Fig. 3
2010
jelutong
17.8×17.8×21.6 cm
7×7 x 8.5 ins

Modern Art at Independent
548 West 22nd Street, New York
4 – 7 March, 2010

Modern Art

Paul Krugman and his wife, Robin Wells, at home with their cats, Doris Lessing and Albert Einstein. Photograph by Tina Barney.

by Larissa MacFarquhar
The New Yorker March 1, 2010

When it is cold at home, or he has a couple of weeks with nothing to do but write his Times column, or when something unexpectedly stressful happens, like winning the Nobel Prize, the Princeton economist Paul Krugman and his wife, Robin Wells, go to St. Croix. Here it is warm, and the days are longer, and the phone doesn’t ring much. Here they live in a one-bedroom condo they bought a few years ago, nothing fancy but right on the beach. The condo’s walls are yellow and blue, the furniture is made of wicker, there are pillows and seashells. There are tall, sprawling bougainvillea bushes along the side of the road.

“We first fell in love with St. John,” Krugman says. “It was New York lawyers who’d decided to give up on the whole thing and live on a houseboat and wear their gray ponytails.”

“But St. John went too upscale,” Wells says.

“Our complex is more Midwesterners. Retired car dealers and so on.”

The east end of St. Croix is something of a tourist spot, but the west end, where they decided to settle, is where the Crucians live, and it has a Jimmy Buffett feel to it that they like. In Frederiksted, the west end’s tiny town, there are a couple of coffee shops, a KFC, a Wendy’s, a few churches, a post office, and a promenade by the sea with concrete picnic tables. Not many people about. Farther out along the coast, there are beach bars with plastic chairs and Christmas lights, men with beards and very tanned middle-aged women sitting and smoking in the afternoon.

“The west end is where the whites who’ve gone native live,” Wells says. “They have a couple of beach bars with not very good blues and jazz bands. They were playing Neil Young as we went by the other night, and Paul said, ‘Boy, that was an awful rendition.’ ”

“It was Buffalo Springfield.”

“Yes, Springfield, O.K. I said, ‘Aging boomers, they love any rendition, no matter how bad.’ ”

Here Krugman wears the same shirt for days, a short-sleeved plaid cotton shirt, and bathing trunks. He sits in the room where they eat their breakfast, which has a long window open to the sea. He types at a tiny table that folds out of a closet, which requires him to sit more or less inside the closet, but this is helpful, because the light can be so bright in the room that it becomes blinding. If he turns his head, he can see the sky.

First thing when he wakes up, he checks out a few Web sites, and if he’s not writing his column that day he and Wells will go for a walk on the beach, or they will stroll into Frederiksted and have breakfast at Polly’s, a little coffee shop that serves iced lattes and pretty good egg burritos. If he is writing his column, he will start it on the morning of the day it’s due, and, if the spirit is with him, he will be done soon after lunch. When he has a draft, he gives it to Wells to edit. Early on, she edited a lot—she had, they felt, a better sense than he did of how to communicate economics to the layperson. (She is also an economist—they met when she was a postdoc at M.I.T. and he was teaching there.) But he’s much better at that now, and these days she focusses on making him less dry, less abstract, angrier. Recently, he gave her a draft of an article he’d done for Rolling Stone. He had written, “As Obama tries to deal with the crisis, he will get no help from Republican leaders,” and after this she inserted the sentence “Worse yet, he’ll get obstruction and lies.” Where he had written that the stimulus bill would at best “mitigate the slump, not cure it,” she crossed out that phrase and substituted “somewhat soften the economic hardship that we face for the next few years.” Here and there, she suggested things for him to add. “This would be a good place to flesh out the vehement objections from the G.O.P. and bankers to nationalization,” she wrote on page 9. “Show us all their huffing and puffing before you dismiss it as nonsense in the following graf.”

On the rare occasion when they disagree about something, she will be the one urging him to be more outraged or recalcitrant. She pushed him to denounce the filibuster. She wanted him to be more stubborn in holding out for the public option in the health-care bill. He spent a few sleepless nights wrestling with his conscience about that but ultimately decided that a flawed bill was so much better than no bill at all that he had to support it. “You can get beaten down,” he says. “When Robin and I started writing about health care, single payer was clearly the way to go. And then bit by bit you start saying, ‘O.K., you take what you can get.’ There’s a trap I’ve seen some people fall into—you let your vision of what should be get completely taken over by what appears possible right now—and that’s something I’m trying to avoid.”

In the late afternoon, they lie on beach loungers underneath a clump of sea-grape trees, facing the ocean. Krugman sips a piña colada through a straw and reads the galleys of a book about the financial crisis. They were thinking of having dinner at a place in town, but then they discovered that there was to be an Elvis impersonator singing there, so they decided to go to the Sunset Grill, where the stereo is playing Wings. It’s getting buggy on the beach, and Wells hands Krugman a can of Off. The tide is coming in. Krugman puts his book down, eases himself out of his lounger, and, still wearing his hat and sunglasses, wades cautiously into the sea.

In his columns, Krugman is belligerently, obsessively political, but this aspect of his personality is actually a recent development. His parents were New Deal liberals, but they weren’t especially interested in politics. In his academic work, Krugman focussed mostly on subjects with little political salience. During the eighties, he thought that supply-side economics was stupid, but he didn’t think that much about it. Unlike Wells, who was so upset when Reagan was elected that she moved to England, Krugman found Reagan comical rather than evil. “I had very little sense of what was at stake in the tax issues,” he says. “I was into career-building at that point and not that concerned.” He worked for Reagan on the staff of the Council of Economic Advisers for a year, but even that didn’t get him thinking about politics. “I feel now like I was sleepwalking through the twenty years before 2000,” he says. “I knew that there was a right-left division, I had a pretty good sense that people like Dick Armey were not good to have rational discussion with, but I didn’t really have a sense of how deep the divide went.”

For the first twenty years of Krugman’s adult life, his world was divided not into left and right but into smart and stupid. “The great lesson was the low level of discussion,” he says of his time in Washington. “The then Secretary of the Treasury”—Donald Regan—“was not that bright, and you could have angry exchanges where neither side understood the policy.” Krugman was buoyed and protected in his youth by an intellectual snobbery so robust that distractions or snobberies of other sorts didn’t stand a chance. “When I was twenty-eight, I wouldn’t have had the time of day for some senator or other,” he says.

Krugman’s tribe was academic economists, and insofar as he paid any attention to people outside that tribe, his enemy was stupid pseudo-economists who didn’t understand what they were talking about but who, with attention-grabbing titles and simplistic ideas, persuaded lots of powerful people to listen to them. He called these types “policy entrepreneurs”—a term that, by differentiating them from the academic economists he respected, was meant to be horribly biting. He was driven mad by Lester Thurow and Robert Reich in particular, both of whom had written books touting a theory that he believed to be nonsense: that America was competing in a global marketplace with other countries in much the same way that corporations competed with one another. In fact, Krugman argued, in a series of contemptuous articles in Foreign Affairs and elsewhere, countries were not at all like corporations. While another country’s success might injure our pride, it would not likely injure our wallets. Quite the opposite: it would be more likely to provide us with a bigger market for our products and send our consumers cheaper, better-made goods to buy. A trade surplus might be a sign of weakness, a trade deficit a sign of strength. And, anyway, a nation’s standard of living was determined almost entirely by its productivity—trade was just not that important.

When Krugman first began writing articles for popular publications, in the mid-nineties, Bill Clinton was in office, and Krugman thought of the left and the right as more or less equal in power. Thus, there was no pressing need for him to take sides—he would shoot down idiocy wherever it presented itself, which was, in his opinion, all over the place. He thought of himself as a liberal, but he was a liberal economist, which wasn’t quite the same thing as a regular liberal. Until the late nineties, when he became absorbed by what was going wrong with Japan, he believed that monetary policy, rather than government spending, was all that was needed to avoid recessions: he agreed with Milton Friedman that if only the Fed had done its job better the Great Depression would never have happened. He thought that people who wanted to boycott Nike and other companies that ran sweatshops abroad were sentimental and stupid. Yes, of course, those foreign workers weren’t earning American wages and didn’t have American protections, but working in a sweatshop was still much better than their alternatives—that’s why they chose to work there. Moreover, sweatshops really weren’t the threat to American workers that the left claimed they were. “A back-of-the-envelope calculation . . . suggests that capital flows to the Third World since 1990 . . . have reduced real wages in the advanced world by about 0.15%,” he wrote in 1994. That was not nothing, but it certainly wasn’t anything to get paranoid about. The world needed more sweatshops, not fewer. Free trade was good for everyone. He felt that there was a market hatred on the left that was as dogmatic and irrational as government hatred on the right.

In writing his first popular book, “The Age of Diminished Expectations,” he became preoccupied by the way that inequality had vastly increased in the Reagan years. (Interestingly for an economist, Krugman believes that the political often determines the economic, rather than the other way around; he believes that the increase in inequality in the U.S. since the sixties is a product less of economic factors—the development of technology, say, leading to the greater importance of skills and education—than of political decisions about taxation and unions.) After the book was published, in 1990, various people denied that inequality had increased, and this really annoyed him. He began to get into fights. He was taken aback by the 1994 midterm elections, and during the impeachment hearings he began to think that the Republicans were getting pretty radical, but he still wasn’t angry about it. “Some of my friends tell me that I should spend more time attacking right-wingers,” he wrote in 1998. “The problem is finding things to say. Supply-siders never tire of proclaiming that taxes are the root of all evil, but reasonable people do get tired of explaining, over and over again, that they aren’t.”

Certainly until the Enron scandal, Krugman had no sense that there was any kind of problem in American corporate governance. (He consulted briefly for Enron before he went to the Times.) Occasionally, he received letters from people claiming that corporations were cooking the books, but he thought this sounded so implausible that he dismissed them. “I believed that the market was enforcing,” he says. “I believed in the S.E.C. I just never really thought about it. It seemed like a pretty sunny world in 1999, and, for all of my cynicism, I shared a lot of that. The extent of corporate fraud, the financial malfeasance, the sheer viciousness of the political scene—those are all things that, ten years ago, I didn’t see.”

When the Times approached him about writing a column, he was torn. “His friends said, ‘This is a waste of your time,’ ” Wells says. “We economists thought that we were doing substantive work and the rest of the world was dross.” Krugman cared about his academic reputation more than anything else. If he started writing for a newspaper, would his colleagues think he’d become a pseudo-economist, a former economist, a vapid policy entrepreneur like Lester Thurow? Lester Thurow had become known in certain circles as Less Than Thorough. It was hard to imagine what mean nickname could be made out of Paul Krugman, but what if someone came up with one? Could he take it?

It was the 2000 election campaign that finally radicalized him. He’d begun writing his column the year before, and although his mandate at the outset was economic and business matters, he began paying more attention to the world in general. During the campaign, he perceived the Bush people telling outright lies, and this shocked him. Reagan’s people had at least tried to justify their policies with economic models and rationalizations. Krugman hadn’t believed the models would work, but at least they were there.

After the election, he began to attack Bush’s policies in his column, and, as his outrage escalated, his attacks grew more venomous. Krugman felt that liberals were unwilling to confront or even to acknowledge the anger on the right with some of their own, so he was going to have to do it. “He saw that it had been very, very painful during the nineties to get American fiscal policy in order, and he saw all of that being thrown away callously and with very little thought,” Brad DeLong, a professor of economics at Berkeley, says. “And it turned out to be true that Alan Greenspan was going to meetings at the White House saying we’re going to regret this. Paul was simply six years behind those of us who had worked in the Clinton Administration, who found the collapse of reality-based Republicanism coming much earlier.” Krugman attacked Bush for trying to bankrupt Social Security, for promoting an economically and environmentally disastrous energy policy, for increasing inequality by cutting taxes for the rich and corporations, for using the war on terrorism to conceal his fiscal misdeeds, and for insider trading before he became President. He wrote a brave column on September 16, 2001, arguing that the catastrophe of September 11th was partly self-inflicted, because the government had abandoned airport security—which should be a public service—to be paid for by the airlines, who naturally did it on the cheap.

In return, he received great piles of hate mail. “He’d get threats,” Wells says. “The Times was constantly barraged with complaints. One time on book tour, he was filmed by this crazy right-winger with a video camera. They were getting hold of his student evaluations to find out if he was indoctrinating Princeton’s youth. At one point, I wanted them to put a panic button in Paul’s office. Our garage doors were egged.” Even some people who agreed with him felt that he was too relentlessly partisan for a columnist in a mainstream paper. But on the left he was revered. “The book tour for ‘The Great Unravelling’ was like revival meetings, because so few people were speaking out then,” Krugman says. “There was a great event—it was in Berkeley, which devalues it a bit—but there was this event with a joint appearance by Al Franken, Kevin Phillips, and me, with three thousand people in the audience, and when we walked onstage we got a standing ovation. That would have been 2004.” “I remember one woman saying, ‘I thought I was going crazy until I read you,’ ” Wells says. “He gave a talk for a small bookstore in Marin County, and the town was so small they didn’t have a place big enough to hold it, so they held it in a local church, and they had to open the windows, because people were outside listening.” All of this—the hate and the love—was exciting, and made Krugman realize that what he was doing was important, even though it was only journalism. Wells tried to prevent it from going to his head. “I said to him, ‘You know, life after Bush is going to be different; you won’t be everybody’s darling, because it will be a more sane time.’ ”

In fact, the change came faster than either of them had anticipated, because during the primary campaign Krugman was very critical of Barack Obama. He was critical chiefly because, of the three main candidates, Obama seemed to him the most conservative (his health plan, for instance, didn’t mandate universal coverage), but it wasn’t just his policies that Krugman objected to. He couldn’t stand all the feel-good stuff about hope and dialogue and reconciliation. He hated that Obama was out there saying nice things about Reagan when what Democrats needed to do most was debunk the persistent myth that Reaganomics had been good for America. He thought Obama was completely wrong to believe that the country’s problems were due largely to partisan nastiness, and ridiculously naïve to imagine that he could bring together Republicans and insurance companies to reform health care. “Anyone who thinks that the next president can achieve real change without bitter confrontation is living in a fantasy world,” he wrote in 2007. Krugman supported John Edwards, for his emphasis on poverty, for his ambitious health-care plan, and for his rough talk about attacking the interests of the wealthy. After Edwards dropped out, he supported Hillary Clinton. She wasn’t as left as Edwards was, but at least she was a fighter, and she obviously had no illusions about bipartisan harmony.

But most people didn’t see Obama the way Krugman did; they thought he was the savior of the left, and the passions of the campaign were such that when Krugman wrote columns deriding Obama he was lacerated—scathing comments on the progressive blogs, more hate mail, and not the fun kind. “I won’t try for fake evenhandedness here,” Krugman wrote. “The Obama campaign seems dangerously close to becoming a cult of personality.” “OK, you did it,” one commenter wrote in response. “You lost me. I’ve defended you on local blogs but you’ve sunk into low territory.” “You’re devolving into a caricature with your gross misrepresentations and strident, ignorant defense of the Clinton campaign,” another wrote. “Paul, you’re killing a little bit of your readers’ souls,” a third wrote, “or at least those of us who used to love your column.” “The primary was terrible, it was awful,” Krugman says.

“Paul was getting attacked by people we thought of as on our side,” Wells says. “I thought to myself, Well, I knew things were going to change, but this is quick and hard enough to give you whiplash. One of our friends said, ‘You’d better be careful, because Obama supporters might put rattlesnakes in your mailbox.’ People said, ‘Oh, Paul’s son works in Hillary’s campaign.’ ” (Krugman has no children.) “People were so upset and angry after Bush, they had taken leave of their senses. They wanted to give themselves over, and they resented people like Paul who said, ‘No, don’t give yourselves over, think about what’s going on.’ They wanted to feel that they were being redeemed, and this is what Obama was offering, but he doesn’t have the right or the ability to redeem people; that’s not appropriate.”

Once Obama won the primary, Krugman supported him. Obviously, any Democrat was better than John McCain.

“I was nervous until they finally called it on Election Night,” Krugman says. “We had an Election Night party at our house, thirty or forty people.”

“The econ department, the finance department, the Woodrow Wilson school,” Wells says. “They were all very nervous, so they were grateful we were having the party, because they didn’t want to be alone. We had two or three TVs set up and we had a little portable outside fire pit and we let people throw in an effigy or whatever they wanted to get rid of for the past eight years.”

“One of our Italian colleagues threw in an effigy of Berlusconi.”

“I put out some coloring paper and markers so that people could write stuff on it and throw it into the fire. People really felt like there was stuff they wanted to shed! I had little hats and party whistles.”

In the first few months of the new Administration, Krugman tried to be sympathetic. It was not in his nature to be hopeful or understanding of human frailty, but he tried to be both. Finally, he had a chance to sway people in power. All over Washington, people read his columns and brought up his arguments in meetings. He met the President. He spoke on the phone to Lawrence Summers, the director of the National Economic Council, every month or so. Peter Orszag, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, read his blog every morning. Senators phoned him, to thank him for a column, or to discuss a policy.

People in the Administration were sometimes frustrated by his criticisms. “Paul’s great strength is his pellucid clarity,” Summers says delicately. “The other side of it is that there’s a degree of complexity in the world that a President has to deal with that he sometimes misses in his search for clarity.” But Krugman could also be useful: if he supported something that the left was dubious about—the Senate health-care bill, for instance—he could bring a lot of people around. On the other hand, when, as was more often the case, it was conservatives who were holding out, he had no influence at all. “I was actually in the room when many of the final negotiations”—over the stimulus package—“were done, and there was no way that a larger package would have gotten sixty votes,” an Administration official says. “Regardless of whether he is academically correct, it just wasn’t in the cards.”

“Now that we have people whose goals I share in power, I’ve seen what it actually takes to make policy change happen,” Krugman says. “It’s pretty revelatory. It’s one thing to do opinion pieces about the way things ought to be; it’s another thing to think about, O.K., given the makeup of the U.S. Senate, given the difficulties of getting people on board and of communicating stuff to the public, what can you actually do?”

But by the anniversary of Obama’s Inauguration Krugman felt unhappily vindicated. Obama’s hands-off, conciliatory style drove him crazy, especially when it became clear that his attempts to win over the Republicans had failed. Why wasn’t he more aggressive, more of a leader on health care, rather than leaving the details to endless committees? Krugman wondered. How could he be so passive about it? Why didn’t he fight? “I have to say,” he wrote on his blog a year after the Inauguration, “I’m pretty close to giving up on Mr. Obama.”

These days when Krugman criticizes Obama, commenters on his blog tend to agree with him. He has regained his credibility with the left. There are even some songs about him on YouTube. “Hey, Paul Krugman,” a young guy with closed eyes and an ironically furrowed brow sings, “why aren’t you in the Administration? Is it some kind of politicking that I don’t understand? I mean, Timothy Geithner is like some little weasel. . . . Hey, Paul Krugman, where the hell are you, man?”

Last August, Krugman decided that before he and Wells departed for a bicycle tour of Scotland he would take a couple of days to speak at the sixty-seventh world science-fiction convention, to be held in Montreal. (Krugman has been a science-fiction fan since he was a boy.) At the convention, there was a lot of extremely long hair, a lot of blue hair, and a lot of capes. There was a woman dressed as a cat, there was a woman with a green brain attached to her head with wire, there was a person in a green face mask, there was a young woman spinning wool. There was a Jedi and a Storm Trooper. Those participants who were not dressed as cats were wearing T-shirts with something written on them: “I don’t understand—and I’m a rocket scientist,” “I see dead pixels,” “Math is delicious.” Krugman has always had a nerdy obsession with puns. (He is very proud of a line in one of his textbooks: “Efforts to negotiate a resolution to Europe’s banana split had proved fruitless.”) He also likes costumes. Once, he and Wells gave a Halloween party where the theme was economics topics—two guests came as Asian tigers, several came as hedge funds, one woman came as capital, dressed as a column. Sitting up onstage at the science-fiction convention, Krugman looked happy to be there. It seemed that these were, in some worrying sense, his people.

“Hi, everyone!” he called out.

“Hi!” everyone called back.

Krugman explained that he’d become an economist because of science fiction. When he was a boy, he’d read Isaac Asimov’s “Foundation” trilogy and become obsessed with the central character, Hari Seldon. Seldon was a “psychohistorian”—a scientist with such a precise understanding of the mechanics of society that he could predict the course of events thousands of years into the future and save mankind from centuries of barbarism. He couldn’t predict individual behavior—that was too hard—but it didn’t matter, because history was determined not by individuals but by laws and hidden forces. “If you read other genres of fiction, you can learn about the way people are and the way society is,” Krugman said to the audience, “but you don’t get very much thinking about why are things the way they are, or what might make them different. What would happen if ?”

With Hari Seldon in mind, Krugman went to Yale, in 1970, intending to study history, but he felt that history was too much about what and not enough about why, so he ended up in economics. Economics, he found, examined the same infinitely complicated social reality that history did but, instead of elucidating its complexity, looked for patterns and rules that made the complexity seem simple. Why did some societies have serfs or slaves and others not? You could talk about culture and national character and climate and changing mores and heroes and revolts and the history of agriculture and the Romans and the Christians and the Middle Ages and all the rest of it; or, like Krugman’s economics teacher Evsey Domar, you could argue that if peasants are barely surviving there’s no point in enslaving them, because they have nothing to give you, but if good new land becomes available it makes sense to enslave them, because you can skim off the difference between their output and what it takes to keep them alive. Suddenly, a simple story made sense of a huge and baffling swath of reality, and Krugman found that enormously satisfying.

This was, he discovered later, a development that Keynes had helped to bring about. In the nineteen-twenties and thirties, economics had been more like history: institutional economics was dominant, and, in opposition to neoclassical economics, emphasized the complicated interactions between political, social, and economic institutions and the complicated motives that drove human economic behavior. Then came the Depression, and the one question that people wanted economists to answer was “What should we do?” “The institutionalists said, ‘Well, it’s very deep, it’s complex, I mean, you just talk about what happened in 1890,’ ” Krugman says. “Keynesian economics, which was coming out of the model-based tradition, even if it was pretty loose-jointed by modern standards, basically said, ‘Push this button.’ ” Push this button—print more money, spend more money—and the button-pushing worked. Push-button economics was not only satisfying to someone of Krugman’s intellectual temperament; it was also, he realized later, politically important. Thinking about economic situations as infinitely complex, with any number of causes going back into the distant past, tended to induce a kind of fatalism: if the origins of a crisis were deeply entangled in a country’s culture, then maybe the crisis was inevitable, perhaps insoluble—even deserved.

“What does it mean to do economics?” Krugman asked on the stage in Montreal. “Economics is really about two stories. One is the story of the old economist and younger economist walking down the street, and the younger economist says, ‘Look, there’s a hundred-dollar bill,’ and the older one says, ‘Nonsense, if it was there somebody would have picked it up already.’ So sometimes you do find hundred-dollar bills lying on the street, but not often—generally people respond to opportunities. The other is the Yogi Berra line ‘Nobody goes to Coney Island anymore; it’s too crowded.’ That’s the idea that things tend to settle into some kind of equilibrium where what people expect is in line with what they actually encounter.”

After Yale, Krugman went to graduate school at M.I.T. “M.I.T. in the mid-seventies was a sort of Athens of economics—everybody was there,” he says. “And it was a golden age for clever little models.” Krugman took a class with Rudiger Dornbusch and became interested in international macroeconomics. Bretton Woods—the international system of monetary control established by the Allies during the Second World War—had just collapsed a few years earlier, floating exchange rates had turned out to be much more volatile than anybody expected, and figuring out why turned out to be a fantastically interesting puzzle.

Krugman wrote his thesis on exchange rates, but another class, on international trade, inspired him. “There was this kind of platonic beauty to the whole thing,” he says. “I remember going through the two-by-two-by-two model—two goods, two countries, two factors of production. The way all these pieces fitted together into a Swiss-watch-like mechanism was beautiful. I loved it.” The traditional theory of international trade, first formulated by the British economist David Ricardo, two hundred years ago, explained trade by comparative advantage: a country exported the goods that it could produce most cheaply, owing to whatever advantages it possessed—cheap labor, climate, technological expertise, and so on. It followed from this theory that countries that were the most dissimilar should do the most trade—countries in the Third World dispatching labor-intensive goods to the First World, the First World selling technology- or capital-intensive goods in return. In the years following the Second World War, however, economists had noticed that much international trade didn’t follow this pattern at all. There was a large amount of trade between countries whose economies were extremely similar, and these countries traded goods that were virtually identical: Germany sold BMWs to Sweden and Sweden sold Volvos to Germany. People had speculated about why this should be so, but nobody had come up with a model that explained it in a rigorous manner.

Krugman realized that trade took place not only because countries were different but also because there were advantages to specialization. If one country was the first to begin manufacturing airplanes, say, it might accumulate an advantage in economies of scale so large that it would be difficult for another country to break into the industry later on, even though there might not be anything about the first country that made it particularly well suited to airplane-making. But why would countries trade goods that were almost the same? Because consumers like to have a choice, and, as Avinash Dixit and Joseph Stiglitz had pointed out a few years earlier, the same logic of increasing returns to scale that Krugman had identified as an essential dynamic in trade could apply to a single brand as well as to a whole industry. Krugman presented his theory to the world in the form of a paper at the National Bureau of Economic Research in July, 1979. “The hour and a half in which I presented that paper was the best ninety minutes of my life,” he wrote later. “There’s a corny scene in the movie ‘Coal Miner’s Daughter,’ in which the young Loretta Lynn performs for the first time in a noisy bar, and little by little everyone gets quiet and starts to listen to her singing. Well, that’s what it felt like: I had, all at once, made it.”

One implication of Krugman’s theory was that, contrary to economic orthodoxy, industrial policy might have its benefits. If the location of a new industry was essentially arbitrary, then a government, by subsidizing and protecting its emergence, could enable it to gain such a lasting advantage that other countries would find it difficult to catch up. But Krugman tried to discourage industrial strategists who cited him. For, while in principle industrial policy could be helpful, in practice, he believed, it was so difficult to determine which industry should receive government help, at the expense of all the others—so difficult to predict an industry’s future, and so difficult to determine merit when powerful interests would be trying to influence that determination—that in the end industrial policy would be likely to benefit mostly the owners of a few businesses and hurt everybody else. (Industrial strategists were not convinced. “You have the cases of Japan, Korea, Brazil, China, and, to some extent, France, and the counterfactual—let’s imagine that they didn’t have an industrial policy, would they have produced the same amount of growth?—is unimaginable,” Robert Kuttner, the co-founder and co-editor of The American Prospect, says. “But to be a conventional academic economist you almost have to swear an oath that governments can’t outguess markets in the allocation of capital.”)

Later on, Krugman became interested in economic geography, in the related question of why there were regional specialties—why, in the United States, for instance, were cars produced in Detroit, carpets in Dalton, Georgia, jewelry in Providence, and chips in Silicon Valley? Again, the answer turned out to be history and accident. Once an industry started up in one place, for whatever reason (the carpet industry in Dalton appears to have its origin in a local teen-ager who in 1895 made a tufted bedspread as a wedding present), local workers became trained in its methods, skilled workers from elsewhere moved there, and related businesses sprang up close by. Then, as more skilled labor became available, the industry could grow and benefit from economies of scale. Soon, as long as it didn’t cost too much to transport the industry’s products, the advantages of the place would be such that it would be impractical for someone to open up a similar business anywhere else. Many economists found the idea that economic geography could be so arbitrary “deeply disturbing and troubling,” Krugman wrote, but he found it exciting.

Again, as in his trade theory, it was not so much his idea that was significant as the translation of the idea into mathematical language. “I explained this basic idea”—of economic geography—“to a non-economist friend,” Krugman wrote, “who replied in some dismay, ‘Isn’t that pretty obvious?’ And of course it is.” Yet, because it had not been well modelled, the idea had been disregarded by economists for years. Krugman began to realize that in the previous few decades economic knowledge that had not been translated into models had been effectively lost, because economists didn’t know what to do with it. His friend Craig Murphy, a political scientist at Wellesley, had a collection of antique maps of Africa, and he told Krugman that a similar thing had happened in cartography. Sixteenth-century maps of Africa were misleading in all kinds of ways, but they contained quite a bit of information about the continent’s interior—the River Niger, Timbuktu. Two centuries later, mapmaking had become much more accurate, but the interior of Africa had become a blank. As standards for what counted as a mappable fact rose, knowledge that didn’t meet those standards—secondhand travellers’ reports, guesses hazarded without compasses or sextants—was discarded and lost. Eventually, the higher standards paid off—by the nineteenth century the maps were filled in again—but for a while the sharpening of technique caused loss as well as gain.

Translating unmappable facts into economic discourse, it turned out, was what Krugman was better at than anyone else: he could take an intriguing notion that had come up in real-world discussions, pare away the details (knowing just what to take out and what was essential), and refine what was left into a clean, clever, “cute” (as he liked to put it), and simple model. “It’s poetry,” Kenneth Rogoff, an economist at Harvard, says. “I mean, you go back to his first book and there was this beautiful chart about what the Volcker contraction did to output that swept aside so much—he just drew this little graph which really cleared the air. I’ve heard economists use the word ‘poet’ in describing him for decades.”

Krugman’s theories of trade and economic geography are still taught everywhere. “I think there’s a pretty good case to be made that the stuff that I stressed in the models is a less important story than the things that I left out because I couldn’t model them, like spillovers of information and social networks,” he says. But failure to represent reality accurately is rarely a fatal flaw in an economics model—what’s valued is the model’s usefulness as an analytic tool. The most successful paper Krugman ever wrote was about target zones, and it was completely wrong. In the years before Europe adopted the euro, it was thought that establishing something between floating exchange rates and fixed ones—a “target zone” within which a currency would be allowed to float—might reap some of the advantages of each. He estimates that by the time the paper was officially published, in 1991, some hundred and fifty derivative papers had already appeared. “Empirically, it doesn’t work at all,” Krugman says. “People loved it as an academic thing, but it had some very strong predictions about interest rates inside target zones. Those predictions all turned out to be wrong. But nobody attacked me for that. I was showing that if target zones worked the way that people say they’re supposed to work, then this is how it would play out.”

When they’re not in St. Croix, Krugman and Wells live in a large house on a quiet country road in Princeton with their two cats, Doris Lessing and Albert Einstein. They built the house a few years ago, in a kind of Japanese modern style, with pale wood and horizontal lines and few walls. Next to the living-room area, there is a large empty space where Wells teaches yoga. On Saturday mornings, she teaches a class for, Krugman says, alter kakers (old farts), which he attends; he avoids the classes for somewhat younger and mostly female people that she teaches during the week. In the front of the house is an orderly garden, and in the back the land slopes downhill toward a stream and woods.

“We have a resident fox, and from my office while working I can look out and see the fox trotting across behind the house,” Krugman says.

“We have—what do we call him? Wally? What did we name the blue heron?”

Krugman’s office is a smallish room on the top floor which is usually extremely messy. On the wall over his desk, he has hung a few framed photographs: F.D.R. when young; his parents when young; himself at the White House at a table with Obama, Larry Summers, Timothy Geithner, Jeffrey Sachs, and Joseph Stiglitz; two photographs of himself with congressmen whose identities he has forgotten; Joe Trippi, Howard Dean’s campaign manager, speaking on the phone with a copy of “The Great Unravelling” visible behind his left ear.

Krugman and Wells moved to Princeton from M.I.T. a few years ago, mostly to be closer to their parents. Krugman’s parents were born into families from Belarus and grew up in Brooklyn, pretty poor. Krugman’s father worked at Equitable Life Insurance on Long Island. “I still get a frisson in Penn Station when I hear them announcing the Babylon-line trains,” Krugman says. “It’s like ad jingles from your childhood, you remember it always.” Krugman’s parents now live in a retirement community in New Jersey, Exit 8A.

“Obviously, they’re kvelling, as they would say,” Krugman says. “Somebody from the retirement community actually accosted my father in the supermarket, bitterly saying, ‘Why has your son turned out the way he has and my son turned out the way he has?’ ”

“Your mother used to complain that every time she’d go to the doctor the doctor wanted to talk about you instead of her,” Wells says.

“I think I have actually been getting faster doctor appointments because of this. On the other hand, it’s not always working. My E.N.T. person is actually—I’m gathering, just from stray remarks—pretty conservative.”

Wells’s mother lives even closer than Krugman’s parents, five minutes away. Wells grew up in Dallas. She is African-American, and her older sister went to a segregated school; Wells, who was born in 1959, did not, but her school was bad enough so that college at the University of Chicago was a shock. Thinking about their parents’ old age and their own, Krugman and Wells have also bought an apartment in New York.

“We figured eventually we’ll retire there,” Wells says. “My hairdresser said she’s lost three clients in the past couple of years; they get older and sell everything and move into the city. Maybe that’s what I’ll have to do when my mother finally can’t drive.”

“Oh, gosh.”

“My mother is very independent.”

“Very independent.”

Their apartment in New York is in the same neighborhood as both Jeffrey Sachs’s and Joseph Stiglitz’s, but since they bought it, a few years ago, they haven’t seen either of them. Krugman doesn’t get out much, socially. But he travels constantly, speaking at conferences, speaking for pay, promoting his books. “I’m not a very easygoing person one on one, but put me in front of five hundred people and I get very relaxed and conversational,” he says. Years ago, when he was just an economist, he did a lot of speaking at corporate events. “I wasn’t enjoying those so much,” he says. “One of them was held at a golf course, and I gave the luncheon talk and I was thinking to myself, I could just as well have been a magician. And then, at dinner, they did have a magician!” These days, the Times forbids him to do gigs like that, to avoid conflicts of interest, but his book publisher sends him all over the place. “I don’t sell as many books as Tom Friedman does,” Krugman says. “That’s O.K. Tom gives you this, you know, ‘I was talking to somebody in Bangalore and this is what I saw.’ That’s a skill I don’t have.” Perhaps this is fortunate, because he finds book tours exhausting.

“Twenty-five cities in forty days,” he says. “The mechanics of washing up in hotel sinks because you’re not in any hotel long enough to use their laundry.”

It’s not so much the washing as the drying that presents a problem. Years of experiments have failed to yield a satisfactory solution. Krugman has discovered that it is slow and quite risky to use a hair dryer with any item that involves elastic. Long ago, in Tel Aviv, his roommates found him attempting to dry his underwear in a frying pan.

“The trick with underwear is to wring it out and then press down—”

“I learned this from yoga workshops,” Wells says. “You get out as much excess water as you can, then you lay a dry towel flat on the floor, you lay the article of clothing on the towel, and roll it up like this—”

“And then it’s only slightly damp in the morning when you have to put it on.”

“No, it’s usually dry. We also do that on bike trips.”

“Because you can’t take forty pairs of underwear.”

“Not in carry-on.”

Krugman is not a keen traveller. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, many of his contemporaries set off for Eastern Europe—every economist wanted his own personal country to transition. Jeffrey Sachs, in particular, was all over the place, but Krugman was never tempted. “I know what Jeff does and I couldn’t do it,” he says. “Taking transport planes, living on yak meat for days—no. But I do write faster than anybody. You’ve got to figure out what you should be doing.”

“Paul is very good at protecting his sense of who and what he is,” Wells says. “I think that’s why he married me. He has a sense of what he’s good at and he sticks with that.” For this reason, even in the unlikely event that he were to be offered Larry Summers’s job, Krugman says he would turn it down. “I mean, I’d have to think really, really hard, because you don’t turn something like that down lightly, but I think I’m actually more effective doing what I’m doing,” he says. “You have to be an inside fighter, all of the negotiations, making sure you’re keeping the ear of the guy in charge. I don’t think I’m very good at that. Larry maybe has his shirttails hanging out, but he gets stuff done in an orderly fashion. I can organize my thoughts, but I can’t organize my office and I certainly can’t organize other people.”

Unlike most well-known academics, Krugman has never had many graduate students. He is unsure why this is so. Is it that his style of thinking, intuitive rather than methodological, is too difficult to imitate? he wonders. Is he too distracted? Too busy? Too short? Whatever the reason, it has become clear that his legacy will not be perpetuated in the usual way by a diaspora of little Krugmans, so, if his name is to survive, it is up to him. His papers and books, of course, are the main thing, but in recent years Krugman has also spent a great deal of time distilling his views into an undergraduate textbook. When he first signed the contract to write it, in 1994, he did it mostly for the money. Then he did no work on it for years. Finally, his publisher told him that he had to get moving, that he should work with a co-author who was better organized and more highly motivated than he was, and suggested his wife. It took them five years of intense work to write the first edition.

“It’s excruciatingly hard,” Wells says.

“You have to put yourself back in the mind of an eighteen-year-old,” Krugman says. “And it has to be impeccable. If you’re writing an academic paper, if you have some stuff that’s blurrily written, that won’t do too much harm. If you write a newspaper article and a third of the readers don’t get it, that’s a success. But a textbook has to be perfect.”

Even though they were doing it mostly for the money, they knew that, for the students who read it, their textbook might be the only time in their lives that they were exposed to proper economic thinking, which of course would have an influence on their political thinking.

“The books we’re competing with tend to be much more rah-rah about the market,” Wells says. “That’s partly because that reflects the views of the author, but also because it’s easy to do it that way—you just find where the lines cross and everybody’s happy. It’s more difficult to talk about how markets fail.”

“The trend when we were putting the latest edition together was to have less and less about the business cycle, and we said, ‘No, this is wrong, the business-cycle sections are still important,’ ” Krugman says. “That turns out to have been a really good bet.”

“We were the only textbook that incorporated the financial crisis, as we were chronically late. We were supposed to have the manuscript delivered in August or September, and by October we were still working, and we just said, ‘We can’t send it out like this, too much is going on.’ We were really in nail-biting territory, because you have to get it to the printers by a certain date or you miss the academic year.”

“We were right in the middle of that when the Nobel Prize committee called, and Robin’s reaction was ‘We don’t have time for this!’ The stress of the week or so after the announcement was crazy, so we actually went off to St. Croix. We were working frantically.”

“Even in Sweden, I was working on pages.”

When they wrote the first edition, they divided the labor according to their specialties, Krugman writing all the macro chapters, Wells writing some of the micro material.

“I’m more micro,” Wells says. “Micro people tend to be wannabe mathematicians, whereas macroeconomists tend to be more policy and real-world oriented. You have to be tolerant of a lot more ambiguity in macro than in micro.”

“In micro, the rules of the game are clear,” Krugman says. “Of course, you can do stuff that involves people not being fully rational, but the bulk of it is the full neoclassical thing, rational individuals interacting with markets that are either perfectly competitive or imperfectly competitive in well-defined ways, whereas macro tends to be a lot of ad-hoc stuff. You say, ‘I have to make this assumption about what’s going on, which I can’t fully justify in terms of the micro foundations, but I’ll make it anyway, because it seems to fit what happens.’ ”

To some extent, this difference also maps onto the divide between the “freshwater” and “saltwater” schools of thought in macroeconomics. Freshwater economists—who live near lakes, particularly at the University of Chicago, but also in Rochester and Minneapolis—are more likely to insist that macroeconomics be based on microeconomic foundations, which is to say that one should study large phenomena like recessions and inflation as functions of the behavior of many perfectly rational individuals. A freshwater economist might argue, for instance, that debt-financed government spending to stimulate the economy won’t have a significant effect, because people will realize that they will have to pay off that debt with higher taxes in the future, and so will save more in anticipation, leaving net spending essentially unchanged. Saltwater economists—who are to be found in coastal areas, especially at M.I.T., Harvard, and Berkeley—are more likely to allow that, at this stage of our understanding, it is excusable to study some macro phenomena without giving a complete account of their causal logic. Saltwater types are also more likely to include irrationality or other market imperfections in their models: they believe, for instance, that since it is clearly the case that prices do not fall immediately following a decline in demand but tend to be “sticky,” you should incorporate this fact, even if you haven’t yet got an account of why it should be so. It isn’t that freshwater types believe that actual people are perfectly rational—they just believe that making that assumption enables a more rigorous economics than is possible without it. After all, while there is only one way to be perfectly rational, there are an infinite number of ways to be irrational, and how do you choose? It all begins to look awfully arbitrary.

Last fall, Krugman wrote an article for the Times Magazine, “How Did Economists Get It So Wrong?,” about the profession’s failure to anticipate the financial crisis, and what that revealed about its failings in general. He accused his colleagues of mistaking beauty for truth. They were so enamored of the elegance of their models and the consistency of their logic, he wrote, that they had come to believe that assumptions that were originally adopted merely as tools (perfectly rational individuals, efficient markets) by Milton Friedman’s generation were so sacrosanct that economics wasn’t economics without them. Freshwater types, in particular, had forgotten the Depression, forgotten what Keynes had said about the resemblance of financial markets to casinos. So attached were they to the idea that markets always got things right that some actually suggested that unemployment must be a consequence of workers’ choosing not to work. Saltwater economists were less blinkered in their view of markets and the rationality of investors, Krugman wrote (Larry Summers, a saltwater type, once began a paper on finance by declaring “THERE ARE IDIOTS. Look around”), and had retained a Keynesian view of recessions as crises of insufficient demand. But even saltwater models had no room for such wild imperfections as bubbles and banking-system collapse. “Economists will have to learn to live with messiness,” Krugman concluded.

Reactions to his article were quick and outraged. “Who are these economists who got it so wrong?” a Washington University economist, David Levine, wrote. “Speak for yourself kemo sabe. . . . It makes me feel physically ill that a distinguished economist could be so ignorant of his own profession.” “How sad,” John Cochrane, of the University of Chicago, wrote. “Don’t argue with them, swift-boat them. Find some embarrassing quote from an old interview. Well, good luck, Paul. Let’s just not pretend that this has anything to do with economics.” Levine and Cochrane maintained that the fact that freshwater economists had failed to predict the financial crisis was not an embarrassment to their theories but a confirmation of them: “The central empirical prediction of the efficient markets hypothesis is precisely that nobody can tell where markets are going—neither benevolent government bureaucrats, nor crafty hedge-fund managers, nor ivory-tower academics,” Cochrane wrote. If professional economists failed to predict or understand the crisis, how could it make sense for Krugman to argue that bureaucrats would do a good job of curing it?

Krugman was bemused by the reactions. True, he had accused Chicago economists of espousing ridiculous ideas in part because of financial incentives—sabbaticals at the Hoover Institution, job opportunities on Wall Street. But when those economists responded with anger he was surprised. “There was no personal invective in what I wrote,” he says. “I never insulted anybody’s personality. It was always at the level of ideas.” Krugman has a peculiar blind spot when it comes to scorn. Even as he delights in the scorn of others (a recent blog post was titled “Today in Exquisite Insults”), he imagines himself to be a rather dry, abstract writer who takes little interest in individuals. There is, it’s true, an understanding in some parts of academia that calling a colleague’s ideas stupid is not supposed to be taken personally, but Krugman goes well beyond this.

Insults may have done some damage to his career over the years. Shortly after Clinton was elected President, Krugman attended an economic summit in Little Rock and then went on “Larry King Live” and called it “useless.” This, along with his relentless criticisms of Robert Reich, may have been what kept him from the chairmanship of Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers. Although Krugman doesn’t always appreciate the effects of his mockery, he does realize that he is not a sugar-tongued, diplomatic sort of guy, and he has incorporated this fact into his self-image. “Paul is really averse to being drawn into a social network, to being groomed,” Wells says. “He doesn’t go to Washington because he doesn’t want to fall into that. As a spouse, you have your little list of things that you jokingly won’t forgive your spouse for. Right after he started writing for the Times and attacking George Bush, we got an invitation to have dinner with Paul Newman and his wife, but he wouldn’t go. And now he’s dead.”

“It was inconvenient,” Krugman says. “I just don’t get any joy out of thinking, Oh, here I am with the movers and shakers. It would have required really discombobulating my schedule just to be able to say I’d had dinner with Paul Newman, and it’s not worth it.”

“Dimon was really stupid this morning,” Krugman said. He was thinking about writing his column the next day about the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission. He had read an account of the congressional hearings in the newspaper which quoted Jamie Dimon, the C.E.O. of JPMorgan Chase, and Lloyd Blankfein, the C.E.O. of Goldman Sachs, saying things so clueless, so insensitive, and so comprehensively boneheaded that even he, not inclined to think well of them, could hardly believe it, and so he had spent that morning vainly hunting for the transcript to see if there was something mitigating about the context that the article had missed. Dimon had commented that financial crises were just things that happened every few years; Blankfein had compared the crisis to an act of God, like a hurricane. Krugman was curious to know whether these giants of Wall Street understood what they’d done wrong. There was a callousness coming through, he felt. Still, in the end, the spectacle wasn’t that satisfying, because this wasn’t the Pecora Commission, of the thirties, which led to the passing of the Glass-Steagall Act. It was probably just a bit of Kabuki that would end in not much.

Why was it so politically difficult to reregulate the banks? he wondered. Why couldn’t the Administration harness the populist outrage? What good had Wall Street ever done for America? “There must be something useful in there, but it is really hard to see what,” he says. “That’s everybody’s challenge: come up with a clearly beneficial example of financial innovation without mentioning A.T.M.s, and no one can do it. If there are arbitrage opportunities and you’re able to spot them a few seconds before anybody else, you can make a lot of money, but there’s no actual social gain from doing that. We’ve tried talking to our friends in finance, and they say, ‘Liquidity, liquidity, liquidity.’ Well, there is some social loss if people are hanging on to a lot of idle cash, so the financial system, by providing liquid assets that provide a pretty good yield, is supposed to deal with that. But it turns out that, just when you need it most, that liquidity froze.”

Krugman and Wells pulled out of the stock market ten years ago and never went back.

“It just takes a lot of work to think about it,” Krugman says, “and at no point—except maybe early 2009, if I’d been really feeling daring, stocks really did look cheap—”

“We bought a couple of things,” Wells says. “We bought muni bonds and some Ford Motor bonds. The thing is, if you look at it on a historical basis, even back in the two-thousands, stocks are not cheap.”

“They were a good deal when the average price-earnings ratio for stocks was thirteen or fourteen, but now, except at the very bottoms of recent swings, it’s been over twenty, which means that historical rules probably don’t apply anymore. Stocks used to be undervalued.”

“I made some money and lost some in the Internet bubble,” Wells says. “You told me to sell and I didn’t sell, and I should have sold, and I never want to go through that feeling again.”

“Let’s put it this way. I can have fairly high confidence—it’s a personality thing—that a market is overvalued. Somehow I never have the same confidence in saying that it’s undervalued.”

The crisis should have been a lesson to people not to rush into investments that they didn’t understand, but Krugman suspects that it wasn’t. “It hasn’t been the searing experience,” he says. “A lot of people got burned, but I’m not sure that they’ll remember. You really have to have a Depression mentality to say, ‘I’d rather have cash or Treasury bills that yield almost nothing, rather than this product that my banker assures me is perfectly safe and yields two per cent.’ So, unless there’s a lot more regulation, we could do this again.” Krugman had been getting more and more pessimistic about the possibilities for recovery. Already, incredibly, people seemed to be forgetting that America’s economy had nearly collapsed, and the usual critics of deficit spending and those who did not share his sanguine attitude toward inflation were speaking up again. He’d been reading a book that amassed data from eight hundred years of economic history, and the lesson he took from it was that, in a financial crisis, being an advanced country was no protection. He’d thought that it was only in the Third World that crises dragged on and on, but it turned out that Finland and Sweden had suffered slumps as long as Indonesia’s.

“Did Blankfein say anything?” Wells asked.

“He was really guarded.”

“He probably figured the pitchforks were waiting for him.”

“I was reading his prepared testimony just now and it is mind-numbingly dull. I couldn’t find a thing to quote in it.”

“Well, that’s the point.”

“That’s the point, I know.”

Krugman doesn’t know how long he’ll be writing his column. Maybe he’ll get tired of it, maybe the Times will kick him out, who knows. But, after the column, then what? He’s checked off pretty much all the career boxes, he reckons. There are some big questions in development that he’d like to think seriously about. “How is it that most of the world remains so poor?” he says. “That was the old mystery. The new mystery is ‘Why is it that every once in a while it’s as if somebody turned on a switch and some previously hapless country suddenly goes soaring?’ ”

But it’s been a long time—years now—since he did any serious research. Could he, still? “I’d like to get back to it,” he says. “I’m craving the chance to do some deep thinking, and I haven’t been doing a lot of that. I guess doing the really creative academic work does require a state of mind that’s hard to maintain throughout your whole life. Even Paul Samuelson—the bulk of the stuff you read from him is before he was fifty. There was an intensity of focus that I had when I was twenty-six that I won’t be able to recapture at fifty-six. You develop your habits of mind, and to a point that’s a good thing, because you learn ways to work, but it does mean that you’re less likely to come up with something really innovative. Even if I weren’t doing all this other stuff, I don’t think I’d be producing a lot of breakthrough papers. There’s crude stuff: if I do have some brilliant academic insight, what are they going to do, give me a Nobel Prize? . . . When I was younger, when I figured something out there was this sense of the heavens parting and the choirs singing that I don’t get now. And that’s life.”

For someone else, this loss might be a devastation, but even though for thirty years thinking deeply about economics was all Krugman really cared about, he has let it pass out of his life without regret. “I think he’s happy,” his friend Craig Murphy says. “A much happier person now than when we first met him. He feels like he’s done good things, and they’re greater than what he expected when he was young. If there is sadness in him at all, I think it is a tiny core of profound sadness of the kind that the Buddha understood—that we probably can’t use human rationality to make the world all better, and it would be really nice if we were able to.” ♦

February 6 - April 17, 2010

Mathew Marks

via

Seven Faces
February 27 – April 3, 2010
Opening reception: Saturday, February 27, 2010, 6 – 8 pm

blum and poe

also be sure to see matt connors show across the street. same opening night and time.
cherry and martin

By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Times Published: February 21, 2010

O.K., the beast is starving. Now what? That’s the question confronting Republicans. But they’re refusing to answer, or even to engage in any serious discussion about what to do.

For readers who don’t know what I’m talking about: ever since Reagan, the G.O.P. has been run by people who want a much smaller government. In the famous words of the activist Grover Norquist, conservatives want to get the government “down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.”

But there has always been a political problem with this agenda. Voters may say that they oppose big government, but the programs that actually dominate federal spending — Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security — are very popular. So how can the public be persuaded to accept large spending cuts?

The conservative answer, which evolved in the late 1970s, would be dubbed “starving the beast” during the Reagan years. The idea — propounded by many members of the conservative intelligentsia, from Alan Greenspan to Irving Kristol — was basically that sympathetic politicians should engage in a game of bait and switch. Rather than proposing unpopular spending cuts, Republicans would push through popular tax cuts, with the deliberate intention of worsening the government’s fiscal position. Spending cuts could then be sold as a necessity rather than a choice, the only way to eliminate an unsustainable budget deficit.

And the deficit came. True, more than half of this year’s budget deficit is the result of the Great Recession, which has both depressed revenues and required a temporary surge in spending to contain the damage. But even when the crisis is over, the budget will remain deeply in the red, largely as a result of Bush-era tax cuts (and Bush-era unfunded wars). And the combination of an aging population and rising medical costs will, unless something is done, lead to explosive debt growth after 2020.

So the beast is starving, as planned. It should be time, then, for conservatives to explain which parts of the beast they want to cut. And President Obama has, in effect, invited them to do just that, by calling for a bipartisan deficit commission.

Many progressives were deeply worried by this proposal, fearing that it would turn into a kind of Trojan horse — in particular, that the commission would end up reviving the long-standing Republican goal of gutting Social Security. But they needn’t have worried: Senate Republicans overwhelmingly voted against legislation that would have created a commission with some actual power, and it is unlikely that anything meaningful will come from the much weaker commission Mr. Obama established by executive order.

Why are Republicans reluctant to sit down and talk? Because they would then be forced to put up or shut up. Since they’re adamantly opposed to reducing the deficit with tax increases, they would have to explain what spending they want to cut. And guess what? After three decades of preparing the ground for this moment, they’re still not willing to do that.

In fact, conservatives have backed away from spending cuts they themselves proposed in the past. In the 1990s, for example, Republicans in Congress tried to force through sharp cuts in Medicare. But now they have made opposition to any effort to spend Medicare funds more wisely the core of their campaign against health care reform (death panels!). And presidential hopefuls say things like this, from Gov. Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota: “I don’t think anybody’s gonna go back now and say, Let’s abolish, or reduce, Medicare and Medicaid.”

What about Social Security? Five years ago the Bush administration proposed limiting future payments to upper- and middle-income workers, in effect means-testing retirement benefits. But in December, The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page denounced any such means-testing, because “middle- and upper-middle-class (i.e., G.O.P.) voters would get less than they were promised in return for a lifetime of payroll taxes.” (Hmm. Since when do conservatives openly admit that the G.O.P. is the party of the affluent?)

At this point, then, Republicans insist that the deficit must be eliminated, but they’re not willing either to raise taxes or to support cuts in any major government programs. And they’re not willing to participate in serious bipartisan discussions, either, because that might force them to explain their plan — and there isn’t any plan, except to regain power.

But there is a kind of logic to the current Republican position: in effect, the party is doubling down on starve-the-beast. Depriving the government of revenue, it turns out, wasn’t enough to push politicians into dismantling the welfare state. So now the de facto strategy is to oppose any responsible action until we are in the midst of a fiscal catastrophe. You read it here first.

Michael Maltzan’s recent project includes the Carver Apartments, standing amid old warehouses and an elevated portion of the 10 Freeway in Los Angeles.

By NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF
NY Published: February 18, 2010

LOS ANGELES

LIKE almost every other American architect who came to prominence in the recent gilded age, Michael Maltzan built his reputation with commissions for prestigious museums and luxurious private houses. In 2002 he garnered national attention for his graceful design for the temporary Museum of Modern Art in Queens. His most recent projects include a flying-saucer-like house for the artists Lari Pittman and Roy Dowell in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains and a far grander, 28,000-square-foot Beverly Hills mansion — part art gallery, part home — for the investor and former Hollywood über-agent Michael Ovitz.

Yet Mr. Maltzan may be the only American architect of his stature with significant experience in a far less glamorous field: providing shelter and other accommodations for his city’s poor. Over the past 16 years he has worked on several housing projects for the homeless and an arts complex for underprivileged children that are remarkable for their architectural sophistication and their spirit of public service.

His newest building, the Carver Apartments, a drum-shaped residential complex, strikes a tricky balance between two fundamental and often conflicting needs of the chronically homeless, for a sense of being protected, on the one hand, and regular human contact on the other. His next project, an elegant composition of prefabricated blocks that is still in the design phase, could make that nuanced approach available to many more people. Together these designs deliver a major blow to the conventional notion of contemporary architecture as little more than an indulgence of the rich or highly cultured.

Mr. Maltzan stumbled into the role of socially conscious architect. He arrived in Los Angeles in 1988 and was soon working for Frank Gehry, then still a cult figure for young architects looking for a way out of the malaise of postmodernism. In 1993, while at work on the early stages of the Walt Disney Concert Hall design, Mr. Maltzan was approached by Irwin Jaeger, a businessman, and Bob Bates, an artist, to look at a garbage-strewn lot at the edge of Skid Row where they were planning to build a home for Inner City Arts, an after-school program.

The project became Mr. Maltzan’s first solo commission. A complex of studio spaces clustered around landscaped courtyards, its sculptured white stucco buildings and raw interiors evoked the lyrical architectural forms of Alvaro Siza as well as the sculptural compositions of Mr. Gehry’s work, suggesting a young architect easing into his own voice.

It also demonstrated an unusual sensitivity for those who taught and worked there. The comforting scale of the gardens and studios, animated by light funneling through big skylights and windows set at the eye level of a small child, imbue these spaces with a warmth that is rare in low-budget construction.

The project attracted the attention of the Skid Row Housing Trust, an organization dedicated to providing permanent homes for the most vulnerable members of the downtown homeless population — people with a combination of disabling conditions like drug addictions, mental illnesses and physical disabilities who had drifted in and out of shelters for years.

Mr. Maltzan’s first building for the trust, the Rainbow apartment complex, is surrounded by Skid Row’s sprawling encampments. To shelter the tenants from the nearby misery, Mr. Maltzan oriented its 87 apartments around a big ceremonial staircase and an outdoor courtyard. From a shared top-floor terrace, tenants look over toward the glittering towers of the business district a few blocks away, which in this neighborhood can sometimes seem an unreachable oasis of prosperity and calm. The project, completed in 2006, offered a sharp contrast to the soul-crushing atmosphere of more typical homeless shelters, from which many of its tenants had been plucked.

“People who are in the shelter-shuttle, going from one to another, are relatively anonymous,” said Mike Alvidrez, the housing trust’s director. “And in an old-fashioned S.R.O., you’re sealed off from the outside and each other. Rainbow spawned this whole interaction between people who didn’t know one another.

“You never know what form it’s going to take,” he added. The kitchen opens onto the courtyard, for example, which promotes outdoor gatherings; the courtyard’s planters spawned a gardening club; the community room gave rise to yoga classes and other activities. There are now 15 to 20 clubs operating in the complex.

By the time Mr. Alvidrez hired Mr. Maltzan to design the Carver Apartments, a 97-unit building on a corner about a mile away, the group’s architectural ambitions had grown in scope.

“Rainbow triggered a lot of ideas,” Mr. Alvidrez said. “What we started to learn is how the design can help people get stabilized as a community. For us the building became part of the recovery.”

The Carver Apartments were designed to serve the same population as Rainbow, but the context of the new building raises distinct challenges. It stands in the middle of a neighborhood of dilapidated warehouses and empty lots, with an elevated section of the 10 Freeway pressing up against it to the south. On a recent weekday morning the only sign of life on the ground was a homeless man silently setting down his shoes just outside his tent underneath a freeway on-ramp.

At first glance the building seems to hold itself somewhat aloof from this setting. Its crisp white cylindrical exterior is broken into a series of saw-tooth-like vertical ridges. A pattern of narrow horizontal and vertical windows, designed to keep out the noise and exhaust fumes, contributes to its slightly defensive air.

As Mr. Maltzan explained the first time we toured the site: “One of the first things people do when they live on the street is put up walls around themselves to try to create some feeling of safety. You need to provide those walls before you can start to open things back up.”

He brings the same level of architectural intelligence to those walls that he does to the design of a mogul’s house. The building’s curved facade, for example, mirrors the curve of the freeway on-ramp, so that as you approach along one of the two streets that border it, the curves seem to converge, creating a sense of acceleration and pulling you around to the front of the building. When you reach the main entrance, the momentum slows, and the scene becomes more peaceful. The faceted concrete box of the lobby pushes out toward the sidewalk as if to invite you inside.

The anticipation builds once again as you move toward the building’s central courtyard, a dreamy cylindrical space that is dominated by a grand staircase. A ring of sheet-metal fins climb the full height of the space, accentuating its vertical thrust, and your eye intuitively follows them up past several rows of balconies to a perfect circle of California sky.

The sense of compression brings to mind the “social condensers” created by Soviet avant-garde architects in the 1920s, communal spaces designed as a means of breaking down bourgeois individualism. But the courtyard has more to do with psychological healing than with utopianism. It is an inner sanctuary meant to nurture a sense of security — not mass conformity.

To keep this feeling from becoming too suffocating, Mr. Maltzan makes a series of bold cuts through other parts of the building, creating surprising visual connections to the world outside. A counter in the communal kitchen, for example, lines up with a slot that runs diagonally through the entire ground floor, framing views of the freeway’s underbelly on one end and back toward Skid Row on the other.

The most unexpected of these views is in the laundry and community room on the third floor. Conceived as the building’s domestic heart, the room overlooks a section of the elevated freeway through a long horizontal window. The window is made of acoustical glass, so that even at midday the noise is reduced to a soft hum. But it is so close to the passing cars that at rush hour, when traffic is barely moving, tenants and drivers can make direct and prolonged eye contact. Late at night, when the freeway is nearly empty, the cars flow by in a dreamy rhythm.

It’s a witty, even poetic moment, one that captures the dueling essences of Los Angeles: the promise of freedom and opportunity embodied by its freeways and the degree to which that promise has turned out to be a fantasy.

But Mr. Maltzan’s housing experiments also suggest another way of thinking about the city. For much of the 20th century many architects vehemently believed in the world-changing power of their art. The age of mass production would create light-filled environments, sweeping away the squalor of urban slums. A profession that had traditionally served an aristocratic elite would now raise up the masses.

That dream, of course, collapsed decades ago, a victim of corrupting political and economic forces, mediocre talents and its own ideological rigidity. In its final days it was reduced to a few dehumanizing formulas for generic housing blocks and office towers. A generation of architects never recovered from the trauma.

Like others who were raised in the postmodern era, Mr. Maltzan is not directly invested in that history. Nor is he interested in coming up with a new ideological formula. His idea of progress is incremental — the kind that can be tested through careful observation of everyday experiences. His aim has been to find a rhythm that accounts for the often conflicting needs of the human condition.

The Carver Apartments are the next step in this quest. The building not only manages to provide a feeling of security while easing the crippling sense of isolation that can often afflict the homeless; it also makes visible, through its strong architectural form, a group of people that many in our society would often prefer to ignore.

Thanks to Nate Lentz

Christopher Walken agened 12 entertains local children outside his home in Long Island in 1955

Interview by Christopher Walken
The Independent UK
Saturday, 20 February 2010

Seeing him sitting in a shady corner of a hotel suite in Marrakesh, it is difficult to tell where the real Christopher Walken ends and the on-screen persona begins, and today he seems to have set out deliberately to blur the boundaries.

Outside, the sun is blazing. Inside, Walken, whey-faced, lupine, with inscrutable blue eyes and an open-mouthed smile that reveals a pair of shark-like incisors, looks bloodless, like a vampiric creature whose skin hasn’t felt the sun in years.

The battered black suit jacket he is wearing is a kleptomaniac’s trophy from The Comfort of Strangers, the film adaptation of Ian McEwan’s novel. It belonged to his character, Robert, a depraved Italian aristocrat with extreme sexual tastes and murderous tendencies – and Walken has recycled it for real life.

He has been stealing clothes for years, he tells me, all from the dressing-room wardrobes of the cavalcade of sinister characters he has played. His on-screen villains have always dressed well.

“I never buy clothes,” he says, tugging at what must have been at the time of filming – in 1990 – a slick new double-breasted jacket. “Whenever I do a movie, all my clothing is from that movie set. They don’t give me anything. I steal…”

One wonders if he has, on even less restrained days, donned his “suicidal soldier” look from The Deer Hunter, or the mid-western plaid shirt of the wild-eyed brother from Annie Hall, or even the gothic raiments of his headless horsemen from Sleepy Hollow.

“Well, when I was in Batman Returns, I wore very interesting things. On my last day of shooting, I had already thought of the things I was going to take; there were some very interesting cufflinks, a bow tie… When I finished the last scene I went back to my dressing room and everything was gone. They saw me coming…”

Walken, who is now 66, is at the Marrakesh Film Festival to receive a lifetime achievement award; with more than a hundred film appearances, the honour has set him to reflection. “I feel a hundred years old,” he quips, his face widening into that shark-like smile.

Walken is, like Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing before him, a sinister-looking man who has made a living from looking – and acting – sinister. Even his famous, maniacal dance in the video to Fatboy Slim’s single, “Weapon of Choice” – which introduced him to a slew of young urban fans who had never seen his films – inspires as many chills as chortles.

So it is hard, perhaps even preposterous, to imagine the Walken of today playing the good guy. Yet as a fresh-faced actor at the start of his career, he was very nearly cast as Han Solo, the intergalactic Everyman and force for good in the Star Wars franchise – although, of course, George Lucas eventually plumped for Harrison Ford.

Walken’s career trajectory – starting benignly enough in children’s commercials, musicals and dance – took a darker turn two years after his near-miss with Star Wars.

In 1978, he was cast as the emotionally decimated Vietnam veteran in Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter, and was immortalised in the “Russian roulette” scene as a gaunt, bug-eyed madman aiming a shaking revolver to his own head. The role won him an Oscar and led to assembly-line casting in an array of deranged, demonic parts over the next three decades.

He appears unconcerned today with that missed opportunity to star as an inter-stellar good guy, but says he does draw a line in the sand when it comes to playing morally bankrupt villains. “I have always refused to do something that has offended me. I have been offered potential roles that are totally vulgar,” he explains.

All except one role. Among the pantheon of psychopaths and suicidal misfits that Walken has played in his time, it is Robert, the depraved and manipulative character in whose threads, ironically, he has come dressed today, who has left him feeling the most compromised. “It was the only time I played someone who affected me. That guy was sick. I was very happy when I finished it,” he says.

Walken is full of subtle contradictions and surprises: his face, so terrifying on film, looks delicate in repose with petite “Tweety Pie” lips and unexpectedly kind eyes; he says he’s “so easy to get along with” and he has been hailed a comic success on Saturday Night Live in a hosting role he is free to reprise whenever he chooses (he is due to appear on next Monday night’s show); his interests are homely – cats, Bugs Bunny, Jerry Lewis, painting – despite being plagued by stories of youthful hell-raising. Then there’s the added controversy that surrounded the death of the Hollywood actress Natalie Wood, which hung around him in the years following her fatal accident in 1981. He had been drinking on the yacht Splendour with Wood and her husband, the actor Robert Wagner, when she drowned near Santa Catalina Island, California, while work was not yet completed on her final film, Brainstorm, in which Walken co-starred.

Walken has been asked about that night time and again, and appears to have reached a point of philosophical equanimity, although it haunted him for years afterwards. “It was a terribly sad thing for her and her family,” he reflects. “Things happen to people that don’t make any sense and yet they happen, just some meaningless accidents.”

Perhaps as a result of the turmoil – and the intrusive press coverage – that her death spawned, he has preferred to live at a distance from Hollywood, either in New York or in Connecticut, where Georgianne Walken, his casting-director wife of 34 years, has a home, and where he is a stickler for domestic routine. “I get up at seven o’clock, I exercise, everything is always the same.”

There is his well-documented love of cooking, which led him to create, with the artist Julian Schnabel, a show called Cooking with Chris – a combination of comedy and convivial conversation, with a little bit of roasting and frying in between.

“The thing about cooking is it’s so interesting to watch. I don’t know why, but if you go to somebody’s house and they’re making something, they usually say interesting things while they’re cooking.

“I watch cooking shows a lot. Cooking with Chris was really amusing. Julian and I and this other guy, a friend who has a restaurant in Little Italy, decided to do this cooking show that had to do with buying the food, cooking it, then eating it. Three acts. I thought it was entertaining. I’m not a terrific cook but I’m a good cook. I always buy good stuff. I make a very good chicken and good fish … There’s only one way to cook fish: with steam.”

Walken did not, as you might imagine, come into acting circuitously. He was a child performer who was groomed for television success by his Scottish Methodist mother. (His father, Paul, was a baker of German extraction – “He was from Essen, I can understand German more than speak it”.) Born in March 1943 as the second of three sons into a no-frills household in New York City, he was pushed by his Glaswegian mother, Rosalie, into the career that had eluded her.

Christopher – then named the liltingly Scottish “Ronnie” – took to it, first appearing on screen as a child extra in numerous variety shows and then landing a regular slot in a 1953 television show, The Wonderful John Acton, at the age of 10. He dropped out of college aged 18, the moment he got his first big break, starring alongside Liza Minnelli in a Broadway Musical, Best Foot Forward, a formative moment in which he broke into the showbiz milieu with all its other-worldly razzle-dazzle – quite an achievement for a kid from Queens.

“Liza was smitten with the stage and the movies. She was a great aficionado. I was in a musical with her when she was only 16 years old. I was two years older than her. Her mother gave her a party on her birthday and I danced with Judy Garland. It’s true. She was good looking and sexy. I was interested… I’m telling you, she was foxy.”

For years afterwards, Walken worked steadily off-Broadway, hoping to break into films. A few years before his near brush with Star Wars, he landed, in 1971, his first leading role alongside Sean Connery in The Anderson Tapes, and then in 1977 he played Diane Keaton’s dangerously unstable brother in Woody Allen’s great comedy, Annie Hall (for which he was mis-credited as Christopher Wlaken).

During the early 1970s his performances were mostly well received but the real breakthrough proved elusive. He ploughed on, appearing in musicals and on stage (notching up an impressive repertoire of Shakespearean roles); it was not until he was 35, when he was cast in The Deer Hunter, that he captured the industry’s attention.

Over the next four decades, Walken worked with some of the most critically acclaimed independent film-makers of the age, including the likes of David Cronenberg, Abel Ferrara, Tim Burton and Michael Cimino, with whom he followed up the success of The Deer Hunter with an almighty turkey – Heaven’s Gate, an American western based on a dispute between land barons and European immigrants in Wyoming in the 1890s that was plagued by time overruns, negative press and rumours about Cimino’s allegedly overbearing directorial ways. It was, when it was finished, considered to be one of the biggest box-office bombs of all time.

In the early 1990s, Walken was cast in near-cameo roles in the Quentin Tarantino hits True Romance (directed by Tony Scott) and Pulp Fiction. He stole the show in both, delivering deadpan monologues – first in True Romance, in the “Sicilian scene”, hailed by critics as the finest and funniest in the movie (on shooting Dennis Hopper three times in the head, Walken’s character Coccotti complains: “I haven’t killed anybody since 1974. Goddamn his soul to burn for eternity in fuckin’ hell for makin’ me spill blood on my hands!”); then a four-minute speech in Pulp Fiction as a Vietnam vet giving his dead comrade’s son the family’s prized possession – a gold watch. He explains how he hid it from the Vietcong by smuggling it in his rectum, after the boy’s father, in whose rectum the watch had previously been concealed, had died of dysentery. “I was talking to the camera. It was great. I had the speech for months. I must say, in that case, every time I went through that long speech, every time I got to the end, it cracked me up. It stayed funny.”

long before the acting, and the accolades, there was dancing, an artform that Walken took most seriously as a child when he was enrolled into the Professional Children’s School in Manhattan. Over the years, he began inserting impromptu dance sequences into his acting roles – some of these scenes stayed, such as his charismatic, loose-limbed spin’n’shuffle in King of New York (a triumphant jig after his character Frank leaves prison), while others ended up on the cutting-room floor. Despite the heavyweight actor’s CV, Walken still clings to his formative training in dance as his “true vocation”. “I’m not really an actor, I’m a dancer. I would spend a week studying something but it made no difference. I was never able to use it.”

He had already performed a turn – as the angel of death – for Madonna in her video for “Bad Girl” in 1993, when the director Spike Jonze came calling. Jonze had watched a video of the 1981 musical, Pennies from Heaven – in which Walken put on a dance number so memorable that Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire are said to have sent their compliments – and asked the actor to star in the music video he was putting together for Fatboy Slim’s techno single, “Weapon of Choice”.

An off-piste choice for Jonze perhaps, but the result was astounding: a po-faced Walken dressed in a sharp suit, dancing wildly the wrong way up escalators and cartwheeling across the vast empty interior of Los Angeles’ Marriott Hotel.

At the time, even the ageing, increasingly eccentric Marlon Brando was captivated by the way Walken moved – and offered to make a variety show with him. Out comes another of Walken’s curious celebrity vignettes: “I was making a movie in Nova Scotia,” he recalls. “And I was reading a book in my room when the phone started ringing. A woman said, ‘Christopher Walken, are you going to be here in the next 10 minutes? Marlon Brando would like to talk to you.’ I hung up thinking, ‘It’s a joke.’ Two minutes later, a man phoned and when he spoke, I knew it was no joke. It was him. He said, ‘You did a movie called Pennies from Heaven. I would like to get in touch
with your choreographer.’ I told Marlon Brando I happened to know the choreographer. He said he wanted to make a musical variety show from his house. He would play the piano and I would dance. He told me that he had lost a hundred pounds eating just Saltines [crackers] and milk. I said I’d get in touch with the choreographer. I called him, he was nearly 80 years old, and I said to him, ‘Marlon Brando wants to do a variety show.’ He said, ‘WHAT?’”

Walken has, remarkably, never experienced a significant slump in his sustained film career, so has never had to stage a John Travolta-style comeback, yet he appears watchful of his celebrity, and the notion of losing it. He tells me a story about a poignant encounter with the boxer Muhammad Ali, whose star had waned for a period in 1972. “I was working in a little town in Canada when Muhammad Ali had his title taken away. He was making his living touring, he was going around little towns in Canada. He came through the town I was staying in and he had three sparring partners. I was fascinated. He would get in the ring with the others guys and would tell some jokes, they’d knock him down and he’d get up again and tell some more jokes. He had a variety act. When he left town, he left his boxing trunks to be auctioned. I said to someone, ‘Wow, it’s going to be very difficult [to buy them].’ I went to the auction and nobody wanted them. The bidding just stopped at $40, and I was that $40. No one went above it, so I now have them in a frame.”

Walken runs no risk of having to push his childhood variety act back out on the road, or having to auction off his (pilfered) clothes, but he is all-too-conscious of his flops, especially the recent ones. The Maiden Heist, a comedy about museum security guards who devise a plan to steal their favourite artworks, which he made last year with Morgan Freeman, did not see the light of day. $5 a Day, made the year before and co-starring Sharon Stone, does not yet have a distributor. This year, he is pencilled in to make Citizen Brando, a whimsical-sounding drama about a Tunisian boy in search of the American Dream, featuring Walken alongside archive footage of Brando himself, and there are two more films at the pre-production stage.

“I have made a number of movies that I have never seen. It’s not a matter of ego. It’s a matter of being disappointed. It’s really a shame. It’s just as difficult to make a movie that no one cares about as to make a hit.”

He likens the act of performing to a short, explosive exertion of energy. His memories of movie-making can all be distilled into concentrated moments of action, alchemical thrills in between hours of waiting for the film to roll. “Acting is a bit like being an athlete,” he explains. “You spend all your time getting ready to do something for two minutes. All the things that made my career in the movies happen took two or three minutes, which is the time that it takes for a ‘take’. In that time, something happens. That’s what people know you for, just like someone running the hundred metres.”

Walken pauses, and offers up his shark-smile. He looks limber – and ready for the next 100-metre sprint.

Johnny Cash, left, John Carter Cash, Smokey Hormel and Rick Rubin
On ‘Ain’t No Grave,’ it’s a vulnerable Johnny Cash, accepting his physical state and making the best of it. Anyone who has lived with the decline of a loved one will feel the raw emotion.

By Ann Powers
The Los Angeles Times
February 21, 2010

Let me tell you a story about my dad and Johnny Cash. Many American music lovers of a certain age could spin out such a connection; Cash is primary among artists who represent the tough psyche of the post-war patriarchal male, his music exposing the connections between empowerment and violence, pride and repression, that defined an ideal still romanticized long after it became dated.

Frank Sinatra did it, tux tie loosened, with a Scotch in his hand. Muddy Waters shouted about it in a sharkskin suit before the folkies persuaded him to put on overalls. Cash wore black, keeping everything primal even when he was playing a role or just goofing around. He was the ultimate father figure, King James biblical in proportion, showing how deep a baritone voice and a limited color wheel could go.

My father, also named John, was never a Cash fan. His taste ran more to the big bands and sentimental singers like Mario Lanza. But when he died of pancreatic cancer at 82, John T. Powers did so in a way that John R. Cash’s late-period music perfectly describes. Exiting this world, the imperfect patriarch of my family was forced to reach for the essence of dignity in a way that both called upon and challenged him as a traditional American man, which is what Cash does on the album that producer Rick Rubin gives us now.

Drawing on my experience with my dad, I’d call “American VI: Ain’t No Grave,” due out Tuesday, Cash’s hospice record. The singer lost his battle with diabetes and asthma months after he recorded these songs; during the sessions, his wife and primary support system, June Carter Cash, unexpectedly succumbed after heart surgery. Though he wasn’t formally in end-of-life care, it’s clear that when he selected and interpreted these 10 songs, he was closing his life’s book.

Taken as a whole, the six-part American Recordings series offers a striking portrait of an artist confronting physical decline. The word “physical” is important here. Cash’s late-coming sobriety and Rubin’s ability to get the old showman to take himself seriously again, combined with the singer’s natural tendency toward minimalism, produced a remarkable clarity.

There might be hokum on these albums — as the critic Jody Rosen pointed out in a 2006 Slate essay, Cash going Goth with covers of Nine Inch Nails and Depeche Mode was “both great art and shameless kitsch” — but there is no fat. Adopting Trent Reznor’s angst, applying his own writing talents to old folk forms like the murder ballad, or simply praising the God who helped him get through, Cash unadorned every lyric, exposing the dumb phrases as well as the gems. The musicians Rubin enlisted to embellish the work, many of them famous but obviously all hushed by the legend’s presence, listened and gave him room.

Cash’s legend grew exponentially, because while Americans have heard many men in their prime declare themselves tough or wounded or murderous, we’ve been less open to the voices of the old or the vulnerable. The sound of Cash in decline was a powerful shock that reminded listeners of the breadth of every human life.

A strongman in decline

At first, it was also something of a show. Like most chronic drug users, Cash had many health struggles, but in 1994 he was in vigorous voice, and you can hear a chuckle behind the spooky tone of his first recordings with Rubin. It’s there in the swing he gave the tale of mayhem ” Delia’s Gone” and in the droll croon he applies to his former son-in-law Nick Lowe’s dissection of the id, “The Beast in Me.”

Holding onto that chuckle was a key part of the remarkable feat Cash and Rubin accomplished over the ensuing decade. Loving the work, Cash recorded all kinds of songs — funny ones, familiar ones, some he’d recorded before and others he never would have heard if not for his hip younger friends. The material matters; it was a blessing that Rubin kept Cash away from the soft rock of contemporary Nashville, and occasionally, the hipster connection worked magic. But the greater value of the American Recordings emerges through Cash and Rubin’s unflinching attention to the details of his slowly failing instrument.

Many older singers just sound bad because they’re still trying to present themselves as totally masterful. Cash didn’t do that. He let in the cracks and the shortness of breath and the flatness. That’s when the chuckle comes in, often silent but always pushing against the inherent drama of the songs and the moment. “Oh, well,” you can almost hear Cash say, “I’m still singing.”

The recordings leading to Cash’s last sessions, which resulted in both “Ain’t No Grave” and the preceding posthumous release “American V: A Hundred Highways,” constitute this public display of a man’s man coming to terms with his own vulnerability. Those final efforts, however, are different, and “Ain’t No Grave” especially captures Cash’s final mood. It’s more private, not as overtly “heavy,” but in its humility and inward-turning spirit it profoundly completes Johnny Cash’s gift of a good death.

Here’s a vivid memory I have from my dad’s first days in hospice. We’d just found out that this cancer, one of several serious diseases that plagued him during his last decade, was inoperable. My Uncle Bill, his older brother, brought my Aunt Joyce over for a visit. We settled into my parents’ living room and exchanged meaningful pleasantries. My dad sat in his special chair; my mom served hors d’oeuvres. The knowledge that my father was dying took up plenty of space in the room, but for that afternoon, we tried to simply live with that knowledge, incorporating it into the day-to-day.

The earliest volumes of the American Recordings remind me of that visit. In both cases — my family in the living room, Cash and his collaborators in various studios, together or alone — everyone involved applied great energy to the act of relaxing into the total ambiguity that takes over when death is in the room. There was a sense that public gestures still mattered.

That feeling is gone on “Ain’t No Grave.” Rubin has told interviewers that after he lost June, Cash lost his motivation to live, beyond making music. Think of that: For Cash, at the end, recording the vocals captured here was the reason to fight for life. Yet they’re not full of blood and thunder. Partly because of failing strength but also maybe because he no longer felt any need for bluster or any other kind of show, Cash melds with these melodies, not so much interpreting them as letting them support him, gently.

There’s plenty here for the morbid to mine. Still, Cash refuses to be overly somber. Rubin’s production on the title track is ominous, with banjo and foot-stomping from his protégés Scott and Seth Avett to give this old hymn a freak-folk edge, but Cash’s vocal has the punch of an old fighter. “Cool Water” is more characteristic; in Cash’s hands, the well-known cowboy song of fatal thirst becomes positively soothing.

Meeting death head-on

“1 Corinthians 15:55,” Cash’s sole writing contribution, better captures the overall mood of acceptance and even some small joy in the face of insurmountable loss. Based around St. Paul’s rhetorical question “O Death, where is thy sting?” it’s a waltz that trips lightly along in an old-timey parlor music arrangement. The song pairs beautifully with folk singer Tom Paxton’s existential blues, “Can’t Help But Wonder Where I’m Bound,” which in Cash’s wavering but calm voice becomes a mantra of self-acceptance.

“Ain’t No Grave” is governed by that spirit, the feeling that comes to the dying once they’ve absorbed the real meaning of the euphemism “making peace with death.” You make peace with life, with what you have left. You take whatever tiny pleasure remains. You try to love the ones losing you.

At least that’s what my dad did, even in the last few weeks of hospice. One song on “Ain’t No Grave” made little sense to me until it triggered another memory of his final days. Near the end, he was confined to his bed. Only immediate family came to visit. We had entered a private space in which no one tried to be particularly upbeat, but the mood in the house wasn’t heavy. My dad was ready to go, and we were ready to let him.

One afternoon I walked into my dad’s room, and music was playing. It was an easy-listening record, probably one by Jackie Gleason and his orchestra. Lying semi-conscious, my father lifted his hands like a conductor and waved them. That corny, beautiful sound had gone right into him and carried him somewhere.

When I hear Johnny Cash singing “Aloha Oe,” the Hawaiian song of goodbye, I see my dad, almost gone but still with us, simultaneously sustained and transported by music.

“Aloha Oe” is a song easily pegged to airline commercials and luau-themed patio parties. But as Cash imparts it in a tone that deserves to be called “dulcet,” that baggage slips away. “Aloha Oe” becomes as basic as life itself is at the end. Just another lovely melody, there for Johnny Cash to sing, while he still could.

thanks to steve hadley

‘Flaggot’
Oil on muslin over found frame
2009
22.75 x 21.5 inches

Dromedary Resting

Opening Reception is Saturday, February 27, 2010 from 6-8pm.

February 27 – April 3, 2010

Cherry and Martin

Walead Beshty, Liz Deschenes, Morgan Fisher, Seth Price

February 20 - March 27

Richard Telles

VitraHaus, by Herzog & de Meuron.

By ALICE RAWSTHORN
Published: February 14, 2010

WEIL AM RHEIN, GERMANY — It could happen to any of us. You have found a new home, but cannot decide what to do with it, which colors to choose, furniture to buy, and so on. When Rolf Fehlbaum faced that problem he asked the advice of one of the designers who worked for his family’s furniture company, Vitra. The designer he chose was a young Dane, Verner Panton, who had no doubt as to the solution.

“Verner said: ‘We’ll do a black room, a red room, a golden room and an orange room,”’ recalled Mr. Fehlbaum. “Everything in those rooms had to be that color. Everything.” Not just the walls and floors, but the furniture, lighting and objects. When Mr. Fehlbaum asked jokingly whether it would be a problem to move something from one room to another, Mr. Panton looked perplexed. Why would he want to wreck the color scheme?

Living in that apartment “was not the happiest experience,” as Mr. Fehlbaum, put it, and 40 years later he still feels unsure when it comes to choosing colors. He should find some ideas (less dogmatic ones than Mr. Panton’s, who had such draconian views on the subject that he always dressed in blue) in the color laboratory of the VitraHaus, the stunning new showroom at Vitra’s production complex in the German town of Weil am Rhein.

Devised by the Dutch designer Hella Jongerius, the laboratory is a space where Vitra’s customers can experiment with different colors and see how they are affected by proximity to other shades, and changes in tone, light and texture. Mr. Fehlbaum hopes it will help them to make bolder, more nuanced color choices and that the company can learn by observing their response to the VitraHaus.

It is a compelling place for them to do so, because the building was designed by Herzog & de Meuron, the Swiss architects based in nearby Basel, whose projects include the Beijing Olympic stadium and the Tate Modern in London. They join a stellar cast of architects who have worked for Vitra at Weil am Rhein since a fire destroyed the original site in 1981. The first was the British architect Nicholas Grimshaw, who built a replacement factory.

Mr. Fehlbaum had planned to ask him to design the rest of the site, until he met by chance with the then-obscure North American architect Frank Gehry. Mr. Gehry built his first permanent structure in Europe for Vitra, as did the Japanese architect Tadao Ando. The British-Iraqi architect Zaha Hadid designed her first-ever building as the site’s fire station. Vitra has since added a factory by the Portuguese architect Álvaro Siza as well as one of Richard Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic domes and a gas station by the French designer Jean Prouvé. Even the bus stops are the work of a designer, Jasper Morrison of Britain.

Mr. Fehlbaum maintains that the architectural commissions inform — and enrich — Vitra’s work with furniture designers like Mr. Morrison and Ms. Jongerius. They also enhance the company’s stature as one of the handful in Europe with a genuinely enlightened approach to design. Like the others, including Royal Tichelaar Makkum in the Netherlands and Flos in Italy, Vitra is a family-owned company that combines technical rigor with an adventurous approach to design. Its design heritage dates to the 1950s, when Mr. Fehlbaum’s parents started working with Charles and Ray Eames, the American designers.

More recent innovations at Vitra include the Joyn, a flexible office system developed by the French brothers Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec for open-plan workspaces, where people come and go with different ways of working. Equally influential is the Polder, a sofa designed by Ms. Jongerius to evoke the idiosyncrasies of a beloved, slightly shabby family heirloom, even though it was rigorously engineered by Vitra’s factories.

It is easy to see why the architectural program makes sense to Vitra and helps to attract 100,000 visitors to the Weil am Rhein site every year. Another attraction is the Vitra Design Museum, by Mr. Gehry, which houses a changing program of design exhibitions and one of the world’s largest collections of modern and contemporary furniture.

Part of that collection will now be displayed in the VitraHaus, which was conceived as what Jacques Herzog, co-founder of Herzog & de Meuron, describes as “a stack of houses.” It consists of a dozen or so replicas of the sort of archetypal gabled homes that a child might draw, literally stacked on top of each other. Each “house” forms a different floor of the building, where Vitra’s furniture is installed in casually stylish room sets, and the glass gabled ends look out across the other buildings on the site, over the countryside toward nearby Basel and up into the surrounding hills.

Beguiling though those views are, the glimpses inside one “house” from another through what Mr. Herzog calls “the unexpected intersections” of the structure are even more so. There is a lovely moment in the color laboratory where you look up through a gabled window at a cluster of the milky white Cloud lights designed by Mr. Gehry for Vitra. The architects have even added a joke. All of the “houses” are built in the same simple geometric shape, except for the lower one, which contains the museum’s furniture collection. Its walls appear to be buckling, as if collapsing from the weight of the building.

The higgledy-piggledy VitraHaus is so seductive that it seems mean to wonder why Vitra did not seize the chance to explore newer directions in interiors, like sustainability or the impact of digital technology on the home. Instead, it has limited its experiments to Ms. Jongerius’s color laboratory and the formal qualities of Herzog & de Meuron’s building.

The result is elegant, intelligent and gently humorous, rather like Vitra itself — so much so that niggling really would seem mean, especially as Vitra is soon to complete a circular factory by SANAA, the Japanese architecture group, as yet another architectural gem at Weil am Rhein.

By Jay Merrick
The Independent Uk
Thursday, 18 February 2010

In Lausanne yesterday, the feted Japanese architects Kazuo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa – aka Sanaa – became the profession’s anointed artists of the floating world. Their new SF110m (£65m) building is a fluid exercise in glass and concrete. It is called the Rolex Learning Centre. Yet visually, it is the reverse – a kind of unlearning centre where the doors of perception melt into a soft vitreous glaze and shape and edge become ambiguous.

If you enjoyed the refined delights of Sanaa’s 2009 Serpentine Pavilion, you will have no trouble recognising the conceptual genetics of the Rolex Learning Centre: the pavilion was the skeleton of this much bigger idea. And here it is, on the campus of the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, where the scientific research is as highly rated as that of Cambridge or Imperial College.

Scientists require chains of repeatable causes and effects. In Sanaa’s building one experiences effects; the causes seem secondary. Ah, so this must be shock-of-the-new architecture! No, it isn’t. And here’s the proof: “Today’s artist lives in an era of dissolution without guidance. The old forms are in ruins, the benumbed world is shaken up, the old human spirit is invalidated and in flux towards a new form. We float in space, and cannot perceive the new order.”

That quote – and I’m typing this, very aptly, at a desk on a plateau floating above the library in the Centre – is from Walter Gropius, the godfather of modernist architecture, and he said it in 1919 in Berlin. Nothing is ever quite new in architecture, it just gets more sophisticated in terms of materials and details. Sanaa are simply the politely creative grandchildren of Gropius; and the grandchildren of the Swedish genius Alvar Aalto too. Aalto’s Paradise Restaurant at the 1930 Stockholm Exhibition was one of the first buildings to use glass as a kind of skin.

The penny drops. The Rolex learning Centre, with its swerves and blurs of glass, is more like a weirdly stretched and twisted version of Aalto’s Savoy vase. Or Oscar Niemeyer’s fabulously sexy Brazilian architecture on acid. But this building is not an object or a jolly hallucination. It is a library, an experimental place of learning. Sanaa and the university are trying something new. They call the building a landscape for learning. Alpine metaphors queue up: ski slopes, luge and slalom runs, hillsides. The key word is not “architecture”, it is “topography”.

The architects explain the idea succinctly: “Inside, the hills, valleys and plateaus formed by the undulations often make the edges of the building invisible, though there are no visual barriers between one area and the next. Instead of steps and staircases, there are gentle slopes and terraces. Clearly, but without dividing walls, one area of activity gives way to another.”

And that’s the big idea, in one sentence. Without quite knowing how, one passes from bookstacks to cafés and from cafés to courtyards. There are no dividing walls – even of glass – between one area of activity and another. The only thing the glass does is sheath the external walls as they dip and rise around the 88,000 cubed metres site, clothing the 14 voids that punch down through the undulating concrete souffle.

There is no fixed vista. Move your eyes only slightly and the view changes greatly. And it is a view composed of layers of transparency and overlaps of physical content. In use, and filled with students, this will be a university building for the Facebook generation – a place where intellectual and purely visual information will be on equal footing.

The Rolex Learning Centre is therefore meant to be a chilled sort of place. Yet architecturally, the dominating effect is not quite of a relaxed form but of an out-and-out display of design virtuosity. The exterior concrete formwork is so superior that it has a polished sheen, even though it has not been polished; the glazing is precisely detailed; the complex geometry of the rise and falls of the internal landscape is so well done that it is hard to see any points of transition.

Yet it is what you can’t see – the structure holding up this internal landscape – that is probably the most original thing about the building. The forming of the concrete had to be extraordinarily precise because the rise and fall of the glass façades has to handle slight movements. The laser-cut formwork was positioned using GPS technology; the structure is made up of two concrete shells and between them are 11 arches, anchored to 70 underground cables. This is real gee-whizz stuff that makes architecture look effortless.

Sanaa’s architecture here may represent a new experiment in educational environments, but it is also quite obviously a straightforward refinement of a design riff that they have been quietly perfecting since their 21st Century Museum in Japan in 2004 announced them as incipient masters of glass architecture. The museum is a circular glazed building containing square glass pavilions. Two years later, Sanaa’s Glass Pavilion in Toledo, Ohio, was the opposite: a square form containing 32,000 square feet of Austrian glass in rounded pavilions, some flowing past others.

The Rolex Learning Centre is this game of glass taken to another level – or series of levels. For Sanaa, the building is of huge significance. It confirms them as the 21st century’s leaders in the creation of transparent architecture and they have risen without so much as a squeak – no polemics or manifesto, no desire to be thought of as charismatic. They simply pursue the design of buildings that look ethereal but are actually very highly wrought in terms of form and concrete technology.

And so, with the Rolex Learning Centre and their forthcoming Louvre annexe at Lens, they join the premier league. In the major cultural architecture stakes, Renzo Piano, Zaha Hadid, Frank Gehry and Steven Holl have serious competition. And if there was any doubt about the extent of Sanaa’s ascent, they have been commissioned to design a new distribution centre at that holy of holies, the Vitra Design Museum at Weil-am-Rein in Germany.

That may give some comfort and a sense of kudos to students who use the Learning Centre’s admirable cache of architectural source material. As will cutting-edge active information systems that can tell them the noise levels in different parts of the building.

Is this great architecture? The Rolex Learning Centre is certainly no advance on the architectural vision of Walter Gropius in 1919. And yet the building may, by chance, be the perfect metaphor for something quite riveting going on elsewhere on the EPFL campus.

Supported by a supercomputer called Blue Brain, researchers are building virtual maps of how neurons, which carry messages through the brain and spinal chord, actually behave. Blue Brain’s maps are edging us closer to an understanding of the way memories and dreams form, and how our thinking processes work at an electro-chemical level.

“This has important cognitive potential,” said a university spokesman, Jérôme Gross. “It could lead to neuro-prosthetics – future vision devices.” Sitting here, engulfed in this swirling architecture, the phrase “future vision devices” seems to sum up Sanaa’s building better than the usual vocabulary of architectural discourse.

via

Ettore Sottsass custom console
Renzo Brugola
Italy, 1997
maple veneer with solid maple edging, corrugated aluminum, Abet laminate, gold leaf, mirrored glass, turned brass
82.75 w x 23.5 d x 80.5 h inches
This console was custom made as a gift for Lawrence Laske, a former student and friend of Ettore Sottsass.

Ettore Sottsass Agra sofa
Memphis
Italy, 1982
marble, upholstery
78.75 w x 22 d x 28.5 h inches

Ettore Sottsass Barbarella cabinet
Poltronova
Italy, 1966/c. 1985
plum, laminate, brass
43.75 w x 15.25 d x 50.5 h inches
Cabinet features three drawers and a drop-front writing surface concealing two interior drawers.

Ettore Sottsass Passed Lots

Double Light Leak, 2010

Arthur Ou

‘Studio Loop I – V’
2010
oil, acrylic, oil pastel on canvas
32 x 22 In. each panel
32 x 110 In. total dimensions

at Arco Madrid

Cherry and Martin

01/30/10 - 03/21/10

The Portikus in Frankfurt is proud to present an exhibition featuring the work of the Los Angeles-based artist Mathias Poledna (b. Vienna, 1965). The exhibition marks the first time this new filmic spatial installation is shown to the public by itself.

The point of departure for Poledna’s work is a crystal glassware set designed by Adolf Loos (1870-1933) and first manufactured in 1929 by the Viennese glassmakers L&J Lobmeyr. The so-called “bar set” consists of twelve individual pieces: a fingerbowl, a champagne flute, a beer glass, a wine decanter, a water pitcher, a water glass, a double Old Fashioned whiskey tumbler, and red wine, white wine, dessert wine, sherry, and liqueur glasses. In contradistinction to traditional glass services of the era, whose individual pieces are usually quite different, each adapted to its particular purpose, and typically adorned with highly detailed decorations, all pieces in Loos’s bar set are based on a single highly reduced basic shape: a fully rounded glass with a flat bottom and sides at a right angle to the floor. The service’s individual components can be understood as “variations” on this motif; their shapes are adapted to their intended purposes, but differences between them are limited to the exact ratio between the height and the diameter of a glass. Loos realizes his philosophical ideas about the progress of culture in the simplicity and precision of the bar set’s formal design. Yet unlike other comparable approaches to design of the same era, Loos combines formal reductionism and the absence of all ornamentation with the utmost refinement in the use of the material and the execution. The bottoms of these mouth-blown glasses, which are ground and polished by hand, bear diamond-cut facets, a fine-grained grid-like pattern that creates the subtlest scintillation. It would be difficult, however, to recognize this cultural-historical background in the work itself; to the contrary, it has been, as it were, compartmentalized, removed from the filmic representation and replaced by a spatial narrative of transparency, texture, absence, and motion. In the interplay between typological recording, detail shot, and shifting dramaturgy, this representation aims at a sort of choreography of objects that explores boundaries and transitions between abstraction, historical documentation, and the hyperaesthetic mise-en-scène of a commercial product.

Portikus

Chengdu Hualin Elementary School (2008)

By ALEXANDRA A. SENO
The Wall Street Journal: Published February 12

Shigeru Ban made a name for himself through his architecture and his humanitarian work. His temporary paper-tube structures have provided housing, schoolrooms and even a concert hall for earthquake survivors around the world. He speaks to WSJ.

In an age of mega-architectural firms that seek larger and larger projects, Mr. Ban has moved the other way. Rather than grow his practice to hundreds of designers, he’s kept his staff to a manageable few dozen. And his company, Shigeru Ban Architects, which has offices in Tokyo, New York and Paris, works on a limited number of projects — each of which he has a hand in, be it a private home or an office building.

There are “too many big projects everywhere,” says Mr. Ban, who is 52 years old. “The quality of projects is getting lower and lower. I am trying to be strict with myself so I don’t get into that trap. Instead of making my practice bigger, I want to limit it to keep good quality on each project.”

In May, his much-awaited Centre Pompidou-Metz, a new contemporary art museum in northeastern France, will open. The design, which Mr. Ban began six years ago, features a roof of woven steel and plywood, covered with a translucent lattice membrane.

Mr. Ban first created temporary shelters in disaster zones from paper tubes in 1995, building short-term housing for earthquake survivors in Kobe, Japan. Since then, he has used tubes to build schools in Sichuan, China (after the earthquake there in 2008), and a music hall in L’Aquila, Italy (following an earthquake last year). Though he uses the tubes — in various thicknesses and diameters, round or square — primarily for interim structures, some stay up for years. Mr. Ban has employed tubes as load-bearing columns and even created arches with them. They can be made waterproof and fire-resistant, and with self-adhesive waterproof sponge tape applied to both sides, are quickly assembled.

The architect, who studied at the New York design school the Cooper Union, was recently in Hong Kong to inaugurate a paper-tube pavilion he created for the Hong Kong & Shenzhen Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture in West Kowloon. This structure is truly temporary; it is permitted to stand only until the end of February, when the event closes.

From Tokyo, where he is based, Mr. Ban spoke with Weekend Journal Asia about his work, his interests and what he believes will define meaningful architecture in the future.

What materials are you interested in at the moment?

I’m very interested in conventional materials like concrete, steel, wood. I try to use the most appropriate material for a particular project.

What is the concept of the new Centre Pompidou-Metz?

View Full Image

Samantha Sin for The Wall Street Journal
The architect in West Kowloon standing underneath the paper-tube pavilion he created for the Hong Kong & Shenzhen Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture.

After the success of the Guggenheim in Bilbao [Spain], people have been talking about the so-called “Bilbao Effect,” the effect of a sculptural building helping a small town. I wanted to design a museum that is monumental but also functional as a museum.

What is the challenge in achieving that?

Many museums are very sculptural, monumental and normal [but] people have never been in because they think modern art is a bit difficult to understand….The museum is almost screening people and only admitting people who think they understand contemporary art. I think the museum has to be more welcoming of people who may not be interested in art.

How do you solve this problem?

I think a museum should be a gathering place. The exhibition should be seen in the public area so that they may be interested in coming into the galleries. I first asked the landscape architect [of Centre Pompidou-Metz] to design the garden. Then I put a big roof on top. The inside space is an extension of the exterior. That is the idea, based on a Chinese traditional bamboo hat.

Where did you find this hat?

In Paris, in an antique shop. I found it almost 10 years ago. I thought it was very architectonic.

What do you do for fun?

I like reading [Japanese] historical stories. It has nothing to do with my work.

What kind of music do you like?

I like classic, jazz. When I was in New York as a student I was always listening to jazz.

What performers do you like?

When I was a student I liked Michael Franks. I still listen to music but I’m not collecting CDs anymore. Now I listen to the radio.

How do you work?

I work anywhere. I make many sketches on a train or airplane.

Why do you take on so many humanitarian projects?

Sometimes working for the privileged makes me tired because they are very demanding. I’m now working in Italy where there was an earthquake. The orchestra has nowhere to play so I decided to make a temporary concert hall.

Is it better to work on big or small projects?

Many of the architects I respect in the 20th century — [Alvar] Aalto, [Mies] Van der Rohe, [Louis] Kahn, Frank Lloyd Wright — they kept designing houses until they died. Now many big architects after they start designing buildings, stop designing houses because it not interesting commercially. The effort is so big but the profit is so small.

Designing office buildings is much easier than a house. You design for an average. But for a house, it is a particular request for each client and there is no repetition of rooms.

What’s next for architecture?

Historically, architects worked for privileged people, religious groups, noblemen. Now architects are working for big corporations, governments, rich people trying to display their power and money by monumental architecture. It is the same.

What would you like to see happen in your field?

When people lose their houses after an earthquake we don’t see architects there because they are too busy working for the privileged. I think we have to include them in working in disaster areas. Also, we [architects] are responsible for disasters. After an earthquake, when a building collapses and people are killed, it is not because of earthquake itself but because of the structure of the building. That is the responsibility of an architect.

shigeru ban

Willem de Rooij
“Bouquet V”, 2010
95 different species of flowers,
vase, plinth, text (description of the bouquet)
and list of botanic terms

“Vertigo’s Doll”, 2010
tapestry, unbleached linen warp,
using 10 different fills,
each fill a different mixture of
silver- and gold coloured metal threads,
on wooden stretcher
135 x 430 x 5 cm

Through March 13th 2010

Daniel Buchholz

By BOB HERBERT
NY Times Published: February 13, 2010

It was primarily a symbolic gesture. Way back in 1979, in the midst of an energy crisis, Jimmy Carter had solar panels installed on the roof of the White House. They were used to heat water for some White House staffers.

“A generation from now,” said Mr. Carter, “this solar heater can either be a curiosity, a museum piece, an example of a road not taken, or it can be a small part of one of the greatest and most exciting adventures ever undertaken by the American people, harnessing the power of the sun to enrich our lives as we move away from our crippling dependence on foreign oil.”

Ronald Reagan had the panels taken down.

We missed the boat then, and lord knows we’re missing it now. Two weeks ago, as I was getting ready to take off for Palo Alto, Calif., to cover a conference on the importance of energy and infrastructure for the next American economy, The Times’s Keith Bradsher was writing from Tianjin, China, about how the Chinese were sprinting past everybody else in the world, including the United States, in the race to develop clean energy.

That we are allowing this to happen is beyond stupid. China is a poor country with nothing comparable to the tremendous research, industrial and economic resources that the U.S. has been blessed with. Yet they’re blowing us away — at least for the moment — in the race to the future.

Our esteemed leaders in Washington can’t figure out how to do anything more difficult than line up for a group photo. Put Americans back to work? You must be kidding. Health care? We’ve been working on it for three-quarters of a century. Infrastructure? Don’t ask.

But, as Mr. Bradsher tells us, “China vaulted past competitors in Denmark, Germany, Spain and the United States last year to become the world’s largest maker of wind turbines and is poised to expand even further this year.”

China also has become the world’s largest manufacturer of solar panels and is pushing hard on other clean energy advances. As Mr. Bradsher wrote: “These efforts to dominate renewable energy technologies raise the prospect that the West may someday trade its dependence on oil from the Mideast for a reliance on solar panels, wind turbines and other gear manufactured in China.”

We’re in the throes of an awful and seemingly endless employment crisis, and China is the country moving full speed ahead on the development of the world’s most important new industries. I’d like one of the Washington suits to step away from the photo-op and explain the logic of that to me.

The truth, of course, is that there is no reason at all for this to be happening. The United States, in many ways, is very well prepared to move ahead on clean energy. It could and should be the world’s leader. Many, if not most, of the innovations in this area were developed right here. But much of that know-how, as we are seeing in China (and have been seeing in Germany and other places), is being implemented overseas.

The conference that I attended in Palo Alto spotlighted the need to move to a low-carbon economy in the U.S. and exemplified some of the resources available to make it happen. It was sponsored by the Brookings Institution and Lazard, the investment banking advisory firm. The participants included the leaders of — and major investors in — companies that are making great strides in the alternative energy industry. But much of their business is done overseas because right now in America’s wacky, dysfunctional public sector there is no clear vision of a viable clean-energy economy, and, thus, no clue about how to get there.

The network of world-class universities and advanced research institutions in the U.S. is by far the most impressive in the world: think Harvard and Stanford and Berkeley and M.I.T. and on and on. If you add to that the venture capital community in the U.S. with its vast experience and the willingness of investors to take risks, and the sheer entrepreneurial talent of the American business community, you end up with an array of resources fully capable of moving the U.S. into a low-carbon, high-growth and extraordinarily productive economy that would be the envy of the world.

But for that to happen — as Bruce Katz, a Brookings executive who was one of the organizers of the conference, pointed out — America’s corporate, civic and political leaders will have to “articulate what’s really at stake here.”

And what’s at stake is the future of the American economy. The low-carbon era is coming. We can be dragged into that newer, greener world by leading countries like China; or we can take up the challenge and become the world’s leader ourselves.

Three Bottles, 2009
C-print
14 1/2 x 11 1/2 inches
(36.8 x 29.2 cm)

February 13 - April 25, 2010

Kunsthalle Zurich

Thanks to Dave Kordansky

By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Times Published: February 11, 2010

“Don’t cut Medicare. The reform bills passed by the House and Senate cut Medicare by approximately $500 billion. This is wrong.” So declared Newt Gingrich, the former speaker of the House, in a recent op-ed article written with John Goodman, the president of the National Center for Policy Analysis.

And irony died.

Now, Mr. Gingrich was just repeating the current party line. Furious denunciations of any effort to seek cost savings in Medicare — death panels! — have been central to Republican efforts to demonize health reform. What’s amazing, however, is that they’re getting away with it.

Why is this amazing? It’s not just the fact that Republicans are now posing as staunch defenders of a program they have hated ever since the days when Ronald Reagan warned that Medicare would destroy America’s freedom. Nor is it even the fact that, as House speaker, Mr. Gingrich personally tried to ram through deep cuts in Medicare — and, in 1995, went so far as to shut down the federal government in an attempt to bully Bill Clinton into accepting those cuts.

After all, you could explain this about-face by supposing that Republicans have had a change of heart, that they have finally realized just how much good Medicare does. And if you believe that, I’ve got some mortgage-backed securities you might want to buy.

No, what’s truly mind-boggling is this: Even as Republicans denounce modest proposals to rein in Medicare’s rising costs, they are, themselves, seeking to dismantle the whole program. And the process of dismantling would begin with spending cuts of about $650 billion over the next decade. Math is hard, but I do believe that’s more than the roughly $400 billion (not $500 billion) in Medicare savings projected for the Democratic health bills.

What I’m talking about here is the “Roadmap for America’s Future,” the budget plan recently released by Representative Paul Ryan, the ranking Republican member of the House Budget Committee. Other leading Republicans have been bobbing and weaving on the official status of this proposal, but it’s pretty clear that Mr. Ryan’s vision does, in fact, represent what the G.O.P. would try to do if it returns to power.

The broad picture that emerges from the “roadmap” is of an economic agenda that hasn’t changed one iota in response to the economic failures of the Bush years. In particular, Mr. Ryan offers a plan for Social Security privatization that is basically identical to the Bush proposals of five years ago.

But what’s really worth noting, given the way the G.O.P. has campaigned against health care reform, is what Mr. Ryan proposes doing with and to Medicare.

In the Ryan proposal, nobody currently under the age of 55 would be covered by Medicare as it now exists. Instead, people would receive vouchers and be told to buy their own insurance. And even this new, privatized version of Medicare would erode over time because the value of these vouchers would almost surely lag ever further behind the actual cost of health insurance. By the time Americans now in their 20s or 30s reached the age of eligibility, there wouldn’t be much of a Medicare program left.

But what about those who already are covered by Medicare, or will enter the program over the next decade? You’re safe, says the roadmap; you’ll still be eligible for traditional Medicare. Except, that is, for the fact that the plan “strengthens the current program with changes such as income-relating drug benefit premiums to ensure long-term sustainability.”

If this sounds like deliberately confusing gobbledygook, that’s because it is. Fortunately, the Congressional Budget Office, which has done an evaluation of the roadmap, offers a translation: “Some higher-income enrollees would pay higher premiums, and some program payments would be reduced.” In short, there would be Medicare cuts.

And it’s possible to back out the size of those cuts from the budget office analysis, which compares the Ryan proposal with a “baseline” representing current policy. As I’ve already said, the total over the next decade comes to about $650 billion — substantially bigger than the Medicare savings in the Democratic bills.

The bottom line, then, is that the crusade against health reform has relied, crucially, on utter hypocrisy: Republicans who hate Medicare, tried to slash Medicare in the past, and still aim to dismantle the program over time, have been scoring political points by denouncing proposals for modest cost savings — savings that are substantially smaller than the spending cuts buried in their own proposals.

And if Democrats don’t get their act together and push the almost-completed reform across the goal line, this breathtaking act of staggering hypocrisy will succeed.

Thanks Shannon!

Wallspace

January 29, 2010 - March 6, 2010

Maccarone

By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Times Published: February 11, 2010

“Don’t cut Medicare. The reform bills passed by the House and Senate cut Medicare by approximately $500 billion. This is wrong.” So declared Newt Gingrich, the former speaker of the House, in a recent op-ed article written with John Goodman, the president of the National Center for Policy Analysis.

And irony died.

Now, Mr. Gingrich was just repeating the current party line. Furious denunciations of any effort to seek cost savings in Medicare — death panels! — have been central to Republican efforts to demonize health reform. What’s amazing, however, is that they’re getting away with it.

Why is this amazing? It’s not just the fact that Republicans are now posing as staunch defenders of a program they have hated ever since the days when Ronald Reagan warned that Medicare would destroy America’s freedom. Nor is it even the fact that, as House speaker, Mr. Gingrich personally tried to ram through deep cuts in Medicare — and, in 1995, went so far as to shut down the federal government in an attempt to bully Bill Clinton into accepting those cuts.

After all, you could explain this about-face by supposing that Republicans have had a change of heart, that they have finally realized just how much good Medicare does. And if you believe that, I’ve got some mortgage-backed securities you might want to buy.

No, what’s truly mind-boggling is this: Even as Republicans denounce modest proposals to rein in Medicare’s rising costs, they are, themselves, seeking to dismantle the whole program. And the process of dismantling would begin with spending cuts of about $650 billion over the next decade. Math is hard, but I do believe that’s more than the roughly $400 billion (not $500 billion) in Medicare savings projected for the Democratic health bills.

What I’m talking about here is the “Roadmap for America’s Future,” the budget plan recently released by Representative Paul Ryan, the ranking Republican member of the House Budget Committee. Other leading Republicans have been bobbing and weaving on the official status of this proposal, but it’s pretty clear that Mr. Ryan’s vision does, in fact, represent what the G.O.P. would try to do if it returns to power.

The broad picture that emerges from the “roadmap” is of an economic agenda that hasn’t changed one iota in response to the economic failures of the Bush years. In particular, Mr. Ryan offers a plan for Social Security privatization that is basically identical to the Bush proposals of five years ago.

But what’s really worth noting, given the way the G.O.P. has campaigned against health care reform, is what Mr. Ryan proposes doing with and to Medicare.

In the Ryan proposal, nobody currently under the age of 55 would be covered by Medicare as it now exists. Instead, people would receive vouchers and be told to buy their own insurance. And even this new, privatized version of Medicare would erode over time because the value of these vouchers would almost surely lag ever further behind the actual cost of health insurance. By the time Americans now in their 20s or 30s reached the age of eligibility, there wouldn’t be much of a Medicare program left.

But what about those who already are covered by Medicare, or will enter the program over the next decade? You’re safe, says the roadmap; you’ll still be eligible for traditional Medicare. Except, that is, for the fact that the plan “strengthens the current program with changes such as income-relating drug benefit premiums to ensure long-term sustainability.”

If this sounds like deliberately confusing gobbledygook, that’s because it is. Fortunately, the Congressional Budget Office, which has done an evaluation of the roadmap, offers a translation: “Some higher-income enrollees would pay higher premiums, and some program payments would be reduced.” In short, there would be Medicare cuts.

And it’s possible to back out the size of those cuts from the budget office analysis, which compares the Ryan proposal with a “baseline” representing current policy. As I’ve already said, the total over the next decade comes to about $650 billion — substantially bigger than the Medicare savings in the Democratic bills.

The bottom line, then, is that the crusade against health reform has relied, crucially, on utter hypocrisy: Republicans who hate Medicare, tried to slash Medicare in the past, and still aim to dismantle the program over time, have been scoring political points by denouncing proposals for modest cost savings — savings that are substantially smaller than the spending cuts buried in their own proposals.

And if Democrats don’t get their act together and push the almost-completed reform across the goal line, this breathtaking act of staggering hypocrisy will succeed.

By TIMOTHY EGAN
NY Times Published: February 10, 2010

LATHROP, Calif. — Drive along foreclosure alley, through new planned communities that look like tile-roofed versions of a 21st century ghost town, and you see what happens when people gamble with houses instead of casino chips.

Dirty flags advertise rock-bottom discounts on empty starter mansions. On the ground, foreclosure signs are tagged with gang graffiti. Empty lots are untended, cratered with mud puddles from the winter storms that have hammered California’s San Joaquin Valley.

Nobody is home in the cities of the future.

In a decade, they saw real property defy reality in real time in these insta-neighborhoods that sprouted in what had been some of the world’s most productive farmland.

In places like Lathrop, Manteca and Tracy, population nearly doubled in 10 years, and home prices tripled. After inhaling all this real estate helium, some developers and their apologists in urban planning circles hailed the boom as the new America at the far exurban fringe. Every citizen a homeowner! Half-acre lots for all! No credit, no problem!

Others saw it as the residential embodiment of the Edward Abbey line that “growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.”

Now median home prices have fallen from $500,000 to $150,000 — among the most precipitous drops in the nation — and still the houses sit empty, spooky and see-through, waiting on demography and psychology to catch up.

In strip malls where tenants seem to last no longer than the life cycle of a gold fish, the bottom-feeders have moved in. “Coming soon: Cigarette City,” reads one sign here in Lathrop, near a “Cash Advance” outlet.

Take a pulse: How can a community possibly be healthy when one in eight houses are in some stage of foreclosure? How can a town attract new people when the crime rate has spiked well above the national average? How can a family dream, or even save, when unemployment hovers around 16 percent?

Yet if these staggered exurbs, about two hours inland from San Francisco, were an illness, they would not quite be Abbey’s cancer. Though sick, foreclosure alley is not terminal. This is not Detroit with sunshine. It will be reborn, remade, inhabited. The question is: as what?

Nationwide, a record 2.8 million homes received foreclosure notices last year — up 119 percent from two years ago. Just under 5 million homeowners — 1 in 10 mortgages — owe more than their houses are worth. The impulse is to walk away. Surrender. And many have.

What they leave behind, along with the gang presence, the vandalism and the absence of vested owners, is a slum. A new slum. In an influential article in the Atlantic in 2008, the writer Christopher B. Leinberger predicted that the catastrophic collapse of the new home market could turn many of today’s McMansions into tenements.

I’m not sure of that. After several days in foreclosure alley, this broad swath of the Central Valley that has been rated by some economists as the most stressed region during the Great Recession, I can’t see such apocalyptic forecasts coming true.

Yes, huge developments are empty, with rising crime at the edges, and thousands of homes owned by banks that can’t unload them even at fire-sale prices.

But through it all, the country churns and expands, unlike most other Western democracies. That great American natural resource — tomorrow — will have to save the suburban slums.

Through immigration and high birth rates, the United States is expected to add another 100 million people by 2050. If you don’t believe me, consider that we’ve added 105 million people since 1970. This is more than the population of France. More than Italy. More than Germany. Currently, we have a net gain of one person every 13 seconds.

At some point, the market will settle on proper pricing levels. At its peak, only 11 percent of the people in this valley could afford the median home price.

In the meantime, during these low, ragged years, a few lessons about urban planning can be picked from the stucco pile.

One is that, at least here in California, the outlying cities themselves encouraged the boom, spurred by the state’s broken tax system. Hemmed in by property tax limitations, cities were compelled to increase revenue by the easiest route: expanding urban boundaries. They let developers plow up walnut groves and vineyards and places that were supposed to be strawberry fields forever to pay for services demanded by new school parents and park users.

Second, look at the cities with stable and recovering home markets. On this coast, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle and San Diego come to mind. All of these cities have fairly strict development codes, trying to hem in their excess sprawl. Developers, many of them, hate these restrictions. They said the coastal cities would eventually price the middle class out, and start to empty.

It hasn’t happened. Just the opposite. The developers’ favorite role models, the laissez faire free-for-alls — Las Vegas, the Phoenix metro area, South Florida, this valley — are the most troubled, the suburban slums.

Come see: this is what happens when money and market, alone, guide the way we live.