test your focus

By MATT RICHTEL
NY Times Published: June 6, 2010

SAN FRANCISCO — When one of the most important e-mail messages of his life landed in his in-box a few years ago, Kord Campbell overlooked it.

Not just for a day or two, but 12 days. He finally saw it while sifting through old messages: a big company wanted to buy his Internet start-up.

“I stood up from my desk and said, ‘Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God,’ ” Mr. Campbell said. “It’s kind of hard to miss an e-mail like that, but I did.”

The message had slipped by him amid an electronic flood: two computer screens alive with e-mail, instant messages, online chats, a Web browser and the computer code he was writing. (View an interactive panorama of Mr. Campbell’s workstation.)

While he managed to salvage the $1.3 million deal after apologizing to his suitor, Mr. Campbell continues to struggle with the effects of the deluge of data. Even after he unplugs, he craves the stimulation he gets from his electronic gadgets. He forgets things like dinner plans, and he has trouble focusing on his family.

His wife, Brenda, complains, “It seems like he can no longer be fully in the moment.”

This is your brain on computers.

Scientists say juggling e-mail, phone calls and other incoming information can change how people think and behave. They say our ability to focus is being undermined by bursts of information.

These play to a primitive impulse to respond to immediate opportunities and threats. The stimulation provokes excitement — a dopamine squirt — that researchers say can be addictive. In its absence, people feel bored.

The resulting distractions can have deadly consequences, as when cellphone-wielding drivers and train engineers cause wrecks. And for millions of people like Mr. Campbell, these urges can inflict nicks and cuts on creativity and deep thought, interrupting work and family life.

While many people say multitasking makes them more productive, research shows otherwise. Heavy multitaskers actually have more trouble focusing and shutting out irrelevant information, scientists say, and they experience more stress.

And scientists are discovering that even after the multitasking ends, fractured thinking and lack of focus persist. In other words, this is also your brain off computers.

“The technology is rewiring our brains,” said Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute of Drug Abuse and one of the world’s leading brain scientists. She and other researchers compare the lure of digital stimulation less to that of drugs and alcohol than to food and sex, which are essential but counterproductive in excess.

Technology use can benefit the brain in some ways, researchers say. Imaging studies show the brains of Internet users become more efficient at finding information. And players of some video games develop better visual acuity.

More broadly, cellphones and computers have transformed life. They let people escape their cubicles and work anywhere. They shrink distances and handle countless mundane tasks, freeing up time for more exciting pursuits.

For better or worse, the consumption of media, as varied as e-mail and TV, has exploded. In 2008, people consumed three times as much information each day as they did in 1960. And they are constantly shifting their attention. Computer users at work change windows or check e-mail or other programs nearly 37 times an hour, new research shows.

The nonstop interactivity is one of the most significant shifts ever in the human environment, said Adam Gazzaley, a neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco.

“We are exposing our brains to an environment and asking them to do things we weren’t necessarily evolved to do,” he said. “We know already there are consequences.”

Mr. Campbell, 43, came of age with the personal computer, and he is a heavier user of technology than most. But researchers say the habits and struggles of Mr. Campbell and his family typify what many experience — and what many more will, if trends continue.

For him, the tensions feel increasingly acute, and the effects harder to shake.

The Campbells recently moved to California from Oklahoma to start a software venture. Mr. Campbell’s life revolves around computers. (View a slide show on how the Campbells interact with technology.)

He goes to sleep with a laptop or iPhone on his chest, and when he wakes, he goes online. He and Mrs. Campbell, 39, head to the tidy kitchen in their four-bedroom hillside rental in Orinda, an affluent suburb of San Francisco, where she makes breakfast and watches a TV news feed in the corner of the computer screen while he uses the rest of the monitor to check his e-mail.

Major spats have arisen because Mr. Campbell escapes into video games during tough emotional stretches. On family vacations, he has trouble putting down his devices. When he rides the subway to San Francisco, he knows he will be offline 221 seconds as the train goes through a tunnel.

Their 16-year-old son, Connor, tall and polite like his father, recently received his first C’s, which his family blames on distraction from his gadgets. Their 8-year-old daughter, Lily, like her mother, playfully tells her father that he favors technology over family.

“I would love for him to totally unplug, to be totally engaged,” says Mrs. Campbell, who adds that he becomes “crotchety until he gets his fix.” But she would not try to force a change.

“He loves it. Technology is part of the fabric of who he is,” she says. “If I hated technology, I’d be hating him, and a part of who my son is too.”

Always On

Mr. Campbell, whose given name is Thomas, had an early start with technology in Oklahoma City. When he was in third grade, his parents bought him Pong, a video game. Then came a string of game consoles and PCs, which he learned to program.

In high school, he balanced computers, basketball and a romance with Brenda, a cheerleader with a gorgeous singing voice. He studied too, with focus, uninterrupted by e-mail. “I did my homework because I needed to get it done,” he said. “I didn’t have anything else to do.”

He left college to help with a family business, then set up a lawn mowing service. At night he would read, play video games, hang out with Brenda and, as she remembers it, “talk a lot more.”

In 1996, he started a successful Internet provider. Then he built the start-up that he sold for $1.3 million in 2003 to LookSmart, a search engine.

Mr. Campbell loves the rush of modern life and keeping up with the latest information. “I want to be the first to hear when the aliens land,” he said, laughing. But other times, he fantasizes about living in pioneer days when things moved more slowly: “I can’t keep everything in my head.”

No wonder. As he came of age, so did a new era of data and communication.

At home, people consume 12 hours of media a day on average, when an hour spent with, say, the Internet and TV simultaneously counts as two hours. That compares with five hours in 1960, say researchers at the University of California, San Diego. Computer users visit an average of 40 Web sites a day, according to research by RescueTime, which offers time-management tools.

As computers have changed, so has the understanding of the human brain. Until 15 years ago, scientists thought the brain stopped developing after childhood. Now they understand that its neural networks continue to develop, influenced by things like learning skills.

So not long after Eyal Ophir arrived at Stanford in 2004, he wondered whether heavy multitasking might be leading to changes in a characteristic of the brain long thought immutable: that humans can process only a single stream of information at a time.

Going back a half-century, tests had shown that the brain could barely process two streams, and could not simultaneously make decisions about them. But Mr. Ophir, a student-turned-researcher, thought multitaskers might be rewiring themselves to handle the load.

His passion was personal. He had spent seven years in Israeli intelligence after being weeded out of the air force — partly, he felt, because he was not a good multitasker. Could his brain be retrained?

Mr. Ophir, like others around the country studying how technology bent the brain, was startled by what he discovered.

The Myth of Multitasking

The test subjects were divided into two groups: those classified as heavy multitaskers based on their answers to questions about how they used technology, and those who were not.

In a test created by Mr. Ophir and his colleagues, subjects at a computer were briefly shown an image of red rectangles. Then they saw a similar image and were asked whether any of the rectangles had moved. It was a simple task until the addition of a twist: blue rectangles were added, and the subjects were told to ignore them. (Play a game testing how well you filter out distractions.)

The multitaskers then did a significantly worse job than the non-multitaskers at recognizing whether red rectangles had changed position. In other words, they had trouble filtering out the blue ones — the irrelevant information.

So, too, the multitaskers took longer than non-multitaskers to switch among tasks, like differentiating vowels from consonants and then odd from even numbers. The multitaskers were shown to be less efficient at juggling problems. (Play a game testing how well you switch between tasks.)

Other tests at Stanford, an important center for research in this fast-growing field, showed multitaskers tended to search for new information rather than accept a reward for putting older, more valuable information to work.

Researchers say these findings point to an interesting dynamic: multitaskers seem more sensitive than non-multitaskers to incoming information.

The results also illustrate an age-old conflict in the brain, one that technology may be intensifying. A portion of the brain acts as a control tower, helping a person focus and set priorities. More primitive parts of the brain, like those that process sight and sound, demand that it pay attention to new information, bombarding the control tower when they are stimulated.

Researchers say there is an evolutionary rationale for the pressure this barrage puts on the brain. The lower-brain functions alert humans to danger, like a nearby lion, overriding goals like building a hut. In the modern world, the chime of incoming e-mail can override the goal of writing a business plan or playing catch with the children.

“Throughout evolutionary history, a big surprise would get everyone’s brain thinking,” said Clifford Nass, a communications professor at Stanford. “But we’ve got a large and growing group of people who think the slightest hint that something interesting might be going on is like catnip. They can’t ignore it.”

Mr. Nass says the Stanford studies are important because they show multitasking’s lingering effects: “The scary part for guys like Kord is, they can’t shut off their multitasking tendencies when they’re not multitasking.”

Melina Uncapher, a neurobiologist on the Stanford team, said she and other researchers were unsure whether the muddied multitaskers were simply prone to distraction and would have had trouble focusing in any era. But she added that the idea that information overload causes distraction was supported by more and more research.

A study at the University of California, Irvine, found that people interrupted by e-mail reported significantly increased stress compared with those left to focus. Stress hormones have been shown to reduce short-term memory, said Gary Small, a psychiatrist at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Preliminary research shows some people can more easily juggle multiple information streams. These “supertaskers” represent less than 3 percent of the population, according to scientists at the University of Utah.

Other research shows computer use has neurological advantages. In imaging studies, Dr. Small observed that Internet users showed greater brain activity than nonusers, suggesting they were growing their neural circuitry.

At the University of Rochester, researchers found that players of some fast-paced video games can track the movement of a third more objects on a screen than nonplayers. They say the games can improve reaction and the ability to pick out details amid clutter.

“In a sense, those games have a very strong both rehabilitative and educational power,” said the lead researcher, Daphne Bavelier, who is working with others in the field to channel these changes into real-world benefits like safer driving.

There is a vibrant debate among scientists over whether technology’s influence on behavior and the brain is good or bad, and how significant it is.

“The bottom line is, the brain is wired to adapt,” said Steven Yantis, a professor of brain sciences at Johns Hopkins University. “There’s no question that rewiring goes on all the time,” he added. But he said it was too early to say whether the changes caused by technology were materially different from others in the past.

Mr. Ophir is loath to call the cognitive changes bad or good, though the impact on analysis and creativity worries him.

He is not just worried about other people. Shortly after he came to Stanford, a professor thanked him for being the one student in class paying full attention and not using a computer or phone. But he recently began using an iPhone and noticed a change; he felt its pull, even when playing with his daughter.

“The media is changing me,” he said. “I hear this internal ping that says: check e-mail and voice mail.”

“I have to work to suppress it.”

Kord Campbell does not bother to suppress it, or no longer can.

Interrupted by a Corpse

It is a Wednesday in April, and in 10 minutes, Mr. Campbell has an online conference call that could determine the fate of his new venture, called Loggly. It makes software that helps companies understand the clicking and buying patterns of their online customers.

Mr. Campbell and his colleagues, each working from a home office, are frantically trying to set up a program that will let them share images with executives at their prospective partner.

But at the moment when Mr. Campbell most needs to focus on that urgent task, something else competes for his attention: “Man Found Dead Inside His Business.”

That is the tweet that appears on the left-most of Mr. Campbell’s array of monitors, which he has expanded to three screens, at times adding a laptop and an iPad.

On the left screen, Mr. Campbell follows the tweets of 1,100 people, along with instant messages and group chats. The middle monitor displays a dark field filled with computer code, along with Skype, a service that allows Mr. Campbell to talk to his colleagues, sometimes using video. The monitor on the right keeps e-mail, a calendar, a Web browser and a music player.

Even with the meeting fast approaching, Mr. Campbell cannot resist the tweet about the corpse. He clicks on the link in it, glances at the article and dismisses it. “It’s some article about something somewhere,” he says, annoyed by the ads for jeans popping up.

The program gets fixed, and the meeting turns out to be fruitful: the partners are ready to do business. A colleague says via instant message: “YES.”

Other times, Mr. Campbell’s information juggling has taken a more serious toll. A few weeks earlier, he once again overlooked an e-mail message from a prospective investor. Another time, Mr. Campbell signed the company up for the wrong type of business account on Amazon.com, costing $300 a month for six months before he got around to correcting it. He has burned hamburgers on the grill, forgotten to pick up the children and lingered in the bathroom playing video games on an iPhone.

Mr. Campbell can be unaware of his own habits. In a two-and-a-half hour stretch one recent morning, he switched rapidly between e-mail and several other programs, according to data from RescueTime, which monitored his computer use with his permission. But when asked later what he was doing in that period, Mr. Campbell said he had been on a long Skype call, and “may have pulled up an e-mail or two.”

The kind of disconnection Mr. Campbell experiences is not an entirely new problem, of course. As they did in earlier eras, people can become so lost in work, hobbies or TV that they fail to pay attention to family.

Mr. Campbell concedes that, even without technology, he may work or play obsessively, just as his father immersed himself in crossword puzzles. But he says this era is different because he can multitask anyplace, anytime.

“It’s a mixed blessing,” he said. “If you’re not careful, your marriage can fall apart or your kids can be ready to play and you’ll get distracted.”

The Toll on Children

Father and son sit in armchairs. Controllers in hand, they engage in a fierce video game battle, displayed on the nearby flat-panel TV, as Lily watches.

They are playing Super Smash Bros. Brawl, a cartoonish animated fight between characters that battle using anvils, explosives and other weapons.

“Kill him, Dad,” Lily screams. To no avail. Connor regularly beats his father, prompting expletives and, once, a thrown pillow. But there is bonding and mutual respect.

“He’s a lot more tactical,” says Connor. “But I’m really good at quick reflexes.”

Screens big and small are central to the Campbell family’s leisure time. Connor and his mother relax while watching TV shows like “Heroes.” Lily has an iPod Touch, a portable DVD player and her own laptop, which she uses to watch videos, listen to music and play games.

Lily, a second-grader, is allowed only an hour a day of unstructured time, which she often spends with her devices. The laptop can consume her.

“When she’s on it, you can holler her name all day and she won’t hear,” Mrs. Campbell said.

Researchers worry that constant digital stimulation like this creates attention problems for children with brains that are still developing, who already struggle to set priorities and resist impulses.

Connor’s troubles started late last year. He could not focus on homework. No wonder, perhaps. On his bedroom desk sit two monitors, one with his music collection, one with Facebook and Reddit, a social site with news links that he and his father love. His iPhone availed him to relentless texting with his girlfriend.

When he studied, “a little voice would be saying, ‘Look up’ at the computer, and I’d look up,” Connor said. “Normally, I’d say I want to only read for a few minutes, but I’d search every corner of Reddit and then check Facebook.”

His Web browsing informs him. “He’s a fact hound,” Mr. Campbell brags. “Connor is, other than programming, extremely technical. He’s 100 percent Internet savvy.”

But the parents worry too. “Connor is obsessed,” his mother said. “Kord says we have to teach him balance.”

So in January, they held a family meeting. Study time now takes place in a group setting at the dinner table after everyone has finished eating. It feels, Mr. Campbell says, like togetherness.

No Vacations

For spring break, the family rented a cottage in Carmel, Calif. Mrs. Campbell hoped everyone would unplug.

But the day before they left, the iPad from Apple came out, and Mr. Campbell snapped one up. The next night, their first on vacation, “We didn’t go out to dinner,” Mrs. Campbell mourned. “We just sat there on our devices.”

She rallied the troops the next day to the aquarium. Her husband joined them for a bit but then begged out to do e-mail on his phone.

Later she found him playing video games.

The trip came as Mr. Campbell was trying to raise several million dollars for his new venture, a goal that he achieved. Brenda said she understood that his pursuit required intensity but was less understanding of the accompanying surge in video game.

His behavior brought about a discussion between them. Mrs. Campbell said he told her that he was capable of logging off, citing a trip to Hawaii several years ago that they called their second honeymoon.

“What trip are you thinking about?” she said she asked him. She recalled that he had spent two hours a day online in the hotel’s business center.

On Thursday, their fourth day in Carmel, Mr. Campbell spent the day at the beach with his family. They flew a kite and played whiffle ball.

Connor unplugged too. “It changes the mood of everything when everybody is present,” Mrs. Campbell said.

The next day, the family drove home, and Mr. Campbell disappeared into his office.

Technology use is growing for Mrs. Campbell as well. She divides her time between keeping the books of her husband’s company, homemaking and working at the school library. She checks e-mail 25 times a day, sends texts and uses Facebook.

Recently, she was baking peanut butter cookies for Teacher Appreciation Day when her phone chimed in the living room. She answered a text, then became lost in Facebook, forgot about the cookies and burned them. She started a new batch, but heard the phone again, got lost in messaging, and burned those too. Out of ingredients and shamed, she bought cookies at the store.

She feels less focused and has trouble completing projects. Some days, she promises herself she will ignore her device. “It’s like a diet — you have good intentions in the morning and then you’re like, ‘There went that,’ ” she said.

Mr. Nass at Stanford thinks the ultimate risk of heavy technology use is that it diminishes empathy by limiting how much people engage with one another, even in the same room.

“The way we become more human is by paying attention to each other,” he said. “It shows how much you care.”

That empathy, Mr. Nass said, is essential to the human condition. “We are at an inflection point,” he said. “A significant fraction of people’s experiences are now fragmented.”

Thanks to Jonathan Maghen and Nate Lentz

Illustration by Barry Blitt

By FRANK RICH
NY Times Published: June 4, 2010

IT turns out there is something harder to find than a fix for BP’s leak: Barack Obama’s boiling point.

The frantic and fruitless nationwide search for the president’s temper is now our sole dependable comic relief from the tragedy in the gulf. Only The Onion could have imagined the White House briefing last week where a CBS News correspondent asked the press secretary, Robert Gibbs, if he had “really seen rage from the president” and to “describe it.” Gibbs came up with Obama’s “clenched jaw” and his order to “plug the damn hole.” (Thank God he hadn’t settled for “darn.”) This evidence did not persuade anyone, least of all Spike Lee, who could be found on CNN the next night begging the president, “One time, go off!”

Not going to happen. Obama will never unleash the anger of the antagonists in “Do the Right Thing” or match James Carville’s rebooted “ragin’ Cajun” shtick. That’s not who Obama is. If he tried to go off, he’d look ridiculous. But the debate over how to raise the president’s emotional thermostat is not an entirely innocuous distraction. It allows Obama to duck the more serious doubts about his leadership that have resurfaced along with BP’s oil.

Unlike his unflappable temperament, his lingering failings should and could be corrected. And they must be if his presidency is not just to rise above the 24/7 Spill-cam but to credibly seize the narrative that Americans have craved ever since he was elected during the most punishing economic downturn of our lifetime. We still want to believe that Obama is on our side, willing to fight those bad corporate actors who cut corners and gambled recklessly while regulators slept, Congress raked in contributions, and we got stuck with the wreckage and the bills. But his leadership style keeps sowing confusion about his loyalties, puncturing holes in the powerful tale he could tell.

His most conspicuous flaw is his unshakeable confidence in the collective management brilliance of the best and the brightest he selected for his White House team — “his abiding faith in the judgment of experts,” as Joshua Green of The Atlantic has put it. At his gulf-centric press conference 10 days ago, the president said he had “probably had more meetings on this issue than just about any issue since we did our Afghan review.” This was meant to be reassuring but it was not. The plugging of an uncontrollable oil leak, like the pacification of an intractable Afghanistan, may be beyond the reach of marathon brainstorming by brainiacs, even if the energy secretary is a Nobel laureate. Obama has yet to find a sensible middle course between blind faith in his own Ivy League kind and his predecessor’s go-with-the-gut bravado.

By now, he also should have learned that the best and the brightest can get it wrong — and do. His economic advisers predicted that without the stimulus the unemployment rate might reach 9 percent — a projection that was quickly exceeded even with the stimulus and that has haunted the administration ever since. Other White House geniuses persuaded the president to make his fateful claim in early April that “oil rigs today generally don’t cause spills” — a particularly specious (indeed false) plank in the argument for his spectacularly ill-timed expansion of offshore oil drilling. The Times reported last week that at the administration meetings leading to this new drilling policy the subject of the vast dysfunction at the Minerals Management Service, the agency charged with regulating the drilling, never even came up.

Obama’s excessive trust in his own heady team is all too often matched by his inherent deference to the smartest guys in the boardroom in the private sector. His default assumption seems to be that his peers are always as well-intentioned as he is. The single biggest mistake he has made in managing the gulf disaster was his failure to challenge BP’s version of events from the start. The company consistently understated the spill’s severity, overestimated the progress of the repair operation and low-balled the environmental damage. Yet the White House’s designated point man in the crisis, Adm. Thad Allen of the Coast Guard, was still publicly reaffirming his trust in the BP chief executive, Tony Hayward, as recently as two weeks ago, more than a month after the rig exploded.

This is baffling, and then some, given BP’s atrocious record prior to this catastrophe. In the last three years, according to the Center for Public Integrity, BP accounted for “97 percent of all flagrant violations found in the refining industry by government safety inspectors” — including 760 citations for “egregious, willful” violations (compared with only eight at the two oil companies that tied for second place). Hayward’s predecessor at BP, ousted in a sex-and-blackmail scandal in 2007, had placed cost-cutting (and ever more obscene profits) over safety, culminating in the BP Texas City refinery explosion that killed 15 and injured 170 in 2005. Last October The Times uncovered documents revealing that BP had still failed to address hundreds of safety hazards at that refinery in the four years after the explosion, prompting the largest fine in the history of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. (The fine, $87 million, was no doubt regarded as petty cash by a company whose profit reached nearly $17 billion last year.)

No high-powered White House meetings or risk analyses were needed to discern how treacherous it was to trust BP this time. An intern could have figured it out. But the credulous attitude toward BP is no anomaly for the administration. Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs was praised by the president as a “savvy” businessman two months before the Securities and Exchange Commission sued Goldman. Well before then, there had been a flood of journalistic indicators that Goldman under Blankfein may have gamed the crash and the bailout.

It’s this misplaced trust in elites both outside the White House and within it that seems to prevent Obama from realizing the moment that history has handed to him. Americans are still seething at the bonus-grabbing titans of the bubble and at the public and private institutions that failed to police them. But rather than embrace a unifying vision that could ignite his presidency, Obama shies away from connecting the dots as forcefully and relentlessly as the facts and Americans’ anger demand.

BP’s recklessness is just the latest variation on a story we know by heart. The company’s heedless disregard of risk and lack of safeguards at Deepwater Horizon are all too reminiscent of the failures at Lehman Brothers, Citigroup and A.I.G., where the richly rewarded top executives often didn’t even understand the toxic financial products that would pollute and nearly topple the nation’s economy. BP’s reliance on bought-off politicians and lax, industry-captured regulators at the M.M.S. mirrors Wall Street’s cozy relationship with its indulgent overseers at the S.E.C., Federal Reserve and New York Fed — not to mention Massey Energy’s dependence on somnolent supervision from the Mine Safety and Health Administration.

Given Toyota’s recent game of Russian roulette with Americans’ safety and Anthem Blue Cross’s unconscionable insurance-rate increases in California, Obama shouldn’t have any problem riveting the country’s attention to this sorry saga. He has the field to himself, thanks to a political opposition whose hottest new star, Rand Paul, and most beloved gulf-state governor, Haley Barbour of Mississippi, both leapt to BP’s defense right after the rig exploded. The Wall Street Journal editorial page perfectly set forth the conservative establishment’s party line on May 26: “There is zero evidence so far that this blowout resulted from lax regulation or shoddy practices.” Or as BP’s Hayward asked indignantly, “What the hell did we do to deserve this?”

If Obama is to have a truly transformative presidency, there could be no better catalyst than oil. Standard Oil jump-started Progressive Era trust-busting. Sinclair Oil’s kickback-induced leases of Wyoming’s Teapot Dome oilfields in the 1920s led to the first conviction and imprisonment of a presidential cabinet member (Harding’s interior secretary) for a crime committed while in the cabinet. The Arab oil embargo of the early 1970s and the Exxon Valdez spill of 1989 sped the conservation movement and search for alternative fuels. The Enron scandal prompted accounting reforms and (short-lived) scrutiny of corporate Ponzi schemes.

This all adds up to a Teddy Roosevelt pivot-point for Obama, who shares many of that president’s moral and intellectual convictions. But Obama can’t embrace his inner T.R. as long as he’s too in thrall to the supposed wisdom of the nation’s meritocracy, too willing to settle for incremental pragmatism as a goal, and too inhibited by the fine points of Washington policy debates to embrace bold words and bold action. If he is to wield the big stick of reform against BP and the other powerful interests that have ripped us off, he will have to tell the big story with no holds barred.

That doesn’t require a temper tantrum. Nor does it require him to plug the damn hole, which he can’t do anyway. What he does have the power to fix is his presidency. Should he do so, and soon, he’ll still have a real chance to mend a broken country as well.

Cimitero Drawing 11, 2010
Gouache, wax pastel and collage on paper
29.3 x 21.5 inches

Cimitero Drawings - June 5 - July 10, 2010

marc selwyn

By CHARLES M. BLOW
NY Times Published: June 4, 2010

Last week, while many of us were distracted by the oil belching forth from the gulf floor and the president’s ham-handed attempts to demonstrate that he was sufficiently engaged and enraged, Gallup released a stunning, and little noticed, report on Americans’ evolving views of homosexuality. Allow me to enlighten:

1. For the first time, the percentage of Americans who perceive “gay and lesbian relations” as morally acceptable has crossed the 50 percent mark. (You have to love the fact that they still use the word “relations.” So quaint.)

2. Also for the first time, the percentage of men who hold that view is greater than the percentage of women who do.

3. This new alignment is being led by a dramatic change in attitudes among younger men, but older men’s perceptions also have eclipsed older women’s. While women’s views have stayed about the same over the past four years, the percentage of men ages 18 to 49 who perceived these “relations” as morally acceptable rose by 48 percent, and among men over 50, it rose by 26 percent.

I warned you: stunning.

There is no way to know for sure what’s driving such a radical change in men’s views on this issue because Gallup didn’t ask, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t speculate. To help me do so, I called Dr. Michael Kimmel, a professor of sociology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook and the author or editor of more than 20 books on men and masculinity, and Professor Ritch Savin-Williams, the chairman of human development at Cornell University and the author of seven books, most of which deal with adolescent development and same-sex attraction.

Here are three theories:

1. The contact hypothesis. As more men openly acknowledge that they are gay, it becomes harder for men who are not gay to discriminate against them. And as that group of openly gay men becomes more varied — including athletes, celebrities and soldiers — many of the old, derisive stereotypes lose their purchase. To that point, a Gallup poll released last May found that people who said they personally knew someone who was gay or lesbian were more likely to be accepting of gay men and lesbians in general and more supportive of their issues.

2. Men may be becoming more egalitarian in general. As Dr. Kimmel put it: “Men have gotten increasingly comfortable with the presence of, and relative equality of, ‘the other,’ and we’re becoming more accustomed to it. And most men are finding that it has not been a disaster.” The expanding sense of acceptance likely began with the feminist and civil rights movements and is now being extended to the gay rights movement. Dr. Kimmel continued, “The dire predictions for diversity have not only not come true, but, in fact, they’ve been proved the other way.”

3. Virulent homophobes are increasingly being exposed for engaging in homosexuality. Think Ted Haggard, the once fervent antigay preacher and former leader of the National Association of Evangelicals, and his male prostitute. (This week, Haggard announced that he was starting a new “inclusive” church open to “gay, straight, bi, tall, short,” but no same-sex marriages. Not “God’s ideal.” Sorry.) Or George Rekers, the founding member of the Family Research Council, and his rent boy/luggage handler. Last week, the council claimed that repealing “don’t ask, don’t tell” would lead to an explosion of “homosexual assaults” in which sleeping soldiers would be the victims of fondling and fellatio by gay predators. In fact, there is a growing body of research that supports the notion that homophobia in some men could be a reaction to their own homosexual impulses. Many heterosexual men see this, and they don’t want to be associated with it. It’s like being antigay is becoming the old gay. Not cool.

These sound plausible, but why aren’t women seeing the same enlightening effects as men? Professor Savin-Williams suggests that there may be a “ceiling effect,” that men are simply catching up to women, and there may be a level at which views top out. Interesting.

All of this is great news, but it doesn’t mean that all measures relating to acceptance of gay men and lesbians have changed to the same degree. People’s comfort with the “gay and lesbian” part of the equation is still greater than their comfort with the “relations” part — the idea versus the act — particularly when it comes to pairings of men.

As Professor Savin-Williams told me, there is still a higher aversive reaction to same-sex sexuality among men than among women.

For instance, in a February New York Times/CBS News poll, half of the respondents were asked if they favored letting “gay men and lesbians” serve in the military (which is still more than 85 percent male), and the other half were asked if they favored letting “homosexuals” serve. Those who got the “homosexual” question favored it at a rate that was 11 percentage points lower than those who got the “gay men and lesbians” question.

Part of the difference may be that “homosexual” is a bigger, more clinical word freighted with a lot of historical baggage. But just as likely is that the inclusion of the root word “sex” still raises an aversive response to the idea of, how shall I say, the architectural issues between two men. It is the point at which support for basic human rights cleaves from endorsement of behavior.

As for the aversion among men, it may be softening a bit. Professor Savin-Williams says that his current research reveals that the fastest-growing group along the sexuality continuum are men who self-identify as “mostly straight” as opposed to labels like “straight,” “gay” or “bisexual.” They acknowledge some level of attraction to other men even as they say that they probably wouldn’t act on it, but … the right guy, the right day, a few beers and who knows. As the professor points out, you would never have heard that in years past.

All together now: stunning.

(I now return you to Day 46 of the oil spill where they finally may be making some progress.)

By Bob Pool
Los Angeles Times
June 5, 2010

Contradictions fly along Hyperion Avenue when the Birdman of Silver Lake takes wing.

Rik Martino rolls his wobbly cart with two mismatched wheels to the corner of Tracy Street and stops at Baller Hardware to buy two 20-pound bags of True Value Wild Bird Food.

More than 30 years after arriving from his native Italy, the 58-year-old actor is still looking for his big-screen break.

Square-jawed and body-builder muscular, Martino views himself as more Al Pacino than Jean-Claude Van Damme. “No martial arts films for me. I want to be a serious actor,” he explains as he waits in line to pay.

The customer in front of him, a man wearing spandex bicycling gear, is a few cents short for his purchase. Martino fishes in his pockets, pulls out a handful of coins and plunks them on the counter in front of the surprised stranger.

Martino spends about $12 for the seed. Clerk Joe Klaas gives him a small discount. “He’s in here a couple of times a day,” Klaas says. “Nobody else buys 50 or 60 pounds of bird seed a day like Franco does.”

Says another hardware store worker with a laugh: “We’re enablers.”

“Franco Massimo” is Martino’s stage name. Some in Silver Lake call him that, while others know him as Rik.

“I should be out looking for a job,” Martino jokes. “I don’t have a car. I’m a poor guy. I shouldn’t be doing this. I know some people don’t like it, but I put the birds first.”

With that, Martino heads up Hyperion, spreading bird seed as he goes. He sprinkles handfuls in planters for small songbirds. He flings cupfuls on the edges of parking lots and landscaped strips for pigeons.

For about 10 years, Martino shared a home a block off Hyperion with an ill man he worked for as a conservator. When the man died last year, Martino sold the house to close out the estate. He now rents a small apartment about two miles away, living off savings.

Martino’s love for birds began in 1984 when he rescued a pigeon hit by a car and nursed him back to health. “When I let him go and watched him fly off, I got so depressed,” he remembers.

A few days later he spied the rescued pigeon on a neighbor’s roof. When Martino tried to re-catch the distinctive-looking bird, the home’s owner called the police. “I explained what I was trying to do and the cops said I should get a little net. I finally caught him a few days later in a fishnet.”

He kept the pigeon for two years until he flew off. After that, Martino began using seed to attract birds.

Eventually, he had about 200 pigeons roosting in a coop and in a shed behind the Silver Lake conservatorship home. About 25 of them still live in a tree at the residence, and they swoop down when Martino whistles for them as he spreads seed along five blocks of Hyperion Avenue.

Hundreds of other pigeons fly in from other directions. They sit atop streetlights, store signs and power lines as they wait for the seed to be distributed.

Many along Hyperion Avenue dislike the bird feeding — and the resulting droppings. But most seem to genuinely like the friendly, outgoing Martino.

“We have a lot of pigeons. We had pigeons alighting on our front door this morning,” said Allison Carter of Crossroads Trading Co., a vintage clothing shop. “But his gesture is so lovely.”

Down the street at the SiLa Bistro, co-owners Frank Boyle and Ray Lopez said they struggle with the pigeon problem constantly.

“I have nothing against pigeons, but you shouldn’t be feeding them where people eat,” Boyle said. “We had to put up spikes to keep them out of our entryway. We have to go out all the time and clean up the poop. It etches the concrete walkway.”

The Birdman is nice, Lopez added. “We don’t wish him ill, but I worry about pigeons swarming out there.”

John McGinnis, who purchased the house that Martino lived in, said the home’s floors had to be refinished because of damage from pigeon droppings. He plans to put up spikes to keep the birds away from the front door.

“My wife and I have a 2-year-old,” said McGinnis, executive producer for a motion graphics company. “It’s a bummer to have poop on the front steps.”

Martino shrugs off that kind of criticism. “Pigeons get a bad rap because people don’t know pigeons,” he says. “They say they are dirty and bring disease. I’ve been taking care of them for 30 years and look at me.”

The Birdman scatters seed in front of a strip mall before ducking inside a copy shop to print some fliers warning of what he calls a “dangerous” puddle of oily gutter water that is attracting thirsty pigeons.

Martino posts the fliers on power poles — near notices placed by the “Franklin Hills Anti-Counterfeiting Committee” warning of fake bills being passed on the street.

His handwritten flier includes his name, phone number and a reference to a YouTube video about him that a friend has produced. That lends legitimacy to what he’s doing, Martino says.

Borrowing a broom from a nearby gas station, Martino sweeps the oily water into a storm drain.

Then he heads for home, his work done for this day.

John Wooden won 10 national championships as coach of the U.C.L.A. Bruins, and is often considered one of the greatest coaches in college basketball history. More Photos »

By FRANK LITSKY and JOHN BRANCH
NY Times Published: June 4, 2010

John Wooden, a staid Midwesterner who migrated to U.C.L.A. and became college basketball’s most successful coach, earning the nickname the Wizard of Westwood and an enduring place in sports history, died Friday at Ronald Reagan U.C.L.A. Medical Center, where he had been hospitalized since May 26. He was 99.

Wooden created a sports dynasty against which all others are compared, and usually pale. His teams at U.C.L.A. won 10 national championships in a 12-season stretch from 1964 to 1975. From 1971 to 1974, U.C.L.A. won 88 consecutive games, still the N.C.A.A. record.

Four of Wooden’s teams finished with 30-0 records, including his first championship team, which featured no starters taller than 6 feet 5 inches.

Three of his other championship teams were anchored by the 7-foot-2 center Lew Alcindor, who later changed his name to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Two others were led by center Bill Walton, a three-time national player of the year.

Wooden retired after U.C.L.A.’s 1975 championship victory over Kentucky. A slight man hugely popular for his winning record and his understated approach, he ultimately became viewed as a kind of sage for both basketball and life, a symbol of both excellence and simpler times.

Even in retirement he remained a beloved figure and a constant presence at U.C.L.A., watching most games from a seat behind the home bench at Pauley Pavilion. Lines of well-wishers and autograph-seekers often snaked their way to his seat in Section 103B. Wooden always obliged his fans, until the university and his family requested that he be granted privacy in January 2008, when he was 97.

A dynasty like Wooden’s would be almost impossible now, because the best players seldom spend more than a year or two in college before turning professional. No N.C.A.A. men’s basketball coach has won more than four championships since Wooden retired. Of Wooden’s eight coaching successors at U.C.L.A., only one — Jim Harrick in 1995 — won an N.C.A.A. championship with the Bruins, who have managed to retain an air of the elite among basketball programs largely on Wooden’s legacy.

Wooden’s success fed upon itself. When he won his first two national championships, landed Alcindor and moved home games to the new Pauley Pavilion, high school stars begged to play for him. Besides Abdul-Jabbar and Walton, Wooden turned out celebrated players like Gail Goodrich, Walt Hazzard, Keith Erickson, Henry Bibby, Lucius Allen, Sidney Wicks, Jamaal Wilkes and Marques Johnson.

“He was almost a mystical figure by the time I got to U.C.L.A.,” said Johnson, a starter on Wooden’s final team. “I couldn’t really sit down and have a conversation with him about real things just because I had so much reverence for him — for who he was and what he had accomplished.”

Johnson added, “He never gave that perception that that was the way he wanted you to treat him, but it was just how it was.”

Johnson, like many of Wooden’s players, grew closer to the coach in the decades after Wooden retired and visited him often.

In his autobiography, “Giant Steps” (Bantam, 1983), Abdul-Jabbar recalled his first meeting with Wooden. “Coach Wooden’s office was about the size of a walk-in closet,” he wrote. “I was brought in, and there was this very quaint-looking Midwesterner. I’d heard a lot about this man and his basketball wisdom, but he surely did look like he belonged in a one-room schoolhouse.”

He continued: “I found myself liking Mr. Wooden right away. He was calm, in no hurry to impress me with his knowledge or his power. He called me Lewis, and that decision endeared him to me even more. It was at once formal, my full name. I was no baby Lewie. Lewis. I liked that.”

Wooden was a dignified, scholarly man who spoke with the precise language of the English teacher he once was. He always carried a piece of paper with a message from his father that read:

“Be true to yourself. Make each day a masterpiece. Help others. Drink deeply from good books. Make friendship a fine art. Build a shelter against a rainy day.”

Wooden said he lived by that creed, and few players tested him. One who did was Walton, a gifted 6-foot-11 center with flowing red hair who went on to play for 10 seasons in the N.B.A.

At the start of Walton’s senior season, in 1973, his U.C.L.A. teams had won 75 consecutive games and two N.C.A.A. titles. But when Wooden walked into the locker room before the first practice and saw Walton’s just-trimmed but still long hair, he said:

“Bill, that’s not short enough. We’re sure going to miss you on this team. Get on out of here.”

Walton jumped onto his bicycle, raced back to the barber shop where his hair had been trimmed the day before, got his head almost shaved and rode back. He made the last half-hour of practice.

During the Vietnam War era, Wooden’s young players, including Walton, asked permission to stage an antiwar protest. “He asked us if this reflected our convictions,” one player, Steve Patterson, told Sports Illustrated in 1989, “and we told him it did. He told us he had his convictions, too, and if we missed practice it would be the end of our careers at U.C.L.A.”

In an interview with The New York Times in 1995, Wooden said his coaching philosophy revolved around three main ideals. One was to get his players “in the best possible condition.” Another was “quickness.”

“I wanted my centers to be quicker than the opposing centers, the forwards quicker than their forwards, and so on,” he explained.

The third was teamwork: “You better play together as a team or you sit.”

“People ask me if I’d permit fancy things, like dunks,” Wooden said. “Well, if they did dunk, it was with no fancy flair. No behind-the-back dribbles or passes unless necessary. If it was for show, you were on the bench.”

John Robert Wooden was born into a Dutch-Irish family on Oct. 14, 1910, in Hall, Ind., and grew up in a farmhouse that had no electricity and no indoor plumbing. Before his sophomore year in high school, when his father, Joshua, and his mother, Roxie, lost the farm, he and his three brothers moved to Martinsville, 8 miles away and 30 miles south of Indianapolis.

His first basketball was a black cotton sock his mother had stuffed with rags. The hoop was a tomato basket until his father forged a rim from the rings of a barrel.

Wooden later led Martinsville High School to three consecutive state finals, winning in 1927. Playing the cornet in the school band at the time was Nellie Riley, a classmate. They were inseparable from then on; their marriage lasted 53 years, until her death in 1985.

Wooden went to Purdue University, even though it had no athletic scholarships. To get tuition money, he spent summers doing construction work.

At Purdue he was a basketball all-American, a 5-foot-10, 175-pound guard and team captain. In 1932 he led Purdue to the Helms Foundation’s unofficial national championship and was named national player of the year. An English major, he also had the highest grade-point average of any Purdue athlete that year. He earned a teaching degree and taught at Dayton High School in Dayton, Ky., where he also coached almost everything, including tennis and baseball. Two years later he moved back to Indiana, to South Bend Central High School, where for nine years he taught English and coached basketball. In his 11 years as a high school basketball coach, his record was 218-42.

From 1943 to 1946, he served in the Navy as a physical education instructor. Afterward, Indiana State Teachers College (now Indiana State) hired him as athletic director and basketball and baseball coach.

In 1948, U.C.L.A. wooed him away as basketball coach for $6,000 a year. His team practiced in a little gymnasium and had to share the court with the wrestling and gymnastics teams.

His success at U.C.L.A, where he perfected a merciless zone defense, brought him a nickname he hated: the Wizard of Westwood, a reference to the Westwood section of Los Angeles, the site of the campus.

Wooden was a religious man whose strongest exclamation was “Goodness gracious sakes alive!” Still, many opposing coaches thought he was not always a saint. Digger Phelps, the longtime Notre Dame coach, once said Wooden rode officials and opposing players more than any other coach. Wooden admitted he was no innocent.

“The thing I may be ashamed of more than anything else is having talked to opposing players,” he said. “Not calling them names, but saying something like ‘Keep your hands off him’ or ‘Don’t be a butcher.’ ”

There was a more serious mark against Wooden and his reign. By the mid-1970s, Sam Gilbert, a team booster, had befriended many U.C.L.A. players. Several said he had given them illegal benefits. According to allegations reported in The Los Angeles Times in 1982, Gilbert provided cars and clothes for U.C.L.A. players and even arranged abortions for their girlfriends at times during the previous 15 years.

“I warned them, but I couldn’t pick their friends,” Wooden told Sports Illustrated in 1989. “I honestly felt Sam meant well.”

In December 1981 — more than six years after Wooden coached his last game — the N.C.A.A. placed U.C.L.A.’s basketball program on a two-year probation for violations, some involving Gilbert, although no legal action was taken against him.

Wooden was 64 and his wife was ill when he retired in 1975, saying he had lost desire. He left with a 620-147 record in 27 years at U.C.L.A. and a 40-year head coaching record of 885-203.

He was honored in many places. Martinsville, Ind., where he grew up, has a John R. Wooden Drive and a John R. Wooden Gymnasium at Martinsville High School. A college basketball player-of-the-year award is named for him. The midseason John R. Wooden Classic features leading college teams. He was the first person elected to the Basketball Hall of Fame as both player and coach. In 2003, U.C.L.A. named its basketball floor the Nell and John Wooden Court.

Ever self-effacing, he declined when U.C.L.A. proposed a ceremony for his 90th birthday. In later years he lived in a modest condominium in Encino, Calif., outside Los Angeles. Hip-replacement surgery forced him to give up morning walks. He also needed his knees replaced, and he walked with a cane.

Wooden watched U.C.L.A. on television as it went to the N.C.A.A. tournament’s Final Four in 2006, 2007 and 2008. A fall at his home in February 2008 left him with a broken wrist and collarbone. He spent several weeks at a hospital and a rehabilitation center.

For most of his retirement, large crowds flocked to his speeches, usually revolving around his “Pyramid of Success,” 15 conceptual building blocks of traits like industriousness, alertness and poise, held together by faith and patience. In recent years Wooden simply sat in a chair and spoke for up to an hour without notes, hoping to impart his wisdom to newer generations. His former players said they did not appreciate Wooden’s life lessons when they were young, but the precepts stuck with them.

“At the time it was like, ‘Pyramid, shmyramid,’ ” Marques Johnson said. “ ‘Where’s the party at? Where are the girls at?’ I didn’t want to hear anything about principles and living a life of integrity at that time. But as you get older, and you have kids, and you try to pass on life lessons, now it becomes a great learning tool.”

Wooden is survived by a son, James, of Orange County, Calif.; a daughter, Nancy, of Los Angeles; 7 grandchildren and 13 great-grandchildren.

Wooden always described his job as teacher, not coach. “He broke basketball down to its basic elements,” Abdul-Jabbar wrote in The New York Times in 2000. “He always told us basketball was a simple game, but his ability to make the game simple was part of his genius.”

Abdul-Jabbar recalled that there “was no ranting and raving, no histrionics or theatrics.” He continued: “To lead the way Coach Wooden led takes a tremendous amount of faith. He was almost mystical in his approach, yet that approach only strengthened our confidence. Coach Wooden enjoyed winning, but he did not put winning above everything. He was more concerned that we became successful as human beings, that we earned our degrees, that we learned to make the right choices as adults and as parents.

“In essence,” Abdul-Jabbar concluded, “he was preparing us for life.”

By ROBERTA SMITH
NY Times Published: June 3, 2010

WASHINGTON — By now, hero worship of the French artist Yves Klein (1928-62) should be a thing of the past. Sure, he was charismatic, movie-star handsome and a black belt in judo, and he had a gift for provocative gestures. At the age of 19, on the beach with two friends, a poet and an artist, Klein “signed the sky” as his first work of art. In the mid-1950s he developed a smoldering ultramarine pigment that in a stroke of branding genius, he patented and named International Klein Blue.

He also made all kinds of important art. His gloriously retinal blue monochromes are among the cornerstones of Minimalism; other works foreshadow Conceptual, performance, body and environmental art, not to mention the dematerialization of art. In an early version of commodity art, he sold collectors chunks of “invisible pictorial sensibility” (thin air) and then converted the purchase price into gold leaf that he frittered into the Seine while the buyer watched and a photographer took pictures.

He was the first artist to exhibit an art gallery as a work of art, in Paris in 1958. And in 1959 he lectured at the Sorbonne on “Art’s Evolution Toward the Immaterial.”

All this in a period of maturity that lasted slightly more than seven years.

Still, in the nearly five decades since Klein died of a heart attack at 34, miles of print have been devoted to demystifying, deconstructing and generally letting the air out of the myth of the artist as genius. Which makes it slightly unsettling that the two extremely intelligent co-curators of the dazzling retrospective of Klein’s work at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden here sometimes sound completely smitten in their catalog essays.

Kerry Brougher, the Hirshhorn’s deputy director and chief curator, calls Klein an “involuntary painter” who depicted “the invisible” and wonders if Klein wasn’t “some strange object who came, only for a short time, from the heavens to open our eyes and minds.” Then Philippe Vergne, the director of the Dia Art Foundation in New York and a former curator at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis — which has organized the show with the Hirshhorn — frets about whether it is possible even to capture his extraordinary essence in exhibition form. “Klein’s gaze was cosmic and spiritual,” Mr. Vergne writes, noting that Klein was “barely older than Jesus when he died,” and that his “imprint on the creative landscape of the second half of the last century is as deep as that of a stigmata.”

A grip needs to be gotten here. Klein was a complicated creature, given to hyperbole, adept at self-mythology, guided by an overweening narcissism and full of contradictions. He also had great style, which gave everything he did a kind of show-biz glamour.

Klein rejected paintbrushes as “too excessively psychological” but used naked women smeared with International Klein Blue as “human brushes” for his “Anthropometry” paintings. These were made in public performances at which he wore white tie and tails. Why is all this not excessive or psychological — or simply par for the course in the age of Brigitte Bardot?

Klein’s “no-hands” approach to painting was probably inspired by Jackson Pollock’s drip technique, but was quite a bit more sensational. He would later use a blow torch — along with nude models and lots of water — and also the wind in the making of his work.

The famous photograph of Klein leaping from the ledge of a roof — “Into the Void” (1960) — may suggest a yearning for total freedom and Zen-like nothingness. But he also loved institutional pomp and dress-up so much that he joined the Order of St. Sebastian and was married in the order’s regalia, which included a cape, a Maltese cross and a navy admiral’s bicorn hat, feather trimmed. Even after deducting for irony, questions remain.

To their credit the curators have organized an exhibition that presents both Klein’s achievement and his foibles with a minimum of fuss and a fitting sense of clarity, concentration and elegance. Seeing his work spaciously arrayed in the circle of the Hirshhorn’s second-floor galleries adds a wonderful momentum to his manic trajectory.

Above all, the curators let Klein himself speak. The show is almost entirely devoid of explanatory texts; whatever words appear on the walls are Klein’s own. In the opening gallery a three-minute film of “The Void,” the empty-gallery-as-art staged at Galerie Iris Clert in 1958, gives a good sense of the man’s charms and contradictions.

With the passage of time “The Void” has acquired a reputation for Minimalist austerity, but in the film it looks surprisingly quaint. Outside, a huge swag of dark blue velvet is draped over the gallery’s entrance, as if heads of state are expected. Inside, Klein, in his white tie and tails, shows us around, gesturing toward various walls as if toward invisible paintings. He’s a sweetly smiling mime, part magician, part maître d’. The title of the Hirshhorn show — “Yves Klein: With the Void, Full Powers” — comes from a note that Albert Camus left at Clert’s gallery after visiting “The Void” and is included here.

This show makes clear the extent of Klein’s artistic “propositions,” as he frequently called them. It ends in a flurry of drawings concerning his “architecture of the air,” which involved walls of fire and water and a roof of blown air that would deflect precipitation, and created an Edenic locale where people could walk around naked, like the women used as human brushes.

But the blue monochromes remain his most singular achievement, and his preparation seems to have started early. Klein was the precocious only child of two painters. His Dutch father, Fred Klein, who was partly Indonesian, was a figurative painter; his mother, Marie Raymond, was an abstractionist active on the Paris art scene. Young Yves pretty much began his career with abstraction, which may help explain how he went so far beyond it. In a touchingly cartoonish watercolor from 1954, one of the earliest works in the Hirshhorn show, three rectangles — of solid yellow, red and green — are grouped together on a proscenium stage, like actors in a play. (It is strikingly reminiscent of works by the contemporary painter Hiroshi Sugito.)

More grown-up monochromes, in different colors and on canvases of different sizes, follow quickly, and by 1957 the blue monochromes have developed. The most voluptuous are dotted with the sponges that Klein used in making them, and the high point of the Hirshhorn show is a large painting blooming with sponges and surrounded by sculptures made of individual sponges on stone and wire pedestals.

Donald Judd, whose extensive use of fiery cadmium red light in his early painted wood pieces was partly if not wholly indebted to Klein, wrote admiringly that Klein’s paintings were “the only ones that are unspatial.” (Frank Stella’s were the next closest.)

Half a century on, these paintings still shock, especially in the way their matte, implacably physical surfaces seem paradoxically to leak color into the air around them. Intense to the point of assault — in a velvet-gloved sort of way — they rivet the attention and open the mind and eye to everything that Klein did subsequently, in part by establishing the sense of purity and concentration underlying all his best work. They remain some of the most nonreferential paintings in the history of Western art, possibly the first to go beyond traditional abstraction and become objects in their own right.

We live in a period when artists who reject art objects are often turned into fetishes themselves. This has happened to Klein. His blue paintings have the distinction of revealing him at his most glamorous but also his deepest. They don’t reflect the artist, and they don’t picture the world: they are simply in it, part of the vast, riveting not-us and not-him.

Another Time Man, 2010

Another Time Man, 2010

Through June 12

Zach Feuer

Wayne Miller, Magnum Photos

By Paul Bloom
May 30, 2010
The Chronicle Review

How do Americans spend their leisure time? The answer might surprise you. The most common voluntary activity is not eating, drinking alcohol, or taking drugs. It is not socializing with friends, participating in sports, or relaxing with the family. While people sometimes describe sex as their most pleasurable act, time-management studies find that the average American adult devotes just four minutes per day to sex.

Our main leisure activity is, by a long shot, participating in experiences that we know are not real. When we are free to do whatever we want, we retreat to the imagination—to worlds created by others, as with books, movies, video games, and television (over four hours a day for the average American), or to worlds we ourselves create, as when daydreaming and fantasizing. While citizens of other countries might watch less television, studies in England and the rest of Europe find a similar obsession with the unreal.

This is a strange way for an animal to spend its days. Surely we would be better off pursuing more adaptive activities—eating and drinking and fornicating, establishing relationships, building shelter, and teaching our children. Instead, 2-year-olds pretend to be lions, graduate students stay up all night playing video games, young parents hide from their offspring to read novels, and many men spend more time viewing Internet pornography than interacting with real women. One psychologist gets the puzzle exactly right when she states on her Web site: “I am interested in when and why individuals might choose to watch the television show Friends rather than spending time with actual friends.”

One solution to this puzzle is that the pleasures of the imagination exist because they hijack mental systems that have evolved for real-world pleasure. We enjoy imaginative experiences because at some level we don’t distinguish them from real ones. This is a powerful idea, one that I think is basically—though not entirely—right. (Certain phenomena, including horror movies and masochistic daydreams, require a different type of explanation.)
Enlarge Image The Pleasures of Imagination 2

The capacity for imaginative pleasure is universal, and it emerges early in development. All normal children, everywhere, enjoy playing and pretending. There are cultural differences in the type and frequency of play. A child in New York might pretend to be an airplane; a hunter-gatherer child will not. In the 1950s, American children played Cowboys and Indians; not so much anymore. In some cultures, play is encouraged; in others, children have to sneak off to do it. But it is always there. Failure to play and pretend is a sign of a neurological problem, one of the early symptoms of autism.

Developmental psychologists have long been interested in children’s appreciation of the distinction between pretense and reality. We know that children who have reached their fourth birthday tend to have a relatively sophisticated understanding, because when we ask them straight out about what is real and what is pretend, they tend to get it right. What about younger children? Two-year-olds pretend to be animals and airplanes, and they can understand when other people do the same thing. A child sees her father roaring and prowling like a lion, and might run away, but she doesn’t act as though she thinks her father is actually a lion. If she believed that, she would be terrified. The pleasure children get from such activities would be impossible to explain if they didn’t have a reasonably sophisticated understanding that the pretend is not real.

It is an open question how early this understanding emerges, and there is some intriguing experimental work exploring this. My own hunch is that even babies have some limited grasp of pretense, and you can see this from casual interaction. A useful way to spend time with a 1-year-old is to put your face up close and wait for the baby to grab at your glasses or nose or hair. Once there is contact, pull your head back and roar in mock rage. The first time you get a bit of surprise, maybe concern, a dash of fear, but then you put your head back and wait for the baby to try again. She will, and then you give the pretend-startled response. Many babies come to find this hilarious. (If the baby is an eye-poker, you can wrestle over keys instead.) For this to work, though, the baby has to know that you are not even a little bit angry; the baby must know that you are pretending.

Why do we get pleasure from the imagination? Isn’t it odd that toddlers enjoy pretense, and that children and adults are moved by stories, that we have feelings about characters and events that we know do not exist? As the title of a classic philosophy article put it, how can we be moved by the fate of Anna Karenina?

The emotions triggered by fiction are very real. When Charles Dickens wrote about the death of Little Nell in the 1840s, people wept—and I’m sure that the death of characters in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series led to similar tears. (After her final book was published, Rowling appeared in interviews and told about the letters she got, not all of them from children, begging her to spare the lives of beloved characters such as Hagrid, Hermione, Ron, and, of course, Harry Potter himself.) A friend of mine told me that he can’t remember hating anyone the way he hated one of the characters in the movie Trainspotting, and there are many people who can’t bear to experience certain fictions because the emotions are too intense. I have my own difficulty with movies in which the suffering of the characters is too real, and many find it difficult to watch comedies that rely too heavily on embarrassment; the vicarious reaction to this is too unpleasant.

These emotional responses are typically muted compared with the real thing. Watching a movie in which someone is eaten by a shark is less intense than watching someone really being eaten by a shark. But at every level—physiological, neurological, psychological—the emotions are real, not pretend.

Does this suggest that people believe, at some level, that the events are real? Do we sometimes think that fictional characters actually exist and fictional events actually occur? Of course, people get fooled, as when parents tell their children about Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, and the Easter Bunny, or when an adult mistakes a story for a documentary, or vice versa. But the idea here is more interesting than that—it is that even once we consciously know something is fictional, there is a part of us that believes it’s real.

There is something to this: It can be devilishly hard to pull apart fiction from reality. There are several studies showing that reading a fact in a story—and knowing that it is fiction—increases the likelihood that you believe the fact to be true. And this makes sense, because stories are mostly true. If you were to read a novel that takes place in London toward the end of the 1980s, you would learn a lot about how people in that time and place talked to one another, what they ate, how they swore, and so on, because any decent storyteller has to include these truths as a backdrop for the story. The average person’s knowledge of law firms, emergency rooms, police departments, prisons, submarines, and mob hits is not rooted in real experience or nonfictional reports. It is based on stories. Someone who watched cop shows on television would absorb many truths about contemporary police work (”You have the right to remain silent . . .”), and a viewer of a realistic movie such as Zodiac would learn more. Indeed, many people seek out certain types of fiction (historical novels, for example) because they want a painless way of learning about reality.

We go too far sometimes. Fantasy can be confounded with reality. For example, the publication of The Da Vinci Code led to a booming tourism industry in Scotland, by people accepting the novel’s claims about the location of the Holy Grail. Then there is the special problem of confusing actors with the characters they play. Leonard Nimoy, an actor born in Boston to Yiddish-speaking Russian immigrants, was frequently confused with his best-known role, Mr. Spock, from the planet Vulcan. This was sufficiently frustrating that he published a book called I Am Not Spock (and then, 20 years later, published I Am Spock). Or consider the actor Robert Young, star of one of the first medical programs, Marcus Welby, M.D., who reported getting thousands of letters asking for medical advice. He later exploited this confusion by appearing in his doctor persona (wearing a white lab coat) on television commercials for aspirin and decaffeinated coffee. There is, then, an occasional blurring between fact and reality.

In the end, though, those brought to tears by Anna Karenina are perfectly aware that she is a character in a novel; those people who wailed when J.K. Rowling killed off Dobby the House Elf knew full well that he doesn’t exist. And even young children appreciate the distinction between reality and fiction; when you ask them, “Is such-and-so real or make-believe?,” they get it right.

Why, then, are we so moved by stories?

David Hume tells the story of a man who is hung out of a high tower in a cage of iron. He knows himself to be perfectly secure, but, still, he “cannot forebear trembling.” Montaigne gives a similar example, saying that if you put a sage on the edge of a precipice, “he must shudder like a child.” My colleague, the philosopher Tamar Gendler, describes the Grand Canyon Skywalk, a glass walkway that extends 70 feet from the canyon’s rim. It is supposedly a thrilling experience. So thrilling

that some people drive several miles over a dirt road to get there and then discover that they are too afraid to step onto the walkway. In all of these cases, people know they are perfectly safe, but they are nonetheless frightened.

In an important pair of papers, Gend-ler introduces a novel term to describe the mental state that underlies these reactions: She calls it “alief.” Beliefs are attitudes that we hold in response to how things are. Aliefs are more primitive. They are responses to how things seem. In the above example, people have beliefs that tell them they are safe, but they have aliefs that tell them they are in danger. Or consider the findings of Paul Rozin, a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, that people often refuse to drink soup from a brand-new bedpan, eat fudge shaped like feces, or put an empty gun to their head and pull the trigger. Gendler notes that the belief here is: The bedpan is clean, the fudge is fudge, the gun is empty. But the alief is stupid, screaming, “Filthy object! Dangerous object! Stay away!”

The point of alief is to capture the fact that our minds are partially indifferent to the contrast between events that we believe to be real versus those that seem to be real, or that are imagined to be real. This extends naturally to the pleasures of the imagination. Those who get pleasure voyeuristically watching real people have sex will enjoy watching actors having sex in a movie. Those who like observing clever people interact in the real world will get the same pleasure observing actors pretend to be such people on television. Imagination is Reality Lite—a useful substitute when the real pleasure is inaccessible, too risky, or too much work.

Often we experience ourselves as the agent, the main character, of an imaginary event. To use a term favored by psychologists who work in this area, we get transported. This is how daydreams and fantasies typically work; you imagine winning the prize, not watching yourself winning the prize. Certain video games work this way as well: They establish the illusion of running around shooting aliens, or doing tricks on a skateboard, through visual stimulation that fools a part of you into thinking—or alieving—that you, yourself, are moving through space.

For stories, though, you have access to information that the character lacks. The philosopher Noël Carroll gives the example of the opening scene in Jaws. You can’t be merely taking the teenager’s perspective as she swims in the dark, because she is cheerful, and you are terrified. You know things that she doesn’t. You hear the famous, ominous music; she doesn’t. You know that she is in a movie in which sharks eat people; she thinks that she is living a normal life.

This is how empathy works in real life. You would feel the same way seeing someone happily swim while a shark approaches her. In both fiction and reality, then, you simultaneously make sense of the situation from both the character’s perspective and from your own.

Samuel Johnson, writing about Shakespeare, said: “The delight of tragedy proceeds from our consciousness of fiction; if we thought murders and treasons real, they would please no more.” Johnson was a brilliant writer, but plainly he had never heard of O.J. Simpson. If he had, he’d realize that we get plenty of pleasure from real tragedy. Indeed, Shakespeare’s tragedies depict precisely the sorts of events that we most enjoy witnessing in the real world—complex and tense social interactions revolving around sex, love, family, wealth, and status.

I have argued that our emotions are partially insensitive to the contrast between real versus imaginary, but it is not as if we don’t care—real events are typically more moving than their fictional counterparts. This is in part because real events can affect us in the real world, and in part because we tend to ruminate about the implications of real-world acts. When the movie is finished or the show is canceled, the characters are over and done with. It would be odd to worry about how Hamlet’s friends are coping with his death because these friends don’t exist; to think about them would involve creating a novel fiction. But every real event has a past and a future, and this can move us. It is easy enough to think about the families of those people whom O.J. Simpson was accused of murdering.

But there are also certain compelling features of the imagination. Just as artificial sweeteners can be sweeter than sugar, unreal events can be more moving than real ones. There are three reasons for this.

First, fictional people tend to be wittier and more clever than friends and family, and their adventures are usually much more interesting. I have contact with the lives of people around me, but this is a small slice of humanity, and perhaps not the most interesting slice. My real world doesn’t include an emotionally wounded cop tracking down a serial killer, a hooker with a heart of gold, or a wisecracking vampire. As best I know, none of my friends has killed his father and married his mother. But I can meet all of those people in imaginary worlds.

Second, life just creeps along, with long spans where nothing much happens. The O.J. Simpson trial lasted months, and much of it was deadly dull. Stories solve this problem—as the critic Clive James once put it, “Fiction is life with the dull bits left out.” This is one reason why Friends is more interesting than your friends.

Finally, the technologies of the imagination provide stimulation of a sort that is impossible to get in the real world. A novel can span birth to death and can show you how the person behaves in situations that you could never otherwise observe. In reality you can never truly know what a person is thinking; in a story, the writer can tell you.

So while reality has its special allure, the imaginative techniques of books, plays, movies, and television have their own power. The good thing is that we do not have to choose. We can get the best of both worlds by taking an event that people know is real and using the techniques of the imagination to transform it into an experience that is more interesting and powerful than the normal perception of reality could ever be. The best example of this is an art form that has been invented in my lifetime, one that is addictively powerful, as shown by the success of shows such as The Real World, Survivor, The Amazing Race, and Fear Factor. What could be better than reality television?

Paul Bloom is a professor of psychology at Yale University. He is author of the forthcoming book, How Pleasure Works: The New Science of Why We Like What We Like (W.W. Norton & Company), from which this essay is adapted.

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Tuesday – Thursday 10pm – 2am

Night Gallery

Louise Bourgeois in 1990,
behind her marble sculpture Eye to Eye (1970)
Photo Raimon Ramis

BY: HOLLAND COTTER
NY Times Published: May 31, 2010

Louise Bourgeois, the French-born American artist who gained fame only late in a long career, when her psychologically charged abstract sculptures, drawings and prints had a galvanizing effect on the work of younger artists, particularly women, died on Monday in Manhattan, where she lived. She was 98.

The cause was a heart attack, said Wendy Williams, managing director of the Louise Bourgeois Studio.

Ms. Bourgeois’s sculptures in wood, steel, stone and cast rubber, often organic in form and sexually explicit, emotionally aggressive yet witty, covered many stylistic bases. But from first to last they shared a set of repeated themes centered on the human body and its need for nurture and protection in a frightening world.

Protection often translated into images of shelter or home. A gouged lump of cast bronze, for example, suggested an animal’s lair. A tablelike wooden structure with thin, stiltlike legs resembled a house ever threatening to topple. Her series of “Cells” from the early 1990s — installations of old doors, windows, steel fencing and found objects — were meant to be evocations of her childhood, which she claimed as the psychic source of her art.

But it was her images of the body itself, sensual but grotesque, fragmented, often sexually ambiguous, that proved especially memorable. In some cases the body took the abstract form of an upright wooden pole, pierced by a few holes and stuck with nails; in others it appeared as a pair of women’s hands realistically carved in marble and lying, palms open, on a massive stone base.

Among her most familiar sculptures was the much-exhibited “Nature Study” (1984), a headless sphinx with powerful claws and multiple breasts. Perhaps the most provocative was “Fillette” (1968), a large, detached latex phallus. Ms. Bourgeois can be seen carrying this object, nonchalantly tucked under one arm, in a portrait by the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe taken for the catalog of her 1982 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. (In the catalog, the Mapplethorpe picture is cropped to show only the artist’s smiling face.)

That retrospective brought Ms. Bourgeois, in her early 70s, the critical and popular acclaim that had long eluded her. In 1993 she represented the United States in the Venice Biennale. In an art world where women had been treated as second-class citizens and were discouraged from dealing with overtly sexual subject matter, she quickly assumed an emblematic presence. Her work was read by many as an assertive feminist statement, her career as an example of perseverance in the face of neglect.

Ms. Bourgeois often spoke of pain as the subject of her art, and fear: fear of the grip of the past, of the uncertainty of the future, of loss in the present.

“The subject of pain is the business I am in,” she said. “To give meaning and shape to frustration and suffering.” She added: “The existence of pain cannot be denied. I propose no remedies or excuses.” Yet it was her gift for universalizing her interior life as a complex spectrum of sensations that made her art so affecting.

Louise Bourgeois was born on Dec. 25, 1911, on the Left Bank of Paris, the second of three children born to Louis and Josephine Bourgeois. Her parents, financially comfortable, owned a gallery that dealt primarily in antique tapestries. A few years after her birth the family moved out of Paris and set up a workshop for tapestry restoration in Choisy-le-Roi. Ms. Bourgeois remembered as a child drawing fragments of missing images to help in the repairs.

She often spoke of her early, emotionally conflicted family life as formative. Her practical and affectionate mother, who was an invalid, was a positive influence. Her father’s domineering disposition, as well as his marital infidelities (he had a 10-year affair with the children’s English governess), instilled a resentment and an insecurity that Ms. Bourgeois never laid to rest.

Her nightmarish tableau of 1974, “The Destruction of the Father,” for example, is a table in a stagily lighted recess, which holds an arrangement of breastlike bumps, phallic protuberances and other biomorphic shapes in soft-looking latex that suggest the sacrificial evisceration of a body, the whole surrounded by big, crude mammillary forms. Ms. Bourgeois has suggested as the tableau’s inspiration a fantasy from childhood in which a pompous father, whose presence deadens the dinner hour night after night, is pulled onto the table by other family members, dismembered and gobbled up.

Similarly, for a 1994 exhibition titled “Louise Bourgeois: Locus of Memory, Works 1982-1993,” she created a single sculpture and suite of drawings in which the central image was a spider, a creature she associated with her mother, a woman of ever-changing moods.

Drawn in orange and flesh-pink gouache, it here stalked across the page and there shrunk to the size of a pea. As an immense sculpture of soldered metal tubing, it loomed ominously over the viewer but was delicate enough to quiver and sway at a touch. Fragility and fierceness were, in fact, the twin poles of Ms. Bourgeois’s art.

Often there was a precise association in her work. After she had created a number of vertical spirals that seemed to twist in space, she evoked childhood memories of the tapestry business and her family: “When a tapestry had to be washed in the river, it took four people to hoist it out and twist it. Twisting is very important for me. When I dreamt of getting rid of the mistress, it was by twisting her neck.”

At the age of 20, she entered the Sorbonne to study mathematics and geometry, disciplines that she valued for their stability. “I got peace of mind,” she later said, “only through the study of rules nobody could change.” But she left to enroll in a succession of art schools, and counted Fernand Léger among her teachers.

In 1938 she married Robert Goldwater, an American art historian noted for his pioneering work in the field then referred to as primitive art. They moved to New York City that same year, and Ms. Bourgeois attended the Art Students League, where she studied painting with Vaclav Vytlacil and also produced sculpture and prints.

She knew many of the European surrealists then arriving as refugees in New York (she later dismissed them as “smart alecks”), but the artists to whom she felt closest were the American painters who would come to be known as Abstract Expressionists.

Ms. Bourgeois had a solo show of paintings in New York in 1945 and her first exhibition of sculpture — an installation of tall, polelike figures that she intended as abstract portraits of family members and friends — four years later at the Peridot Gallery, at which time she gave up painting for good.

She enjoyed some professional success as a sculptor thereafter (she participated in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Annual Exhibition almost yearly until 1962). But a significant shift in her career came in 1966, when she was included in an exhibition at the Fischbach Gallery in New York, “Eccentric Abstraction,” organized by the critic Lucy Lippard.

Ms. Bourgeois’s long involvement in the nascent feminist movement, about which she had passionate but ambivalent feelings, began at this time. In the following year she made her first of many trips to the marble works in Carrara and Pietrasanta, Italy, where she produced dozens of major marble pieces over several years.

After her husband’s death in 1973, she began teaching at the School of Visual Arts and elsewhere, including Columbia University, Cooper Union, New York Studio School and Yale University, which awarded her an honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degree in 1977. She also received an honorary doctorate from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn in 1993.

By the mid-1970s, with shifts in art-world trends, her reputation was steadily growing. Although she had been given only four one-woman shows in 30 years after her debut as a sculptor in 1949, from 1978 to 1981 she had five in New York alone. Her retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art the following year, the first retrospective of a woman at the museum, secured her place as an influential figure. Her reputation grew stronger in the context of the body-centered art of the ’90s, with its emphasis on sexuality, vulnerability and mortality.

Ms. Bourgeois’s first European retrospective was organized by the Kunstverein in Frankfurt in 1989. In 1993 she was chosen to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale. Her exhibition, organized by Charlotta Kotik of the Brooklyn Museum of Art and titled “Louise Bourgeois: The Locus of Memory, Works 1982-1993,” later traveled to the Brooklyn and to the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington.

A second international retrospective was organized by the Tate Modern in London and the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 2007 and traveled to New York, Los Angeles and Washington the following year. The Museo Nacional Centro de Arte/Reina Sofia in Madrid and the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg mounted retrospectives.

She also was in four Whitney Biennials, the first in 1973 and the most recent in 1997, and a number of major international shows, including Documenta and the Carnegie International.

A survey of her prints was organized by the Modern in 1994, and a survey of her drawings by the University Art Museum at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1995. At her death, two films about her had been completed. She was represented by the Cheim & Read Gallery in Chelsea.

Ms. Bourgeois was named Officer of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French minister of culture in 1983. Other honors included the Grand Prix National de Sculpture from the French government in 1991; the National Medal of Arts, presented to her by President Bill Clinton in 1997; the first lifetime achievement award from the International Sculpture Center in Washington; and election as a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Certainly her personal style contributed to her mystique. Petite in size, gruff of voice and manner, outspoken but suspicious of interviewers, she spent much of her time either in her home in Chelsea or in her studio in Brooklyn, where she worked with Jerry Gorovoy, her assistant since 1980.

Ms Bourgeois is survived by two sons, Jean-Louis, of Manhattan, and Alain, of Brooklyn; two grandchildren; and a great granddaughter. Her son Michel died in 1990.

A lifelong insomniac, she often stayed up drawing or writing in her journal, in the same plain, epigrammatic style in which she spoke. (Her writings and interviews were published under the title “Destruction of the Father/Reconstruction of the Father” by the MIT Press in 1998).

“I have a religious temperament,” Ms. Bourgeois, a professed atheist, said about the emotional and spiritual energy that she poured into her work. “I have not been educated to use it. I’m afraid of power. It makes me nervous. In real life, I identify with the victim. That’s why I went into art.”

Untitled, 2010
Silkscreen ink and enamel on linen
126 x 96 inches (320 x 243.8 cm)

Through July 30 Gagosian (Rome)

Suzy Allman for The New York Times

Eddie Walsh, a trail builder, on a remade segment of the Appalachian Trail.

By PETER APPLEBOME
NY Times Published: May 30, 2010

BEAR MOUNTAIN, N.Y.

David Litke, trail name Denver Dave, was descending Bear Mountain about 45 miles from Midtown Manhattan, finishing up a two-month, 700-mile hike on the Appalachian Trail, when he came upon — what?

It was a wilderness trail, yes, but a preternaturally precise and elegant one, 800 steps made of 1,000-pound slabs of granite, and more than one mile of walkway supported by stone crib walls with boulders called gargoyles guarding the edges of the path, and trees and greenery totally undisturbed. It looked equally like an immaculate walkway that had been there forever, and like something plopped down by aliens who were skilled in stonecutting and possessed a feel for the soul of the A.T.

“Wow,” Mr. Litke said to a group at the bottom of the hill. “That is one beautiful trail. Someone could really give a lesson in trail building here.”

Actually, two of the people there did help put together the project, which has transformed the most traveled and one of the oldest sections of the most famous hiking trail in America. Eddie Walsh, a professional trail builder, managed the day-to-day work, and Edward Goodell, executive director of the New York-New Jersey Trail Conference, helped oversee and coordinate the project.

The four-year, $1 million project, largely done by 700 volunteers doing low-tech rock and quarry work on hundreds of tons of rock, will officially open Saturday at Bear Mountain. It is a reminder of how much the 2,179-mile footpath that runs through 14 states from Maine to Georgia remains a marvel of volunteer energy, an ever-changing work in progress and a cherished green atavism in a world that feels more degraded by the day.

“This was not simply laying out a footpath and putting white blazes on some trees,” said Pamela Underhill, superintendent of the Appalachian National Scenic Trail, which is managed by the National Park Service and the nonprofit Appalachian Trail Conservancy, with contributions from various state and federal agencies. It is largely maintained by some 6,400 volunteers from 30 regional trail clubs.

“It was highly technical work that’s the largest and most complex relocation and improvement project that’s taken place, certainly during my history on the trail, and I’ve been working on it since 1979,” Ms. Underhill said. “It’s just extraordinary.”

The Appalachian Trail, which was conceived in 1921 and completed in 1937, regularly pops up in popular culture, whether in “A Walk in the Woods” by Bill Bryson or in the feverish imagination of Gov. Mark Sanford of South Carolina. But in truth, it is an ingeniously cobbled together pastiche of trail experiences.

Bear Mountain has been a destination for city residents looking to experience some semblance of nature since the 19th century. Local hiking and tramping clubs began seriously building trails in the 1920s, and in January 1924, 20 miles of it was the first section specifically built as part of the A.T.

A good thing about Bear Mountain is that millions of people can get to it. A bad thing is that millions of people can get to it. So over the years, the trails have been rebuilt and relocated many times. By the 1990s, it was clear that the Bear Mountain section of the trail, used by a half-million people a year, needed to be rebuilt again. The solution, drawn up primarily by Mr. Walsh and another trail designer, Peter Jensen, was an impossibly ambitious series of steps and walkways supported by native stone.

It would last, one hoped, forever. It would keep neophytes on the trail instead of bounding out into the woods. It would work for urban hikers showing up in tennis shoes and flip-flops, as well as for serious long-haul hikers. And it would be a challenge to build.

Planning began around 2000. A design was approved in 2005, and work began in 2006. After a day of training, volunteers, working with paid employees, learned to split and shape rocks from the site, which were maneuvered into place either by hand or via a series of overhead cables rigged up in the surrounding trees.

About half the 700 volunteers worked for just a day. For many others it became an unpaid part-time job. For example, Catherine Kelleher, an information technology manager from Bethesda, Md., has come regularly every four to six weeks, usually over the weekends when most of the work was done.

“I got started, and I thought, oh my goodness, when could I ever expect to work on something on this scale again?” she said. “The A.T. is sort of like this long, skinny virtual community, like a really long power strip that wherever you plug into it, you get a little bit of energy from it.”

It opens Saturday at 10 a.m., on National Trails Day. All 700 volunteers have been invited. For those who miss it — like Ms. Kelleher, who will do trail work closer to home — well, there’s always more to do. The rock-breakers-in-chief figure they will be needing volunteers on the rest of the trails project, 1,200 steps in all, through 2013.

By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Times Published: May 30, 2010

What’s the greatest threat to our still-fragile economic recovery? Dangers abound, of course. But what I currently find most ominous is the spread of a destructive idea: the view that now, less than a year into a weak recovery from the worst slump since World War II, is the time for policy makers to stop helping the jobless and start inflicting pain.

When the financial crisis first struck, most of the world’s policy makers responded appropriately, cutting interest rates and allowing deficits to rise. And by doing the right thing, by applying the lessons learned from the 1930s, they managed to limit the damage: It was terrible, but it wasn’t a second Great Depression.

Now, however, demands that governments switch from supporting their economies to punishing them have been proliferating in op-eds, speeches and reports from international organizations. Indeed, the idea that what depressed economies really need is even more suffering seems to be the new conventional wisdom, which John Kenneth Galbraith famously defined as “the ideas which are esteemed at any time for their acceptability.”

The extent to which inflicting economic pain has become the accepted thing was driven home to me by the latest report on the economic outlook from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, an influential Paris-based think tank supported by the governments of the world’s advanced economies. The O.E.C.D. is a deeply cautious organization; what it says at any given time virtually defines that moment’s conventional wisdom. And what the O.E.C.D. is saying right now is that policy makers should stop promoting economic recovery and instead begin raising interest rates and slashing spending.

What’s particularly remarkable about this recommendation is that it seems disconnected not only from the real needs of the world economy, but from the organization’s own economic projections.

Thus, the O.E.C.D. declares that interest rates in the United States and other nations should rise sharply over the next year and a half, so as to head off inflation. Yet inflation is low and declining, and the O.E.C.D.’s own forecasts show no hint of an inflationary threat. So why raise rates?

The answer, as best I can make it out, is that the organization believes that we must worry about the chance that markets might start expecting inflation, even though they shouldn’t and currently don’t: We must guard against “the possibility that longer-term inflation expectations could become unanchored in the O.E.C.D. economies, contrary to what is assumed in the central projection.”

A similar argument is used to justify fiscal austerity. Both textbook economics and experience say that slashing spending when you’re still suffering from high unemployment is a really bad idea — not only does it deepen the slump, but it does little to improve the budget outlook, because much of what governments save by spending less they lose as a weaker economy depresses tax receipts. And the O.E.C.D. predicts that high unemployment will persist for years. Nonetheless, the organization demands both that governments cancel any further plans for economic stimulus and that they begin “fiscal consolidation” next year.

Why do this? Again, to give markets something they shouldn’t want and currently don’t. Right now, investors don’t seem at all worried about the solvency of the U.S. government; the interest rates on federal bonds are near historic lows. And even if markets were worried about U.S. fiscal prospects, spending cuts in the face of a depressed economy would do little to improve those prospects. But cut we must, says the O.E.C.D., because inadequate consolidation efforts “would risk adverse reactions in financial markets.”

The best summary I’ve seen of all this comes from Martin Wolf of The Financial Times, who describes the new conventional wisdom as being that “giving the markets what we think they may want in future — even though they show little sign of insisting on it now — should be the ruling idea in policy.”

Put that way, it sounds crazy. And it is. Yet it’s a view that’s spreading. And it’s already having ugly consequences. Last week conservative members of the House, invoking the new deficit fears, scaled back a bill extending aid to the long-term unemployed — and the Senate left town without acting on even the inadequate measures that remained. As a result, many American families are about to lose unemployment benefits, health insurance, or both — and as these families are forced to slash spending, they will endanger the jobs of many more.

And that’s just the beginning. More and more, conventional wisdom says that the responsible thing is to make the unemployed suffer. And while the benefits from inflicting pain are an illusion, the pain itself will be all too real.

By JACK EWING
Published: May 30, 2010

FRANKFURT — If the European Central Bank has one monetary dragon it considers essential to slay, it is inflation.

Keeping inflation under control is the central bank’s primary legal responsibility, and as Europe struggles to overcome economic problems caused by the sovereign debt crisis, inflation has remained the bank’s primary focus.

But some economists say it has become a driving obsession that has blinded the bank to a potentially bigger threat to Europe: deflation.

The central bank’s doubters grew louder after it made a big show of taking measures to cancel out the supposed inflationary impact of the government bond purchases it began on May 10 to help keep Greece and several other euro zone countries from defaulting on their debts.

“It’s nuts: how can they be concerned about the inflationary impact of this?” said Carl B. Weinberg, chief economist of High Frequency Economics in Valhalla, N.Y. “If I were the head of the E.C.B., I would be printing money to avert the decline in the money supply.”

Many economists regard deflation as more dangerous than inflation, because it prompts consumers to delay purchases as they wait for lower prices, creating a downward spiral of lower demand and production. Deflation is also bad for debtors like Greece, because they may have to pay back money that would be worth more than it was when they borrowed it.

Economists like Mr. Weinberg — and a few policy makers as well — are beginning to worry that a danger of deflation in Europe, similar to the one that strangled Japanese growth for most of the 1990s, is a bigger threat than inflation.

Prices fell in Ireland in April, while inflation was below 1 percent in five other euro zone countries. The problem also extends outside the euro zone.

“We all share some risks and problems in common with Japan circa 1995,” Adam S. Posen, a member of the Bank of England’s monetary policy committee, told an audience at the London School of Economics on May 2.

The United States is also at risk, Mr. Posen said, though he rated the chances of deflation there as low. But just as Japan did in the 1990s, the European Central Bank and the United States Federal Reserve have cut interest rates close to zero while pumping huge amounts of credit into their economies. That means the two central banks would have limited policy tools left with which to combat a collapse in prices and demand.

The downward pressure on prices has its roots in the economic decline that followed the 2008 financial crisis, but Europe’s sovereign debt problems are likely to add extra impetus. Governments, including those of Spain and Germany, are sharply reducing spending to lower their deficits, which will inevitably curb consumer demand and employment, hindering growth.

Inflation in the euro zone — the 16 countries that use the euro — rose slightly in April, to an annual rate of 1.5 percent, from 1.4 percent in March. Declines in categories like recreation and culture, communications and vacation tour packages blunted the impact of higher transportation costs. And so-called core inflation — which excludes energy prices and which most economists consider a better measure for policy-making purposes — declined to 0.7 percent in April from 0.8 percent in March. By either measure, the overall rate was still well below the central bank’s target of about 2 percent.

The real challenge for policy makers will occur in the coming months and years as Spain, Greece and Portugal struggle to regain their competitiveness on international markets. Without their own currencies to devalue, they have little choice but to cut wages and keep them well below those in countries like Germany and France. Pay cuts and lower government spending will put downward pressure on prices.

Spanish core inflation already turned negative in April.

A mild decline in prices in a few euro zone countries can be managed, economists say, but it will add to the risks of deflation. And the central bank will face more difficulty than usual in devising a monetary policy that fits both the ailing countries and the faster-growing economies like Germany and France.

“The E.C.B. has a careful balancing act to do,” said Dennis Snower, president of the Kiel Institute for the World Economy in Germany.

The central bank has remained firm in its focus on containing inflation. Jean-Claude Trichet, the bank’s president, has said he considers inflation a tax on the poor. And the bank’s charter obliges it to serve foremost as guardian of price stability.

As recently as Friday, Lorenzo Bini Smaghi, a member of the bank’s executive board, defended the wisdom of the mandate. In a speech in Rabat, Morocco, he said permitting inflation to rise to make it easier for European nations to repay their debts, as some have urged, would backfire.

The resulting decline in the value of government bonds would inflict “major losses on the banks and financial institutions which have been heavily investing in these markets, potentially undermining the recovery,” he said.

Nevertheless, Mr. Trichet has been under fire, especially from critics in Germany, ever since the central bank began the unprecedented bond purchases to halt a sell-off of Greek, Portuguese and Spanish government debt.

By buying government bonds on the open market, and being coy about how much it was spending, the bank was able to reduce the high premiums investors were demanding for debt from the weakest countries. A continuation of the market rout would have raised the interest rates that Spain and other countries had to pay to sell new bonds, aggravating their already grave fiscal problems.

The problem was that, to buy the bonds, the bank had to expand the assets it held on its books. So to prove that it had not stooped to printing money, the bank promised to offset the bond purchases, which totaled 26.5 billion euros ($32.6 billion as of May 24, the most recent data available), by taking in a like amount in short-term deposits from banks. In effect, it siphoned off as much liquidity as it had added.

The bond purchases were only the latest of a series of extraordinary moves that Mr. Trichet has pursued to stabilize the European banking system. Since the beginning of the financial crisis, the central bank has been essentially keeping banks afloat by providing almost unlimited loans at 1 percent interest.

Mr. Trichet is eager to squash any doubts that such moves represent a shift in the bank’s focus on inflation, said Mr. Snower of the Kiel Institute. “The E.C.B. is showing very clearly that its objectives have not changed.”

Other economists say that scale of the bond purchases would not increase the money supply enough to pose an inflation risk. And the money supply is falling because of a decline in bank lending.

In addition, factories are operating below capacity and euro zone unemployment is at 10 percent. Extra money in the system would not create scarcities of goods or labor that could drive up prices, Mr. Weinberg of High Frequency Economics said.

“You don’t have to pay any more to get those workers to come out of unemployment,” Mr. Weinberg said.

The recent decline of the euro against the dollar could create some inflation. Oil and other commodities are priced in dollars and could become more expensive in euros.

Still, few economists see prices rising. “There is no reason to fear high inflation for the time being,” Simon Junker, a Commerzbank analyst, said in a note.

Much of Mr. Trichet’s anti-inflation stance seems aimed at mollifying Germany’s anxiety over the bank’s bond purchases.

After the purchases, Mr. Trichet gave interviews to three leading German publications, an unusually high number in such a short period. In each case, he tried to reassure Germans on inflation and convince them that the euro is as solid as the German mark that they reluctantly gave up 11 years ago.

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
NY Times Published: May 28, 2010

It took almost the entire press conference at the White House on Thursday for President Obama to find his voice in responding to the oil disaster in the gulf — and it is probably no accident that it seemed like the only unrehearsed moment. The president was trying to convey why he takes this problem so seriously, when he noted:

“When I woke this morning and I’m shaving and Malia knocks on my bathroom door and she peeks in her head and she says, ‘Did you plug the hole yet, Daddy?’ Because I think everybody understands that when we are fouling the Earth like this, it has concrete implications — not just for this generation, but for future generations. I grew up in Hawaii where the ocean is sacred. And when you see birds flying around with oil all over their feathers and turtles dying, that doesn’t just speak to the immediate economic consequences of this; this speaks to how are we caring for this incredible bounty that we have. And so sometimes when I hear folks down in Louisiana expressing frustrations, I may not always think that their comments are fair. On the other hand, I probably think to myself, ‘These are folks who grew up fishing in these wetlands and seeing this as an integral part of who they are.’ And to see that messed up in this fashion would be infuriating.”

And a child shall lead them. …

This oil leak is not President Obama’s fault. Stopping the spill is BP’s responsibility; it both caused it and it has the best access to the best technology to plug it. Of course, as the nation’s C.E.O., Mr. Obama has to oversee the cleanup, and he has been on top of that. His most important job, though, is one he has yet to take on: shaping the long-term public reaction to the spill so that we can use it to generate the political will to break our addiction to oil. In that job, the most important thing Mr. Obama can do is react to this spill as a child would — because it is precisely that simple gut reaction, repeated over and over, speech after speech, that could change our national conversation on energy.

You see, right now our energy conversation is dominated by three voices. There are the “petro-determinists,” who never tire of telling us that we’ll be dependent on oil for a “long, long time.” That is true. The problem is, these same people have been telling us that ever since the first oil crisis in 1973, and their real objective in doing so is not to help us understand that breaking our oil addiction is difficult, but to make us think that it is impossible — so don’t bother.

Then there are the “eco-pessimists,” who argue that it is probably already too late. We are toast. Unless we rewire human beings to want less growth — not only ourselves but the millions in China and India who aspire to live like us — the end is nigh. The eco-pessimists may be right, and they are certainly sincere, but they have little respect for the power of innovation, the power of six billion minds all trying to solve one problem.

Finally, we have the “Obama realists.” These are the political pros who whisper to him every day that this is not the time to lay out a big new “Obama End to Oil Addiction Act.” The Democrats, they contend, are suffering from “legislative fatigue.” After casting a hard vote for health care, they don’t want to be asked to cast a supposedly hard vote for a price on carbon — the essential first step in getting off oil. And, they rightly add, the G.O.P. today is so cynical, so bought and paid for by Big Oil, that only a couple of Republican senators would have the courage and vision to vote for a price on carbon. So Democrats would be out there alone.

The Obama realists make sure that the president is always careful to talk in vague terms about how he stands behind “Waxman-Markey” and “Kerry-Lieberman” — sterile Washington-speak for the House and Senate bills that attempt to put a small price on carbon. I am glad he is behind them; I just wish he were in front of them. I am glad the president passed health care for the nation. But healthy to do what? To go where? To grasp what dream?

Answering those questions is the president’s great opportunity here, but he has to think like a kid. Kids get it. They ask: Why would we want to stay dependent on an energy source that could destroy so many birds, fish, beaches and ecosystems before the next generation has a chance to enjoy them? Why aren’t we doing more to create clean power and energy efficiency when so many others, even China, are doing so? And, Daddy, why can’t you even mention the words “carbon tax,” when the carbon we spill into the atmosphere every day is just as dangerous to our future as the crude oil that has been spilling into the gulf?

That is what a child would want to know if he or she could vote. That is the well of aspiration for a game-change on energy that Mr. Obama can tap into. And he could even rip off BP for his moon shot motto: Let’s get America “Beyond Petroleum.” As you would say, Mr. President, this is your time, this is your moment. Seize it. A disaster is an inexcusable thing to waste.

Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

John Fitzgerald, a blacksmith for the New York parks department, with a finished rim.

By A. G. SULZBERGER
NY Times Published: May 29, 2010

The old steel rim that presides over this public basketball court absorbs missed shots with an angry clank, sending the ball careening upward and the wood and metal backboard into a rickety seizure.

Like generations before them, the young men who play at the ramshackle court in St. Nicholas Park in Harlem know the rim is so troublesome that they tend to avoid perimeter jump shots in favor of aggressive drives to the basket, where perhaps its vagaries will be less pronounced.

“These are ghetto rims,” said Quaeshawn Berry, a lanky 14-year-old who is a regular at the park. “But I prefer these. I’ve been playing on these my whole life.”

These unforgiving, practically unbreakable orange rims — built so simply that there are no hooks to accommodate a net — are longstanding fixtures of the public basketball courts throughout New York City, where they play a minor, if usually overlooked, role in countless pick-up games.

But largely unknown to even the most devoted practitioners of the city game is that most of the basketball rims on these courts have been individually crafted by a team of blacksmiths who cut, weld and paint each by hand.

Using a century-old method that has long since vanished elsewhere, the half-dozen parks department employees — all basketball players themselves — have forged thousands of rims, each one worked into a microcosm of the local game.

“There are minor differences,” said John Fitzgerald, the longtime city blacksmith in charge of making the rims. “It’s like no snowflakes are exactly the same.”

Working from a hand-drawn blueprint, the blacksmiths use hammers and the horn of an anvil to shape the steel ring that serves as the hoop, welding it to several slabs of metal that form a support bolted to the backboard. The finished product is a remnant of an earlier era of the sport, somewhere on the evolutionary chain between the original wooden peach baskets and the modern spring-loaded breakaway rims used by the National Basketball Association.

Other cities, including those with their own share of contributions to basketball lore like Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles and Newark, buy modern, factory-made rims. New York is among the few places, and possibly the only one, where municipal rims used at more than 700 public parks are still made by hand.

“I’m totally amazed that they still do it that way,” said Dan Shaw, an engineer and sales manager for Spalding and an expert on the history of basketball rims. “I would love to see one made.

“Walking in there would be like watching equipment made 100 years ago when there were no basketball manufacturers, when all the equipment was being made locally.”

There remains something of a cult of personality around the showy offshoot of basketball known as streetball, a pastime marked by elbows-out play, a casual commitment to the rulebook and makeshift facilities. That is particularly true in New York, where the public courts are credited with grooming generations of stars.

And while it is unclear what, if any, supporting role these immutable rims might have played, Jason Curry, president of Big Apple Basketball, which runs clinics and tournaments around the city, suggested that they might be one reason many of the best players who honed their games outside have historically been skilled at driving close to the hoop rather than shooting from distance.

“There are so many different variables that it makes it difficult to become a really good outside shooter on New York City playgrounds,” he said.

A streetball legend, Joe Hammond, who is better known by his nickname the Destroyer, said the New York rims were so tricky that he became focused on having his shots avoid them altogether, refusing to count points if the ball touched steel. “One thing about playing on the rims in the parks: you learn to adjust,” Mr. Hammond said.

But even in New York, the forging of rims may be an endangered art. Some of the city’s most celebrated courts, like Rucker Park in Harlem and the West Fourth Street Cage in the West Village, have made the switch to prefabricated rims, in part because the players there expect modern equipment. And when a new park is built or an existing one receives a full rehabilitation, a prefabricated rim is installed.

The prefabricated rims are not only more up to date, but they are also less expensive — typically costing other cities less than $60, compared with about $90 for the handmade rims, which includes about $65 for labor.

But officials from the city’s Department of Parks and Recreation say the handmade rims stand up better to the demands of New York players, so they will continue to be produced — at least to replace those that have been stolen or, in rare cases, damaged. (The rest of the time blacksmiths occupy themselves with an assortment of other tasks, like repairing park fences and building lifeguard chairs.)

“We have found its more economical to make them because they’re stronger, they last longer,” said Jim Cafaro, the deputy chief of technical services for the parks department. “So it’s cost-effective to do this.”

The design, which parks officials said was of unknown provenance, has been kept in a dusty composition notebook in the center of the cavernous workshop on Randalls Island underneath the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge, where 92 rims were made last year. The blacksmiths are in the process of vacating the 80-year-old building, so production of the rims has been temporarily suspended.

The machinery and tools, including the old anvil, will be moved to a new location. Left behind will be the old hoop that hangs over an oil-stained section of the shop, used for years of lunchtime games. “You have to have a nice touch for them because they’re solid,” said Eugene Desplantes, a metal worker who starred in those daily battles. “They’re not forgiving.”

Even if fewer of these rims are being made, those already in the parks are not going anywhere soon.

Those made with a slightly different design, which features a double rim and straight steel supports, were discontinued years ago but remain a common sight in schoolyards, public parks and small lots around the city.

They have survived endless rounds of slam dunks, and occasionally served as chin-up bars and, for the especially nimble, even as spectator seating. Once, the blacksmiths strung a cable around a rim inside the workshop, which they used to tow a van halfway off the ground. That led them to conclude that their handiwork was, with all due humility, indestructible.

“These are the strongest hoops you’ll ever find,” Mr. Fitzgerald said. “They last forever. You could hand them down to your grandkids.”

Dennis Hopper directing “The Last Movie,” a hallucinogenic film about the making of a movie. The 1971 movie failed with critics and at the box office.

By EDWARD WYATT
Published: May 29, 2010

Dennis Hopper, who was part of a new generation of Hollywood rebels in portrayals of drug-addled misfits in the landmark films “Easy Rider,” “Apocalypse Now” and “Blue Velvet” and then went on to great success as a prolific character actor, died on Saturday at his home in Venice, Calif. He was 74.

The cause was complications from metastasized prostate cancer, according to a statement issued by Alex Hitz, a family friend.

Mr. Hopper, who said he stopped drinking and using drugs in the mid-1980s, followed that change with a tireless phase of his career in which he claimed to have turned down no parts. His credits include no fewer than six films released in 2008 and at least 25 over the past 10 years.

Most recently, Mr. Hopper starred in the television series “Crash,” an adaptation of the Oscar-winning film of the same title. Produced for the Starz cable channel, the show had Mr. Hopper portraying a music producer unhinged by years of drug use.

During a promotional tour last fall for that series, he fell ill; shortly thereafter, he began a new round of treatments for prostate cancer, which he said had been first diagnosed a decade ago.

Mr. Hopper was hospitalized in Los Angeles in January, at which time he also filed for divorce from his fifth wife, Victoria Duffy, with whom he had a young daughter. Mr. Hopper issued a news release citing “irreconcilable differences” for the filing.

“I wish Victoria the best but only want to spend these difficult days surrounded by my children and close friends,” he said in the release.

Mr. Hopper first won praise in Hollywood as a teenager in 1955 for his portrayal of an epileptic on the NBC series “Medic” and for a small part in the film “Rebel Without a Cause,” which starred James Dean, who was a friend of his.

Mr. Hopper confirmed his status as a rising star as the son of a wealthy rancher and his wife, played by Rock Hudson and Elizabeth Taylor, in “Giant” (1956), the epic western with Dean.

In those years, he was linked romantically with Natalie Wood and Joanne Woodward.

Yet that success brought with it a growing hubris, and in 1958 Mr. Hopper found himself in a battle of wills with the director Henry Hathaway on the set of “From Hell to Texas.”

The story has several versions; the most common is that his refusal to play a scene in the manner that the director requested resulted in Mr. Hopper’s stubbornly performing more than 80 takes before he finally followed orders.

Upon wrapping the scene, Mr. Hopper later recalled, Mr. Hathaway told him that his career in Hollywood was finished.

He soon left for New York, where he studied with Lee Strasberg for several years, performed onstage and acted in more than 100 episodes of television shows.

It was not until after his marriage in 1961 to Brooke Hayward — who, as the daughter of Leland Hayward, a producer and agent, and Margaret Sullavan, the actress, was part of Hollywood royalty — that Mr. Hopper was regularly offered film roles again.

He wrangled small parts in big studio films like “The Sons of Katie Elder” (1965) — directed by his former nemesis Henry Hathaway — as well as “Cool Hand Luke” (1967) and “Hang ’Em High” (1968).

And he grew close to his wife’s childhood friend Peter Fonda, who, with Mr. Hopper and a few others, began mulling over a film whose story line followed traditional western themes but substituted motorcycles for horses.

That film, “Easy Rider,” which Mr. Hopper wrote with Mr. Fonda and Terry Southern and directed, followed a pair of truth-seeking bikers (Mr. Fonda and Mr. Hopper) on a cross-country journey to New Orleans.

It won the prize for best first film at the 1969 Cannes Film Festival (though it faced only one competitor, as the critic Vincent Canby pointed out in a tepid 1969 review in The New York Times).

Mr. Hopper also shared an Oscar nomination for writing the film, while a nomination for best supporting actor went to a little-known Jack Nicholson.

“Easy Rider” introduced much of its audience, if not Mr. Hopper, to cocaine, and the film’s success accelerated a period of intense drug and alcohol use that Mr. Hopper later said nearly killed him and turned him into a professional pariah.

Given nearly $1 million by Universal for a follow-up project, he retreated with a cadre of hippies to Peru to shoot “The Last Movie,” a hallucinogenic film about the making of a movie. It won a top prize at the 1971 Venice Film Festival, but it failed with critics and at the box office.

Mr. Hopper edited the film while living at Los Gallos, a 22-room adobe house in Taos, N.M., that he rechristened the Mud Palace and envisioned as a counterculture Hollywood.

It was there that his drug-induced paranoia took full flower, including a period in which he posted armed guards on the roof.

“I was terribly naïve in those days,” he told The New York Times in 2002. “I thought the crazier you behaved, the better artist you would be. And there was a time when I had a lot of energy to display how crazy that was.”

Mr. Hopper was seen mostly in small film parts until he returned to prominence with his performance in “Apocalypse Now” (1979).

In a 1993 interview with the British newspaper The Guardian, Mr. Hopper credited Marlon Brando, a star of the film, with the idea of having him portray a freewheeling photojournalist, rather than the smaller role of a C.I.A. officer, in which he was originally cast.

But Mr. Hopper’s after-hours style continued to affect his work; in “Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse,” a documentary about the making of that film, the director, Francis Ford Coppola, is seen lamenting that Mr. Hopper cannot seem to learn his lines.

After becoming sober in the 1980s, Mr. Hopper began taking on roles in several films a year, becoming one of the most recognizable character actors of the day.

He earned a second Oscar nomination for best supporting actor for his role as the alcoholic father of a troubled high school basketball star in “Hoosiers” (1986), and he honed his portrayal of unhinged villains in films like “Blue Velvet” (also in 1986), “Speed” (1994) and “Waterworld” (1995), as well as in the first season of the television series “24” (2002).

Mr. Hopper had several artistic pursuits beyond film. Early in his career, he painted and wrote poetry, though many of his works were destroyed in a 1961 fire that burned scores of homes, including his, in the Los Angeles enclave Bel Air.

Around that time, Ms. Hayward gave him a camera as a gift, and Mr. Hopper took up photography.

His intimate and unguarded images of celebrities like Ike and Tina Turner, Andy Warhol and Jane Fonda were the subject of gallery shows and were collected in a book, “1712 North Crescent Heights.” The book, whose title was his address in the Hollywood Hills in the 1960s, was edited by Marin Hopper, his daughter by Ms. Hayward.

He also built an extensive collection of works by artists he knew, including Warhol, Ed Ruscha and Julian Schnabel.

Born on May 17, 1936, in Dodge City, Kan., and raised on a nearby farm, Dennis Lee Hopper moved with his family to San Diego in the late 1940s.

He studied at the Old Globe Theater there while in high school, then signed a contract with Warner Brothers and moved to Los Angeles.

Mr. Hopper’s five marriages included one of eight days in 1970 to the singer Michelle Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas. He is survived by four children, all of the Los Angeles area: Marin Hopper; Ruthanna Hopper, his daughter by Daria Halprin, his third wife; a son, Henry Lee Hopper, whose mother is Katherine LaNasa; and Galen, his daughter by Ms. Duffy.

On March 26, surrounded by friends like Mr. Nicholson and David Lynch, the director of “Blue Velvet,” Mr. Hopper received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Looking frail, he began his brief acceptance speech by sardonically thanking the paparazzi for supposedly distracting him and causing him to lose his balance and fall the day before. He continued, “Everyone here today that I’ve invited — and obviously some that I haven’t invited — have enriched my life tremendously.”

04. Untitled, 2010

Rose of Portugal
21.8 x 35 x 19” / 55.4 x 88.9 x 48.3 cm

Sorcerer’s Stone
by Andrea K. Scott May 31, 2010
The New Yorker

The four marble phenomena—the word “sculptures” seems too constraining—in Trisha Donnelly’s fourth show at the Casey Kaplan gallery join a wildly eclectic decadelong oeuvre (drawings, photographs, videos, texts, sound pieces, performances) that is as captivating as it is elusive. What did it mean, in 2002, when Donnelly rode unannounced into Kaplan on a white horse and gave a speech that concluded “I am electric”? Who knows, but its impact still resonates. The best art is, on some level, a transmitter of mysteries, and the medium—the artist, her chosen material—is merely a go-between. A Sphinx-like air of inscrutability persists in Donnelly’s absorbing new objects, which she carved using a mechanical blade and, in the case of a towering slab of polished quartzite, a chisel. They may suggest relics of uncertain function (divinatory, funereal), but they represent nothing beyond themselves and their metamorphosis—from limestone to marble, over millions of years, and then, in a comparative heartbeat, from stone into art. ♦

The New Yorker

Casey Kaplan through June 26

11 new paintings going to ArtBasel

The Breeder

Environmental hazards may cause lasting harm to children.

by Jerome Groopman
The New Yorker
May 31, 2010

How worried should we be about everyday chemicals?

Bisphenol A, commonly known as BPA, may be among the world’s most vilified chemicals. The compound, used in manufacturing polycarbonate plastic and epoxy resins, is found in plastic goggles, face shields, and helmets; baby bottles; protective coatings inside metal food containers; and composites and sealants used in dentistry. As animal studies began to show links between the chemical and breast and prostate cancer, early-onset puberty, and polycystic ovary syndrome, consumer groups pressured manufacturers of reusable plastic containers, like Nalgene, to remove BPA from their products. Warnings went out to avoid microwaving plasticware or putting it in the dishwasher. On May 6th, the President’s Cancer Panel issued a report deploring the rising number of carcinogens released into the environment—including BPA—and calling for much more stringent regulation and wider awareness of their dangers. The panel advised President Obama “to use the power of your office to remove the carcinogens and other toxins from our food, water, and air that needlessly increase health care costs, cripple our Nation’s productivity, and devastate American lives.” Dr. LaSalle Leffall, Jr., the chairman of the panel, said in a statement, “The increasing number of known or suspected environmental carcinogens compels us to action, even though we may currently lack irrefutable proof of harm.”

The narrative seems to follow a familiar path. In the nineteen-sixties, several animal studies suggested that cyclamates, a class of artificial sweetener, caused chromosomal abnormalities and cancer. Some three-quarters of Americans were estimated to consume the sweeteners. In 1969, cyclamates were banned. Later research found that there was little evidence that these substances caused cancer in humans. In the nineteen-eighties, studies suggesting a cancer risk from Alar, a chemical used to regulate the color and ripening of apples, caused a minor panic among parents and a media uproar. In that case, the cancer risk was shown to have been overstated, but still present, and the substance remains classified a “probable human carcinogen.” Lead, too, was for years thought to be safe in small doses, until further study demonstrated that, particularly for children, even slight exposure could result in intellectual delays, hearing loss, and hyperactivity.

There is an inherent uncertainty in determining which substances are safe and which are not, and when their risks outweigh their benefits. Toxicity studies are difficult, because BPA and other, similar chemicals can have multiple effects on the body. Moreover, we are exposed to scores of them in a lifetime, and their effects in combination or in sequence might be very different from what they would be in isolation. In traditional toxicology, a single chemical is tested in one cell or animal to assess its harmful effects. In studying environmental hazards, one needs to test mixtures of many chemicals, across ranges of doses, at different points in time, and at different ages, from conception to childhood to old age. Given so many variables, it is difficult to determine how harmful these chemicals might be, or if they are harmful at all, or what anyone can do to avoid their effects. In the case of BPA and other chemicals of its sort, though, their increasing prevalence and a number of human studies that associate them with developmental issues have become too worrisome to ignore. The challenge now is to decide a course of action before there is any certainty about what is truly dangerous and what is not.

In 1980, Frederica Perera, a professor at Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health and a highly regarded investigator of the effects of environmental hazards, was studying how certain chemicals in cigarette smoke might cause cancer. Dissatisfied with the research at the time, which measured toxic substances outside the body and then made inferences about their effects, she began using sophisticated molecular techniques to measure compounds called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, or PAH—which are plentiful in tobacco smoke—in the body. Perera found that after entering the lungs the compounds pass into the bloodstream and damage blood cells, binding to their DNA. She hoped to compare the damaged blood cells from smokers with healthy cells, and decided to seek out those she imagined would be uncontaminated by foreign substances. “I thought that the most perfect pristine blood would come from the umbilical cord of a newborn,” Perera said.

But when she analyzed her samples Perera discovered PAH attached to some of the DNA in blood taken from umbilical cords, too. “I was pretty shocked,” she said. “I realized that we did not know very much about what was happening during this early stage of development.”

Perera’s finding that chemicals like PAH, which can also be a component of air pollution, are passed from mother to child during pregnancy has now been replicated for more than two hundred compounds. These include PCBs, chemical coolants that were banned in the United States in 1979 but have persisted in the food chain; BPA and phthalates, used to make plastics more pliable, which leach out of containers and mix with their contents; pesticides used on crops and on insects in the home; and some flame retardants, which are often applied to upholstery, curtains, and other household items.

Fetuses and newborns lack functional enzymes in the liver and other organs that break down such chemicals, and animal studies in the past several decades have shown that these chemicals can disrupt hormones and brain development. Some scientists believe that they may promote chronic diseases seen in adulthood such as diabetes, atherosclerosis, and cancer. There is some evidence that they may have what are called epigenetic effects as well, altering gene expression in cells, including those which give rise to eggs and sperm, and allowing toxic effects to be passed on to future generations.

In 1998, Perera initiated a program at Columbia to investigate short- and long-term effects of environmental chemicals on children, and she now oversees one of the largest and longest-standing studies of a cohort of mothers and newborns in the United States. More than seven hundred mother-child pairs have been recruited from Washington Heights, Harlem, and the South Bronx; Perera is also studying pregnant women in Kraków, Poland, and two cities in China, and, since September 11, 2001, a group of three hundred and twenty-nine mothers and newborns from the downtown hospitals near the World Trade Center. In all, some two thousand mother-child pairs have been studied, many for at least a decade.

This March, I visited Columbia’s Center for Children’s Environmental Health, where Perera is the director, and met with a woman I’ll call Renee Martin in an office overlooking the George Washington Bridge. Martin was born in Harlem, attended a community college in Queens, and then moved to 155th Street and Broadway, where she is raising her five children. She entered the study eleven years ago, when she was pregnant with her first child. “I was asthmatic growing up,” Martin said. “And I was concerned about triggers of asthma in the environment. So when they asked me to be in the study I thought it would be a good way to get information that might tell me something about my own health and the health of my child.” She showed me a small black backpack containing a metal box with a long plastic tube. During her pregnancy, Martin would drape the tube over her shoulder, close to her chin, and a vacuum inside the device would suck in a sample of air. A filter trapped particles and vapors of ambient chemicals, like pesticides, phthalates, and PAH. “I walked around pregnant with this hose next to my mouth, but, living in New York, people hardly notice,” she said with a laugh.

The Columbia team also developed a comprehensive profile of Martin’s potential proximity to chemicals, including an environmental map that charted her apartment’s distance from gas stations, dry cleaners, fast-food restaurants, supermarkets, and major roadways. They took urine samples and, at delivery, blood samples from her and from the umbilical cord, along with samples from the placenta. Nearly a hundred per cent of the mothers in the study were found to have BPA and phthalates in their urine. Urine and blood samples are taken as the babies grow older, as well as samples of their exhaled breath. “We have a treasure trove of biological material,” Perera said. The researchers track the children’s weight and sexual development, and assess I.Q., visual spatial ability, attention, memory, and behavior. Brain imaging, using an M.R.I., is performed on selected children.

Martin was still breast-feeding her two-year-old daughter. “I bottle-fed my first child,” she told me. “But when you learn what can come out of plastic bottles and all the benefits of breast-feeding—my other children were nursed.” The Columbia group regularly convenes the families to hear results and discuss ways to reduce their exposure to potential environmental hazards. At one meeting, Martin found out that some widely used pesticides could result in impaired learning and behavior. “I told the landlord to stop spraying in the apartment” to combat a roach infestation, she said. On the advice of the Columbia researchers, Martin asked him to seal the cracks in the walls that were allowing cockroaches to enter, and Martin’s family meticulously swept up crumbs. This approach has now become the New York City Department of Health’s official recommendation for pest control. “You don’t need to be out in the country and have compost,” Martin said. “This has made me into an urban environmentalist.”

In 2001, using data from animal studies, the E.P.A. banned the sale of the pesticide chlorpyrifos (sold under the name Dursban) for residential and indoor use. Many agricultural uses are still permitted, and farming communities continue to be exposed to the insecticide. Residues on food may affect those who live in urban areas as well. In 2004, the Columbia group published results in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives showing that significant exposure during the prenatal period to chlorpyrifos was associated with an average hundred-and-fifty-gram reduction in birth weight—about the same effect as if the mother had smoked all through pregnancy. Those most highly exposed to the insecticide were twice as likely to be born below the tenth percentile in size for gestational age. The researchers found that children born after 2001 had much lower exposure levels—indicating that the ban was largely effective.

For those children who were exposed to the pesticide in the womb, the effects have seemed to persist. The children with the greatest exposure were starting to fall off the developmental curve and displayed signs of attention-deficit problems by the time they were three. By seven, they showed significant deficits in working memory, which is strongly tied to problem-solving, I.Q., and reading comprehension. Another study, published this month in Pediatrics, using a random cross-section of American children, showed that an elevated level of a particular pesticide residue nearly doubled the likelihood that a child would have A.D.H.D.

“The size of this deficit is educationally meaningful in the early preschool years,” Virginia Rauh, the leader of Columbia’s research, said. “Such a decline can push whole groups of children into the developmentally delayed category.”

First used in Germany, in the nineteen-thirties, bisphenol A has a chemical structure similar to that of estrogen, but was considered too weak to be developed into a contraceptive pill. Recent animal studies have shown that, even at very low levels, BPA can cause changes that may lead to cancer in the prostate gland and in breast tissue. It is also linked to disruption in brain chemistry and, in female rodents, accelerated puberty. Japanese scientists found that high levels of BPA were associated with polycystic ovary syndrome, a leading cause of impaired fertility.

Phthalates are also ubiquitous in cosmetics, shampoos, and other personal-care products. They may have effects on older children and adults as well as on neonates. A study at Massachusetts General Hospital found an association of high levels of certain phthalates with lower sperm concentrations and impaired sperm motility; young girls in Puerto Rico who had developed breasts prematurely were more likely to have high levels of phthalates in their blood. Immigrant children in Belgium who exhibited precocious puberty also showed greater exposure to the pesticide DDT, which has estrogenlike effects and has been banned in the U.S., but is still used in Africa to help control malaria.

Long-term studies have provided the most compelling evidence that chemicals once considered safe may cause health problems in communities with consistent exposure over many years. Researchers from SUNY Albany, including Lawrence Schell, a biomedical anthropologist, have worked over the past two decades with Native Americans on the Mohawk reservation that borders the St. Lawrence River, once a major shipping thoroughfare, just east of Massena, New York. General Motors built a foundry nearby that made automobile parts, Alcoa had two manufacturing plants for aluminum, and the area was contaminated with PCBs, which were used in the three plants. Several Mohawk girls experienced signs of early puberty, which coincided with higher levels of PCBs in their blood.

The Albany researchers also observed that increased levels of PCBs correlated with altered levels of thyroid hormone and lower long-term memory functioning. Similar results have been found in an area of Slovakia near heavy industry. “Folks have complained about reproductive problems,” Schell said, of the residents of the Mohawk reservation. “They talked a lot about rheumatoid arthritis, about lupus, about polycystic ovary syndrome. And, you know, you hear these things and you wonder how much of it is just a heightened sensitivity, but, when you see elevated antibodies that are often a sign of autoimmune disease of one kind or another, it could be the beginning of discovering a biological basis for their complaints about these diseases.”

Beginning in 2003, Antonia Calafat, a chemist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and Russ Hauser, of the Harvard School of Public Health, set out to evaluate the exposure of premature infants to certain environmental contaminants. The researchers hypothesized that infants treated in the most intensive ways—intravenous feedings and delivery of oxygen by respirators—would receive the most exposure, since chemicals like phthalates and BPA can leach from plastic tubing. They studied forty-one infants from two Boston-area intensive-care units for BPA. Calafat told me, “We saw ten times the amounts of BPA in the neonates that we are seeing in the general population.” In several children, the levels of BPA were more than a hundred times as high as in healthy Americans.

Calafat, who came to the United States from Spain on a Fulbright scholarship, developed highly accurate tests to detect BPA, phthalates, and other compounds in body fluids like blood and urine. This advance, she explained, “means that you are not simply doing an exposure assessment based on the concentration of the chemicals in the food or in the air or in the soil. You are actually measuring the concentrations in the body.” With this technology, she can study each individual as if he or she were a single ecosystem. Her studies at the Centers for Disease Control show that 92.6 per cent of Americans aged six and older have detectable levels of BPA in their bodies; the levels in children between six and eleven years of age are twice as high as those in older Americans.

Critics such as Elizabeth Whelan, of the American Council on Science and Health, a consumer-education group in New York (Whelan says that about a third of its two-million-dollar annual budget comes from industry), think that the case against BPA and phthalates has more in common with those against cyclamates and Alar than with the one against lead. “The fears are irrational,” she said. “People fear what they can’t see and don’t understand. Some environmental activists emotionally manipulate parents, making them feel that the ones they love the most, their children, are in danger.” Whelan argues that the public should focus on proven health issues, such as the dangers of cigarettes and obesity and the need for bicycle helmets and other protective equipment. As for chemicals in plastics, Whelan says, “What the country needs is a national psychiatrist.”

To illustrate what Whelan says is a misguided focus on manufactured chemicals, her organization has constructed a dinner menu “filled with natural foods, and you can find a carcinogen or an endocrine-disrupting chemical in every course”—for instance, tofu and soy products are filled with plant-based estrogens that could affect hormonal balance. “Just because you find something in the urine doesn’t mean that it’s a hazard,” Whelan says. “Our understanding of risks and benefits is distorted. BPA helps protect food products from spoiling and causing botulism. Flame retardants save lives, so we don’t burn up on our couch.”

Several studies also contradict the conclusion that these chemicals have deleterious effects. The journal Toxicological Sciences recently featured a study from the E.P.A. scientist Earl Gray, a widely respected researcher, which indicated that BPA had no effect on puberty in rats. A study of military conscripts in Sweden found no connection between phthalates and depressed sperm counts, and a recent survey of newborns in New York failed to turn up an increase in a male genital malformation which might be expected if the effects from BPA seen in rodents were comparable to effects in humans. Richard Sharpe, a professor at the University of Edinburgh, and an internationally recognized pioneer on the effects of chemicals in the environment on endocrine disruption, recently wrote in Toxicological Sciences, “Fundamental, repetitive work on bisphenol A has sucked in tens, probably hundreds of millions of dollars from government bodies and industry, which, at a time when research money is thin on the ground, looks increasingly like an investment with a nil return.”

With epidemiological studies, like those at Columbia, in which scientists observe people as they live, without a control group, the real-life nature of the project can make it difficult to distinguish between correlation and causation. Unknown factors in the environment or unreported habits might escape the notice of the researchers. Moreover, even sophisticated statistical analysis can sometimes yield specious results.

Dr. John Ioannides, an epidemiologist at the University of Ioannina, in Greece, has noted that four of the six most frequently cited epidemiological studies published in leading medical journals between 1990 and 2003 were later refuted. Demonstrating the malleability of data, Peter Austin, a medical statistician at the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences, in Toronto, has retrospectively analyzed medical records of the more than ten million residents of Ontario. He showed that Sagittarians are thirty-eight per cent more likely to fracture an arm than people of other astrological signs, and Leos are fifteen per cent more likely to suffer a gastrointestinal hemorrhage. (Pisces were more prone to heart failure.)

To help strengthen epidemiological analysis, Sir Austin Bradford Hill, a British medical statistician, set out certain criteria in 1965 that indicate cause and effect. Researchers must be sure that exposure to the suspected cause precedes the development of a disease; that there is a high degree of correlation between the two; that findings are replicated in different studies in various settings; that a biological explanation exists that makes the association plausible; and that increased exposure makes development of the disease more likely.

When epidemiological studies fulfill most of these criteria, they can be convincing, as when studies demonstrated a link between cigarettes and lung cancer. But, in an evolving field, dealing with chemicals that are part of daily life, the lack of long-term clinical data has made firm conclusions elusive. John Vandenbergh, a biologist who found that exposure to certain chemicals like BPA could accelerate the onset of puberty in mice, served on an expert panel that advised the National Toxicology Program, a part of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, on the risks of exposure to BPA. In 2007, the panel reviewed more than three hundred scientific publications and concluded that “there is some concern” about exposure of fetuses and young children to BPA, given the research from Vandenbergh’s laboratory and others.

Vandenbergh is cognizant of the difficulty of extrapolating data from rodents and lower animals to humans. “Why can’t we just figure this out?” he said. “Well, one of the problems is that we would have to take half of the kids in the kindergarten and give them BPA and the other half not. Or expose half of the pregnant women to BPA in the doctor’s office and the other half not. And then we have to wait thirty to fifty years to see what effects this has on their development, and whether they get more prostate cancer or breast cancer. You have to wait at least until puberty to see if there is an effect on sexual maturation. Ethically, you are not going to go and feed people something if you think it harmful, and, second, you have this incredible time span to deal with.”

The inadequacy of the current regulatory system contributes greatly to the atmosphere of uncertainty. The Toxic Substances Control Act, passed in 1976, does not require manufacturers to show that chemicals used in their products are safe before they go on the market; rather, the responsibility is placed on federal agencies, as well as on researchers in universities outside the government. The burden of proof is so onerous that bans on toxic chemicals can take years to achieve, and the government is often constrained from sharing information on specific products with the public, because manufacturers claim that such information is confidential. Several agencies split responsibility for oversight, with little coördination: the Food and Drug Administration supervises cosmetics, food, and medications, the Environmental Protection Agency regulates pesticides, and the Consumer Product Safety Commission oversees children’s toys and other merchandise. The European Union, in contrast, now requires manufacturers to prove that their compounds are safe before they are sold.

According to the E.P.A., some eighty-two thousand chemicals are registered for use in commerce in the United States, with about seven hundred new chemicals introduced each year. In 1998, the E.P.A. found that, among chemicals produced in quantities of more than a million pounds per year, only seven per cent had undergone the full slate of basic toxicity studies. There is no requirement to label most consumer products for their chemical contents, and no consistent regulation throughout the country. Although the F.D.A. initially concluded that BPA was safe, some states, including Massachusetts and Connecticut, either have banned it or are considering a ban. (In January, the F.D.A. announced that it would conduct further testing.)

There has been some movement toward stricter controls: in July, 2008, Congress passed the Product Safety Improvement Act, which banned six phthalates from children’s toys. But so far removal from other products has been voluntary. The President’s Cancer Panel report advised people to reduce exposure with strategies that echo some of what the mothers in Frederica Perera’s study have learned: choose products made with minimal toxic substances, avoid using plastic containers to store liquids, and choose produce grown without pesticides or chemical fertilizers and meat free of antibiotics and hormones.

Mike Walls, the vice-president of regulatory affairs at the American Chemistry Council, a trade association that represents manufacturers of industrial chemicals, agrees that new laws are needed to regulate such chemicals. “Science has advanced since 1976, when the last legislation was enacted,” he said. But Walls notes that some eight hundred thousand people are employed in the companies that the A.C.C. represents, and that their products are found in ninety-six per cent of all American manufactured goods. “The United States is the clear leader in chemistry,” Walls said. “We have three times as many new applications for novel compounds as any other country in the world. We want to make good societal decisions but avoid regulations that will increase the burden on industry and stifle innovation.”

Academic researchers have found that the enormous financial stakes—the production of BPA is a six-billion-dollar-a-year industry—have prompted extra scrutiny of their results. In 2007, according to a recent article in Nature, a majority of non-industry-supported studies initially deemed sound by the National Toxicology Program on the safety of BPA were dismissed as unsuitable after a representative of the A.C.C. drafted a memo critiquing their methods; experimental protocols often differ from one university lab to another. Researchers are now attempting to create a single standard protocol, and a bill introduced by Representative Louise Slaughter, of New York, would fund a centralized research facility at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences.

Other legislation aims to completely overhaul the 1976 law. “It’s clear that the current system doesn’t work at all,” Ben Dunham, a staffer in the office of Senator Frank Lautenberg, of New Jersey, who crafted the bill now before the Senate, told me. Henry Waxman, of California, and Bobby Rush, of Illinois, have released a companion discussion draft in the House. Lautenberg’s bill seeks to allow the E.P.A. to act quickly on chemicals that it considers dangerous; to give new power to the E.P.A. to establish safety criteria in chemical compounds; to create a database identifying chemicals in industrial products; and to set specific deadlines for approving or banning compounds. The bill also seeks to limit the number of animals used for research. (Millions of animals are estimated to be required to perform the testing mandated under the E.U. law.) How much data would be needed to either restrict use of a chemical or mandate an outright ban is still unclear. Lautenberg’s bill resisted the call of environmental groups to ban certain compounds like BPA immediately.

Dr. Gina Solomon, of the Natural Resources Defense Council, said that the Lautenberg bill is “an excellent first step,” but noted several “gaps” in the bill: “There is what people call lack of a hammer, meaning no meaningful penalty for missing a deadline in evaluating a chemical if E.P.A. gets bogged down, and we know from history that it can be easily bogged down.” The language setting a standard for safety is too vague, she added. “You could imagine industry driving a truck through this loophole.”

Linda Birnbaum, the director of the N.I.E.H.S. and its National Toxicology Program, helps assess chemicals for the federal government and, if Slaughter’s bill passes, could become responsible for much of the research surrounding these safety issues. Birnbaum’s branch of the National Institutes of Health is working with the National Human Genome Research Institute and the E.P.A. to test thousands of compounds, singly and in combination, to assess their potential toxicity. Part of the difficulty, she points out, is that “what is normal for me may not be normal for you. We all have our own balance of different hormones in our different systems.” When it comes to development and achievement, incremental differences—such as the drop of five to ten I.Q. points, or a lower birth weight—are significant. “We’re all past the point of looking for missing arms and legs,” Birnbaum said.

“I know of very little science where you will ever get hundred-per-cent certainty,” Birnbaum says. “Science is constantly evolving, constantly learning new things, and at times decisions have to be made in the presence of a lot of information, but maybe not certainty. The problem is we don’t always want to wait ten or twelve or twenty years to identify something that may be a problem.”

Perera, who is keenly aware of the potential pitfalls of epidemiological research, told me that her team employs rigorous statistical methods to avoid falsely suggesting that one chemical or another is responsible for any given result. And she objects to the characterization of her research as fear-mongering. “Our findings in children increasingly show real deleterious effects that can occur short-term and potentially for the rest of the child’s life,” Perera said. In January, the Columbia group published data from the mothers and infants it studied following September 11th. Cord-blood samples saved at the time of birth had been analyzed for the presence of flame retardants. Each year, the children were assessed for mental and motor development. As a point of reference, low-level lead poisoning results in an average loss of four to five I.Q. points. Those children in Columbia’s group with the highest levels of flame retardant in their blood at birth had, by the age of two, I.Q. scores nearly seven points lower than normal.

How do we go forward? Flame retardants surely serve a purpose, just as BPA and phthalates have made for better and stronger plastics. Still, while the evidence of these chemicals’ health consequences may be far from conclusive, safer alternatives need to be sought. More important, policymakers must create a better system for making decisions about when to ban these types of substances, and must invest in the research that will inform those decisions. There’s no guarantee that we’ll always be right, but protecting those at the greatest risk shouldn’t be deferred. ♦

at Sam Moyer’s Woodshop
June 4, 2010 6-9pm
533 S. Los Angeles St, 6th Floor, L.A. CA 90013

Dental Scene from “Syndromes and a Century” (2006)

Apichatpong Weerasethakul Wins Palme d’Or at Cannes for “Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives”.

NY Times

Ruth Fremson/The New York Times

Nicola Marzovilla, the owner of I Trulli, emphasizes the importance of the dinner table. From left, his daughters, Julia and Olivia, and his wife, Astrid.

By SUSAN DOMINUS
NY Times Published: May 24, 2010

Nicola Marzovilla runs a business, so when a client at his Gramercy Park restaurant, I Trulli, asks for a children’s menu, he does not say what he really thinks. What he says is, “I’m sure we can find something on the menu your child will like.” What he thinks is, “Children’s menus are the death of civilization.”

Parents have so come to expect the safe fare (and cheaper prices) of a children’s menu that Fornino, a pizza restaurant in Park Slope, nearly faced a boycott when it opened earlier this month without one. But Mr. Marzovilla has never had one and swears he never will. Easy for him to say: He’s not in nurture-happy Park Slope, and maybe expectations are different at a restaurant where a plate of handmade pasta costs $24. But even if he were running a pizza joint, he would never offer children what he considers a “dumbed down” menu on the side.

Mr. Marzovilla welcomes young children at his restaurant, even discounts their meals on Sunday evenings, and is not above serving a simple appetizer portion of pasta to please little ones. But he has strong opinions about food, and about the messages parents convey to their offspring through what they eat. Children’s menus aim too low, he argues — they’re a parenting crutch.

“The table is very important,” Mr. Marzovilla explained as we sat around one at his restaurant early Sunday evening with our five collective children. “It’s about nutrition, it’s about family; you go right down the line. And the children’s menu is about the opposite — it’s about making it quick, making it easy, and moving on.”

Mr. Marzovilla, 50, moved with his family to Arthur Avenue in the Bronx from the Puglia region of Italy when he was 11. Even if Mr. Marzovilla was not a foodie by profession, it would be important to him that his children try, say, octopus: “It’s my culture.”

He does not make it easy for his children to refuse new foods of any kind, a policy that has yielded a 14-year-old daughter who devours all manner of raw fish, a 17-year-old son who prefers his fish whole, and an 11-year-old daughter who slurps down snails in Chinatown with such relish that the waiters sometimes line up to stare.

Try it. No. Just try it. No. Just try it! No! — such is the dialogue that accompanies many a family meal, usually ending with the parent in defeat. How is it that Mr. Marzovilla encouraged them so successfully?

Everyone at the table had a good laugh at that one. “Encouraged: that’s a good word,” said Mr. Marzovilla.

“Try ‘forced,’ ” said Julia, the 14-year-old.

“There wasn’t a time we didn’t end up trying it,” said Domenico, the 17-year-old. “Sometimes it took longer than others.”

“You know, I’m their parent, I’m not their best friend,” Mr. Marzovilla noted. “I have a duty to mold and teach.”

Olivia, the 11-year-old, was looking at the menu. “How does fried rabbit taste?” she asked.

“Very good,” advised Domenico.

Mr. Marzovilla works most evenings, but the children sit down every night at their home in SoHo with his wife, Astrid, for a meal she cooked, usually no later than 6 p.m. It’s such a given that the children do not bother trying to negotiate their way out of it.

“Some parents, it’s important to them that their kids do sports,” Mr. Marzovilla said. “To me, it doesn’t mean a thing. To have this experience with their family is more important.”

The table was not just a place to eat for a young Mr. Marzovilla — it was a place to grow. At mealtime, he literally had a seat at the table, along with the adults and his older cousins. Two of his three siblings now live nearby, and their families often join forces in Chinatown or at their mother’s home in Murray Hill, where smaller children see older ones keeping it together for the course of the meal and eating whatever is put in front of them with an open mind.

It happened at our table Sunday at I Trulli. The restaurant experience of my twin boys, who will turn 4 this summer, extends to exactly one local diner, where, yes, they have been known to eat chicken fingers and fries. At a worshipful distance across the round table, they kept their eyes trained on Julia, Olivia and Domenico. Like them, my children devoured orecchiette with rabbit ragout. When offered a clam off the shell, one asked that I remove some brown stuff at the base — and then ate it. No, he didn’t like it. But he tried it.

“If you don’t ask your children to try things, how will they ever know what they’re capable of?” Mr. Marzovilla said. “And isn’t the same true of us?”

Catherine Deneuve, B & Bewitch
1988
Dye bleach photogram from magazine page 13 x 10.75 Inches

From the Series Are You Rea
1966
Black and white photogram
11 1/4 x 8 1/4 inches

Group Show at Cherry and Martin through July 3

Group Show at Stephen Cohen through June 26