Mary Heilmann
Tic Tac Toe
oil on canvas
1988
54″ x 54″

GLENDALE COLLEGE ART GALLERY IS PLEASED TO ANNOUNCE THE OPENING OF:

ABSTRACTIONISTS UNITE! WHO GIVE YOU JUST ENOUGH TO LAST A LIFE TIME.

OPENING SUNDAY JUNE 21st 2009 THRU AUGUST 8TH, 2009
Reception from 6 to 9:00 PM

A GROUP SHOW OF 13 INTERNATIONAL CONTEMPORARY ABSTRACT ARTISTS
Curated by Nancy Chaikin

This show was made possible with a generous contribution from the Glendale College Foundation and the Peter and Barbara Benedek Family Trust.

Artists: Richard Aldrich, Raoul De Keyser, Fergus Feehily, Joe Fyfe, Mary Heilmann, Max Jansons, Thomas Kiesewetter, Liz Larner, Rebecca Morris, Scott Olson, Josh Smith, Katja Strunz and Mary Weatherford.

This show spans generations, continents and practices. All of the works in the show function using suggestion rather than dogma. The works reveal how form and content can become inseparable. The artists shy away from boundaries and limitations and their options become limitless.

Richard Aldrich’s delicate touch gently asks the viewer to pay attention to detail, enjoy the moment and revel in small triumphs. He utilizes an offhanded, casual approach and exploits the depth and variety available in the practice of abstract painting. His work gestures to Lucio Fontana, Blinky Palermo and Richard Tuttle.

Raoul De Keyser lives and works in Deinze, Belgium. At 79 years old, he creates canvases that seem to float in space where the gesture is buoyant and the content open ended. His works can at once seem like landscapes, or mere fragmented forms, but remain ambiguous as if the subject of the work remains outside of the confines of the canvas. He is known in Belgium as the father of contemporary abstract painting and has influenced a number of contemporary European artists. This exhibit will be the first showing of his work in Los Angeles.

Fergus Feehily hailing from Dublin, Ireland creates his own context as an artist. He flushes out his practice with drawing, collage, painting, using found objects and assembling them to form compositions. He makes no distinction between his various disciplines as he views all of his work as an ongoing project. His work functions as an observation in stream of conciousness, exploring the architecture of his thinking.

Joe Fyfe is an accomplished artist, writer and critic based in New York. His paintings rarely use paint, rather they are constructed from sewn swatches of colorful fabric in which the painting and support become one. Fyfe’s work contains brevity of touch and attention to detail. He creates wonderfully jubilant combinations of texture, color and examples of endless freedom. The work creates a place where every nuance and detail function as a clue to the work’s meaning.

Mary Heilmann Mary Heilmann seems to extract emotion from every gesture of her paintbrush and every drip of paint. Her vibrant, expressive paintings are inspired by New Wave and Punk Rock music, fashion, lovers, landscapes, and fellow artists. She has been known to say; “I worked hard all summer long to make it look easy”.

Max Jansons’s quiet investigations in abstraction are both free and ordered, painterly and refined. His small-scale paintings teeter from representation to abstraction and from abstraction to representation. They are introspective and sensitive to surface and color. His palette is sophisticated and he allows himself to explore and indulge in his curiosities. Max Jansons lives and works in Santa Monica.

Thomas Kiesewetter lives and works in Berlin. His sculptures are primarily first constructed in cardboard and then cast in bronze. His sculptures posses quirky sometimes anthropomorphic qualities and are both painterly and visceral. His work takes humble, casual gestures and elevates them to the status and stage of classical sculpture.

Los Angeles-based sculptor Liz Larner’s piece “1845,“Ingres” references the French Neo-Classical painter Jean Auguste Dominque Ingres. In this work she address ideas about painting and translates them into three dimensions. Her overall project is diverse and far-reaching, and ranges from intimate objects to large-scale installations and monumental sculpture.

Rebecca Morris mixes up a serious cocktail of painterly; Jackson Pollock, Joan Mitchell, neon and a little Metallica thrown in. Rebecca Morris lives and works in Los Angeles. She is the author of the Manifesto (for Abstractionists and Friends of the Non-Objective).

Scott Olson makes improvisational, small-scale linear abstract paintings. The works use varied supports and grounds as a backdrop to his experiments in the alchemic nature of paint. There is a whimsical delicacy to the compositions, that often reveal themselves slowly.

Josh Smith explores ideas of authorship and authenticity. Through systematic processes, replication and serial repetition, his work strives to expose the purpose of painting itself. He employs a casual style and questions traditional ideas of painting and conventional aesthetics.

Berlin based Katja Strunz elegant works relish the materials from which they are made. Her spatial compositions often hint at movement that is arrested in flight, and achieve a breezy lightness that reveals the equal importance of the structured form and the space that surrounds it.

Los Angeles based painter Mary Weatherford conjures a bridge between landscape and abstraction. Her paintings are often titled after a place in nature. She paints on jute using flashe, a paint that absorbs rather than reflects light. This brings one’s attention to the work’s physicality and the textural, playful qualities of her materials. It reveals how a painting serves not just as an inert object, but also how its presence can be physically felt.

Admission to this exhibition and its opening reception is free and open to the public.

Glendale College

Untitled (Grey Face 778) (detail), 2009
Oil on cardboard mounted on linen
60 x 48 inches (152.4 x 121.9 cm)

May 30 - July 31, 2009

I have an idea as to what sort of face is going to happen when I do a “face painting”, but I don’t exactly know what color it will take, or how many eyes it’s going to have, whereas the “butterfly paintings” are fairly planned out. They’re still intuitive, but I generally know where they’re going. It’s a different kind of freedom…
–Mark Grotjahn

Gagosian Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new paintings by Mark Grotjahn. This is his first exhibition with the London gallery.

In Grotjahn’s first “butterfly paintings,” clusters of vibrant, gradated triangular forms were anchored to vertical tangents, vehicles by which to treat problems in classical perspective such as dual and multiple vanishing points. As he continues to mine this hieratic motif — which over the last decade has yielded extensive permutations that invoke narratives central to modernist painting, from the utopian vision of Russian Constructivism to the hallucinatory images of Op Art – the allusions to the natural world have ceded to more specific aesthetic issues such as the monochrome, the serial image, and the sublime. Increasingly, he has restricted his use of color, moving through phases of blue and black, and now to red and yellow. In the new paintings he has closely subdivided the “rays”, making the chromatic distinctions ever more nuanced. With Untitled (Red Butterfly I Yellow P MARK GROTJAHN 07-08 751) Grotjahn revels in a highly controlled mastery of shade while continuing to embrace contingency. From the upper right hand side of the painting, moving clockwise, the palette shifts from a darker red to an intense vermillion, contrasting with the acid yellow undercoat, which he deliberately reveals in the block-lettered signature.

As Grotjahn continues to refine the butterfly paintings so does he, conversely, appear to find release in the raw energy of the “face paintings.” Roughly painted on cardboard, with sections often cut away to reveal painted canvas beneath, they compel with their strident tones, scratchy textures, and cartoonish faces that loom from the surface. Inspired by Picasso’s primitivist explorations, they resemble tribal masks and other ritualistic totems. In Untitled (Red Face 773), an abstract face in yellow, grey, white, and pale green is traced in linear dashes and concentric whorls, its glowering eyes incised from the vivid red background.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with an essay by Robert Storr, Dean of the Yale School of Art.

Mark Grotjahn was born in 1968 in Pasadena, CA, and currently lives in Los Angeles. He received his MFA from the University of California, Berkeley. Recent solo exhibitions include Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2005); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2006); and Kunstmuseum Thun, Switzerland (2007). Selected public collections include the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.

gagosian

Nightfall, Bas Jan Ader, 1971, 16mm, 4 min 16 sec

Larry Johnson
Untitled (Morgan Camera and King o’ Lawn)
1994

June 21 - September 6, 2009

The Hammer Museum presents the first full-scale survey exhibition in the U.S. of the work of Larry Johson. Johnson, born in 1959, is one of many important figures who emerged from CalArts in the 1980s. His unique style blends drawing, painting, photography, graphic design, and text. Many works explore themes of Hollywood and celebrity, where aspirations and fantasies bump up against reality. Texts are a crucial part of Johnson’s work, either written by him or appropriated from disparate sources such as People magazine, pulp fiction, celebrity autobiographies, black box flight recorders, and rock lyrics.

The Hammer

American and Filipino troops in April 1942 on the Bataan Death March, a 66-mile ordeal that remains a hallmark of brutality.

By DWIGHT GARNER
NY Times Published: June 16, 2009

The Bataan Death March has been written about before, and well, by a number of historians. Memoirs alone about Bataan fill a long, harrowing shelf. Their titles cry out in silent pain, bitterness and defiance: “My Hitch in Hell,” “No Uncle Sam,” “We Refused to Die.”

No aspect of this battle or the infamous march that followed seems to have been overlooked. It is possible to buy volumes devoted to Bataan’s nurses, its military chaplains and, in Hampton Sides’s best-selling 2001 book, “Ghost Soldiers,” the men who rescued its survivors.

It was not clear that this wall needed another brick. But then you pick up Michael Norman and Elizabeth M. Norman’s calm, stirring and humane “Tears in the Darkness: The Story of the Bataan Death March and Its Aftermath,” and you think: yes, we needed another brick.

“Tears in the Darkness” is authoritative history. Ten years in the making, it is based on hundreds of interviews with American, Filipino and Japanese combatants. But it is also a narrative achievement. The book seamlessly blends a wide-angle view with the stories of many individual participants. And at this book’s beating emotional heart is the tale of just one American soldier, a young cowboy and aspiring artist out of Montana named Ben Steele.

This story begins in earnest on Dec. 7, 1941, the day the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. Japan had planned to attack American military bases in the Philippines, where the peninsula of Bataan lies, at the same time, but its bombers and fighter planes were delayed by fog, eliminating the element of surprise, Japan thought. But when its planes flew over, eight hours after Pearl Harbor, the American planes sat on runways, inexplicably, like sitting ducks. It was carnage.

Two weeks later Japan invaded the Philippines. The poorly trained and untested American and Filipino forces were overmatched; they eventually retreated into the mountainous jungles of Bataan for a brutal last stand, one that the Normans, who are husband and wife, describe as “a modern Thermopylae.”

After four months of intense fighting, the Allied forces — their ranks decimated by hunger, dysentery and malaria, and with no relief or reinforcements in sight — surrendered. “No American general had ever surrendered such a force,” the Normans write, “76,000 men, an entire army.”

The authors are sympathetic toward Ned King, the surrendering American major general, who was beloved by his men. (General King made it clear to his soldiers that he had surrendered, not they.) Mr. and Ms. Norman reserve their scorn for the initial Allied general overseeing Bataan, Douglas MacArthur, whom they accuse of not leading from the field and later abandoning his men there.

What is now known as the Bataan Death March began on April 10, 1942. Some 76,000 soldiers, many already close to death, were forced to walk 66 miles during the hottest season of the year — there were almost no buildings along the way, no trees, no shade — with little food and almost no water.

It was called a death march for a simple reason: if you stopped marching, you were killed, by bayonet or rifle. There were many other ways to die during the Bataan Death March; it was a spree of arbitrary brutality. For sport, Japanese soldiers fractured skulls with their rifle butts. Japanese tanks ran over men who fell. Good Samaritans who tried to help fallen comrades were beaten or stabbed. Men were forced to bury others alive.

To be on this march, one soldier said, was what it must feel like to “come to the end of civilization.” Some 11,000 died along the way to the ultimate destination, a prison camp.

What’s remarkable about this story, for Ben Steele and many others, was that it was just the beginning of the horrors that awaited them as Japanese prisoners of war. There are accounts here of train journeys in deadly, overheated box cars; of foul prison camps and hospitals filled with dying men; of being placed into the holds of transport ships like “pickles jammed into a jar”; of work details that were their own kinds of death marches. Many men who didn’t die simply lost their minds.

There are many Japanese voices in “Tears in the Darkness.” Mr. and Ms. Norman don’t excuse Japan’s actions, but place them in careful context. Japanese soldiers, they write, were the products of “a closed world of violence where men were subjected to the most brutal system of army discipline in the world.” These soldiers “had been savaged to produce an army of savage intent.”

Mr. Norman is a Vietnam veteran and formerly a reporter for The New York Times; Ms. Norman’s books include “Women at War: The Story of Fifty Military Nurses Who Served in Vietnam.” In this book they step back, at regular intervals, to explain dispassionately what it was like to undergo the experiences these men went through.

What are the physics of suffocation? How does a bomb blast actually kill a person? What exactly does lack of water do to a human body? “Tears in the Darkness” is a grim and comprehensive catalog of man’s inhumanity to man.

In the end, though, “Tears in the Darkness” is a book about heroism and survival. All along you are glued, out of the corner of your eye, to one story, Ben Steele’s. If you aren’t weeping openly by the book’s final scenes, when he is at last able to call home and let his family know that he is still alive after more than three years “missing in action,” during which time this thin young man lost 50 pounds, then you have a hard crust of salt around your soul.

By ALICE RAWSTHORN
NY Times Published: June 14, 2009

It took just one-and-a-half days for eight workers to build the frame from 11› tons of steel. The walls were made from prefabricated panels, and the windows were of a type usually used in factories. The staircase was ordered from a marine supplies catalog. The cost? Just $1 per square foot.

That was back in 1949, and the bill didn’t include the labor of the owners, who’d designed the house, or their employees. Even so, $1 was remarkably cheap, especially when compared with the $11.50 it then cost to build a square foot — that’s roughly a tenth of a square meter — of a typical American home. It seems even cheaper if you consider that the end result was occupied by its owner-designers, Charles and Ray Eames, for nearly 40 years. The Eameses went on to become America’s most famous industrial designers, and their new home was to be one of the most influential — and beloved — houses of the 20th century.

The Eames House in Pacific Palisades, California, is to celebrate its 60th birthday next weekend with a picnic on the grounds, once a meadow owned by the Western movie star Will Rogers. The ingenuity of the prefabricated structure dazzled architects and designers at the time, and still does today. The Eameses also created an exceptionally beautiful place to live and work, where the tumbleweed they found on their honeymoon drive from Chicago to Los Angeles hangs beside a Robert Motherwell painting, and the shadows of the surrounding eucalyptus trees dance across the factory windows.

Preserved by the Eames Foundation as a National Historic Landmark, the Eames House is still beguiling. I have yet to meet anyone who has been there and hasn’t fallen in love with it.

The simplest explanation is that the house was the Eameses’ most personal project, and the purest expression of their design sensibility. “Nowhere is their enthusiasm, curiosity and love for design better represented,” said Paola Antonelli, senior curator of design and architecture at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The couple met in 1940 at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan, where Charles was a teacher, and Ray a student. They married the following year, and settled in Los Angeles. From a makeshift studio in their apartment, they produced their first commercial success, a plywood leg splint for the U.S. Army, using materials that Charles had smuggled home from his day job building movie sets for MGM. They went on to design furniture that, as The Washington Post once put it, changed the way “the 20th century sat down.”

That’s no mean feat, but there was more to the Eameses. So far they have been best known for their furniture, but other aspects of their work are compelling, too. If you asked a scientist to cite a favorite example of the Eameses’ work, the answer might well be one of the short films in which they sought to demystify science and math, not a chair. Films like “Powers of Ten” — which takes the viewer on a journey from a human hand through the universe and back to earth again, ending with a carbon atom — were once praised for popularizing science and are now hailed as inspirations for the newly developed visual language known as Visualization.

Their zest for science complemented the Eameses’ passion for technology, which is reflected in the house’s innovative structure. Yet they also imbued their work with sensuality. The gentle curves and vibrant colors give their designs a warmth that feels very contemporary.

The same applies to their interests. Some, like their fascination with folklore, appeared eccentric at the time but seem less so now, as does the eclecticism of a couple as intrigued by physics and prefabrication as by Mexican craftsmanship. All of this is visible in the house, which is filled with thoughtful arrangements of the pebbles, buttons, pencils, toys, masks, kites and other knickknacks they collected over the years, as well as furniture and artworks made by them and their friends.

Equally prescient was the Eameses’ love of nature. When they started work on the house in the mid-1940s as part of the Case Study House Program to build model modern homes in California, they envisaged it as two separate buildings: a house with ocean views across the meadow and a studio set into the hillside. The longer they spent at the site, the more they loved it. Abandoning the original design, the couple devised a plan to preserve the area’s natural beauty by excavating a lot for both buildings between the trees and hill.

They were even early recyclers, and rarely threw anything away. One of their cars, a Ford, lasted them 18 years, and in the four decades they lived in their house, they replaced only one appliance, a refrigerator.

The Eameses’ way of working was influential, too. “Their practice of operating in multiple arenas — architecture, design, film and exhibitions — has become the template for today’s avant-garde designers, who are intentionally blurring the boundaries between the disciplines,” observed Joseph Rosa, chair of architecture and design at the Art Institute of Chicago.

Similarly Ray blazed a trail as one of the few prominent women designers of the day, although her contribution was often underestimated. A British design organization once presented a medal to Charles and a rose to her, but he always insisted on crediting her equally. When they appeared on NBC’s “Today” show in 1956, Ray was welcomed on set with: “This is Mrs. Eames and she is going to tell us how she helps Charles design his chairs.” He cringed, while she smiled gamely. (See it for yourself on YouTube.)

“Their house has become a beacon for the American way of poetic pragmatism,” said Ms. Antonelli. “Chez Eames, art is not intimidating, great design really is for everybody, and high taste means being able to enjoy the occasional tchotchke in a modernist masterpiece.” That’s why we love it.

“Flooded Chambers Maid,” an installation by Jessica Stockholder in Madison Square Park.

By CAROL KINO
NY Times Published: June 12, 2009

IT was a brilliant spring morning in Madison Square Park, and the uptown end of the central lawn was already crowded with children playing on a multicolored triangular platform that looked as though it had been made from giant Lego blocks. The children clambered up and down, tossing balls, yelling gleefully and digging in a square of blue rubber mulch that lay on the ground beneath this structure. Their mothers and baby sitters lounged alongside them, sitting on the platform or watching from a set of adjoining turquoise bleachers.

At first glance this assemblage might have been mistaken for a particularly inventive playground. But it was actually a piece by the artist Jessica Stockholder, who was watching from the sidelines with Debbie Landau, the president of the Madison Square Park Conservancy, which commissioned the work. Both of them laughed in amazement at the unfolding spectacle.

For more than 25 years Ms. Stockholder has been celebrated for site-specific sculptures and installations that challenge boundaries, blurring the distinction among painting, sculpture and environment, and even breaching gallery walls by extending beyond windows and doors. But with this piece, in the park through Aug. 15, she seems to have crossed another sort of border.

“I’ve never worked in a place like this, with all these people and kids,” Ms. Stockholder said happily, over the din of children’s voices. “I didn’t realize it would be such a magnet, that it would be the thing people really wanted to sit on, and that kids would like it so much.”

Ms. Landau said she too had been struck by the installation’s instant allure. “People discovered it immediately,” she said, noting that its mood changes throughout the day, with the morning rush of children giving way to a more adult lunchtime and early evening crowd. Even before the piece opened to the public, she added, she realized that it would pose an operational challenge. “The minute the blue mulch went down,” she said, “we e-mailed Jessica and said: ‘This is a sandbox. What kid wouldn’t want to play?’ And in fact by the next day a kid had made mounds and had a truck in there.” (The solution: Park employees rake and reshape the mulch twice a day.)

The piece, called “Flooded Chambers Maid” — a play on the concept of women’s work and service work, as well as art making — has much in common with Ms. Stockholder’s gallery installations. It incorporates industrial materials and ready-made manufactured objects, and its brightly colored parts combine to create something of a three-dimensional abstract painting in space.

Although elements like the bleachers and the steel-and-fiberglass gridded segments that make up the platform were fabricated months in advance, the piece feels as though it were invented on the spot. And part of it was: beyond the bleachers lays a garden that Ms. Stockholder planted in a somewhat free-form fashion in April, with the help of Christy Dailey, the conservancy’s chief gardener. The result suggests a D.I.Y. take of a Constructivist painting, built from plants, flowers and upturned buckets and bins from Wal-Mart.

With its focus on geometry this work also suggests a nod to the surrounding architecture and streets, especially the triangular Flatiron Building, which lies just south of the park. But that wasn’t what Ms. Stockholder consciously intended. “I don’t sit down and think about things in that way,” she said. “I walked around the park and spent time thinking about it. I made this piece in response to the patterning that was already here.”

In a sense this is a golden moment for Ms. Stockholder, who recently turned 50. Although she has been showing here since 1985, soon after receiving her master of fine arts degree from Yale, she has three simultaneous exhibitions of her work on view this month. As well as the park piece there is a sculpture show, “Sailcloth Tears,” through June 20 at Mitchell-Innes & Nash in Chelsea. And “Swiss Cheese Field,” a suite of monoprint constructions based on Ms. Stockholder’s drawings for the park project, can be seen through July 2 at Senior & Shopmaker, a gallery overlooking the site. As Ms. Stockholder said, “We took advantage of the moment.”

She produced the prints during a handful of frenzied sessions at Two Palms, a SoHo print shop, working on several at once, with technologically sophisticated machinery and a several crew members. “It’s one of the more exhausting things I’ve done,” she said.

But the sculptures were made the way she usually works: alone in her studio near Yale, where she is director of the graduate sculpture department. (She lives in an adjoining house with her husband, Patrick Chamberlain, a psychologist, and Charles, their 13-year-old son.)

“I don’t have assistants and things in the studio,” she said. Although she works with “anything I can buy and carry,” she frequently allows herself to be limited by the material she already has on hand, like buckets, bolts of cloth, paint and light bulbs, and lets her intuition guide her. “What I like about it is I don’t know what I’m doing,” she said. “I make things complicated for myself and chaotic, so I feel unsettled, and then the challenge is to make something structured and complete emerge from that.”

The park project offered yet another challenge, she said: “It involved much more planning.”

That planning began about three years ago when Ms. Landau, a longtime fan of Ms. Stockholder’s work, mentioned her name to the committee that advises the conservancy’s art program, Mad. Sq. Art. (Since 2004 it has commissioned work by living artists including Sol LeWitt, Roxy Paine and Ursula von Rydingsvard.) Ms. Landau suggested Ms. Stockholder because “I loved her use of color, the vividness, the bold collages, the geometry,” she said. “What was also great was that we’d never had anything that you could quite call an installation before.”

The nomination was ardently supported by another committee member, Adam D. Weinberg, the director of the Whitney Museum of American Art. He first met Ms. Stockholder in 1990 when he included five sculptures in a display of new appropriation art at the museum’s Equitable Center gallery. One piece, he recalled, incorporated burlap, painted Sheetrock, an old car door and a tiny orange light bulb.

“What I immediately loved about them is that I couldn’t figure them out,” he said. “They were somewhere between painting and sculpture and environment. The work also draws on the whole history of art from Matisse to Rauschenberg, Smithson and Gordon Matta-Clark.”

Mr. Weinberg was also uniquely familiar with Ms. Stockholder’s rare alfresco projects. In 2002, as director of the Addison Gallery of American Art in Andover, Mass., he commissioned her first outdoor work made in this country. (The conservancy project is her second.) Made for a show called “SiteLines: Art on Main,” it was installed on a vista landscaped by Frederick Law Olmstead and involved armchairs, a park bench and bleachers, and encouraged visitors to become part of the piece by luring them to sit and enjoy the view. “Her work makes you very aware of your own physical presence in the environment,” he said.

As for Ms. Stockholder, the current project came as a welcome antidote to traveling around the world making museum and gallery projects. “It wasn’t just like arriving and making something in two weeks and leaving,” she said. “It seemed to have roots in a community and a dialogue that are a little bit more substantive.”

So in summer 2007 she embarked on a creative process that for her was quite atypical. It involved making drawings, building a model and working with a cast of dozens: as well as the 23-member conservancy staff, the team included a production manager, a fabrication manager, two engineers and maintenance, installation and gardening crews.

There were city building codes to worry about. “Debbie and I talked a lot about the size of the holes in these gratings,” Ms. Stockholder said. “They couldn’t be too large, because little kids would be likely to be running around, and you didn’t want their feet to get stuck, and we had to think a lot about the edges of things and making sure they weren’t sharp.” Because the platform could be only so high without a railing, she made a virtue of that restriction by positioning it at seating level.

There was also a budget of $300,000, which clocks in as the priciest in the conservancy’s history (although it’s a far cry from the cost of some other recent public artworks, like Olafur Eliasson’s $15.5 million “New York City Waterfalls” in 2008).

After the initial quotes came in, Ms. Stockholder let her imagination run away with her, coming up with ideas for more elaborate elements, like a more lushly planted garden. But last fall, after the economy tanked, her ambitions had to be reined in. Although she stuck to a couple of wish-list items, she impressed the team with her willingness to compromise on many more, from the vinyl coating for the bleachers (largely replaced by commercial oil paint) to the number of plants (scaled down). “She’s a very easy artist to work with,” said Ms. Landau.

But Ms. Stockholder said she took these constraints as inspiration. “In some way that’s what the work is about,” she said. “I work in response to the limitations of any situation and in relationship to what’s possible.” Besides, she added, the project had given her new opportunities. “In a park,” she said, you are not working with studio materials or a flat piece of paper. You have grass, and the people and the city and the daylight.”

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
NY Times Published: June 13, 2009

This year marks the 40th anniversary of President Richard Nixon’s start of the war on drugs, and it now appears that drugs have won.

“We’ve spent a trillion dollars prosecuting the war on drugs,” Norm Stamper, a former police chief of Seattle, told me. “What do we have to show for it? Drugs are more readily available, at lower prices and higher levels of potency. It’s a dismal failure.”

For that reason, he favors legalization of drugs, perhaps by the equivalent of state liquor stores or registered pharmacists. Other experts favor keeping drug production and sales illegal but decriminalizing possession, as some foreign countries have done.

Here in the United States, four decades of drug war have had three consequences:

First, we have vastly increased the proportion of our population in prisons. The United States now incarcerates people at a rate nearly five times the world average. In part, that’s because the number of people in prison for drug offenses rose roughly from 41,000 in 1980 to 500,000 today. Until the war on drugs, our incarceration rate was roughly the same as that of other countries.

Second, we have empowered criminals at home and terrorists abroad. One reason many prominent economists have favored easing drug laws is that interdiction raises prices, which increases profit margins for everyone, from the Latin drug cartels to the Taliban. Former presidents of Mexico, Brazil and Colombia this year jointly implored the United States to adopt a new approach to narcotics, based on the public health campaign against tobacco.

Third, we have squandered resources. Jeffrey Miron, a Harvard economist, found that federal, state and local governments spend $44.1 billion annually enforcing drug prohibitions. We spend seven times as much on drug interdiction, policing and imprisonment as on treatment. (Of people with drug problems in state prisons, only 14 percent get treatment.)

I’ve seen lives destroyed by drugs, and many neighbors in my hometown of Yamhill, Oregon, have had their lives ripped apart by crystal meth. Yet I find people like Mr. Stamper persuasive when they argue that if our aim is to reduce the influence of harmful drugs, we can do better.

Mr. Stamper is active in Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, or LEAP, an organization of police officers, prosecutors, judges and citizens who favor a dramatic liberalization of American drug laws. He said he gradually became disillusioned with the drug war, beginning in 1967 when he was a young beat officer in San Diego.

“I had arrested a 19-year-old, in his own home, for possession of marijuana,” he recalled. “I literally broke down the door, on the basis of probable cause. I took him to jail on a felony charge.” The arrest and related paperwork took several hours, and Mr. Stamper suddenly had an “aha!” moment: “I could be doing real police work.”

It’s now broadly acknowledged that the drug war approach has failed. President Obama’s new drug czar, Gil Kerlikowske, told the Wall Street Journal that he wants to banish the war on drugs phraseology, while shifting more toward treatment over imprisonment.

The stakes are huge, the uncertainties great, and there’s a genuine risk that liberalizing drug laws might lead to an increase in use and in addiction. But the evidence suggests that such a risk is small. After all, cocaine was used at only one-fifth of current levels when it was legal in the United States before 1914. And those states that have decriminalized marijuana possession have not seen surging consumption.

“I don’t see any big downside to marijuana decriminalization,” said Peter Reuter, a professor of criminology at the University of Maryland who has been skeptical of some of the arguments of the legalization camp. At most, he said, there would be only a modest increase in usage.

Moving forward, we need to be less ideological and more empirical in figuring out what works in combating America’s drug problem. One approach would be for a state or two to experiment with legalization of marijuana, allowing it to be sold by licensed pharmacists, while measuring the impact on usage and crime.

I’m not the only one who is rethinking these issues. Senator Jim Webb of Virginia has sponsored legislation to create a presidential commission to examine various elements of the criminal justice system, including drug policy. So far 28 senators have co-sponsored the legislation, and Mr. Webb says that Mr. Obama has been supportive of the idea as well.

“Our nation’s broken drug policies are just one reason why we must re-examine the entire criminal justice system,” Mr. Webb says. That’s a brave position for a politician, and it’s the kind of leadership that we need as we grope toward a more effective strategy against narcotics in America.

They can be eccentric, slow afoot, even grouchy. But dogs live out their final days with a humility and grace we all could learn from.

The Week
By Gene Weingarten

Not long before his death, Harry and I headed out for a walk that proved eventful. He was nearly 13, old for a big dog. Walks were no longer the slap-happy Iditarods of his youth, frenzies of purposeless pulling in which we would cast madly off in all directions, fighting for command. Nor were they the exuberant archaeological expeditions of his middle years, when every other tree or hydrant or blade of grass held tantalizing secrets about his neighbors. In his old age, Harry had transformed his walk into a simple process of elimination—a dutiful, utilitarian, head-down trudge. When finished, he would shuffle home to his ratty old bed, which graced our living room because Harry could no longer ascend the stairs. On these walks, Harry seemed oblivious to his surroundings, absorbed in the arduous responsibility of placing foot before foot before foot before foot. But this time, on the edge of a small urban park, he stopped to watch something. A man was throwing a Frisbee to his dog. The dog, about Harry’s size, was tracking the flight expertly, as Harry had once done, anticipating hooks and slices by watching the pitch and roll and yaw of the disc, as Harry had done, then catching it with a joyful, punctuating leap, as Harry had once done, too.

Harry sat. For 10 minutes, he watched the fling and catch, fling and catch, his face contented, his eyes alight, his tail a-twitch. Our walk
home was almost … jaunty.

Some years ago, The Washington Post invited readers to come up with a midlife list of goals for an underachiever. The first-runner-up prize went to: “Win the admiration of my dog.”

It’s no big deal to love a dog; they make it so easy for you. They find you brilliant, even if you are a witling. You fascinate them, even if you are as dull as a butter knife. They are fond of you, even if you are a genocidal maniac. Hitler loved his dogs, and they loved him.

Puppies are incomparably cute and incomparably entertaining, and, best of all, they smell exactly like puppies. At middle age, a dog has settled into the knuckleheaded matrix of behavior we find so appealing—his unquestioning loyalty, his irrepressible willingness to please, his infectious happiness. But it is not until a dog gets old that his most important virtues ripen and coalesce. Old dogs can be cloudy-eyed and grouchy, gray of muzzle, graceless of gait, odd of habit, hard of hearing, pimply, wheezy, lazy, and lumpy. But to anyone who has ever known an old dog, these flaws are of little consequence. Old dogs are vulnerable. They show exorbitant gratitude and limitless trust. They are without artifice. They are funny in new and unexpected ways. But, above all, they seem at peace.

Kafka wrote that the meaning of life is that it ends. He meant that our lives are shaped and shaded by the existential terror of knowing that all is finite. This anxiety informs poetry, literature, the monuments we build, the wars we wage—all of it. Kafka was talking, of course, about people. Among animals, only humans are said to be self-aware enough to comprehend the passage of time and the grim truth of mortality. How, then, to explain old Harry at the edge of that park, gray and lame, just days from the end, experiencing what can only be called wistfulness and nostalgia? I have lived with eight dogs, watched six of them grow old and infirm with grace and dignity, and die with what seemed to be acceptance. I have seen old dogs grieve at the loss of their friends. I have come to believe that as they age, dogs comprehend the passage of time, and, if not the inevitability of death, certainly the relentlessness of the onset of their frailties. They understand that what’s gone is gone.

What dogs do not have is an abstract sense of fear, or a feeling of injustice or entitlement. They do not see themselves, as we do, as tragic heroes, battling ceaselessly against the merciless onslaught of time. Unlike us, old dogs lack the audacity to mythologize their lives. You’ve got to love them for that.

The product of a Kansas puppy mill, Harry was sold to us as a yellow Labrador retriever. I suppose it was technically true, but only in the sense that Tic Tacs are technically “food.” Harry’s lineage was suspect. He wasn’t the square-headed, elegant type of Labrador you can envision in the wilds of Canada hunting for ducks. He was the shape of a baked potato, with the color and luster of an interoffice envelope. You could envision him in the wilds of suburban Toledo, hunting for nuggets of dried food in a carpet.

His full name was Harry S Truman, and once he’d reached middle age, he had indeed developed the unassuming soul of a haberdasher. We sometimes called him Tru, which fit his loyalty but was in other ways a misnomer: Harry was a bit of an eccentric, a few bubbles off plumb. Though he had never experienced an electrical shock, whenever he encountered a wire on the floor—say, a power cord leading from a laptop to a wall socket—Harry would stop and refuse to proceed. To him, this barrier was as impassable as the Himalayas. He’d stand there, waiting for someone to move it. Also, he was afraid of wind.

While Harry lacked the wiliness and cunning of some dogs, I did watch one day as he figured out a basic principle of physics. He was playing with a water bottle in our backyard—it was one of those 5-gallon cylindrical plastic jugs from the top of a water cooler. At one point, it rolled down a hill, which surprised and delighted him. He retrieved it, brought it back up and tried to make it go down again. It wouldn’t. I watched him nudge it around until he discovered that for the bottle to roll, its long axis had to be perpendicular to the slope of the hill. You could see the understanding dawn on his face; it was Archimedes in his bath, Helen Keller at the water spigot.

That was probably the intellectual achievement of Harry’s life, tarnished only slightly by the fact that he spent the next two hours insipidly entranced, rolling the bottle down and hauling it back up. He did not come inside until it grew too dark for him to see.

I believe I know exactly when Harry became an old dog. He was about 9 years old. It happened at 10:15 on the evening of June 21, 2001, the day my family moved from the suburbs to the city. The move took longer than we’d anticipated. Inexcusably, Harry had been left alone in the vacated house—eerie, echoing, empty of furniture and of all belongings except Harry and his bed—for eight hours. When I arrived to pick him up, he was beyond frantic.

He met me at the door and embraced me around the waist in a way that is not immediately reconcilable with the musculature and skeleton of a dog’s front legs. I could not extricate myself from his grasp. We walked out of that house like a slow-dancing couple, and Harry did not let go until I opened the car door.

He wasn’t barking at me in reprimand, as he once might have done. He hadn’t fouled the house in spite. That night, Harry was simply scared and vulnerable, impossibly sweet and needy and grateful. He had lost something of himself, but he had gained something more touching and more valuable. He had entered old age.

In the year after our move, Harry began to age visibly, and he did it the way most dogs do. First his muzzle began to whiten, and then the white slowly crept backward to swallow his entire head. As he became more sedentary, he thickened a bit, too.

On walks, he would no longer bother to scout and circle for a place to relieve himself. He would simply do it in mid-plod, like a horse, leaving the difficult logistics of drive-by cleanup to me. Sometimes, while crossing a busy street, with cars whizzing by, he would plop down to scratch his ear. Sometimes, he would forget where he was and why he was there. To the amusement of passersby, I would have to hunker down beside him and say, “Harry, we’re on a walk, and we’re going home now. Home is this way, okay?” On these dutiful walks, Harry ignored almost everything he passed. The most notable exception was an old, barrel-chested female pit bull named Honey, whom he loved. This was surprising, both because other dogs had long ago ceased to interest Harry at all, and because even back when they did, Harry’s tastes were for the guys.

Still, when we met Honey on walks, Harry perked up. Honey was younger by five years and heartier by a mile, but she liked Harry and slowed her gait when he was around. They waddled together for blocks, eyes forward, hardly interacting but content in each other’s company. I will forever be grateful to Honey for sweetening Harry’s last days.

Some people who seem unmoved by the deaths of tens of thousands through war or natural disaster will nonetheless grieve inconsolably over the loss of the family dog. People who find this behavior distasteful are often the ones without pets. It is hard to understand, in the abstract, the degree to which a companion animal, particularly after a long life, becomes a part of you. I believe I’ve figured out what this is all about. It is not as noble as I’d like it to be, but it is not anything of which to be ashamed, either.

In our dogs, we see ourselves. Dogs exhibit almost all of our emotions; if you think a dog cannot register envy or pity or pride or melancholia, you have never lived with one for any length of time. What dogs lack is our ability to dissimulate. They wear their emotions nakedly, and so, in watching them, we see ourselves as we would be if we were stripped of posture and pretense. Their innocence is enormously appealing. When we watch a dog progress from puppy hood to old age, we are watching our own lives in microcosm. Our dogs become old, frail, crotchety, and vulnerable, just as Grandma did, just as we surely will, come the day. When we grieve for them, we grieve for ourselves.

From the book Old Dogs, text by Gene Weingarten and Michael S. Williamson, based on a longer excerpt that originally appeared in The Washington Post. ©2008 by Gene Weingarten and Michael S. Williamson. Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster Inc.

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By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Times Published: June 11, 2009

Back in April, there was a huge fuss over an internal report by the Department of Homeland Security warning that current conditions resemble those in the early 1990s — a time marked by an upsurge of right-wing extremism that culminated in the Oklahoma City bombing.

Conservatives were outraged. The chairman of the Republican National Committee denounced the report as an attempt to “segment out conservatives in this country who have a different philosophy or view from this administration” and label them as terrorists.

But with the murder of Dr. George Tiller by an anti-abortion fanatic, closely followed by a shooting by a white supremacist at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the analysis looks prescient.

There is, however, one important thing that the D.H.S. report didn’t say: Today, as in the early years of the Clinton administration but to an even greater extent, right-wing extremism is being systematically fed by the conservative media and political establishment.

Now, for the most part, the likes of Fox News and the R.N.C. haven’t directly incited violence, despite Bill O’Reilly’s declarations that “some” called Dr. Tiller “Tiller the Baby Killer,” that he had “blood on his hands,” and that he was a “guy operating a death mill.” But they have gone out of their way to provide a platform for conspiracy theories and apocalyptic rhetoric, just as they did the last time a Democrat held the White House.

And at this point, whatever dividing line there was between mainstream conservatism and the black-helicopter crowd seems to have been virtually erased.

Exhibit A for the mainstreaming of right-wing extremism is Fox News’s new star, Glenn Beck. Here we have a network where, like it or not, millions of Americans get their news — and it gives daily airtime to a commentator who, among other things, warned viewers that the Federal Emergency Management Agency might be building concentration camps as part of the Obama administration’s “totalitarian” agenda (although he eventually conceded that nothing of the kind was happening).

But let’s not neglect the print news media. In the Bush years, The Washington Times became an important media player because it was widely regarded as the Bush administration’s house organ. Earlier this week, the newspaper saw fit to run an opinion piece declaring that President Obama “not only identifies with Muslims, but actually may still be one himself,” and that in any case he has “aligned himself” with the radical Muslim Brotherhood.

And then there’s Rush Limbaugh. His rants today aren’t very different from his rants in 1993. But he occupies a different position in the scheme of things. Remember, during the Bush years Mr. Limbaugh became very much a political insider. Indeed, according to a recent Gallup survey, 10 percent of Republicans now consider him the “main person who speaks for the Republican Party today,” putting him in a three-way tie with Dick Cheney and Newt Gingrich. So when Mr. Limbaugh peddles conspiracy theories — suggesting, for example, that fears over swine flu were being hyped “to get people to respond to government orders” — that’s a case of the conservative media establishment joining hands with the lunatic fringe.

It’s not surprising, then, that politicians are doing the same thing. The R.N.C. says that “the Democratic Party is dedicated to restructuring American society along socialist ideals.” And when Jon Voight, the actor, told the audience at a Republican fund-raiser this week that the president is a “false prophet” and that “we and we alone are the right frame of mind to free this nation from this Obama oppression,” Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, thanked him, saying that he “really enjoyed” the remarks.

Credit where credit is due. Some figures in the conservative media have refused to go along with the big hate — people like Fox’s Shepard Smith and Catherine Herridge, who debunked the attacks on that Homeland Security report two months ago. But this doesn’t change the broad picture, which is that supposedly respectable news organizations and political figures are giving aid and comfort to dangerous extremism.

What will the consequences be? Nobody knows, of course, although the analysts at Homeland Security fretted that things may turn out even worse than in the 1990s — that thanks, in part, to the election of an African-American president, “the threat posed by lone wolves and small terrorist cells is more pronounced than in past years.”

And that’s a threat to take seriously. Yes, the worst terrorist attack in our history was perpetrated by a foreign conspiracy. But the second worst, the Oklahoma City bombing, was perpetrated by an all-American lunatic. Politicians and media organizations wind up such people at their, and our, peril.

By PENELOPE GREEN
NY Times Published: June 10, 2009

One bright morning recently, Ms. Hayes patted the glittering quartz landscape of a section of her tiny Brooklyn garden into which were tucked soft, blobby silicone planters no bigger than a child’s hand and filled with begonias. “Living room necklaces” — little webs of crocheted fishing line designed by Ms. Hayes — curled down from a Japanese maple; some of their pockets were filled with bromeliads, spiky water-hoarding epiphytes that looked like alien pets. You wanted to lie down and peer through the underbrush, in case a critter was lurking there.

“I wanted to make the garden magical and hopeful,” said Ms. Hayes, 50, whose fantastical herbaceous art pieces like hand-blown terrariums have made her an art-world darling. “A healing place that’s part of our story. The other thing I was after is this idea of visitation. You know, aliens.”

Except for the bromeliads, aliens were not wildly apparent that morning. But there was a sense that the garden, a postage-stamp space behind a brick row house in Boerum Hill, was nonetheless a place of tremendous abundance (even slugs are welcome; Ms. Hayes plants sweet potato vines for them to munch).

Yet it was not too long ago that this garden was a desolate square of lawn and fallow vegetable patch that had been abandoned by its owner, Teo Camporeale, 43, a soulful 3-D animator and composer who is now married to Ms. Hayes, and Ms. Hayes was living like a monk in a small walk-up on East Fifth Street in Manhattan. She had a few amenities — a futon, a rice cooker, a stack of clear plastic boxes with the childhood artwork of her son and daughter, now in their late 20s — and a companion, a surly Chihuahua named Diego.

“I was pretty much married to my work,” said Ms. Hayes, the daughter of farmers from Fonda, N.Y. (population 810), who took her master’s degree in sculpture at Parsons in the late ’80s and supported herself by working as a gardener. By the late ’90s, sculpture and gardens had merged in her brain, she said. She created her signature planters — soft and biomorphic silicone pouches that gentle a plant’s root ball — and Plantpacks, designed to be worn on the chest like BabyBjorns for asparagus ferns. “Like motherhood,” she said. “Love on the go!”

Since then, her down-the-rabbit-hole environments — and Ms. Hayes’s “nurturing spirit,” in the words of William T. Georgis, an architect with whom she has collaborated on a few rarefied Hamptons properties — have kept her an unlikely art star for over a decade; unlikely because her deeply personal, ephemeral and handmade worlds have told a markedly different story from the identity politics, nihilism and cultural commentary of many of her art world peers.

“It’s like a continuous art project, her biospheres,” said Aby Rosen, the developer, who has eight. “They are a hybrid between a living organism and a piece of art.” Also, as he pointed out, “You just want to crawl inside them.”

This year is typically robust: Ms. Hayes was nominated for a Cooper-Hewitt National Design Award, a huge honor, though another firm took the prize. Next Thursday, she has a show opening at the Marianne Boesky Gallery in Chelsea. It includes six giant terrariums, a beguilingly beautiful animated film about an extraterrestrial gardener that is a collaboration between Ms. Hayes and Mr. Camporeale, and a rooftop garden.

On July 1, the W South Beach, a 408-room luxury hotel five years in the making, will be open for business in Miami Beach. Designed by Costas Kondylis, with interiors by Yabu Pushelberg and Anna Busta, it is surrounded by the dreamscape-landscapes Ms. Hayes has created, whimsical outdoor rooms of sea grape, saw palmetto and pitch apple trees hung with birdcages and fragments of poetry.

But back in the spring of 2006, Ms. Hayes’s daughter, Rylan Morrison, was compelled to give her mother a lecture. “She told me I was never going to meet the love of my life having dinner with Diego in front of the Jim Lehrer news hour,” said Ms. Hayes, who had been divorced from Rylan’s father for two decades. So instead of ordering in that April, Ms. Hayes began dutifully picking up her meals at Caravan of Dreams, a vegetarian restaurant on East Sixth Street. She soon met Mr. Camporeale, another regular there, who liked to visit Caravan of Dreams after he looked in on his widowed mother on 10th Street.

Sitting on the bench out front, Ms. Hayes and Mr. Camporeale sipped bright green juices and uncovered common interests, like animals, quantum physics and outer space. “Of course I noticed he was hot,” said Ms. Hayes, who boldly invited Mr. Camporeale to visit her 13th Street studio, where the terrariums and other projects are hatched. A year later, Ms. Hayes moved into Mr. Camporeale’s century-old Boerum Hill house

“Welcome to our highly humble hippie habitat,” Ms. Hayes said. “I am very domestic, as it turned out.” There was a crystal terrarium on the dining room table — crystals are the latest iterations of Ms. Hayes’s magical biospheres (besides being a new passion of hers, they are harder for clients to kill, though they do like full moon baths, she said, and come with a calendar detailing five years worth of full moons). Nearby was a giant biomorphic terrarium big enough to tango with, one of six that will be on view at Ms. Hayes’s show next week. There were eucalyptus, laurel and grapevines woven through the stair balusters to keep Diego from slipping through them. (Diego, having been released from an upstairs bedroom, clattered over to a reporter and looked up at her with eager, rheumy eyes. “It’s a trick: Do not pat the dog,” warned Ms. Hayes. “He will bite.”)

Mr. Camporeale, whose two cats and a turtle, all rescue animals, have by now grudgingly accepted Diego, urged breakfast (“He’s a super mensch,” Ms. Hayes said) and told of buying this house in 1997, for about $225,000. His father, an artist and thwarted gardener, had just received a diagnosis of cancer. Mr. Camporeale’s parents’ apartment on East 10th, where they had been living since 1952, was stuffed with his father’s efforts: herbs and tomatoes on the fire escape, and a living room layered with seedlings and compost. Fruit flies were an issue. “It was driving my mother crazy,” said Mr. Camporeale, who offered his new yard to his father.

Mr. Camporeale did the heavy lifting — hefting in thousands of dollars of topsoil and compost, carving out beds to his father’s instructions for tomatoes, green beans, herbs, roses, geraniums and lots of marigolds to keep the bugs away.

“Of course, your taste is more expensive,” Mr. Camporeale said to his wife.

Mr. Camporeale’s father would come out each afternoon after chemotherapy to work on the garden. “It was his therapy,” Mr. Camporeale said. “The garden got him through. But when the cancer came back seven years later, he was no longer able to work on it.”

Mr. Camporeale, who married soon after he bought the house, was divorced in 2003. His father died the next year. The garden suffered.

“I couldn’t keep up with it,” he said. “It got pretty forlorn looking.” When he met Ms. Hayes, he said, “we had both been through hard stuff. The house retained a kind of grimness. It was pretty sad here.”

Said Ms. Hayes: “I made him throw everything away. We were exorcising.”

Then she tackled the garden, moving slowly at first. She wove birch twigs into a chain-link fence. “Chain-link is harsh unless you can connect to that fishnet stocking look,” Ms. Hayes said. She moved a rosebush from the front to the back of the house and planted a fig tree. The soil, she said, was wonderful, retaining the richness that Mr. Camporeale’s father had put there.

“It made me cry,” she said, bursting into tears.

On the terrace, she showed off her Dumpling planters, soft rubber pouches with drawstring ties. “In the summer, you can undress them, and work the root ball, and in the winter you can cinch them really tight,” Ms. Hayes said. “This one is ruched and so glamorous, don’t you think?” — she nodded fondly at a Dumpling filled with Japanese forest grass — “it’s like a Chanel bag.” Her terrariums and crystal gardens range from $4,000 to $60,000, and living necklaces (bromeliads in delicate crocheted sacks) from $200 to $1,200; she is looking to mass-produce the Dumplings at a more affordable price point.

Last week, she wore a stretchy bright blue tunic by Maria Cornejo, a designer she wears exclusively. (“She gets women,” Ms. Hayes said, pulling out the fabric at her midsection, “she gets it if you have a belly day.”) Although, she said, “Since the recession I’ve been trying not to weed in them. I’m like, ‘Honey, I’m going to slip into something less expensive.’ ”

Ms. Hayes was on her way to a presentation at the Core Club of her latest project, the gardens surrounding the new W South Beach, which were finished last month. David Edelstein, who with Aby Rosen is the developer, talked about how he had been moved by Ms. Hayes’s Alice in Wonderland qualities, and how he’d wanted that kind of soul for his new hotel, which is rather surprising, given that “soul” is not a word one hears too often in conjunction with pricey Miami Beach real estate.

“That’s what I always hope people want,” Ms. Hayes said, “but so often there is a kind of erasure.”

Two summers ago, Mr. Camporeale invited Ms. Hayes for a walk on the piers along the West Side Highway. She balked at first. “We don’t have time,” she remembered saying. “He’s like, ‘I have something for you.’ We sat down and he handed me an old Cat in the Hat jack-in-the-box. I’m like, ‘Oh, vintage, that’s cool.’ He said, ‘Why don’t you see if it works?’ ”

It did, and what popped out was the cat holding a sign Mr. Camporeale had inked with the words “Will you marry me?”

Last August, the two were married in the garden Ms. Hayes had made, and danced a five-step tango along its tiny path with a rose that migrated from Mr. Camporeale’s breast pocket to Ms. Hayes’s teeth.

“We really practiced,” Ms. Hayes said, “and I’d been doing lots of yoga so I didn’t break anything.”

They strung hundreds of marigolds and hung them inside and outside the house. “The spirit of the marigolds!” Mr. Camporeale said of the garlands, put there in honor of his father, whose ashes are in the garden.

What still thrills Mr. Camporeale, he said, “is that a good night for us is sitting on the couch watching a DVD about quantum physics.”

“We are both nerds,” said Ms. Hayes, pushing her glasses up the bridge of her nose. “We both wear glasses.”

“Paula used to be the most ethereal person,” said Andrea Rosen, the gallerist, the other day. “Now she’s evolved into a grounded fairy.”

Ms. Hayes is not entirely convinced.

“The thing about being an overachiever is, you are stoic and you believe you can do anything, so you do,” Ms. Hayes said. “It’s not until you find love that you realize you are fragile.”

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“For anybody who doesn’t know who [Voulkos] was, he’s the hero of American ceramics. He’s the guy who essentially liberated the medium from the craft hierarchy that was controlling it up to that time. The way he taught was just to come into the studio, and he approached making work by a method I call “direct frontal onslaught.” We were a small group of very committed students. Some people thought they were pretty good before they got there, but when we saw him, he just blew our minds. This is a short talk, and so I can’t go too deeply into it, but he was so far ahead of us, it was just ridiculous.
Anyway, I learned to work from watching him.”

–from Ken Price’s lecture at the Chinati Foundation, Marfa, Texas in October 2004

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CONSTRUCTION AREA A beaver dam in Boxborough Station Wildlife Management Area in Massachusetts has helped create wetlands.

By CORNELIA DEAN
NY Times Published: June 8, 2009

CONCORD, Mass. — The dozens of public works officials, municipal engineers, conservation agents and others who crowded into a meeting room here one recent morning needed help. Property in their towns was flooding, they said. Culverts were clogged. Septic tanks were being overwhelmed.

“We have a huge problem,” said David Pavlik, an engineer for the town of Lexington, where dams built by beavers have sent water flooding into the town’s sanitary sewers. “We trapped them,” he said. “We breached their dam. Nothing works. We are looking for long-term solutions.”

Mary Hansen, a conservation agent from Maynard, said it starkly: “There are beavers everywhere.”

Laura Hajduk, a biologist with the state’s Division of Fisheries and Wildlife, had little to offer them. When beavers are trapped, others move in to replace them. And, she said, you can breach a beaver dam, but “I guarantee you that within 24 hours if the beavers are still there it will be repaired. Beavers are the ultimate ecosystem engineers.”

That was not what Mr. Pavlik was hoping to hear.

He is not alone in his dismay, and it is not just beavers. Around the nation, decades of environmental regulation, conservation efforts and changing land use have brought many species, like beavers, so far back from the brink that they are viewed as nuisances. As Stuart Pimm, a conservation ecologist at Duke University, put it, “We are finding they are inconvenient.”

In Florida, alligators were once nearly wiped out by hunters; today the state maintains a roster of trappers who remove thousands of nuisance gators each year. The pesticide DDT once left the Pelican State, Louisiana, bereft of the birds; today wildlife organizations say fishermen must guard their bait and catches from the birds. In California, warnings about marauding mountain lions are posted on hiking trails.

There were tens and maybe hundreds of millions of beavers in North America before it was settled by Europeans, whose craze for beaver hats is often cited as motivating much of the exploration of the continent. But by 1900 their numbers had been reduced to about 100,000, almost all of them in Canada. As farming faded and the forests reclaimed much of their lost ground, Castor canadensis made a spectacular comeback. Today there are believed to be 10 million to 15 million of the animals in North America, and they are regarded as pests in much of their range.

In 1999, for example, a colony moved into the Tidal Basin in Washington, where they cut down a number of cherry trees before being trapped and removed. According to the Department of Agriculture, states like Mississippi, North Carolina and Wisconsin lose tens of millions of dollars each year from beaver damage to buildings, roads, timber, crops and trout streams.

In Massachusetts, beavers had vanished by the early 19th century, killed by trappers and dispossessed by farmers who turned woods into pastures. But they have had a particularly strong comeback here as farmland has returned to woodland. The change has also brought an unwelcome abundance of coyotes, black bears, moose and other species. Wild turkeys, once extirpated, now go one-on-one with suburban pedestrians in what biologists call misguided efforts to establish their dominance in a pecking order.

The advice from the experts on beavers is to find a way to live with them and reduce the damage. As Ms. Hajduk said during the Concord meeting, chicken-wire fencing can keep beavers out of culverts or away from prized trees. Companies market water flow devices called “beaver deceivers” or “beaver bafflers” that can be installed in dams to lower the water level of beaver ponds. Some people even coat prized trees with paint and sand in the hope that the grit will discourage gnawing beavers. If people want to live in a more natural environment, they must adjust to animals, even inconvenient animals, Dr. Pimm said in a telephone interview. “You have to accept Mother Nature as she is,” he said.

John Livsey, Mr. Pavlik’s boss and the town engineer in Lexington, has firsthand experience with the beaver problem. The animals are building dams in wooded areas traversed by the town’s sewer lines, he said, and as water rises, it seeps through manholes into the sewer pipes.

The town must pay for the treatment of this extra “inflow.” Though Mr. Livsey said he could not put a dollar figure on it, “it’s a lot of money.”

The town periodically obtains permits to breach dams and trap and kill the animals, but destroying a beaver dam can have unintended consequences downstream, from flooding a neighbor’s property to destroying habitat crucial for rare amphibians or silting up streams where endangered Atlantic salmon spawn. Some people date the beaver’s return to Massachusetts to 1928, when beavers were observed in West Stockbridge and “greeted with enthusiasm,” according to the Web site of the Division of Fisheries and Wildlife. By 1946, there were an estimated 300 beavers, all west of the Connecticut River.

Today, Ms. Hajduk said, there are at least 30,000 beavers, all over the state.

In her presentation in Concord, Ms. Hajduk said that beavers, which can reach 60 pounds and are the largest rodents in North America, are monogamous animals that mate for life and like to eat plants that grow underwater. They look for places to build a dam and create a pond. Their webbed feet are adapted for life in the water, and their front teeth, four giant incisors, are useful for cutting the trees they use as raw materials for their dams and lodges. (They also eat the bark, particularly in the winter.)

Typically, she said, they work at night, building a stick-and-mud lodge in the pond or at its edge, with its entrance underwater for safety. A pair of beavers typically live 10 years, producing a litter of two or more kits each spring. The kits stay with their parents until they are 2 years old, then disperse in search of their own territories.

Though the people at the meeting found it hard to believe — or irrelevant — the beavers have produced many benefits for the state’s environment, Ms. Hajduk said. She pointed to some of them after the meeting, when she and Mary B. Griffin, the state’s commissioner of fish and game, met at the Boxborough Station Wildlife Management Area, a state reserve northwest of here.

At first glance it hardly seemed like an ideal spot for beavers. Route 2, a major east-west highway, runs along one edge; a much-used rail line runs along another. “You are really surrounded by a lot of suburbia and roadways,” Ms. Hajduk said.

But trees had reclaimed the land between the ancient stone walls. Beavers have taken full advantage of the site, damming a small stream with mud and branches to impound a 45-acre pond perhaps five or six feet deep, with a lodge in the middle.

As she and Dr. Griffin neared the pond, a group of wood ducks, alarmed by their approach, went squawking into the air. It was good to see them, Dr. Griffin said — they are among the species favored by hunters that the state is trying to encourage. She pointed to an osprey sitting on a dead tree. Ospreys were almost wiped out by DDT but are now back in Massachusetts, and this one was taking advantage of beaver-created habitat. Just then, a great blue heron glided to a landing in the pond, another guest of the beavers.

Impoundments like this one absorb water, especially in the spring, when streams swell with rain and snow runoff, Dr. Griffin said. And when the impoundment eventually silts up and the beavers move on, their dam will decay and the pond will drain, leaving unusually rich soil behind.

“These beaver meadows stand out like rich little oases,” Ms. Hajduk said.

Dr. Griffin said she and her colleagues emphasized these advantages in urging people to adopt “tolerance and coexistence as a first line of defense.”

Mr. Livsey can embrace this concept, up to a point, perhaps because he admires the animals’ engineering ability.

“They’re amazingly skilled creatures, actually,” he said. “They seem to be able to put things where they want them. I wish they worked for us.”

By DANIEL J. WAKIN
NY Times Published: June 9, 2009

Merce Cunningham, the nonagenarian choreographer, is planning for a world without him. He has decided that when he dies, or when the right time comes, the Merce Cunningham Dance Company will embark on a final two-year international tour and then shut down, the Cunningham Dance Foundation, which supports the company, announced on Tuesday.

By other provisions of the plan, the Merce Cunningham Trust will take control of Mr. Cunningham’s dances for licensing purposes; the dancers will each receive a year’s salary as severance and extra money to help find new careers; staff members and the musicians who play for his performances will also receive payments.

Meanwhile, Cunningham associates will prepare detailed records of the dances so they can be licensed and given authentic productions by other companies. The foundation has embarked on an $8 million fund-raising campaign to pay for the transition.

The plan is Mr. Cunningham’s effort to confront the vexing problem of how choreography created by a lone master and interpreted by a dedicated company should be treated once the master has died. He turned 90 on April 16.

Cunningham associates say the plan can serve as a model for other creative artists, particularly choreographers with their own companies, to protect their legacies. At the least, it should help Mr. Cunningham’s body of work avoid the ugliness that surrounded the legacy of Martha Graham (who gave Mr. Cunningham his start in dance) after her death in 1991. The Graham foundation fought a bitter legal battle with Ron Protas, Ms. Graham’s heir, over rights to her ballets and was eventually awarded most of them.

“It’s really a concern about how do you preserve the elements of an art which is really evanescent, which is really like water,” Mr. Cunningham said in an interview last week. “It can disappear. This is a way of keeping it — at least with our experience here — of keeping it alive.”

The announcement came at a news conference at the dance company’s studio in the West Village. Mr. Cunningham did not attend because, foundation officials said, he was uncomfortable discussing the matter in public. One of the company’s dancers, Daniel Madoff, surrounded by eight colleagues, said, “It deeply saddens us to think about a future without Merce.” But he said the dancers support the plan.

Despite the careful planning, several issues remain unresolved, including what will initiate the transition plan. It certainly goes into effect on Mr. Cunningham’s death, but he could also make the decision beforehand. When asked what might prompt him to do so, he said: “It could be fatigue. It could be a lot of things. Certainly the financial situation could have a great deal to do with it.”

The board of the Cunningham foundation could also make the decision to cease company operations and begin the transfer to the trust, said Allan Sperling, a board member and a lawyer who helped work out the plan.

“It’ll be clear,” Mr. Sperling said, based on Mr. Cunningham’s capacities in the future.

“He’s the key to the whole thing,” Mr. Sperling added, noting that some board members had suggested that the winding down begin now, but that Mr. Cunningham refused.

“I don’t want to drop it,” Mr. Cunningham said. “If necessity makes that happen, all right. But at the moment, I’d like to continue.” At some points in the interview Mr. Cunningham appeared to contradict the documents prepared by the foundation, which included clear references to the company’s eventual closing.

That is the plan, he acknowledged. “But I hope that in its own way it can go on,” he said. “I’m under no illusions about things not changing. I would like it mostly if the ideas we explored were continued, not only with the present people but with other companies.”

Mr. Sperling said Mr. Cunningham had mentioned the possibility of the trust’s keeping on a few dancers to teach his works at other companies.

Mr. Cunningham added that he can accept the company’s future closing. “So if it stops, then it stops,” he said. “I won’t be around. I’m not going to say yes or no.” ”

Then he offered another possibility. “As far as I’m concerned,” he said, “if they close the present company down, they can start building something else.” Another uncertainty is whom Mr. Cunningham will name as successor trustees, and thus who will control his legacy. They are likely to come from his closest associates, who include Robert Swinston, his assistant; Trevor Carlson, the foundation’s executive director; and Laura Kuhn, executive director of the trust for the composer John Cage, Mr. Cunningham’s longtime collaborator and companion.

The plan calls for the Cunningham trust, which was established in 2000, to assume control of Mr. Cunningham’s personal art collection, including works by Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, who each designed sets for him. It will also take charge of the sets, props, costumes, archives and the digital “capsule” of each dance, which will include video, audio, lighting designs, and production notes.

The final two-year tour will offer a “triumphant conclusion to the creation phase of Merce’s work,” a document outlining the plan says.

Mr. Cunningham has stipulated that tickets to New York performances should cost $10.

In the interview Mr. Cunningham acknowledged the fragility of his choreographic record.

“I understand that my pieces, whatever they’re worth, can easily enough be forgotten not only for what they were,” he said, “but because as time continues, something else is happening which changes, which will push dance in different directions.”

Wilhelm Sasnal
02 June 2009 - 11 July 2009
69 South Audley Street and 9 Balfour Mews
London W1

Sadie Coles

The long-beaked echidna is hard to find but easy to appreciate.

By NATALIE ANGIER
NY Times Published: June 8, 2009

If you wanted to push yourself to the outermost chalk line of human endurance, you might consider an ultramarathon, or a solo row across the Atlantic Ocean, or being nominated to the United States Supreme Court.

Or you could try studying the long-beaked echidna, one of the oldest, rarest, shyest, silliest-looking yet potentially most illuminating mammals on earth.

Muse Opiang was working as a field research officer when he became seized by a passion for the long-beaked echidna, or Zaglossus bartoni, which are found only in the tropical rain forests of New Guinea and a scattering of adjacent islands. He had seen them once or twice in captivity and in photographs — plump, terrier-size creatures abristle with so many competing notes of crane, mole, pig, turtle, tribble, Babar and boot scrubber that if they didn’t exist, nobody would think to Photoshop them. He knew that the mosaic effect was no mere sight gag: as one of just three surviving types of the group of primitive egg-laying mammals called monotremes, the long-beaked echidna is a genuine living link between reptiles and birds on one branch, and more familiar placental mammals like ourselves on the next.

Mr. Opiang also knew that, whereas members of the two other monotreme genuses, the duck-billed platypus and short-beaked echidna, had been studied for years — last May, the entire genetic code of the platypus was published to great fanfare — the life of the long-beaked echidna remained obscure and unsung.

“We knew nothing about it,” he said in a phone interview. “Scientists had written that it was impossible to study,” he said, adding with a laugh, “I took that as a challenge.”

In a recent issue of The Journal of Mammalogy, Mr. Opiang offers the first glimpse of the natural history and ecology of an immaculately private nocturnalist with a surprisingly well-endowed brain. And while Mr. Opiang’s report shows that the doubters were technically wrong, the grueling details of his field methods suggest that as a workaday rule, “impossible to study” still suits Zaglossus quite well.

“Muse has amazing perseverance,” said Debra Wright, who was Mr. Opiang’s honors thesis adviser. “I don’t think that anyone else on earth could have done what he did.”

The research and Mr. Opiang’s training were initially supported by the Wildlife Conservation Society of the Bronx Zoo, but Mr. Opiang, who pronounces his first name Moo-say and is now working on his doctorate through the University of Tasmania, has since cofounded his own organization, the Papua New Guinea Institute of Biological Research.

Reproductively, monotremes are like a VCR-DVD unit, an embodiment of a technology in transition. They lay leathery eggs, as reptiles do, but then feed the so-called puggles that hatch with milk — though drizzled out of glands in the chest rather than expressed through nippled teats, and sometimes so enriched with iron that it looks pink.

Monotreme sex determination also holds its allure. In most mammals, a single set of XX chromosomes signifies a girl, a set of XY specifies a boy. For reasons that remain mysterious, monotremes have multiple sets of sex chromosomes, four or more parading pairs of XXs and XYs, or something else altogether: a few of those extra sex chromosomes look suspiciously birdlike. Another avianlike feature is the cloaca, the single orifice through which an echidna or platypus voids waste, has sex and lays eggs, and by which the group gets its name. Yet through that uni-perforation, a male echnida can extrude a four-headed penis.

However they conduct their affairs, monotremes do it remarkably well. Not only are they the oldest surviving mammalian group, but individual monotremes can live 50 years or longer. Peggy Rismiller of the University of Adelaide has studied the short-beaked echidna, or spiny anteater, since 1988. “One of the females we’ve been radiotracking since 1988 is at least 45, and she’s still reproducing,” Dr. Rismiller said.

Dr. Rismiller also pointed out that short-beaked echidnas are Australia’s most widely distributed mammals, adapting to life in the desert, along on the coast, in the rain forest, up above the snowline, all the while feeding on any invertebrates they can disinter. Even in summer they maintain their internal body temperature at a temperate 88 degrees Fahrenheit, and on a winter night they may lapse into a torpor, their core body thermostat dropping down as low as 40 degrees — a cryogenic skill of interest to surgeons and space enthusiasts alike.

Echidnas keep their cool, all right. “They’re one of the most pacifistic mammals,” Dr. Rismiller said. “Nobody bothers them; they don’t bother anybody. There’s a lot we could learn from them.” And in that level head sits a mighty brain. Among humans, the neocortex that allows us to reason and remember accounts for 30 percent of the brain; in echidnas, that figure is 50 percent.

If only they could stand to teach us. Short-beaked echidnas put up with people, however grudgingly, but as Mr. Opiang learned, the long-beaks of New Guinea shun all signs of human habitation, perhaps because, being twice the size of short-beaked echidnas, they are prized as bushmeat by local hunters and their dogs. “They’re not attracted to baits,” he said. “You can’t catch them with traps for tagging.”

To reach them, you must hike for miles into the highlands, on treacherously steep and slippery terrain where it rains 275 inches a year. “It’s one of the wettest places on earth,” Dr. Wright said.

That rain also wipes away signs of echidna foraging and denning. It took Mr. Opiang months of searching before he found his first echidna. Then he discovered that if he followed trails of freshly dug nose pokes at night — the holes that echidnas made with their beaks as they foraged for earthworms — he could find a den where a sated echidna would be hiding. He learned to grab them under the stomach, where there were no spines. “If you hold them against yourself, they’re friendly and they won’t struggle,” he said. Over five years he managed to capture, measure and, in most cases, attach radio transmitters to 22 individuals. Among his intriguing early findings: unlike most mammals, the females are bigger than the males, and the toothless, hairless tubular beaks through which they aim their ribbony tongues are longer, too.

Once again, the long-beaked echidna pokes fun at all the rules.

By Pico Iyer
NY Times Published: June 7, 2009

“The beat of my heart has grown deeper, more active, and yet more peaceful, and it is as if I were all the time storing up inner riches…My [life] is one long sequence of inner miracles.” The young Dutchwoman Etty Hillesum wrote that in a Nazi transit camp in 1943, on her way to her death at Auschwitz two months later. Towards the end of his life, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “All I have seen teaches me to trust the creator for all I have not seen,” though by then he had already lost his father when he was 7, his first wife when she was 20 and his first son, aged 5. In Japan, the late 18th-century poet Issa is celebrated for his delighted, almost child-like celebrations of the natural world. Issa saw four children die in infancy, his wife die in childbirth, and his own body partially paralyzed.

I’m not sure I knew the details of all these lives when I was 29, but I did begin to guess that happiness lies less in our circumstances than in what we make of them, in every sense. “There is nothing either good or bad,” I had heard in high school, from Hamlet, “but thinking makes it so.” I had been lucky enough at that point to stumble into the life I might have dreamed of as a boy: a great job writing on world affairs for Time magazine, an apartment (officially at least) on Park

In the corporate world, I always knew there was some higher position I could attain, which meant that, like Zeno’s arrow, I was guaranteed never to arrive and always to remain dissatisfied.

Avenue, enough time and money to take vacations in Burma, Morocco, El Salvador. But every time I went to one of those places, I noticed that the people I met there, mired in difficulty and often warfare, seemed to have more energy and even optimism than the friends I’d grown up with in privileged, peaceful Santa Barbara, Calif., many of whom were on their fourth marriages and seeing a therapist every day. Though I knew that poverty certainly didn’t buy happiness, I wasn’t convinced that money did either.

So — as post-1960s cliché decreed — I left my comfortable job and life to live for a year in a temple on the backstreets of Kyoto. My high-minded year lasted all of a week, by which time I’d noticed that the depthless contemplation of the moon and composition of haiku I’d imagined from afar was really more a matter of cleaning, sweeping and then cleaning some more. But today, more than 21 years later, I still live in the vicinity of Kyoto, in a two-room apartment that makes my old monastic cell look almost luxurious by comparison. I have no bicycle, no car, no television I can understand, no media — and the days seem to stretch into eternities, and I can’t think of a single thing I lack.

I’m no Buddhist monk, and I can’t say I’m in love with renunciation in itself, or traveling an hour or more to print out an article I’ve written, or missing out on the N.B.A. Finals. But at some point, I decided that, for me at least, happiness arose out of all I didn’t want or need, not all I did. And it seemed quite useful to take a clear, hard look at what really led to peace of mind or absorption (the closest I’ve come to understanding happiness). Not having a car gives me volumes not to think or worry about, and makes walks around the neighborhood a daily adventure. Lacking a cell phone and high-speed Internet, I have time to play ping-pong every evening, to write long letters to old friends and to go shopping for my sweetheart (or to track down old baubles for two kids who are now out in the world).

When the phone does ring — once a week — I’m thrilled, as I never was when the phone rang in my overcrowded office in Rockefeller Center. And when I return to the United States every three months or so and pick up a newspaper, I find I haven’t missed much at all. While I’ve been rereading P.G. Wodehouse, or “Walden,” the crazily accelerating roller-coaster of the 24/7 news cycle has propelled people up and down and down and up and then left them pretty much where they started. “I call that man rich,” Henry James’s Ralph Touchett observes in “Portrait of a Lady,” “who can satisfy the requirements of his imagination.” Living in the future tense never did that for me.

I certainly wouldn’t recommend my life to most people — and my heart goes out to those who
have recently been condemned to a simplicity they never needed or wanted. But I’m not sure how much outward details or accomplishments ever really make us happy deep down. The millionaires I know seem desperate to become multimillionaires, and spend more time with their lawyers and their bankers than with their friends (whose motivations they are no longer sure of). And I remember how, in the corporate world, I always knew there was some higher position I could attain, which meant that, like Zeno’s arrow, I was guaranteed never to arrive and always to remain dissatisfied.

Being self-employed will always make for a precarious life; these days, it is more uncertain than ever, especially since my tools of choice, written words, are coming to seem like accessories to images. Like almost everyone I know, I’ve lost much of my savings in the past few months. I even went through a dress-rehearsal for our enforced austerity when my family home in Santa Barbara burned to the ground some years ago, leaving me with nothing but the toothbrush I bought from an all-night supermarket that night. And yet my two-room apartment in nowhere Japan seems more abundant than the big house that burned down. I have time to read the new John le Carre, while nibbling at sweet tangerines in the sun. When a Sigur Ros album comes out, it fills my days and nights, resplendent. And then it seems that happiness, like peace or passion, comes most freely when it isn’t pursued.

If you’re the kind of person who prefers freedom to security, who feels more comfortable in a small room than a large one and who finds that happiness comes from matching your wants to your needs, then running to stand still isn’t where your joy lies. In New York, a part of me was always somewhere else, thinking of what a simple life in Japan might be like. Now I’m there, I find that I almost never think of Rockefeller Center or Park Avenue at all.

U.S. Border Patrol agents arrested a man attempting to smuggle marijuana ashore on a surfboard. Five packages of marijuana with an estimated street value of $74,400 were found inside a duffel bag the man threw into the water.
The suspect was spotted paddling north about 200 yards off Imperial Beach, near the Mexican border. Agents went into the water to make the arrest.

By Tony Perry
LA Times June 9, 2009

A 30-year-old Mexican national was arrested while trying to smuggle 24 pounds of marijuana ashore on a surfboard, the U.S. Border Patrol said.

The suspect was spotted Sunday morning paddling north about 200 yards off Imperial Beach, near the Mexican border. When agents ordered the surfer to come ashore, he threw a blue duffel bag into the water, the Border Patrol said. Agents went into the water to make the arrest.

The bag later washed ashore, containing five packages of marijuana with an estimated street value of $74,400, agents said. The suspect, whose name was not released, admitted that he was in the U.S. illegally, agents said.

Since Oct. 1, 2008, Border Patrol agents have seized more than 14,000 pounds of marijuana in the San Diego area.

link to dick brewer surfboards / surfboards hawaii

galerie rodolphe janssen

By PERRI KLASS, M.D.
NY Times Published: June 8, 2009

Back in the 1990s, I did a physical on a boy in fifth or sixth grade at a Boston public school. I asked him his favorite subject: definitely science; he had won a prize in a science fair, and was to go on and compete in a multischool fair.

The problem was, there were some kids at school who were picking on him every day about winning the science fair; he was getting teased and jostled and even, occasionally, beaten up. His mother shook her head and wondered aloud whether life would be easier if he just let the science fair thing drop.

Bullying elicits strong and highly personal reactions; I remember my own sense of outrage and identification. Here was a highly intelligent child, a lover of science, possibly a future (fill in your favorite genius), tormented by brutes. Here’s what I did for my patient: I advised his mother to call the teacher and complain, and I encouraged him to pursue his love of science.

And here are three things I now know I should have done: I didn’t tell the mother that bullying can be prevented, and that it’s up to the school. I didn’t call the principal or suggest that the mother do so. And I didn’t give even a moment’s thought to the bullies, and what their lifetime prognosis might be.

In recent years, pediatricians and researchers in this country have been giving bullies and their victims the attention they have long deserved — and have long received in Europe. We’ve gotten past the “kids will be kids” notion that bullying is a normal part of childhood or the prelude to a successful life strategy. Research has described long-term risks — not just to victims, who may be more likely than their peers to experience depression and suicidal thoughts, but to the bullies themselves, who are less likely to finish school or hold down a job.

Next month, the American Academy of Pediatrics will publish the new version of an official policy statement on the pediatrician’s role in preventing youth violence. For the first time, it will have a section on bullying — including a recommendation that schools adopt a prevention model developed by Dan Olweus, a research professor of psychology at the University of Bergen, Norway, who first began studying the phenomenon of school bullying in Scandinavia in the 1970s. The programs, he said, “work at the school level and the classroom level and at the individual level; they combine preventive programs and directly addressing children who are involved or identified as bullies or victims or both.”

Dr. Robert Sege, chief of ambulatory pediatrics at Boston Medical Center and a lead author of the new policy statement, says the Olweus approach focuses attention on the largest group of children, the bystanders. “Olweus’s genius,” he said, “is that he manages to turn the school situation around so the other kids realize that the bully is someone who has a problem managing his or her behavior, and the victim is someone they can protect.”

The other lead author, Dr. Joseph Wright, senior vice president at Children’s National Medical Center in Washington and the chairman of the pediatrics academy’s committee on violence prevention, notes that a quarter of all children report that they have been involved in bullying, either as bullies or as victims. Protecting children from intentional injury is a central task of pediatricians, he said, and “bullying prevention is a subset of that activity.”

By definition, bullying involves repetition; a child is repeatedly the target of taunts or physical attacks — or, in the case of so-called indirect bullying (more common among girls), rumors and social exclusion. For a successful anti-bullying program, the school needs to survey the children and find out the details — where it happens, when it happens.

Structural changes can address those vulnerable places — the out-of-sight corner of the playground, the entrance hallway at dismissal time.

Then, Dr. Sege said, “activating the bystanders” means changing the culture of the school; through class discussions, parent meetings and consistent responses to every incident, the school must put out the message that bullying will not be tolerated.

So what should I ask at a checkup? How’s school, who are your friends, what do you usually do at recess? It’s important to open the door, especially with children in the most likely age groups, so that victims and bystanders won’t be afraid to speak up. Parents of these children need to be encouraged to demand that schools take action, and pediatricians probably need to be ready to talk to the principal. And we need to follow up with the children to make sure the situation gets better, and to check in on their emotional health and get them help if they need it.

How about helping the bullies, who are, after all, also pediatric patients? Some experts worry that schools simply suspend or expel the offenders without paying attention to helping them and their families learn to function in a different way.

“Zero-tolerance policies that school districts have are basically pushing the debt forward,” Dr. Sege said. “We need to be more sophisticated.”

The way we understand bullying has changed, and it’s probably going to change even more. (I haven’t even talked about cyberbullying, for example.) But anyone working with children needs to start from the idea that bullying has long-term consequences and that it is preventable.

I would still feel that same anger on my science-fair-winning patient’s behalf, but I would now see his problem as a pediatric issue — and I hope I would be able to offer a little more help, and a little more follow-up, appropriately based in scientific research.

California is in serious danger of losing 80% of it’s 279-unit state park system. Go here to help.

via anambitiousprojectcollapsing