Accidents in Abstract Painting
Free Public Event: Sunday, January 22, 4pm

In the outdoor spectacle entitled Accidents in Abstract Painting Richard Jackson will fly and crash a radio-controlled, model military plane with a fifteen-foot wingspan, filled with paint, into a twenty-foot wall that reads “accidents in abstract painting.” The spectacle, free and open to the public, will take place on Sunday January 22, 2012 at 4pm at Pasadena’s Arroyo Seco, southeast of the Rose Bowl in Area H. This monumental spectacle is part of the Pacific Standard Time Performance and Public Art Festival.

The Armory as part of Pacific Standard Time

Thanks to Morris and Andy Goldman

January 17 – February 25, 2012

David Zwirner

By DAVID FIRESTONE
NY Times Published: January 17, 2012

Having strongly suggested at Monday night’s debate that he would release his 2011 tax returns in April, Mitt Romney needs to begin inoculating himself against the backlash that will almost inevitably ensue when the public sees how much annual income he has, where it comes from and how little tax he pays on it. He started this process Tuesday morning, when he told reporters in South Carolina that his effective tax rate is about 15 percent.

An effective tax rate of 15 percent means that most of his income comes from investments, as he acknowledged Tuesday. The rate on such capital gains income is far lower than the top rate of 35 percent on ordinary income, the kind that most people who receive paychecks have to pay. (Investment income is also not subject to the payroll tax.)

As a result, Mr. Romney is one of the 200,000 millionaires in America who pays a rate less than that of a taxpayer making $100,000. And if his rate turns out to be lower than 15 percent (a feat usually achieved through various tax avoidance schemes), he will be one of the 22,000 millionaire households paying less than half the rate of a middle-class family. (Based on the vague information Mr. Romney has already disclosed about his 2010 income, Citizens for Tax Justice estimated last year that his rate would be 14 percent.)

If that is the case, he would be subject to the “Buffett rule”—a new minimum tax rate for people making over a million per year— proposed by President Obama. Mr. Romney opposes the rule, and any other effort to raise taxes on the wealthy. When asked about it, he routinely deflects the question and says that government needs to be shrunk. But once it is clear that such a rule would directly affect him, he won’t be able to bat it away quite as easily. The Super PAC supporting President Obama already has a video out entitled “the Romney rule.”

There may be another reason why Mr. Romney is already trying to build up immunity to the coming Democratic onslaught over his income. As The New York Times reported last month, he negotiated a retirement deal with Bain Capital, the private equity firm he ran, that provides him with a substantial share of Bain’s profits every year. That probably means he can take advantage of the low 15 percent tax rate on carried interest, the special tax break for hedge fund and private equity managers. (Hedge-fund partners like to claim they deserve an investment-level break because they put their money at risk, but most people outside the business—including the United States Tax Court—have said that it is really pure compensation.)

If true — and this may become clearer depending on how much of his tax return he releases — he will then displace Warren Buffett as the country’s most prominent example of elite tax treatment. Mr. Obama has proposed ending the break on carried interest, one of the principal reasons why the incomes of the very richest Americans has soared in recent years, at a time when ordinary American incomes have been stagnant or fallen behind. The president is certain to amp up his demand once it is clear it will directly affect his likely opponent in the general election. The concept of income inequality is about to become far less abstract.

The Bridge (Gnomes), 2011
Italian marbleized paper on French poster, 46 x 40 cm

Through January 21, 2011

Vava

Art LA at Clifton Benevento

By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Times Published: January 15, 2012

“I have a dream,” declared Martin Luther King, in a speech that has lost none of its power to inspire. And some of that dream has come true. When King spoke in the summer of 1963, America was a nation that denied basic rights to millions of its citizens, simply because their skin was the wrong color. Today racism is no longer embedded in law. And while it has by no means been banished from the hearts of men, its grip is far weaker than once it was.

To say the obvious: to look at a photo of President Obama with his cabinet is to see a degree of racial openness — and openness to women, too — that would have seemed almost inconceivable in 1963. When we observe Martin Luther King’s Birthday, we have something very real to celebrate: the civil rights movement was one of America’s finest hours, and it made us a nation truer to its own ideals.

Yet if King could see America now, I believe that he would be disappointed, and feel that his work was nowhere near done. He dreamed of a nation in which his children “will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” But what we actually became is a nation that judges people not by the color of their skin — or at least not as much as in the past — but by the size of their paychecks. And in America, more than in most other wealthy nations, the size of your paycheck is strongly correlated with the size of your father’s paycheck.

Goodbye Jim Crow, hello class system.

Economic inequality isn’t inherently a racial issue, and rising inequality would be disturbing even if there weren’t a racial dimension. But American society being what it is, there are racial implications to the way our incomes have been pulling apart. And in any case, King — who was campaigning for higher wages when he was assassinated — would surely have considered soaring inequality an evil to be opposed.

So, about that racial dimension: In the 1960s it was widely assumed that ending overt discrimination would improve the economic as well as legal status of minority groups. And at first this seemed to be happening. Over the course of the 1960s and 1970s substantial numbers of black families moved into the middle class, and even into the upper middle class; the percentage of black households in the top 20 percent of the income distribution nearly doubled.

But around 1980 the relative economic position of blacks in America stopped improving. Why? An important part of the answer, surely, is that circa 1980 income disparities in the United States began to widen dramatically, turning us into a society more unequal than at any time since the 1920s.

Think of the income distribution as a ladder, with different people on different rungs. Starting around 1980, the rungs began moving ever farther apart, adversely affecting black economic progress in two ways. First, because many blacks were still on the lower rungs, they were left behind as income at the top of the ladder soared while income near the bottom stagnated. Second, as the rungs moved farther apart, the ladder became harder to climb.

The Times recently reported on a well-established finding that still surprises many Americans when they hear about it: although we still see ourselves as the land of opportunity, we actually have less intergenerational economic mobility than other advanced nations. That is, the chances that someone born into a low-income family will end up with high income, or vice versa, are significantly lower here than in Canada or Europe.

And there’s every reason to believe that our low economic mobility has a lot to do with our high level of income inequality.

Last week Alan Krueger, chairman of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers, gave an important speech about income inequality, presenting a relationship he dubbed the “Great Gatsby Curve.” Highly unequal countries, he showed, have low mobility: the more unequal a society is, the greater the extent to which an individual’s economic status is determined by his or her parents’ status. And as Mr. Krueger pointed out, this relationship suggests that America in the year 2035 will have even less mobility than it has now, that it will be a place in which the economic prospects of children largely reflect the class into which they were born.

That is not a development we should meekly accept.

Mitt Romney says that we should discuss income inequality, if at all, only in “quiet rooms.” There was a time when people said the same thing about racial inequality. Luckily, however, there were people like Martin Luther King who refused to stay quiet. And we should follow their example today. For the fact is that rising inequality threatens to make America a different and worse place — and we need to reverse that trend to preserve both our values and our dreams.

Boys Let’s Be Bad Boys (5), 1998, corrugated cardboard and glue, 41.3 x 50.8 x 8.3 cm

Richard Tuttle in conversation with Richard Shiff
Royal Academy Schools Annual Lecture

16 January 2012
6.30–8pm

Royal Academy Schools Annual Lecture

Doug Wheeler’s “Untitled” (sprayed lacquer on acrylic with neon tubing) from 1969.

By RANDY KENNEDY
NY Times Published: January 15, 2012

THE artist Doug Wheeler tells two stories, both having to do with light, that go a long way toward explaining why he is so revered by many fellow artists — as a visionary and a relentlessly stubborn perfectionist — and also why his work has been seen by so few American artgoers over the last few decades, particularly those in New York.

The first story takes place at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, where several years ago Mr. Wheeler created a complex installation he calls an “infinity environment,” featuring a light-saturated, all-white, rounded room with no corners or sharp angles, rendering viewers unable to fix their eyes on any surface. It invokes an experience of light itself as an almost tactile presence. As Mr. Wheeler continued to tweak the piece, a small boy walked up to the room and hesitated before entering, putting his hands in front of him because his senses told him that the square entrance was a wall, not simply a wall of light flooding his vision.

“I thought, ‘O.K., I can stop worrying so much and being mad about them letting people in too early,’ ” Mr. Wheeler said recently over coffee at the David Zwirner gallery in Chelsea, where he has just opened his first solo New York gallery show at the age of 72, remaking a cavernous interior into a kind of immaculate white vacuum tube — the city’s first infinity environment.

The second story he tells happened in the late 1960s, in a former dime store in Venice, Calif., the studio where he first began creating the ethereal, experiential work that made him a founder of the so-called Light and Space movement, along with fellow West Coast artists like Robert Irwin, James Turrell and Mary Corse. One afternoon Mr. Wheeler welcomed a couple of prominent dealers from a New York gallery — “who shall remain nameless,” he now says tersely — to show off a new work using phosphorus paint and lights to create the sensation of a mistlike plane bisecting part of the studio.

The dealers walked right past the piece without noticing it, making a beeline to some earlier, popular light works that hung on the walls like paintings.

“I just thought what idiots they were for not seeing it,” he said. “Now maybe it wasn’t powerful enough. Maybe it was just my arrogance. But at that time I didn’t think of it that way.”

“What they expected to see, they saw,” he added, “and then they left.”

He bid them a friendly goodbye and never did business with the gallery again.

His career has been punctuated by such decorous but epic refusals. He has said no to major museum exhibitions, because of his doubts that the works would be shown in the way they were intended. In a career of more than four decades he has never had a full-time American gallery represent him except for a brief, troubled turn with the Los Angeles dealer Doug Chrismas. He even once turned down Leo Castelli, at the time the most powerful dealer in the country, because he felt that Castelli wanted to push him to crank out versions of older works, from which “I’d already learned everything I wanted to learn.” (“I heard he told people he thought I was crazy,” Mr. Wheeler said.)

The effect of this deeply principled approach has been that his work has been seen mostly on the West Coast and in Europe, where the Milanese collector Giuseppe Panza di Biumo, who died in 2010, and his wife, Giovanna, were enthusiastic supporters. Through the Panza collection, Wheeler pieces are now in the collections of the Guggenheim Museum in New York and the Hirshhorn in Washington. But sightings of the work on the East Coast have been few and far between, partly because of the complexity of their installation.

For several years in the mid-1970s Mr. Wheeler grew so frustrated with the art world that he took up screenwriting to support himself, so he could keep making his art his way. (The one result that made it to the screen was a 1978 television trucker movie, “Steel Cowboy,” with James Brolin and Rip Torn, of which Mr. Wheeler says, gratefully, “There was nothing of my work left in it at all.”)

By the ’80s he had left Los Angeles for Santa Fe, N.M., where he still works. When David Zwirner — whose gallery has dug deeply in recent years into the works of Minimalist and ’60s and ’70s West Coast artists — included a Wheeler piece in a show several years ago, Mr. Zwirner said, he considered Mr. Wheeler a “kind of mythical figure.”

“And then we get an e-mail from Doug Wheeler — he exists! — and he was telling us we’d shown the work the wrong way, that it was not just a wall piece,” he recalled. “We’d screwed it up.” But despite the infelicitous introduction he began to pursue Mr. Wheeler and offered to support him in the creation of an infinity environment in New York. (Besides the version in Bilbao, Mr. Wheeler has made works like it only two other times, in 1975 in Milan and in 1983 at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.)

Mr. Zwirner said: “I told him: ‘We’ll give you carte blanche. I mean, we have to see a budget, but once we sign off on it, it’s your baby.’ ”

For the last several weeks this baby, made from precisely curved and fitted fiberglass wall sections, special paints and resins and an elaborate combination of lights, has been growing clandestinely inside one of the Zwirner spaces on West 19th Street, behind papered-over windows. The exhibition, titled “SA MI 75 DZ NY 12,” a reference to the initial 1975 work, will be the most expensive single installation ever mounted by the gallery, said Mr. Zwirner, who had been forewarned.

At the beginning, Mr. Wheeler said, he told Mr. Zwirner: “You know it’s really hard to do that kind of piece, don’t you? It’s very hard to create absence.”

Arguably more so than any other Light and Space artist Mr. Wheeler has made the quest to create a sense of absence — to enable people to perceive space and light in ways they normally cannot — a primary obsession. And his explorations of it were deeply influential in the formation of the loose movement of Los Angeles artists who began to work with light.

“Doug was really the first one out of the box with a lot of these ideas, doing things very early on,” said the painter Ed Moses, who experimented with light environments himself in the 1960s. It was a heady, competitive time. “We were all friends,” Mr. Moses said, “but we all wanted to get the first bite of something, not be the guy who got the second bite.”

In subsequent years, he said, he believed Mr. Wheeler’s role as a pioneer had been diminished in Mr. Irwin’s and Mr. Turrell’s favor, perhaps owing partly to the difficulty of both the work and the artist. “Even the museums wouldn’t often do the kinds of things Doug needed them to do, either because of money or because he was just so exacting,” Mr. Moses said. “He got very despondent about the whole thing, but he just kept on working.”

In person Mr. Wheeler can seem at times like a low-key, latter-day New Mexico cowboy, with flowing white hair and Western-accented belts. But his resolve flashes through quickly, particularly in his reticence about being interviewed. (He said he managed to go more than a couple of decades without finally sitting for one again in 2008.) In talking about his work he is painstakingly methodical, particularly in trying to emphasize what it is not.

Works like the infinity room — which over about a half hour will gradually cycle from light that mimics dawn up to full daylight and then down to dusk — are not designed with the end purpose of creating illusion or destabilizing perception. The works are trying instead to use those things as tools to enable an experience of light and space in a much more direct way than is normally possible, “without,” as Mr. Wheeler once wrote, “the diminishing effect of a learned associative response to explain away” the essence of what is being seen.

Growing up in rural Arizona, he said, he sometimes had such visceral experiences of light and space, almost Proustian in their power. They often occurred with his father, a doctor who became well known for barnstorming the state in a Stagger-wing Beechcraft to attend to patients in remote areas. In the air above the desert, the sky seen between massive cloudbanks could take on an otherworldly aspect.

“It created a torquing in space, a tension that I think is something my work has always tried to achieve,” said Mr. Wheeler, who also became a pilot and flies a 1978 Cessna. “When I was growing up, the sky was everything for me.”

Mr. Wheeler’s family life was often tumultuous. There were times when his father would leave him for days with people he barely knew while he flew off to see patients. “That really did a number on me,” he said. He became headstrong and refused baptism in his family’s faith, Seventh Day Adventism, “because I thought that if I got baptized, it would change me, and I’d be like all these other people.” (Today he divides his time between Santa Fe and Los Angeles with his wife, the film producer Bridget Johnson.)

He first began to find himself at Chouinard Art Institute, later the California Institute of the Arts, one of the most important crucibles of postwar Los Angeles talent, with students and faculty like Mr. Irwin, Ed Ruscha and John Baldessari. “I think I was actually pretty crazy in those days,” Mr. Wheeler said. “When I started school, they made me go see the shrink in order to keep my scholarship.”

Like almost everyone he knew at the time he started out as a painter and made “some ugly, horrible stuff for a while.” But it was a series of early paintings — large, mostly white canvases with polished-looking, bulletlike shapes in the corners — that began to lead him to his work with light. “Looking at them I started to realize that what was really important was the space between things,” he said. This led by the late 1960s to works known as light encasements, squares of monochrome plastic with neon lights embedded along the edges, intended to be installed in white rooms with coved corners.

The curator Germano Celant, who included Mr. Wheeler in an influential exhibition of environment-based art at the 1976 Venice Biennale, said in an interview that he considered the kinds of immersive installations that Mr. Wheeler began to gravitate toward to be radical. “He was avoiding representation of any kind,” said Mr. Celant, who is helping to compile a monograph for the Zwirner show. “There was nothing to see — only light. I think it was a big shift.”

It has always been a shift as unearthly to experience as it is difficult to achieve, at least to Mr. Wheeler’s standards. One day this month, as he surveyed painters slowly turning the inside of the installation a blinding, pristine white, he complained gravely that the floor had not been made the way he had wanted and, toward the end of an interview, he excused himself hurriedly with an exasperated look, saying, “I’m sorry, but I have a real crisis on my hands now.”

Mr. Zwirner, the dealer, said that he hopes to represent Mr. Wheeler permanently, but that he will not allow himself any firm expectation of doing so until the show is over and Mr. Wheeler is happy. “I’m treading very lightly,” he said. “I guess I’m always waiting for the other shoe to drop.”

Ed Ruscha, “Thirtyfour Parking Lots in Los Angeles,” 1967

That prized garage space or curbside spot you’ve been yearning for may be costing you—and the city—in ways you never realized. A journey into the world of parking, where meter maids are under siege, everybody’s on the take, and the tickets keep on coming

By Dave Gardetta
Los Angeles Magazine
12/1/2011

Anyone scanning Disney Hall’s debut calendar in the fall of 2003 would have noticed the size of that first season’s schedule, 128 shows in all. That’s a weighty number for a new hall—one might have assumed it was chosen by venue management wanting the gravitas of a world-class chamber’s arrival or perhaps seeking a broad spectrum of music that could reflect the diverse city. Those guesses would have been wrong. Disney Hall had been built atop Parcel K, a county-owned square of land on Bunker Hill that long had sat empty, awaiting development. For decades Parcel K served a prosaic function: It was a parking lot. Commercial landowners like parking lots; they generate cash until better economic conditions arrive, and blank space can be converted into a more profitable moneymaking device—typically a building. The practice is called “land banking.”

Yet before an auditorium could be raised on K, a six-floor subterranean garage capable of holding 2,188 cars needed to be sunk below it at a cost of $110 million—money raised from county bonds. Parking spaces can be amazingly expensive to fabricate. In aboveground structures they cost as much as $40,000 apiece. Belowground, all that excavating and shoring may run a developer $140,000 per space. The debt on Disney Hall’s garage would have to be paid off for decades to come, and as it turned out, a minimum schedule of 128 annual shows would be enough to cover the bill. The figure “128” was even written into the L.A. Philharmonic’s lease. In 2003, Esa-Pekka Salonen opened Frank Gehry’s masterpiece to a packed house with Mahler’s Resurrection, and in the years since, concertgoers—who lay out $9 to enter the garage—have steadily funded performances that exist to cover the true price of their parking.

Donald Shoup, a Yale-trained economist and former chair of UCLA’s Department of Urban Planning, loves telling this story. Gehry’s auditorium may be wonderful, says Shoup, but it is also a fine example of poor planning. The garage—designed to serve the public good—instantly made the Metro immaterial to concertgoers, placed several thousand cars on the road every week, and pumped a few hundred tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year. Like any parking lot entrance, the one on Bunker Hill sucked air from street life. “L.A.,” says Shoup, “required 50 times more parking under Disney Hall than San Francisco would allow at their own hall.” Downtown already had an oversupply of garages and lots where music fans could leave their cars. “After a concert in San Francisco,” says Shoup, “the streets are full of people walking to their cars, eating in restaurants, stopping into bars and bookstores. In L.A.? The bar next door at Patina is a ghost town.” Receipts that should have gone to the philharmonic’s endowment instead are funding enough parking for nearly every ticket holder to park a car every night downtown.

L.A. has been a wellspring for a parking guru like Shoup to become self-realized. Our downtown contains more parking spaces per acre than any other city in the world and has been adding them at a rate of about 1,000 a year for a century. If you grew up here, the earliest and most essential phrase drilled into you by adults—“Remember, we’re in blue Mickey”—was uttered in a parking lot bigger than Disneyland itself. Angelenos can immediately recognize outsiders, lost souls seen wandering through parking garages with no memory of where the Corolla sits. We valet at Macy’s and at the dentist, at Christmas parties and Oscar shindigs: When Bob Shaye, head of New Line Cinema, threw a party to celebrate The Lord of the Rings in 2004, 900 cars showed up on his cul-de-sac. Shaye had the chaparral lot across the street paved to park them all. L.A. can claim the nation’s first LEED-certified parking garage (Santa Monica Civic Center), and we depend on other prized garages to plan our day’s pilgrimage—Santa Monica (2nd and Colorado, of course), Beverly Hills (Canon and Beverly), Pasadena (Fair Oaks and Green). We dream up complicated strategies to clinch the choicest spot at the curb, and we rely on parking reservations to get on the studio lot, parking passes when returning to our jobs, parking permits to grab a street spot on our streets, and an app to find a space when we go to court to pay a parking ticket.

In the United States hundreds of engineers make careers out of studying traffic. Entire freeway systems like L.A.’s have been hardwired with sensors connecting to computer banks that aggregate vehicle flow, monitor bottlenecks, explain congestion in complicated algorithms. Yet cars spend just 5 percent of their lives in motion, and until recently there was only one individual in the country devoting his academic career to studying parking lots and street meters: Donald Shoup.

Shoup is 73 years old. He drives a 1994 Infiniti but for the last three decades has steered a 1975 Raleigh bike two miles uphill daily in fair weather, from his home near the Mormon temple to the wooded highlands of UCLA’s north campus. He was born near one shore (Long Beach), grew up on a far shore (Hawaii), and resembles a 19th-century figure sketched by Melville. He has a mildly hectic complexion, a halo of silver hair that breaks over his small ears into a white froth of a beard, and brimstone eyes. This year Shoup’s 765-page book, The High Cost of Free Parking, was rereleased to zero acclaim outside of the transportation monthlies, parking blogs, and corridor beyond his office door in UCLA’s School of Public Affairs building. He wasn’t surprised—“There’s not even a name for what I do,” he says. Shoup, however, does not lack for acolytes. His followers call themselves Shoupistas, like Sandinistas, and on a Facebook page they leave posts suggesting parking meters for prostitutes and equations that quantify the contradiction between time spent cruising for free parking versus the “assumed time-value” cited to justify expanding roadways. (The hooker stuff is more interesting.)

After 36 years, Shoup’s writings—usually found in obscure journals—can be reduced to a single question: What if the free and abundant parking drivers crave is about the worst thing for the life of cities? That sounds like a prescription for having the door slammed in your face; Shoup knows this too well. Parking makes people nuts. “I truly believe that when men and women think about parking, their mental capacity reverts to the reptilian cortex of the brain,” he says. “How to get food, ritual display, territorial dominance—all these things are part of parking, and we’ve assigned it to the most primitive part of the brain that makes snap fight-or-flight decisions. Our mental capacities just bottom out when we talk about parking.”

****

In 1930, Oklahoma City had a half-million cars on its streets and seemingly no place to park them. Automobiles were choking commerce: Drivers who worked downtown were monopolizing the parking, keeping away others who wished to conduct business there. Someone needed to invent a machine that could regulate street parking. Carlton Magee was an editor of the Albuquerque Morning Journal when in 1920 he helped uncover what would become the Teapot Dome Scandal. A few years later, in a hotel lobby, a judge whom Magee once accused of corruption walked up and knocked him to the floor. The editor drew his pistol and shot wide, killing a bystander. Acquitted of manslaughter, Magee moved to Oklahoma City to run the Oklahoma News, where parking, not vindictive judges, was the big story. Magee invented the Dual Park-O-Meter, filed for its patent, and on July 16, 1935, 174 parking meters were slotted into Oklahoma City.

For businessmen and courts around the country, the invention of the parking meter was on par with shooting at a judge. In Alabama in 1937, the state supreme court declared Birmingham’s parking meters unconstitutional and ordered them removed. In Los Angeles the Times editorial staff went full steam. Three city attempts to install meters during the 1940s were beat back by stories that described parking meters as “illegal,” “immoral,” and “a perversion.” Nonetheless, in 1949 in North Hollywood the first 400 meters were installed on Lankershim and Magnolia.

Today there are 39,440 parking meters positioned along L.A. streets, each one earning on average about a thousand dollars a year. Some 2,537,521 citations were handed out to motorists by the city’s parking enforcement bureau last year. The most expensive ticket—“Parking hazardous waste carrier in residential area”—is almost never written and costs $378. The most common ticket, for parking on a street cleaning day, will set you back $68. Last year fines to drivers totaled $166,700,840—money that was used to pay for parking operations; surplus revenue is handed over to the city council. The L.A. Department of Transportation, which oversees the city’s parking enforcement program, does not keep tabs on the streets with the most violations. But of its five enforcement areas—which include Central, Southern, Valley, and Western—Hollywood has the highest issuance rate. Not that everybody pays. In May City Controller Wendy Greuel publicized the existence of the DOT’s Gold Card program, which had regularly dismissed tickets issued to city politicians and their staffs. (The report made everyone but Greuel look bad, until the mayor’s office shot back with proof that a top aide of Greuel’s had used the service.) According to an audit by Greuel’s office, $132 million in outstanding fines were collected last year, with 28 percent of citations still unpaid. The DOT monitors the license numbers of some 18,000 scofflaws whose collective tally adds up to around $17 million. As of mid-September the honor for most citations went to a gentleman living on 36th Street. His trailer had received 124 tickets, all unpaid and totaling $13,028.

John Van Horn, a Shoupista who edits the country’s only independent parking magazine, Parking Today, was attending an Australian parking conference five years ago when a local enforcement officer shared a piece of information with him: “Let’s face it, only 10 percent of parking citations ever get written.” Stateside, Van Horn spoke to enforcement managers around the country, who confirmed the Aussie’s remark—drivers with expired meters typically get away 90 percent of the time. Van Horn decided to conduct an experiment. “Once a month,” he says, “I visited a friend who lives by the Grove on a street with permit-only parking.” Van Horn parked without a city pass on each visit and by year’s end had received just two tickets; he escaped without citation about 83 percent of the time. Next, Van Horn parked once a week in a Beverly Hills metered space without paying. His odds improved dramatically. In the span of a year he was cited only twice, a ticket-dodging rate of about 96 percent.

“If you received a ticket for every violation,” says Van Horn, “you’d be yelling Parking Nazi! and Selective enforcement! Elected governments aren’t ready for that outcry, so cities hold back on tickets.” Yet if we evade enforcement as often as Van Horn claims, why does the sight of a ticket on the windshield unhinge our natures? “We break the law often and get away with it,” he says. “Deep down inside we know that. What makes us mad is getting caught the few times we do. Ninety percent of drivers on this street got away scot-free today, but I get the ticket? That makes us crazy.”

Upon receiving citations, frustrated L.A. drivers have spit on parking officers, slashed their tires, attacked their cars with baseball bats, pulled them from their vehicles to beat them, and even fired handguns at officers. It’s like Kabul out there. LAPD commander Michael Williams, the mayor’s recent appointment to take charge of the DOT’s Parking Enforcement Division, might be better equipped to deal with the assaults. His background? Counterterrorism.

Shoup can often be found dallying around parking meters and brings a camera to photograph illegally parked cars. Not long ago you could have spotted Shoup clicking on the corner of Pico and Fairfax, where the city had quadrupled its meter rates. (“Rates had gone too high there—sometimes there wasn’t a car on the street.”) In Westwood Village Shoup once rode the Raleigh back and forth for weeks tailing cars. He discovered that the average driver had to circle the block two and a half times before locating an open metered space. Westwood became a model for Shoup; the “cruising” he observed there occurs wherever drivers seek out inexpensive metered space to avoid pricier garages and lots. (A similar study in Manhattan in 1995 revealed that New Yorkers spent 11 minutes on average searching for a space.) In a year’s time in Westwood, space hunting by drivers consumed an extra 47,000 gallons of gas. It stalled traffic, increased accidents, and required 950,000 extra vehicle miles, about four trips to the moon and back.

The problem, according to Shoupistas, is that meters are priced equally. “Imagine what would happen at Dodger Stadium if every seat cost the same and went on sale game day,” says Dan Mitchell, an engineer at DOT. “Everyone would run for that seat behind home plate—it would be insanity. But that’s what we have now with parking—equal pricing.” This spring the DOT plans to introduce an $18.5 million smart wireless meter system based on Shoup’s theories. Called ExpressPark, the 6,000-meter array will be installed on downtown streets and lots, along with sensors buried in the pavement of every parking spot to detect the presence of cars and price accordingly, from as little as 50 cents an hour to $6. Street parking, like pork bellies, will be open to market forces. As blocks fill, prices will rise; when occupancy drops, so will rates. In an area like downtown, ideal for Shoup’s progressive pricing, people will park based on how much they’re willing to pay versus how far they are willing to walk to a destination. In a trendy area like Melrose Avenue’s shopping district, where parking on side streets is forbidden to visitors, Shoup would open those residential blocks to market-priced meters, wooing home owners by guaranteeing that meter profits would be turned over to them in the form of property tax deductions. (That benefit could add up to thousands of dollars a year per household.)

Brooklyn’s Park Slope neighborhood is already experimenting with a version of the system, and so are San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington, D.C. If adopted by more cities, the system would hopefully stop a Westwood scenario from ever occurring again, guaranteeing one open space of parking at any time of day on every metered block by pricing out drivers who are more willing to park on cheaper blocks. Should a block remain empty, its meters will drop their hourly rates over the course of a month. Nobody, of course, really knows what will happen once L.A.’s system powers up. After Seattle conducted its own study on performance-based parking, engineers noticed an oddity: When prices dropped on certain blocks, drivers actually parked less. No one can explain this.

“In San Francisco we’ve seen prices go up on one block, down on the next, then up again,” says Shoup. “Why that’s happening, we don’t know.” The DOT and Shoup expect ExpressPark to illuminate the static lives of automobiles. “All we need is to move one car off each block for the system to work and get rid of all cruising,” says Shoup. “It’s not like we’re talking about a problem as big as the Reformation or Prohibition.”

Parking is an emotionally hot issue. When the City of Ventura began playing around with Shoup’s ideas last summer, Tea Party activists responded by vowing to vote out three city council members before year’s end. Progressives also adore free parking: San Jose, the hub of enlightened capitalism, has more vacant garage space than it can handle. “Everyone believes parking should be free,” says Van Horn. “We want that in the Constitution. But it’s too expensive, and there’s too much of it. Today there are garages all over L.A. with top floors that have never seen a car.” Whereas a skyscraper of a million square feet in New York may be required to have 100 parking spaces, an equal-size structure in L.A., like the U.S. Bank Tower, is compelled by the city to provide closer to 1,300 spaces. The maxim is wrong: L.A. wasn’t built around the car. It was built around the parking lot. And the individuals who knew this best were the original lot men of downtown L.A.

As a boy working in an Italian-shoe concession, Andrew Pansini had fitted a tiny bell into the heel of a ladies’ shoe, figuring women enjoyed being noticed when they walk. After he arrived in L.A. in 1916, a wooden leg caught his attention: Its owner spent his days flagging down cars, collecting change from drivers who parked on his block and then patrolling their cars. Pansini realized you could move those cars into vacant lots and do better. He found a square of land at 4th and Olive, charged five cents, and waited six days for his first customer to drive in.

By 1920, there were 40 parking lots downtown and by 1926, more than 100, but still there were not enough. Pansini began leveling buildings, looking for more parking. He erased 83 addresses in his career. Jobs disappeared, businesses vanished, neighborhoods faded out, all to make room for more parking lots. Pansini’s most famous fight was his attempt to raze the old City Hall on Broadway. His opponent was Simon Lazarus, who ran the Million Dollar Theater and wanted the land Pansini was after. Eventually the two men squared off in city council chambers. Bidding and counterbidding on the property’s lease escalated until the price was near $3,000, whereupon the proceedings collapsed and neither won. Years later Pansini left Los Angeles for San Francisco, where he reckoned that parking could be found in the ground, not on it. At Union Square in 1942, he built the world’s first underground garage.

By the 1950s, almost a thousand people were licensed to manage parking lots in L.A. New York was a big parking lot town (lots were at a minimum there; profits were high), and so was Chicago. But L.A. had more than 1,300 lots—the largest game of all. Only a handful of L.A. operators could claim more than a few lots. There was Walter Briggs; thin lipped and gangly, he wore his pants too short, strutted like a cowboy from Kansas, cheated on his wives and landlords, and ended up running the LAX concession along with a hundred other sites. There was Chic Wolk, an air force vet who in 1954 was pulling a night shift at Lockheed when he leased his first lot on Bunker Hill, where Angels Flight let out. Wolk had forearms like pistons and fair skin that would soon frizzle in the California sun, and from that original lot—which charged 45 cents a day—Wolk built an empire that would include 163 lots. There was also Mushy Greenstein, an ex-con and illiterate who spent his days at the track with a bodyguard and burned through his leases as fast as he won them, always seeking more gambling cash. But Mushy had talent. He could tell you the monthly income of any city lot at a glance just by driving past it. He was that good.

Lot men were intensely secretive. They never shared their properties’ incomes (a poorly performing lot might lease for $500 a month and could earn an operator a dollar a day for every car), the names of their brokers, or the latest intelligence. Each time a building went up, the parking map shifted and the values of lots rose or fell. Knowing what developers had in mind was key. Wolk won two lots from Walter Briggs that proved to be lucrative. Where were these lots? Wolk won’t say. He retired long ago, sold off his interests, and still he won’t reveal their locations. That’s how secretive lot men were. “Why would you want to know?” Wolk asked recently with suspicion. “Let’s just say they were downtown.”

Briggs and a handful of others had sewn up the parking lot market by the time Ray Liesegang left New York for L.A. in 1966. “Those five men would have breakfast every Saturday at the old Hilton downtown, exchange information, trade leases, and massage the market for themselves,” Liesegang recalls. They didn’t, however, control garages. “Psychologically people didn’t like driving into the bowels of the earth back then,” he says. “I wanted into that.” Liesegang opened the garage at the new Union Bank building before his career really took off. Ventura Boulevard was booming in the 1970s, and at one point Liesegang ran almost every commercial garage along the Valley way. He eventually would manage more than 250 garages, including one on Grand Avenue that grossed $12 million in a single year.

Garages and lots in L.A. take in about $850 million each year, much of it in cash and without a great deal of oversight. Clyde Wilson, the president of an audit firm called the Parking Network, estimates that the city’s garages lose as much as 28 percent of their earnings annually to poor management and theft. In 1980, when LAX lots were producing $15 million in receipts, the airport’s parking manager claimed that employee theft amounted to less than a half-million dollars. After the installation of a computerized system, it was revealed that LAX attendants were stealing close to $4 million a year. “In L.A.,” says Wilson, “just one-quarter of operations have some kind of automation. That means $600 million a year is being processed with no mechanical controls. Loss rates are very high.” They’re also high for the city government, which claims that parking lot owners have cheated the city out of $23 million in tax revenue since 2008. This past October, the city drew up a law requiring permitted parking lot operators to provide mechanical or digital monitoring to do business in L.A.

During the 1990s, Wall Street realized that, loss rates or not, there was money in parking, and a vast consolidation within the industry began. Lot men like Liesegang and Wolk sold out, and national companies moved in—Standard, Central, Ampco System. Lazarus wouldn’t recognize the landscape today if he returned from the grave. No one meets for breakfast at the Hilton these days, no one walks their lots—those spaces are now run by offices in Nashville and Chicago. Very few private operators make real money, as less lucrative management fees long ago replaced lot leases, but Chic Wolk’s daughter, Cari Wolk, is an operator who does. She owns a garage at 6th and Hope, which, after the Standard hotel opened for business, became one of the more profitable garages downtown—a 24-hour operation. How profitable? “Why would you want to know?” she asks.

****

When Rick Cole became a Pasadena councilman in 1983—he would later be mayor of the city—he noticed the town’s historic bungalows were vanishing and quickly being displaced by ugly boxes. These new condo buildings had no doors and sometimes no windows facing the sidewalk. Instead they offered once-charming streetscapes a two-story wall. Whole blocks were being colonized and lost to these incognito squares. Cole wanted to know why.

“It turned out that Pasadena, which didn’t mandate parking when its single-family bungalows were built in the 1920s, now required eight parking spots for a building where four people might live,” says Cole, a Shoupista who is now the city manager of Ventura. “Subterranean parking was too expensive, so a thing called ‘tuck-under’—or semisubterranean—parking was invented.” With tuck-under buildings, residents park half a story below street level and enter their entombed front doors from the garage. Everything is hidden from the street, including the residents who call it home. “Parking requirements,” says Cole, “had created whole communities of new blank walls that faced other blank walls. I hated it.”

After Cole was elected mayor of Pasadena in 1992, he heard that the man who had been public works director for the city in the 1940s was buried in the basement beneath Cole’s office. “I would actually spend time wandering alone down there,” says Cole, “looking for the headstone. The parking meters this guy had ordered to be installed throughout the city were supposedly down there with him.” Cole never found the grave site; it was the career of the public works director that lay dead in the basement. Unlike other cities, Pasadena hadn’t installed street meters. “When this guy suggested they do so,” says Cole, “and then ordered them, the citizenry revolted. That was the end of him.”

So Cole, an untested mayor, decided to commit career suicide—he would be the first to install meters. And not just anywhere but in the city’s seediest business district, its skid row, a stroll for prostitutes that would soon be renamed Old Pasadena. Cole had chosen the area to install parking meters because it was ideal for conducting his own experiment: He wanted to attract merchants to the area, where the rent on the decaying buildings was low and the potential for foot traffic was high. Could meter revenue clean and repair Old Pasadena, then help police its streets? “There was, putting it politely, tremendous opposition,” says Cole. Shop owners barely hanging on told Cole he was crazy. In a large meeting with merchants, Cole said something that swayed them: Rather than fill city coffers, meter collections would go back to businesses in the form of new alleyways, sidewalk improvement, more trees, and police. “The moment I said that, one of my staff members kicked me under the table,” says Cole.

The area took off. The Gap moved in a block away from the old Le Sex Shoppe. Cole pushed his project further: Unlike other cities, Pasadena would not require businesses to build parking lots or garages. Two city-owned parking structures would rent spaces to merchants for $50 a month—a cost of $600 a year per space instead of the tens of thousands of dollars to construct one. Soon the meters were earning more than $1 million annually. Some $415,000 covered the city’s garage debt, while $700,000 went back to neighborhood improvement every year. People who once drove to Westwood on Saturday nights now visited Old Pasadena.

“If you had told people in 1990 that this switch would occur,” says Shoup, “you would have been considered insane.” There are many theories about why Westwood died, and Shoup has his own. “It’s a myth to say Westwood died because of one high-profile homicide in the 1980s,” he says, referring to the 1988 death of a Long Beach woman named Karen Toshima, killed in crossfire. “Westwood had an unbelievably high parking requirement—ten spaces for every 1,000 square feet of restaurant. Old Pasadena had none. Westwood had dangerous alleys, crumbing sidewalks. If you want to know why Old Pasadena succeeded Westwood, parking was a big part of the story.”

Cole had created the first Shoupista paradise: No parking requirements, parking meters where once there were none. His city grew rich off the notion—and nobody has tried it since. “For 5,000 years,” says Cole, “we built cities around people, and they worked well. For 50 years we’ve built them around the parking lot—a ridiculous use of land, of money, and an intrusion into the intimacy of human scale. Now we’ve painted ourselves into a corner. The saving grace is that the first 5,000 years might come back again.”

****

Parking had never crossed Shoup’s mind when he left Yale for L.A. in 1968—his focus was public finance and land-value theory. In 1975, he stumbled onto a master’s thesis by two USC students who had worked their way through school parking cars for a man named Rex Link. “Link,” says Shoup, “was annoyed that county workers were offered free parking downtown when federal workers had to pay. ” Link’s student employees proposed a study. “They found that 72 percent of county workers drove to work alone,” says Shoup, “but 60 percent of federal employees carpooled, took public transportation, or even walked. These were workers in the same professions, driving to the same location.” When forced to pay a practical value for their parking, drivers were twice as likely to carpool—traffic congestion was halved, carbon emissions were halved. “The more I thought of that,” says Shoup, “the more I thought there was a perfect storm here. No one can tell you why parking prices are set as they are. But when people pay comparatively little for something that’s expensive to produce, the result is collective irrational behavior.”

Choosing to study parking in 1975, on the other hand, was singular irrational behavior. “People thought I was nuts,” says Shoup. “Parking was a blind spot in universities.” Like his subject, Shoup is caught between urban planning and traffic engineering—a no-man’s-land. “Because Don came out of Yale trained as an economist,” says Richard Willson, a professor of urban planning at Cal Poly Pomona, “and looked at parking issues as an economic problem, he was never really welcomed into urban planning circles.” Few people Shoup worked with at UCLA had heard of the Parking Standards report, published by the Institute of Transportation Engineers, or the parking index report of the American Planning Association. Taken together, Shoup discovered, the two publications shaped the look of modern cities. The APA’s index lists 662 business types, along with suggestions for the number of parking spaces each structure should include. Urban planners, says Shoup, have no theory, use no hard data, when choosing parking requirements; they consult the manuals to decide. Every business imaginable is found within: Funeral parlors? A basic formula is eight parking spaces plus one for each hearse. Convents? One-tenth of a space per nun is fine. Adult bookstores? One space for every prospective patron plus one for the cashier holding the longest shift (no mention of the flasher in the alley). Public swimming pools? One space for every 2,500 gallons of water on the premises, chlorine included.

The figures are as precise as their origins are incomprehensible. Willson, who was a student of Shoup’s in the 1980s, says, “For 30 years parking was a number you looked up in the book—it’s magical the way these numbers spread.” He became fascinated by the office parks that proliferate along L.A. and Orange county freeways. “Parking requirements are a primary shaper of these landscapes,” says Willson. “The golden rule for office buildings has been four spaces for every 1,000 square feet. But where did that number come from?” Nobody knew, so Willson plotted a case study to gauge whether parking requirements connected to reality. He chose ten office parks and discovered that their peak occupancy rate was around 56 percent. Twice as many parking lots had been mandated by cities than was actually needed. “I interviewed the planners and the developers,” says Willson. “The planners would say, ‘It’s not our fault—the developers want that much.’ The developers would say, ‘We thought the planners knew what they were doing.’ ”

Parking mandates had been shuffling the look of L.A. neighborhoods for some time. Among the ugliest—or most charming, depending on your perspective—of apartment profiles, the 1950s dingbat was conceived as an answer to parking requirements. The dingbat offered sidewalk strollers the bewitching view of a cement “front yard” and several car trunks. Single-car garages, hidden in backyards and alleyways in the early 20th century, doubled in size by the 1970s and moved onto the front lawn once cities began to require two residential spaces for every house. Shopping centers and malls assembled seas of asphalt around their retail islands, not because developers wanted them that size but because cities did. During the 1960s and ’70s—the epoch of Southern California’s shopping center build-out—malls had to offer enough parking for every car that might show up around 2 p.m. on the second Saturday before Christmas. Since planners didn’t know how many cars would arrive, an estimate was made: four or five cars for every 1,000 square feet of mall space. That would mean devoting 50 percent more land to cars than to people.

Shoup is not opposed to all parking lots; he’s against cities requiring parking lots. “Would you require every home to come with a pool or every office to include a dining room because someone might want it?” asks Shoup. “Why not let developers build parking where the market demands it and charge its true value?” It’s a market-based utopian wager: If you ask drivers to pay the actual price of their parking at the Grove or Santa Monica Place or Disney Hall, what would they do? If the fair price of your parking space is $60, would you view your car differently? In Manhattan a small portion of the population owns cars—it’s too expensive to park them. L.A. has the highest density of parking spaces in the world. “You can’t have the number of cars we have in L.A. without our parking lots,” says Shoup. “And you can never create urban density with the parking lots we’ve built.” They make driving too easy.

L.A. sits on a mountain-size surplus of parking it doesn’t know what to do with. “For decades,” says Willson, “cities have asked urban planners, ‘How much parking do we need?’ keeping in mind that it should be free for everyone who wants it and there’s no mass transportation involved. Shoup is saying, ‘How much parking do you want for the city you desire to live in?’ ” San Francisco or New York might have ten times the parking each has now if they had buildings like 1100 Wilshire, where the first 15 floors are all garage. But the downtown areas of those cities won’t allow it.

L.A. mandates it. In Los Angeles we attend dinner parties and wish out loud for more pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods, increased urban density, more mass transportation, less congestion, less air pollution, less reliance on our cars—and cheap, abundant parking wherever we go. Shoup’s theories sound counterintuitive, even irrational, to people over 40. But there is a parking generation gap. “For people in my generation,” says Willson, who is 55, “people who grew up with free parking wherever they went, grasping what Shoup is saying can be really tough. But the young couples who live in my neighborhood on Mount Washington or my students who bike wherever they go? They get it instantly. They understand Shoup.”

*****

Feeling Fined
The city’s most common ticket? Parking during street cleaning, which resulted in 700,000 citations between 2010 and 2011 (the fine: $68); in the same period more than 555,000 were issued for meter violations, the second-most-common parking ticket in the city.

Hot Property
According to a July 2011 survey by Colliers International, Midtown Manhattan is the country’s most expensive place to leave your car, averaging $41 a day, or more than $540 for monthly parking. Boston and Honolulu both edged out L.A., where the average parking downtown is $30 a day. San Francisco and Seattle came in at $26 and $24, respectively.

Irresistible Force
There are currently 565 parking enforcement officers in the City of L.A. Annual salary ranges from $34,000 to $45,000. While it is not illegal to swear at the person giving you a parking ticket, assaulting one could land you in county jail for up to six months or a $2,000 fine or both.

Going Rogue
You can’t be arrested for delinquent parking fines, but you will have to pay penalty fees (with the first late fee, a $58 ticket goes to $116; with the second, it’s $141) and a hold will be placed on your registration. Fail to pay five tickets, and your car is eligible to be impounded or to have a metal boot placed on one wheel, costing you $150 to have it removed.

Territorial
A study by a Penn State University researcher in the 1990s found that people take longer to vacate a space when there is another car waiting for them to leave. However, men left “significantly sooner” when an expensive car was waiting.

Fraud Magnet
A disabled placard or license plate brings with it the right to park free at meters and in preferential parking areas (such as neighborhoods where permits are required)—an attractive perk for fraudsters. Being caught with a fake placard could earn you a $1,000 fine. Parking illegally in a disabled space, like Laker Andrew Bynum was photographed doing earlier this year, can result in a $353 ticket.

via

Mitt Romney, a Republican presidential candidate, with his extended family in 2007.Jon Moe/Associated Press

By LEE SIEGEL
NY Times Published: January 14, 2012

Mitt Romney may not have officially clinched the Republican nomination, but his victory has never really been in doubt. Nor has his viability in November: the most fanatical Tea Partiers are not about to withhold their votes and risk allowing President Obama to be re-elected.

Pundits have already begun the endless debate over whether Mr. Romney’s wealth and religion are hindrances or assets. But there has yet to be any discussion over the one quality that has subtly fueled his candidacy thus far and could well put him over the top in the fall: his race. The simple, impolitely stated fact is that Mitt Romney is the whitest white man to run for president in recent memory.

Of course, I’m not talking about a strict count of melanin density. I’m referring to the countless subtle and not-so-subtle ways he telegraphs to a certain type of voter that he is the cultural alternative to America’s first black president. It is a whiteness grounded in a retro vision of the country, one of white picket fences and stay-at-home moms and fathers unashamed of working hard for corporate America.

In this way, Mr. Romney’s Mormonism may end up being a critical advantage. Evangelicals might wring their hands over the prospect of a Mormon president, but there is no stronger bastion of pre-civil-rights-America whiteness than the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Yes, since 1978 the church has allowed blacks to become priests. But Mormonism is still imagined by its adherents as a religion founded by whites, for whites, rooted in a millenarian vision of an America destined to fulfill a white God’s plans for earth.

It’s true that Mr. Romney’s opponents are all white as well. But each is tainted in his own way. Rick Perry and Newt Gingrich appear soft on Hispanic immigration, and Mr. Gingrich is hardly the standard-bearer for the invincible nuclear family.

Rick Santorum is an Italian-American Catholic, while Jon Huntsman, though a Mormon himself, wears his cosmopolitanism too brazenly. (Does he really think it’s an asset, in the eyes of a Republican primary voter, to speak Mandarin?) And Ron Paul’s isolationist conspiracy-mongering recalls, if anything, the radical-right fringe of the ’50s and ’60s, of the John Birchers and the followers of George Wallace, a manic moment even most evangelicals would rather forget.

Contrast that with Mr. Romney’s meticulously cultivated whiteness. He is nearly always in immaculate white shirt sleeves. He is implacably polite, tossing off phrases like “oh gosh” with Stepford bonhomie. He has mastered Benjamin Franklin’s honesty as the “best policy”: a practiced insincerity, an instant sunniness that, though evidently inauthentic, provides a bland bass note that keeps everyone calm. This is the bygone world of Babbitt, of small-town Rotarians.

Mr. Romney does not merely use the past as an inspirational reference point, as the other candidates often do. He conjures it as a total social, cultural and political experience that must be resurrected and reinhabited. He speaks of the founding fathers and the Declaration of Independence as phases of national creativity that we are destined to live through again. He frequently accompanies his recitative with verses from “America the Beautiful.”

And while Mr. Romney may, in some people’s eyes, be a non-Christian, he is better than any of his opponents at synching his worldview with that of the evangelicals. He likes to present, with theological urgency, a stark choice between, in his words, President Obama’s “entitlement society” and the true American freedom of an “opportunity society.” By the time he intones the Puritans’ alabaster ideal of America as a “shining city on a hill,” you wonder if he is not also asking us to choose between two different types of mountaintops.

In this way, whether he means to or not, Mr. Romney connects with a central evangelic fantasy: that the Barack Obama years, far from being the way forward, are in fact a historical aberration, a tear in the white space-time continuum. And let’s be clear: Mr. Obama’s election was not destiny, but a fluke.

Despite a general revulsion against George W. Bush and his policies, despite John McCain’s lack of ideas and his remoteness from contemporary American problems, the Republican ticket was ahead of Mr. Obama by several points in September 2008. Then came the fall: Lehman Brothers, the stock-market plunge and skyrocketing unemployment (not to mention Sarah Palin).

By the iron law of elections, the country threw the bums out and rejected anyone even remotely tied to them. The result? America’s first black president.

And yet, as became immediately apparent in 2009, millions of Americans were unwilling to accept the basic democratic premise that Mr. Obama legally and morally deserved to sit in the White House — and that was before they confronted his “socialist” and “un-American” policy agenda.

Mitt Romney knows this. He knows that he offers to these people the white solution to the problem of a black president. I am sure that Mr. Romney is not a racist. But I am also sure that, for the many Americans who find the thought of a black president unbearable, he is an ideal candidate. For these sudden outsiders, Mitt Romney is the conventional man with the outsider faith — an apocalyptic pragmatist — who will wrest the country back from the unconventional man with the intolerable outsider color.

Grand Gesture, 2011
Glazed Earthenware, Epoxy Resin, Lacquer, Acrylic Paint
38 by 40 by 8 inches

Through January 21, 2012

Salon 94

By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Times Published: January 12, 2012

“And greed — you mark my words — will not only save Teldar Paper, but that other malfunctioning corporation called the U.S.A.”

That’s how the fictional Gordon Gekko finished his famous “Greed is good” speech in the 1987 film “Wall Street.” In the movie, Gekko got his comeuppance. But in real life, Gekkoism triumphed, and policy based on the notion that greed is good is a major reason why income has grown so much more rapidly for the richest 1 percent than for the middle class.

Today, however, let’s focus on the rest of that sentence, which compares America to a corporation. This, too, is an idea that has been widely accepted. And it’s the main plank of Mitt Romney’s case that he should be president: In effect, he is asserting that what we need to fix our ailing economy is someone who has been successful in business.

In so doing, he has, of course, invited close scrutiny of his business career. And it turns out that there is at least a whiff of Gordon Gekko in his time at Bain Capital, a private equity firm; he was a buyer and seller of businesses, often to the detriment of their employees, rather than someone who ran companies for the long haul. (Also, when will he release his tax returns?) Nor has he helped his credibility by making untenable claims about his role as a “job creator.”

But there’s a deeper problem in the whole notion that what this nation needs is a successful businessman as president: America is not, in fact, a corporation. Making good economic policy isn’t at all like maximizing corporate profits. And businessmen — even great businessmen — do not, in general, have any special insights into what it takes to achieve economic recovery.

Why isn’t a national economy like a corporation? For one thing, there’s no simple bottom line. For another, the economy is vastly more complex than even the largest private company.

Most relevant for our current situation, however, is the point that even giant corporations sell the great bulk of what they produce to other people, not to their own employees — whereas even small countries sell most of what they produce to themselves, and big countries like America are overwhelmingly their own main customers.

Yes, there’s a global economy. But six out of seven American workers are employed in service industries, which are largely insulated from international competition, and even our manufacturers sell much of their production to the domestic market.

And the fact that we mostly sell to ourselves makes an enormous difference when you think about policy.

Consider what happens when a business engages in ruthless cost-cutting. From the point of view of the firm’s owners (though not its workers), the more costs that are cut, the better. Any dollars taken off the cost side of the balance sheet are added to the bottom line.

But the story is very different when a government slashes spending in the face of a depressed economy. Look at Greece, Spain, and Ireland, all of which have adopted harsh austerity policies. In each case, unemployment soared, because cuts in government spending mainly hit domestic producers. And, in each case, the reduction in budget deficits was much less than expected, because tax receipts fell as output and employment collapsed.

Now, to be fair, being a career politician isn’t necessarily a better preparation for managing economic policy than being a businessman. But Mr. Romney is the one claiming that his career makes him especially suited for the presidency. Did I mention that the last businessman to live in the White House was a guy named Herbert Hoover? (Unless you count former President George W. Bush.)

And there’s also the question of whether Mr. Romney understands the difference between running a business and managing an economy.

Like many observers, I was somewhat startled by his latest defense of his record at Bain — namely, that he did the same thing the Obama administration did when it bailed out the auto industry, laying off workers in the process. One might think that Mr. Romney would rather not talk about a highly successful policy that just about everyone in the Republican Party, including him, denounced at the time.

But what really struck me was how Mr. Romney characterized President Obama’s actions: “He did it to try to save the business.” No, he didn’t; he did it to save the industry, and thereby to save jobs that would otherwise have been lost, deepening America’s slump. Does Mr. Romney understand the distinction?

America certainly needs better economic policies than it has right now — and while most of the blame for poor policies belongs to Republicans and their scorched-earth opposition to anything constructive, the president has made some important mistakes. But we’re not going to get better policies if the man sitting in the Oval Office next year sees his job as being that of engineering a leveraged buyout of America Inc.

Residents of Christiania, a 40-year experiment in communal living near downtown Copenhagen, are trying to buy the land they have squatted on, despite the ideological dissonance. Photograph by Jan Grarup

By SALLY McGRANE
NY Times Published: January 12, 2012

COPENHAGEN — Last summer, the Danish state offered to sell a good chunk of the 80-odd-acre former military base at the edge of downtown Copenhagen to Christiania, the alternative community whose residents had been squatting there illegally for four decades. For the residents, who fundamentally reject the idea of landownership, this presented an ideological quandary.

After a Supreme Court ruling that said the squatters had no legal right to remain on the land, the residents made a pragmatic decision to buy the property.

“Christiania has offered to buy it,” said Risenga Manghezi, a spokesman for the community. “But Christiania doesn’t want to own it.”

To resolve the contradiction, Mr. Manghezi and a handful of others decided to start selling shares in Christiania. Pieces of paper, hand-printed on site, the shares can be had for amounts from $3.50 to $1,750. Shareholders are entitled to a symbolic sense of ownership in Christiania and the promise of an invitation to a planned annual shareholder party. “Christiania belongs to everyone,” Mr. Manghezi said. “We’re trying to put ownership in an abstract form.”

Since the shares were first offered in the fall, about $1.25 million worth have been sold in Denmark and abroad. The money raised will go toward the purchase of the land from the government.

Justifying the transaction still takes some artful semantic twists. “According to their system, you are not an owner of a house, you’re a user of the house,” explained Knud Foldschack, the lawyer for the community who negotiated the purchase. “You don’t own the area, you care take the area.”

But after a rocky decade under a conservative-led government, during which the carless, hashish-friendly community faced threats of expulsion and a Supreme Court ruling that said the squatters had no legal right to remain on the land, the residents made a pragmatic decision to buy the property — or, as many would have it, to “buy it free.”

“People were afraid, and we had to respect this fear,” said Allan Lausten, a handyman who took part in the negotiations despite an aversion to bureaucrats.

The Danish state made it easy, too. Not only did officials offer to sell the land for about $14.5 million, a fraction of what it would be worth if sold commercially, but they also made several provisions to accommodate the Christianites’ way of life.

One sticking point was how to negotiate with a group run by consensus democracy, where a decision is made only if everyone who shows up at a meeting agrees. “Their system of government is very difficult to deal with from the perspective of the state,” said Carsten Jarlov, director of the Danish State Building Agency, who first began working on the deal in 2004. “What do you do with all these meetings, where everyone has a say and no one is responsible?”

The solution was to create a foundation, with a board made up of five residents and six outsiders, to act as owners on behalf of the Christianites.

Because it can be difficult for people who reject basic tenets of capitalism to get a loan, the Danish state also guaranteed the bank loan. Further, Danish officials stipulated that the land must remain open to the public. Lastly, any profit from the sale of the land or buildings would immediately revert to the state. “This is a nonprofit zone,” said Mr. Foldschack, who called the deal “fantastic” and its eight-year evolution “Buddhistic.”

Mr. Jarlov said the decision had broad-based political support. “Danish public opinion is very ambivalent, when it comes to Christiania,” he added. “If you ask if there should be space for Christiania in society, they say, ‘Yes, we love it!’ But if you say, ‘Is it a good idea to take over property you don’t own?’ they are against that. Every Dane has this split within himself.”

Jacob Ludvigsen, a newspaper editor who with some friends started squatting on the land the day after a fisherman told him about the unused space in 1971, welcomed the decision. “A 40-year-long conflict has been brought to an end,” said Mr. Ludvigsen, who no longer lives in Christiania but said that he carried a piece of Christiania in his heart. “This will give Christiania a real independence.”

Still, the sale makes many here uncomfortable. “I think it would have been better to remain squatters,” said a young man on Pusher Street as he sorted through a bag labeled “Outdoor Skunk.” “Pressure from the outside forces you to evolve, to stick together.”

Others point out that now the ramshackle, do-it-yourself community will have to come up with the money to pay for the land. But for many, the problem is less tangible.

“I have a feeling of sorrow that the state forced us to buy it,” said Ida Klemann, an artist who first moved to Christiania in 1971, then left to have a baby (at the time, there was no running water on the premises), before moving back in 1972. “I thought it was wonderful the Danish state was generous enough to allow this wild little thing to go on living inside itself.”

“When you say, ‘You have to buy it,’ you’re trying to throw it into normal conditions, in a way,” added Ms. Klemann, one of the progenitors of the Christiania share idea (she calls herself a “share carer”). “What do we do now? It’s not just money, but identity.”

In November, a small group traveled to the United States to promote the Christiania shares. They visited the Occupy Wall Street protest in New York, where they were greeted with cheers.

On Wall Street itself, they had less success. On a blog documenting the adventures of an anthropomorphic Christiania share — which would go on to have both an identity crisis and a love affair with a California road map — a video shows Mr. Manghezi performing on the street. “It’s not that there’s anything wrong with investing for profit,” he calls out. “It’s just so yesterday, and a little bit primitive, too!”

As a result of these efforts, the group sold two shares for $5 each on the steps of the New York Stock Exchange. But thanks to the publicity, sales here surged. “It’s a cultural difference,” Mr. Manghezi said. “We thought it was hilarious, and the Danish press thought it was hilarious, but Americans were like: ‘$10? That’s a total failure! You shouldn’t even talk about it.’ ”

“We’d like to be a speculation-free zone, an alternative to a society based on gambling and speculation,” Mr. Manghezi said. “Of course, if we have to take a loan, we will.”

January 20 – April 7, 2012
1062 North Orange Grove, Los Angeles, CA 90046
Opening: Thursday, January 19th, 6:00 – 8:00 P.M.

Matthew Marks LA

By Caitlin Flanagan
The Atlantic
January 11, 2012

In the spring of 2006, shortly after the publication of Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, Slate assembled a panel of three young critics—Meghan O’Rourke, Katie Roiphe, and Stephen Metcalf—to discuss the book in an event broadcast online from the Housing Works Bookstore Café in New York. The two women were staunch Didion fans and admirers of the new book, which they thought portrayed a mesmerizing marriage that had come to a heartbreaking end. Stephen Metcalf, however, considered the book at best an artistic failure, and at worst an example of unintentional high comedy; he described its principals as having “a perfectly complementary narcissistic personality disorder that was shared beautifully between two people.”

The discussion, then, was a protracted game of Canadian doubles, although Metcalf easily got the better of his competitors, who crumbled under the nonstop assault of his blistering and often unbearably astute insights into the book (“There are some books that shouldn’t be written out of habit—the habit of writing. This was a book produced by habit,” he said).

Shaken, Roiphe defended the canon with the weirdest praise ever (admitting of her heroine that “her words are clichés—her sentences and her rhythms and her tics are clichés because we know them so well”). O’Rourke started talking gibberish, praising the book for something she called the “second iteration of the gestural,” and the entire Didion soufflé—which had been slowly collapsing for three long decades—was reduced, on the one hand, to a withering account of its biggest inadequacies, and on the other, to a collection of dubious compliments. But Roiphe tried a new tactic, and—for a brief, exciting moment—the women rallied. She challenged Metcalf to admit that there were certain Didion details so imperishable that any literary mistake she might commit was as nothing when held up against them. For example, Roiphe said, there was “the smell of jasmine—”

“—and the list she put on her suitcase before she left!,” O’Rourke interrupted happily.

Metcalf, confused both by the sudden ardor and by the two examples themselves (where had they come from?), tried to get the discussion back to the failures of The Year of Magical Thinking, but the women doubled down on their strategy, hitting him hard with Honolulu and leis, and with the ravishing sangfroid of checking into the Royal Hawaiian Hotel “in lieu of getting a divorce.”

Metcalf was thrown off his game for two reasons: First, no matter how frantically he paged through his viciously well-read copy of The Year of Magical Thinking, he would not find the jasmine or the packing list. Nor would he have found them in Where I Was From or Political Fictions or After Henry or Miami or Salvador. To find the details that these women loved so well that they remembered them verbatim, he would have had to pass over most of Joan Didion’s extensive nonfiction body of work and go back to the beginning, to Slouching Towards Bethlehem, published in 1968, and to The White Album, in 1979. If you love Joan Didion so much that she fundamentally changed the way you think—and there are many who feel this way—the books that did this to you are those two and no others.

The second reason Metcalf was left flat by this line of reasoning is that he isn’t a woman, and to really love Joan Didion—to have been blown over by things like the smell of jasmine and the packing list she kept by her suitcase—you have to be female.

I once watched a hysterically sycophantic male academic ask Didion about her description of what she wore in Haight-Ashbury so that she could pass with both the straights and the freaks. “I’m not good with clothes,” he admitted, “so I don’t remember what it was.”

Not remembering what Joan wore in the Haight (a skirt with a leotard and stockings) is like not remembering what Ahab was trying to kill in Moby-Dick.

Women who encountered Joan Didion when they were young received from her a way of being female and being writers that no one else could give them. She was our Hunter Thompson, and Slouching Towards Bethlehem was our Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. He gave the boys twisted pig-fuckers and quarts of tequila; she gave us quiet days in Malibu and flowers in our hair. “We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold,” Thompson wrote. “All I ever did to that apartment was hang fifty yards of yellow theatrical silk across the bedroom windows, because I had some idea that the gold light would make me feel better,” Didion wrote. To not understand the way that those two statements would reverberate in the minds of, respectively, young men and young women is to not know very much at all about those types of creatures. Thompson’s work was illustrated by Ralph Steadman’s grotesque ink blots, and early Didion by the ravishing photographs of the mysterious girl-woman: sitting barelegged on a stone balustrade; posing behind the wheel of her yellow Corvette; wearing an elegant silk gown and staring off into space, all alone in a chic living room.

Didion’s genius is that she understands what it is to be a girl on the cusp of womanhood, in that fragile, fleeting, emotional time that she explored in a way no one else ever has. Didion is, depending on the reader’s point of view, either an extraordinarily introspective or an extraordinarily narcissistic writer. As such, she is very much like her readers themselves. “I’ve been reading you since I was an adolescent,” a distinctly non-adolescent female voice said on a call-in show a decade ago, and Didion nodded, comprehending. All of us who love her the most have, in ways literal and otherwise, been reading her since adolescence.

“A writer is coming to dinner next week,” my father says. “I think you will like her.”

I’m 14 years old and watching TV. “Uh-huh.”

Writers are always coming to dinner. I have no interest in them.

Before the dinner party, I swan around the kitchen while my mother cooks. It’s the beginning of the gourmet revolution. “Daddy thinks you’ll like this writer. She’s young. You should talk to her.”

“Mmm.”

“She has a daughter, too.”

“So?”

I don’t like writers. I like Carly Simon and Elton John and The Mary Tyler Moore Show. I like getting out of Berkeley altogether, driving through the Caldecott Tunnel and going to the Sunvalley Mall, where they have a food court, a movie theater, birds in cages, a Macy’s, a J. C. Penney, and a Sears. I am trying to make a life very different from the one I’m growing up in, which is filled with intellectuals and writers and passionate ideas about long-dead people. I’m growing up with people who take a dim view of America (many who come to dinner parties at our house hate America), but I love America, a place whose principal values and delights are on display at the Sunvalley Mall. My father has never set foot in the mall, and he thinks my attraction to it, and to all that it stands for, is either the kind of charming foible that younger daughters are encouraged to nurture, or else evidence of some serious deficit of intellect and taste that is going to add up to something bad in me. He seems always to be in the midst of making this decision; the result will be very important. I want to be admired by him, but even more I want to see That Darn Cat! in matinee revival at the Sunvalley Mall.

Joan Didion, the writer I was supposed to like, had arrived at Berkeley, her alma mater, to serve as a Regents’ Lecturer, which was a special month-long teaching appointment for people who worked in a field outside academia. As an undergraduate, she had been the star student of Mark Schorer—this was the way she was often referred to during that period in Berkeley: not as a writer but as “Mark’s student”—and he had helped put the appointment into motion, although her C.V., at that point, was slight: two novels and a slender collection of essays. My father was then the chairman of the Berkeley English Department, and so it was my parents’ job to host the welcome dinner.

Business as usual—until she arrived. The immediate impression she gave, patently obvious even to a 14-year-old, was one of a person in misery. I’d once seen a Korean graduate student show up for a faculty dinner party and just about implode from anxiety, but he was a Noël Coward of cocktail-party self-confidence compared with Joan Didion. In the first place—what was she wearing? A Chanel suit, my mother (at once impressed and amused) informed me the next day. It was so clearly the wrong thing to wear to a faculty dinner party in the early 1970s—where were the leotard and the skirt?—so clearly an indication that she was trying to put her best, most grown-up foot forward in the face of all these scary former professors, that it doubled the sense of her being catastrophically unsure of herself.

“She never took her purse off her lap!” my mother said afterward of that night, gobsmacked. “She took it to the dinner table!”

If you had told my mother that Didion regularly served elaborately cooked meals to 60 people at a time, on Spode china in a rambling—and very Berkeley—house in the seedy part of Hollywood, and had interviewed Jim Morrison and entertained Janis Joplin, she would have been shocked. Didion seemed like a young woman who had never been to a dinner party without her parents. She seemed like someone who owned one good thing to wear, and would bravely wear it whenever an engagement even hinted at formality.

I can tell you this for certain: anything you have ever read by Didion about the shyness that plagued her in her youth, and about her inarticulateness in those days, in the face of even the most banal questions, was not a writer’s exaggeration of a minor character trait for literary effect. The contemporary diagnosis for the young woman at our dinner table would be profound—crippling—social-anxiety disorder.

Before dinner, when I was hanging out in the kitchen nibbling on blanched almonds and waiting around to help my mother serve, she told me to go out and talk to Joan—not in the sense of chatting with an important up-and-comer, but in the sense of bailing out Mark’s student. I went and sat down on the floor next to her chair. Among her misfortunes, when offered a seat in the living room, she had chosen the armchair my mother usually sat in, which had not become apparent to her until my father took his place in the matching one beside it, and she realized they were in the power positions, looking out at the other guests.

“So you have a daughter?,” I asked, because—what else are you going to say?

“Yes,” she said tensely, but added nothing else, just looked at me searchingly.

Her extreme brevity would have seemed curt—like a snub—except for the fact that it’s impossible to snub a 14-year-old girl while sitting in her mother’s chair preparing to eat that good woman’s daube and Strawberries Romanov.

I asked a couple of follow-up questions—how old was the child? What was her name? But because each of those simple inquiries went to the same place (nowhere, albeit accompanied by the same anxious expression), and because I had not yet mastered the art of “drawing someone out,” as we girls were then always encouraged to do—although Mata Hari would not have been able to draw Joan Didion out—I gave up and headed back to the kitchen.

Years later—after reading everything else by her I could get my hands on—I read Didion’s first novel, Run River, and encountered the deeply autobiographical character of Lily Knight McClellan, about whom a jerk college boy at Berkeley says: “Taking out Lily Knight was like dating a deaf mute.” Lily’s sister-in-law remarks acidly (Didion’s fiction always includes the wisecracking, jaded older woman): “Somebody holds the door open for Lily in a hardware store, and she thinks she has a very complex situation on her hands.” My asking Joan if she had a daughter was evolving into another complex situation.

I served dinner, sat beside my father through two courses, and then wandered away to watch television and eat an early dessert, while the professors and their wives drank Irish coffee and laughed and while the visiting writer clutched her purse on her lap and waited to leave. The consensus was that the little lady had her work cut out for her.

There was also the impression that she had returned to Berkeley a prodigal, but ready at last to put herself on the right path. And it was entirely possible! All she had to do was move back to town, get her clothes under control, put her nose to the grindstone of Henry James criticism, and, with a few years of earnest work, she would be rewarded with the Ph.D. in English that was surely her right calling.

And it looked at first like the old campus was indeed working its charms. She took to wearing a dirty raincoat, spent too much time alone at the Faculty Club, smoked too many cigarettes, kept an undergraduate’s anxious tally of minor expenditures—

$1.15, papers, etc.
$2.85, taco plate
$ .50, tips
$ .15, coffee

But however strong the tidal pull of Berkeley might have been on Didion, the power brokers of the English Department began to experience a much stronger countervailing force: the huge, mesmerizing power she held over a vast reading audience. They hadn’t simply underestimated it; they had been almost entirely unaware of it. They began to realize that the tiny, inarticulate young woman was not simply Mark’s student—not by a long shot.

“There’s something weird going on with Joan Didion and women,” my father remarked one night over dinner. Apparently, vast numbers of women—students, staff members, faculty, Berkeley people—were thronging to her office hours, hanging around the door of her classroom, arranging their schedules so that they could bump into her, or at least catch a glimpse of her, as she walked from the Faculty Club to Wheeler Hall. It was becoming clear that she didn’t have just readers; she had fans—not the way writers have fans, but the way musicians and actors have fans—and that almost all of them were female.

Things got stranger when her husband showed up. “He’s a Svengali,” my father said; “she does whatever he says, and she doesn’t say a word.” John Gregory Dunne’s visit was also the seed of another Didion legend. My father had taken both of them, along with his secretary—a young woman named Heidi, beloved by my family —to look at the room Heidi had booked for Didion’s Regents’ lecture, the high point of her appointment. Looking out at the lecture hall, Heidi asked Didion if it was to her liking. Didion said nothing, just looked up at her husband. He remarked coldly, “It’s too small,” and Joan nodded fiercely, as though this were obvious.

Never antagonize a secretary. Heidi marched back to her desk and scheduled Didion’s talk in the biggest hall she could book. Let her see how she liked lecturing to a half-filled room!

It was a madhouse. There were tearful women who were turned away at the door, others grateful to stand in the back or to sit on the floor, a huge, rapt crowd of the type that doesn’t feature in even the wildest dreams of most writers. I didn’t go that night, when she presented the now famous “Why I Write.” But when I heard about it and about the frenzy of Didion-mania it produced—there was a sense that something was happening that spring in Berkeley, something important and memorable that you didn’t want to miss out on—I determined to go to the English Department’s commencement, for which she was delivering the address.

I remember sitting in the second row, listening to my father introduce her and then—despite my eagerness to hear what she had to say—only half listening to her speech. I was still too young to be able to follow a complex piece of oratory, although I remember that she talked about her own graduation from the eighth grade, and how she had worn a certain necklace to that event, and how she remembered the cool of the crystals on her neck. It was precisely the kind of image for which she was becoming famous, though I didn’t yet know it, but 35 years later, I remember the way she held her hand to her neck, remembering where the crystal had been.

While she was talking, someone came to the foot of the stage and passed a note to my father, who was sitting behind the podium with a couple of other professors. I watched him open it, and then look over at Didion. He started to stand up, then didn’t. She kept reading, oblivious to the little drama. I assumed the note said that she was running long, but this seemed a very rude thing to demonstrate.

She finished her talk, and my father raced to the microphone and said something about the beautiful day, and about Berkeley being a place not bound by tradition, and so why not scrap the plan described on the program—the students were supposed to process up the aisle to receive their diplomas—and all go out to the front of the building and do it there instead?

“Also,” he said, “please do it using all available exits.”

Bomb scare. That was Berkeley in the ’70s: lots of scare, not many bombs.

And that was the last I saw of Joan Didion for many years, standing beside my father in the bright sunshine of the south portico of Wheeler Hall, the two of them doling out, respectively, diplomas and handshakes. All of these events—the dinner party and the fan stories and the commencement address with the bomb scare—would have faded in my memory, just Berkeley stories (there was always something happening in Berkeley, always something you didn’t want to miss) and nothing to dwell on, except for something that took place a few weeks after she left town that made me think back on all the things that had happened, all the details, and see them for what they really were: a youthful encounter with greatness.

I was sitting in the living room of some friends of my parents, during our annual summer in Dublin, and I noticed on the coffee table a book with a bright orange-and-yellow cover. I craned my neck around to read the title: Slouching Towards Bethlehem, by Joan Didion. I asked if I could borrow it. I began reading it right there on the couch, and took it away with me, and never gave it back. It changed my life.

Slouching Towards Bethlehem is composed of 20 essays written between 1961 and 1967, some of them extremely brief and all of them written against deadline and for money. Although the book is often characterized—because of its title essay and arresting preface on the subject—as being about the social upheavals of the ’60s, the collection is surpassingly eclectic. It includes an essay on a famous murder, a movie-star profile, several travel pieces, a meditation on the wedding industry, and a description of the emotional complexities that attend a grown woman’s visit to her parents’ home. In another writer’s hands, it would have been a dog’s breakfast of occasional pieces, and its lack of focus is in part attributable to the fact that collecting some of her journalism in a book was not Didion’s idea at all: she was, in her deepest sense of herself, a novelist. The essays were a means to that end.

Like many people in a wide variety of callings, she did not realize that it was the thing she did repeatedly, and always at the cost of what seemed to her the more important and more exalted work, that would come to define her. Someone suggested a collection, Didion tossed off the preface in a night, and that was that. Although she had a growing reputation as a fiction writer, she had not developed a steadily growing number of readers of her nonfiction, because she tended to publish in places that did not have a significant overlap of subscribers: the average reader of Vogue—a home for her work because she had been in the magazine’s employ for her first seven years out of college—was not also a reader of The Saturday Evening Post, where she liked to publish because, as she explained in the book’s preface, The Post “is extremely receptive to what the writer wants to do, pays enough for him to be able to do it right, and is meticulous about not changing copy.” The New York Times Book Review hailed Slouching Towards Bethlehem as “a rich display of some of the best prose written today in this country,” and the book was everywhere well received, but it was no rocket ship in the beginning, finding its audience in gradually enlarging waves, woman by woman, and slowly building to a phenomenon not often seen in the book business: becoming something far too widely read to be called a cult book, but engendering a cult’s kind of fierce and jealously protective loyalty. Encountering someone who loves it as much as you do is a bedeviling experience: you have met both a landsman and a rival; each of us believes that our relationship with the book is unique.

What a disaster it would have been if young Joan Didion had worked not at Vogue but at a literary magazine, or at The New Yorker or Harper’s or this magazine. Her years at Vogue—beginning with her year as a Prix de Paris winner, most of which she spent sitting in a room alone reading the bound back issues, a matchless education—were an apprenticeship that has informed all of her work. There can’t be a novelist who writes with more authority about clothes. If you are going to pay serious attention to women—to their sense of themselves, their position (social, political, economic), their assumptions about the face they are presenting to their world, it helps a good deal if you know exactly what they are wearing. Joan Didion always knows which woman is wearing a Liberty shift and which one a crepe-de-chine wrapper, who’s in a Peck & Peck silk shirtdress with a fallen hem and who’s in a navy-blue dress with Irish lace at the collar and cuffs. She learned from the magazine about houses and decorating, two subjects that are of immeasurable usefulness to anyone who is going to write about what Tom Wolfe calls status culture. Her years spent writing captions for interior-decorating photographs (“All through the house, colour, verve, improvised treasures in happy but anomalous coexistence. Here, a Frank Stella, an Art Nouveau stained-glass panel, a Roy Lichtenstein. Not shown: A table covered with a brilliant oilcloth, a Mexican find at fifteen cents a yard.”) allowed her later to remark of a 1968 Beverly Hills political gathering: “The music was not 1968 rock but the kind of jazz people used to have on their record players when everyone who believed in the Family of Man bought Scandinavian stainless steel flatware and voted for Adlai Stevenson,” and to describe 1920s Glendale as “antimacassars among the orange groves, a middle-class prelude to Forest Lawn.”

This attention—serious, thoughtful, and audaciously self-assured—to clothes and houses and flatware (the Family of Man stainless so different from the movie-industry vermeil) accounts in large measure for the rapt interest women have always paid her work. Slouching Towards Bethlehem may be the book that taught us all that “writers are always selling somebody out,” but it is also a very short book with four different sets of curtains in it: the frayed silk ones of the old Newport cottages, the pale appliquéd muslin ones of the Hotel Playa de Cortés in Guaymas, the paper flowered ones in the fortune-teller’s booths on Hotel Street in Honolulu, and the yellow-silk ones she hung in her New York apartment, forgetting to weight them properly, so “all that summer the long panels of transparent golden silk would blow out the windows and get tangled and drenched in the afternoon thunderstorms.”

The collection is named for the piece about life in the Haight, but the book is anchored—in sentiment, concern, and tone—by the final essay, “Goodbye to All That.” It’s about the exquisite sadness of the end of a love affair, the growing disenchantment with living in New York, and most of all what it’s like for a woman to lose her youth:

There was a song on all the jukeboxes on the upper East Side that went “but where is the schoolgirl that used to be me,” and if it was late enough at night I used to wonder that … One of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened to anyone before.

She had stepped into the revolving door of the Seagram Building and stepped out “a good deal older, and on a different street.” She began to cry a lot, and the smell of certain perfumes overwhelmed her with emotion, and “it was very bad when I was twenty-eight.”

Critics of Joan Didion—and they are legion—fall into several camps, the largest and best-organized of which maintains that she’s a downer. “Can nothing be done to cheer this woman up?” asked Darcy O’Brien in the lede to his exasperated New York magazine review of The White Album. Or, as Sandra Hawk of Fort Worth, Texas, wrote to the editors of Life magazine in the January 23, 1970, issue: “Your new writer, Joan Didion, is not exactly ‘Little Mary Sunshine,’ is she?” Guilty as charged. What Didion wrote about were the exquisitely tender and often deeply melancholy feelings that are such a large part of the inner lives of women and especially of very young women—and girls—who are leaving behind the uncomplicated, romance-drenched state of youth and coming to terms with what comes next. Didion’s sensibility is like that of the young Joan Baez, whom she encountered in 1965: “Above all, she is the girl who ‘feels’ things, who has hung on to the freshness and pain of adolescence, the girl ever wounded, ever young.” She herself had once been the girl with “skirts too long, shy to the point of aggravation … full of recriminations and little hurts and stories I do not want to hear again.”

Didion is the writer who expressed most eloquently the eternal-girl impulse, the one that follows us into adulthood: the desire to retreat to our room, to close the door, to spend some time alone with our thoughts and our feelings. She understood that the old governor’s mansion in Sacramento was superior to the Reagans’ giant tract house because it had big, airy bedrooms, “and one can imagine reading in one of them, or writing a book, or closing the door and crying until dinner.” She loved Alcatraz Island not only for the flowers and the view, but because she is a person who likes a moat. Like Baez, when the world was too much with her she wanted to be able to retreat to someplace beautiful and “lock the gate.” When we learned that each time she finished a novel she had done so back in her old bedroom at her parents’ house—the one she had painted carnation pink during her first year at college, and that had green vines growing up over all the windows, so that the light was filtered—we all imagined writing novels and finishing them in just that way. That’s who we all wanted to be—someone’s star student and someone else’s star daughter, the ingenue who didn’t have to carry the picture but without whom it would be flat and lusterless. We were the ones who wanted to provide—or be—“colour, verve, improvised treasures in happy but anomalous coexistence.”

Even marriage—that girl-buster, that instant ager—was, in her description, a state of extended girlhood. When she had been too long a difficult and troubled wife, she was rewarded not with a stern lecture and a visit to the marriage counselor, but with a trip to Honolulu, where the baby got a new frangipani lei and where everyone was kind. When it had rained so long in Los Angeles that she no longer felt like getting dressed in the morning, she was rewarded with a trip to Guaymas, Sonora, where it was sunny and where she spent a lot of time lying in hammocks and where, she reports, “my husband caught eight sharks, and I read an oceanography textbook, and we did not talk much.” Isn’t this every woman’s dream of marriage—where our sulks will be rewarded with trips to better climates, where our husbands will catch sharks and leave us alone to read books about deep water until it’s time for drinks?

Ultimately Joan Didion’s crime—artistic and personal—is the one of which all of us will eventually be convicted: she got old. Her writing got old, her perspective got old, her bag of tricks didn’t work anymore. Where was the Didion who was a Goldwater girl and a Nixon voter, the Republican at Berkeley, the woman who didn’t care at all about the prevailing literary and political fashions, who went to the supermarket in an old bikini and boarded first-class compartments of international flights in bare feet, and who therefore—because she thought about things always on her own terms—could see things in front of us that we’d been missing all along? How could someone that original turn into another tired espouser of the most doctrinaire New York Review of Books political opinions? How could the woman who crafted sentences so original they made us fall in love with her have turned out decades of prose about which Katie Roiphe can rightly say, “Her words are clichés—her sentences and her rhythms and her tics are clichés because we know them so well”? It’s because she got old.

Blue nights, which has about it the feel of a valedictory, a sign-off, is about getting old. It’s about the physical indignities that go along with aging, which—in Didion’s case—include being unable to wear her favorite red suede sandals with the four-inch heels, contracting shingles, spending too many hours in the waiting rooms of too many specialists, having friends recommend that she have someone come to live with her.

The book has a second subject: the death of her only child, Quintana, at age 39. That this event should coexist with—should be described in the same tone as—the bummer about the red suede sandals, that this event should not even get top billing in the title, hints at the fact that Joan Didion may have been quite right when she suggested to Lynn Nesbit that they send the advance back to Sonny Mehta and shelve the project. The thing isn’t quite cooked.

Quintana’s parents wrote her into existence in myriad places, and always managed to present themselves as the parents of the century, but off the page she was a deeply troubled person, whose demons ranged from a chronic overuse of alcohol to a variety of mental illnesses, including manic depression. In other words, she should have fit right in, but she didn’t fit right in, because the Didion-Dunnes had one of those insular, deeply interdependent, and mutually reinforcing marriages that children have an impossible time breaking into.

Didion reports that the central demon of Quintana’s life was a fear of abandonment. “How,” she writes plaintively, “could she have ever imagined that we could abandon her?” A cursory reading of the Didion-Dunne canon provides a partial answer. In The White Album, Didion saw fit to quote liberally from her own psychiatric evaluation (as an outpatient she was treated over a lengthy period). The diagnosis included that she had emotionally “alienated herself almost entirely from the world of other human beings.” In thrall to “an underlying psychotic process,” her contact with reality was “obviously and seriously impaired.” This period lasted from 1966 to 1971, a fact that takes on a different complexion when you realize that Quintana was born and adopted in 1966.

Both of Quintana’s parents worked constantly, left her alone with a variety of sitters—two teenage boys who happened to live next door, a woman who “saw death” in Joan Didion’s aura, whatever hotel sitter was on duty—and they left her alone in Los Angeles many, many times when they were working. The Christmas Quintana was 3, Didion planned to make crèches and pomegranate jelly with her, but then got a picture in New York and decided she’d rather do that, leaving her child home. (She was there because the movie was “precisely what I want to be doing,” Didion wrote defiantly, although she admitted that it was difficult for her to look into the windows of FAO Schwarz.) She balanced ill health and short deadlines by drinking gin and hot water to blunt the pain and taking Dexedrine to blunt the gin, which makes for some ravishing reading, but is hardly a prescription for attentive parenting. Where was Quintana when Didion was living at the Faculty Club, or finishing her novels at her parents’ house, or bunking down in the Haight? Not with her mother.

John Gregory Dunne was a brilliant writer and a bully, a prince and an angry guy, a besotted father and a bad drunk who could throw Quintana’s essays out the car window on the way to school if he found out she hadn’t had one of her parents “proof” them. He was the kind of man who kicked down doors during marital quarrels and could have a bad fight with his wife and then blame it on his very young daughter; at one point he left the two of them and moved into a bachelor pad in Vegas for a year and a half. (“How could she have ever imagined that we could abandon her?”) He wrote that one of his last acts before leaving them was visiting a doctor to have his sperm examined, to learn “if there was any medical reason why I had been unable to conceive a child.” He didn’t want to conceive a child, of course—his adopted one, he wrote, was fantastic. Thanks, Dad.

In Blue Nights, Didion reports that at the age of 5, Quintana called a mental hospital and asked what to do if she was going crazy. At “five or six” she called Twentieth Century Fox to find out how to become a movie star. These strange events (which are easy to imagine a child reporting to her parents, much more difficult to imagine her actually doing) are, suggests Didion, evidence of Quintana’s “depths and shallows, quicksilver changes.” Or perhaps they are evidence of a child desperate to get her parents’ attention and keenly aware that crazy people and movie stars were the only ones who reliably commanded it. Ordinary little girls didn’t have much luck.

Enough of all that! It was a Hollywood childhood of the ’60s/’70s variety, and it was the usual mess. The survivors are all over Los Angeles; I run into them all the time, and there’s hardly a one of them who didn’t get badly into drugs or cults or booze or some damn thing. Let us close the curtains—frayed silk or appliquéd muslin or paper flowered or un-weighted yellow, take your pick—on that sorry scene. I never wanted to tell you about all of that.

I just wanted to tell you about the young woman who came to dinner at my house so long ago. Almost everyone else from that dinner party is dead—my parents are dead, and Mark Schorer is dead. Jim Hart, her other great champion in the department, is dead. Who can blame those two old teachers for wanting to bring their bright-eyed girl back to Berkeley, who can blame them for wanting to keep her forever in Wheeler Hall with the transom windows and the parquet floors and the Beaux Arts balconies and the perfect bay views? They had a fondness for her that was the old man’s fondness for a very young woman he has helped along the way, something far past lust, something that was instead the deepest kind of affection. Who can blame them for not wanting to let her go, once they finally had her back?

But she belonged to all of us, to her girl readers, and we wanted her back in the airport, with the rental car turned in, and the mohair throw over her lap, and the portable typewriter propped up on the chair so she could type the day’s notes. We wanted her on the floor of the studio watching the Doors wait around for Jim Morrison to show up, and we wanted her on the set of John Wayne’s latest picture. We wanted her to stay on the road forever.

In Where I Was From, Didion describes flying across the country—already an old woman—to attend to the death of her mother, age 90. “Who will look out for me now?” she asks the reader. “Who will remember me as I was?”

I don’t know the answer to the first question, although some very famous names come to mind. But I know for certain the answer to the second: All of us. Always.

Laurel Canyon Rooftop
2011
Selenium toned silver gelatin print / 27 x 33 x 3 cm

“EIGHTEEN ANALOGUE DOUBLE EXPOSURES”

09.12.2011-14.01.2012 / PREVIEW: FRIDAY 09.12.2011 / 19.00-21.00

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SENTENCES ON PHOTOGRAPHY BY TORBJØRN RØDLAND

1. The muteness of a photograph matters as much as its ability to speak.

2. The juxtaposition of photographs matters as much as the muteness of each.

3. All photography fattens. Objectifcation is inescapable.

4. Photography cannot secure the integrity of its subject any more than it can satisfy the need to touch or taste.

5. Good ideas are easily bungled.

6. Banal ideas can be rescued by personal investment and beautiful execution.

7. Lacking an appealing surface, a photograph should depict surfaces appealingly.

8. A photograph that refuses to market anything but its own complexities is perverse. Perversion is bliss.

9. A backlit object is a pregnant object.

10. To disregard symbols is to disregard a part of human perception.

11. Photography may employ tools and characteristics of reportage without being reportage.

12. The only photojournalistic images that remain interesting are the ones that produce or evoke myths.

13. A photographer in doubt will get better results than a photographer caught up in the freedom of irony.

14. The aestheticizing eye is a distant eye. The melancholic eye is a distant eye. The ironic eye is a distant eye.

15. One challenge in photography is to outdistance distance. Immersion is key.

16. Irony may be applied in homeopathic doses.

17. A lyrical photograph should be aware of its absurdity. Lyricism grows from awareness.

18. For the photographer, everyone and everything is a model, including the photograph itself.

19. The photography characterized by these sentences is informed by conceptual art.

20. The photography characterized by these sentences is not conceptual photography.

STANDARD OSLO

James Welling, Lock, 1976
Polapan print
3 ¾ in x 2 ¾ in.

Michael Fried’s Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before Panel
A discussion on ideas brought up in Mr. Fried’s books Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before and Four Honest Outlaws : Sala, Ray, Marioni, Gordon.

MODERATOR:
Michael Fried (Art Critic)
PANELISTS:
Charles Ray
James Welling
Walead Beshty
Russell Ferguson

1:30 – 2:30 January 14, 2011

PHOTO LA

Thanks to Peter Bartlett

BUZZ ALDRIN STEPPED HERE NASA has asked that lunar visitors stay at least 75 meters from the Apollo 11 lander.

By KENNETH CHANG
NY Times Published: January 9, 2012

California’s catalog of historic artifacts includes two pairs of boots, an American flag, empty food bags, a pair of tongs and more than a hundred other items left behind at a place called

The history registry for New Mexico lists the same items.

That might be surprising, since Tranquillity Base is not in New Mexico or California but a quarter of a million miles away, in the spot where Neil A. Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stepped onto the moon in 1969.

But for archaeologists and historians worried that the next generation of people visiting the moon might carelessly obliterate the site of one of humanity’s greatest accomplishments, these designations were important first steps toward raising awareness of the need to protect off-world artifacts.

“I think it’s humanity’s heritage,” said Beth L. O’Leary, a professor of anthropology at New Mexico State University. “It’s just an incredible realm that archaeologists haven’t begun to look at until now.”

Dr. O’Leary herself had not given much thought to historic preservation on the Moon until a student asked her in 1999 whether federal preservation laws applied to the Apollo landing sites.

“That started the ball rolling,” she said.

It turned out to be a tricky question. Under international law, the United States government still owns everything it left on the moon: the bottom half of the first lunar lander, the scientific experiments, the urine bags. But 100 nations, including the United States, have signed the Outer Space Treaty, in which they agree not to claim sovereignty over any part of the moon.

For most of the last decade, the effort by Dr. O’Leary and her students to seek formal protection for the Apollo sites was a lonely pursuit. NASA, by its nature, looks more to its future than its past. “There’s a tendency of NASA, when their programs end, they tend to get rid of everything,” said Milford Wayne Donaldson, the historic preservation officer for California.

Federal officials were also wary that other countries would see granting historic protection to the Apollo sites as a ruse by the United States to put down territorial claims. And with no plans to go back to the moon, it all seemed like an academic exercise.

But interest in the moon has perked up again. Russia and India plan to send robotic landers. NASA was going to send astronauts back there until the Obama administration changed course a couple of years ago.

Most crucially, the Google Lunar X Prize, a competition among 26 teams to become the first private organization to put a spacecraft on the moon, offered a $1 million bonus for visiting a historic site there. At least one team announced it was heading for Tranquillity Base.

Suddenly, the prospect of a new little rover’s rolling over Neil Armstrong’s footprints was not entirely farfetched.

So Dr. O’Leary started placing calls to historic preservation officials in states where the space industry looms large. Texas, she learned, couldn’t help her, because to be listed as a historic resource there, an item must lie in Texas.

In early 2009, she called Mr. Donaldson in Sacramento to recruit his help in protecting American relics on the moon, “which I thought was an incredible, great idea right off the bat,” he said. Dr. O’Leary and her students had already tried to get the National Park Service to list the base as a national historic landmark, but “they had been turned down flatly,” Mr. Donaldson said.

When he checked California’s laws, he found that artifacts just had to have an association with the state to be listed. The Apollo program qualified, and the Historical Resources Commission approved the listing in January 2010. New Mexico followed three months later.

NASA became interested, too. Robert Kelso, manager of lunar commercial services at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, said he had talked with top officials at the agency: “We said if they’re serious about going, we ought to get some of our best and brightest together and begin looking at this.”

NASA held a workshop a year ago about the preservation issue. Then Mr. Kelso led a team that cataloged what was left on the moon after the six Apollo landings, and it recommended how to balance historic preservation with the likely desire in the future to investigate how well the materials have lasted.

The recommendations, issued in the fall, place greater protections on items from the first moon mission, Apollo 11, and the last one, Apollo 17. For Apollo 11, the recommendations ask that any visitor, robotic or human, stay at least 75 meters from the lander.

“In that case, it would protect every footprint from Neil and Buzz and all the flight hardware,” Mr. Kelso said.

For Apollo 17, the protection bubble is even wider — 225 meters — because a lunar buggy let the last two men on the moon, Eugene A. Cernan and Harrison H. Schmitt, cover much more ground.

“We didn’t protect every rover track and footprint,” Mr. Kelso said, “but we protected a lot of them.”

The recommendation for the other landing sites is that visitors can get close but not touch anything.

Mr. Kelso’s team also suggested guidelines for the paths of spacecraft overhead, to limit the chance that rocket exhaust will blow around lunar dust and damage the footprints.

Mr. Kelso said NASA’s recommendations, like the listings by California and New Mexico, have no legal force. “We are hoping that whether it’s an international team or a commercial team, they would honor and recognize the value of these sites and honor these recommendations,” he said.

That may be enough.

“It’s a sea change for NASA to come out with recommendations,” Dr. O’Leary said. “I think that the guidance you provide certainly strengthens the moral sanctions against obliterating some part of the archaeological record.”

The Lunar X Prize team that declared that it was going to Tranquillity Base, run by a company called Astrobotic Technology, now says it will stay away from the Apollo 11 and 17 sites.

Mr. Donaldson would like to add Tranquillity Base to the United Nations’ list of world heritage sites. But first he will have to get the rules changed. Currently, nations can nominate only sites that are “on their territory.”

Yann Arthus-Bertrand/Altitude

A sea of Green? A working lot at Disney World in Orlando, Fla.

By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN
NY Times Published: January 6, 2012

THERE are said to be at least 105 million and maybe as many as 2 billion parking spaces in the United States.

A third of them are in parking lots, those asphalt deserts that we claim to hate but that proliferate for our convenience. One study says we’ve built eight parking spots for every car in the country. Houston is said to have 30 of them per resident. In “Rethinking a Lot,” a new study of parking, due out in March, Eran Ben-Joseph, a professor of urban planning at M.I.T., points out that “in some U.S. cities, parking lots cover more than a third of the land area, becoming the single most salient landscape feature of our built environment.”

Absent hard numbers Mr. Ben-Joseph settles on a compromise of 500 million parking spaces in the country, occupying some 3,590 square miles, or an area larger than Delaware and Rhode Island combined. If the correct number is 2 billion, we’re talking about four times that: Connecticut and Vermont.

Either way it’s a lot of pavement.

As the critic Lewis Mumford wrote half a century ago, “The right to have access to every building in the city by private motorcar in an age when everyone possesses such a vehicle is the right to destroy the city.” Yet we continue to produce parking lots, in cities as well as in suburbs, in the same way we consume all those billions of plastic bottles of water and disposable diapers.

What to do?

For starters we ought to take these lots more seriously, architecturally. Many architects and urban planners don’t. Beyond greener designs and the occasional celebrity-architect garage, we need to think more about these lots as public spaces, as part of the infrastructure of our streets and sidewalks, places for various activities that may change and evolve, because not all good architecture is permanent. Hundreds of lots already are taken over by farmers’ markets, street-hockey games, teenage partiers and church services. We need to recognize and encourage diversity. This is the idea behind Parking Day, a global event, around since 2005, that invites anybody and everybody to transform metered lots. Each year participants have adapted hundreds of them in dozens of countries, setting up temporary health clinics and bike-repair shops, having seminars and weddings.

That’s akin to the approach of an architecture and planning firm in Brooklyn called Interboro Partners. Several years ago it entered a competition in Los Angeles focused on dead shopping malls. Entrants picked malls they wanted to revive. Most contestants proposed erecting office parks or retirement homes or apartment buildings. Interboro took a different approach.

It chose the Dutchess County Mall in Fishkill, N.Y. Opened with fanfare in spring 1974 as another consumer paradise and symbol of automotive and suburban progress, it was built on the promising corner of a major highway interchange in the heart of a county poised for growth. But development ended up gravitating elsewhere, and by the early 1990s the mall was half-empty; by 1998 it was officially closed. To drivers passing it on Interstate 84 it looked like every other dead mall, floating in the usual asphalt sea of parking spaces.

But Interboro’s partners saw something else there: life.

Of course suburban and urban lots are not all the same, and it’s glib to say we should just buy fewer cars. Yes, we ought to wean ourselves from automobiles in favor of public transportation. We rely too much on cars because our public transit systems are often so abysmal. But cars aren’t going away anytime soon, certainly not in the suburbs or in cities like Los Angeles, and we can’t just wish away lots in which to park them. John Brinckerhoff Jackson, the landscape writer who died in 1996, years ago pleaded that the parking lot be treated like the city common, with its own community values.

But what does this entail? For big cities like New York it is high time to abandon outmoded zoning codes from the auto-boom days requiring specific ratios of parking spaces per housing unit, or per square foot of retail space. These rules about minimum parking spaces have driven up the costs of apartments for developers and residents, damaged the environment, diverted money that could have gone to mass transit and created a government-mandated cityscape that’s largely unused. We keep adding to the glut of parking lots. Crain’s recently reported on the largely empty garages at new buildings like Avalon Fort Greene, a 42-story luxury tower near downtown Brooklyn, and 80 DeKalb Avenue, up the block, both well occupied, both of which built hundreds of parking spaces to woo tenants. Garages near Yankee Stadium, built over the objections of Bronx neighbors appalled at losing parkland for yet more parking lots, turn out never to be more than 60 percent full, even on game days. The city has lost public space, the developers have lost a fortune.

The Pensacola Parking Syndrome is a term of the trade used to describe a city that tears down its old buildings to create parking spaces to entice more people downtown, until people no longer want to go there because it has become an empty lot. Cities should let the free market handle the construction of new parking spaces. People who buy or rent new homes can pay extra if they want someplace to park a car. Municipalities can instead cap the maximum number of lots or the ratio of spaces to dwellings and offices.

Back in 1973 Boston instituted a successful parking freeze in concert with the Environmental Protection Agency, an approach that Los Angeles attempted to follow until Congress blocked the tactic, bouncing the ball over to city courts. Since then Cambridge, Mass., has set its own limit on parking spaces. More cities could now do the same.

As for the perception that parking spots are hard to find, as if everyplace were Midtown Manhattan, the reality is that a space may not be open precisely when and where a driver wants it. But the journal Transportation Science has shown that drivers who parked at the first available spot and then walked to their destination on average saved considerable time (never mind savings in gasoline and anxiety) over those who cruised around until a “better” spot opened.

Driver behavior is revealing. We ignore the stripes and take shortcuts when lots are not full, but then are inclined to slow down and become more alert to pedestrians when we do so, a fact that led a Dutch traffic engineer to remove lights and other markings in the town of Drachten. Traffic accidents there declined. Various cities in northern Europe have followed suit, experimenting with removing traffic controls in areas shared by cars, pedestrians and cyclists — creating lots that function, in effect, as public squares.

I recently called John Kaliski, who runs Urban Studio in Los Angeles, and asked him whether this approach might work in car-centric Southern California, and he said it could. “But you would have to be rigorous about how you applied it,” he cautioned. “Liability is different in the United States than in Europe.” He recalled the case of the elderly driver who had a stroke at the wheel in 2003 and killed pedestrians in a farmers’ market in Santa Monica, prompting a slew of legal suits and new regulations.

It’s a no-brainer to argue that lots should be greener. The biggest advancements in lot designs have involved porous surfaces, more trees for shade and storm-water collection facilities. In Turin, Italy, Renzo Piano transformed part of the area around Fiat’s Lingotto factory by extending a grid of trees from the parking lot into the building’s formerly barren courtyards, creating a canopy of soft shade and a ready metaphor: nature reclaiming the postindustrial landscape. At Dia:Beacon, the Minimalist museum up the Hudson River, the parking lot designed by the artist Robert Irwin in collaboration with the firm OpenOffice is one with the art inside, trees in rigorous ranks rising subtly toward the front door. It’s an example not only of green design but also of treating parking lots the way people actually experience them: as the real entrance to a building.

But these are exceptions.

Which gets us back to Interboro and the parking lot of the Dutchess County Mall. By the late 1990s its developer had decided to land-bank the site, hoping its price would rise along with property values in the area. This meant that the mall and its lot had an absentee landlord.

But Interboro noticed that the parking lot was quietly being used as a depot and stop by bus lines. A hot dog truck had set up shop there. Patrons at a drive-through McDonald’s ate in their parked cars. Truckers slept there overnight. The Fishkill flea market took over on weekends, and a graphic design firm and a couple of banks and a post-office processing center converted vacant mall stores into offices.

In short, said Daniel D’Oca, one of Interboro’s partners, “what looked dead wasn’t, but you would have missed it if you just passed by it with a predisposed idea about sprawl.”

The firm wanted “to be responsive to the ways people already used the space,” elaborated Tobias Armborst, another partner, by making temporary interventions that “enhanced its urbanity.” The notion was that these interventions might open the door to various possible futures. Interboro proposed that the lot become, in effect, a laboratory for “small, cheap, feasible experiments,” is how Georgeen Theodore, a third Interboro partner, put it. “We embraced the fact that it was functioning for Fishkill as a version of Jane Jacobs’s sidewalk,” she said. “No one would disagree with permeable surfaces or solar panels. But it’s not as obvious to see lots for what they are, as public spaces where diverse people meet.”

So the firm imagined installing fitness and day care centers, which the postal workers said they wanted, and turning part of the mall over to a nightclub, so that the parties already happening in the lot could move indoors. The lot would get a beer garden, a recycling facility, a used-car business, a hiking trail entrance where the lot abutted protected wilderness, and a summer stage that exploited, as a readymade band shell, the existing porte-cochère of the mall’s defunct Jamesway.

“The point was to think of the whole lot not as a blight but as a space for architectural invention worth engaging with, warts and all,” Ms. Theodore stressed.

In the end the developer didn’t take up Interboro on its plan. But the scheme served its rhetorical purpose. Lots don’t need to be dead zones. And the best architecture can be light on its feet.

Two Chairs, Two Chests of Drawers, Two Pieces of Fabric and Two Tables
January 7 through February 4, 2012

Ambach and Rice

Thanks to RS

A Banned Segment from Saturday Night Live

The 1998 Robert Smigel animated short film “Conspiracy Theory Rock”, part of a March 1998 “TV Funhouse” segment, has been removed from all subsequent airings of the Saturday Night Live episode where it originally appeared. Michaels’ claimed the edit was done because it “wasn’t funny”. The film is a scathing critique of corporate media ownership, including NBC’s ownership by General Electric/Westinghouse.

Thanks to Jonathan Maghen