Ron Stander, known as the Butcher, went face to fist with Joe Frazier in Omaha in 1972.

By DAN BARRY
NY Times Published: November 14, 2011

OMAHA

The ex-fighter known around here as the Butcher, affectionately, has a signed photograph of Joe Frazier that he keeps like a laminated Mass card in his wallet. He has other personalized mementos, too, including a couple of scars on his fist-dented face, the handiwork of Smokin’ Joe.

The Butcher knew Frazier as well as anyone can in the public intimacy of a boxing match, where exhausted men hold each other in sweaty, slow-dance clinches. But he did not go to Frazier’s funeral in Philadelphia on Monday, attended by boxing’s elite. Among other reasons, the Butcher drives a school bus now; he had to make his rounds.

Besides, Frazier is forever with the Butcher. It has been this way for nearly 40 years, since May 25, 1972, when Frazier, the heavyweight champion of the world — the world — came to Omaha to fight an obscure long shot from the neighboring Iowa city of Council Bluffs: a challenger with a steel-driving punch and a penchant for bleeding by the name of Ron Stander, also called “The Bluffs Butcher.” Or, simply, the Butcher.

“If,” the Butcher says, past bridgework that he often pops out with his tongue as a joking but startling reminder of his brutal past life. His hair is gray, his gut is pronounced, and his mind is sharp enough to know the toll that the Butcher has taken.

“If,” he says. “The biggest word in the dictionary.”

The Butcher’s “if” moment — if he wins, he becomes world champion — took place on national television and before nearly 10,000 fans in the Omaha Civic Auditorium. Nearly all of them were chanting, “Go, Big Ron,” for the boxy man in red trunks, with a mop of dark hair and sideburns that didn’t know where to stop.

The Butcher, a beefy 27, was 23-1-1, with a wow knockout against the powerful Earnie Shavers, an uh-oh loss against a forgotten nobody, and a reputation for patiently taking beatings until he could unload his knockout punch. He lacked discipline, liked his beer, and had virtually no chance of winning.

Not even his wife at the time gave him a shot; she famously said: You don’t take a Volkswagen into the Indy 500, unless you know of a hell of a shortcut.

“And in this corner, the world heavyweight champion,” trumpeted the ring announcer. “Weighing in at 217 and one-half pounds. Unbeaten in 28 fights, 25 by knockouts, World Champion Joe Frazier.”

Out jogged Frazier, a rock-solid 28, his face a mask of all business. He had beaten Muhammad Ali a year earlier, and was looking forward to the big payday chance to do it again. For him, the Bluffs Butcher was merely a human tuning fork.

Imagine sitting on that stool a few feet away, in front of everyone you’ve ever known in your life, about to challenge a world heavyweight champion known for a left hook that could knock you into tomorrow. And just to make it fun, a pug named Mighty Joe Young had recently broken your nose while sparring.

“It was bothersome,” the Butcher says of his sore nose.

The two men tapped their gloves in center ring. “You ready?” Frazier asked, as the Butcher recalls. He says he winked, went back to his corner, and said a quick prayer.

If.

If only the Butcher had capitalized on his first-round punch that buckled Frazier’s knees — a blow that had the television announcer shouting that “Stander is carrying the fight to Frazier.” If only he had connected with that uppercut that just missed Frazier’s jaw, just. If only his own jaw had not met a Frazier uppercut that Jell-O-jiggled his brains.

“I was out on my feet,” the Butcher recalls. “But I wasn’t going down.”

In Omaha, at least, that is what is most remembered: the Butcher never went down. But the blood seeping from cuts to the bridge of his nose and his right eye could not be stemmed by his corner men. “I couldn’t look up,” the Butcher says. “I tried to follow him around by his feet.”

By the fourth round, the television announcer was shouting a sad ballad for the Butcher: “Stander with the crowd behind him, but Frazier doing the dynamite. … Stander going for broke. … And a cut over the eyebrow, but look at this kid battle. … And the claret continues to flow …”

DING! DING! DING! DING!

In the auditorium, Toddy Ann Leytham, who had gone to high school with Ronnie, as she called him, became so upset by the bloodbath she was watching through binoculars that she tumbled onto the concrete floor. She spent the next several hours in the hospital with a concussion.

Meanwhile, Dr. Jack Lewis, the attending physician, was telling the Butcher he was done. “Hell, he couldn’t see me!” Dr. Lewis recalls. “He didn’t know where Joe was. He was just swinging.”

Soon the announcer was again at center ring, his Kleenex-white tuxedo in sharp contrast to the blood just shed. “The winner, by a technical knockout after the fourth round, and still heavyweight champion of the world, Joe Frazier! Frazier!”

The greatest opportunity of the Butcher’s life lasted 12 minutes — or a split second, if you just count that missed uppercut. The crowd cheered their gladiator, while commentators made his gruesome loss sound epic. He received 17 stitches to his puffy face, and then he went off somewhere and broke down.

Joe Frazier continued on. He lost his championship; lost two rematches to his tormenter, Ali; made and lost millions; and died of liver cancer last week at the age of 67. He ranks among the very best fighters of all time: a lunch-pail warrior who never gave up. All business.

As for the Butcher?

He kept on fighting for another decade, barreling away in boxing rings from Hawaii to South Africa, but his career effectively ended that night in Omaha. You might say he left more than his blood on the mat.

Divorced, remarried, divorced, with four children all told. Bought a bar called the Sportsman Inn (“Come See the Butcher and Friends”), drank too much, and had a few run-ins with the law. Drove a cement truck. Worked as a bodyguard for celebrities; you can find his name among the credits on the Eagles album “Hotel California.”

Worked as a machine operator for 13 years, but lost that job when the plant closed. Worked now and then as a boxing referee. Received a perfect-attendance certificate at a heating and air-conditioning school, only to find no work. Quit a lousy maintenance job at an apartment complex. Did odd jobs around town. Collected cans. Gave up drinking, but still drinks a little.

A scramble of a life, it turned out, always looking for that one clear shot at security. But as the Butcher says, more than once: “You can’t change destiny.”

Three years ago, the Butcher attended his 45th high school reunion in Council Bluffs. Who was there but Toddy Ann Leytham, the only one to be carried out after the Frazier-Stander fight, widowed and still harboring a crush for Ronnie. They married a year later.

Destiny for the Butcher at 67 means driving a school bus, helping out disadvantaged kids and living in a cozy house with Toddy, his biggest fan. She wears a T-shirt that bears his younger image and the words “My Hero.” She makes reprints of boxing posters to have him sign and sell. She hangs photographs from his boxing years, including a particularly gory one from the fight with Frazier, always with him.

People in Omaha have not forgotten that fight. And when they see Frazier’s bloodied victim around town, they call out his name. Hey, Butcher, they say. Hey, Champ.

Thanks to Keith Kandell

Beatrice Wood at the Santa Monica Museum of Art

By ROBERTA SMITH
NY Times Published: November 10, 2011

LOS ANGELES — The postwar art of Southern California is a house with many mansions, a great number of which are now open for viewing. I refer of course to the cacophonous, synergistic, sometimes bizarre colossus of exhibitions known as “Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945-1980,” which is rampant throughout the Los Angeles region.

It sharply divides our knowledge of postwar art — not just Californian but American — into two periods: before and after “Pacific Standard Time.” Before, we knew a lot, and that lot tended to greatly favor New York. A few Los Angeles artists were highly visible and unanimously revered, namely Ed Ruscha and other denizens of the Ferus Gallery, that supercool locus of the Los Angeles art scene in the 1960s, plus Bruce Nauman and Chris Burden, but that was about it. After, we know a whole lot more, and the balance is much more even. One of the many messages delivered by this profusion of what will eventually be nearly 70 museum exhibitions is that New York did not act alone in the postwar era. And neither did those fabulous Ferus boys.

Los Angeles may have entered the postwar years with little to speak of in the way of a contemporary art world, but within a decade it was more than making up for lost time. The oft-cited litany of factors contributing to this explosion of art making includes the region’s light, the spaciousness, the cheap rents, Hollywood, the aerospace industry, the car culture, a handful of groundbreaking exhibitions in the ’60s at the Pasadena Art Museum, and the increasingly influential art schools. (There were also the harsh, sometimes galvanizing inequities of the city, especially as experienced by those living in the ghettos and barrios of South Central and East Los Angeles.)

Today Los Angeles has museums and galleries galore, and generations of artistic talent to showcase. And above all — and above it all — it has the Getty Center, on its Brentwood hilltop, which underwrote the project to the tune of about $10 million. Parceled out, the Getty’s largess enabled scores of institutions to mount exhibitions excavating and retrieving one portion or another of the area’s rich recent cultural past.

During my 5 days here I crammed in about 10 days’ worth of art viewing, with visits to some 35 shows in museums, alternative spaces and a few of the commercial galleries that joined the fray.

It was like moving among linked sites on a real-world information superhighway. Exhibitions veered from dense displays of archival documents to elegantly spacious presentations of artworks, all complementing, amplifying and contradicting one another, highlighting the contributions of African-American and Mexican-American artists, the effects of feminism and the proliferation of art forms like assemblage, ceramics and photography. Certain artists and events put in repeat appearances, seen from new angles or within different narratives. And amid it all, a few overarching ideas emerged.

THE CENTER CANNOT HOLD

The great thing about “Pacific Standard Time” is that as more and more institutions got involved, the Getty loosened its grip, and the project morphed into something whose revelations no one could have predicted. But both the older, neater version of Los Angeles’s postwar art history and hints of the messier one emerging from the surrounding shows are encapsulated in the Getty’s own “Pacific Standard Time: Crosscurrents in L.A. Painting and Sculpture 1950-1970.” In a highly compressed fashion (read: crowded, too small and weirdly canonical), the show rehearses the well-known (read: too white and too male) ’60s narrative of found-object assemblage, sleek, abstract Finish Fetish sculpture painting, Pop Art and illusionistic Light and Space work, adding some new twists to the story.

In the first gallery the narrative backs up to the late 1950s, reviewing the alacrity with which ceramics artists like John Mason, Peter Voulkos, Ken Price and Henry Takemoto responded to the liberating scale and gesture of Abstract Expressionism in aggressive, often monumental clay sculptures and reliefs, even as some painters, like John McLaughlin, emphatically ignored it, fashioning pristine atmospheric geometries that set the stage for the Light and Space generation.

The show goes on to establish that assemblage was, from the start, a mixed-race endeavor, pursued by white artists like Ed Kienholz, Wallace Berman and Llyn Foulkes, but also by black ones like Melvin Edwards, Ed Bereal, Noah Purifoy and Betye Saar (as well as the Japanese-American Ron Miyashiro). Next the Finish Fetish section includes a decoratively painted car hood from 1964 by the feminist pioneer Judy Chicago. The show continues to the brink of Conceptual Art with a painted word painting from the late 1960s by John Baldessari and concludes with a photograph of Simon Rodia’s Watts Towers, whose mosaic-covered spires are a monumental ode to outsider art and assemblage.

For an illuminating footnote to the Getty show, “Artistic Evolution: Southern California Artists at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, 1945-1963,” a small exhibition at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County in Exposition Park, celebrates the annual juried art shows for local artists held there starting in the 1940s. Just about everyone who became anyone submitted work; the sampling here includes little-known early Abstract Expressionist paintings by Robert Irwin and Mr. Baldessari.

DEEPER AND WIDER

Other shows enlarge upon the different aspects of the Getty show with visionary force. Distributed among the three sites of the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, the impeccable “Phenomenal: California Light, Space, Surface,” traces the dematerialization of Finish Fetish sculpture into the perceptual etherealities of Light and Space art. It includes a capsule survey of Larry Bell’s early progress from geometric painting to glass-box sculptures, as well as the luminous paintings and installations of Douglas Wheeler and Mary Corse and the translucent resin sculptures of Helen Pashgian and DeWain Valentine. And, in a narrow corridor piece by Mr. Nauman, light and space turn psychological and claustrophobic. It certainly doesn’t hurt that the museum’s main building, in La Jolla, sits on the edge of the light and space of the Pacific.

A visionary power of a gritty, urban sort permeates “Now Dig This: Art and Black Los Angeles, 1960-1980,” a beautiful show at the Hammer Museum at the University of California, Los Angeles. This exhibition examines the rich art scene that emerged in the early 1960s in South Central, revealing how a host of mostly but not always black artists explored assemblage’s special capacities to fuse medium and message, in some cases inspired by the trauma of the 1965 Watts riots.

Mr. Edwards’s fierce welded scrap assemblage-sculptures are seen again here, as are Ms. Saar’s poetic recylings of image and object, joined by the efforts of a dozen or so more artists, including the macabre doll-like sculptures of John Outterbridge, and the brooding reliefs of Alonzo Davis. The exhibition also reveals how assemblage was further transformed in the early 1970s by performance-oriented installations of found objects by Senga Nengudi, Maren Hassinger and David Hammons.

The Hammer show is itself placed in even broader context by “Places of Validation,: Art and Progression,” at the California African American Museum, back in Exposition Park. Its nearly 90 artists include half of those at the Hammer, with especially impressive pieces by Mr. Hammons and Mr. Purifoy.

(An apotheosis of assemblage as medium and message is on view at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, in Kienholz’s wrenching, incendiary “Five-Car Stud” made from 1969 to ’72. The stark nighttime tableau of life-size figures and real cars, which depicts the castration of a black man by six white men while Delta blues plays on the radio of the victim’s pickup truck and, inside it, his white female companion looks on in horror. The piece was exhibited previously only once, at the 1972 “Documenta 5” in Germany.)

Southern California is showcased as an epicenter of feminist art in “Doin’ It in Public: Feminism and Art at the Woman’s Building” in a cavernous gallery at the Otis College of Art and Design near Los Angeles Airport. A deluge of mostly archival material — pamphlets, broadsheets, posters, documents, photographs, videos — with only occasional artworks, its main focus is the evolution of consciousness and collective spaces that culminated in the Woman’s Building, founded in Los Angeles in 1973 by Judy Chicago, the designer Sheila Levrant de Bretteville and the art historian Arlene Raven. That, and the array of further activism, feminist art and outreach programs that the Woman’s Building fostered during its 18-year existence. This is the kind of show that I once would have said would make a better book than exhibition, and it comes with two very fine volumes. But nothing beats wading through the array of documentary evidence for a visceral sense of the passions, hard work, ingenuity, commitment and very real changes that these women wrought.

FORM AND FUNCTION

While prominently placed at the Getty, ceramics had only a few echoes among the “Pacific Standard Time” shows that I saw — but that will soon change. “Common Ground: Ceramics in Southern California, 1945-1975,” opening on Saturday at the American Museum of Ceramics Art in Pomona, with some 300 variously functional, abstract and decorative works by around 50 artists. And among the second wave of shows opening in January is the more focused “Clay’s Tectonic Shift: Peter Voulkos, John Mason and Ken Price” at Scripps College in Claremont, accompanied by a catalog that traces the Ferus Gallery’s often ignored promotion of ceramic artists like Mason in the late ’50s.

Ceramics do have one stunning moment in the current lineup: the survey of the potter Beatrice Wood (1893-1998) at the Santa Monica Museum of Art. A confidante of Marcel Duchamp during his New York Dada days in the late 1910s, Wood moved to Los Angeles in 1928 and gravitated slowly to clay. In an instance of late blooming that more or less coincided with the growth of studio ceramics in Southern California, she became a potter of distinction, reaching maturity in the 1960s with clunky lusterware chalices and goblets. Their brash yet subtle iridescent surfaces look spectacular beneath the Santa Monica museum’s skylights. Wood’s indifference to the niceties of craft give her forms a roguish humor and sculptural force comparable to those of the Italian modernist Lucio Fontana’s (quite different) works in clay. Meanwhile functional ceramics as well as the sculptural kind are plentiful in “California Design 1930-1965: ‘Living in a Modern Way’ ” at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where a wall label notes Voulkos’s influential (and controversial) pronouncement in the 1950s that his efforts were art, not craft. The design-theme equivalent of the Getty show, this dense, meandering homage to California’s considerable influence on American lifestyle also encompasses furniture, textiles, fashion, industrial and graphic design as well as the emblematic living room of Charles and Ray Eames, available in its entirety because the Eames house-museum in Pacific Palisades is undergoing restoration.

The onslaught of the county museum show finds a highly focused counterpoint in “Eames Words” at the fledgling Architecture and Design Museum, in a climate-control-free storefront across the street. All but devoid of art, the show succeeds on sheer curatorial imagination. With quotations from the Eameses displayed across walls, a few films and some alluring displays of everyday objects and raw materials, it is like being inside the designers’ heads.

VIVA MÉXICO

Five eye-opening exhibitions that together highlight the work of Mexican-Americans — as well as the Mexican influence on the region’s visual culture — suggest that one of the richest veins running through postwar Southern California art is the Mexican-American one. And still these shows leave you with the suspicion that the surface has barely been scratched.

At the Autry National Center in Griffiths Park, “Art Along the Hyphen: The Mexican-American Generation” is devoted to mostly realist painting and sculpture by six Angeleno artists (from three generations, actually). The works range in date from 1906 to the 1970s, with high points including the beautifully reserved still lifes of Eduardo Carrillo (1937-1997).

At the Fowler Museum at the University of California, Los Angeles, the photographs of Oscar Castillo offer a stirring photojournalistic account of Mexican-American life in Los Angeles in the 1970s, while “Mapping Another L.A.: The Chicano Art Movement” sweeps through paintings, drawings, mural art, political posters and punk music. It also includes Asco, the subversive Chicano collective of the 1970s, whose founding members — Harry Gamboa Jr., Willie Herrón, Gronk and Patssi Valdez — dissented from the more decorous and familiar forms of Chicano art with openly rebellious hit-and-run street performances and other actions.

Asco really gets its due in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s “Asco: The Elite of the Obscure,” where it s combination of incisive satire, attitude and style is preserved in images that presage post modern set-up photography and appropriation art. And the artists of Asco also figure, both collectively and individually, in the amazing if disjointed “MEX/L.A.: ‘Mexican’ Modernism(s) in Los Angeles, 1930-1985” at the Museum of Latin American Art, which was established 15 years ago in a former bowling alley in Long Beach. Opening with a fabulously customized lowrider from 1970 by Jesse Valdez Jr., this exhibition reaches back to before World War II with drawings by Mexican muralists José Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros.

Its wide net includes all kinds of artists influenced by Mexican culture (Frank Lloyd Wright, the Eameses, Walt Disney), and encompasses the photographer Graciela Iturbide, the great outsider Martin Ramirez and recent Conceptualists like Guillermo Gómez-Peña. One telling resurrection is Alfredo Ramos Martínez (1871-1946), whose politically pointed paintings from the late ’30s of rope-bound Mexicans were executed on pages taken from newspapers, a strategy that presages similar works by Adrian Piper 30 years later. Among the most exciting, open-ended achievements of “Pacific Standard Time,” this rambunctious show should inspire a larger, even more omnivorous one.

THE PHOTO-CONCEPTUAL EXPLOSION

Another insistent strain in much of “Pacific Standard Time” is photography and its constantly mutating role in Conceptual Art starting in the early ’70s. Among the several worthy gallery shows up during my visit, the most impressive was the near total re-creation, at Cherry and Martin, a gallery on La Cienega Boulevard, of “Photography into Sculpture,” a 1970 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York that included numerous Los Angeles artists who were exploring three-dimensional uses of photographs. (Two early innovators in this area are the subject of their own show, “Speaking in Tongues: The Art of Wallace Berman and Robert Heinecken” at the Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena.)

The metastasizing of photography (and also video) is a central component in two immense exhibitions, which also go beyond the Southern California focus of “Pacific Standard Time” to address the perennial art historical imbalance between Los Angeles and San Francisco. In Newport Beach, the Orange County Museum of Art’s “State of Mind: New California Art Circa 1970” is a dense, seemingly encyclopedic presentation of Conceptual Art from up and down the coast, shot through with various forms of satire, political fury and emotional vulnerability. Organized with the Berkeley Art Museum, where it will open in late February, it presents works by some 50 artists and artist collectives and resurrects numerous forgotten talents while deepening appreciation of more familiar ones.

An interesting minor sidebar to this exhibition — and also to the women’s show at Otis — is “She Accepts the Proposition: Women Gallerists and the Redefinition of Art in Los Angeles, 1967-1978” at the Crossroads School in Santa Monica. Conceived as a corrective to the view that male curators and art dealers did all the heavy lifting in Los Angeles, it centers on five female art dealers who mounted pioneering shows of installation, conceptual and video art. The Getty should offer grant support for a catalog for this show, which is a gem.

The other immense show that is rife with (although hardly limited to) photo-based work is the baleful, ambitious “Under the Big Black Sun: California Art 1974-1981,” at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles organized by Paul Schimmel, its chief curator.

An instances of curatorial imperiousness that makes few concessions to viewer stamina, it represent some 140 artists with nearly 500 artworks, spanning the years between two Californian presidencies — from Richard M. Nixon’s resignation to the inauguration of Ronald Reagan — and charting what might be called the beginning of the breakdown of the American Dream that owed so much to California.

It opens with a haunting juxtaposition of Robert Arneson’s monumental 1981 bust of San Francisco’s assassinated mayor, George Moscone, and several paintings by Mr. Foulkes that riff with Baconesque defacements on official, implicitly presidential portraiture. In effect this exhibition “samples” work from almost every other show in “Pacific Standard Time.” It contains paintings by Mr. Ruscha, Chicano posters and mural drawings, one of Mr. Outterbridge’s wicked dolls and just about every artist, it sometimes seems, in the “State of Mind” show. Its breadth of vision is breathtaking, but it also flattens the art. One can’t help but feel that the “big black sun” may be Mr. Schimmel himself.

EXPLODING ART HISTORY

“Pacific Standard Time” has been touted as rewriting history. It seems equally plausible to say that it simply explodes it, revealing the immensity of art before the narrowing and ordering of the historicizing process. Taken together, its shows may be the next best thing to being there the first time around, or maybe even better: they surely reveal more than any single individual living through these times could have seen or known about.

To a great extent this epic of exhibitions reflect our moment’s broader historical attitude, which might be characterized as No Artist Left Behind. Anyone who made art at a given moment is eligible to be part of the history of that moment. It’s expansive and inclusive and also reminds of me of Lewis Carroll’s imaginary full-scale map, which was meant to be as large as the area it charted.

“Pacific Standard Time” is a great argument for museums concentrating first and foremost on local history, for a kind of cosmopolitan regionalism, if you will. It sets an example that other curators in other cities should follow, beginning in my mind with Chicago and San Francisco. If America has more than one art capital, it probably has more than two.

Through November 19, 2011

greene naftali

By FRANK BRUNI
NY Times Published: November 12, 2011

SILVIO BERLUSCONI isn’t comfortable with English. Brett Ratner, I’m guessing, hasn’t mastered Italian. What a pity. They’d probably get along like a palazzo on fire.

They could thumb-wrestle for first dibs to hit on the cocktail waitress. Collaborate on an Italian-English dictionary of homophobic slurs. Maybe shoot a movie: “Rush Hour 4: Silvio Drives Italy Off a Cliff.” Can’t you just see him, taut face behind the wheel of a Lamborghini tumbling toward the Adriatic? Unless, that is, Ratner got a better product-placement deal from Toyota. Then Berlusconi would have to plummet in a Prius.

Neither man is riding so high right now, after a week in which Berlusconi agreed to let go of the Italian government and Ratner surrendered the Oscars, which he was supposed to help produce. And there’s undeniable satisfaction in that.

But a less pleasant, queasy feeling lingers. To ponder the Italian potentate and the Hollywood reprobate is to be reacquainted with how crudely, brashly or blindly many of the most successful and self-important people behave. And not all of them get much of a comeuppance, at least not for a good long while.

Shelley said that power “pollutes whate’er it touches.” Edmund Burke said that it rids its possessors of “every humane and gentle virtue.” Grandma Bruni said that big shots get big heads. I say that a stretch of good poll numbers have really swollen Herman Cain’s.

During the Republican debate on Wednesday, I found him more unsettling than Rick Perry, whose poignant search for syllables wasn’t entirely unlike my pathetic search for my keys. He should try looking between the couch cushions.

Cain had no problem finding syllables. True, most of them were nine, nine and nine, but he also spat out “Princess Nancy” without hesitation, hurling an insult at Nancy Pelosi that was childish and in poor taste.

How is it that he could be batting back charges of sexual harassment and yet gratuitously go after the highest-ranking woman in Congress — and choose sexist language to boot? As if following Berlusconi’s lead, Cain travels to the frontier where defiance meets delirium.

He sort-of kind-of apologized for the Pelosi dig, just as he sort-of kind-of apologized for that smoky Web ad in which his chief of staff pointed the way toward emphysema and lung cancer. There’s a pattern here, the pattern of a man so puffed up that he doesn’t pause to consider whom he might offend, and doesn’t seem to care. As the debate wound down, word went out: any additional women who stepped forward with accusations against Cain could expect fierce, Swift Boat reprisal. And the next day, he actually made an Anita Hill joke, wondering aloud if he’d get her endorsement.

Gall can be one of ambition’s greatest handmaidens. The man who never questions himself never doubts his due. Just a few lecterns away from Cain stood Newt Gingrich, whose every vocal inflection and facial expression dripped derision for the electoral process and its occasional insistence that he squeeze his vast intellect into a 30-second box. Health care in half a minute? How dare we.

Of course he has a point, but he also has nerve, this onetime Clinton condemner who did his own philandering, this Roman Catholic-come-lately who is on his third wife, the one with the bias for Tiffany’s blue. To condescend and cast judgment from a perch like that requires real hubris.

There’s been a lot of it going around lately, though not always in such ostentatious form. Sometimes it’s quieter. Almost always it encourages those in its grip to exempt themselves from the usual rules and responsibilities.

Does that explain Joe Paterno? Was his stature at Penn State so mythic and his mission so vaunted that he didn’t think he needed to bother himself with the possibility of child sexual abuse — the bureaucrats could surely deal with it — and didn’t worry that passing the buck might come back to haunt him? From what I can tell he doesn’t share Berulsconi’s boorishness or rival Gingrich’s talent for hypocrisy, but like them he has been living in his own rarefied world.

And we frequently contribute to that sort of isolation and delusion. Even now Paterno’s fans are rallying around him, loath to let the legend go.

We give our adulation too unreservedly. We thrill too readily to a larger-than-life character’s swagger, correctly understanding that outsize confidence can assist extraordinary accomplishment and then losing sight of the line between headstrong and head case. I think that’s what Cain’s dogged supporters have done.

Or we just ignore all the ugly stuff as long as someone is promising something useful. When Academy Awards officials turned to Ratner, they knew what they were getting. Throughout much of Hollywood he had a reputation as a crass operator overinvested in his macho, party-animal image. But his “Rush Hour” and “X-Men” movies had made gazillions. To the academy he represented the hope of reaching a younger, less stodgy audience.

Then he took that cherished image of his out for too public a spin. At a screening for his newest movie, “Tower Heist,” he said that as a director he didn’t put much stock in rehearsals, which were for homosexuals. Except he didn’t say homosexuals.

His virility clearly cresting, he segued into an appearance on Howard Stern’s radio show, where he bragged about the size of his testicles, the altitude of his sperm count and all the women he had been with, his language as misogynistic as it was puerile. Suddenly he was Oscars arsenic, though I’m sure there’s a lovely leotard awaiting him on “Dancing with the Stars.”

In my fantasies he does a tango with Berlusconi, who last year tried to make light of charges that he had been involved with a 17-year-old girl by saying, “It’s better to be passionate about beautiful women than to be gay.”

If only he had been half as passionate about the welfare of Italy. He used his many years as the country’s prime minister, which are at long last coming to an end, to do largely as he pleased, his power and wealth feeding each other and both bankrolling a hedonism he crowed and crowed about.

Italians put up with it longer than many other people would have. But we’d be lying and fooling ourselves if we denied our own indulgence of such shamelessness.

By WILLIAM DERESIEWICZ
NY Times Published: November 12, 2011

EVER since I moved three years ago to Portland, Ore., that hotbed of all things hipster, I’ve been trying to get a handle on today’s youth culture. The style is easy enough to describe — the skinny pants, the retro hats, the wall-to-wall tattoos. But style is superficial. The question is, what’s underneath? What idea of life? What stance with respect to the world?

Previous youth cultures — beatniks, hippies, punks, slackers — could be characterized by two related things: the emotion or affect they valorized and the social form they envisioned. For the hippies, the emotion was love: love-ins, free love, the Summer of Love, all you need is love. The social form was utopia, understood in collective terms: the commune, the music festival, the liberation movement.

The beatniks aimed at ecstasy, embodied as a social form in individual transcendence. Theirs was a culture of jazz, with its spontaneity; of marijuana, arresting time and flooding the soul with pleasure (this was before the substance became the background drug of every youth culture); of flight, on the road, to the West; of the quest for the perfect moment.

The punks were all about rage, their social program nihilistic anarchy. “Get pissed,” Johnny Rotten sang. “Destroy.” Hip-hop, punk’s younger brother, was all about rage and nihilism, too, at least until it turned to a vision of individual aggrandizement.

As for the slackers of the late ’80s and early ’90s (Generation X, grunge music, the fiction of David Foster Wallace), their affect ran to apathy and angst, a sense of aimlessness and pointlessness. Whatever. That they had no social vision was precisely what their social vision was: a defensive withdrawal from all commitment as inherently phony.

So what’s the affect of today’s youth culture? Not just the hipsters, but the Millennial Generation as a whole, people born between the late ’70s and the mid-’90s, more or less — of whom the hipsters are a lot more representative than most of them care to admit. The thing that strikes me most about them is how nice they are: polite, pleasant, moderate, earnest, friendly. Rock ’n’ rollers once were snarling rebels or chest-beating egomaniacs. Now the presentation is low-key, self-deprecating, post-ironic, eco-friendly. When Vampire Weekend appeared on “The Colbert Report” last year to plug their album “Contra,” the host asked them, in view of the title, what they were against. “Closed-mindedness,” they said.

According to one of my students at Yale, where I taught English in the last decade, a colleague of mine would tell his students that they belonged to a “post-emotional” generation. No anger, no edge, no ego.

What is this about? A rejection of culture-war strife? A principled desire to live more lightly on the planet? A matter of how they were raised — everybody’s special and everybody’s point of view is valid and everybody’s feelings should be taken care of?

Perhaps a bit of each, but mainly, I think, something else. The millennial affect is the affect of the salesman. Consider the other side of the equation, the Millennials’ characteristic social form. Here’s what I see around me, in the city and the culture: food carts, 20-somethings selling wallets made from recycled plastic bags, boutique pickle companies, techie start-ups, Kickstarter, urban-farming supply stores and bottled water that wants to save the planet.

Today’s ideal social form is not the commune or the movement or even the individual creator as such; it’s the small business. Every artistic or moral aspiration — music, food, good works, what have you — is expressed in those terms.

Call it Generation Sell.

Bands are still bands, but now they’re little businesses, as well: self-produced, self-published, self-managed. When I hear from young people who want to get off the careerist treadmill and do something meaningful, they talk, most often, about opening a restaurant. Nonprofits are still hip, but students don’t dream about joining one, they dream about starting one. In any case, what’s really hip is social entrepreneurship — companies that try to make money responsibly, then give it all away.

It’s striking. Forty years ago, even 20 years ago, a young person’s first thought, or even second or third thought, was certainly not to start a business. That was selling out — an idea that has rather tellingly disappeared from our vocabulary. Where did it come from, this change? Less Reaganism, as a former student suggested to me, than Clintonism — the heroic age of dot-com entrepreneurship that emerged during the Millennials’ childhood and youth. Add a distrust of large organizations, including government, as well as the sense, a legacy of the last decade, that it’s every man for himself.

Because this isn’t only them. The small business is the idealized social form of our time. Our culture hero is not the artist or reformer, not the saint or scientist, but the entrepreneur. (Think of Steve Jobs, our new deity.) Autonomy, adventure, imagination: entrepreneurship comprehends all this and more for us. The characteristic art form of our age may be the business plan.

AND that, I think, is the real meaning of the Millennial affect — which is, like the entrepreneurial ideal, essentially everyone’s now. Today’s polite, pleasant personality is, above all, a commercial personality. It is the salesman’s smile and hearty handshake, because the customer is always right and you should always keep the customer happy. If you want to get ahead, said Benjamin Franklin, the original business guru, make yourself pleasing to others.

I was contacted recently by a young man who plans to start a Web site to promote the need for reading and reflection to people of his generation. Not just promote it, though, of course, but market it. When he asked me for advice, I suggested he begin by pointing out the superficiality of so much social media. Well, he said, I agree with that idea, that’s a big premise of what I’m trying to do, but I wouldn’t want to come across as negative, because that turns people off. If they think you’re criticizing them, they won’t want to buy what you’re selling.

That kind of thinking is precisely what I’m talking about, what lies behind the bland, inoffensive, smile-and-a-shoeshine personality — the stay-positive, other-directed, I’ll-be-whoever-you-want-me-to-be personality — that everybody has today. Yes, we’re vicious, anonymously, on the comment threads of public Web sites, but when we speak in our own names, on Facebook and so forth, we’re strenuously cheerful, conciliatory, well-groomed. (In fact, one of the reasons we’re so vicious, I’m convinced, is to relieve the psychic pressure of all that affability.) They say that people in Hollywood are always nice to everyone they meet, in that famously fake Hollywood way, because they’re never certain whom they might be dealing with — it could be somebody who’s more important than they realize, or at least, somebody who might become important down the road.

Well, we’re all in showbiz now, walking on eggshells, relentlessly tending our customer base. We’re all selling something today, because even if we aren’t literally selling something (though thanks to the Internet as well as the entrepreneurial ideal, more and more of us are), we’re always selling ourselves. We use social media to create a product — to create a brand — and the product is us. We treat ourselves like little businesses, something to be managed and promoted.

The self today is an entrepreneurial self, a self that’s packaged to be sold.

In “Bobos in Paradise,” David Brooks articulated the phenomenon of the bourgeois bohemians, a class that merges respectable incomes with countercultural attitudes. Where, I wondered recently, do the real bohemians — the hipsters, in other words — fit into the scheme? Some are just bobos in training; others are destined to remain bohemians for life. But whatever their individual trajectories, hipsters possess a relationship to mainstream society that is radically different from that of their youth-culture forebears, and they have the bobos to thank. Indeed, they have them to thank for their very existence.

The rise of the bobos in the 1990s (when creativity became lucrative and money became cool) put a new kind of pressure on the true bohemians. Now they no longer stood in opposition to mainstream culture, as the beatniks did to the company men or the slackers did to the business boys. Now they looked exactly like it. Mainstream culture had come to them, and it drew them to itself. Et voilà, the hipster. Instead of having to get a haircut and a new wardrobe, not to mention a new set of friends, if you wanted to go over to the man, you just kept doing what you were doing, at gradually higher price points. Hence the hipster as Bobo-in-training, bohemia merging imperceptibly with the bourgeoisie.

Hipsters and bobos are symbiotic. I should know; I’m a bobo in a hipster-bobo neighborhood — which is pretty much what I was looking for when I moved to Portland in the first place. We’re all into organic food and progressive politics; we just have different relationships to the commodities through which those attitudes are expressed. Hipsters create bobo culture. They make or sell or serve, or simply pioneer, what bobos buy. Try to picture Allen Ginsberg having a chat with Don Draper, across the counter at the local coffeehouse, about the latest Lady Gaga video, and you’ll realize how far we’ve come.

All this is why, unlike those of previous youth cultures, the hipster ethos contains no element of rebellion, rejection or dissent — remarkably so, given that countercultural opposition would seem to be essential to the very idea of youth culture. That may in turn be why the hipster has proved to be so durable. The heyday of the hippies lasted for all of about two years. The punks and slackers held the stage for little more than half a decade each. That’s the nature of rebellion: it needs to keep on happening. The punks rejected the mainstream, but they also rejected the previous rejection, hippiedom itself — which, by the late ’70s, was something that old people (i.e. 28-year-olds) were into. But hipsters, who’ve been around for 15 years or so, appear to have become a durable part of our cultural configuration.

Or maybe not. These movements always have an economic substrate. The beatniks and hippies — love, ecstasy, transcendence, utopia — were products of the postwar boom. The punks and slackers and devotees of hip-hop — rage, angst, nihilism, withdrawal — arose within the long stagnation that lasted from the early ’70s to the early ’90s. The hipsters were born in the dot-com boom and flourished in the real estate bubble.

Affability is a commercial virtue, but it is also the affect of people who feel themselves to be living in a fundamentally agreeable society. Already, the makings of a new youth culture may be locking into place.

Invocation of my Demon Brother (1969)

November 13, 2011 through February 27, 2011

MOCA

Richard Perry/The New York Times

Discarded plastic bottles account for about 30 percent of the Grand Canyon park’s waste stream, according to the park service.

By FELICITY BARRINGER
NY Times Published: November 9, 2011

Weary of plastic litter, Grand Canyon National Park officials were in the final stages of imposing a ban on the sale of disposable water bottles in the Grand Canyon late last year when the nation’s parks chief abruptly blocked the plan after conversations with Coca-Cola, a major donor to the National Park Foundation.

Stephen P. Martin, the architect of the plan and the top parks official at the Grand Canyon, said his superiors told him two weeks before its Jan. 1 start date that Coca-Cola, which distributes water under the Dasani brand and has donated more than $13 million to the parks, had registered its concerns about the bottle ban through the foundation, and that the project was being tabled. His account was confirmed by park, foundation and company officials.

A spokesman for the National Park Service, David Barna, said it was Jon Jarvis, the top federal parks official, who made the “decision to put it on hold until we can get more information.” He added that “reducing and eliminating disposable plastic bottles is one element of our green plan. This is a process, and we are at the beginning of it.”

Mr. Martin, a 35-year veteran of the park service who had risen to the No. 2 post in 2003, was disheartened by the outcome. “That was upsetting news because of what I felt were ethical issues surrounding the idea of being influenced unduly by business,” Mr. Martin said in an interview. “It was even more of a concern because we had worked with all the people who would be truly affected in their sales and bottom line, and they accepted it.”

Neil J. Mulholland, president of the foundation, said that a representative of Coca-Cola had reached out to him late in the process to inquire about the reasons for the water bottle ban and how it would work.

“There was not an overt statement made to me that they objected to the ban,” Mr. Mulholland said, adding, “There was never anything inferred by Coke that if this ban happens, we’re losing their support.” The foundation president noted in the interview that Coca-Cola had recently donated $80,000 for a recycling program on the Mall in Washington.

A spokeswoman for Coca-Cola Refreshments USA, Susan Stribling, said the company would rather help address the plastic litter problem by increasing the availability of recycling programs. “Banning anything is never the right answer,” she said. “If you do that, you don’t necessarily address the problem.” She also characterized the bottle ban as limiting personal choice. “You’re not allowing people to decide what they want to eat and drink and consume,” she said.

In seeking the ban, the Grand Canyon park, under Mr. Martin’s direction from 2006 until his retirement last December, was following the example of Zion National Park, in Utah, which had instituted a similar program to great acclaim in 2008. The park service gave it an environmental achievement award in 2009 for eliminating 60,000 plastic bottles from the park in its first year.

Discarded plastic bottles account for about 30 percent of the park’s total waste stream, according to the park service. Mr. Martin said the bottles are “the single biggest source of trash” found inside the canyon.

Mr. Martin said he got approval to proceed with implementing the ban after he briefed his superiors in both the Denver regional office and Washington headquarters in the spring of 2010. Research showed that the park sold about $400,000 worth of bottled water in a given year. The planned ban at the Grand Canyon would have covered only smaller bottles and would not have applied to other beverages such as soda or juices.

In preparation, the park and its contracted concessionaires installed more water “filling stations” for reusable bottles at a cost of about $300,000, according to information provided by the park service to Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, an environmental group based in Washington that has worked to uncover the underlying reasons for the abrupt turn-around on the ban.

Senior park officials considered having Mr. Jarvis announce the ban to a meeting of the Society of Environmental Journalists in the fall of 2010. “From a media standpoint, we see this as good news, it fits perfectly into Jon’s sustainability goals,” Mr. Barna wrote in an internal park service e-mail. He concluded, “We are aware that others (Nestle, etc.) may not be thrilled at this decision but other than that, are there any downsides?”

In mid-December, Mr. Martin received a telephone call and an e-mail from his immediate boss, John Wessels, the Intermountain regional director for the park service, with news that the ban was being postponed indefinitely.

Mr. Jarvis said that he had not heard of the ban until Nov. 17, and felt that an action by Grand Canyon park would have more impact than Zion’s. He added: “My decision to hold off the ban was not influenced by Coke, but rather the service-wide implications to our concessions contracts, and frankly the concern for public safety in a desert park.”

The decision was laid out in an e-mail by Jo A. Pendry, then chief of commercial services for the park service, who explained that during a Dec. 13 meeting, Mr. Jarvis “reiterated his decision to have the Grand Canyon hold off on implementation” until “we have hosted a meeting with the major producers of bottled water.”

She also wrote that Mr. Jarvis expected that Mr. Wessels would “touch base with the N.P.F./Coke, and he asked that I get in touch with you to see where you are with making that contact.”

The N.P.F. refers to the acronym for the nonprofit foundation, which was chartered by Congress to generate individual and corporate private donations to the national parks.

The e-mails were provided to The New York Times by a current park service employee concerned about the handling of the bottle ban. The employee declined to be identified because he does not have permission to speak publicly on the subject.

PEER, the public employees’ group, filed a Freedom of Information Act request in August seeking documents that could shed light on the decision, but only two documents — letters between Mr. Martin and representatives of the park concessionaire Xanterra — were released, said Jeff Ruch, the group’s president, who is weighing a lawsuit.

Asked why Mr. Mulholland, the president of the foundation, had been involved in the decision to table the ban, Mr. Barna, the park service spokesman, said, “He’s a partner, and he represents a lot of people who do good things in the parks. He’s a way for people to get introductions within the park service.”

Mr. Barna quickly added that he did not mean that donors could buy access.

For his part, Mr. Mulholland said he had no qualms about entertaining Coca-Cola’s questions and concerns. “I don’t feel conflicted, because the park service does a very good job of policing themselves and adhering to their standards,” he said.

via

Joe Frazier is directed to the ropes by referee Arthur Mercante after decking Muhammad Ali in a 1971 title fight. (AP Photo / March 8, 1971)

By Bill Dwyre, Los Angeles Times
November 8, 2011

Joe Frazier, the heavyweight boxing champion who in 1971 became the first fighter to defeat Muhammad Ali, then lost two epic rematches including a ferocious battle known as the “Thrilla in Manila,” died Monday night. He was 67.

Smokin’ Joe, as he was known, died in Philadelphia, said his manager, Leslie Wolff. He had liver cancer.

It was a golden age of heavyweight boxing in the 1970s, when fight fans filled massive arenas and boosted the sport’s television ratings to watch the likes of Ali and Frazier and George Foreman, Jerry Quarry and Ken Norton.

Photos: Joe Frazier through the years

In his 37 professional fights, Frazier won 32 times — 27 by knockout — and lost only four, with one draw. But he never really accepted his 1-2 record against Ali.

“I whupped him three times,” Frazier said many times over the years.

They met for the first time on March 8, 1971, in New York’s Madison Square Garden, with each fighter guaranteed $2.5 million. Ali, then 31-0, had been stripped of his heavyweight titles when, as Cassius Clay, he refused to be inducted into the military after being drafted for the Vietnam War. Frazier, at 26-0, had captured the title of undisputed heavyweight champion in 1970 with a technical knockout of Jimmy Ellis.

It was a brutal battle, rated by many as the “fight of the century” and considered the best boxing match of all time at any weight. When Frazier knocked Ali down in the 15th and final round and won on points, both received rave reviews for their performances. Both also went immediately to the hospital.

Before they could be paired again in the ring, Frazier defended his title four times, most notably on Jan. 22, 1973, against Foreman in Kingston, Jamaica.

Even the burly, fearsome-looking Foreman, who was 4 inches taller, admitted that the thought of getting into the ring with the brawling fireplug Frazier frightened him.

“Every time he swung at me,” Foreman said, “it scared five years out of my life.”

Nevertheless, in the second round, Foreman caught Frazier with a right uppercut that sent the fighter from Philadelphia to the canvas.

Sitting ringside for the boxing telecast was announcer Howard Cosell, by now internationally known for his boisterous and opinionated broadcast style. When Frazier, the champion, hit the deck, Cosell stole the moment and the show with his dramatic bellowing of the call:

“DOWN GOES FRAZIER! DOWN GOES FRAZIER! DOWN GOES FRAZIER!”

It was as if he was calling an airplane crash rather than a boxing match. It not only stuck with Frazier, who got to his feet too late to avoid being counted out, but it is a mocking call to this day among boxing fans for all such spectacular knockdowns.

After Foreman took Frazier’s title away, Frazier fought Ali twice more, losing in a more subdued battle in the Garden in 1974, when Ali kept Frazier away more effectively with holding and clinching, and a year later, after Ali had gotten his title back by beating Foreman in Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo).

It was for this third match, on Oct. 1, 1975, in Quezon City, the Philippines, that Ali predicted he would have an easy time with Frazier. In the pre-fight promotions for what was dubbed the “Thrilla in Manila,” Ali called Frazier an “Uncle Tom” and a “gorilla” and repeatedly ridiculed him. The fight was anything but easy, and Ali later likened it to being “the closest thing to dying.” By the 14th round, both having hit and been hit too many times to count, Frazier’s eyes were nearly swollen shut and he couldn’t see Ali’s punches, even though he had stood in and flailed away for several rounds right through his near-blindness.

Finally, after the 14th round, his veteran trainer, Eddie Futch, over loud protests from Frazier, threw in the towel to end the fight.

“Sit down, son,” Futch told Frazier. “It’s all over. Nobody will ever forget what you did here today.”

Frazier and Ali had fought 41 rounds and served up a boxing trilogy for the ages.

Frazier fought only two more times. In 1976, he lost to Foreman in a fifth-round knockout, announced his retirement, then finished for good in 1981 after a 10-round draw with Floyd Cummings.

Joseph William Frazier was born Jan. 12, 1944, in Beaufort, S.C. He was the youngest of 12 surviving children of Rubin and Dolly Frazier and lived his early life on a farm, where his parents worked as sharecroppers.

He was inspired to think about being a boxer when somebody told him he was built like a young Joe Louis, and when he was 15, he moved north to Philadelphia to stay with relatives and find work. One of his first jobs was in a slaughterhouse, where he would pummel the hanging slabs of beef for exercise. Years later, Sylvester Stallone borrowed from that scene for his “Rocky” movies.

Frazier worked his way through the ranks of local Golden Gloves competition in Philadelphia and lost only once as an amateur, to Buster Mathis, who beat him out of the heavyweight spot on the U.S. Olympic team for the 1964 Summer Games in Tokyo. But Mathis was injured before the Games, Frazier won the spot back and took home a gold medal.

After his boxing career ended, Frazier purchased a gym in Philadelphia, where he lived in his later years. Along the way, he sang with a group called the Knockouts and had a clothing brand, a restaurant and a limousine service. He dabbled in investments and real estate.

The tension between Ali and Frazier remained for decades. Frazier could not forget the taunts and the insults — Ali always said they were nothing more than fight promotion hype — and when Frazier was interviewed shortly after Ali, shaking and feeble from dementia and Parkinson’s disease, lighted the torch to begin the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta, he said he wished Ali had “fallen into the fire.”

But in an interview in Jet magazine later that year, and in some subsequent interviews, an aging Frazier said he no longer held a grudge.

“It’s like we were fighting the Vietnam War,” he said. “We should meet and hug.”

Frazier, who was divorced from his wife, Florence, is survived by 11 children. His son Marvis was a heavyweight contender in the 1980s, and daughter Jacqui Frazier-Lyde fought and lost to Ali’s daughter Laila in 2001.

Muhammad Ali after a left hook from Joe Frazier, above right, in the 15th round of their title fight in 1971 at Madison Square Garden, won by Frazier

By DAVE ANDERSON
NY Times Published: November 7, 2011

Some people mean more together than they do apart, whatever the stage. Churchill and Hitler. Bogart and Bacall. Ali and Frazier. And for all the deserved accolades for Muhammad Ali, I’ve always believed that each at his best, Joe Frazier, who died Monday night at age 67, was the better fighter. And the better man.

After both entered the Madison Square Garden ring undefeated in 1971 for what was called the Fight of the Century, Frazier flattened Ali with a left hook and earned a unanimous and unquestioned 15-round decision that Ali didn’t wait to hear. His jaw swollen, he hurried out of the ring on the way to a nearby hospital. He knew who had won.

The Thrilla in Manila in 1975 was awarded to Ali when Frazier’s trainer, Eddie Futch, wouldn’t let him answer the bell for the 15th round because “he couldn’t see the right hands coming” out of his closed left eye, but Frazier soon talked freely in the interview area. When an exhausted Ali finally arrived, he described their epic in brutality as “next to death.”

That evening, at a party in an old Filipino palace, Ali, his ribs battered, walked stiffly and sat stiffly, painfully offering a finger or two instead of shaking hands.

At his hotel, Frazier sang and danced. Seeing them both, if you didn’t know what had happened in the fight, you had to think Frazier was the winner.

Not long after that, Ali had a party for his autobiography at the Rainbow Room high in Rockefeller Center. Frazier was invited, but would he show up?

For years, Ali had insulted Frazier, calling him a “gorilla” and “stupid.” Frazier seethed; he once grappled with Ali briefly — and seriously — in a television studio before they were separated. But the night of the book party, he greeted Ali with a smile and “Hiya, champ” — the ultimate compliment from one boxer to another. Class.

To me, Joe Frazier won that night, too.

But the Joe Frazier I’ll always remember wasn’t in a boxing ring or at a book party. Soon after the Garden triumph, he was back home in Beaufort, S.C., where, one of 12 children, he had grown up picking vegetables for 15 cents a crate when not helping his father, a handyman who lost his left arm in an auto accident.

“I was his left arm,” he said.

Ten years earlier, Joe had left Beaufort with about $200 in his pocket on a Greyhound bus bound for New York and a better life. He soon settled in Philadelphia, where he sometimes worked in a meat locker, battering a side of beef as if it were a punching bag — the inspiration for a scene in the “Rocky” movie.

Now, as the undisputed heavyweight champion who had earned $2.5 million at the Garden, he had returned to Beaufort in a maroon Cadillac limousine. He was there to buy a new-home site for his 62-year-old mother. “Dolly Frazier, the mother of the champ,” she introduced herself. “How sweet it is.”

That day they drove over to a nearby farm: “Trask and Sons, Fancy Vegetables,” where Mrs. Frazier had picked radishes. “Four lots right here,” said the land owner, Harold Trask, known as Beanie. “At $1,500 a lot, that’s a good price. Or if you want twice as much property, from the corner down to that bend there, it’s $3,000 an acre. And I’ll sell you four acres for $9,000.”

Joe and his mother listened and thanked Trask for his offer. On their way back to her shingled home between drooping moss trees, she said: “It’s nice, high land. No swamps. And we owe him first choice for showing it to us.”

“You say give him first choice, Momma,” Joe said, his voice rising, “but he can’t be first choice if he don’t give the right price. He ain’t giving you nothin’. He’s selling it to you. He ain’t giving you nothin’ at all.”

Back in his mother’s home, Joe talked about how he had watched fights on their little television. “Sugar Ray, Hurricane Jackson, Floyd Patterson,” he said. “Joe Louis was my idol. Down in the South, the black goes for the black.” But soon he was talking about Trask’s land offer.

“He’s talking that white talk,” Joe said. “He was saying that he wouldn’t mind if I came over to his house for a cup of coffee. And tell me that I could come back down and live. I’ll forgive, but I’ll never forget.”

I never learned what happened with that land deal for his mother, but Joe Frazier sure won the conversation about it. The next day, South Carolina state troopers escorted him in a high-speed motorcade to Columbia, S.C., where he was the first black man to address the State Legislature since the Civil War. Joe won that day, too. Just as he won at the Garden and “won” in Manila. Won that book party, too.

The record shows that Joe Frazier lost four fights — two against Ali (a mostly forgotten 12-round decision in a nontitle fight between their two classics) and two knockouts by George Foreman. But to me, somehow he always won.

Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times

Part of the job for this officer, shown standing with a backpack, is looking for “lush workers.”

By MICHAEL WILSON
Published: November 4, 2011

In the world of crime statistics, there is a certain subsection of victim on the city subways: a reveler who, overserved during a night on the town, nods off on a train. He wakes with a flapping, precision-cut hole in his trousers and cool, thin air where his wallet used to be.

This victim shakes his head in self-disgust, joining the besotted ranks to fall prey to a brand of criminal as old and established below the streets as a twisted root.

The police, long ago, coined a name for this criminal. The lush worker.

“Do they still exist?” said Lt. Kevin Callaghan, a 20-year veteran of the New York Police Department. “Yes.”

The lush worker sounds like a monster in a bedtime story, a stooped creature with a razor blade in one stealthy hand. Don’t drink, children, or the Lush Worker will get you.

But he is actually a middle-aged or older man who has been doing this for a very long time. And he is a fading breed.

“It’s like a lost art,” the lieutenant said. “It’s all old-school guys who cut the pocket. They die off.” And they do not seem to be replacing themselves, he said. “It’s like the TV repairman.”

Lush workers date back at least to the beginning of the last century, their ilk cited in newspaper crime stories like one in The New York Times in 1922, describing “one who picks the pockets of the intoxicated. He is the old ‘drunk roller’ under a new name.” While the term technically applies to anyone who steals from a drunken person, most police officers reserve it for a special kind of thief who uses straight-edge razors found in any hardware store.

The Police Department does not have a rough estimate of how many lush workers are out working lushes.

It offers an exact number: 109.

That is far fewer than there once were. What do we know of these 109 criminals? All but two are men, and overwhelmingly middle-aged or older, some born in 1947, 1943, 1938 and even, in one case, 1931.

They have all been arrested for lush working, or “lushing,” since 2006. They are persistent. One suspect arrested last weekend had 37 previous arrests under his belt — where, by the way, these guys like to hide razors, or in their hat brims or shoes or wallets.

And they are busy. “It happens every weekend,” said Officer James Rudolph with the police transit bureau that covers Manhattan below 34th Street, where many a young man goes to celebrate the weekend to excess.

“They’ll nudge them and see how incoherent they really are,” Officer Rudolph said. Then out comes the tool of the trade. “It’s unbelievable they don’t cut the person’s leg wide open. They’re like surgeons with a razor blade, for God’s sake.”

His commanding officer, Capt. Paul Rasa, said there had been 15 arrests of lush workers in that downtown district this year, and 35 complaints, which represent 28 percent of all the downtown transit grand larcenies in 2011.

This does not count unreported thefts. Victims, after all, are perhaps understandably ashamed to come forward to report being drunk enough to not have noticed the filleting of their pants by a man born in 1931.

“I had a guy take a swing at me once,” Lieutenant Callaghan said, recalling waking a construction worker with newly ventilated jeans. “He thought I robbed him.”

The victim of the theft on Sunday was 23 years old and referred to in a criminal complaint only as “a sleeping male.” The suspect, with 37 previous arrests, Robert Bookard, 48, is accused of cutting the man’s pocket and taking cash in a subway at the Brooklyn Bridge station at 3:40 a.m. A plainclothes officer saw the act and arrested him, finding three razor blades.

And yet, as Lieutenant Callaghan put it, “the cutting is a trade that’s going extinct.” Why? Pick a theory. Today’s subway robber is of the snatch-an-iWhatever-and-run variety that has recently driven up transit crime rates. With victims displaying $500 iPads in plain view, or passed out with a phone in their hand, why bother with a razor and a wallet?

Maybe the cutting is just too difficult. Officer Rudolph believes the good ones practice at home with mannequins.

And maybe the old thieves just don’t have anyone to teach.

The police keep track of who among the 109 is in jail, and when they are released. Lieutenant Callaghan sounds almost pleased to notice a familiar face on the train.

“I say, ‘Oh, you’re back,’ ” he said. “ ‘Good to see you.’ ”

ugo la pietra

By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Times Published: November 6, 2011

For decades the story of technology has been dominated, in the popular mind and to a large extent in reality, by computing and the things you can do with it. Moore’s Law — in which the price of computing power falls roughly 50 percent every 18 months — has powered an ever-expanding range of applications, from faxes to Facebook.

Our mastery of the material world, on the other hand, has advanced much more slowly. The sources of energy, the way we move stuff around, are much the same as they were a generation ago.

But that may be about to change. We are, or at least we should be, on the cusp of an energy transformation, driven by the rapidly falling cost of solar power. That’s right, solar power.

If that surprises you, if you still think of solar power as some kind of hippie fantasy, blame our fossilized political system, in which fossil fuel producers have both powerful political allies and a powerful propaganda machine that denigrates alternatives.

Speaking of propaganda: Before I get to solar, let’s talk briefly about hydraulic fracturing, a k a fracking.

Fracking — injecting high-pressure fluid into rocks deep underground, inducing the release of fossil fuels — is an impressive technology. But it’s also a technology that imposes large costs on the public. We know that it produces toxic (and radioactive) wastewater that contaminates drinking water; there is reason to suspect, despite industry denials, that it also contaminates groundwater; and the heavy trucking required for fracking inflicts major damage on roads.

Economics 101 tells us that an industry imposing large costs on third parties should be required to “internalize” those costs — that is, to pay for the damage it inflicts, treating that damage as a cost of production. Fracking might still be worth doing given those costs. But no industry should be held harmless from its impacts on the environment and the nation’s infrastructure.

Yet what the industry and its defenders demand is, of course, precisely that it be let off the hook for the damage it causes. Why? Because we need that energy! For example, the industry-backed organization energyfromshale.org declares that “there are only two sides in the debate: those who want our oil and natural resources developed in a safe and responsible way; and those who don’t want our oil and natural gas resources developed at all.”

So it’s worth pointing out that special treatment for fracking makes a mockery of free-market principles. Pro-fracking politicians claim to be against subsidies, yet letting an industry impose costs without paying compensation is in effect a huge subsidy. They say they oppose having the government “pick winners,” yet they demand special treatment for this industry precisely because they claim it will be a winner.

And now for something completely different: the success story you haven’t heard about.

These days, mention solar power and you’ll probably hear cries of “Solyndra!” Republicans have tried to make the failed solar panel company both a symbol of government waste — although claims of a major scandal are nonsense — and a stick with which to beat renewable energy.

But Solyndra’s failure was actually caused by technological success: the price of solar panels is dropping fast, and Solyndra couldn’t keep up with the competition. In fact, progress in solar panels has been so dramatic and sustained that, as a blog post at Scientific American put it, “there’s now frequent talk of a ‘Moore’s law’ in solar energy,” with prices adjusted for inflation falling around 7 percent a year.

This has already led to rapid growth in solar installations, but even more change may be just around the corner. If the downward trend continues — and if anything it seems to be accelerating — we’re just a few years from the point at which electricity from solar panels becomes cheaper than electricity generated by burning coal.

And if we priced coal-fired power right, taking into account the huge health and other costs it imposes, it’s likely that we would already have passed that tipping point.

But will our political system delay the energy transformation now within reach?

Let’s face it: a large part of our political class, including essentially the entire G.O.P., is deeply invested in an energy sector dominated by fossil fuels, and actively hostile to alternatives. This political class will do everything it can to ensure subsidies for the extraction and use of fossil fuels, directly with taxpayers’ money and indirectly by letting the industry off the hook for environmental costs, while ridiculing technologies like solar.

So what you need to know is that nothing you hear from these people is true. Fracking is not a dream come true; solar is now cost-effective. Here comes the sun, if we’re willing to let it in.

Hand/Sculpture (Modular) 2011, Silver gelatin print, 24 x 20 inches

November 5 – December 22, 2011
Opening Reception: Saturday, November 5, 6-8pm

Michael Benevento

By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Times Published: November 3, 2011

Inequality is back in the news, largely thanks to Occupy Wall Street, but with an assist from the Congressional Budget Office. And you know what that means: It’s time to roll out the obfuscators!

Anyone who has tracked this issue over time knows what I mean. Whenever growing income disparities threaten to come into focus, a reliable set of defenders tries to bring back the blur. Think tanks put out reports claiming that inequality isn’t really rising, or that it doesn’t matter. Pundits try to put a more benign face on the phenomenon, claiming that it’s not really the wealthy few versus the rest, it’s the educated versus the less educated.

So what you need to know is that all of these claims are basically attempts to obscure the stark reality: We have a society in which money is increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few people, and in which that concentration of income and wealth threatens to make us a democracy in name only.

The budget office laid out some of that stark reality in a recent report, which documented a sharp decline in the share of total income going to lower- and middle-income Americans. We still like to think of ourselves as a middle-class country. But with the bottom 80 percent of households now receiving less than half of total income, that’s a vision increasingly at odds with reality.

In response, the usual suspects have rolled out some familiar arguments: the data are flawed (they aren’t); the rich are an ever-changing group (not so); and so on. The most popular argument right now seems, however, to be the claim that we may not be a middle-class society, but we’re still an upper-middle-class society, in which a broad class of highly educated workers, who have the skills to compete in the modern world, is doing very well.

It’s a nice story, and a lot less disturbing than the picture of a nation in which a much smaller group of rich people is becoming increasingly dominant. But it’s not true.

Workers with college degrees have indeed, on average, done better than workers without, and the gap has generally widened over time. But highly educated Americans have by no means been immune to income stagnation and growing economic insecurity. Wage gains for most college-educated workers have been unimpressive (and nonexistent since 2000), while even the well-educated can no longer count on getting jobs with good benefits. In particular, these days workers with a college degree but no further degrees are less likely to get workplace health coverage than workers with only a high school degree were in 1979.

So who is getting the big gains? A very small, wealthy minority.

The budget office report tells us that essentially all of the upward redistribution of income away from the bottom 80 percent has gone to the highest-income 1 percent of Americans. That is, the protesters who portray themselves as representing the interests of the 99 percent have it basically right, and the pundits solemnly assuring them that it’s really about education, not the gains of a small elite, have it completely wrong.

If anything, the protesters are setting the cutoff too low. The recent budget office report doesn’t look inside the top 1 percent, but an earlier report, which only went up to 2005, found that almost two-thirds of the rising share of the top percentile in income actually went to the top 0.1 percent — the richest thousandth of Americans, who saw their real incomes rise more than 400 percent over the period from 1979 to 2005.

Who’s in that top 0.1 percent? Are they heroic entrepreneurs creating jobs? No, for the most part, they’re corporate executives. Recent research shows that around 60 percent of the top 0.1 percent either are executives in nonfinancial companies or make their money in finance, i.e., Wall Street broadly defined. Add in lawyers and people in real estate, and we’re talking about more than 70 percent of the lucky one-thousandth.

But why does this growing concentration of income and wealth in a few hands matter? Part of the answer is that rising inequality has meant a nation in which most families don’t share fully in economic growth. Another part of the answer is that once you realize just how much richer the rich have become, the argument that higher taxes on high incomes should be part of any long-run budget deal becomes a lot more compelling.

The larger answer, however, is that extreme concentration of income is incompatible with real democracy. Can anyone seriously deny that our political system is being warped by the influence of big money, and that the warping is getting worse as the wealth of a few grows ever larger?

Some pundits are still trying to dismiss concerns about rising inequality as somehow foolish. But the truth is that the whole nature of our society is at stake.

Christopher McDougall demonstrates a lost running technique from the 1800s called the 100-Up.

By CHRISTOPHER McDOUGALL
Published: November 2, 2011

When you’re stalking barefoot runners, camouflage helps. “Some of them get kind of prancy when they notice you filming,” Peter Larson says. “They put on this notion of what they think barefoot running should be. It looks weird.” Larson, an evolutionary biologist at Saint Anselm College in New Hampshire who has been on the barefoot beat for two years now, is also a stickler about his timing. “You don’t want to catch them too early in a run, when they’re cold, or too late, when they’re tired.”

If everything comes together just right, you’ll be exactly where Larson was one Sunday morning in September: peeking out from behind a tree on Governors Island in New York Harbor, his digital video camera nearly invisible on an ankle-high tripod, as the Second Annual New York City Barefoot Run got under way about a quarter-mile up the road. Hundreds of runners — men and women, young and old, athletic and not so much so, natives from 11 different countries — came pattering down the asphalt straight toward his viewfinder.

About half of them were actually barefoot. The rest wore Vibram FiveFingers — a rubber foot glove with no heel cushion or arch support — or Spartacus-style sandals, or other superlight “minimalist” running shoes. Larson surreptitiously recorded them all, wondering how many (if any) had what he was looking for: the lost secret of perfect running.

It’s what Alberto Salazar, for a while the world’s dominant marathoner and now the coach of some of America’s top distance runners, describes in mythical-questing terms as the “one best way” — not the fastest, necessarily, but the best: an injury-proof, evolution-tested way to place one foot on the ground and pick it up before the other comes down. Left, right, repeat; that’s all running really is, a movement so natural that babies learn it the first time they rise to their feet. Yet sometime between childhood and adulthood — and between the dawn of our species and today — most of us lose the knack.

We were once the greatest endurance runners on earth. We didn’t have fangs, claws, strength or speed, but the springiness of our legs and our unrivaled ability to cool our bodies by sweating rather than panting enabled humans to chase prey until it dropped from heat exhaustion. Some speculate that collaboration on such hunts led to language, then shared technology. Running arguably made us the masters of the world.

So how did one of our greatest strengths become such a liability? “The data suggests up to 79 percent of all runners are injured every year,” says Stephen Messier, the director of the J. B. Snow Biomechanics Laboratory at Wake Forest University. “What’s more, those figures have been consistent since the 1970s.” Messier is currently 11 months into a study for the U.S. Army and estimates that 40 percent of his 200 subjects will be hurt within a year. “It’s become a serious public health crisis.”

Nothing seems able to check it: not cross-training, not stretching, not $400 custom-molded orthotics, not even softer surfaces. And those special running shoes everyone thinks he needs? In 40 years, no study has ever shown that they do anything to reduce injuries. On the contrary, the U.S. Army’s Public Health Command concluded in a report in 2010, drawing on three large-scale studies of thousands of military personnel, that using shoes tailored to individual foot shapes had “little influence on injuries.”

Two years ago, in my book, “Born to Run,” I suggested we don’t need smarter shoes; we need smarter feet. I’d gone into Mexico’s Copper Canyon to learn from the Tarahumara Indians, who tackle 100-mile races well into their geriatric years. I was a broken-down, middle-aged, ex-runner when I arrived. Nine months later, I was transformed. After getting rid of my cushioned shoes and adopting the Tarahumaras’ whisper-soft stride, I was able to join them for a 50-mile race through the canyons. I haven’t lost a day of running to injury since.

“Barefoot-style” shoes are now a $1.7 billion industry. But simply putting something different on your feet doesn’t make you a gliding Tarahumara. The “one best way” isn’t about footwear. It’s about form. Learn to run gently, and you can wear anything. Fail to do so, and no shoe — or lack of shoe — will make a difference.

That’s what Peter Larson discovered when he reviewed his footage after the New York City Barefoot Run. “It amazed me how many people in FiveFingers were still landing on their heels,” he says. They wanted to land lightly on their forefeet, or they wouldn’t be in FiveFingers, but there was a disconnect between their intentions and their actual movements. “Once we develop motor patterns, they’re very difficult to unlearn,” Larson explains. “Especially if you’re not sure what it’s supposed to feel like.”

The only way to halt the running-injury epidemic, it seems, is to find a simple, foolproof method to relearn what the Tarahumara never forgot. A one best way to the one best way.

Earlier this year, I may have found it. I was leafing through the back of an out-of-print book, a collection of runners’ biographies called “The Five Kings of Distance,” when I came across a three-page essay from 1908 titled “W. G. George’s Own Account From the 100-Up Exercise.” According to legend, this single drill turned a 16-year-old with almost no running experience into the foremost racer of his day.

I read George’s words: “By its constant practice and regular use alone, I have myself established many records on the running path and won more amateur track-championships than any other individual.” And it was safe, George said: the 100-Up is “incapable of harm when practiced discreetly.”

Could it be that simple? That day, I began experimenting on myself.

When I called Mark Cucuzzella to tell him about my find, he cut me off midsentence. “When can you get down here?” he demanded.

“Here” is Two River Treads, a “natural” shoe store sandwiched between Maria’s Taqueria and German Street Coffee & Candlery in Shepherdstown, W.Va., which, against all odds, Cucuzzella has turned into possibly the country’s top learning center for the reinvention of running.

“What if people found out running can be totally fun no matter what kind of injuries they’ve had?” Cucuzzella said when I visited him last summer. “What if they could see — ” he jerked a thumb back toward his chest — “Exhibit A?”

Cucuzzella is a physician, a professor at West Virginia University’s Department of Family Medicine and an Air Force Reserve flight surgeon. Despite the demands of family life and multiple jobs, he still managed enough early-morning miles in his early 30s to routinely run marathons at a 5:30-per-mile pace. But he constantly battled injuries; at age 34, severe degenerative arthritis led to foot surgery. If he continued to run, his surgeon warned, the arthritis and pain would return.

Cucuzzella was despondent, until he began to wonder if there was some kind of furtive, Ninja way to run, as if you were sneaking up on someone. Cucuzzella threw himself into research and came across the work of, among others, Nicholas Romanov, a sports scientist in the former Soviet Union who developed a running technique he called the Pose Method. Romanov essentially had three rules: no cushioned shoes, no pushing off from the toes and, most of all, no landing on the heel.

Once Cucuzzella got used to this new style, it felt suspiciously easy, more like playful bouncing than serious running. As a test, he entered the Marine Corps Marathon. Six months after being told he should never run again, he finished in 2:28, just four minutes off his personal best.

“It was the beginning of a new life,” Cucuzzella told me. “I couldn’t believe that after a medical education and 20 years of running, so much of what I’d been taught about the body was being turned on its head.” Two weeks before turning 40, he won the Air Force Marathon and has since completed five other marathons under 2:35. Shortly before his 45th birthday this past September, he beat men half his age to win the Air Force Marathon again. He was running more on less training than 10 years before, but “felt fantastic.”

When he tried to spread the word, however, he encountered resistance. At a Runner’s World forum I attended before the Boston Marathon in April 2010, he told the story of how he bounced back from a lifetime of injuries by learning to run barefoot and relying on his legs’ natural shock absorption. Martyn Shorten, the former director of the Nike Sports Research Lab who now conducts tests on shoes up for review in Runner’s World, followed him to the microphone. “A physician talking about biomechanics — I guess I should talk about how to perform an appendectomy,” Shorten said. He then challenged Cucuzzella’s belief that cushioned shoes do more harm than good.

No matter. Cucuzzella went home and began hosting his own conferences. Peter Larson traveled from New Hampshire for Cucuzzella’s first gathering on a snowy weekend this past January. “I was a bit curious about how many people might show up to such an event in rural West Virginia,” Larson says. “Were the panelists going to outnumber the audience?” In fact, more than 150 attendees crowded right up to the dais.

Since then, West Virginia has become a destination for a growing number of those who are serious about the grass-roots reinvention of running. Galahad Clark, a seventh-generation shoemaker who created the Vivobarefoot line, flew in from London with the British running coach Lee Saxby for a one-day meeting with Cucuzzella. International researchers like Craig Richards, from Australia, and Hiro Tanaka, chairman of Exercise Physiology at the University of Fukuoka, have also visited, as well as scientists from a dozen different American states.

“He has turned a small town in an obese state into a running-crazed bastion of health,” Larson says. “Mark’s effort in transforming Shepherdstown is a testament to what a single person can accomplish.”

Not that he has everything figured out. I was at one of Cucuzzella’s free barefoot running clinics in May when he confronted his big problem: how do you actually teach this stuff? He had about 60 of us practicing drills on a grassy playground. “Now to run,” he said, “just bend forward from the ankles.” We all looked down at our ankles.

“No, no,” Cucuzzella said. “Posture, remember? Keep your heads up.”

We lifted our heads, and most of us then forgot to lean from the ankles. At that moment, a young girl flashed past us on her way to the monkey bars. Her back was straight, her head was high and her bare feet skittered along right under her hips.

“You mean like — ” someone said, pointing after the girl.

“Right,” Cucuzzella said. “Just watch her.”

So what ruined running for the rest of us who aren’t Tarahumara or 10 years old?

Back in the ’60s, Americans “ran way more and way faster in the thinnest little shoes, and we never got hurt,” Amby Burfoot, a longtime Runner’s World editor and former Boston Marathon champion, said during a talk before the Lehigh Valley Half-Marathon I attended last year. “I never even remember talking about injuries back then,” Burfoot said. “So you’ve got to wonder what’s changed.”

Bob Anderson knows at least one thing changed, because he watched it happen. As a high-school senior in 1966, he started Distance Running News, a twice-yearly magazine whose growth was so great that Anderson dropped out of college four years later to publish it full time as Runner’s World. Around then, another fledgling operation called Blue Ribbon Sports was pioneering cushioned running shoes; it became Nike. Together, the magazine and its biggest advertiser rode the running boom — until Anderson decided to see whether the shoes really worked.

“Some consumer advocate needed to test this stuff,” Anderson told me. He hired Peter Cavanagh, of the Penn State University biomechanics lab, to stress-test new products mechanically. “We tore the shoes apart,” Anderson says. He then graded shoes on a scale from zero to five stars and listed them from worst to first.

When a few of Nike’s shoes didn’t fare so well in the 1981 reviews, the company pulled its $1 million advertising contract with Runner’s World. Nike already had started its own magazine, Running, which would publish shoe reviews and commission star writers like Ken Kesey and Hunter S. Thompson.

“Nike would never advertise with me again,” Anderson says. “That hurt us bad.” In 1985, Anderson sold Runner’s World to Rodale, which, he says, promptly abolished his grading system. Today, every shoe in Runner’s World is effectively “recommended” for one kind of runner or another. David Willey, the magazine’s current editor, says that it only tests shoes that “are worth our while.” After Nike closed its magazine, it took its advertising back to Runner’s World. (Megan Saalfeld, a Nike spokeswoman, says she was unable to find someone to comment about this episode.)

“It’s a grading system where you can only get an A,” says Anderson, who went on to become the founder and chief executive of Ujena Swimwear.

Just as the shoe reviews were changing, so were the shoes: fear, the greatest of marketing tools, entered the game. Instead of being sold as performance accessories, running shoes were rebranded as safety items, like bike helmets and smoke alarms. Consumers were told they’d get hurt, perhaps for life, if they didn’t buy the “right” shoes. It was an audacious move that flew in the face of several biological truths: humans had thrived as running animals for two million years without corrective shoes, and asphalt was no harder than the traditional hunting terrains of the African savanna.

In 1985, Benno Nigg, founder and currently co-director of the University of Calgary’s Human Performance Lab, floated the notion that impact and rear-foot motion (called pronation) were dangerous. His work helped spur an arms race of experimental technology to counter those risks with plush heels and wedged shoes. Running magazines spread the new gospel. To this day, Runner’s World tells beginners that their first workout should be opening their wallets: “Go to a specialty running store . . . you’ll leave with a comfortable pair of shoes that will have you running pain- and injury-free.”

Nigg now believes mistakes were made. “Initial results were often overinterpreted and were partly responsible for a few ‘blunders’ in sport-shoe construction,” he said in a speech to the International Society of Biomechanics in 2005. The belief in the need for cushioning and pronation control, he told me, was, in retrospect, “completely wrong thinking.” His stance was seconded in June 2010, when The British Journal of Sports Medicine reported that a study of 105 women enrolled in a 13-week half-marathon training program found that every single runner who was given motion-control shoes to control excess foot pronation was injured. “You don’t need any protection at all except for cold and, like, gravel,” Nigg now says.

Of course, the only way to know what shoes have done to runners would be to travel back to a time when no one ever wore them. So that’s what one anthropologist has effectively done. In 2009, Daniel Lieberman, chairman of Harvard’s human evolutionary biology department, located a school in Kenya where no one wore shoes. Lieberman noticed something unusual: while most runners in shoes come down hard on their heels, these barefoot Kenyans tended to land softly on the balls of their feet.

Back at the lab, Lieberman found that barefoot runners land with almost zero initial impact shock. Heel-strikers, by comparison, collide with the ground with a force equal to as much as three times their body weight. “Most people today think barefoot running is dangerous and hurts, but actually you can run barefoot on the world’s hardest surfaces without the slightest discomfort and pain.”

Lieberman, who is 47 and a six-time marathoner, was so impressed by the results of his research that he began running barefoot himself. So has Irene Davis, director of Harvard Medical School’s Spaulding National Running Center. “I didn’t run myself for 30 years because of injuries,” Davis says. “I used to prescribe orthotics. Now, honest to God, I run 20 miles a week, and I haven’t had an injury since I started going barefoot.”

Last fall, at the end of a local 10-mile trail race, I surprised myself by finishing five minutes faster than I had four years ago, when I was in much better shape. I figured the result was a fluke — until it happened again. No special prep, awful travel schedule and yet a personal best in a six-mile race.

“I don’t get it,” I told Cucuzzella this past June when we went for a run together through the Shepherd University campus in Shepherdstown. “I’m four years older. I’m pretty sure I’m heavier. I’m not doing real workouts, just whatever I feel like each day. The only difference is I’ve been 100-Upping.”

It was five months since I discovered W.S. George’s “100-Up,” and I’d been doing the exercise regularly. In George’s essay, he says he invented the 100-Up in 1874, when he was an 16-year-old chemist’s apprentice in England and could train only during his lunch hour. By Year 2 of his experiment, the overworked lab assistant was the fastest amateur miler in England. By Year 5, he held world records in everything from the half-mile to 10 miles.

So is it possible that a 19th-century teenager succeeded where 21st-century technology has failed?

“Absolutely, yes,” says Steve Magness, a sports scientist who works with top Olympic prospects at Nike’s elite “Oregon Project.” He was hired by Alberto Salazar to create, essentially, a squad of anti-Salazars. Despite his domination of the marathon in the ’80s, Salazar was plagued with knee and hamstring problems. He was also a heel-striker, which he has described as “having a tire with a nail in it.” Magness’s brief is to find ways to teach Nike runners to run barefoot-style and puncture-proof their legs.

“From what you’re telling me, it sounds promising,” Magness told me. “I’d love to see it in action.”

Mark Cucuzzella was just as eager. “All right,” he said in the middle of our run. “Let’s get a look at this.” I snapped a twig and dropped the halves on the ground about eight inches apart to form targets for my landings. The 100-Up consists of two parts. For the “Minor,” you stand with both feet on the targets and your arms cocked in running position. “Now raise one knee to the height of the hip,” George writes, “bring the foot back and down again to its original position, touching the line lightly with the ball of the foot, and repeat with the other leg.”

That’s all there is to it. But it’s not so easy to hit your marks 100 times in a row while maintaining balance and proper knee height. Once you can, it’s on to the Major: “The body must be balanced on the ball of the foot, the heels being clear of the ground and the head and body being tilted very slightly forward. . . . Now, spring from the toe, bringing the knee to the level of the hip. . . . Repeat with the other leg and continue raising and lowering the legs alternately. This action is exactly that of running.”

Cucuzzella didn’t like it as a teaching method — he loved it. “It makes so much physiological and anatomical sense,” he said. “The key to injury-free running is balance, elasticity, stability in midstance and cadence. You’ve got all four right there.”

Cucuzzella began trying it himself. As I watched, I recalled another lone inventor, a Czechoslovakian soldier who dreamed up a similar drill: he’d throw dirty clothes in the bathtub with soap and water, then jog on top. You can’t heel strike or overstride on slippery laundry. There’s only one way to run in a tub: the one best way.

At the 1952 Olympics, Emil Zatopek became the only runner ever to win gold medals in all three distance events: 5,000 meters, 10,000 meters and the marathon, the first he ever ran. Granted, “the Human Locomotive” wasn’t a pretty sight. During his final push to the finish line, his head would loll and his arms would grab at the air “as if he’d just been stabbed through the heart,” as one sportswriter put it.

But from the waist down, Zatopek was always quick, light and springy, like a kid swooping across a playground — or like this once-arthritic physician in front of me, laughing with excitement as he hopped up and down in his bare feet in a parking lot.

The author recalls growing up in California in the 1950s, and his father gardening, tending to rosebushes and dahlias.

By WALTER MOSLEY
NY Times Published: November 2, 2011

MY first memory and so, in some essential way, the beginning of my life starts with me on my knees in front of an old console television set. I was 3 years old and didn’t know where I was or even that the TV was there because my eyes were closed. There was a sense of excitement tingling in my shoulders and thrumming at the back of my head; an electricity that made me want to laugh out loud, but I didn’t laugh.

Opening my eyes the first thing I saw was the TV. It was off. There was dark blue carpeting beneath my knees and the room I was in, the living room, was bright because of daylight that came through the windows and also from the front door of the adjacent dining room. This door was open but the screen was closed.

There were sounds in the air. Cars, a far-off airplane, a chicken squawked somewhere. I knew the sound, could imagine the bird. But I didn’t yet remember who I was or where life had found me. Thinking back on this day many years ago I supposed I was like an artificial being brought to life fully equipped with memories that were dawning on me slowly, like the motes of dust dancing in the sunlight that flowed through that front door.

I stood up, still looking at the console TV. I didn’t consider turning it on. I suppose now that this scene was like a passive devotion performed by the young disciple of an inanimate god that he would worship forever.

I went to the screen door and looked out on the bright California day. The lawn, bisected by a nearly white concrete path, was impossibly green St. Augustine grass so powerful that you could almost hear the crunch of its growing.

A woman with white skin wearing a coral jumper and holding a floral printed hat against an imagined breeze was standing there, looking down on a black man. The man was on his knees as I had been. But instead of praying to the bug-eyed monster (as I knew he called the TV), he was using a hand spade on the soil around the pale violet dahlias crowding the wire fence that went across the front of the yard. This man was worshiping the earth and the woman was loving him for this devotion.

I clearly remember saying to myself, “These must be my parents.” This is not a faulty memory but an accurate sense of the world that was growing in me as I went from my knees to the front door. I was going over the lessons of experience, connecting language to animal knowledge, and exploring the world around me: a world I knew and that I was learning about at the same time.

“Hi, Mom and Dad!” I shouted, throwing open the screen door and running down the wood steps.

I was barefoot. The grass was moist and warm and spiky against my soles.

My mother nodded. My father said my name, an incantation. Neither touched me, but I had learned by then not to expect that.

There were rosebushes along the fence to my left; large orange and yellow flowers that looked delicious even though I knew you could not eat them. The chickens were across the street in Mr. Diego’s huge front yard. Dogs were always hanging around Mr. Diego’s high fence. They sat there contemplating the fowl and salivating.

“What you doin’?” I asked my father.

He said something about soil and flowers. I remembered that he had somehow invented this breed of dahlia; crossed different roots or something and came up with that color, the only one like it in the world.

I laughed and fell down on the grass, rolled around and then ran down the driveway on the east side of our small lot.

Down that path, toward the green Pontiac, I passed first a kumquat tree, a short line of small flowering plants that are less specific in my memory, and then a towering pomegranate tree. This skinny, exotic fruit sapling looked down on my father’s car. Beyond it was a lush but fraying banana tree that could grow but not produce fruit in the dry southern California climate.

This was my home: the couple so in love with each other, the chickens, the sun, trees and concrete.

The garage had once been a hangar for a small single-engine airplane when this neighborhood was less populous. Los Angeles in the 1950s was growing as fast as the front lawn.

To the left was another patch of grass and two trees: a dark apple (I never knew the variety) that also needed more water to be fruitful and a bright and bushy lemon that was always attended by dozens of yellowy honeybees.

I was afraid of the bees, though I had never been stung.

There were grasshoppers and butterflies leaping and fluttering between the dark shade of the apple and the intense sunlight where the lemon blossoms luxuriated.

And then there was the back house.

My father had transformed three-quarters of the one-time hangar into a small house. He had floored and plumbed it, wired and walled the empty space and now it was a home for someone, one day, maybe.

I went into the newly formed untenanted domicile because this too was my home. I believed that I lived everywhere that I could see or walk to.

It was shadowy and cool inside. You entered through a room that would one day be a kitchen. The living room was twice that size and the back bedrooms were small again. This layout was a kind of architectural poetry though I wouldn’t have been able to say so at the time.

I ignored the possibility of ghosts and climbed into the window of the left-most back bedroom. There I could see the strip of dirt, the small lane that bordered the very back of our property. Then there was a tall fence, shaded by an overgrown eucalyptus tree that hid whatever lay beyond.

One day, many months in the future, my father would kill a sickly kitten that had been rejected by its mother. In that barren strip the baby cat would be slaughtered and buried; I would harbor a yowling anger at my father and at the injustice of the mother cat.

But that day I just squinted at the eerie dark lane hidden from the otherwise bright day. There moths followed their zigzag paths going dangerously close to spiders’ webs and wood splinters from the foreboding back fence.

I went out the window and back through to the front door and came upon my mother standing there in her floral hat and jumper. On bright concrete, between the pomegranate-guarded Pontiac and the deep shading from the apple tree, she was waiting for me. This seemed proper, even expected.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

Questions like these meant very little to me. I was standing there, looking up at my mother who if she had a name I didn’t know it. I was looking up at the woman who rarely kissed or hugged me but who followed me back through the property colonized by bees and flowers and my father’s ingenuity.

I shrugged and hummed my ignorance.

“Come back up to the front with us,” she said.

I followed; there was nothing else to do. I wasn’t hungry or thirsty. I didn’t have to go to the toilet. Nothing hurt or worried me. Life was the sunlight cascading through kumquat and pomegranate leaves. We were headed for the front yard where my father was praying to the soil and laughing, probably. There were chickens and dogs, cars and airplanes, black people and brown people and my one white mother who followed at a certain distance.

This is my memory of home. The boundaries have become smaller as I have aged. The passions have receded and the sun shines less brightly. But none of that matters because the primitive heart that remembers is, in a way, eternal.

Walter Mosley’s 30th novel, “The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey,” was published in a paperback edition on Tuesday