The New Yorker
November 9, 2009
By Dave Cowen

I am not a fan of books. I would never want a book’s autograph. I am a proud non-reader of books. I like to get information from doing stuff like actually talking to people and living real life.

—Kanye West, promoting his book “Thank You and You’re Welcome.”

Whoever said life is an open book probably didn’t have any friends. Sure, he probably liked the people in his book. But did they like him? No. Why? Because they aren’t real.

My friends are real. They actually talk to me. Like just the other day my friend Bill said, “I’m not reading your e-mail for you anymore. You need to learn how to read.” And I said, “Bill, if you don’t read me my e-mail, I won’t sign an autograph for your son.” And Bill was, like, “Well, go fuck yourself. I’m going back to the hospital.” Bill’s son, Bill, Jr., or Billy Bob, was in the children’s unit there. He didn’t read the label on the box of his Sticky Stones™, and when he swallowed three of the iron-ore magnets they fused into a chain along the wall of his esophagus. Bill, Sr., felt extra bad because he hadn’t read that a consumer safety group had placed the Sticky Stones™ on its annual list of the ten worst toys. I told Bill that’s life. That stuff happens when you are doing stuff. In life. Real life. If I had told you that what had happened to Billy Bob had happened in a book, you would have said no way, that would never happen, that’s fiction. But it did. Because I told you it did.

Now, don’t get me wrong. There are a few books that I am a fan of. Matchbooks are good. A lot of people are under the impression that books burn only at a specific temperature. But it’s just not true. I can burn most books at or below 451 degrees Fahrenheit. Sometimes below 300, if I soak the jacket in lighter fluid.

I also like MacBooks. You can really do stuff on them, you know. Like see how many followers you have on Twitter, or take pictures of yourself with Photo Booth, or play Second Life, or check if Bill has checked your e-mail. I miss Bill. He set up my Facebook account on my MacBook. I’ve got my own page on there. I have more than a million fans. Do you know how many fans Books have? Twenty-five thousand seven hundred and sixty-four. That’s it. So I’m not alone here. You know what else has more fans than Books? The Olive Garden. One hundred and eighty-five thousand nine hundred and eighty-six. What else? Sleep: over three hundred thousand. More people would rather be unconscious than read a book. Now, I’m not condoning sleep. I’m about doing stuff. Living life. But it just goes to show that I’m in the majority.

Right now you’re probably wondering, Hey, why is this guy, a proud non-reader of books, writing this? Isn’t this a Catch-22? And I say no, it’s not. It’s a Catch-23. What’s a Catch-23? It’s like a Catch-22, except there is no catch. I don’t want you to read this. In fact, you should stop reading right now. Seriously. Stop reading this. Start doing stuff. What kind of stuff, you ask? I don’t know. Why don’t you go to the Olive Garden? But just watch out. They give you the never-ending salad before the never-ending pasta bowl. You wouldn’t think so, but the salad fills you right up. The lettuce is mostly iceberg. All water. And the waiter really makes you feel like shit when you don’t make it to the fettucine Alfredo.

Sometimes when I don’t know what to do I imagine other people doing stuff. But like people in a different time. Or like people in a different place. And I think how cool would it be to be that person for awhile. Like to know how other people I don’t know talk or do stuff. How they really live, you know? But that’s when I’m not doing stuff of my own. Which is all the time anyway. ♦

Los Angeles Times, November 11, 2009
By: Andrew Blankstein

A Spider-Man impersonator was arrested on outstanding criminal warrants today after an incident in which he allegedly slugged a man near the Hollywood and Highland complex, Los Angeles police said.

It was not immediately clear what led to the altercation, which was reported about 12:30 p.m. in the 6800 block of Hollywood Boulevard. But it’s the latest in a string of incidents involving movie characters and celebrity lookalikes who vie for space — and attention — along the tourist-filled corridor that includes Grauman’s Chinese Theater.

Christopher Loomis, 39, was being held on outstanding misdemeanor warrants in lieu of $5,500 bail, police said.

The incident unfolded when LAPD patrol officers received a radio call reporting a battery by a man in a Spider-Man costume. When they arrived, they encountered four different people dressed as the web-slinging crusader.

“They stopped one, it wasn’t him,” LAPD Lt. Beverly Lewis said. “They stopped the second, and it was the suspect.”

The victim, who said he was hit in the face and arms, refused to press charges against the costumed impersonator. But Lewis said that when they discovered the warrants, he was booked. She said it appeared the suspect and victim knew each other.

Costumed impersonators portraying the likes of Elvis, Superman, SpongeBob SquarePants and others have worked on Hollywood Boulevard for years. They collect tips from tourists by posing for pictures or performing in front of the theater.

But sometimes the fun has turned violent. Tourists have complained that some costumed characters turn abusive when the tourists refuse to pay them to pose for pictures. And there have also been brawls. Two years ago, authorities convened a “super-hero summit” designed to reduce tensions among the performers.

The meeting was prompted in part by an incident in which LAPD officers arrested a “Star Wars” street performer in his furry brown Chewbacca costume for allegedly head-butting a tour guide who complained about the character’s treatment of Japanese tourists.

In other incidents, actors dressed as the superhero Mr. Incredible, Elmo the Muppet and
the dark-hooded character from the movie “Scream” were arrested for aggressive begging. A man dressed as the horror film character Freddy Krueger was also taken into custody for allegedly stabbing someone, although no charges were filed.

“Typical Hollywood; it’s always something different,” said the LAPD’s Lewis. Loomis, still wearing his Spider-Man outfit, sat nearby, handcuffed to a bench in the Hollywood Station.

If you need a koala dog haircut, and are in Tokyo look no further.

Dog Man

By DEBORAH SONTAG and ROBIN POGREBIN
NY Times Published: November 10, 2009

One day in the mid-1980s, Dakis Joannou, a Greek Cypriot industrialist, was exploring the art galleries of the East Village in Manhattan when he came upon a basketball suspended in a tank of liquid. Captivated, he invested $2,700 in “One Ball Total Equilibrium Tank” by a little-known artist named Jeff Koons. It was, he said, as if a whole new world had opened up to him.

Twenty-five years — and 40 Koonses — later, Mr. Joannou is considered one of the most important contemporary art collectors in the world. And the New Museum of Contemporary Art in Manhattan is preparing to showcase his vast collection in a three-story exhibition, with Mr. Koons, now an art superstar, as the guest curator.

The show, slated to open in March, is generating anticipatory chatter in the art world. But it is also leading to buzz of a different kind, about the propriety of turning over a public museum to a private collector who also happens to be a museum trustee and a chief patron of the curator.

Private collection shows appeal to many art museums because they can display great works that are otherwise inaccessible. Over the last decade, though, as prices rose in the art market, the museum industry came to believe that such shows required extra vigilance about potential conflicts of interest. In this case, critics say the New Museum, which in its 32-year history has evolved from a scrappy alternative space into a mainstream institution, is jeopardizing its integrity by giving too much power to a board member with a vested interest in the artists he collects.

“Maybe it is a fantastic collection, but the museum is a public trust: nonprofit, tax exempt and government supported,” said Noah Kupferman, a former specialist at Sotheby’s who teaches a course called Fine Art as a Financial Asset at New York University. “It is supposed to be an independent arbiter of taste and art-historical value. It is not supposed to surrender itself to a trustee and donor whose collection stands to be enhanced in value by a major museum show.”

As the New Museum sees it, exhibiting Mr. Joannou’s collection, which has never been shown in the United States, is a gift to the public, providing a creative model for public-private partnerships in difficult economic times.

“We think the public will be the beneficiaries of Dakis’s very generous agreement to allow works from his foundation to cross the ocean,” said Lisa Phillips, the New Museum’s director, referring to Mr. Joannou’s Deste Foundation Center for Contemporary Art in Athens.

“I understand why some people might consider it a perceived conflict,” she continued. “But we’re confident that the initiative is artistically and intellectually important and ethically legitimate, consistent with our mission and our vision.”

Mr. Joannou dismissed concerns. Speaking by phone from his home in Athens, he said: “Sure, I am a trustee. Would it be different if I weren’t? Some people may think some things. For me, it’s a nonissue. I know who I am and what I am doing.”

Museums have always depended on collectors for loans and donations, and some have a long history of exhibiting private collections. But a decade ago, “Sensation: Young British Artists From the Saatchi Collection” at the Brooklyn Museum prompted an ethical debate.

“Sensation” is best remembered as a battle from the culture wars, in which Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani denounced as “sick stuff” artwork like Chris Ofili’s “Holy Virgin Mary” with its appended elephant dung. But because the collection’s owner, the advertising mogul Charles Saatchi, was an active trader in the contemporary art market, “Sensation” also heightened concerns about museums renting out their reputations, being manipulated by collectors or “acting more like commercial galleries,” said Erik Ledbetter, director of international programs and ethics at the American Association of Museums.

This prompted the association, which accredits but does not regulate museums, to issue guidelines for exhibiting borrowed objects, stressing “transparency, intellectual integrity and institutional control,” Mr. Ledbetter said. While the New Museum is not accredited by the association, all museums are considered to be bound by its standards.

The guidelines stress the potential for conflicts if board members become lenders, Mr. Ledbetter said. He offered these “cautionary flags”: a show devoted to one collector; a show in which the collector is a board member, donor or underwriter; a show in which the museum gives away or pools curatorial judgment with the collector.

“Any one of those things can be managed,” he said, “but when you layer them on top of each other, it’s more complicated.”

The New Museum show raises all the association’s cautionary flags except one: Mr. Joannou is not underwriting the exhibition.

In a phone interview that she limited to 20 minutes, Ms. Phillips expressed exasperation that the museum was being challenged. Several art world blogs, especially Tyler Green’s well-read Modern Art Notes, have been critical.

“We’re not the first to do an exhibition of a private collection, and we won’t be the last,” she said.

There are abundant recent examples of private collection shows at American museums, but none that involve both a trustee and a guest curator close to the trustee.

This year alone, the Brooklyn Museum, which was showing private collections decades before “Sensation,” gave over a gallery — and curatorial control — to works by Hernan Bas, a young Miami artist, from the Rubell Family Collection. (The Rubells are not affiliated with the museum). The Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibited Old Master drawings from the collection of its trustee Jean Bonna, although it organized the show itself.

And the National Gallery of Art, using its own curator, is now showing modern art from the Robert and Jane Meyerhoff Collection; in this case, all the works have been donated or promised to the museum.

That is what many institutions, like the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of Art, require to deal with potential conflict: a gift. “The minute you enter into a relationship with a private collection, you have to make sure that it’s in ink that the stuff is coming to you,” said Maxwell Anderson, director of the Indianapolis Museum of Art.

The New Museum does not maintain a permanent collection, and is therefore not positioned to receive gifts.

Some museums ask the lender to sign an agreement promising a moratorium on sales so that art is not whisked straight from museum walls to an auction block. Ms. Phillips said Mr. Joannou “is aware that the museum has a policy of not exhibiting work from a trustee if they are intending to sell.” Further, she said, Mr. Joannou buys much more than he sells.

The selection of Mr. Koons as curator, Ms. Phillips said, was “the resounding choice” of the museum’s curators, partly because he has been “engaged in conversation and debate with Dakis” for the last 25 years.

Mr. Joannou’s rise as a collector paralleled Mr. Koons’s as an artist. Mr. Joannou became not only Mr. Koons’s patron, acquiring such trophy works as a giant balloon dog and a stainless steel train filled with bourbon, but also his close friend. Mr. Joannou, 69, served as best man at Mr. Koons’s first wedding and is godfather to his son. Mr. Koons, 54, designed the exterior of Mr. Joannou’s yacht, “Guilty,” and created a giant wedding cake for his daughter.

“I am extremely, extremely curious to see how Jeff will deal with the work of his peers — and of his own,” Mr. Joannou said of the coming exhibition.

Dan Cameron, a former New Museum curator who is now artistic director of the Prospect New Orleans art biennial, said the choice of Mr. Koons made him uncomfortable. “I am a big fan of Jeff’s,” he said, “but he is not a fair or impartial or even interesting interpreter of what Dakis does.”

An assistant to Mr. Koons said he was too busy to talk to a reporter.

Mr. Joannou, the chairman of an international construction firm, has more than 1,000 pieces in his collection with concentrations of works by Mr. Ofili, Maurizio Cattelan, Urs Fischer, Robert Gober, Kiki Smith and others. His collection, periodically exhibited at his Athens foundation, has been shown in Paris and Vienna.

In discussing the New Museum show, several museum leaders cautioned against what Thomas Campbell, director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, described as “overly puritanical” judgments about “the delicate dance” between museums and collectors.

“The Met wouldn’t be the Met — the Met wouldn’t have the collections it has — if it hadn’t been for private collectors,” he said.

And several figures in the art world defended, and applauded, the New Museum for its Joannou show. Amy Cappellazzo, the international co-head for postwar and contemporary art at Christie’s, called Mr. Joannou a “collector of record and a tastemaker” with a “fantastic collection that will bring back to New York a lot of things that haven’t been seen here in decades.”

Richard Armstrong, the director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, agreed. “I think it’s useful for the entire food chain of the contemporary art world that private collections go on view — and if they become more valuable in the process, that doesn’t hurt anyone.”

Art business experts expressed no doubt that a museum show enhances the art’s value —regardless of whether it is taken right to market. “Showing at a museum gives credence to the works a collector has assembled and does add value to the asset,” said John Arena, senior vice president in custom credit at U.S. Trust, Bank of America Private Wealth Management.

Contemporary art, in particular, can benefit from a museum’s stamp of approval. “When contemporary art comes into a collection, it is still wet,” said Mr. Kupferman of N.Y.U., who also works in the financial sector. “It has not withstood the test of time. In financial terms, an Old Master is kind of like a utility stock. Contemporary art is like a dot-com. It can lose its value — poof.”

Marcia Tucker, a former curator at the Whitney, founded the New Museum in 1977 as a laboratory for emerging and under-recognized artists. Ms. Phillips took the reins in 1999, and over the last decade, the museum, whose succinct mission is “new art, new ideas,” has grown considerably in ambition, profile and attendance.

Two years ago, Ms. Phillips oversaw the museum’s move into its new $48 million home on the Bowery at Prince Street, where each nook and cranny has a sponsor (the Ruth E. Horowitz stairs, the Jerome L. and Ellen Stern restrooms), as does Ms. Phillips herself (the Toby Devan Lewis director).

Mr. Cameron said he believed the new building signaled a “dramatically different direction,” more mainstream and aligned with the art market. Its exhibition schedule increasingly features artists who are already established on the contemporary art scene, and the museum’s critics consider it to be overly enmeshed in what can seem like a dizzyingly insular circle of art world insiders.

A lot of families start out in small houses – just not this small. Kelly Breslin, Ryan Conder and their 9-month-old son, Thurston, live in a 380-square-foot 1950s house in Echo Park with living quarters built above the garage. The family also makes room for a mutt named Charlie. Conder and Breslin insist they prefer living small and don’t let it cramp their style. The space is arranged for maximum efficiency but maintains the vibe of an artist’s loft with a carefully edited selection of contemporary art and midcentury Danish and Italian furniture.

We recently dropped in on Breslin and Conder, owner of the men’s clothing store South Willard. It wasn’t an exhausting tour — you’re looking at about half of their home here — but their designs for living (and parenting) were eye-opening.

Conder is a fan of furniture and lighting by the Italian designer Tobia Scarpa. The sofa is part of a three-piece Scarpa design, but the house had room for only two of the sections.

“When you have this small a space, every decision is critical. You can only have things that fit within the scale of this space,” Conder says. “And these are all things I have wanted for a long time.”

Textiles add color to the otherwise earthy, woodsy room. Rugs with geometric designs and folkloric motifs were purchased from Echo Park antiques dealer Peter Vanstone to cover the hardwood floor. Pendleton wool pillows on the sofa complement a Western camp blanket on the bed.

On the shelf above: a ceramic bowl by Akio Nukaga, a bronze plaque by Los Angeles sculptor Ricky Swallow and one of Breslin’s handmade ceramic pieces.

The closet is concealed behind drapes made from Japanese mosquito netting and the patched and mended indigo fabrics known as boro.

A bright red Formica counter separates the kitchen from the rest of the living space. It is decked with Bauer pottery and Heath Ceramics bowls purchased at estate sales.

To the right, a Danish dresser also serves as Thurston’s dressing table. “People tell you need all this stuff for a baby,” Breslin says. “All you really need is diapers, a place to change him and boobs.”

In the picture window, the couple hung a vintage California driftwood sculpture purchased at Yoko Antiques in South Pasadena.

“I love the view of the trees,” Breslin says. “It’s the closest we can get to being in a cabin and still be in the city.”

Breslin, who grew up in a large two-story home in Grosse Pointe, Mich., says she can understand that people might find her home peculiar. “I don’t think we’re so crazy,” she says. “The way that most people structure their living situations is so the parents are most happy. But who’s to say that a kid wants to be in a room down a hall?”

This is the view from the front door. Artwork includes the Arthur Ou photograph above Breslin’s head.

“Everyone who comes over says, ‘Wow, it’s so cute,’ but I know they are thinking, ‘Wow, it’s so small,’ ” she says.

Adds Conder: “Even the guy who comes to fix the sink asked where the bedroom is.”

With space at a premium, the couple stacks their cookbooks on top of the refrigerator in a wooden crate painted a brilliant blue. The top of it serves as a pedestal for a basket — one of several craft purchases they have made traveling the West in the family camper van — and an alphabet jug made by the painter and ceramist David Korty.

The solid wood and iron-legged dining table is a classic Danish design by Piet Hein and Arne Jacobsen. The chairs are Shaker-style designs by Borge Mogensen. Conder designed the stacked plywood bookcase.

The large ceramic bowl on the table was purchased at the Pasadena City College Flea Market. Conder’s pottery collection also includes the work of avant-garde ceramist Peter Voulkos and Northern California and sculptor Stan Bitters.

The front door is on a pathway that leads to another house in the back of the property. For privacy, Conder hung a vintage honeycomb-pattern American quilt. The dog door was even simpler: Charlie enters through a panel of the screen door that has been cut away from the frame.

By David A. Keeps
Los Angeles Times
November 7, 2009

Though he is still crawling, 9-month-old Thurston Conder takes about 10 seconds to have the run of the house. It’s not that he’s exceptionally fast; he just doesn’t have that far to roam. Thurston shares 380 square feet with his mom and dad, Kelly Breslin and Ryan Conder, and a medium-sized mutt named Charlie.

Lots of young families start out in small houses, just not this small. These parents say it’s their preference, and that the small space hasn’t cramped their style. It’s arranged for maximum efficiency, but it still looks comfortable and fashionably decorated. Conder, 35, owner of the men’s clothing store South Willard, and Breslin, 32, a ceramic artist, have given it a distinct personality: Quadruple their living quarters and it would look like a downtown artist’s loft with a carefully edited selection of contemporary art and Midcentury Danish and Italian design.

“Everyone who comes over says, ‘Wow, it’s so cute,’ but I know they are thinking, ‘Wow, it’s so small,’ ” Breslin says.

Adds Conder: “Even the guy who comes to fix the sink asked where the bedroom is.”

There isn’t one. Built atop a two-car garage, the 1950s house’s living quarters consist of two rooms — and that’s if you count the bath. There isn’t a designated nursery or even a crib. Along with other parents in their Echo Park circle of friends, Conder and Breslin practice co-sleeping, so Thurston rests with them.

Breslin, a former nanny, says she would hardly call their lifestyle neo-hippie.

“We are trying to be conscientious about the choices we make,” she says. “People tell you you need all this stuff for a baby. All you really need is diapers, a place to change him and boobs.”

The queen-sized bed that she and Conder share with Thurston sits on a minimalist platform with drawers for his toys. It is the only thing Conder says he has ever purchased at IKEA, and it’s tucked in a corner, a few inches from a swank, streamlined sofa by eminent Italian architect and designer Tobia Scarpa. Overnight visitors crash on the couch or sleep in a backyard tent.

At the foot of the bed, Thurston gets his diaper changed atop a Danish modern dresser. Photos and works on paper by the couple’s artist friends cover the walls. Conder also collects pottery, including the work of the noted Peter Voulkos and celebrated Northern California ceramist Stan Bitters.

Textiles add color to the otherwise earthy, woodsy room. The Western-style camp blanket on the bed that complements Pendleton wool pillows on the sofa. Rugs with geometric designs and folkloric motifs purchased from Echo Park antiques dealer Peter Vanstone cover the hardwood floors. A handcrafted American quilt hangs over the screened front door, and the clothes closet is concealed behind a vibrant indigo boro, a Japanese patchwork panel made from vintage fabrics.

An early 1960s Cocoon lamp by Achille and Pier Castiglioni — an exotic variation on George Nelson’s Bubble lamp that Conder purchased on the German EBay — hangs over an L-shaped red Formica counter that delineates the kitchen area.

The family eats at a round wooden table, with Mom and Dad sitting on chairs by Danish designer Borge Mogensen. Should guests drop by, there is a second table with a solid teak top and wrought-iron legs, a collaboration between Arne Jacobsen and Piet Hein.

“When you have this small space, every decision is critical,” Conder says. “You can only have things that fit within the scale of this space. And these are all things I have wanted for a long time. Everyone needs to question the idea of what we really need.”

Conder has had that opportunity. He was born in a 600-square-foot Craftsman in Huntington Beach but grew up in a five-bedroom tract house.

“My father made a little money, and buying that house was his biggest regret,” Conder says. “It was eventually taken back by the bank.”

Five years ago, just before he moved in as a bachelor, Conder had the opportunity to buy his current residence for $260,000. These days, the new father is happy to be paying $1,000-a-month rent.

“The American dream is to have a kid and buy a house,” he says, adding he’s thankful he went only halfway.

Living small runs in the family, apparently. His sister lives in a yurt in Hawaii. His brother, Ramsey, lives nearby with his girlfriend and baby daughter in a relatively palatial 500-square-foot apartment.

Breslin, who grew up in a large two-story home in Grosse Pointe, Mich., says she can understand why people would see her small home as peculiar.

“I don’t think we’re so crazy,” she says. “There are moms out there who never stop trying to rack up all the things that mean they have it all. Living here, I don’t need to have a job. I can focus on having as many experiences as we can have as a family rather than the stress of a mortgage or having to pay someone else to raise my child.”

Close quarters, she contends, create a tight family. “Living in one room, I can constantly see Thurston, and he knows I am watching him. The way that most people structure their living situations is so the parents are most happy. But who’s to say that a kid wants to be in a room down a hall?”

Conder laughs. “It’s probably going to mess him up in a whole new way,” he jokes, adding that Thurston may grow up longing for a mansion.

Living in such close confines demands a sense of humor, Conder says, and the size of their home has made the couple’s relationship stronger.

“When you get in a fight there is nowhere to go,” he says. “You have to deal with stuff head on.”

LA Times

NY Times By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: November 9, 2009

Last Thursday there was a rally outside the U.S. Capitol to protest pending health care legislation, featuring the kinds of things we’ve grown accustomed to, including large signs showing piles of bodies at Dachau with the caption “National Socialist Healthcare.” It was grotesque — and it was also ominous. For what we may be seeing is America starting to be Californiafied.

The key thing to understand about that rally is that it wasn’t a fringe event. It was sponsored by the House Republican leadership — in fact, it was officially billed as a G.O.P. press conference. Senior lawmakers were in attendance, and apparently had no problem with the tone of the proceedings.

True, Eric Cantor, the second-ranking House Republican, offered some mild criticism after the fact. But the operative word is “mild.” The signs were “inappropriate,” said his spokesman, and the use of Hitler comparisons by such people as Rush Limbaugh, said Mr. Cantor, “conjures up images that frankly are not, I think, very helpful.”

What all this shows is that the G.O.P. has been taken over by the people it used to exploit.

The state of mind visible at recent right-wing demonstrations is nothing new. Back in 1964 the historian Richard Hofstadter published an essay titled, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” which reads as if it were based on today’s headlines: Americans on the far right, he wrote, feel that “America has been largely taken away from them and their kind, though they are determined to try to repossess it and to prevent the final destructive act of subversion.” Sound familiar?

But while the paranoid style isn’t new, its role within the G.O.P. is.

When Hofstadter wrote, the right wing felt dispossessed because it was rejected by both major parties. That changed with the rise of Ronald Reagan: Republican politicians began to win elections in part by catering to the passions of the angry right.

Until recently, however, that catering mostly took the form of empty symbolism. Once elections were won, the issues that fired up the base almost always took a back seat to the economic concerns of the elite. Thus in 2004 George W. Bush ran on antiterrorism and “values,” only to announce, as soon as the election was behind him, that his first priority was changing Social Security.

But something snapped last year. Conservatives had long believed that history was on their side, so the G.O.P. establishment could, in effect, urge hard-right activists to wait just a little longer: once the party consolidated its hold on power, they’d get what they wanted. After the Democratic sweep, however, extremists could no longer be fobbed off with promises of future glory.

Furthermore, the loss of both Congress and the White House left a power vacuum in a party accustomed to top-down management. At this point Newt Gingrich is what passes for a sober, reasonable elder statesman of the G.O.P. And he has no authority: Republican voters ignored his call to support a relatively moderate, electable candidate in New York’s special Congressional election.

Real power in the party rests, instead, with the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin (who at this point is more a media figure than a conventional politician). Because these people aren’t interested in actually governing, they feed the base’s frenzy instead of trying to curb or channel it. So all the old restraints are gone.

In the short run, this may help Democrats, as it did in that New York race. But maybe not: elections aren’t necessarily won by the candidate with the most rational argument. They’re often determined, instead, by events and economic conditions.

In fact, the party of Limbaugh and Beck could well make major gains in the midterm elections. The Obama administration’s job-creation efforts have fallen short, so that unemployment is likely to stay disastrously high through next year and beyond. The banker-friendly bailout of Wall Street has angered voters, and might even let Republicans claim the mantle of economic populism. Conservatives may not have better ideas, but voters might support them out of sheer frustration.

And if Tea Party Republicans do win big next year, what has already happened in California could happen at the national level. In California, the G.O.P. has essentially shrunk down to a rump party with no interest in actually governing — but that rump remains big enough to prevent anyone else from dealing with the state’s fiscal crisis. If this happens to America as a whole, as it all too easily could, the country could become effectively ungovernable in the midst of an ongoing economic disaster.

The point is that the takeover of the Republican Party by the irrational right is no laughing matter. Something unprecedented is happening here — and it’s very bad for America.

The New Yorker, November 9, 2009,
By Dana Goodyear

For nearly twenty-five years, Jonathan Gold, the high-low priest of the L.A. food scene, has been chronicling the city’s carts and stands and dives and holes-in-mini-malls; its Peruvian, Korean, Uzbek, Isaan Thai, and Islamic Chinese restaurants; the places that serve innards, insects, and extremities. He tells his readers where to get crickets, boiled silkworm cocoons, and fried grasshoppers. On their behalf, he eats hoof and head and snout, and reveals which new populations have come to town, and where they are, and what they’re cooking up. Two years ago, Gold won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism, a first for a food writer, and a first for his home paper, the alternative L.A. Weekly. Interesting cuisine, he believes, often comes out of poverty. He sees L.A. as “the anti-melting pot” —the home of true, undiluted, regional cookery—but also has a fondness for what he calls the “triple carom”: the Cajun seafood restaurant that caters to Chinese customers and is run by Vietnamese from Texas. Chefs read Gold, as do food nerds in their thirties who spend their weekends retracing his steps. Mentions Javier Cabral. Gold has been mistaken for the chef Jonathan Waxman and for Mario Batali. He is sly and erudite; withdrawn in person and, in print, exuberant. The avant-garde composer Carl Stone considers him the S. J. Perelman of food. Gold is forty-nine, and grew up in South Central. He attended U.C.L.A., and then worked for a legal newspaper downtown. As an experiment, he set about trying every restaurant along Pico Boulevard, which encompasses Korean, Nicaraguan, Salvadoran, Oaxacan, and Jaliscan areas. Mentions Brooklyn Bagel Bakery and Mama’s Hot Tamales. Gold eats at three to five hundred restaurants every year. Mentions Robert Sietsema. At the Weekly, when Gold was in his mid-twenties, he met Laurie Ochoa. They got married in 1990, and she has been his dining companion and first reader ever since. They have two kids, Leon and Isabel. Gold drives twenty thousand miles a year in search of food. Mentions the San Gabriel Valley. Gold has observed that the insular nature of L.A. allows imported regional cuisines to remain intact, traceable almost to the restaurant-owners’ villages of origin. Describes Gold’s visit to a Malan fast-food restaurant and to a Sichuan restaurant in Rowland Heights. In 1990, Gold started writing about Renu Nakorn, an Isaan Thai place twenty miles southeast of downtown. After his reviews, large numbers of white people started coming in, for the first time. To Gold’s readers, his reviews have the ontological status that the New York Times has for people interested in current events: he doesn’t write about it because it is, it is because he’s written about it. Gold used to guzzle hot sauce as a kid, and he still eats as if his manhood depended on it. He suspects that he has encouraged those he calls the “dining-as-sport” crowd. The other night, the stunt dish was live octopus, in a divey strip-mall restaurant. Mentions Jitlada, a restaurant with a once-untranslated menu of hard-to-find southern-Thai specialties.

The New Yorker

Thanks to Danny Bralver

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
NY Times Published: November 7, 2009

Your body is probably home to a chemical called bisphenol A, or BPA. It’s a synthetic estrogen that United States factories now use in everything from plastics to epoxies — to the tune of six pounds per American per year. That’s a lot of estrogen.

More than 92 percent of Americans have BPA in their urine, and scientists have linked it — though not conclusively — to everything from breast cancer to obesity, from attention deficit disorder to genital abnormalities in boys and girls alike.

Now it turns out it’s in our food.

Consumer Reports magazine tested an array of brand-name canned foods for a report in its December issue and found BPA in almost all of them. The magazine says that relatively high levels turned up, for example, in Progresso vegetable soup, Campbell’s condensed chicken noodle soup, and Del Monte Blue Lake cut green beans.

The magazine also says it found BPA in the canned liquid version of Similac Advance infant formula (but not in the powdered version) and in canned Nestlé Juicy Juice (but not in the juice boxes). The BPA in the food probably came from an interior coating used in many cans.

Should we be alarmed?

The chemical industry doesn’t think so. Steven Hentges of the American Chemistry Council dismissed the testing, noting that Americans absorb quantities of BPA at levels that government regulators have found to be safe. Mr. Hentges also pointed to a new study indicating that BPA exposure did not cause abnormalities in the reproductive health of rats.

But more than 200 other studies have shown links between low doses of BPA and adverse health effects, according to the Breast Cancer Fund, which is trying to ban the chemical from food and beverage containers.

“The vast majority of independent scientists — those not working for industry — are concerned about early-life low-dose exposures to BPA,” said Janet Gray, a Vassar College professor who is science adviser to the Breast Cancer Fund.

Published journal articles have found that BPA given to pregnant rats or mice can cause malformed genitals in their offspring, as well as reduced sperm count among males. For example, a European journal found that male mice exposed to BPA were less likely to make females pregnant, and the Journal of Occupational Health found that male rats administered BPA had less sperm production and lower testicular weight.

This year, the journal Environmental Health Perspectives found that pregnant mice exposed to BPA had babies with abnormalities in the cervix, uterus and vagina. Reproductive Toxicology found that even low-level exposure to BPA led to the mouse equivalent of early puberty for females. And an array of animal studies link prenatal BPA exposure to breast cancer and prostate cancer.

While most of the studies are on animals, the Journal of the American Medical Association reported last year that humans with higher levels of BPA in their blood have “an increased prevalence of cardiovascular disease, diabetes and liver-enzyme abnormalities.” Another published study found that women with higher levels of BPA in their blood had more miscarriages.

Scholars have noted some increasing reports of boys born with malformed genitals, girls who begin puberty at age 6 or 8 or even earlier, breast cancer in women and men alike, and declining sperm counts among men. The Endocrine Society, an association of endocrinologists, warned this year that these kinds of abnormalities may be a consequence of the rise of endocrine-disrupting chemicals, and it specifically called on regulators to re-evaluate BPA.

Last year, Canada became the first country to conclude that BPA can be hazardous to humans, and Massachusetts issued a public health advisory in August warning against any exposure to BPA by pregnant or breast-feeding women or by children under the age of 2.

The Food and Drug Administration, which in the past has relied largely on industry studies — and has generally been asleep at the wheel — is studying the issue again. Bills are also pending in Congress to ban BPA from food and beverage containers.

“When you have 92 percent of the American population exposed to a chemical, this is not one where you want to be wrong,” said Dr. Ted Schettler of the Science and Environmental Health Network. “Are we going to quibble over individual rodent studies, or are we going to act?”

While the evidence isn’t conclusive, it justifies precautions. In my family, we’re cutting down on the use of those plastic containers that contain BPA to store or microwave food, and I’m drinking water out of a metal bottle now. In my reporting around the world, I’ve come to terms with the threats from warlords, bandits and tarantulas. But endocrine disrupting chemicals — they give me the willies.

Redling

By ALESSANDRA STANLEY
NY Times Published: November 3, 2009

IT is almost too perfect that the first African-American president of the United States was elected in time for the 40th anniversary of “Sesame Street.” The world is finally beginning to look the way that the PBS show always made it out to be.

So it is to the credit of this daunting cultural landmark — a program that has taught generations of children to count, countless parents how to teach and is seen in 125 countries around the world — that Tuesday’s anniversary is not a frenzy of preening self-celebration. Episode No. 4187 is as child-centric and respectful of routine as any other.

The special guest — the first lady, Michelle Obama — doesn’t make her appearance alongside Big Bird until midway into a show crammed with the usual preschool didactics. The letter of the day comes first — H, as in help and hug and healthy.

The only real difference is that on this day, viewers have to count to 40.

The pedagogy hasn’t changed, but the look and tone of “Sesame Street” has evolved. Forty years on, this is your mother’s “Sesame Street,” only better dressed and gentrified: Sesame Street by way of Park Slope. The opening is no longer a realistic rendition of an urban skyline but an animated, candy-colored chalk drawing of a preschool Arcadia, with flowers and butterflies and stars. The famous set, brownstones and garbage bins, has lost the messy graffiti and gritty smudges of city life over the years. Now there are green spaces, tofu and yoga.

It’s still a messianic show, but the mission has shifted to the more immediate concerns of pediatricians and progressive parents, especially when it comes to childhood obesity. “Sesame Street” takes the Muppets, rhymes and visual verve that were developed to instill tolerance, racial pride and equality, to preach exercise and healthy eating.

Put it this way, Mrs. Obama’s message on the anniversary episode isn’t an exhortation to future soldiers, scientists and presidents to be all that they can be, but to tiny consumers to eat the freshest food they can find. “Veggies taste so good when they come fresh from the garden, don’t they?” Mrs. Obama tells a rainbow coalition of children gathered around a soil tray, an echo of her White House kitchen garden. “If you eat all these healthy foods, you are going to grow up to be big and strong,” Mrs. Obama says, flexing her fists. “Just like me.”

That foodie focus is a reflection of the times and current fads, but also of a tension in the mandate of “Sesame Street,” as it straddles the two imperatives of being a public service in the broadest sense of the word — serving the underserved — while also competing with all the other shows and satisfying the public television donor base.

It is an urban myth that Cookie Monster was turned into Veggie Monster to appease nutrition Nazis, however — that was a blogosphere rumor in the Paul-Is-Dead school of whispering campaigns. But Cookie Monster’s palate was refined during Season 36 as part of the show’s “healthy habits for life” campaign. He now also gobbles fruits and vegetables, which are labeled by the show as “anytime” foods while cookies are held in reserve as “sometime” food. And almost every episode has a subliminal message about exercise and nutrition, along with a fruit bowl.

So much carb consciousness raising makes it all the more incongruous that McDonald’s is a “Sesame Street” corporate sponsor — perhaps the most overt sign of changing mores. It was a financially driven decision, made in 2003 after public television loosened its restrictions on sponsors’ promotional efforts.

“Sesame Street” no longer has a monopoly on growing minds; if anything, it is an endangered species. There are now scores of preschool shows, and some of them also are shown without ads, like “Playhouse Disney.” Not surprisingly, fewer children are watching “Sesame Street,” but most children are watching more television than ever: a recent Nielsen Company study showed that on average children ages 2 to 5 now spend nearly 25 hours a week watching TV and an additional 7 hours either watching taped shows and DVDs or sitting in front of a computer. The top-rated show in that age group in the month of September, according to Nielsen, was “Go, Diego, Go!” on Nickelodeon. “Sesame Street” trailed far behind.

To help cover costs “Sesame Street” reached out to family-friendly sponsors like Beaches resorts and Earth’s Best organic baby foods.

The inclusion of McDonald’s, however, horrified some, including Commercial Alert, a nonprofit group founded by Ralph Nader, which couldn’t reconcile healthy content with fast-food promotions and weren’t lovin’ it. It should be noted that unlike many fast-food ads aimed at children, these spots do not entice children with displays of a happy meal or an M&M McFlurry. Instead they showcase a child doing an art project — a little boy tracing the golden arches.

Oddly enough McDonald’s presented that distinctive trademark in 1969, the year that “Sesame Street” made its premiere on public television. It was a tumultuous time. The Children’s Television Workshop, the nonprofit production company that is now known as the Sesame Workshop, was introduced to the public in 1968, when “Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color” referred to Technicolor cartoons, not race. The top-rated series on television was “The Andy Griffith Show.”

By 1969 mass culture had swerved: “Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In” was the No. 1 show in the nation; “Mod Squad” was a hit, and so was “Julia,” the first network series to star an African-American actress in a nonstereotypical role. “Sesame Street” took its breezy magazine format and sock-it-to-me comic style from “Laugh-In,” but its commitment to “relevance,” in the parlance of the times, was in tune with the most serious social issues of the era.

The show’s original intent was to present enjoyable and beguiling preschool education to poor children who did not have access to decent preschools while bringing diversity to children’s programming. “Sesame Street” wasn’t the only children’s show with a social message. (Rocky and Bullwinkle are celebrating their 50th anniversary this year. Some of the earliest cartoons, back when the show was still known as “Rocky and His Friends,” were way ahead of the times; a 1962 retelling of “The Ugly Duckling” on “Fractured Fairy Tales” is a screed against cosmetic surgery.)

But it was the mixture of whimsy, pop music and didactic rigor that distinguished “Sesame Street” from everything else. It has arguably had an even greater impact overseas, especially in places like Kosovo and South Africa, where the show is made in partnership with local television producers and tailored to local concerns. Kami, the world’s first H.I.V.-positive Muppet, made her debut on the South African version in 2002 when the government of Thabo Mbeki was still questioning the value of anti-viral drugs.

Peace in the Middle East can be measured by the status of “Sesame Street.” For a while, in the more hopeful 1990s, there was an adaptation that catered jointly to Israeli and Palestinian preschoolers — in Hebrew and Arabic. That entente died in the first Intifada, and now Israelis have one version, Palestinians another.

Even in this country the smallest innovations on “Sesame Street” resound as cultural markers. The addition in 2006 of Abby Cadabby, a pink and sparkly fairy with a button nose and long eyelashes was taken as yet another sign of the ascent of third wave feminism — or a concession to the commercial appeal of Disney-style princess paraphernalia. New technologies abound: this year, for the first time “Abby’s Flying Fairy School” will be in CGI.

Past episodes on the anniversary DVD boxed set serve as a kind of time tunnel to lost eras: In 1971 the Rev. Jesse Jackson, natty in an afro and a gold medallion, prompted little children to recite “I Am Somebody.” In 1998 Tony Bennett serenaded a worm who yearned for outer space with the song, “Slimey to the Moon.” Disco, rap and hip-hop have all had their “Sesame Street” moment.

This season has an Om sensibility. “My mom takes me to yoga class, I love doing yoga,” a little girl in pigtails says in an episode that ran in October. She is narrating a short film that shows a pixieish teacher and her pupils folding into the downward dog position. After class her mother arrives with a plastic water bottle. “She says it’s important to drink water when you exercise,” the girl explains. “When I grow up I want to be a yoga teacher.”

46 Squid Boats off Ventura County Line 11/5/09. Photograph by Billy Wilson.

In the 70s

November 7 through December 19

Michael Kohn

Thanks to Basil Katz

By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Times Published: November 5, 2009

Remember those Republican boasts that they would turn health care into President Obama’s Waterloo? Well, exit polls suggest that to the extent that health care was an issue in Tuesday’s elections, it worked in Democrats’ favor. But while health care won’t be Mr. Obama’s Waterloo, economic policy is starting to look like his Anzio.

True, the elections weren’t a referendum on Mr. Obama. Most voters focused on local issues — and those who did focus on national issues tended, if anything, to go Democratic. In New Jersey, voters who considered health care the top issue went for Gov. Jon Corzine by a 4-to-1 margin; Chris Christie won voters who were concerned about property taxes and corruption.

Yet there was a national element to the election. Voters across America are in a bad mood, largely because of the still-grim economic situation. And when voters are feeling bad, they turn on whomever currently holds office. Even Michael Bloomberg, the mayor of New York City, saw his supposedly easy reelection turn into a tight race.

And challengers did well even if they had no coherent alternative to offer. Mr. Christie never explained how he can reduce property taxes given New Jersey’s dire fiscal straits — but voters were nonetheless willing to take a flier.

This bodes ill for the Democrats in the midterm elections next year — not because voters will reject their agenda, but because all indications are that a year from now unemployment will still be painfully high. And Republicans may well benefit, despite having become the party of no ideas.

Which brings me to the Anzio analogy.

The World War II battle of Anzio was a classic example of the perils of being too cautious. Allied forces landed far behind enemy lines, catching their opponents by surprise. Instead of following up on this advantage, however, the American commander hunkered down in his beachhead — and soon found himself penned in by German forces on the surrounding hills, suffering heavy casualties.

The parallel with current economic policy runs as follows: early this year, President Obama came into office with a strong mandate and proclaimed the need to take bold action on the economy. His actual actions, however, were cautious rather than bold. They were enough to pull the economy back from the brink, but not enough to bring unemployment down.

Thus the stimulus bill fell far short of what many economists — including some in the administration itself — considered appropriate. According to The New Yorker, Christina Romer, the chairwoman of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers, estimated that a package of more than $1.2 trillion was justified.

Meanwhile, the administration balked at proposals to put large amounts of additional capital into banks, which would probably have required temporary nationalization of the weakest institutions. Instead, it turned to a strategy of benign neglect — basically, hoping that the banks could earn their way back to financial health.

Administration officials would presumably argue that they were constrained by political realities, that a bolder policy couldn’t have passed Congress. But they never tested that assumption, and they also never gave any public indication that they were doing less than they wanted. The official line was that policy was just right, making it hard to explain now why more is needed.

And more is needed. Yes, the economy grew fairly fast in the third quarter — but not fast enough to make significant progress on jobs. And there’s little reason to expect things to look better going forward. The stimulus has already had its maximum effect on growth. Even Timothy Geithner, the Treasury secretary, admits that banks remain reluctant to lend. Many economists predict that the economy’s growth, such as it is, will fade out over the course of next year.

The problem is that it’s not clear what Mr. Obama can do about this prospect. Conventional wisdom in Washington seems to have congealed around the view that budget deficits preclude any further fiscal stimulus — a view that’s all wrong on the economics, but that doesn’t seem to matter. Meanwhile, the Democratic base, so energized last year, has lost much of its passion, at least partly because the administration’s soft-touch approach to Wall Street has seemed to many like a betrayal of their ideals.

The president, then, having failed to exploit his early opportunities, is pinned down in his too-small beachhead.

If the Democrats lose badly in the midterms, the talking heads will say that Mr. Obama tried to do too much, this is a center-right nation, and so on. But the truth is that Mr. Obama put his agenda at risk by doing too little. The fateful decision, early this year, to go for economic half-measures may haunt Democrats for years to come.

Roald Gundersen built his home and greenhouse using whole tree for structure and support.

By ANNE RAVER
NY Times Published: November 4, 2009

STODDARD, Wis.

ROALD GUNDERSEN, an architect who may revolutionize the building industry, shinnied up a slender white ash near his house here on a recent afternoon, hoisting himself higher and higher until the limber trunk began to bend slowly toward the forest floor.

“Look at Papa!” his life and business partner, Amelia Baxter, 31, called to their 3-year-old daughter, Estella, who was crouching in the leaves, reaching for a mushroom. Their son, Cameron, 9 months, was nestled in a sling across Ms. Baxter’s chest.

Wild mushrooms and watercress are among the treasures of this 134-acre forest, but its greatest resource is its small-diameter trees — thousands like the one Mr. Gundersen, 49, was hugging like a monkey.

“Whooh!” he said, jumping to the ground and gingerly rubbing his back. “This isn’t as easy as it used to be. But see how the tree holds the memory of the weight?”

The ash, no more than five inches thick, was still bent toward the ground. Mr. Gundersen will continue to work on it, bending and pruning it over the next few years in this forest which lies about 10 miles east of the Mississippi River and 150 miles northwest of Madison.

Loggers pass over such trees because they are too small to mill, but this forester-architect, who founded Gundersen Design in 1991 and built his first house here two years later, has made a career of working with them.

“Curves are stronger than straight lines,” he explained. “A single arch supporting a roof can laterally brace the building in all directions.”

The firm, recently renamed Whole Tree Architecture and Construction, is also owned by Ms. Baxter, a onetime urban farmer and community organizer with a knack for administration and fundraising. She also manages a community forest project modeled after a community-supported agriculture project, in which paying members harvest sustainable riches like mushrooms, firewood and watercress from these woods, and those who want to build a house can select from about 1,000 trees, inventoried according to species, size and shape, and located with global positioning system coordinates, a living inventory that was paid for with a $150,000 grant from the United States Department of Agriculture.

According to research by the Forest Products Laboratory in Madison, run by the USDA, a whole, unmilled tree can support 50 percent more weight than the largest piece of lumber milled from the same tree. So Mr. Gundersen uses small-diameter trees as rafters and framing in his airy structures, and big trees felled by wind, disease or insects as powerful columns and curving beams.

Taking small trees from a crowded stand in the forest is much like thinning carrots in a row: the remaining plants get more light, air and nutrients. Carrots grow longer and straighter; trees get bigger and healthier.

And when the trees are left whole, they sequester carbon. “For every ton of wood, a ton and a half of carbon dioxide is locked up,” he said, whereas producing a ton of steel releases two to five tons of carbon. So the more whole wood is used in place of steel, the less carbon is pumped into the air.

These passive solar structures also need very little or no supplemental heat.

Tom Spaulding, the executive director of Angelic Organics Learning Center, near Rockford, Ill., northwest of Chicago, knows about this because he commissioned Mr. Gundersen to build a 1,600-square-foot training center in 2003. He said: “In the middle of winter, on a 20-below day, we’re in shorts, with the windows and doors open. And we don’t burn a bit of petroleum.”

“It’s eminently more frugal and sustainable than milling trees,” he added. “These are weed trees, so when you take them out, you improve the forest stand and get a building out of it. You haven’t stripped an entire hillside out west to build it, or used a lot of oil to transport the lumber.”

Mr. Gundersen had a rough feeling for all of this 16 years ago, when he started building a simple A-frame house here for his first wife and their son, Ian, now 15. He wanted to encourage local farmers to use materials like wood and straw from their own farms to build low-cost, energy-efficient structures. So he used small aspens that were crowding out young oaks nearby.

“I would just carry them home and peel them,” said Mr. Gundersen, who later realized he could peel them while they were standing, making them “a lot lighter to haul and not so dangerous to fell.”

Mr. Gundersen, who built most of the house singlehandedly, also recognized the beauty of large trees downed by disease or wind, and used the peeled trunks, shorn of their central branches a few feet from the crook, as supporting columns in the house. “I thought they were beautiful, but I didn’t think how strong they were,” he said.

“In architecture, how materials come together and how they are connected is really the god in the details,” he continued. “The connection is where things will fall apart,” he said, adding that the crook of a tree “has been time-tested by environmental conditions for 200 million years.”

He refers to that first house — which cost $15,000 (for plumbing, electrical, septic and other basic amenities, as well as $4,000 in paid labor) and a year of his own labor — as his master’s degree in architecture. Divorced in 1997, he now lives there with Ms. Baxter and their two children.

After finishing the A-frame, Mr. Gundersen built a 100-by-20-foot solar greenhouse next door with thick straw-bale walls on three sides, banked into the north slope. He used small-diameter, rot-resistant black locust trees for the timber framing.

A wall of double-paned glass, positioned to optimize the low-angle winter light, faces south. Growing beds angled slightly toward the sun are planted with rows of mustard greens, kale, chard, arugula, lettuces and herbs. Hanging trays of micro-greens and a fig and bay tree promise fresh food for the fall and winter.

But it is the Book End — the little house attached to the greenhouse, which is home to the firm’s project manager and his wife — that quietly vibrates with the spirit of the forest.

“We used a lot of standing dead elm here,” Mr. Gundersen said, pointing out the delicate trails, or galleries, left by the beetles that killed the tree. Peeled of their bark and satiny smooth, these trees have a presence that seems to draw one’s arm around their trunks and invite a viewer to lean into them, to soak up strength from these powerful old souls.

In this quiet farming community, where people may not have a lot of money to spend, but do have plenty of wood and straw, word of the beauty and practicality of Mr. Gundersen’s structures has spread. Solar greenhouses made of local materials can extend the growing season through winter, even in a place where temperatures can drop to 30 or 40 below. In the last 18 years, Whole Trees has built 25 of them here.

It’s part of a vision Mr. Gundersen developed after spending three years as a project architect on Biosphere 2, the three-acre glass-enclosed miniature world constructed near Tucson in the 1980s, which tried to replicate the earth’s systems, but foundered on carbon dioxide, acidic seas, failed crops and internal intrigues. After that experience, he wanted to build something more basic to human needs.

Mr. Gundersen grew up in nearby LaCrosse, where his Norwegian great-grandfather, a doctor, founded a local institution, the Gundersen Clinic; he comes from a clan of doctors and tree lovers. “There are 23 doctors in the family,” he said, including his father and uncle and four great-uncles, but he seems to be wired more like his great-grandmother Helga, whose family still owns a tree farm in Norway. He and his grandmother would often picnic on this piece of wild land, where he remembers picking watercress and wildflowers and building tree forts.

Now, to be in his buildings is to be among the trees.

“It almost feels like we’re in a forest, the trees have such a presence,” said Marcia Halligan, a client who is a farmer and Reiki instructor, standing among the birch posts of her airy bedroom.

She and her partner, Steven Adams, who grows seed for organic seed companies, worked with Mr. Gundersen on a design that uses 22 different kinds of wood, most of it from their own land outside Viroqua, southeast of Stoddard.

The economic downturn has put commissions for several large buildings for nonprofits and a 4,600-square-foot residence on hold, Mr. Gundersen and Ms. Baxter say, but the demand for small houses like theirs is up.

“It’s remarkable how many people have called this last year asking for 1,000-square-foot houses,” Ms. Baxter said. “People are downsizing for their retirement homes, and even younger folks are thinking about energy costs, environmental awareness and simplicity.”

Whole Trees can keep construction costs as low as $100 a square foot, not including site preparation, if the client is willing to shop for secondhand fixtures and the like.

As people begin to see forests as a resource, they may begin to take care of them rather than cutting them down to make room for cornfields or pastures. And the forests keep giving back.

“I’ve taken 20 trees per year off one acre, for 12 buildings,” Mr. Gundersen said. “You can never tell that we’ve taken out that much wood.”

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
NY Times Published: November 4, 2009

The moment of truth for health care is at hand, and the distortion that perhaps gets the most traction is this:

We have the greatest health care system in the world. Sure, it has flaws, but it saves lives in ways that other countries can only dream of. Abroad, people sit on waiting lists for months, so why should we squander billions of dollars to mess with a system that is the envy of the world? As Senator Richard Shelby of Alabama puts it, President Obama’s plans amount to “the first step in destroying the best health care system the world has ever known.”

That self-aggrandizing delusion may be the single greatest myth in the health care debate. In fact, America’s health care system is worse than Slov—er, oops, more on that later.

The United States ranks 31st in life expectancy (tied with Kuwait and Chile), according to the latest World Health Organization figures. We rank 37th in infant mortality (partly because of many premature births) and 34th in maternal mortality. A child in the United States is two-and-a-half times as likely to die by age 5 as in Singapore or Sweden, and an American woman is 11 times as likely to die in childbirth as a woman in Ireland.

Canadians live longer than Americans do after kidney transplants and after dialysis, and that may be typical of cross-border differences. One review examined 10 studies of how the American and Canadian systems dealt with various medical issues. The United States did better in two, Canada did better in five and in three they were similar or it was difficult to determine.

Yet another study, cited in a recent report by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Urban Institute, looked at how well 19 developed countries succeeded in avoiding “preventable deaths,” such as those where a disease could be cured or forestalled. What Senator Shelby called “the best health care system” ranked in last place.

The figures are even worse for members of minority groups. An African-American in New Orleans has a shorter life expectancy than the average person in Vietnam or Honduras.

I regularly receive heartbreaking e-mails from readers simultaneously combating the predations of disease and insurers. One correspondent, Linda, told me how she had been diagnosed earlier this year with abdominal and bladder cancer — leading to battles with her insurance company.

“I will never forget standing outside the chemo treatment room knowing that the medication needed to save my life was only a few feet away, but that because I had private insurance it wasn’t available to me,” Linda wrote. “I read a comment from someone saying that they didn’t want a faceless government bureaucrat deciding if they would or would not get treatment. Well, a faceless bureaucrat from my private insurance made the decision that I wouldn’t get treatment and that I wasn’t worth saving.”

It’s true that Americans have shorter waits to see medical specialists than in most countries, although waits in Germany are shorter than in the United States. But citizens of other countries get longer hospital stays and more medication than Americans do because our insurance companies evict people from hospitals as soon as they can stagger out of bed.

For example, in the United States, 90 percent of hernia surgery is performed on an outpatient basis. In Britain, only 40 percent is, according to a report by the McKinsey Global Institute.

Likewise, Americans take 10 percent fewer drugs than citizens in other countries — but pay 118 percent more per pill that they do take, McKinsey said.

Opponents of reform assert that the wretched statistics in the United States are simply a consequence of unhealthy lifestyles and a diverse population with pockets of poverty. It’s true that America suffers more from obesity than other countries. But McKinsey found that over all, the disease burden in Europe is higher than in the United States, probably because Americans smoke less and because the American population is younger.

Moreover, there is one American health statistic that is strikingly above average: life expectancy for Americans who have already reached the age of 65. At that point, they can expect to live longer than the average in industrialized countries. That’s because Americans above age 65 actually have universal health care coverage: Medicare. Suddenly, a diverse population with pockets of poverty is no longer such a drawback.

That brings me to an apology.

In several columns, I’ve noted indignantly that we have worse health statistics than Slovenia. For example, I noted that an American child is twice as likely to die in its first year as a Slovenian child. The tone — worse than Slovenia! — gravely offended Slovenians. They resent having their fine universal health coverage compared with the notoriously dysfunctional American system.

As far as I can tell, every Slovenian has written to me. Twice. So, to all you Slovenians, I apologize profusely for the invidious comparison of our health systems. Yet I still don’t see anything wrong with us Americans aspiring for health care every bit as good as yours.

Baladrón & Grass
Claudio Baladrón Z. (1983) was born in Santiago, Chile and raised in Punta Arenas, Chile.
Studied architecture at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile (2002-2009) and has collaborated with Diego Grass P. since 2008.

Diego Grass P. (1983) was born and raised in Santiago, Chile.
Studied architecture at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile (2002-2009) and has collaborated with Claudio Baladrón Z. since 2008.

There are oaks, wind and rain coming from the west. A dusty road is at the east.

Community soccer field is south; bamboo and empty beer cans all over the north.

Now there is also a wooden barn structure over a concrete platform, with corrugated metal cladding in the outside and pine boards in the inside, plus 100 chairs, lectern, altar, virgin figure and a cross.

Mass is once a month, community activities every evening. Both happen in the same space.

A new chapel for 100 people in the remote countryside of Southern Chile.

Baladrón & Grass

Claudio Baladrón Z. (1983) was born in Santiago, Chile and raised in Punta Arenas, Chile.
Studied architecture at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile (2002-2009) and has collaborated with Diego Grass P. since 2008.

Diego Grass P. (1983) was born and raised in Santiago, Chile.
Studied architecture at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile (2002-2009) and has collaborated with Claudio Baladrón Z. since 2008.

via

Thanks to Nate Lentz

via

Thanks to Darrell Kunitomi

via

Directed and written by Michael Mann, the beach scene with a magnificent score of Tangerine Dream. Nice tackle by James Belushi.

Thanks to Scott Caan

By SARAH KERSHAW
NY Times Published: October 31, 2009

Life as a Labradoodle may sound free and easy, but if you’re Jet, who lives in New Jersey, there is a lot of work to be done.

He is both a seizure alert dog and a psychiatric service dog whose owner has epilepsy, severe anxiety, depression, various phobias and hypoglycemia. Jet has been trained to anticipate seizures, panic attacks and plunging blood sugar and will alert his owner to these things by staring intently at her until she does something about the problem. He will drop a toy in her lap to snap her out of a dissociative state. If she has a seizure, he will position himself so that his body is under her head to cushion a fall.

Jet seems like a genius, but is he really so smart? In fact, is any of it in his brain, or is it mostly in his sniff?

The matter of what exactly goes on in the mind of a dog is a tricky one, and until recently much of the research on canine intelligence has been met with large doses of skepticism. But over the last several years a growing body of evidence, culled from small scientific studies of dogs’ abilities to do things like detect cancer or seizures, solve complex problems (complex for a dog, anyway), and learn language suggests that they may know more than we thought they did.

Their apparent ability to tune in to the needs of psychiatric patients, turning on lights for trauma victims afraid of the dark, reminding their owners to take medication and interrupting behaviors like suicide attempts and self-mutilation, for example, has lately attracted the attention of researchers.

In September, the Army announced that it would spend $300,000 to study the impact of pairing psychiatric service dogs like Jet with soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan with post-traumatic stress disorder. Both the House and Senate have recently passed bills that would finance the training and placement of these dogs with veterans.

Hungarian researchers reported in a study last year that a guide dog for a blind and epileptic person became anxious before its master suffered a seizure and was taught to bark and lick the owner’s face and upper arm when it detected an onset, three to five minutes before the seizure. It is still somewhat mysterious how exactly dogs detect seizures, whether it’s by picking up on behavioral changes or smelling something awry, but several small studies have shown that a powerful sense of smell can detect lung and other types of cancer, as the dogs sniff out odors emitted by the disease.

Beyond these perceptual abilities, in which trainers can use the dogs’ natural instincts, some research has examined dogs’ actual cognitive ability, and found not just good doggie, but smart doggie.

“I believe that so much research has come out lately suggesting that we may have underestimated certain aspects of the mental ability of dogs that even the most hardened cynic has to think twice before rejecting the possibilities,” said Stanley Coren, a psychology professor at the University of British Columbia and an author of several books on dogs.

Dr. Coren’s work on intelligence, along with other research suggesting that the canine brain processes information something like the way people do, has drawn criticism. And there is good reason. For most of the last century the specter of a horse named Clever Hans hung over anyone who tried to prove that dogs were acting in thoughtful ways — not merely mimicking or manipulating people into believing that they in fact grasped human concepts.

Clever Hans was said to be able to count, make change and tell time by tapping his hoof, until investigators in the early 1900s learned that Hans was merely responding to his trainer’s body language, tapping when the trainer nodded his head. This provided an enduring example for those who believed thought was the exclusive domain of humans.

But in 2004, German researchers reported that a border collie named Rico could learn the name of an object in one try, had 200 objects in his repertoire and remembered them all a month later, all very human. Even skeptical animal behavior researchers found the Rico results impressive and sound. Is it possible that Rico turned the tide on the Clever Hans problem, even though there is debate about how we can reliably measure what dogs know?

By giving dogs language learning and other tests devised for infants and toddlers, Dr. Coren has come up with an intelligence ranking of 100 breeds, with border collies at No. 1. He says the most intelligent breeds (poodles, retrievers, Labradors and shepherds) can learn as many as 250 words, signs and signals, while the others can learn 165. The average dog is about as intellectually advanced as a 2- to 2-and-a-half-year-old child, he has concluded, with an ability to understand some abstract concepts. For example, the animal can get “the idea of being a dog” by differentiating photographs with dogs in them from photographs without dogs.

But Clive D. L. Wynne, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Florida who specializes in canine cognition and has himself said he met a border collie who knew 1,500 words, takes issue with efforts to compare human and canine brains.

He argues that it is dogs’ deep sensitivity to the humans around them, their obedience under rigorous training, and their desire to please that can explain most of these capabilities. They may be deft at reading human cues — and teachable — but that doesn’t mean they are thinking like people, he says. A dog’s entire world revolves around its primary owner, and it will respond to that person to get what it wants, usually food, treats or affection.

“I take the view that dogs have their own unique way of thinking,” Dr. Wynne said. “It’s a happy accident that doggie thinking and human thinking overlap enough that we can have these relationships with dogs, but we shouldn’t kid ourselves that dogs are viewing the world the way we do.”

Thanks to Jonathan Maghen

the nominal three (to William of Ockham), 1963. Daylight fluorescent light, edition 2/3, 6-ft. fixtures, h. 72 inches (182.9 cm)

Series and Progressions

November 5 – December 23, 2009

David Zwirner

Designed by Finnish architect Antti Lovag. It was the home of Pierre Cardin. Nestled in the stunning red rock face, this masterpiece of modern design was built utilizing entirely curved surfaces. The network of anti-seismic, self-sustaining bubbles extend over almost 5,000 square feet, and are dramatically perched 2,000 feet above the beautiful blue Mediterranean Sea. The views, they say, are absolutely unbelievable.

via

Thanks to Rodney Hill

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
NY Times Published: October 31, 2009

Perhaps the most wretched people on this planet are those suffering obstetric fistulas.

This is a childbirth injury, often suffered by a teenager in Africa or Asia whose pelvis is not fully grown. She suffers obstructed labor, has no access to a C-section, and endures internal injuries that leave her incontinent — steadily trickling urine and sometimes feces through her vagina.

She stinks. She becomes a pariah. She is typically abandoned by her husband and forced to live by herself on the edge of her village. She is scorned, bewildered, humiliated and desolate, often feeling cursed by God.

I’ve met many of these women — or, often, girls of 13, 14, 15 — in half a dozen countries, for there are three million or four million of them around the world. They are the lepers of the 21st century.

Just about the happiest thing that can happen to such a woman is an encounter with Dr. Lewis Wall, an ob-gyn at Washington University in St. Louis. A quiet, self-effacing but relentless man of 59, Dr. Wall has devoted his life to helping these most voiceless of the voiceless, promoting the $300 surgeries that repair fistulas and typically return the patients to full health.

“There’s no more rewarding experience for a surgeon than a successful fistula repair,” Dr. Wall reflected. “There are a lot of operations you do that solve a problem — I can take out a uterus that has a tumor in it. But this is life-transforming for everybody who gets it done. It’s astonishing. You take a human being who has been in the abyss of despair and — boom! — you have a transformed woman. She has her life back.”

“In Liberia, I saw a woman who had developed a fistula 35 years earlier. It turned out to be a tiny injury; it took 20 minutes to repair it. For want of a 20-minute operation, this woman had lived in a pool of urine for 35 years.”

Dr. Wall started out as an anthropologist working in West Africa, and he speaks Hausa, an African language. But he concluded that the world needed doctors more than it needed anthropologists, so at age 27 he went to medical school.

He has had a dazzling career as an academic, writing several books and scores of journal articles, but his passion has been ending the scourge of fistulas. In 1995, he founded the Worldwide Fistula Fund, and he has been campaigning tirelessly year after year to build a fistula hospital in West Africa. That has been his life, his dream.

Now it is a reality.

The West African country of Niger recently approved Dr. Wall’s plan for a fistula hospital, affiliated with an existing leprosy hospital run by SIM, a Christian missionary organization. Eventually, when $850,000 in fund-raising is complete, a new 40-bed fistula hospital, modeled on the extremely successful Addis Ababa Fistula Hospital of Ethiopia, will rise on vacant ground next to the leprosy hospital. (For information on how to help, please visit my blog, nytimes.com/ontheground.)

For the time being, an existing operating theater in the leprosy hospital has been renovated for fistula repairs. Dr. Wall has already shipped a container of medical supplies to Niger, and he expects to go with a team to conduct the first fistula repairs there in December.

The day the final approval came through, Dr. Wall sent me an elated e-mail message with the news. “There are tears in my eyes,” he wrote.

Aside from repairing fistulas, the hospital will also organize outreach efforts to promote maternal health and reduce deaths in childbirth. It will also undertake education and microfinance efforts to empower women more broadly.

It could be just the beginning. The new hospital is part of a grand vision to eradicate fistulas worldwide by building 40 such hospitals in the world’s poorest countries. The plan, drawn up by Dr. Wall, would cost $1.5 billion over 12 years and operate as an American foreign aid program.

I can’t imagine a better use of foreign assistance dollars — or better symbolism than having the most powerful nation on earth reach out to help the most stigmatized, suffering people on the planet. The proposal for the global plan is circulating in Congress, the State Department and the White House, as well as among religious and aid organizations that are lining up to back it. President Obama hasn’t signaled a position yet, but I hope he will seize upon it.

The new fistula hospital in Niger is a tribute to the heroic doggedness of Dr. Wall, and with luck it will be replicated in many other countries. Anybody who has seen a fistula patient after surgery — a teenager’s shy, radiant smile at something so simple as being able to control her wastes — can’t conceive of a better investment.

via