Chang W. Lee/The New York Times

By MATT RICHTEL
NY Times Published: August 15, 2010

GLEN CANYON NATIONAL RECREATION AREA, Utah — Todd Braver emerges from a tent nestled against the canyon wall. He has a slight tan, except for a slim pale band around his wrist.

For the first time in three days in the wilderness, Mr. Braver is not wearing his watch. “I forgot,” he says.

It is a small thing, the kind of change many vacationers notice in themselves as they unwind and lose track of time. But for Mr. Braver and his companions, these moments lead to a question: What is happening to our brains?

Mr. Braver, a psychology professor at Washington University in St. Louis, was one of five neuroscientists on an unusual journey. They spent a week in late May in this remote area of southern Utah, rafting the San Juan River, camping on the soft banks and hiking the tributary canyons.

It was a primitive trip with a sophisticated goal: to understand how heavy use of digital devices and other technology changes how we think and behave, and how a retreat into nature might reverse those effects.

Cellphones do not work here, e-mail is inaccessible and laptops have been left behind. It is a trip into the heart of silence — increasingly rare now that people can get online even in far-flung vacation spots.

As they head down the tight curves the San Juan has carved from ancient sandstone, the travelers will, not surprisingly, unwind, sleep better and lose the nagging feeling to check for a phone in the pocket. But the significance of such changes is a matter of debate for them.

Some of the scientists say a vacation like this hardly warrants much scrutiny. But the trip’s organizer, David Strayer, a psychology professor at the University of Utah, says that studying what happens when we step away from our devices and rest our brains — in particular, how attention, memory and learning are affected — is important science.

“Attention is the holy grail,” Mr. Strayer says.

“Everything that you’re conscious of, everything you let in, everything you remember and you forget, depends on it.”

Echoing other researchers, Mr. Strayer says that understanding how attention works could help in the treatment of a host of maladies, like attention deficit disorder, schizophrenia and depression. And he says that on a day-to-day basis, too much digital stimulation can “take people who would be functioning O.K. and put them in a range where they’re not psychologically healthy.”

The quest to understand the impact on the brain of heavy technology use — at a time when such use is exploding — is still in its early stages. To Mr. Strayer, it is no less significant than when scientists investigated the effects of consuming too much meat or alcohol.

But stepping away is easier for some than others. The trip begins with a strong defense of digital connectedness, a debate that revolves around one particularly important e-mail.

On the Road

The five scientists on the trip can be loosely divided into two groups: the believers and the skeptics.

The believers are Mr. Strayer and Paul Atchley, 40, a professor at the University of Kansas who studies teenagers’ compulsive use of cellphones. They argue that heavy technology use can inhibit deep thought and cause anxiety, and that getting out into nature can help. They take pains in their own lives to regularly log off.

The skeptics use their digital gadgets without reservation. They are not convinced that anything lasting will come of the trip — personally or scientifically.

This group includes the fast-talking Mr. Braver, 41, a brain imaging expert; Steven Yantis, 54, the tall and contemplative chairman of the psychological and brain sciences department at Johns Hopkins, who studies how people switch between tasks; and Art Kramer, 57, a white-bearded professor at the University of Illinois who has gained attention for his studies of the neurological benefits of exercise.

Also on the trip are a reporter and a photographer, and Richard Boyer, a quiet outdoorsman and accomplished landscape painter, who helps Mr. Strayer lead the journey.

Among the bright academic lights in the group, Mr. Kramer is the most prominent. At the time of the trip he was about to take over a $300,000-a-year position as director of the Beckman Institute, a leading research center at the University of Illinois with around 1,000 scientists and staff workers and tens of millions of dollars in grant financing.

He is also intense personally — someone who has been challenging himself since early in life; he says he left home when he was a teenager, became an amateur boxer and, later, flew airplanes, rock-climbed and smashed his knee in a “high-speed skiing accident.”

They are driving six hours from Salt Lake City to the river, and they stop at a camping store for last-minute supplies. Mr. Kramer waits out front, checking e-mail on his BlackBerry Curve. This sets off a debate between the believers and skeptics.

Back in the car, Mr. Kramer says he checked his phone because he was waiting for important news: whether his lab has received a $25 million grant from the military to apply neuroscience to the study of ergonomics. He has instructed his staff to send a text message to an emergency satellite phone the group will carry with them.

Mr. Atchley says he doesn’t understand why Mr. Kramer would bother. “The grant will still be there when you get back,” he says.

“Of course you’d want to know about a $25 million grant,” Mr. Kramer responds. Pressed by Mr. Atchley on the significance of knowing immediately, he adds: “They would expect me to get right back to them.”

It is a debate that has become increasingly common as technology has redefined the notion of what is “urgent.” How soon do people need to get information and respond to it? The believers in the group say the drumbeat of incoming data has created a false sense of urgency that can affect people’s ability to focus.

In his case, Mr. Kramer says there have been few side effects: the only time he could recall being overly distracted by technology was when he became too immersed in writing a paper, and was late to pick up his teenage daughter.

“As academics, we live on computers,” he says.

The scenery has turned spartan as they drop down into a red-rock desert. The group stops for gas in Green River, where Mr. Kramer checks his e-mail again. Mr. Strayer quips that he shows signs of addiction.

“Some people think only others have the problem,” Mr. Strayer says. But he concedes of Mr. Kramer, whom he likes and under whom he earned his doctorate: “He’s under a lot of pressure.”

On the River

They awaken at the Recapture Lodge, a rustic two-story motel surrounded by cottonwood trees. There are no phones in the rooms, but there is wireless Internet access, installed a few years ago because, the proprietor says, people could not stand to be without it.

Mr. Kramer still has not received any news on the grant. He stuffs his laptop into a backpack and stores it at the motel office.

Hours later, the group arrives at the raft launching site, Mexican Hat, named for a sombrero-shaped rock outcropping. The travelers assemble and pack the rafts, loading food for five days, beer, water jugs, a portable toilet, tents and sleeping bags, kitchen and first aid supplies. Then they’re off.

A short distance downstream they see it: a narrow steel bridge 150 feet above the river — after which there is no longer any cellphone coverage.

“It’s the end of civilization,” Mr. Atchley jokes.

Late in the afternoon, they make camp on the banks. They eat pork chops, the Big Dipper brilliant above, the thousand-foot canyon walls narrowing their view of the heavens. A few bats dart and dive, seeking bugs drawn to the flashlights.

The men drink Tecate beer and talk about the brain. They are thinking about a seminal study from the University of Michigan that showed people can better learn after walking in the woods than after walking a busy street.

The study indicates that learning centers in the brain become taxed when asked to process information, even during the relatively passive experience of taking in an urban setting. By extension, some scientists believe heavy multitasking fatigues the brain, draining it of the ability to focus.

Mr. Strayer, the trip leader, argues that nature can refresh the brain. “Our senses change. They kind of recalibrate — you notice sounds, like these crickets chirping; you hear the river, the sounds, the smells, you become more connected to the physical environment, the earth, rather than the artificial environment.”

“That’s why they call it vacation. It’s restorative,” Mr. Braver says. He wonders if there’s any science behind the nature idea. “Part of being a good scientist is being skeptical.”

Mr. Braver accepts the Michigan research but wants to understand precisely what happens inside the brain. And he wonders: Why don’t brains adapt to the heavy stimulation, turning us into ever-stronger multitaskers?

“Right,” says Mr. Kramer, the skeptic. “Why wouldn’t the circuits be exercised, in a sense, and we’d get stronger?”

Ideas Start to Flow

Scientists have long thought about how new forms of media affect attention — from the printing press to the television. But the modern study of attention emerged in the early 1980s with the spread of machines that allowed researchers to see changes in blood flow and electrical activity in the brain. Newer machines have let them pinpoint the parts of the brain that light up when people switch from one task to another, or when they are paying attention to music or a movie.

This has become such a sizzling field of research that two years ago the National Institutes of Health established a division to support studies of the parts of the brain involved with focus.

Now, Mr. Yantis says, “we can study the brain and the mind together in a rigorous scientific way, rather than a Freudian sit-back-and-think-about-it way.”

This trip is more about rowing while thinking. Mr. Braver and Mr. Yantis sit in a red kayak in calm waters, passing a goose and her two goslings on the banks. The skeptics are talking about how to study the toll taken by constant interruption from e-mail and other digital bursts.

Behavioral studies have shown that performance suffers when people multitask. These researchers are wondering whether attention and focus can take a hit when people merely anticipate the arrival of more digital stimulation.

“The expectation of e-mail seems to be taking up our working memory,” Mr. Yantis says.

Working memory is a precious resource in the brain. The scientists hypothesize that a fraction of brain power is tied up in anticipating e-mail and other new information — and that they might be able to prove it using imaging.

“To the extent you have less working memory, you have less space for storing and integrating ideas and therefore less to do the reasoning you need to do,” says Mr. Kramer, floating nearby.

Over the course of the next few days, the rafters find themselves darting in and out of such scientific conversations. Two scientists packing their tents discuss which imaging techniques may best show the effects of digital overload on the brain. The full group tosses around ways to measure the release of brain chemicals into the bloodstream. A pair paddling the big raft talk about how to apply neuroeconomics — measuring how the brain values information — to understand compulsive texting by teenagers.

The conversations blur, with periods of silence and awed looks at surroundings — the circling hawks, the bighorn sheep. There are moments, too, when the men experience intense focus during physical challenges, like rafting the rapids or hiking narrow canyon walls.

This is the rhythm of the trip: As the river flows, so do the ideas.

“There’s a real mental freedom in knowing no one or nothing can interrupt you,” Mr. Braver says. He echoes the others in noting that the trip is in many ways more effective than work retreats set in hotels, often involving hundreds of people who shuffle through quick meetings, wielding BlackBerrys. “It’s why I got into science, to talk about ideas.”

‘Third-Day Syndrome’

“Time is slowing down,” Mr. Kramer says. He has been moving quickly his whole life, since he left home at 15, and has elevated himself to a position of great influence. It’s the second day on the river, and he has finished packing his tent. He’s the first of the morning to do so, but he feels no urgency.

He has not read any of the research papers he brought. And the $25 million e-mail? “I was never worried about it. I haven’t thought about it,” he says, as if the very idea were silly.

Mr. Kramer says the group has become more reflective, quieter, more focused on the surroundings. “If I looked around like this at work, people would think I was goofing off,” he says.

The others are more relaxed too. Mr. Braver decides against coffee, bypassing his usual ritual. The next day, he neglects to put on his watch, though he cautions against reading too much into it. “I sometimes forget to put my watch on at home, but in fairness, I usually have my phone with me and it has a clock on it.”

Mr. Strayer, the believer, says the travelers are experiencing a stage of relaxation he calls “third-day syndrome.” Its symptoms may be unsurprising. But even the more skeptical of the scientists say something is happening to their brains that reinforces their scientific discussions — something that could be important to helping people cope in a world of constant electronic noise.

“If we can find out that people are walking around fatigued and not realizing their cognitive potential,” Mr. Braver says, then pauses and adds: “What can we do to get us back to our full potential?”

What he is getting at is something the scientists won’t put a fine point on until the last few minutes of the trip: they have ideas on how to answer this question.

Heading Home

Later that night, back at the Recapture Lodge, Mr. Kramer reclaims his laptop from the front desk. At first, he says he’ll wait to log on until he showers and rests. Then he decides to have a quick peek. He has received 216 e-mail messages, but nothing about the military grant.

“The $25 million saga continues,” he says, and logs off.

The next morning, he and Mr. Braver sit in the back of the car, heading to the airport, the pair of skeptics sharing beef jerky and a perspective. The trip didn’t transform them, but it did get them to change the way they think about their research — and themselves.

Mr. Braver says that when he retrieved his phone the night before, it dawned on him how much he turns to it in tiny moments of boredom: “Sometimes I do use it as an excuse to be antisocial.”

When he gets back to St. Louis, he says, he plans to focus more on understanding what happens to the brain as it rests. He wants to use imaging technology to see whether the effect of nature on the brain can be measured and whether there are other ways to reproduce it, say, through meditation.

Mr. Kramer says he wants to look at whether the benefits to the brain — the clearer thoughts, for example — come from the experience of being in nature, the exertion of hiking and rafting, or a combination.

Mr. Atchley says he can see new ways to understand why teenagers decide to text even in dangerous situations, like driving. Perhaps the addictiveness of digital stimulation leads to poor decision-making. Mr. Yantis says a late-night conversation beneath stars and circling bats gave him new ways to think about his research into how and why people are distracted by irrelevant streams of information.

Even without knowing exactly how the trip affected their brains, the scientists are prepared to recommend a little downtime as a path to uncluttered thinking. As Mr. Kramer puts it: “How many years did we prescribe aspirin without knowing the exact mechanism?”

As they near the airport, Mr. Kramer also mentions a personal discovery: “I have a colleague who says that I’m being very impolite when I pull out a computer during meetings. I say: ‘I can listen.’ ”

“Maybe I’m not listening so well. Maybe I can work at being more engaged.”

TRAILER #2: Temporal Collections… In the General Vicinity of Inner & Outer Space from R.T. on Vimeo.

closes September 12

By ALICE RAWSTHORN
NY Times Published: August 15, 2010

LONDON — The Rev. Samuel Henshall was not a lucky man. His hopes of academic glory in late 18th century Oxford were scuppered when his scholarly essays flopped, and he failed to bag a professorship. He began a new career in the church only to be dogged by legal tussles over money, or the lack of it. Once he was taken to court by a brewery to which he owed £420 — a hefty beer bill for the time.

But his boozing wasn’t entirely wasteful, because it inspired Mr. Henshall’s sole success. He invented a contraption to extract corks from wine bottles, the corkscrew, which was patented by the industrialist Matthew Boulton in 1795. Despite his failure to pay his share of the patenting expenses and a flood of complaints from rival inventors (one of whom dismissed him as a “piratical screwmaker”) Mr. Henshall is still credited as the corkscrew’s designer. Several of his early models were buried with him.

A modern version of his invention is displayed together with a paper clip, clothespin, rubber band, egg carton, shipping container and 30 other useful and familiar objects in “Hidden Heroes: The Genius of Everyday Things,” an exhibition opening Friday at the Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein, Germany.

“They’re the sort of products that every designer dreams of making — very simple, very ingenious items that we use on a daily basis,” said Jochen Eisenbrand, who curated the exhibition. “They’ve continued to exist for decades without changing very much, because they haven’t needed to.”

Some of the objects in the show were devised by amateur inventors like the hapless Mr. Henshall. One is the glass preserving jar, a forerunner of the tin can, which was dreamed up in 1809 by a Paris chef, Nicolas Appert, as the winning entry of a competition launched by Napoleon Bonaparte to improve the French Army’s food. Another is the clothes hanger, which dates back to 1903 when Albert J. Parkhouse arrived for work at a lampshade frame factory in Jackson, Michigan, only to find that all of the coat hooks were taken. He made something to hang his coat on by bending a piece of wire into an elongated triangle and twisting the ends into a hook.

Other “Hidden Heroes” stemmed from sudden flashes of inspiration. The German pharmacist Maximilian Negwer hit upon his 1907 idea of cushioning wax ear plugs with cotton wool when reading Homer’s “The Odyssey.” Untangling burrs from his dog’s fur after an Alpine hunting trip prompted the Swiss engineer George de Mestral to develop Velcro fabric fastener in the 1940s and 1950s.

Air bubble film, or bubble wrap, was conceived in the 1950s after a Swiss inventor, Marc Chavannes, noticed how the clouds seemed to cushion an airplane as it descended, and realized that a similar effect could be achieved in packaging by sealing air inside plastic film. An American scientist, Art Fry, dreamed up the Post-it note in the late 1970s when singing in a church choir. He couldn’t find the right page in his hymn book because the paper bookmark kept slipping out.

The exhibition also shows how some familiar objects are industrialized versions of homemade devices that evolved over centuries. The baby pacifier dates back to the scraps of cloth filled with sugar, which soothed agitated babies in the 1500s. The design of the rubber condom was based on the cloth bags and animal intestines that had historically been used as makeshift contraceptives.

Intriguing though the stories behind these “Hidden Heroes” are, many of them have been told before. (Although to the Vitra Design Museum’s credit it has unearthed patent drawings, industrial films and early advertising campaigns to document how they were designed, manufactured and marketed.) Similar objects featured in 2004’s “Humble Masterpieces” exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and “Super Normal,” a 2006 show organized by the British designer Jasper Morrison and his Japanese counterpart, Naoto Fukasawa. Some re-emerged last year in “Design Real,” an exhibition curated by the German designer, Konstantin Grcic, at the Serpentine Gallery in London.

Why do we find them so fascinating? The stories help, obviously, especially the ones with “it could have been you” sub-plots. Take the German housewife, Melitta Bentz, who made a fortune by inventing the coffee filter in 1908, after experimenting with blotting paper from her son’s school exercise book.

It’s equally tantalizing to be able to think of familiar things, especially useful and inexpensive ones, as being unexpectedly interesting. “We all find these objects irresistible because they give us a sense of adventure and discovery,” said Paola Antonelli, senior curator of architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art, who organized “Humble Masterpieces.” “It is a great worldwide treasure hunt, which is open to everyone with no need for star designers or erudite curators.”

The modesty of the “Hidden Heroes” is particularly appealing at a time when we’ve become bored by the brashness of what’s been called “Design-with-a-capital-D.” (Remember the lamp mounted on an 18-karat-gold-plated Kalashnikov AK-47 assault rifle by the French designer, Philippe Starck? That was the peak/nadir of “Design.”) Designers, the thoughtful ones, at least, are increasingly absorbed by the ontology of objects, or the abstract qualities that define them, rather than aesthetics.

It’s also easy to see why we should treasure economy, pragmatism and longevity in a deepening environmental crisis. Though one object in both “Hidden Heroes” and “Humble Masterpieces” doesn’t quite fit that picture. It’s the incandescent lightbulb, which embodies the utilitarian virtues of cheapness, practicality, simplicity and so on, except when it comes to energy. Only 15 percent of the electricity it consumes is used to create light; the rest disappears as heat.

The lightbulb industry has spent a fortune developing energy-efficient alternatives, but so far none has matched the warm, soulful light that makes the incandescent bulb so special. And unless one succeeds, it won’t qualify as a design “hero,” hidden or otherwise.

John Lurie in 1984. Photograph by Sylvia Plachy.

By Tad Friend
August 16, 2010
The New Yorker

ABSTRACT: DOWNTOWN CHRONICLES
about John Lurie. From 1984 to 1989, everyone in downtown New York wanted to be John Lurie. Or sleep with him. Or punch him in the face. Lurie, the star of the Jim Jarmusch films “Stranger Than Paradise” and “Down by Law” and the saxophone-playing leader of the jazz-punk group the Lounge Lizards, was intensely charismatic. He wore a Borsalino fedora and old suits and painted expressionist album covers and picked up girls at the Mudd Club and snorted coke at the Palladium. In the nineties, he let his acting career go, but “Fishing with John,” his tongue-in-cheek cable show showcased his ingenuity and candor. A year and a half ago, however, at the age of fifty-six, Lurie disappeared. What happened first was that Lurie was stricken with a mysterious disease that confined him to his SoHo apartment for six years. Then, in 2008, he and his closest friend, a younger artist named John Perry, had an explosive rupture, and Lurie went into hiding in the belief that Perry intended to kill him. This was a reasonable point of view, as Perry was stalking him. In October, Lurie began living incognito in a rented house in Palm Springs, California. Perry and Lurie got to know each other in the early nineties, at the SoHo restaurant Lucky Strike. In the fall of 2008, Perry asked Lurie to pose for him for an instructional TV pilot called “The Drawing Show.” A few hours in, Lurie was clearly ill, wincing and slumping in his chair. Sometime after 10:30 P.M., Lurie left and then he collapsed in the hallway. In the days that followed, Perry called Time Warner Cable and discovered that Lurie had ordered a pay-per-view boxing match shortly after he left the shoot. Lurie e-mailed Perry to say, “I suffered agony for you—it was met with disappointment and derision.” Perry, stung, began speed-dialing Lurie’s apartment, and then he appeared downstairs at his apartment building. That night, Lurie moved out to the Bowery Hotel and in the morning he sent Perry an e-mail saying that his threats amounted to extortion. Perry promptly filed a police complaint against Lurie, making up a claim that Lurie had threatened to hit him with a baseball bat. That afternoon, Lurie filed a police complaint against Perry for harassment. Both men were avowedly heterosexual, but Lurie felt that Perry’s behavior suggested a rebuffed lover. In February of 2009, Lurie moved to Flea’s house in Big Sur to paint. Mentions Lurie’s assistant, Nesrin Wolf, and “Good Morning America”’s Bill Stanton. A number of Lurie’s friends now felt that Perry was his default topic, and paranoia his default mode. Neither man wants to apologize unilaterally—or, really, at all. However, Perry did tell the writer, “I regret the whole thing, it was silly and cruel.” The protracted duet has become a kind of living performance piece, but neither man is able to see it as art: Perry because he views himself solely as a painter, and Lurie because he never before associated art with a fear of death.

Sorry The New Yorker doesn’t allow articles to be posted in full.
I highly recommend picking up this weeks copy for this article alone. (August 16, 2010)

Bruno S. in Werner Herzog’s “Enigma of Kaspar Hauser.”

By DOUGLAS MARTIN
NY Times Published: August 14, 2010

He wrote songs and sang them on the streets of Berlin. One told of a poor boy who grows up wishing for a little horse. The horse arrives years later pulling his mother’s hearse.

The man who sang it in a croaky voice, accompanying himself on the accordion and glockenspiel, was known as Bruno S. He was a street musician, a painter of pictures, a forklift operator in a steel mill and, at one time, a mental patient. But, perhaps most remarkably, he was the lead actor in a movie that won the Grand Jury Prize at the Cannes International Film Festival in 1975.

His full name, which he seldom used, was Bruno Schleinstein. He died Wednesday at the age of 78 in Berlin, according to the German Press Agency, quoting his friend the artist Klaus Theuerkauf.

Werner Herzog, one of the innovators of postwar German cinema, twice in the 1970s cast Bruno to play pretty much himself — a damaged but somehow transcendent character.

The first of those films, the one that won at Cannes, was “The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser” (1974), based on a true story. In the film the character played by Bruno appears in a square in 19th-century Nuremburg. He cannot speak and can barely stand, having apparently been kept in a kind of dungeon. The only clue to his identity is a paper giving his name as Kaspar and asking that he be taken into service as a soldier.

Kaspar is taught to speak and to read and write, and then, in a fashion as mysterious as his appearance, he is murdered.

Bruno’s acting moved Richard Eder of The New York Times to write: “Kaspar’s extraordinary face, his eyes strained wide to see better, his whole posture suggesting a man trying to swallow, trying to grasp a world of strangeness, is the film’s central image.”

As he learns to speak, Kaspar finds much of society repulsive. “Every man is a wolf to me,” he says. He has no ego: “Nothing lives less in me than my life.”

“The story of Kaspar is more fascinating than the story of Jesus Christ,” Anaïs Nin was quoted as saying in an advertisement for the film.

Bruno Schleinstein was born on June 2, 1932, most likely in Berlin. Some accounts say his mother, a prostitute, had beaten him so badly when he was 3 that he became temporarily deaf. This led to his placement in a mental hospital, where he was the subject of Nazi experiments on mentally disabled children.

Nobody visited him, not even relatives he knew. He spent 23 years in institutions, including jails and homeless shelters. When on his own, he broke into cars for a warm place to sleep.

As an adult he held various jobs, including forklift driver, and began to sing in courtyards around Berlin in the oral tradition that inspired Brecht’s “Threepenny Opera.”

He didn’t sing songs, Bruno said; he transmitted them. One song, “Thoughts Are Free,” concerned the impossibility of finding refuge even in one’s thoughts.

Mr. Herzog first glimpsed Bruno in a 1970 documentary about street musicians.

“I instantly knew he could be the leading character in ‘Kaspar Hauser,’ ” Mr. Herzog said in an interview with NPR in 2006. Bruno did not want his name known, and so Mr. Herzog began calling him “the unknown soldier of cinema.” During filming, Mr. Herzog said, Bruno would have moments of “utter despair” and start talking, sometimes screaming, in the middle of a shot and continue in that way for two hours.

Bruno’s second film, “Stroszek” (1977), was based on his life; Mr. Herzog had written the script expressly for him. Some scenes were shot in Bruno’s own apartment. In the film, Bruno, a prostitute he befriends and his aging landlord move to the mythical Railroad Flats, Wis., where they live in a trailer.

In the film, Bruno, who refers to himself in the third person, has sharp comments about America. “Bruno is still being pushed around,” he says, “not physically but spiritually; here they hurt you with a smile.”

Bruno said in interviews that he had never wanted to be a movie star, and in time the benefits of fame faded, other than the occasional free haircut by a friendly barber.

“Everybody threw him away,” Bruno said of himself.

He continued to carve out a life with his music and artwork, some of which was compelling enough to be exhibited at shows of so-called outsider art, including one in New York. When playing for street audiences, he never asked for money. Sometimes a friend would pass a hat for him. He drew a small pension. He apparently had no survivors.

In 2002, the German filmmaker Miron Zownir made a documentary called “Bruno S. — Estrangement Is Death.” In it, Bruno seems to answer the many who worried that he had been exploited by Mr. Herzog.

“I have my pride, and I can think,” he said, “and my thinking is clever.”

Early 80′s Peter Shire

more here

Sue Ogrocki/Reuters

Scottie Pippen spent 11 of his 17 seasons in Chicago, 10 with Michael Jordan, and won six championships.

By HARVEY ARATON
NY Times Published: August 12, 2010

On the eve of Scottie Pippen’s induction into basketball’s highest society, Phil Jackson recalled him as “the ultimate team player.” Quite the homage from Jackson, the former Chicago Bulls coach who once watched incredulously as Pippen sat down with 1.8 seconds left in a deadlocked playoff game against the Knicks and refused to get up.

It was 1994 — Game 3 of the Eastern Conference semifinals — and Pippen wanted the ball for the last shot because Michael Jordan, on a baseball sabbatical, was not around to take it. Jackson instead nominated Toni Kukoc, a European legend but an N.B.A. rookie, who made the winning jumper.

“A lot of people thought the 1.8-second ‘denial’ would define Scottie’s career,” Jackson wrote in an e-mail. Instead, Pippen’s entry into the Naismith Memorial Hall of Fame Friday night for his 17-year, six-championship career will be the final answer to those who argued he never, ever, would live down the episode of Sitting Bull.

“It was a learning moment in his life,” Jackson wrote. “He came back as a leader of teams for another decade.”

In the Bulls’ locker room that night, Bill Cartwright, the veteran center, stood up and said, “Scottie, how could you?” In a telephone interview, Cartwright said: “My thing for Pip was that with Michael gone, it was his team, his time to lead. And when things are at their worst, you’ve got to be at your best.”

Pippen apologized, Cartwright said, and played brilliantly as the Bulls evened the series and took a one-point lead into the final seconds of Game 5 in New York. With the jump-shooter Hubert Davis squaring up in the area of the key, the 6-foot-8 Pippen emerged from the lane, extending the long arm of an eight-time all-league defender, who took on the toughest assignments, position be damned.

Davis rushed the shot and missed it, but Pippen grazed his fingertips well after the release. A referee named Hue Hollins awarded Davis free throws that would live in infamy almost everywhere outside New York. The Knicks survived and took the series in seven games, leaving the Air-less Bulls, a surprise 55-victory team that season, crestfallen but certain they were much more than their reputation as a subordinate band of Jordanaires.

“If we had won that game and then the series and gone on to win the title that year, the whole legacy of Michael would have been different,” said Jerry Reinsdorf, the Bulls’ owner, who recently hired Pippen as an organizational ambassador. “But because Michael had left and came back and then we won again, he was given all the credit, and sometimes it was unfair, especially to Scottie.”

As the years passed, Pippen was acknowledged as a valued member of the so-called supporting cast but was, in a larger sense, undervalued as merely the largest moon in orbit of the planet Michael. But to judge Pippen’s legacy against the league’s most lethal weapon and its first corporately supported powerhouse was always beside the point or missing it entirely, said Don Dyer, who coached Pippen at the University of Central Arkansas.

Nobody recruited Pippen when he graduated from high school, Dyer said, not even the junior colleges. “His high school coach had played for me in college,” he said. “He called me and said, ‘I have no idea if he can play at your level, but I’d appreciate it if you gave him a look.’ Scottie’s brother brought him over; he was maybe 6-2, 145 pounds, an athlete but not really what you’d call a basketball player.”

Pippen was the youngest of 12 children and grew up in a two-room house in rural Hamburg, Ark. His father, Preston, a mill worker, was disabled by a stroke and became unable to work when Pippen was a teenager. Dyer got him into school on a Pell grant and put him to work as the team manager until a position on the team opened during the season.

He cleaned lockers, handed out towels. “And now he’s going into the Hall of Fame — and that’s amazing,” said Dyer, who will attend the ceremony in Springfield, Mass., at the invitation of Pippen.

Preps to pros, rarely has an N.B.A. great emerged from such humble beginnings. Far from the clichéd Jordan comparisons, there lies the essence of the Scottie Pippen story.

According to Jerry Krause, the former general manager who traded for Pippen in a prearranged draft-day deal with Seattle, it was a sight to behold, watching Jordan punish the rail-thin and raw Pippen in practice.

“One of the smartest things Doug Collins did was match them up,” Krause said, referring to the Bulls’ coach before Jackson. “And I mean Michael just killed Scottie, beat the hell out of him. But it was the best thing that could have happened to Scottie, winding up with Michael in Chicago. He had to get stronger. He had to learn to compete.”

Jordan prepped him for bully opponents like the Pistons and later the Knicks, who focused on Pippen as a player who could be physically and verbally whipped. They were only encouraged to push harder, taunt louder, when he begged off a 1990 conference finals game against the Pistons with a migraine.

“He had that label put on him; he definitely was a target of ours,” said John Starks, the former Knick who introduced himself to Pippen during the conference semifinals in 1992 by clotheslining him, knocking him silly — accidentally, of course, Starks said — on a fast break at Madison Square Garden.

“I think part of it was because he didn’t show his emotions and he’d get that frown on his face,” Starks added. “But to his credit, he stood up. He showed in ’94 he could step up on his own. He’ll always live in Michael’s shadow, but, hey, they were a great Batman and Robin duo.”

Robin fought some battles independent of Batman, feuding with Bulls management over money, dealing with a gun possession charge and conducting messy and litigious business affairs well after his playing days.

Was an involvement in the purchase of a Gulfstream II jet in 2002 that bled Pippen of several million dollars a symbolic statement that he, like Jordan, believed he could fly?

Maybe he couldn’t, not like Jordan, but Jackson said Jordan would now admit that without Pippen he might have been the LeBron James of his day, searching for a championship fit in some other city.

“When Michael came back from the Barcelona Olympics, he came into our coach’s office and said that Scottie was the best player on the team,” Jackson said.

A debatable statement, but suffice to say that Pippen is the most credentialed player of an estimable 2010 Hall of Fame individual class that includes Karl Malone, Dennis and Gus Johnson (no relation) posthumously, the women’s star Cynthia Cooper, and Bob Hurley Sr., a New Jersey high school coaching legend.

Just Pippen’s luck, the Hall will also induct two gold-medal winning Olympic teams from 1960 and 1992, meaning that he will get in twice but that Jordan is also expected back after his own individual induction last year.

No worries. Jordan is also Pippen’s planned presenter. Viewed in its proper context, it could be no other way.

thanks kit kat

T.C. Worley for The New York Times

Purple martins in Tony Lau’s Otsego, Minn.

By KATE MURPHY
NY Times Published: August 11, 2010

AFTER a long day at work, Chuck Abare, 63, a computer designer, likes to sit on the porch of his two-story ranch house on the outskirts of Huntsville, Ala., drink a gin and tonic, and watch the antics of the purple martins winging around his backyard.

Glossy aerial acrobats with forked tails, purple martins are a type of swallow, and the only species of bird entirely dependent on humans for housing. Every spring, Mr. Abare said, they show up to nest in the bulbous chandelier-like birdhouses he made several years ago out of plywood and hollowed-out gourds, and mounted on 12-foot poles.

“Purple martins are addicting,” said Mr. Abare, who built two standard birdhouses for them as well, to accommodate a total of 104 nests. “When the birds start to fledge, I’ll have maybe 300 at a time chitchatting and flying around. It gets pretty noisy, but I never get tired of them.”

Sales figures from companies that make housing for purple martins, like S&K Manufacturing in Missouri, suggest that Mr. Abare is not alone in his enthusiasm. The company, one of the largest suppliers of martin housing, reports that sales of houses and gourds have increased annually by nearly 40 percent for the last five years.

The Purple Martin Conservation Association, a nonprofit organization based in Erie, Pa., has seen evidence of growing interest as well, with a big upswing in participation in its online forums since its Web site was introduced in 2003. (The first year, the site had 30 active users; today, 3,000 people post questions and comments on 15,000 topics related to attracting and caring for purple martins.) And a number of rival organizations, like the Purple Martin Society of North America and the Purple Martin Preservation Alliance, have emerged, as have countless blogs and videos on YouTube devoted to purple martins.

This spike in interest coincides with the increased popularity of bird-watching in general — the number of bird-watchers in the United States is now estimated to be somewhere between 48 million and 69 million, according to sources ranging from the United States Fish and Wildlife Service to the journal Environmental Conservation.

Those who act as purple martin “landlords,” however, are often far more than mere observers. Many interact with their tenants, inspecting nests and tending to baby birds. Some monitor the birds with video or “nest cams” and intervene to protect them if necessary.

David Bonter, an ornithologist at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., said this is one reason the species, which had been dwindling in number, has seen a comeback in recent years.

“Purple martins, like all aerial insectivore populations, have not been doing well, partly due to pesticides poisoning their food supply, so it’s good that more people are getting involved in helping them,” Dr. Bonter said.

Their dependence on humans began centuries ago, according to the Audubon Society, when American Indians put out hollowed gourds for them, probably because the birds are voracious insectivores that provided pest control and also chased off vultures picking at drying meat and hides.

Purple martins winter in the Amazon basin in South America and return to nest in North America from late February through August. They are found mostly in the Eastern half of the United States, but also in parts of Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, California, Oregon and Washington. This time of year, they can be seen teaching their fledglings how to catch bugs in midair and fattening up for their journey south.

MARTINS like to nest up high, where they are safe from predators like snakes and raccoons, and can spy and swoop down on insects. The best place to put their housing is in a clearing, 10 to 15 feet off the ground, far enough from trees or shrubs so they have an unimpeded flyway.

Mr. Abare put a nest cam in one of his gourds so he can watch the eggs hatch and chart the nestlings’ progress. Every four or five days, he inspects the nests in person, using ropes and pulleys to lower the gourd racks and birdhouses to the ground like flags on a flagpole.

The various rooms of the birdhouses are numbered, as are the gourds. Mr. Abare opens the hatches on each compartment, calling out status reports to his wife, Betty, 63, who jots them down in a notebook. He also takes pictures, which he posts on his Web site, chuckspurplemartinpage.com.

Like Mr. Abare, Larry Melcher, 47, a pipe fitter, keeps meticulous records of the goings-on inside the 58 purple martin nesting cavities in the birdhouse and two gourd racks he keeps on 10-foot poles behind his tidy brick house outside Louisville, Ky. When a baby falls out of a nest, he can figure out where it belongs from his spreadsheets. He also cleans and replaces nesting material in compartments that have become infested with blood-sucking mites, which can kill baby birds.

“Unlike other birds, martins don’t care if you touch their babies,” Mr. Melcher said. “It’s like they know you’re there to help.”

Friends and neighbors often attend his weekly nest checks, and more than 2,000 people have watched the video of him returning a baby martin to its nest, which he posted on YouTube.

As well as being up high, purple martins like to be within a few miles of water, where there are plenty of bugs. Pat Lynch, 75, of Rochester said the yard of her clapboard home on Lake Ontario would be unbearable during the spring and summer were it not for her purple martin colony “scarfing up” all the biting flies and insects. Ms. Lynch, a retired nurse, watches her martins, which she calls “sky sweepers,” from a swing on her patio. She also has a nest cam that relays the action inside one of the compartments in her two 12-room birdhouses. “It’s better than TV,” she said.

Some purple martin fans will go to great lengths for that entertainment. When Tony Lau, 44, a frozen-dairy manager for a Target store near Minneapolis, had trouble drawing martins to nest in his birdhouse four years ago, he borrowed a neighbor’s Bobcat mini bulldozer and dug a 75-foot-long pond in his backyard.

“I was reading online about other people getting all these martins, and I got sort of competitive about it,” he said. “I decided to do everything I could to get them here.”

Mr. Lau now has 35 pairs of purple martins nesting in his birdhouse and assorted gourds. He is hoping for 100 pairs next year, he said, because martins that successfully reproduce at a site usually return and bring friends.

But he knows he’ll have to be on guard against what he and other purple martin lovers consider the birds’ archenemies: European starlings and English house sparrows. These non-native birds, introduced to the United States in the late 1800s, will evict martins from their nests, poke holes in their eggs and kill nestlings. As Mr. Melcher put it, “It makes your blood boil.”

He and Mr. Abare kill English sparrows with an air rifle; Ms. Lynch traps and drowns them. Specially sized half-moon openings in the birdhouses and gourds usually keep out starlings, they said, so they don’t have to exterminate them.

“I hate to talk about killing birds,” Mr. Melcher said. “But once I saw how they steal nests and kill babies — it’s like someone walking into your home and telling you to get out, and murdering your kids.”

Even so, others prefer just to shoo them away. Laura Joseph, 67, a retired school administrator, said she manually removes sparrows from the 164 nesting cavities in the birdhouses and gourds she put on poles in the lot next to her Greek revival home in Austin, Tex. “I asked neighbors to sign up, and we have 34 volunteers who check the nests every day and take out the sparrows,” Ms. Joseph said. “We make their lives as uncomfortable as possible, so they won’t get established.”

Frequent monitoring and intervention may increase the number of purple martins that fledge, said Dr. Bonter of Cornell. Still, he added, “You don’t really have to do more than put up housing in an appropriate spot to have a successful colony.”

But for purple martin landlords like Kathy Freeze, 47, a computer systems analyst with a 45-nest colony in Licking, Mo., near Springfield, interacting with the birds is a large part of the appeal.

“You get a profound sense of accomplishment at the end of the season, when all the young nestlings are fledging,” she said. “And you know that you have contributed to a great conservation effort.”

Bird Housing, Specs and Sources

PURPLE MARTIN housing can look like anything from a Chinese pagoda to a Ferris wheel with gondolas. But structures with multiple, spacious compartments are the most effective at attracting the birds.

Whether you choose to go with houses or gourds, they should be painted white to reflect the sun, which will keep nesting birds cooler; there should also be half-moon-shaped openings (about 1 3/16 by 2 3/4 inches) to keep out starlings. Most hands-on martin landlords say they prefer housing that can be raised and lowered with a winch or a rope-and-pulley system, so they don’t have to climb a ladder to check on their tenants.

If you want to build the housing yourself, plans are available online. So is ready-made housing.

Sources include the Purple Martin Conservation Association (purplemartin.org), a nonprofit organization that offers information on caring for the birds; S&K Manufacturing, a Missouri company specializing in purple martin housing and accessories (skmfg.com); the Backyard Bird Company (backyardbird.com), which sells a selection of housing for purple martins and other birds; and Purple Martin Majesty (purplemartinmajesty.com), which sells and ships gourd racks nationwide, and offers installation services in the Houston area.

Gary Meszaros/Photo Researchers

OH, MY The star-nosed mole, to humans, “is disturbing because it looks like the animal has no face,” a neuroscientist says. More Photos »

By NATALIE ANGIER
NY Times Published: August 9, 2010

A friend recently sent around an e-mail with the subject line “lost cat bulletin.” Open the message and — gack! — there was a head-on shot of a star-nosed mole, its “Dawn of the Dead” digging claws in full view and its hallmark nasal boutonniere of 22 highly sensitive feelers looking like fresh bits of sirloin being extruded through a meat grinder.

“I don’t think anyone would come near that cat, much less steal it,” tittered one respondent. Another participant, unfamiliar with the mole, wondered whether this was a “Photoshop project gone bad,” while a third simply wrote, “Ugh.”

We see images of jaguars, impalas and falcons and we praise their regal beauty and name our muscle cars for them. We watch a conga line of permanently tuxedoed penguins, and our hearts melt faster than the ice sheet beneath those adorable waddling feet. Even creatures phylogenetically far removed from ourselves can have an otherworldly appeal: jellyfish, octopus, praying mantis, horseshoe crab.

Yet there are some animals that few would choose as wallpaper for a Web browser — that, to the contrary, will often provoke in a human viewer a reflexive retraction of the nostrils accompanied by a guttural or adenoidal vocalization: ugh, yuck, ew.

Let’s not pussyfoot. They are, by our standards, ugly animals — maybe cute ugly, more often just ugly ugly. And though the science of ugliness lags behind investigations into the evolution of beauty and the metrics of a supermodel’s face, a few researchers are taking a crack at understanding why we find certain animals unsightly even when they don’t threaten us with venom or compete for our food.

Among the all-star uglies are the star-nosed mole, whose mug in close-up, said Nancy Kanwisher, a neuroscientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, “is disturbing because it looks like the animal has no face,” or as if its face has been blown away. The blobfish, by contrast, is practically all face — a pale, gelatinous deep-sea creature whose large-lipped, sad-sack expression seems to be melting toward the floor.

“It looks like if you handled it,” said Geoffrey Miller, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of New Mexico, “at the very least you’d get some kind of rash.”

We have the male proboscis monkey and the male elephant seal, with their pendulous, vaguely salacious Jimmy Durantes, and the woolly bat and the vampire bat, their squashed snub noses accentuating their razor-toothed gapes. The warthog’s trapezoidal skull is straight out of Picasso’s “Guernica,” while the warthog’s kin, the babirusa, gives new meaning to the word skulduggery: On occasion, one of its two pairs of curving tusks will grow up and around and pierce right into its skull.

Don’t forget the gargoyles of our own creation, purebred cats and dogs that are stump-limbed, hairless and wrinkled, with buggy eyes and concave snouts, and ears as big as a jack rabbit’s or curled at the tips like rotini. We love them, we do, our dear little mutants, not in spite of their ugliness, but because of it.

As scientists see it, a comparative consideration of what we find freakish or unsettling in other species offers a fresh perspective on how we extract large amounts of visual information from a millisecond’s glance, and then spin, atomize and anthropomorphize that assessment into a revealing saga of ourselves.

“No one would find the star-nosed mole ugly if its star were iridescent blue,” said Denis Dutton, professor of the philosophy of art at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. “But the resemblance of the pinkish nose to human flesh subverts our expectations and becomes a perverse violation of whatever values we have about what constitutes normal or healthy human skin.”

Conservation researchers argue that only by being aware of our aesthetic prejudices can we set them aside when deciding which species cry out to be studied and saved. Reporting recently in the journal Conservation Biology, Morgan J. Trimble, a research fellow at the University of Pretoria in South Africa, and her colleagues examined the scientific literature for roughly 2,000 animal species in southern Africa, and uncovered evidence that scientists, like the rest of us, may be biased toward the beefcakes and beauty queens.

Assessing the publication database for the years 1994 through 2008, the researchers found 1,855 papers about chimpanzees, 1,241 on leopards and 562 about lions — but only 14 for that mammalian equivalent of the blobfish, the African manatee.

“The manatee was the least studied large mammal,” Ms. Trimble said. Speculating on a possible reason for the disparity, she said, “Most scientists are in it for the love of what they do, and a lot of them are interested in big, furry cute things.”

Or little cute things. Humans and other mammals seem to have an innate baby schema, an attraction to infant cues like large, wide-set eyes, a button nose and a mouth set low in the face, and the universality of these cues explains why mother dogs have been known to nurse kittens, lionesses to take care of antelope kids.

On a first pass, then, “ugliness would be the deviation from these qualities,” said David Perrett, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. Tiny, close-set eyes, prominent snout, no forehead to speak of: it sure sounds like a pig.

A helpless baby grows into a healthy, fertile youth, which in humans is visually characterized by clarity of shape, sleekness of form and visibility of musculature, said Wendy Steiner of the University of Pennsylvania, who is author of “Venus in Exile” and “The Real, Real Thing,” to be published this fall. “An animal with saggy skin, whiskers and no neck will look like some old guy who’s lost it,” she joked.

The more readily we can analogize between a particular animal body part and our own, the more likely we are to cry ugly. “We may not find an elephant’s trunk ugly because it’s so remote,” Dr. Dutton said. “But the proboscis on a proboscis monkey is close enough to our own that we apply human standards to it.” You can keep your rhinoplasty, though: the male monkey’s bulbous proboscis lends his mating vocalizations resonant oomph.

People are also keenly, even obsessively vigilant for signs of ill health in others. “That means anything that looks seriously asymmetrical when it should be symmetrical, that looks rough and irregular when it should be smooth, that looks like there might be parasites on the skin or worms under the skin, jaundice or pallor,” Dr. Miller said. “Anything mottled is considered unattractive. Patchy hair is considered unattractive.” We distinguish between the signs of an acquired illness and those of an innate abnormality. Splotches, bumps and greasy verdigris skin mean “possibly infectious illness,” while asymmetry and exaggerated, stunted or incomplete features hint of a congenital problem.

If we can’t help staring, well, life is nasty and brutish, but maybe a good gander at the troubles of others will keep it from being too short. “Deformities provide a lot of information about what can go wrong, and by contrast what good function is,” Dr. Miller said. “This is not just about physical deformities. People who seem crazy are also highly attention-grabbing.”

And as long as we’ve been gawking and rubbernecking, we’ve felt guilty about the urge. In his book “The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution,” Dr. Dutton recounts a passage from Plato in which a man passing by a pile of corpses at the feet of an executioner wants desperately to look, tries to resist and then finally relents, scolding his “evil” eyes to “Take your fill of the beautiful sight!”

The appeal of ugly animals is that neither they nor their mothers will care if you stare, and if you own a pet that others find shocking or ugly, you probably won’t mind if others stare, too.

Joan Miller, vice president of the Cat Fanciers’ Association Inc., said she found the hairless Sphynx cat, with its “huge ears” and only “a minor amount of wrinkling,” to be “absolutely marvelous looking” and “strong as an ox,” although she conceded it sometimes needed to wear a sweater.

Classical beauty is easy, but a taste for the difficult, the unconventional, the ugly, has often been seen as a mark of sophistication, a passport into the rarefied world of the artistic vanguard. “Beauty can be present by its violation,” Dr. Steiner said, and the pinwheel appendages of the star-nosed mole are the rosy fingers of dawn.

By ANDY NEWMAN and RAY RIVERA
NY Times Published: August 9, 2010

It has been a long time since flight attendant was a glamorous job title. The hours are long. Passengers with feelings of entitlement bump up against new no-frills policies. Babies scream. Security precautions grate but must be enforced. Airlines demand lightning-quick turnarounds, so attendants herd passengers and collect trash with the grim speed of an Indy pit crew. Everyone, it seems, is in a bad mood.

On Monday, on the tarmac at Kennedy International Airport, a JetBlue attendant named Steven Slater decided he had had enough, the authorities said.

After a dispute with a passenger who stood to fetch luggage too soon on a full flight just in from Pittsburgh, Mr. Slater, 38 and a career flight attendant, got on the public-address intercom and let loose a string of invective.

Then, the authorities said, he pulled the lever that activates the emergency-evacuation chute and slid down, making a dramatic exit not only from the plane but, one imagines, also from his airline career.

On his way out the door, he paused to grab a beer from the beverage cart. Then he ran to the employee parking lot and drove off, the authorities said.

He was arrested at his home in Belle Harbor, Queens, a few miles from the airport, and charged with felony counts of criminal mischief and reckless endangerment.

“When they hit that emergency chute, it drops down quickly within seconds,” a law enforcement official said. “If someone was on the ground and it came down without warning, someone could be injured or killed.”

In a statement, JetBlue said it was working with the Federal Aviation Administration and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey to investigate the episode. “At no time was the security or safety of our customers or crew members at risk,” the company said.

According to his online profiles, Mr. Slater has been the leader of JetBlue’s uniform redesign committee and a member of the airline’s in-flight values committee. Neighbors in California, where Mr. Slater grew up, said he had recently been caring for his dying mother, a retired flight attendant, and had done the same for his father, a pilot.

The contretemps on Monday unfolded as JetBlue Flight 1052, an Embraer 190, landed at Kennedy around noon — on time — and pulled up to the gate, said another law enforcement official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the investigation was continuing.

The official offered the following account:

One passenger stood up to retrieve belongings from the overhead compartment before the crew had given permission. Mr. Slater instructed the person to remain seated. The passenger defied him. Mr. Slater reached the passenger just as the person was pulling down the luggage, which struck Mr. Slater in the head.

Mr. Slater asked for an apology. The passenger instead cursed at him. Mr. Slater got on the plane’s public-address system and cursed out the passenger for all to hear. Then, after declaring that 20 years in the airline industry was enough, he blurted out, “It’s been great!” He activated the inflatable evacuation slide at a service exit and left the world of flight attending behind.

In short order, his gray two-story house on Beach 128th Street in the Rockaways, just off the ocean, was swarmed by detectives and uniformed officers from New York City and the Port Authority. “It was like there was a hostage in there,” said Curt Krakowski, who was working on the deck of a house across the street.

Mr. Slater, Mr. Krakowski said, “had a smile on his face when the cops brought him out, like, ‘Yeah, big deal.’ ” Mr. Slater was taken to a Port Authority police building at the airport and was expected to be held overnight.

One person familiar with the investigation said JetBlue took more than 20 minutes to notify the Port Authority police, allowing Mr. Slater time to get home. A spokesman for the airline declined to comment when asked about the delay, and a Port Authority spokesman said, “In matters of criminality, the Port Authority Police Department should be notified immediately.”

The episode is the latest round in what is seen as an increasingly hostile relationship between airlines and passengers.

A few weeks ago, an Air France flight attendant was arrested for stealing the wallets of first-class passengers. Last year, a Canadian singer parodied United Airlines on YouTube in a series of songs about how the airline broke his guitar.

A new study by the International Air Transport Association found an increase in instances of disgruntled passengers and violence on planes, with the chief cause being passengers who refuse to obey safety orders. By the same token, frequent-flier blogs echo with tales of “flight attendant rage.”

While JetBlue’s flight attendants are not unionized, a spokeswoman for the Association of Flight Attendants, Corey Caldwell, said anxieties were common on planes. “Anyone who has traveled since Sept. 11 understands that being in the cabin is stressful these days,” Ms. Caldwell said.

The portrait of Mr. Slater that emerges from interviews with neighbors and friends and from profiles on MySpace, Facebook and LinkedIn shows a man with decidedly mixed feelings about his job.

Photographs show him in the mountains of El Yunque National Forest in Puerto Rico and sitting behind the wheel of a convertible. “Steven Slater has visited 22 percent of the countries in the world!” the MySpace page announces.

Yes, and Pittsburgh, too. “Chances are I am flying 35,000 feet somewhere over the rainbow on my way to some semifabulous JetBlue Airways destination!” the MySpace page says. “Truly, some are better than others. But I am enjoying being back in the skies and seeing them all.”

A former roommate, John Rochelle, said Mr. Slater was seldom home and used his house primarily as a crash pad. When Mr. Slater was not working, Mr. Rochelle said, he was usually in Thousand Oaks, Calif., a Los Angeles suburb, caring for his sick mother.

A neighbor there, Ron Franz, said Mr. Slater also cared for his father as he was dying from Lou Gehrig’s disease. Mr. Franz, 72, was hard-pressed to explain Mr. Slater’s actions on Monday. “It could be the pressure of his mother’s illness, because that’s not the type of behavior or conduct that Steve exhibits,” he said. “He’s a very conscientious, responsible individual.”

But a former flight attendant, Janet Bavasso, who lives next door to Mr. Slater in Queens, found nothing mysterious at all.

“Enough is enough — good for him,” Ms. Bavasso said. “If he would have called me, I would have picked him up.”

Reporting was contributed by Cate Doty, Christine Negroni, Tim Stelloh and Matthew L. Wald.

Organized by Walead Beshty
Through August 21, 2010

Twentieth Century debates over the “politics of representation,” the autonomy of art, or art’s capacity for “critique” still linger like disgruntled spirits on the hunt for living bodies to inhabit. At first, contemporary art looks vaguely amenable to such interpretations: appropriated/pop imagery, collage, the monochrome, automaticism, the aleatory etc. are no less common now than they were when such ideas were a breath of fresh air. But seen through a contemporary lens, the meanings of these strategies are less certain, less overt, as though much contemporary art beckons to these anachronisms only to misdirect them. How better to display ambivalence for such battles than to invite them in only to step gently to the side, behaving, in the terminology of language acquisition, like a false friend?

Theodor Adorno referred to a phenomenon similar to this as “late style,” where “conventions find expression as the naked representation of themselves,” turning, “emptiness outward”. Late style was a perversity, an ambivalence directed at analysis, a “dredg(ing) up of the past in the anguish of the present as sacrifices to the future,” (and it was Adorno who punned museum into mausoleum, art works reduced to memento mori in its halls). Melancholy aside, Los Angeles is a city whose character is akin to his notion of late style, offering a hollowness that questions our expectations of civic cohesion, even its physical appearance as a flat smear of beige semi-disposable low-flung boxes extending from mountains to ocean seems to mock the traditional idea of the metropolis. In truth, it is a city born after the industrial revolution that projects the image of a “soft” city of “soft” labor and “soft” products: pictures, services, cultural capital, and flexible workforces. This is probably why its affectless architecture often incites derision from those whose affinities lie with older conceptions of urban life, who prefer gears and pulleys to govern the operation and appearance of their machines, and granite and marble to anchor their cities to the earth.

In most Los Angeles social circles, when one speaks of the “industry” they are referring to the Entertainment Industry (a.k.a. the “Picture Industry”). Pictures have a knack for supplanting the concrete, sliding as though self-lubricating around the globe, like poltergeists, they haunt the world they represent like vague recollections, inhabiting concrete forms briefly until slipping off to another host, a billboard here, a magazine page there, creating momentary associations, and chance resonances. And what to make of the application of the term industry, with the heaviness of factories and smoke stacks encircling it, to the production of ephemeral pictures whose power is synonymous with their lightness? It could be said that it is the seemingly invisible and ephemeral aspects—the means of distribution, the contextual frame, the vicissitudes of taste, and an object’s ability to “pass”—which serve as the most robust material of the contemporary work, an embrace of convention that produces an endless sequence of provisional “meanings”. Perhaps the only solution available to us is to allow pictures to be concrete, to reclaim their moments of heaviness, instead of pretending that they are endlessly able to float listlessly in the breeze.

- Walead Beshty, Los Angeles, June 2010

Regen Projects

Eileen Quinlan
Santa Fe #19, 2008
Silver gelatin fiber print
Framed dimensions: 62 x 50 inches (157.5 x 127 cm)

Matthew Buckingham, Moyra Davey, Liz Deschenes, Zoe Leonard, Sam Lewitt, Eileen Quinlan

Through August 14

miguel abreu

Tony Cenicola/The New York Times

A tight lid is kept on the recipe for Thomas’ English muffins.

By WILLIAM NEUMAN
NY TIMESPublished: August 6, 2010

Bite into a Thomas’ English muffin and, it turns out, you are about to swallow one of the most closely guarded secrets in the world of baking.

The company that owns the Thomas’ brand says that only seven people know how the muffins get their trademark tracery of air pockets — marketed as nooks and crannies — and it has gone to court to keep a tight lid on the secret.

That leaves one of the seven, Chris Botticella, out of a job — and at the center of a corporate spectacle involving top-secret recipe files, allegations of clandestine computer downloads and an extreme claim of culinary disloyalty: dumping English muffins for Twinkies and Ho Hos.

Mr. Botticella, 56, delved into the mystery of Thomas’ muffinhood (hint: it has nothing to do with the fork), after Bimbo Bakeries USA bought the brand early last year. At the time, Mr. Botticella was a Bimbo vice president in charge of bakery operations in California.

But he left the company in January, apparently allowing co-workers to believe he was retiring. But he had accepted a job with the rival baker Hostess Brands, which years ago had tried to crack the muffin code.

Bimbo obtained a federal court order barring the move, and late last month an appeals panel in Pennsylvania upheld the order. Mr. Botticella is now contemplating his next legal move, his lawyer, Elizabeth K. Ainslie, said.

Neither Mr. Botticella nor a Bimbo spokesman would comment for this article, but the legal papers in the case suggest a muffin culture more reminiscent of Langley than Drury Lane. Recipe manuals are called code books. Valuable information is compartmentalized to keep it from leaking out. Corporate officials speak of sharing information on a “need-to-know basis.”

According to Bimbo’s filings, the secret of the nooks and crannies was split into several pieces to make it more secure, and to protect the approximately $500 million in yearly muffin sales. They included the basic recipe, the moisture level of the muffin mixture, the equipment used and the way the product was baked. While many Bimbo employees may have known one or more pieces of the puzzle, only seven knew every step.

“Most employees possess information only directly relevant to their assigned task,” Daniel P. Babin, a Bimbo senior vice president, said in a written court declaration, “and very few employees, such as Botticella, possess all of the knowledge necessary to produce a finished product.”

The company claimed that Mr. Botticella had access to many more secrets as well, including sales and production plans, labor agreements and key financial information. And Bimbo suspected that he meant to share at least some of it with his new employer, something Mr. Botticella denied in his own court filings.

Mr. Botticella, who lives in Southern California, has worked in the baking business for nearly four decades, spending the last eight years with Bimbo USA, the American division of the Mexican bakery giant Grupo Bimbo.

After Bimbo bought Thomas’ in January 2009, Mr. Botticella became responsible for an English muffin factory in Placentia, Calif. That March, apparently as a condition for entering the ranks of the nook and cranny cognoscenti, the company had him sign a confidentiality agreement. It barred him from revealing company secrets, but did not prohibit him from going to work for a competitor.

At about the same time, according to papers filed by Mr. Botticella’s lawyers, the company embarked on a broad cost-cutting drive. It involved plant closings and layoffs, and the papers say he found the process painful and became unhappy in his job.

Last October, he accepted a job offer from Hostess to run its Eastern operations. The salary was $200,000 a year, $50,000 less than he was paid at Bimbo.

But he did not start right away.

Instead, he arranged to begin his new job in January (in court papers he said he wanted to claim his year-end bonus from Bimbo). But he told no one at Bimbo of his plans and continued to attend meetings and receive documents where confidential company information was discussed.

In early January, Mr. Botticella gave two weeks’ notice. Bimbo said in court papers that his co-workers believed he was retiring. But days before his last scheduled day at work, Bimbo executives heard rumors about the Hostess job.

They confronted Mr. Botticella in a telephone call and he told them it was true.

Within minutes of hanging up the phone, Bimbo’s lawyers say, Mr. Botticella used his laptop computer to access a dozen company files containing confidential information and apparently copied them onto a flash drive. The company said that a search of computer records revealed other activities in the weeks before his departure in which he appeared to have copied sensitive files.

Mr. Botticella said in a deposition that he was merely practicing his computer skills in preparation for his new job. But R. Barclay Surrick, the federal judge who in February granted the injunction barring Mr. Botticella from going to Hostess, concluded that his behavior demonstrated “an intention to use Bimbo’s trade secrets during his intended employment with Hostess.”

In a written statement, Hostess, which was not part of the legal case, said that it “sought to hire Chris Botticella for his vast experience in our industry, not for any particular technology” and that the agreement he signed with Hostess required that he not divulge Bimbo’s trade secrets.

Mr. Botticella appealed the ruling but a three-member panel of the appeals court upheld the decision on July 27. In the meantime, Hostess said that it was no longer holding the job for Mr. Botticella.

“We have a business to run,” said Becky Madeira, a Hostess spokeswoman. “We have to move on.”

Some bakery experts were skeptical about Bimbo’s claims of top-secret processes, saying the mythology surrounding Thomas’ muffins was more about smart product branding than proprietary baking. The basic techniques for making an English muffin were widely known, they said: English muffin dough is very watery and when it is cooked at high heat the water evaporates quickly and leaves large air pockets.

“It’s a matter of taking the time, getting the right equipment, paying attention to detail, to produce the product you want,” said Carl Hoseney, a retired professor of cereal chemistry at Kansas State University.

Not so in Thomas’ case, said Theresa Cogswell, a baking industry consultant who spent a good portion of the 1980s and 1990s trying to break Thomas’ English muffin code, first for a bakery ingredient supplier and later for Hostess (then known as Interstate Brands).

“I could get nooks and crannies,” Ms. Cogswell said, “but I couldn’t get them consistently all day, every day.”

Thanks to Jonathan Maghen

Joe Pestoni
Untitled
2010

through August 13

greene naftali

Thanks Steve

Dave Green

BUILDING BLOCKS Microscopic one-celled creatures known as diatoms are thought to be the source of a vast majority of the world’s oil.

By WILLIAM J. BROAD
NY Times Published: August 2, 2010

In 1913, as the automobile zoomed into American life, The Outing Magazine gave its readers a bit of background on what fueled the new motorcars in “The Story of Gasoline.” After a brief vignette describing the death of “old Colonel Stegosaurus Ugulatus,” the article explained that “yesterday you poured the remains of the dinosaur from a measuring-can — which, let us hope, held five gallons, full measure — into your gasoline tank.”

The idea that oil came from the terrible lizards that children love to learn about endured for many decades. The Sinclair Oil Company featured a dinosaur in its logo and in its advertisements, and outfitted its gas stations with giant replicas that bore long necks and tails. The publicity gave the term “fossil fuels” new resonance.

But the emphasis turned out to be wrong.

Today, a principal tenet of geology is that a vast majority of the world’s oil arose not from lumbering beasts on land but tiny organisms at sea. It holds that blizzards of microscopic life fell into the sunless depths over the ages, producing thick sediments that the planet’s inner heat eventually cooked into oil. It is estimated that 95 percent or more of global oil traces its genesis to the sea.

“It’s the dominant theory,” said David A. Ross, scientist emeritus at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution on Cape Cod. The idea, he added, has been verified as geologists have roamed the globe over the decades and repeatedly found that beds of marine sediments are “a good predictor” of where to discover oil.

The theory also explains offshore drilling — why there is oil in many seabeds, why it is more often near shore than in the abyss, and why, despite the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, which killed 11 crewmen and caused the worst offshore oil spill in American history, oil experts say offshore drilling may increase, rather than cease.

As land reservoirs dry up, oil geologists say, the high costs and potential risks of offshore drilling will seem less onerous and more acceptable. This, of course, is a matter of politics and economics as much as geology. Just because the oil is there doesn’t mean wells must be drilled. Many things could affect the frequency of offshore drilling, like the public interest in and commitment to the development of alternative energy sources, not only solar, wind, geothermal and other natural processes, but nuclear fission and even fusion.

Whatever the future importance of oil, offshore beds are the most likely new sources. “For most areas, offshore offers the greatest potential,” said William E. Galloway, an oil geologist at the University of Texas at Austin. “We’ve been drilling wells for a hundred years and most of those have been on land. So the volumes that remain unexplored are primarily offshore in areas that have previously been inaccessible.”

Some of the ancestral waters that made the planet’s oil still exist, like the Gulf of Mexico, while others have long vanished, like the ocean that produced the massive oil fields of the Middle East. The bodies come and go because the earth’s crust, through seemingly rigid, actually moves a great deal over geologic time, tearing apart continents and ocean basins and rearranging them like pieces of a giant jigsaw puzzle.

The secret of the oil story turned out to be understanding how the bygone oceans, ancient seas and smaller bodies of water produced complex environmental conditions that raised the prevalence of microscopic life and ensured its deep burial, producing what eventually became the earth’s main oil reservoirs.

The clues accumulated over more than a century and included discoveries from geology, chemistry and paleontology. An early indication was that petroleum discoveries were always associated with ancient beds of sedimentary rock — the kind that forms when debris rains down through water for ages and slowly grows into thick seabed layers.

A breakthrough came in the 1930s. Alfred E. Treibs, a German chemist, discovered that oil harbored the fossil remains of chlorophyll, the compound in plants that helps convert sunlight into chemical energy. The source appeared to be the tiny plants of ancient seas.

By the 1960s and 1970s, oil samples were producing many fossil molecules. One class, the hopanoids, were seen as representing the remains of ancient microbes that fed on seabed detritus. A 2009 book, “Echoes of Life: What Fossil Molecules Reveal About Earth History” (Oxford University Press), says geologists found so many fossil molecules, and in such variety, that they began using them as fingerprints to identify the family relationships among pockets of deep oil.

A separate breakthrough came as paleontologists peering at oil came to recognize a host of microfossils. Often smaller than grains of sand, the fossils nonetheless spoke volumes. Many were foraminifera, minuscule sea creatures with a bewildering array of shells. Oil geologists began using the foraminifera’s shifting appearance as a reliable guide to geologic dating.

As the clues fell into place, so did the big picture. It was the dominant view by the 1970s.

The process typically starts in warm seas ideal for the incubation of microscopic life. The sheer mass is hard to imagine. But scientists note that every drop of seawater contains more than a million tiny organisms.

Oil production begins when surface waters become so rich in microscopic life that the rain of debris outpaces decay on the seabed. The result is thickening accumulations of biologic sludge.

Dorrik Stow, a petroleum geologist at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, said the flow of nutrients into surface waters — partly from rivers and coastal regions, partly from the upwelling of bottom currents — determines the richness of the microscopic life and ultimately the oil abundance.

In his new book, “Vanished Ocean: How Tethys Reshaped the World” (Oxford University Press), Dr. Stow describes how these nutrient surges can engender “a biological orgy” of frenzied reproduction that ultimately ends in “black death.” The black mud is riddled with the remains of life, and eventually form into sedimentary rock.

The history of the Gulf of Mexico shows how many environmental factors came together to produce huge oil reserves. Perhaps most important, the big rivers and waterways of North America sent rich flows of nutrients into the ancient gulf, much as the Mississippi River does today.

Scott W. Tinker, the state geologist of Texas, said the abundant flows of mud and sediment not only fed microscopic life but also formed rocky barriers that sealed off the organic remains from the outer world. A main barrier was shale, a sedimentary rock made of clay and silt.

“The organics got buried quickly because of the heavy sediment flow,” Dr. Tinker said. “So they didn’t get biodegraded as quickly. You preserved the organic richness.”

He said the flow was so heavy that the growing accumulations keep pressing the lower sediment layers deeper into the earth, forcing them into hot zones where the organic material got transformed into oil. The process involves a long series of chemical reactions that slowly turn life molecules into inanimate crude.

“The gulf has miles and miles of sediments,” he said. “So that gets the source rocks down into the kitchen where they cook.”

The standard temperature for oil formation is between 120 and 210 degrees Fahrenheit. The earth gets increasingly warm with increasing depth, the temperature eventually rising so high that rocks melt (and occasionally remerge at the surface in volcanic eruptions).

The gulf’s environmental context also promoted oil formation. The ancient body was largely cut off from the diluting influences of the wider global sea, concentrating the nutrients and mud.

“It’s always been restricted,” said Dr. Galloway of the University of Texas. “One reason it works as a major world-class resource is that it’s been mostly isolated from the world’s oceans.”

Restrictions on watery flows turn out to have played starring roles in determining where oil formed, scientists say. The Tethys Sea — an ancient ocean that girded the equator in the Cretaceous period, some 100 million years ago, in the heyday of the dinosaurs — became a sprawling factory.

Its most productive regions centered on shorelines, coastal regions and shallow seas, said Dr. Stow of Heriot-Watt University, whose new book describes the secret life of the Tethys. He identified “broad shelf areas” as some of the best “factories for biogenic proliferation.” When the Tethys mostly closed up (its remnants include the Aral, Black, Caspian and Mediterranean Seas), its fertile southern shores formed the dozen or so nations of the Middle East that produce two-thirds of the world’s oil.

Dr. Stow called their wealth “an accident of geology.”

A similar accident took place when Africa and South America slowly pulled apart in the Cretaceous period, forming the narrow beginnings of the South Atlantic. Big rivers poured in nutrients. A biological frenzy on the western shores of the narrow ocean ended up forming the vast oil fields now being discovered and developed off Brazil in deep water.

In June, Petrobras, the Brazilian state oil company, unveiled a $224 billion, five-year investment plan to tap deepwater fields and double its petroleum output.

Many countries and oil companies are now racing to exploit the geological happenstance of deep coastal waters. Hot spots include offshore areas of Angola, Azerbaijan, Congo, Cuba, Egypt, Libya and Tanzania, while countries like Canada and Norway, which have long pursued offshore drilling, are pushing ahead with new plans. Cambridge Energy Research Associates, a consulting firm, estimates that global deepwater extraction could roughly double by 2015, the output rivaling what Saudi Arabia produces on land.

“It’s not about dinosaurs,” said Kenneth E. Peters, a petroleum geochemist at Stanford University. “Any kind of organic material can contribute, yes. But if you look at the food chain, they’re way at the top. It’s the little guys that matter.”

Thanks to Jonathan Maghen

Dave Yoder for The New York Times

The clothier Luciano Barbera in his family’s “spa for yarn,” where crates of thread rest for months. Economists fear that such small-scale artisanship cannot sustain Italy’s economy forever

By DAVID SEGAL
NY Times Published: July 31, 2010

“THIS tradition is finita,” says Luciano Barbera, as he opens the door to an underground warehouse. Dozens of large wooden boxes are stacked to the ceiling, containing nearly 80 tons of colorful thread, wound in spools and idling like sunbathers at a beach, absorbing moisture in a cavernous room kept naturally cool and humid by a creek that burbles under the floor.

“I call it a spa for yarn,” explains Mr. Barbera, a lean and regal 72-year-old, who is dressed in a style that could be described as aristo-casual: white linen button-down shirt, brown herringbone pants and brown leather shoes. He is giving a quick tour of the Carlo Barbera mill, named for his 99-year-old father, and destined to be run by two or three of Luciano’s sons.

Mr. Barbera calls wool a living fiber, and he does not mean this metaphorically. After yarn is dyed here, it rests in the spa for as long as six months, recuperating until 20 percent of its weight is water. Then the material undergoes a 15-step process, which Mr. Barbera will not detail, other than to magisterially summarize it as “the nobilization of the fabric.”

Any shortcuts, he says, would harm the fabric’s “performance.”

Wait, performance?

“Yes, performance,” he says in an accent both purring and professorial. “If your suit is not performing well, it’s like being in a car where you can feel every little bump in the road. If a suit is performing well, it’s as though you drive right over the bumps and you feel nothing.”

And thus the paradox.

As insiders of the fashion world will confirm, the bolts of wool and cashmere produced at this mill can indeed be described as high performance, among the finest in the world, sold to dozens of luxury brands like Armani, Zegna and Ralph Lauren.

The financial performance of the mill that creates this fabric, on the other hand, is far from stellar.

Like much of the Italian economy, the Carlo Barbera factory is struggling and for reasons, according to academics, that say just about everything you need to know about what ails Italy.

Since the economic crisis began, this country has regularly turned up on the informal list of Nations That Worry Europe. While its finances are not as precarious as those of Greece, Portugal or Ireland, because it is far larger — the Italian economy is the seventh largest in the world — its troubles are more frightening. As a recent report by UniCredit, a European banking group, put it, Italy is “the swing factor” in the crisis, “the largest of the vulnerable countries, and most vulnerable of the large.”

Study the numbers and you will find symptoms of distress that look a lot like those of Greece. Public sector debt amounts to roughly 118 percent of the gross domestic product, nearly identical to Greece. And like Greece, Italy is trying to ease fears in the euro zone and elsewhere with an austerity package, one intended to cut the deficit in half, to 2.7 percent of G.D.P., by 2012.

But dig a little deeper and the similarities end. The Italians, unlike the Greeks, are born savers, and much of the Italian debt is owned by the Italians. That means that unlike Greece, which will be sending a sizable percentage of its G.D.P. to foreign creditors for a generation to come, Italy is basically in hock to its own citizens.

“I know that in the States, all Mediterranean countries get lumped together,” says Carlo Altomonte, an economist with Bocconi University in Milan. “But Italy’s problem isn’t that we have a lot of debt. It’s that we don’t grow.”

Like Italy, Mr. Barbera has debt woes — he owes his creditors roughly $5.8 million and says that if his country’s financial system offered the protections of Chapter 11-style bankruptcy, he would have sought it several years ago. But he could also solve his debt problem if more orders were coming in.

Instead, orders are drying up. The Barberas have long been small, niche players, the family that high-end designers turn to when assembling their most fabulous collections. And since 1971, Luciano Barbera has also sold clothing under his own name, made with his own fabric. Today the line is sold in stores like Barney’s and Neiman Marcus, handmade suits that sell for $4,000 and a line of upmarket women’s wear, some of which you can see on Angelina Jolie in the recent film “Salt.”

But sales for Luciano Barbera clothing and Carlo Barbera fabric have drastically slowed in recent years. In the late ’90s, the mill enjoyed record annual sales of what amounts to about $15.5 million, Mr. Barbera says. Last year, the figure was half that sum.

WHEN describing the ills of his businesses, Mr. Barbera tends to focus on one issue: the “Made in Italy” label. For the last decade, he says, a growing number of clothing designers have been buying cheaper fabric in China, Bulgaria and elsewhere and slapping “Made in Italy” on garments, even if those garments are merely sewn here.

Until recently, there weren’t any rules about what “Made in Italy” actually meant, but that will change when a new law goes into effect in October. It states that if at least two stages of production — there are four stages altogether — occur in Italy, a garment is made in Italy.

To Mr. Barbera, this is an outrage, though somehow the word “outrage” doesn’t quite capture the depth of his feelings. He says the law will wreck the national brand, which has long been built on the skill of its craftspeople.

In op-ed articles and an assortment of meetings, he has crusaded against the law, clashing with a nemesis with a familiar last name: Santo Versace, the chairman of the Versace house of fashion. Mr. Versace is also a member of Italy’s Parliament and a co-sponsor of what is officially called the Reguzzoni-Versace Law.

“It’s a truffa,” says Mr. Barbera one recent afternoon, using the Italian word for scam. “And I am fighting with all my strength to make people understand that this country is destroying itself in order to advance the interests of just a few people who are unfortunately members of the most powerful caste of this country.”

But labeling is just one of many obstacles standing between Mr. Barbera and profitability. To understand why his factory, and so much of Italy, is stagnant or worse, requires a bit of geopolitical history and a look at the highly idiosyncratic business culture here. It is defined, to a large degree, by deep-seated mistrust — not just of the government, but of anyone who isn’t part of the immediate family — as well as a widespread aversion to risk and to growth that to American eyes looks almost quaint.

It has economists here worried not about a looming fiasco so much as a gradual, grinding decline.

“There is no sense of what a market economy is in this country,” says Professor Altomonte. “What you see here is an incredible fear of competition.”

THE Carlo Barbera factory is a series of glass and brick buildings beside a stream about 55 miles west of Milan. Luciano Barbera grew up here, learning the craft from his father, before heading to the University of Leeds in England.

He brought home know-how in textile engineering as well as admiration for British finery, to which he added a flair for color and pattern and which he has turned into a personal trademark. A fashion director at Neiman Marcus once called Mr. Barbera “the most elegant man in the world.” It is not uncommon for strangers to introduce themselves and ask, “How can I look like you?”

“I don’t want to generate people who all look the same,” he says, sitting in his office one recent afternoon. “I am a soloist. You can be a soloist and play in an orchestra.”

His career as a designer began, he says, almost by accident. In 1962, a photographer from Vogue snapped a photo of him in a suit made of fabric he had designed. (In the image, he is leaning against a fence, a cigar in hand, gazing at his horse, Edwan.) Several years later, a man named Murray Pearlstein, who owned LouisBoston, a menswear store, knocked at the Carlo Barbera factory, introduced himself to Luciano and told him that he wanted to sell his line of clothing to the American market.

“I said: ‘Mr. Pearlstein, I have no collection. I have only my own suits.’ He said: ‘You have talent. You should design your own collection.’ ”

At roughly 41 euros a meter ($48.75 a yard), the average price of the fabric that the Carlo Barbera factory produces today is almost double that of competitors in Biella, a town in the foothills of the Alps that has been renowned for centuries as a textiles hub. The problem is that fewer designers have been willing to pay this premium, and factories in other countries have been copying the Barberas’ methods, with results that may not be as good but that cost a small fraction of the price.

There’s a demand-side problem, too: the number of men buying bespoke suits has plunged in recent years, as the workplace becomes more casual. LouisBoston doesn’t carry Luciano Barbera any longer.

“At a certain point, he could have gone to China and opened factories there,” says Mr. Pearlstein, who is now retired. “But mentally, I don’t think there was any way he could do that because he has always been so committed to his hands-on methods.”

Mr. Barbera says he has no qualms about globalization. In his opinion, Italy can’t compete when it comes to low-skill labor and shouldn’t try.

“But I say that Italy, with its 20 million workers, can be the boutique of the world,” he says. That will never happen, he adds, if designers can buy fabric outside Italy and tag it “Made in Italy.”

While his vehemence on this subject is easy to understand, economists here say that Mr. Barbera’s small empire would be teetering even if he could rewrite the “Made in Italy” law tomorrow.

In a list of what is crushing Mr. Barbera’s balance sheet, they say, the provenance of labels is not at the top.

FIVE years ago, Francesco Giavazzi needed a taxi. Cabs are relatively scarce in Milan, especially at 5 a.m., when he wanted to head to the airport, so he called a company at 4:30 to schedule a pickup. But when he climbed into the cab half an hour later, he discovered that the meter had been running for more than 20 minutes, because the taxi driver had arrived soon after the call and started charging for his time. Allowed by the rules, but to Mr. Giavazzi, utterly unfair.

“So it was 20 euros before we started the trip to the airport,” recalls Mr. Giavazzi, who is an economics professor at Bocconi University. “I said, ‘This is impossible.’ ”

Professor Giavazzi later wrote an op-ed article denouncing this episode as another example of the toll exacted by Italy’s innumerable guilds, known by several names here, including “associazioni di categoria.” (These are different from unions, another force here, in that guilds are made up of independent players in a trade or profession who have joined to keep outsiders out and maintain standards, as opposed to representing employees in negotiations with management, as a union might.) Even baby sitters have associations in Italy.

The op-ed did not endear Professor Giavazzi to the city’s cab drivers. They pinned leaflets with his name and address at taxi stands around Milan and for the next five nights, cabs drove around his home, honking their horns.

“This is a country with a lot of rents,” says Professor Giavazzi, sitting in his office one recent afternoon, using the economists’ term for excess profits that flow to a business because of a lack of competition. “You need a notary public, it’s like 1,000 euros before you even open your mouth. If you’re a notary public in this country, you live like a king.”

For Mr. Barbera, as is true with every entrepreneur here, the prevalence and power of Italy’s guilds explains much of what is driving up costs. He says he must overspend for accountants, lawyers, truckers and other members of guilds on a list that goes on and on: “Everything has a tariff, and you have to pay.”

THE protectionist impulses of the guilds are mimicked throughout the Italian labor market. The rules are different for small companies, but in effect, people with a full-time job in a company with more than 18 workers have what amounts to tenure, even if they don’t belong to a union. This makes managers reluctant to hire, especially in a downturn. You are stuck with new employees in perpetuity, whether they’re good or not.

A sclerotic job market is a major reason that the Italian economy has been all but dormant for the past decade, growing far more slowly than its European peers. And this is a country that never had a housing bust or a major bank crisis.

So how does Italy keep going? Given the numbers, you expect it to be flat on its back. But when you visit, there are hardly any signs of despair, even in Biella, where hundreds of factories and warehouses have closed in the last decade. Why?

One answer is the black economy, say economists. Roughly one-quarter of Italy’s G.D.P. is off the books. When you inquire about the cause and persistence of this longstanding fact of life, people here say that most Italians have little sense of national identity, an obstacle to a system of national taxation. The country didn’t really begin to transcend its clannish roots and regional dialects until after World War II; even today, displays of national pride are reserved for World Cup victories and little else.

Italians, notes Professor Altomonte, are among the world’s heaviest consumers of bottled water. “Do you know why? Because the water in the tap comes from the government.”

The suspicion of Italians when it comes to extra-familial institutions explains why many here care more about protecting what they have than enhancing their wealth. Most Italians live less than a mile or two from their parents and stay there, often for financial benefits like cash and in-kind services like day care. It’s an insularity that runs all the way up to the corporate suites. The first goal of many entrepreneurs here isn’t growth, so much as keeping the business in the family. For a company to really expand, it needs capital, but that means giving up at least some control. So thousands of companies here remain stubbornly small — all of which means Italy is a haven for artisans but is in a lousy position to play the global domination game.

“The prevailing management style in this country is built around loyalty, not performance,” says Tito Boeri, scientific director at Fondazione Rodolfo Debenedetti, who has written about Italy’s dynastic capitalism.

In the eternal contest between the meticulously honed and the nationally franchised, Italy knows where it stands. As a matter of profit and loss, it doesn’t make sense to store wool in a spa and let it convalesce for six months, but the methods of Luciano Barbera were never destined for a get-rich-quick guide to manufacturing. His business will make sense only to customers, and for them, quality has a logic of its own.

And of course, the worship of growth has its limitations. The American economy is vastly more robust, but instead of family-owned bakeries, which seem to dot every hectare of Italy, we’ve got Quiznos. And for all the efficiency and horsepower in Germany, no character in a movie has ever welled up and sighed, “We’ll always have Stuttgart.”

Despite his cash flow woes, Mr. Barbera is sticking to his plan, even the plan to hand his business to his sons, which according to a national maxim is likely to end in tears.

“We say in this country that the first generation builds, the second generation maintains and the third generation destroys,” Mr. Barbera says. “But my father and I worked together, so I think we were the first generation. My sons are the second generation. So at least they will maintain.”

MR. Barbera can discuss all the quirks and pathologies of the Italian economy, but there is rarely more than five minutes between his monologues about “Made in Italy.” He is reluctant to name the fashion houses he thinks are snookering consumers, in part because they are his customers, and in part because they are acting legally.

“I’m criticizing the law,” he says. “I am not criticizing the people who buy my fabric.”

One name he is happy to mention is Santo Versace, whose purchases — his brand buys a “very small” amount of fabric, says Mr. Barbera — are eclipsed by his role in pushing the new law.

In a phone interview, Mr. Versace noted that there was no “Made in Italy” rule before the law he co-wrote, which means his rule is a huge improvement on the free-for-all that had existed. Yes, his company makes less expensive products, like jeans, in countries like Croatia and Turkey, but he said every luxury brand does the same.

“Never our top stuff,” he said, through an interpreter. “All of that is made in Italy.”

He sounded skeptical about one of Mr. Barbera’s ideas: a label that simply lays out the origins of a garment, stating where its fabric was made, where it was constructed, and so on.

“You can’t make a label too complicated,” said Mr. Versace. “You need a simplified label. Otherwise you can’t sell things.”

For now, Mr. Barbera is hoping that the European Commission will overturn the law, which it can do. Meanwhile, garments in the collection that bears his name are labeled “Entirely manufactured in Italy.”

Economists said that Mr. Barbera had a point, but they also said that worrying about this issue was like fretting about the head cold of a patient with Stage 3 cancer. They see a country with a service sector dominated by guilds, which don’t just overcharge but also raise the barriers to entry for the millions in ill-fated manufacturing jobs who might otherwise find work as, for instance, taxi drivers. They see a timid entrepreneur class. They see a political system in the thrall of the older voters who want to keep what they have, even if it dooms the nation to years of stasis.

They see a society whose best and brightest are leaving and not being replaced by immigrants, because Italy has so little upward mobility to offer.

To Professor Giavazzi, the future here doesn’t look like Greece. It looks like Argentina.

“Before World War II, Argentina was rich,” he says. “Even in 1960, the country was twice as rich as Italy.” Today, he says, you can compare the per capita income of Argentina to that of Romania. “Because it didn’t grow. A country could get rich in 1900 just by producing corn and meat, but that is not true today. But it took them 100 years to realize they were becoming poor. And that is what worries me about Italy. We’re not going to starve next week. We are just going to decline, slowly, slowly, and I’m not sure what will turn that around.”

Mr. Barbera is optimistic. He is working with a bank to allow him to pay off creditors. After lengthy negotiations with the government and workers’ representatives, he has reduced his payroll to 90 employees from 120.

Best of all, he says he thinks he has found a large group of new customers in an improbable place: China, where he has been talking to a number of distributors. Given that he has been undersold by the Chinese for years, it would be a surprising twist if Chinese consumers became fans of Mr. Barbera’s fabric and his painstaking methods.

“Water from the creek,” he says, as we leave the yarn spa. “Listen. It is the sound of music.”

The sentiment seems so sincere and romantic that it sounds as if he could be kidding. But when the line elicits a laugh, Mr. Barbera’s gentle rebuke makes it plain that he is not.

“You know,” he says, with a resilient smile, “it is a hard world for poets.”

Brian Sokol for The New York Times

Traveling on the Rohtang Pass road in northern India, can be treacherous, with various natural and animal obstacles, so India is building a tunnel.

By LYDIA POLGREEN
NY Times Published: July 31, 2010

ROHTANG PASS, India — The name of this white-knuckle pass, one of the highest in the world, means “pile of corpses” in the Tibetan language. Every year a few dozen people die trying to cross these spiky Himalayan peaks.

For six months the road is snowbound, putting at the mercy of the elements tens of thousands of Indian troops posted beyond it in this remote but strategically important region along India’s long and disputed border with China.

In the past decade, as China has furiously built up its military and civilian infrastructure on its side of the border, the Rohtang Pass on the Indian side has stood as mute testimony to India’s inability and unwillingness to master its far-flung and rugged outermost reaches.

But now, India is racing to match its rival for regional and global power, building and bolstering airstrips and army outposts, shoring up neglected roads and — finally, decades after it was first proposed — building a tunnel to bypass the deadly Rohtang Pass.

In June, work started on the ambitious project, which will take five years and require boring five miles through the Pir Panjal range. Several other tunnels, which would allow all-weather access to Ladakh, which abuts the Tibetan Plateau, are also in the works.

“What India is belatedly seeking to do is to improve its defenses by upgrading its logistics,” said Brahma Chellaney, an analyst who tracks the India-China relationship at the Center for Policy Research in New Delhi, in an e-mail. “By building new railroads, airports and highways in Tibet, China is now in a position to rapidly move additional forces to the border to potentially strike at India at a time of its choosing.”

As a result, he said, “The Sino-Indian border remains more unstable than the Pakistani-Indian frontier.”

India and China are hardly enemies, but much of the 2,521-mile border they share is disputed or ill marked. The two countries fought a brief but bloody border war in 1962, and while these days they have, on the surface, a mostly cordial relationship, it is marked by tension over border disputes and the future of Tibet and its leader, the Dalai Lama, who lives in exile in India.

China’s push to develop its infrastructure on its side of the border — including an all-weather railway to Tibet that includes the world’s highest tunnel, at 16,000 feet — is viewed with considerable suspicion in India.

For much of its history India has regarded the Himalayas as a form of protection, not a barrier to be overcome, said Rajeswari Rajagopalan, an expert in India-China relations at the Observer Research Foundation in New Delhi.

“The Indian side has been very slow to develop the border areas,” Ms. Rajagopalan said. “They believed if you improved the infrastructure it would only allow the Chinese to walk into your territory. This was very foolish and naive.”

Three hundred miles of winding road lead from the town of Manali, through the verdant Kullu Valley, to Ladakh, an alpine desert that abuts the Tibetan plateau.

Tens of thousands of Indian Army troops are stationed among Ladakh’s barren peaks, and the region borders several potential trouble spots, including Aksai Chin, a region that India claims as part of its territory but that China administers. North of Ladakh is the Siachen Glacier, a river of barren ice that India and Pakistan have fought over intermittently since the 1980s. Both countries maintain outposts on the glacier, which sits at an altitude of 20,000 feet.

During the summer, thousands of trucks, laden with supplies to last the harsh mountain winters, rumble up the two roads that lead to Ladakh, from Manali and Srinagar, the summer capital of Indian-administered Kashmir.

The road from Ladakh to Srinagar is also closed in the winter, and because of its proximity to the Line of Control that splits Kashmir between India and Pakistan, Indian officials worry that the road can easily be cut, as it was in 1999, when the two countries clashed at Kargil.

Gurmeet Kanwal, a retired brigadier who runs the Center for Land Warfare Studies, a New Delhi research institution, said India could not afford to be cut off from its most vulnerable reaches half of the year.

“As long as we have these territorial disputes you cannot rule out another border conflict,” Brigadier Kanwal said. “We would like to make sure that we can deploy our forces in the right quantities in the right places.”

The tunnel has been on the drawing board for decades, said P. K. Mahajan, the chief engineer on the $320 million project. He first became involved as a young engineer in 1988, when he helped carry out a feasibility study, five years after the project was first proposed by Indira Gandhi, then the prime minister.

“It is only now that these projects are seeing the light of day,” Mr. Mahajan said.

The challenges of building a long tunnel in the rough environment of the Pir Panjal are enormous. The Himalayas are the world’s youngest mountain range. They shift and grind, still moving, expanding and shrinking.

That makes life tough for people like Thomas Riedel, a German contractor working at the north end of the tunnel. Because no one is sure what kind of rock will be found inside the mountain, the tunnel will be built using a painstaking method of blasting and digging, rather than the tunnel-boring machines that have revolutionized tunnel construction in recent years.

“Nobody can look inside the mountain,” Mr. Riedel said. “That is where we will find problems.”

Just weeks into what will be at least five years of digging, the workers encountered their first unexpected obstacle: a foot of snow. In June.

The tunnel will sit beneath more than a mile of snow-covered rock for much of its length. Ventilation will pose a huge problem.

People who live on the other side of the Rohtang Pass say the tunnel will transform their lives.

“For six months, we are prisoners,” said Chetan Devi, a schoolteacher who lives in a town beyond the pass. “In the winter, you have to risk your life to go to Manali.”

The tunnel will turn an ordeal of several hours, even in the summer, into a brisk 20-minute trip.

Virender Sharma, the chief government official in Kyelang, the main town of the Lahaul Valley, which sits between Manali and Ladakh, said that last winter 21 people died trying to cross the Rohtang Pass on foot. People were found frozen solid, he said, “sitting with rucksacks on their backs, water bottles at their sides, but they were dead.”

Winters in the Lahaul Valley are a miserable affair, he said.

“During summer, it seems very pleasant,” Mr. Sharma said. “In the winter, there is no light. No vegetables. No mail. Nothing to do in the evening. If there is an emergency, you are practically at the mercy of God.”

For the engineers building the tunnel, it is not merely a matter of logistics, but also a matter of national pride.

“Once this tunnel is complete, it will be an engineering marvel for the whole nation,” Mr. Mahajan said.

Hari Kumar contributed reporting.

Thanks to Jonathan Maghen

Musée National D’Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou, Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris.

“Endless Column in Voulangis” (fall 1947) by Constantin Brancusi, whose blurry shots made sculptures seem alive.

By HOLLAND COTTER
NY Times Published: July 29, 2010

Art history sinks unless it keeps moving in unpredictable directions. So every now and then the Museum of Modern Art breaks its marmoreal stride to head down an unpaved byway with an idea-rich theme show.

Such shows tend to be brainy and bookish. They demand our time and concentration. As a reward they give us new ways of looking at art. So it was with “Manet and the Execution of Maximilian” four years ago. So it is with “The Original Copy: Photography of Sculpture, 1839 to Today,” which opens at the museum on Sunday.

A blockbuster the new show is not. The opposite, I’d say. If you believe that art’s job is to deliver knockout visual goods at first glance, you’ll be happier spending your MoMA time in the current Matisse exhibition. If, however, you’re in the mood to see an array of images — odd, fabulous and often unfamiliar — telling a story of how two art forms, photography and sculpture, met, married, reproduced and virtually became one, then “The Original Copy” is for you.

The show, organized by Roxana Marcoci, a curator in the museum’s photography department, starts where photography officially started, with the public debuts of the daguerreotype in France in 1839 and, soon after, the paper-print picture in England. By this time, of course, sculpture had a very ancient history. Yet almost immediately the two mediums became aligned.

Both timing and technology played a role in their merging. The age of the art museum was well under way. Through museums a burgeoning middle class gained access to art that had once been the preserve of the rich and that in the case of classical Greek sculpture, represented Europe’s cultural heritage. Members of the new art audience wanted a piece of that heritage for themselves. Through photographs they could have it.

The show’s earliest picture, an 1839 daguerreotype by Alphonse Eugène Hubert, is basically a still life, but one composed entirely of bits and pieces of Classical sculpture, including a plaster bust of the Venus de Milo. Relatively cheap to buy, such pictures could turn a shopkeeper’s home into a mini-Louvre.

The liaison between sculpture and photography had formal as well as social advantages. Early photography, with its long exposure time, required motionless subjects. If a person sitting for a portrait so much as twitched, the image was blurred. Sculpture was much easier to photograph. It didn’t twitch.

It also didn’t travel if it was monumental or fixed in place. You had to go to where it was, and daredevil photographers did. In the 1850s Charles Nègre clambered, Quasimodo style, over the roofs of Notre-Dame in Paris and took a picture of the carved angel of the Resurrection perched on the peaks.

At almost the same time another Parisian shutterbug, Maxime Du Camp, was in Egypt, where he paid a team of local workers to excavate a colossal image of the pharaoh Ramesses II expressly so he could photograph it. Under Napoleon, the French had occupied Egypt and shipped tons of ancient sculpture to Paris. Later, through photography, du Camp sent even more spectacular sculptures home.

Early photography led a double life, as a recording instrument and as an art form. For Eugène Atget it was both. The pictures he took of outdoor sculptures at Versailles in the 1920s are documentary but also fantastic. By photographing them repeatedly, in different seasons and changing light, he gives them moods and personalities, makes them actors in a visual theater.

His contemporary Auguste Rodin, was also aware of photography’s power, but as an advertising medium. He could show only limited amounts of his bulky sculpture in any one place, but he had photographs of the rest of it to bump up sales. When he agreed to pose with “The Thinker” for the young Edward Steichen in 1902, Rodin probably figured he would get promotional images out of the deal. What he got in the photograph, which Steichen made by joining two negatives, was a classic example of photography manipulating and absorbing sculpture.

Constantin Brancusi was the idealist to Rodin’s realist. He obsessively photographed his own work. It was only in photographs, he felt, that his sculpture was complete, that it matched his originating vision. In part this was because photography allowed him complete control over the display of his work as it appeared in his studio, which was itself a form of sculptural assemblage and a quasi-mystical environment. To create that environment he broke basic photographic rules. With his flash he produced blinding explosions of light on polished bronze surfaces. He shot out of focus so that certain sculptures seem to vibrate as if alive. The results are sensational: sculpture disembodied, in some extraterrestrial dimension.

Marcel Duchamp pushed the interdependence of the two mediums one radical step further by creating sculptures strictly for the camera. In the process he decisively flipped the conventional values then attached to sculpture and photography. By making a traditional, solid, high-art form dependent for its existence on a modern medium that still had only the shakiest cultural status, he introduced a new politics of art.

As to the relationship of sculpture and photography to social politics, that was an old story, and Ms. Marcoci devotes considerable space to it in the show’s largest gallery. Here we return to the 19th century in a pair of 1871 photographs by Bruno Braquehais taken as antigovernment rebels in Paris pulled down the Napoleonic monument known as the Vendôme Column during the Paris Commune.

In images that bring to mind the destruction of Saddam Hussein’s statue in Baghdad in 2003, we first see the column standing but wrapped with cables, then its crowning statue of Napoleon lying on the ground. Braquehais intended his pictures to be souvenirs of a glorious event. Instead they were used by the police to prosecute the rebels, one of whom was Gustave Courbet.

These photographs are the earliest of the dozens of depictions of ideologically loaded monuments that make up this part of the show: Soviet-era sculptures of heroic workers taken by Igor Moukhin in Russia; white supremacist monuments shot by David Goldblatt in South Africa; a Hindu processional sculpture caught by Rosalind Solomon in Calcutta; and the presidential portraits of Mount Rushmore as viewed through Lee Friedlander’s lens.

In these photographs, sculptures designed to embody quite specific ideas are simultaneously documented and altered.

Mr. Moukhin’s worker, shot in a weedy lot surrounded by run-down homes, no longer looks so heroic. The monumental Mount Rushmore in Mr. Friedlander’s picture is just a dim reflection in a window. Other photographs are more overtly critical of their tightly programmed sculptural subjects; most, however, assume a more neutral stance, letting attitudes and ideas flow free.

Free-floating is pretty much the name of the game in the rest of the show, as it becomes increasingly clear that after a long and continuing partnership with photography, sculpture can be anything, and anything can be sculpture: a wad of chewing gum, an eggbeater hung on a wall, a lunar crater transported, via photo-collage, to an American desert.

Possibly the one indisputably defining feature of art in our own time is its shape-shifting inclusiveness. All mediums — sculpture, photography, painting, performance, video, etc. — are on equal footing and can even coexist in a single artist’s work.

Distinctions between high and low, original and copy, real and virtual, classical and whatever its opposite once was, have pretty much evaporated. What’s left is a kind of cornucopian aesthetic, one vividly represented by one of the exhibition’s most recent pieces, Rachel Harrison’s 2007 “Voyage of the Beagle.”

Named for the 1839 book in which Charles Darwin detailed the exotic research expeditions that led to his writing “On the Origin of Species,” the piece is made up of dozens of portraitlike photographs, all taken by Ms. Harrison, of mannequins, stuffed animals, carved medieval saints, prehistoric grave markers, topiary figures and so on.

The range is deliberately and hilariously broad. And the images, lined up edge to edge in a solid row running across two walls, appear to be arranged in no evolutionary order, with no hidden hierarchies or even mutual connections. Is the piece primarily about sculpture? About photography? Conceptually it feels new, not quite like anything seen before, even if every component is dimly familiar, either from art history or pop culture.

But you have seen something like it before, back in the first gallery: the 1839 daguerreotype still life, with its multimedia jumble of pseudo-Classical tchotchkes and fancy period ideals. Ms. Marcoci, who is responsible for the very cool exhibition catalog (with its images in tight sequence, it’s visually much punchier than the show), seems to be steering our thoughts in that direction, which is perhaps why she has installed Ms. Harrison’s photographic sequence high on the gallery wall, as if in imitation of a sculptural frieze, a deft and original touch.

“The Original Copy: Photography of Sculpture, 1839 to Today” is on view beginning Sunday through Nov. 1 at the Museum of Modern Art, (212) 708-9400, moma.org.

Such shows tend to be brainy and bookish. They demand our time and concentration. As a reward they give us new ways of looking at art. So it was with “Manet and the Execution of Maximilian” four years ago. So it is with “The Original Copy: Photography of Sculpture, 1839 to Today,” which opens at the museum on Sunday.

A blockbuster the new show is not. The opposite, I’d say. If you believe that art’s job is to deliver knockout visual goods at first glance, you’ll be happier spending your MoMA time in the current Matisse exhibition. If, however, you’re in the mood to see an array of images — odd, fabulous and often unfamiliar — telling a story of how two art forms, photography and sculpture, met, married, reproduced and virtually became one, then “The Original Copy” is for you.

The show, organized by Roxana Marcoci, a curator in the museum’s photography department, starts where photography officially started, with the public debuts of the daguerreotype in France in 1839 and, soon after, the paper-print picture in England. By this time, of course, sculpture had a very ancient history. Yet almost immediately the two mediums became aligned.

Both timing and technology played a role in their merging. The age of the art museum was well under way. Through museums a burgeoning middle class gained access to art that had once been the preserve of the rich and that in the case of classical Greek sculpture, represented Europe’s cultural heritage. Members of the new art audience wanted a piece of that heritage for themselves. Through photographs they could have it.

The show’s earliest picture, an 1839 daguerreotype by Alphonse Eugène Hubert, is basically a still life, but one composed entirely of bits and pieces of Classical sculpture, including a plaster bust of the Venus de Milo. Relatively cheap to buy, such pictures could turn a shopkeeper’s home into a mini-Louvre.

The liaison between sculpture and photography had formal as well as social advantages. Early photography, with its long exposure time, required motionless subjects. If a person sitting for a portrait so much as twitched, the image was blurred. Sculpture was much easier to photograph. It didn’t twitch.

It also didn’t travel if it was monumental or fixed in place. You had to go to where it was, and daredevil photographers did. In the 1850s Charles Nègre clambered, Quasimodo style, over the roofs of Notre-Dame in Paris and took a picture of the carved angel of the Resurrection perched on the peaks.

At almost the same time another Parisian shutterbug, Maxime Du Camp, was in Egypt, where he paid a team of local workers to excavate a colossal image of the pharaoh Ramesses II expressly so he could photograph it. Under Napoleon, the French had occupied Egypt and shipped tons of ancient sculpture to Paris. Later, through photography, du Camp sent even more spectacular sculptures home.

Early photography led a double life, as a recording instrument and as an art form. For Eugène Atget it was both. The pictures he took of outdoor sculptures at Versailles in the 1920s are documentary but also fantastic. By photographing them repeatedly, in different seasons and changing light, he gives them moods and personalities, makes them actors in a visual theater.

His contemporary Auguste Rodin, was also aware of photography’s power, but as an advertising medium. He could show only limited amounts of his bulky sculpture in any one place, but he had photographs of the rest of it to bump up sales. When he agreed to pose with “The Thinker” for the young Edward Steichen in 1902, Rodin probably figured he would get promotional images out of the deal. What he got in the photograph, which Steichen made by joining two negatives, was a classic example of photography manipulating and absorbing sculpture.

Constantin Brancusi was the idealist to Rodin’s realist. He obsessively photographed his own work. It was only in photographs, he felt, that his sculpture was complete, that it matched his originating vision. In part this was because photography allowed him complete control over the display of his work as it appeared in his studio, which was itself a form of sculptural assemblage and a quasi-mystical environment. To create that environment he broke basic photographic rules. With his flash he produced blinding explosions of light on polished bronze surfaces. He shot out of focus so that certain sculptures seem to vibrate as if alive. The results are sensational: sculpture disembodied, in some extraterrestrial dimension.

Marcel Duchamp pushed the interdependence of the two mediums one radical step further by creating sculptures strictly for the camera. In the process he decisively flipped the conventional values then attached to sculpture and photography. By making a traditional, solid, high-art form dependent for its existence on a modern medium that still had only the shakiest cultural status, he introduced a new politics of art.

As to the relationship of sculpture and photography to social politics, that was an old story, and Ms. Marcoci devotes considerable space to it in the show’s largest gallery. Here we return to the 19th century in a pair of 1871 photographs by Bruno Braquehais taken as antigovernment rebels in Paris pulled down the Napoleonic monument known as the Vendôme Column during the Paris Commune.

In images that bring to mind the destruction of Saddam Hussein’s statue in Baghdad in 2003, we first see the column standing but wrapped with cables, then its crowning statue of Napoleon lying on the ground. Braquehais intended his pictures to be souvenirs of a glorious event. Instead they were used by the police to prosecute the rebels, one of whom was Gustave Courbet.

These photographs are the earliest of the dozens of depictions of ideologically loaded monuments that make up this part of the show: Soviet-era sculptures of heroic workers taken by Igor Moukhin in Russia; white supremacist monuments shot by David Goldblatt in South Africa; a Hindu processional sculpture caught by Rosalind Solomon in Calcutta; and the presidential portraits of Mount Rushmore as viewed through Lee Friedlander’s lens.

In these photographs, sculptures designed to embody quite specific ideas are simultaneously documented and altered.

Mr. Moukhin’s worker, shot in a weedy lot surrounded by run-down homes, no longer looks so heroic. The monumental Mount Rushmore in Mr. Friedlander’s picture is just a dim reflection in a window. Other photographs are more overtly critical of their tightly programmed sculptural subjects; most, however, assume a more neutral stance, letting attitudes and ideas flow free.

Free-floating is pretty much the name of the game in the rest of the show, as it becomes increasingly clear that after a long and continuing partnership with photography, sculpture can be anything, and anything can be sculpture: a wad of chewing gum, an eggbeater hung on a wall, a lunar crater transported, via photo-collage, to an American desert.

Possibly the one indisputably defining feature of art in our own time is its shape-shifting inclusiveness. All mediums — sculpture, photography, painting, performance, video, etc. — are on equal footing and can even coexist in a single artist’s work.

Distinctions between high and low, original and copy, real and virtual, classical and whatever its opposite once was, have pretty much evaporated. What’s left is a kind of cornucopian aesthetic, one vividly represented by one of the exhibition’s most recent pieces, Rachel Harrison’s 2007 “Voyage of the Beagle.”

Named for the 1839 book in which Charles Darwin detailed the exotic research expeditions that led to his writing “On the Origin of Species,” the piece is made up of dozens of portraitlike photographs, all taken by Ms. Harrison, of mannequins, stuffed animals, carved medieval saints, prehistoric grave markers, topiary figures and so on.

The range is deliberately and hilariously broad. And the images, lined up edge to edge in a solid row running across two walls, appear to be arranged in no evolutionary order, with no hidden hierarchies or even mutual connections. Is the piece primarily about sculpture? About photography? Conceptually it feels new, not quite like anything seen before, even if every component is dimly familiar, either from art history or pop culture.

But you have seen something like it before, back in the first gallery: the 1839 daguerreotype still life, with its multimedia jumble of pseudo-Classical tchotchkes and fancy period ideals. Ms. Marcoci, who is responsible for the very cool exhibition catalog (with its images in tight sequence, it’s visually much punchier than the show), seems to be steering our thoughts in that direction, which is perhaps why she has installed Ms. Harrison’s photographic sequence high on the gallery wall, as if in imitation of a sculptural frieze, a deft and original touch.

“The Original Copy: Photography of Sculpture, 1839 to Today” is on view beginning Sunday through Nov. 1 at the Museum of Modern Art, (212) 708-9400

MOMA

Here is your opportunity to own a piece of history. The house was designed by Raphael Soriano in 1940 for the artist Glen Lukens. This property is a historic cultural monument. Buyer to do their own investigations of property. Exterior of the house been maintained its architectural integrity, although the interior of the house is in complete disarray. Due to the condition of the house, this will be a cash sale.
3425 W 27TH ST $290,000

MLS Listing

Thanks to Bret Witke

Eros Hoagland for The New York Times

Sea Ranch, California

By Jayne Merkel
July 29, 2010
The New York Times

Not long after the wrenching end of the Vietnam War, skyscrapers with pointed tops, stony-looking concrete walls and decorative marble bases — in other words, new buildings made to look like old ones — began to rise in American cities.

These buildings were called “postmodern” because they constituted a reaction to the bold, modern, glass-and-steel ones that had been built after World War II, when it seemed that anything was possible and new technology would create a brave new world. That they rose so soon after the war was no coincidence: by the late 1960s, faith in progress had been tarnished by assassinations of public figures, the quagmire in Vietnam and riots in American cities. Social anxiety created a mood in which looking backwards seemed safer and more comforting than looking forward to an uncertain future.

Although the most visible signs of the new postmodern movement were in city centers, the first and most interesting ones actually came in houses designed by ground-breaking young architects. And while few of the houses built in the 1970s reflected postmodern ideas explicitly, these buildings had an enormous impact on architecture — and on how people thought about, and lived in, houses over the next few decades.

In 1966 the American architect Robert Venturi, who had teasingly answered Mies van der Rohe’s dictum “less is more” by declaring “less is a bore,” published “Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture,” a book calling for more decoration, symbolism, color, pattern and clever references to historic structures. Old buildings were not just worth saving, he said; they could inspire new ones.
Vanna Venturi houseRollin LaFrance for Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates, Inc. The home Robert Venturi built for his mother, Vanna Venturi, who is sitting in the doorway.

Venturi made his argument in sheet rock and wood framing as well as words. A house he built for his mother near Philadelphia “critiqued” the modern movement’s tendency to reject the past while also showing a playfulness often lost in modernist architecture. With its gabled roof and central entrance, it looks like a child’s drawing of a house, but it is not as simple as it looks. It is small, but spatially complex inside. The house looks symmetrical but, on closer inspection, isn’t. It has a traditional central staircase, but after the second floor, the staircase leads nowhere. Unlike Mies’s steel-and-glass jewel boxes, Venturi’s house is full of wit and whimsy as well as clever references to historic buildings — while still working as a house for his aging mother.

Modern architects had built many interesting houses, but these never really caught on with the general public because they looked too unusual. They were also, perhaps, too plain, subtle and modest for American tastes. During the postmodern period, however, knowledgeable, talented architects started designing houses that captured the popular imagination.
Sea Ranch, CaliforniaEros Hoagland for The New York Times Sea Ranch, Calif.

Between 1964 and 1972, the Yale School of Architecture dean Charles Moore, Joseph Esherick and Lawrence Halprin, along with Moore’s West Coast partners in the firm Moore Lyndon Turnbull Whitaker, built an influential and enormously popular group of unpainted, shed-roofed, wood-sided condominiums nestled into the landscape at Sea Ranch, California. Appearing at once modern and traditional, they made slanted roofs trendy again. Suddenly architects no longer felt they had to use the modernist flat roofs that had never made much sense outside the tropics. These rather energy-efficient, clustered houses were also part of a “back to nature” movement; they blended into the raw, hilly, oceanside terrain, instead of trying to dominate it.
Private residence, Warren, New Jersey, 1977Courtesy of Michael Graves & Associates Private residence by Michael Graves. Warren, New Jersey, 1977.

In the late 1960s and early ’70s, Michael Graves, who taught at Princeton, did a series of houses and additions inspired first by Cubist paintings and then by traditional buildings. Despite their size and limited budgets, they were aesthetically ambitious. They not only suggested intriguing alternatives to the modernist box but ways to use art and architectural history to invent new forms. Widely published, they eventually earned Graves commissions for very original and colorful public buildings, inspired by the classical past, that influenced not only architecture but furniture, fashion and product design.
Robert A.M. Stern homeGreg Premru A Robert A.M. Stern home in Chilmark, Martha’s Vineyard, Mass. (1979-1983).

Robert A.M. Stern also put his considerable knowledge of architectural history to work, beginning in the early 1970s, by designing neo-Art Deco apartments and houses in and around New York that blended old and new styles. As Stern’s reputation grew (he eventually became one of Moore’s successors as dean at Yale), his houses grew in size and became more explicitly traditional, but always knowledgeably so. Stern and other very visible, very successful architects, and many less well-known ones, made working in historic styles — or being inspired by them — acceptable practice within the profession.

And many architects trained in the 1960s and ’70s moved into old houses or pre-war apartments themselves. Their renovations showed that it was possible to be creative, modern and historically respectful at the same time. These projects showed up in magazines, creating a taste for inventively remodeled old buildings. Exposed brick interior walls became common, along with decorative moldings, daring color combinations and exposed columns.

Despite the rising crime rates and urban riots of the 1960s, a growing number of middle- and upper-middle-class residents began to move into the urban areas in the 1970s and ’80s, at least partly because of their cheap, historic housing stock. But the trendiness of the old embraced by the early postmodernists likely had something to do with it as well. Urban streets developed such cachet that they turned up in television programs like “Sesame Street,” which premiered in 1969, and the “Cosby Show,” which aired from 1984 to 1992.

But there was a limit to all this returning to the past. Not all urban neighborhoods came back to life. Some became chic, while others declined. And gentrification was not always good for the people already there, especially renters. Sadly, many older urban neighborhoods came to have less socio-economic mix than they had had at the midcentury, even if they grew wealthier.

The interest in old buildings also failed to have much influence on houses in new suburban subdivisions, where most new housing was being built. These had always aped historical styles, and fresh ideas from famous architects about how to use those styles in different ways had little impact. Home builders might add a new stained glass window or beveled glass door, like those in old urban houses, but the quality of construction, design and materials did not improve. Customers preferred specific features, like hot tubs and decks, and prized “curb appeal” and more space above all else.

But the most unfortunate development in the postmodern period was that the commercial mainstream figured out how to appropriate historic styles to its own ends. Walt Disney World, which opened in 1971, with its Main Street and Frontierland, was only the most obvious example. These cookie-cutter, sentimental simulacrums of the past, without the dirt and diversity of real history, became a tool for branding and product placement. (Though Disney did later commission hotels from Graves and Stern, whose buildings were more inventively designed.)

Even genuine historic buildings were used to create fantasy worlds. In 1986 Ralph Lauren’s flagship store opened in a beautifully restored 1897 mansion on New York’s Madison Avenue. The store made the fabulous Gilded Age, chateau-style house accessible to the everyone, and anyone with $50 to spend on a tennis shirt could leave with one. But the message the place conveyed was that all you needed was the look; you could indulge aristocratic pretensions without the obligations that privilege had once involved required.

Postmodernism reached its apotheosis around 1987, the year of Tom Wolfe’s novel “The Bonfire of the Vanities” and Oliver Stone’s movie “Wall Street,” in which Michael Douglas’ character, Gordon Gekko, uttered the line that symbolized the decade: “Greed is good.” Though it turned out not to be so good for Gekko, a desperate desire for more of everything led to out-of-control consumption that bloated home sizes, deflated savings accounts, and distorted the American economy for the next 20 years.

Postmodern design, at home and downtown, fueled a fairy tale view of history that in turn abetted this desire for getting and spending. It stimulated the economy, but its glance backward merely obscured social fissures and helped us ignore looming economic risks. The verdict on postmodernism isn’t all negative, though: It led to the preservation of numerous public buildings; it made architecture fun again, and it gave the next generation of architects something to react against, just as Venturi, Moore and Stern had done vis-a-vis modernism in the late ’60s.

Christian Hansen for The New York Times

Frankie Fidilio, one of the metal collectors in Spike TV’s new reality series “Scrappers.”

By WENDELL JAMIESON
NY Times Published: July 29, 2010

HERE’S Frankie Fidilio rolling down Avenue U in Brooklyn on the second-hottest day of the year in his blue 1986 GMC Suburban. The van has no air-conditioning, but that’s the least of its problems.

So much rust dust has accumulated in the back that this looks like the only vehicle in creation with a dirt floor. Still, that’s better than the front, where there is no floor, just the hot asphalt of Avenue U flying by beneath the soles of his sneakers. Frankie’s Newports and a copy of Playboy rest on the dashboard. The exterior is so rusty that a tetanus shot should be required just to look at it.

To Frankie and his partner, Joe Posa, that empty dirt floor is a beautiful blank canvas: soon, if all goes well, it will be covered with scrap metal: pieces of cars, plumbing, old appliances, air ducts, fences: anything that the citizens of Brooklyn no longer need or want. So they give it to Frankie, a scrapper. To him that old steel, iron, copper and aluminum might as well be gold.

Racing to fill the van gives narrative tension to Frankie’s day and also allows for all kinds of interactions with construction workers, auto mechanics, other scrappers and even little old Italian ladies. So: why not a reality show? We’ve already got “Ice Road Truckers,” and crab fishermen off Alaska and real housewives. How about Brooklyn scrappers driving around in their rusty van hoping to fill up and unload before the sun goes down?

Frankie pitched the idea and got a deal. On Tuesday night at 10 “Scrappers” will make its debut on Spike TV. In it Frankie and Joe and two other teams drive around doing their thing and cursing a lot: to themselves, to each other, even to their customers. You hope the guy who did all the bleeping for Spike got overtime. In the first two episodes there are accidents, broken windows, fences that are too long to fit in the back of the van, a dumb mistake involving bricks and a cellphone dropped in water.

Watching “Scrappers” can be confusing. What exactly is going on here? But it is hard to look away.

In person Frankie’s a bit more polished than his on-air persona, even if he’s wearing shorts and a T-shirt. His eyes twinkle beneath a sharp haircut, the curses come few and far between. He’s made some amateur movies and has a Web site. This is a man with plans. He says he always knew his livelihood would make great television and insists he’s never seen any of the “Real Housewives” shows.

“It’s a great job to make into a show about because it mixes knowledge and comedy,” he says of scrapping. “Knowledge of recycling, how to recycle and comedy — all the stuff that happens every day.”

Also there can be twists. “You’ll be surprised at what you find in my business,” he says.

Frankie is very big on the green aspect of what he does, and there’s no denying he’s a key part of the process through which society’s metallic junk finds new uses. He starts most mornings at 7 a.m. at Café #2 on Avenue U, a storefront that might as well be in Sicily — whirring espresso machine, zinc bar, Italian soft drinks, those little sugar bowls they have in Europe, a group of customers who, you are almost certain but don’t want to look too closely, had bit parts in “Prizzi’s Honor.”

Frankie is a third-generation scrapper. His grandfather told him, “You’ll never be anything without scrap.” Words to live by. He ran his own yard back in the 1990s, but there were troubles with that, he says vaguely, and now he drives his van to make enough for a new yard.

That’s the overall narrative arc of the show: Will he make enough to accomplish his dream? He already has a spot picked out, a decrepit plot just off Coney Island Creek.

Joe Posa joined Frankie’s company, Scrappers USA, to help him drum up new business. They’d been friends for years. “He’d come home and say this happened and this happened and this happened, and I wouldn’t believe him,” Joe says. “But it was true. It was a great idea for a show.”

So off we go, powered by those espressos. “Watch the hole in the floor,” he says to his front-seat passenger. Joe sits on an egg crate behind him. There are occasional crashes back there.

“Easy, Joe, be careful,” Frankie shouts after hitting a pothole.

“I’m good, I’m good,” Joe answers after a pause.

First stop: Riviera Auto Collision on Stillwell Avenue. Frankie and Joe hurl pieces of a destroyed car into the back. Then it’s off to a house on 86th Street; Frankie got a call the day before to pick up the pieces of an old trampoline there. “This is No. 1 steel cut less than four feet,” he says, looking approvingly at one piece. “Less than four feet gets me more money.” Small pieces, he explains, are easier to fit into kilns.

Then its time to hit a nearby house whose owner called Frankie for a pickup. Frankie converses with the owner’s mother in Italian through the window. She doesn’t know anything about a pickup. Frankie and Joe leave empty-handed, discussing possible reasons why the lady does not have the air-conditioning on.

“When they are old like that, they like to sweat,” Joe says, with some authority, ending the discussion.

Did we mention that it’s the second hottest day of the year?

Did we mention that the van has no air-conditioning?

At 11 a.m. the temperature outside is in the high 90s; inside the van, despite the cooling hole in the floor, it’s got to be 15 degrees hotter. The streets are so bright with heat that everyone squints.

The encounter with the Old Italian Lady Who Likes to Sweat was the low point of a day that had otherwise been running pretty smoothly. But in the first two episodes of “Scrappers,” life is rougher than an old crushed fender.

Sal Vassallo heads up another crew in the show. He’s a heavily tattooed boxer with a hot temper. In the first episode, he punches out a refrigerator that had squashed his finger. Mimmo Saldino and Dino Minni make up the third crew, two perpetually smiling foul-ups who seem to have the worst luck and the least stress about it. They call themselves “The Mad Scrappers.” Episode 2 leaves us hanging: Will they be able to unload that van load of used bricks? Stay tuned.

Camera crews spent 10 hours a day with the scrappers, two or three days a week for 10 weeks. The material was edited to 10 half-hour episodes, which will run back to back in pairs. “What surprised us was how naturally funny these guys are, and the comedy that came out of their everyday situations,” said Sharon Levy, the executive vice president for original series at Spike, who oversaw production.

For a lifelong Brooklyn resident, watching “Scrappers” is an engaging puzzle: One by one, and not always in the right order, the borough’s neighborhoods fly by outside the van windows: Park Slope, Fort Greene, Carroll Gardens, Bensonhurst. Wait — was that my old block?

The show reminds us that no matter how fancy some parts of our city become, there will always be a thriving human infrastructure making the place work. We never think about scrappers until the day we find ourselves with a pile of used trampoline parts — No. 1 steel — and no way to get rid of them.

It’s all very legal. As recyclers, if they have permission, Frankie and his crew are allowed to take scrap under the city’s peddler laws, no license required. Spike executives wouldn’t say how much the stars got paid, but made it clear: It wasn’t enough for anyone to give up scrapping.

The only tension on the second-hottest day of the year with Frankie and Joe came at the end, when they arrived at the Mystery Scrap Yard with their three-quarter-full van. It was weighed, then emptied, then weighed again. (The difference was the unloaded scrap.) They made $90. On busier (cooler?) days, they make three runs with the van full.

To be truthful, the place was not called the Mystery Scrap Yard. But the manager, while saying he was very happy for Frankie and his television show, and wished him all the luck in the world, really, announced in friendly but firm tones that he did not want to see his name, or the name of his scrap yard, or any photographs of it, in a newspaper. Ever. Get it?

Now, technically speaking, he couldn’t really stop us from using his name, nor that of his business. But he did not seem like a man who wanted to get into a discussion of the fine points of ethical journalism. And it was really, really hot out there. And he knew where we worked. So, sometimes, discretion is the better part of valor.

Let’s just say that it was a big, dusty, noisy yard, with piles of black and silvery scrap, and lots of vans coming and going, and a bending scrap handler with a giant round magnet hoisting loads of dangling, clanging metal from one pile to another. It was just like many scrap yards, including one at 2994 Cropsey Avenue, near Coney Island.

Time for another espresso at Café #2.

But Frankie was distracted. He was on his cellphone, out on the sidewalk, lining up the next day’s work; when one round of scrapping ends, the next begins. Was he arranging a pickup, or promoting his television show? Hard to tell. A Newport in his mouth, he cocked his phone on his shoulder as he shook hands goodbye.

Ken Blaze for The New York Times

The Cleveland Botanical Garden has a “learning farm.”

By JUDITH H. DOBRZYNSKI
NY Times Published: July 26, 2010

For the last quarter century, the Cleveland Botanical Garden went all out for its biennial Flower Show, the largest outdoor garden show in North America. With themed gardens harking back to the Roman empire, or an 18th-century English estate, the event would draw 25,000 to 30,000 visitors.

But in 2009, the Flower Show was postponed and then abandoned when the botanical garden could not find sponsors. This year, the garden has different plans. From Sept. 24 to 26, it is inaugurating the “RIPE! Food & Garden Festival,” which celebrates the trend of locally grown food — and is supported in part by the Cleveland Clinic and Heinen’s, a supermarket chain.

“The Flower Show may come back someday, but it’s not where people are these days,” says Natalie Ronayne, the garden’s executive director. “Food is an easier sell.”

So it is across the country. Botanical gardens are experiencing an identity crisis, with chrysanthemum contests, horticultural lectures and garden-club ladies, once their main constituency, going the way of manual lawn mowers. Among the long-term factors diminishing their traditional appeal are fewer women at home and less interest in flower-gardening among younger fickle, multitasking generations.

Forced to rethink and rebrand, gardens are appealing to visitors’ interests in nature, sustainability, cooking, health, family and the arts. Some are emphasizing their social role, erecting model green buildings, promoting wellness and staying open at night so people can mingle over cocktails like the Pollinator (green tea liqueur, soda water and Sprite). A few are even inviting in dogs (and their walkers) free or, as in Cleveland, with a canine admission charge ($2).

“We’re not just looking for gardeners anymore,” says Mary Pat Matheson, the executive director of the Atlanta Botanical Garden. “We’re looking for people who go to art museums and zoos.”

In May, the Atlanta garden opened an attraction that would fit right in at a jungle park: a “canopy walk” that twists and turns for 600 feet at a height of up to 45 feet, allowing visitors to trek through the treetops. Not far away, food enthusiasts can stop in at a new edible garden, with an outdoor kitchen frequently staffed by guest chefs creating dishes with fresh, healthy ingredients. Edible gardens are the fastest-growing trend at botanical gardens, consistently increasing attendance, experts say, along with cooking classes.

Attendance in Atlanta since May is double what it was for the same period last year.

Public gardens across the country receive about 70 million visits a year, according to the American Public Gardens Association. But experts say that because of social trends and changing demographics, attendance is at risk if gardens do not change.

They can, however, take advantage of several trends that could increase garden attendance, including concern for the environment, interest in locally grown food, efforts to reduce childhood obesity, demand for family activities and mania for interactive entertainment. Even economic pressures could help botanical gardens, as more people try to grow their own food. In 2009, 35 percent of American households had some kind of food garden, up from 31 percent in 2008, says Bruce Butterfield, research director of the National Gardening Association. Only 31 percent participated in flower gardening in 2009, about the same proportion as in the last few years.

“There’s a generation that will be less interested in gardens,” says Daniel J. Stark, executive director of the public gardens association, “but that generation is incredibly interested in what’s happening with the planet. Recently, my own two daughters, and a friend, were reading me the riot act about cutting down some trees.”

Mr. Stark’s daughters are 4 and 8.

Some tactics designed to entice nongardening Americans are not new, of course — sculpture and concerts have been around for years — but their popularity is growing. The New York Botanical Garden, for example, is drawing big crowds with its current tribute to the poet Emily Dickinson, who was also a gardener.

The new exhibition at the United States Botanic Garden in Washington features “the spectacular spud family,” with potato-related artifacts, music and bits of pop culture, especially the endurance of Mr. Potato Head.

And children’s gardens are growing more whimsical and interactive, says Sharilyn Ingram, a former president of the Royal Botanical Gardens in Canada who is now a culture professor at Brock University in Ontario. “You get to have a little more fun now,” she said.

When the Coastal Maine Botanical Garden, in Boothbay, opened its $1.7 million, two-acre children’s garden this month, it came with a chicken coop, where children can harvest eggs, and a windmill weather station.

In Wyoming, at the Cheyenne Botanic Gardens, the new children’s village has adopted sustainability as its theme. It includes a solar-powered discovery laboratory where children can make art from reused materials, a feature that helped it win the highest level of Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certification.

Teenagers in Cleveland are learning how to grow corn and zucchini on urban plots.

Because of environmental concerns, Descanso Gardens, near Los Angeles, is doing the once-unthinkable: it plans to uproot its historic — but nonnative — collection of camellias, some as tall as 30 feet, which were planted decades ago under the shade of natural woodlands. “It’s a fantasy forest,” says Brian Sullivan, the director of horticulture and garden operations.

But the fantasy cannot be sustained. Camellias require so much water that it is killing the trees — not to mention being wasteful. Descanso will relocate the camellias, even though some will be lost, and allow the woodlands to return to their native state. “We expect opposition and kudos both,” Mr. Sullivan said.

But Descanso still must reach out beyond its aging membership group, he added, so it is remaining open in the evening; offering cocktails (including the Pollinator) at a new Camellia Lounge; breaking ground on a $2.1 million art gallery whose exterior walls will be hung with vertical plant trays that will blend into a turf roof; and maintaining an edible garden dense with fruits, vegetables and herbs that are donated to a local food bank.

Food festivals are becoming a large part of the year-round programming that gardens view as important to winning repeat visitors. In January, the Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden in Coral Gables, Fla., drew some 12,000 people to its fourth International Chocolate Festival with Coffee and Tea. It was followed in April with a local food festival, and this month with a mango festival. In November comes its annual Ramble, a garden party featuring antiques and music.

Yes, Fairchild also has an orchid festival.

But showcasing flowers is clearly shrinking in importance. “Most gardens,” Ms. Ingram, the Canadian professor, said, “would feel that displaying flowers is necessary, but not sufficient.”

Thanks to Mike Abelson