as a decent cook, I had sharpened my knives not once.

If Mr. Pépin was appalled, he was too gracious to show it. He simply grabbed a sharpening steel and demonstrated how to run a knife blade along the wand, which he did without flicking his wrist. “Like a conductor,” he said. “You have to keep the angle constant.”

That angle needs to be about 20 or 30 degrees in relation to the steel. You can pull the knife toward you, across the steel, or away from you, but the point is to strive for uniformity.

For knives that are in truly sorry shape, one needs a sharpening stone. He placed one atop the counter and smeared it with some mineral oil. Then he began to run the blade of a knife along the oiled stone.

The motion was not at all like, say, slicing steak. Mr. Pépin drew the edge across the stone in a single long sweep, repeated over and over, as though he were skimming the oil off the surface.

Now and then, he would dab it with a rag to wipe away the black residue. “I have to keep it clean, otherwise the stone won’t be abrasive anymore,” he said. “If I spend 15 or 20 minutes here, I will create a new edge. If the knife’s in really bad shape, that’s what you do.”

His knife was in very good shape.

To prove it, Mr. Pépin began, with great alacrity and élan, to cut things. There was that schloomp through the bread. He minced some onion. He peeled the skin of a tomato and made a rose out of it.

“For me, what I mean by technique is almost what you might call a sleight of hand,” he said.

Famously averse to waste, Mr. Pépin skinned an apple and left the peel on the cutting board. “You can dry that out in the oven and make tea,” he said. “It’s supposed to be good for your kidneys. We don’t throw anything out.”

What I tend to waste in my home kitchen is time. Just peeling and mincing a clove of garlic seems to eat up a month. But Mr. Pépin’s technique with garlic was a small miracle of deftness and economy.

He placed a whole head of garlic on his cutting board, upside-down, and held it at a slight angle. He popped it hard with the base of his palm. The cloves went scattering like marbles. He sliced off the stem of one (“that will make it much easier to peel,” he said) and smashed the clove under the flat blade of his knife. The skin slipped off like a silk robe.

He smashed the skinned garlic again, to release the essential oils, placing it under the flat of his knife and banging the blade with his hand. “At this point, I can chop it,” he said. He now did so by rocking the knife back and forth over the flattened clove. He kept the knife steady by placing the fingers of his left hand on top, guiding the knife up and down in a semicircle across the cutting board as if it were the hand of a clock.

“And I have purée of garlic,” he said.

An omelet was next.

Now, if there is any realm of cooking in which I feel a twinge of confidence, even cockiness, it is eggs. When I scramble them, I bring tenderness and precise timing (and tons of butter) to the equation, and the results are consistently impressive.

Nevertheless, I was prepared to be shamed. I confessed to Père Pépin that my concept of an omelet probably qualified as heresy: beat the eggs, pour them into a hot pan, let them set and brown a bit, and then fold the flaps over a few random gobs of goat cheese.

Mr. Pépin’s brown eyes took pity on me. “There’s nothing wrong with that,” he said kindly. “Sometimes I’m in the mood for that type of omelet.”

It’s just not really a French omelet, that’s all.

A proper French omelet is all about (you guessed it) technique. He grabbed a selection of backyard eggs provided by a neighbor and cracked three on his cutting board, not against the rim of the mixing bowl. (This, he said, prevents any bacteria on the surface of the shells from getting into the bowl.)

He dropped clumps of salt and pepper and chopped chives and tarragon into the bowl with the three eggs, and then, using a fork, he began to beat the eggs with notable brio. “People tend to turn it like a wet mop,” he said. “You have to break the whites so that there aren’t long strings of the white showing.”

He had agitated the eggs so fiercely that there was now a flotilla of bubbles on their surface.

That mixture went into a buttered nonstick pan; the heat was turned all the way up. What followed was a kind of Tilt-A-Whirl shaking and spinning and scraping of the pan, with Mr. Pépin keeping the eggs constantly in motion. He’d shake the pan like a tambourine, then stop and very quickly scrape off the papery edges of egg that would slosh up the sides, then shake again.

“I move this as much as I can, as fast as I can, so it’s the smallest curd possible,” he said. “I don’t let it brown on the top. Because browning will indicate that it has toughened the albumen.”

There was barely a second when the eggs sat idle in the pan, and that was the point. The omelet, when finished, was meant to have a consistent tenderness, inside and out.

He finished with a flourish that involved shifting the eggs to one side of the pan, tilting the pan up and using a fork to roll the still slightly wet mix into an oblong shape. His description of this, in “Essential Pépin,” sounds much easier than it looks: “Roll the omelet by folding over one side and then the opposite side, and invert it onto a plate.”

Alas, in the kitchen, there’s a lot more nuance to it than that. Even though I’d watched the whole thing up close, I knew I could not do what he had just done. But I knew I could master the next step.

“What you have to do now,” he said, “is eat that omelet with some salad.”

thanks to jonathan maghen

The secret subject of Joan Didion’s work has always been her troubled daughter. Her wrenching new memoir tells us why. Photograph by Brigitte Lacombe

By Boris Kachka
New York Magazine Published Oct 16, 2011

Reading Joan Didion on any subject is like tiptoeing across a just-frozen pond filled with beautiful sharks. You look down and pray the ice will hold. Meeting her is not a vastly different experience.

Opening the door to her cavernous Upper East Side apartment, the writer murmurs a monotone “hello” but doesn’t shake hands. There’s bottled water, she says, waving in the direction of a double-size Sub-Zero in her double-size kitchen. She wears a sun-faded white sleeveless skirt-suit fashioned from the raw silk curtains in her old house in Brentwood. She is 76 but looks older. She has always been birdlike, five two and wire-thin, but never quite this frail. Her arms are translucent river systems of veins. Her face is worn, unyielding. “She doesn’t express it,” says her agent and friend Lynn Nesbit, but “you see the pain in her face.”

It’s true that drawing out her feelings in person is a doomed project—that ice is thicker than it looks. Possibly the best living American essayist and probably the most influential, Didion has always maintained that she doesn’t know what she’s thinking until she writes it down. Yet over the past decade, she’s been writing down more about her own life than ever before. If you want to know about her upbringing, read Where I Was From, about the delusions of her California pioneer ancestors. If you want to know how she feels about the sudden 2003 death of her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne, you can read The Year of Magical Thinking, her stark but openhearted account of emotional dislocation. And if you want to know how she feels about the drawn-out death of her adopted daughter, Quintana Roo, two years later at the age of 39, you can order her new memoir, Blue Nights, on Amazon.

Having dissected the pain of others for decades, Didion has spent the last few years turning the scalpel on herself. This introverted late phase is as coherent and revealing as Philip Roth’s. The essayist who once reprinted her own psychological evaluation has always used her personal story, but in her early years she only feinted at confession on the way to observations of the larger world. Beginning with Where I Was From, which presents California’s history as her own, she’s reversed the bait-and-switch, writing about those close to her as a way of bringing herself, finally, into public view.

“Writers are always selling somebody out,” Didion wrote at the beginning of her first essay collection, 1968’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem. That warning, later echoed infamously by Didion’s contemporary Janet Malcolm, is a statement of mercenary purpose in the guise of a confession: not a preemptive apologia but an expression of grandiose, even nihilistic ambition. We think of memoirs, especially memoirs of grief, as a soft art, one that necessarily humanizes the writer. And Didion the memoirist is painfully human—heartsick, vulnerable, and honest about her fears. But she’s also as ruthless as she’s ever been, tearing down the constructs she’s built to protect herself and her family. If she’s selling anyone out with Blue Nights, it’s Joan Didion.

The book is about many things: mental illness, fate, and our overgrown faith in medical technology. But it is most importantly a reckoning with her shortcomings as a mother. Quintana died just six weeks before the publication of The Year of Magical Thinking, after a lifetime of suffering and a series of cascading illnesses (pneumonia, septic shock, pulmonary embolism, brain bleeding) exacerbated by emotional difficulties for which Didion wonders if she’s partly responsible. “I don’t think anybody feels like they’re a good parent,” Didion tells me. “Or if people think they’re good parents, they ought to think again.”

In Blue Nights, Quintana’s truncated, troubled life is interwoven with Didion’s own physical decline. The title, she explains, comes from those twilights that linger in northern latitudes in the early summer, giving the eerie impression that darkness might never come. “I found my mind turning increasingly to illness, to the end of promise, the dwindling of the days, the inevitability of the fading, the dying of the brightness. Blue nights are the opposite of the dying of the brightness, but they are also its warning,” she writes. And later: “I was no longer, if I had ever been, afraid to die: I was now afraid not to die.”

The Year of Magical Thinking transformed Didion, who looks today like the world’s unlikeliest self-help guru. Perched on a white slipcovered love seat in front of the fireplace in her split-level living room—which is where her husband died—she speaks reluctantly but in sudden crescendos, punctuated by nervous laughs. On a vast coffee table between us sit neatly stacked books of all sizes—many of them unread, she tells me. And all around—on shelves, mantels, and dressers, and arrayed along a hallway that leads to two offices and two bedrooms—are pictures of mostly bygone family. “I hadn’t thought that I was generally a pack rat, but it turns out I am,” she says, showing me around the orderly apartment. “Everything here is a mess.”

By far the best-selling book of her nearly half-century career, The Year of Magical Thinking sold more than a million copies and made its author, for the first time, a truly public figure, even a kind of literary saint—no longer a cult favorite but a celebrity writer embraced by book clubs and heralded in airport bookstores. That success was a disorienting shock, she says—especially the crowds. “People would stop me in airports and tell me what it had done for them,” she tells me. “I had no clue; I hadn’t done anything as far as I could see.” When that happens, “I go remote on them,” she says. “I actively do not want to be a mentor. I never liked teaching, for that reason.”

Nonetheless, she got busy touring. “I promised myself that I would maintain momentum,” she writes dispassionately in Blue Nights of a mourning period she filled with distractions. She let Scott Rudin persuade her to adapt Magical Thinking into a play directed by playwright David Hare. Vanessa Redgrave was the star. Critics would complain Redgrave was far too large and strident to play Didion, who weighed less than 80 pounds. The crew set up a table backstage, which they called Café Didion, in order to make sure she ate daily.

And Didion kept working, tirelessly. There were screenplays, which she had so often written with her husband: a movie on Katharine Graham and an adaptation of her novel The Last Thing He Wanted. There were also articles for The New York Review of Books, including a takedown of Dick Cheney and a devil’s-advocate essay on the vegetative Terri Schiavo—an essay she says she wrote for reasons unrelated to Quintana’s hospital experiences.

She continued to see friends, as she still does today, a few times a week. Some of them insisted Didion take a vacation. She was in her seventies, after all, and had just lost both members of her immediate family, then wrestled with the loss in a remarkably public way. One day, during the run of the play, she came down with a very bad case of shingles. A doctor said she was making an “inadequate adjustment to aging.” She corrected him: She was making no adjustment to aging. Instead of taking a vacation, she began to think about another, more painful project.

“My intention had been to make Magical Thinking less polished, and I thought I had done that until I finished it,” Didion says. “And then I realized that it was exactly as polished as everything I wrote had always been.”

She set out to try something rougher—though not quite as rough, she says, as the book she ultimately published. “I was going to make it more theoretical than it turned out to be, less specifically about Quintana,” she says. “It was going to be much less personal.” Instead, she wrote the most personal, wrenching book of her life. Magical Thinking, not exactly a breezy piece of work, “simply wrote itself,” she says. “This did not write itself.”

Didion has always been known for the crystal sheen of her writing—as a child she retyped pages from A Farewell to Arms—and the seeming casualness of her prose has long divided readers. The critic John Lahr once condemned Didion for suffusing her writing with nothing more than her own anomie, which he memorably called “the Brentwood Blues. She meditates on her desolation and makes it elegant,” he wrote. “Sent to get the pulse of a people, Didion ends up taking her own temperature. Narcissism is the side show of conservatism.”

And yet Didion owes her stature to more than solipsistic style. She’s also a soothsayer, always timely and often prescient. By virtue of her age—just ahead of the baby-boomers, young enough to recognize them and old enough to see them clearly—Didion has made a career as a canary in the American coal mine. In the sixties, she observed, from the vital center, the dangers of the counterculture, and long before Woodstock. Beginning in the nineties, she anticipated the shallow polarization that now dominates American politics. In the aughts, just in advance of aging contemporaries like Joyce Carol Oates, she anatomized the pain of widowhood. And, in Blue Nights, she warns against the false comforts of helicopter parenting and industrial medicine.

In each case, she makes the story her own—slyly conflating private malaise and social upheaval, a signature technique that has launched a thousand personal essayists. But sometimes it’s difficult to tell which of her confessions are genuine and which calculated for literary effect, how much to trust her observations as objective and how much to interrogate them as stylistic quirks. Her clinical brand of revelation can sometimes feel like an evasion—as likely to lead the reader away from hard truths as toward them.

In person, Didion does concede to me the occasional hard criticism. She admits that her writing might lack empathy, even human curiosity. “I’m not very interested in people,” she says. “I recognize it in myself—there is a basic indifference toward people.”

But there is one critique that still gets her hackles up, decades later. In “Only Disconnect,” published in 1980, Barbara Grizzutti Harrison called Didion a “neurasthenic Cher” whose style was “a bag of tricks” and whose “subject is always herself.” That wasn’t the worst of it: “My charity does not naturally extend itself,” Harrison wrote, to “someone who has chosen to burden her daughter with the name Quintana Roo.” Asked 25 years later, in this magazine, whether she felt Magical Thinking was criticproof, Didion replied, “Not if my daughter’s name wasn’t criticproof.”

It’s a telling scar. From the very beginning of her career, family has been the secret heart of Didion’s work, the empathic center of that otherwise icy moral universe. Critics may charge Didion with a lack of feeling for her subjects, but her reverence for blood ties and her esteem for clan loyalty animate everything she wrote about the social disorder wrought by the generation that followed hers. Didion took the title of Slouching Towards Bethlehem from the apocalyptic Yeats poem “The Second Coming,” with its proclamation that “the center cannot hold.” For her, the true center that could not hold was the family—sacrificed, she felt, on the altar of universal love and self-fulfillment. No Didion scene is more evocative than the kicker of the title essay of Slouching Towards Bethlehem: A neglected 3-year-old hippie child, having just burned his arm in a fire, is caught chewing on an electrical cord.

The real engine of this scene, Didion now acknowledges, was Quintana, whom she worried that she was herself neglecting. “I was leaving her alone while I was in San Francisco,” she says. “I went home to Los Angeles on weekends, and she would turn her face away when I would kiss her because I had been away for a week. So I was feeling very strongly the sense of failing at parenting there.” In her libertarian cri de coeur, “On Morality,” Didion criticizes the tendency of social movements to “assuage our private guilts in public causes.” It wasn’t just the American family she was worrying about, but her own.

Blue Nights dwells on the warning signs of Quintana’s incipient instability, which one doctor diagnosed as borderline personality disorder. It started, Didion now believes, at a very young age, perhaps not long after she was adopted at birth. (Didion and Dunne had tried and failed to conceive for two years.) As a toddler, Quintana would go on about a “Broken Man” who haunted her nightmares. At age 5, she called Camarillo, the mental institution rumored to have inspired “Hotel California,” to ask what she should do if she went crazy—a story Didion insists is not just family lore. When Quintana got chicken pox, she told her parents coldly, “I just noticed I have cancer.”

At 14, she informed them that she’d written a novel “just to show you”: It involved a girl named Quintana who got pregnant. Her parents “said that they would provide the abortion but after that they did not even care about her any more … Her father had a bad temper, but it showed that they cared very much about their only child. Now, they didn’t even care any more.”

Didion had always wanted to be a novelist. Like Tom Wolfe and Susan Sontag, she grew up thinking she was put on Earth to write fiction, and it’s in her novels that she is typically most revealing and reflective. They usually feature a distant woman, intelligent but inscrutable and generally fatalistic. Almost invariably, she has a troubled daughter.

In Play It As It Lays, she writes about a 4-year-old who’s in treatment for “an aberrant chemical in her brain.” In A Book of Common Prayer, a broken woman finds herself in a fictional banana republic, dreaming of being reunited with her daughter, a fugitive radical. (“It was about having your children grow up,” Didion realizes now. “Quintana was reaching that age.”) Inez Victor, the mother in Democracy, published when Quintana was 18, has the all-too-­familiar “capacity for passive detachment,” but in the course of the novel she is forced into action when her daughter, Jessie, runs off to Vietnam just before the 1975 evacuation of Americans. One night, Inez discovers Jessie prostrate in her bedroom with a heroin needle in her Snoopy wastebasket. “Let me die and get it over with,” Jessie says. “Let me be in the ground and go to sleep.”

“Let me be in the ground and go to sleep,” a teenage Quintana is quoted as saying, several times, in Blue Nights. Or, rather, she is quoted once, while depressed, on the floor of their Brentwood home. But, having appropriated the line for Democracy, Didion appropriates it once more in Blue Nights, repeating the phrase again and again throughout the book, like a mantra of self-flagellation.

It’s unclear when exactly Quintana began exhibiting what Didion calls “quicksilver changes of mood,” or when she first became depressed, or when she began to have problems with alcohol. It’s also unclear, even in Didion’s mind, whether she and Dunne had anything to do with it. Dissecting herself in Blue Nights, Didion seems unable to decide if she was too coddling as a mother—“I had been raising her as a doll”—or too cold—“Did we demand that she be an adult?” She did once bring up her parenting with a grown-up Quintana, she says. Her daughter reassured her, sort of: “I think you were a good parent, but maybe a little remote.”

If Didion was remote with Quintana, she was consumingly close to the third member of the family, her husband, John Gregory Dunne. The central, immutable premise of both memoirs is John and Joan’s idyllic marriage—the one Utopia in which the skeptical Didion placed her faith. “They were always together,” as their old friend Calvin Trillin puts it. “They could finish each other’s sentences.” Working on screenplays together, they did. Beginning with The Panic in Needle Park, they embarked on a lucrative career that put them in rarefied celebrity company and earned them, for the indignity of not having final cut, paychecks that made them two of the highest-paid screenwriters in Hollywood. In this setting, as in others, Joan was the greater writer but the lesser social force—the observer. “I liked being on set more than John did,” Didion says, “because you could just sit there and have other people do things around you. You could just watch.”

Quintana didn’t always fit easily into this universe of two; sometimes she must have felt like the clumsy apprentice in a sleek dream factory. Susan Traylor, Quintana’s best friend since nursery school, used to envy the structure of Quintana’s household—but Quintana envied the freedom of Traylor’s. “It used to drive her crazy that her parents were so on top of things,” says Traylor. She remembers warmly one ride to elementary school with Dunne and his daughter. Quintana showed him a paper she was going to turn in. He asked her if she’d given it to him or Didion to proof, and when she said no, he threw it out the window. There’s an echo of that moment in Blue Nights, when Didion unearths a journal Quintana kept—in which Quintana dwelled on her “present fear of life”—and finds herself proofreading it. “Considerable time passes before I realize that my preoccupation with the words she used has screened off any possible apprehension of what she was actually saying.”

Quintana went to college at Bennington, where Didion had wanted to go (she’d studied at Berkeley instead). “I think the only reason she stayed there for two years,” Didion says, “was that she was immediately too depressed to think about transferring.” On a visit late in Quintana’s sophomore year, Didion knew something was terribly wrong, and persuaded Quintana to transfer to Barnard, where her mood improved markedly. But there were many ups and downs. “There was something going on in her head,” Didion tells me. “There was more going on in her head than I was thinking about.”

But by her early thirties, Quintana seemed to have gained some traction. A promising photographer—her pensive landscapes are scattered throughout Didion’s apartment—she had become the photo editor at Elle Decor. She talked to her mother daily, about “what she was doing at work,” says Didion, “why she was mad at so-and-so, why that seems to me an unworthy reason to be mad at so-and-so.” So-and-so was often Dunne. “They fought about everything,” Didion says. “They just fought.” She adds that the fights didn’t abate after Quintana left home; if anything, they got worse.

Then, one Saturday in 1998, Quintana got a FedEx package from her birth sister, whom she had never known, and flew down to Dallas to meet the rest of the clan. (Didion had learned the names of Quintana’s biological parents by accident, and writes that she dreaded the possibility that they’d ever meet Quintana.) Her birth mother began calling all the time, interfering with her job. Quintana tried to declare a temporary break, but her birth mother overreacted, disconnecting her phone. Soon after that, her birth father got in touch. He wrote, “What a long strange journey this has been.” Quintana responded with what became the funniest line in Blue Nights. “ ‘On top of everything else,’ she said through the tears, ‘my father has to be a Deadhead.’ ”

Didion doesn’t dwell on what followed, either in person or in the book. (“Just look at the size of it,” she says now. “Clearly I’ve left stuff out.”) Dunne’s nephew Griffin Dunne says meeting the birth family “had an enormous effect on Quintana, and not for the better.” Her newfound relatives “were a troubled lot, and it struck Quintana: ‘That’s my DNA too; am I more like that or am I more like my parents?’ It was the beginning of a real emotional struggle.”

“Because she was depressed and because she was anxious she drank too much,” Didion writes in Blue Nights. “This was called medicating herself. Alcohol has its well-known defects as a medication for depression but no one has ever suggested—ask any doctor—that it is not the most effective anti-anxiety agent yet known.”

At some point it became impossible to figure out ­whether depression was causing the alcohol abuse or vice versa. One family friend would call it “alcohol personality disorder.” “Was it sick or was it self-destructive?” the friend asks. “Or was the self-destructive part covering up the part that was sick? It’s one of those ­chicken-or-the-egg questions, and as a mother, you want to solve it so that you can see one’s potential realized.”

At loose ends, Didion began seeing a therapist. “I think she was very interested in how she could better communicate with Quintana,” says a friend. The counseling helped her realize she’d been infantilizing her grown daughter. These are thoughts that went straight into Blue Nights: “She was already a person. I could never afford to see that.” In person she is more pointed: “I had treated Quintana like a baby and not a human being.”

She also realized that she might have treated herself the same way—reluctant to play the grown-up in the family. “One of her abiding fears,” she writes of Quintana, perhaps projecting her own worries, “was that John would die and there would be no one but her to take care of me.” But gradually, Didion did begin to grow more assertive and more reflective, prompted by her therapist, by her troubles with her daughter, and especially by the death of her mother, in 2001.

Unsurprisingly, the first sign of that transformation was in her writing. Where I Was From tore apart the California pioneer mythos that had shaped her emotional life and driven so much of her work. “That was a book that was very important to her,” says her friend Christopher Dickey, “and it didn’t get much of a reception at all. People didn’t understand it. My wife and I both read it in galleys, and my wife, who is very sensitive and very close to Joan as well—she said, ‘This is really about Quintana … She was kind of Slouching Towards Quintana.’ ”

Near the end of the book, Didion walks with her mother and Quintana through a re-created section of Old Sacramento. Quintana is 5 or 6, and Didion wants to explain her family’s roots there. But then, she realizes, “Quintana was adopted. Any ghosts on this wooden sidewalk were not in fact Quintana’s responsibility,” she writes. “In fact I had no more attachment to this wooden sidewalk than Quintana did: It was no more than a theme, a decorative effect. It was only Quintana who was real.”

Both The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights are recognizably memoirs of grief, but they’re rendered in Didion’s familiar remote voice. It’s an oddly effective fit: Her coolness plays against the genre’s sentimental excesses but still allows her to avoid argument and indulge in open-ended reveries built from repetitions of painful facts. Didion has always been a presence in her nonfiction, though ultimately a withdrawn (and withdrawing) one, whose bafflement at the chaos of life is meant to stand in for the reader’s. In Magical Thinking and especially in Blue Nights, she represents her own unwillingness to reach conclusions as the ultimate form of honesty. The result is a deeply personal book that still feels strangely passive: Blue Nights articulates many half-regrets but never a cohesive feeling that things could have gone differently.

In July 2003, two months before Where I Was From was published, Quintana married an older musician named Gerry ­Michael. An evocative description of the ceremony, at St. John the Divine in Morningside Heights, opens Blue Nights. It was—though Didion doesn’t say so—supposed to mark the end of Quintana’s blue period and the beginning of the stable, sober part of her life.

Five months later, Quintana was rushed to the hospital with the flu and a fever of 103. Over the next few days she developed pneumonia, then septic shock. She survived 50-50 odds but remained in intensive care. By December 30, Dunne was distraught, talking tearfully to friends about the ordeal, incredulous that the flu could turn into something like this. When Lynn Nesbit found out through a mutual friend that something terrible had happened, she was sure Quintana had died. Of course, it wasn’t Quintana. It was Dunne, who dropped dead while Didion was fixing him a salad for dinner.

Quintana had to be told three times that her father had died—twice in January, as she drifted in and out of consciousness, and once more at UCLA Medical Center the following spring. The family finally held a funeral for Dunne, also at St. John the Divine, on March 23, 2004. Two days later, Quintana flew out to California with her husband—“to restart their life,” as Didion wrote in Magical Thinking. When Didion said good-bye, Quintana seemed anxious. While leaving the airport in Los Angeles, she collapsed with a cerebral hemorrhage. Another month of touch-and-go hospitalization left her partially paralyzed. After recovering yet again, she came down with acute pancreatitis in the late spring of 2005. She died on August 26.

Mystery surrounded the sequence of events—a mystery Didion worried over in Magical Thinking and continues to worry over today. Was it possible, as widespread rumor has it, that Quintana was drinking on the flight to L.A., and that her fall might have been the result? Had Quintana’s depression and her drinking contributed to her illnesses? “I think they were probably intertwined,” says Susan Traylor. Was it the trauma of Quintana’s fall that caused the blood vessel in her brain to rupture, or vice versa? A surgeon told Didion the fall had come first, but Didion stubbornly considered the question unsettled—as though she wanted it to remain that way, more comfortable with the uncertainty. “I realized that the answer to the question made no difference,” she wrote in Magical Thinking. “It had happened. It was the new fact on the ground.”

“How many vast shelves of literature are devoted to the misunderstandings between fathers and sons and mothers and daughters,” asks Dickey, who wrote a memoir about his own father and thinks it’s obvious why Magical Thinking was so much easier to write. “When you have a partner, someone you love, who’s your age, with the same terms of reference, and you are together for decades, you really do understand each other,” he says. “Your child is never going to be understood in that way.”

Didion agrees. “I guess I do know her better than anyone else. But as well as I knew her, I barely touched knowing her,” she says. “I couldn’t possibly have written a biography of her.”

What she has written instead is a kind of biography of Joan Didion, and an elusive one at that. Like her novels, it’s more a work of accumulation than of argument, at the end of which Quintana the grown-up remains the enigma Didion must want her to be, while Didion is the woman revealed. All of her fears are in it, and so is the central contradiction in all of her work, laid bare: the fear of not knowing overlaid with the terror of knowing.

“The goal of the book was to get it off my mind,” says Didion of Blue Nights. But she contradicts herself just a moment later by saying it was meant to “bring it back.” Anne Roiphe, one of the authors who followed Didion into widow-memoir territory, wrote in her book Epilogue, “I will be sad often but not always.” Didion says she doesn’t feel that way about Quintana, at all. “I will be sad always,” she says.

“I don’t think she’s a masochist,” says Dickey. “But one of the things that happens when you write an intimate memoir, an honest memoir, is that you think it will be cathartic—that you can say, ‘I have now positioned this memory, and now I can move on.’ But very often it just doesn’t work that way.”

I ask Didion if she knows herself better now. “Yes,” she says. “I don’t know that there’s any value in knowing yourself better, but I think I do. I don’t feel worse or better. It’s just there.”

James Welling, Selections from Los Angeles Architecture, 1976–78

Through Febuary 13, 2012

The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA

1. No Tenure / No Pension.
A Congressman collects a salary while in office and receives no pay when
they are out of office.

2. Congress (past, present & future) participates in Social Security.
All funds in the Congressional retirement fund move to the Social Security
system immediately. All future funds flow into the Social Security system,
and Congress participates with the American people. It may not be used for
any other purpose.

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do.

4. Congress will no longer vote themselves a pay raise. Congressional pay
will rise by the lower of CPI or 3%.

5. Congress loses their current health care system and participates in the
same health care system as the American people.

6. Congress must equally abide by all laws they impose on the American
people.

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Congressmen made all these contracts for themselves. Serving in Congress is
an honor, not a career. The Founding Fathers envisioned
citizen legislators, so ours should serve their term(s), then go home and
back to work.

Warren Buffet is asking each addressee to forward this email to a minimum
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likewise.

Thanks to Peter Shire

By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Times Published: October 16, 2011

As the Occupy Wall Street movement continues to grow, the response from the movement’s targets has gradually changed: contemptuous dismissal has been replaced by whining. (A reader of my blog suggests that we start calling our ruling class the “kvetchocracy.”) The modern lords of finance look at the protesters and ask, Don’t they understand what we’ve done for the U.S. economy?

The answer is: yes, many of the protesters do understand what Wall Street and more generally the nation’s economic elite have done for us. And that’s why they’re protesting.

On Saturday The Times reported what people in the financial industry are saying privately about the protests. My favorite quote came from an unnamed money manager who declared, “Financial services are one of the last things we do in this country and do it well. Let’s embrace it.”

This is deeply unfair to American workers, who are good at lots of things, and could be even better if we made adequate investments in education and infrastructure. But to the extent that America has lagged in everything except financial services, shouldn’t the question be why, and whether it’s a trend we want to continue?

For the financialization of America wasn’t dictated by the invisible hand of the market. What caused the financial industry to grow much faster than the rest of the economy starting around 1980 was a series of deliberate policy choices, in particular a process of deregulation that continued right up to the eve of the 2008 crisis.

Not coincidentally, the era of an ever-growing financial industry was also an era of ever-growing inequality of income and wealth. Wall Street made a large direct contribution to economic polarization, because soaring incomes in finance accounted for a significant fraction of the rising share of the top 1 percent (and the top 0.1 percent, which accounts for most of the top 1 percent’s gains) in the nation’s income. More broadly, the same political forces that promoted financial deregulation fostered overall inequality in a variety of ways, undermining organized labor, doing away with the “outrage constraint” that used to limit executive paychecks, and more.

Oh, and taxes on the wealthy were, of course, sharply reduced.

All of this was supposed to be justified by results: the paychecks of the wizards of Wall Street were appropriate, we were told, because of the wonderful things they did. Somehow, however, that wonderfulness failed to trickle down to the rest of the nation — and that was true even before the crisis. Median family income, adjusted for inflation, grew only about a fifth as much between 1980 and 2007 as it did in the generation following World War II, even though the postwar economy was marked both by strict financial regulation and by much higher tax rates on the wealthy than anything currently under political discussion.

Then came the crisis, which proved that all those claims about how modern finance had reduced risk and made the system more stable were utter nonsense. Government bailouts were all that saved us from a financial meltdown as bad as or worse than the one that caused the Great Depression.

And what about the current situation? Wall Street pay has rebounded even as ordinary workers continue to suffer from high unemployment and falling real wages. Yet it’s harder than ever to see what, if anything, financiers are doing to earn that money.

Why, then, does Wall Street expect anyone to take its whining seriously? That money manager claiming that finance is the only thing America does well also complained that New York’s two Democratic senators aren’t on his side, declaring that “They need to understand who their constituency is.” Actually, they surely know very well who their constituency is — and even in New York, 16 out of 17 workers are employed by nonfinancial industries.

But he wasn’t really talking about voters, of course. He was talking about the one thing Wall Street still has plenty of thanks to those bailouts, despite its total loss of credibility: money.

Money talks in American politics, and what the financial industry’s money has been saying lately is that it will punish any politician who dares to criticize that industry’s behavior, no matter how gently — as evidenced by the way Wall Street money has now abandoned President Obama in favor of Mitt Romney. And this explains the industry’s shock over recent events.

You see, until a few weeks ago it seemed as if Wall Street had effectively bribed and bullied our political system into forgetting about that whole drawing lavish paychecks while destroying the world economy thing. Then, all of a sudden, some people insisted on bringing the subject up again.

And their outrage has found resonance with millions of Americans. No wonder Wall Street is whining.