Walt Disney Imagineering

A rendering of Sleeping Beauty Castle, which is to be built at the Hong Kong Disneyland theme park.
April 25, 2005
The Feng Shui Kingdom
By LAURA M. HOLSON

When building the new entrance to Hong Kong Disneyland, Walt Disney executives decided to shift the angle of the front gate by 12 degrees. They did so after consulting a feng shui specialist, who said the change would ensure prosperity for the park. Disney also put a bend in the walkway from the train station to the gate, to make sure the flow of positive energy, or chi, did not slip past the entrance and out to the China Sea.

Heeding the advice of a feng shui consultant is one of many steps Disney executives have taken at the park to reflect the local culture - and to make sure they do not repeat some mistakes of the past.

When Disney opened Disneyland Paris in a former sugar beet field outside Paris in 1992, the company was roundly criticized for being culturally insensitive to its European guests. Now Disney burns incense ritually as each building is finished in Hong Kong, and has picked a lucky day (Sept. 12) for the opening.

The financial stakes are high: international growth is a critical part of Disney's expansion efforts. In Asia, Mickey Mouse, Buzz Lightyear and Winnie-the-Pooh are hardly household names, and Disney wants to change that. Mainland China is expected to become one of the world's largest tourist destinations in the next 15 years, according to the World Tourism Organization, an international group that oversees policy issues. That trend bodes well for Disney, as Hong Kong itself is already in the top 15.

"It used to be Disney was exported on its own terms," said Robert Thompson, a professor of popular culture at Syracuse University. "But in the late 20th and early 21st century, America's cultural imperialism was tested. Now, instead of being the ugly Americans, which some foreigners used to find charming, we have to take off our shoes or belch after a meal."

Plans for Hong Kong Disneyland, Disney's 11th theme park and a replica of the original Disneyland, began in 1999 for the undeveloped Lantau Island, a 30-minute train ride from downtown Hong Kong. Built on Penny's Bay and flanked by mountains, the park is a venture with the Hong Kong government and the first of the parks that Disney wants to build in China, including one in Shanghai. Disney invested $316 million for a 43 percent equity stake in Hong Kong Disneyland; the rest is owned by the Hong Kong government, which contributed $419 million. (The park has $1.1 billion in debt.)

Some of the dazzling visual effects and nods to cultural differences at Hong Kong Disneyland may seem like so much marketing. One of the park's main ballrooms, which will surely be used for Disney's popular wedding services, measures 888 square meters, because 8 is thought to be a number of fortune, said Wing Chao, who is the master planner of architecture and design at Walt Disney Imagineering. In Chinese, the number four is considered bad luck so there are no fourth-floor buttons in the elevators at the Hollywood Hotel or other hotels in the park.

Cash registers are close to corners or along walls, where such placement is believed to increase prosperity. And in the park's upscale restaurant, Crystal Lotus, Disney installed a virtual koi pond where computer-animated fish dart away from guests who walk on a glass screen. The pond is one of five feng shui elements in the restaurant; the others are wood, earth, metal and fire, which glows on a screen behind bottles in the bar. "We could not have real fire because of the fire code," said Mr. Chao.

After the mishaps at Euro Disney and, closer to home, problems with attendance at its California Adventure park in Anaheim, it is easy to understand why the company would take such pains. "I don't know anything about fire and kitchens and where fire belongs and what doesn't," said Jay Rasulo, president of Disney's theme parks and resorts division. "But I certainly have learned that you need to respect people."

Tourists sniffed at California Adventure when it opened in 2001, saying it looked more like a shopping mall than a theme park. In recent years, Disney added, at considerable expense, the Tower of Terror thrill ride and an attraction based on the animated film "A Bug's Life."

The French government recently helped bail out Euro Disney, the parent company of Disneyland Paris, offering loan concessions and investments to save it from bankruptcy. Though its finances have been restructured, Euro Disney is still about $2 billion in debt. And many in the entertainment industry considered the opening of Disneyland Paris a study in how not to open a theme park.

Mr. Rasulo, who was president of Euro Disney from 1998 to 2000, said Disneyland Paris grew quickly as a tourist attraction in Europe, with 10 million visitors its first year. But he conceded the park was initially larger than it should have been, and was financed using too much debt.

Profits at Euro Disney in recent years have been slim to nonexistent; the park has shown a net loss for the last three fiscal years, according to Disney. By contrast, Hong Kong Disneyland is being built in two smaller phases, and is carrying half the debt of its French sibling.

Disneyland Paris got off to a bad start by not offering wine when it opened, a culinary faux pas among the French. After wine was later introduced, Disney hoped to placate parkgoers by offering more French food. "Our guests told us, 'Guess what? That's not what we want,' " Mr. Rasulo said. What they wanted, he said, was distinctly American corn bread and barbecued chicken.

Disney also misunderstood how Europeans plan vacations. Unlike Americans, who often book their trips directly with Disney, Europeans rely more on travel agents. In 1992, Disney did not adequately train travel agents, leading to fewer bookings, said Mr. Rasulo. By contrast, Disney marketing executives in Asia have been training travel agents for months, mostly in China, where the company expects one-third of the park's business to come from.

Teaching the Chinese about Disney may be critical to the park's success there. Disney merchandise and characters are little known in Asia outside of Japan, where the company has had a successful theme park for 22 years. China, in particular, has resisted the spread of Western culture. For Disney, analysts say, Hong Kong Disneyland is an opportunity to introduce new generations to princess costumes, Winnie-the-Pooh stuffed animals and Mickey Mouse T-shirts.

Last year Disney hired the Chinese pop singer Jacky Cheung to host the "Magical World of Disneyland," a television show where classic animated films like "Tarzan," "Dumbo" and "Alice in Wonderland" are introduced to the Chinese. Based on the format developed and made popular by Walt Disney, Mr. Cheung gives a brief introduction of Disney and the theme park before the movie starts.

Because of the diverse cultures in Asia, said Mr. Rasulo, Disney had to be flexible. Park employees will speak three languages: English, Cantonese and Mandarin. At a recent tasting of dishes to be served in the park's eight restaurants - everything from curry to noodles to sushi - Disney executives considered a hamburger prepared by a local chef.

"I've had curry before and I've had sushi before, but this was a hamburger that didn't taste like a hamburger that I knew," said Tom Fitzgerald, a senior creative executive at Imagineering. (He said it tasted like pork meat loaf.) "You don't want to say, 'Well, this is the way we make a hamburger in the States and so that's the way we're going make a hamburger here.' " Disney went with the proposed burger.

The park has a topiary garden where Minnie and Mickey Mouse and other characters will pose for photographs with guests, a favorite pastime with international parkgoers. One of the most anticipated attractions is the Jungle River Cruise. Unlike other parks with a similar attraction, Disney has created Cambodian ruins for guests to float past, and an unruly pack of hippos. "Instead of the guns that scare off the hippos, we actually have our hippos in Hong Kong have bad breath and then they belch," said Mr. Fitzgerald.

While talk of feng shui may seem like overkill to those with Western sensibilities, Mr. Rasulo said that as a practice it was just common sense. Mr. Rasulo said Mr. Chao came to his office recently and suggested putting a mirror on the wall behind his computer. "Now if my secretary wants to get my attention I can see her in the mirror," said Mr. Rasulo, with a laugh. "So it actually is an incredibly practical thing."

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Galleria Massimo De Carlo, Milan

Paola Pivi's "Untitled (Donkey)," on view in "Universal Experience."

April 29, 2005
ART REVIEW | 'UNIVERSAL EXPERIENCE'
Eager Globe-Trotters Shrink the Art World
By KEN JOHNSON

CHICAGO - If Voltaire were still around to tell the story of globalization, two of his principal character types would be the enlightened, transnational citizen of the world and his imbecilic twin, the tourist. The second of these, a figure much reviled by globally minded sophisticates these days, is nominally the subject of a big, ambitious exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art here, called "Universal Experience: Art, Life and the Tourist's Eye."

Occupying the whole museum and populated by numerous darlings of the international art circuit - Rirkrit Tiravanija, Doug Aitken, Maurizio Cattelan, Thomas Hirschhorn and Tacita Dean, among others - the exhibition was organized by the museum's senior curator, Francesco Bonami.

If you expect the show to focus specifically on tourists and tourism, you may find it confusing. Among the works of photography, video, sculpture and installation (painting is conspicuously absent) are many things that do not obviously pertain to tourism. Surrealistic sculptures by Urs Fischer, Jeff Koons's stainless steel bunny, a pile of candy by Felix Gonzalez-Torres and a deep purple wall sculpture by Anish Kapoor are some examples. Modern travel, however, is the thematic glue that holds the show together, and the interest is sharpened by tension between enlightened cosmopolitanism and the tourist's brainless consumerism.

The art world's prime example of enlightened cosmopolitanism is Mr. Tiravanija, the globe-traveling conceptualist with a Thai passport and a home base in New York. He is represented by the remnants of a 1994 performance: an old bicycle outfitted with a video camera, a folding table and camping equipment. The artist walked the bicycle from the Madrid Airport to the Reina Sofia Museum in the city, and his experiences with people and places along the way became part of the art that was subsequently displayed in a show at the museum.

It was an exercise in what you might call exemplary anti-tourism - a way of traveling that takes the time to experience a place slowly, sensitively and intimately in its own terms.

The opposite of Mr. Tiravanija's gentle cosmopolitanism is represented by Alexander Timtschenko's large, glossy color photographs of sites in Las Vegas that mimic other places and times, like the Eiffel Tower in Paris and the American Wild West. To similar effect, Hiroshi Sugimoto presents a life-size multipanel photograph of Leonardo's "Last Supper," rendered in hyper-realistic three dimensions in a Japanese wax museum.

The implicit message is that places like these would not exist were it not for yahoos with too much time and money who can't or don't care to differentiate between high-quality culture and junk culture, or between the real and the fake.

A darker reflection of tourism is Darren Almond's double video projection of seemingly old grainy black-and-white films of bus stops in Auschwitz, at one of which visitors wait to be taken to visit the site of the concentration camp. But the most appalling representation of tourism is a video by Dennis O'Rourke that documents ditzy American and Australian tourists visiting and photographing tribes in New Guinea that they have been led to believe still practice cannibalism. But the impoverished, puzzled and, in some cases, angry natives want only to sell photo opportunities and their wooden carvings.

The excellent catalog, which consists mainly of excerpts from the writings about travel by many different people - including Bruce Chatwin, Susan Sontag and Walter Benjamin as well as less well-known scholars and essayists - has a lot in it about tourism. But there is also much in it about other kinds of traveling and about the many different motivations and meanings that travel can have. Travel can be undertaken in a spirit of scientific inquiry, as a religious obligation, as a bohemian rejection of mainstream ways of living and for political or military purposes. It can be transformative and redemptive as well as escapist and consumerist.

Still, the exhibition's general view of travel in the age of globalization ranges from skeptical to negative. A large floor area in the museum covered by orange wall-to-wall carpeting - a minimalist installation by Rudolf Stingel - helps to clarify what is at issue. Mr. Stingel's installation is not left untouched, as it would be in one of his solo exhibitions. Overhead video monitors and molded plywood seats scattered about are meant to recreate the feeling of an airport waiting space.

This evokes the sense of dislocation or placelessness so many people experience at least some of the time in a world of advanced transportation and communication, where international forms of culture increasingly prevail over local ones. Tourists are not the only people who transiently inhabit this world; so do business travelers, pilgrims, nomads, refugees, diplomats and art world professionals who travel incessantly to keep up with the many international art fairs and biennials that have proliferated on every continent except Antarctica.

The show's most complicated meditation on modern mobility is a sprawling installation by Mr. Hirschhorn. It is a willfully crude representation of a museum of Egyptian antiquities, with clumsy wood-grained cardboard walls, ersatz artifacts and commercial appliances on display. Printed material taped to the walls includes lots of graphic pornography and news items about war in the Mideast. Mr. Hirschhorn is conflating tourism, archaeology, consumerism, war and phallic aggression in what amounts to a vituperative critique of Western imperialism. It is an overbearingly energetic work, and people who like being ideologically bludgeoned will especially enjoy it.

A large photograph of a donkey, standing placidly in a small flat-bottomed boat floating on water, is more quietly curious. It was made by Paola Pivi without photographic or digital trickery. In the context of the exhibition, this enigmatic image becomes an allegory of what you might call spiritual bemusement. Humans are animals, but they have the ability to invent means of escaping their biological limitations. Yet that is not entirely possible - not yet, anyway - and technology can lead to absurdly incongruous relations between the natural and the artificial, which can confuse and even do violence to the soul.

The paradox of tourism is that tourists, however misguidedly, are often in search of deeper connections to things local and natural - dimensions of experience that the West's Industrial Revolution has succeeded all too well in overriding. "Universal Experience" offers a rambling and distracted but valuable contribution to a continuing conversation about this conflicted pilgrimage.

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- posted by Michael P. Whelan @ 4:11 PM

 

Matthew Staver/Bloomberg News

A new house goes up in Littleton, Colo. Sales of new homes rose by 12.2 percent in March and hit a record annual pace of 1.43 million
April 27, 2005
Consumers Are Wary, but Housing Remains Hot
By EDMUND L. ANDREWS

WASHINGTON, April 26 - Consumer confidence fell in April, but the nation's housing market seems hotter than ever.

Confounding most forecasters, who had expected home sales to decline last month, the government reported on Tuesday that sales of new homes rose sharply by 12.2 percent in March and hit a record annual pace of 1.43 million.

The unexpected surge came despite slightly higher mortgage rates last month, worries about slowing growth and an escalating debate about a "housing bubble" in at least some regions that many specialists argue might be on the verge of bursting.

Analysts cautioned that the estimate of home sales might be revised down slightly as new data becomes available, and they noted that consumer confidence had been shaken since March by higher gasoline prices, sluggish employment growth and this month's swoon in the stock markets.

But despite scattered signs pointing to slower growth, the strong pace of home-buying is expected to reinforce the Federal Reserve's intention to keep raising interest rates until they have reached a level that no longer serves as a stimulus for growth. The central bank is expected to raise short-term rates by another quarter point next Tuesday, to 3 percent, which would be the eighth rate increase since last June.

The Conference Board reported on Tuesday that its index of consumer confidence dropped to 97.7 in April, from 103 in March, and expectations about the next six months dropped to their lowest level in nearly two years.

The decline, steeper than forecasters had predicted, comes on the heels of signs of sluggish retail sales.

"Looking ahead, consumers do not anticipate an improvement in economic growth nor in their incomes," reported Lynn Franco, director of the Conference Board's Consumer Research Center. And many people expect it to be harder to find a job over the summer months, he said.

But Fed officials have paid relatively little heed to recent data suggesting an economic slowdown, suggesting that they are more concerned about the danger of rising inflation.

Surveys of consumer confidence provide an erratic guide at best to consumer spending, because the surveys often reflect the bad news that people have already heard rather than what they actually plan to do in the months ahead.

By contrast, analysts said the startling rise in new-home sales suggested that the real estate market might continue its expansion despite price increases of 20 percent and more over the last year in many parts of California, Florida and along the East Coast.

"It still appears that it doesn't take much to generate faster home sales," said Peter E. Kretzmer, a senior economist at Bank of America. Indeed, Mr. Kretzmer predicted that the housing market might actually gain strength because long-term interest rates have edged down a bit since March.

The relentless rise of the housing market is a growing puzzle for central bankers. The Fed fueled a housing boom after 2001 by slashing interest rates to their lowest levels since the 1950's, which caused prices to soar and allowed millions of people to cash out some of the new equity in their homes and spend it on everything from kitchens to cars.

But even though the Fed has been raising short-term rates steadily since last June, the long-term interest rates that determine mortgage rates are still about as low today as they were one year ago.

Alan Greenspan, the Fed's chairman, told House lawmakers in February that the continued low level of long-term interest rates was a "conundrum" that he could not fully explain. Several economists have suggested that huge inflows of foreign savings into the government bond and mortgage markets have also played a significant role in keeping interest rates low.

And while Fed officials have argued that there is little danger of a national housing bubble, they have acknowledged concerns that low interest rates may have encouraged speculative buying by people who have unrealistic expectations about future price increases.

"Low interest rates, in turn, have been a major force driving the phenomenal run-up in residential real estate prices over the past few years," Donald L. Kohn, a Fed governor, said in a speech last week. Though he discounted worries about a crash in real estate prices, Mr. Kohn said that prices had climbed high enough to "raise questions" about an increase in speculative buying and overvaluations.

Analysts said part of last month's rush to buy homes probably reflected a race by people to complete deals before mortgage rates start to climb higher. But a growing number of Wall Street economists are convinced that a housing bubble is under way, at least in many parts of the country.

Housing starts declined precipitously last month, which may have reflected an expectation among builders that higher interest rates would stifle demand later in the year. But sales of existing homes climbed 1 percent in March and have climbed 4.9 percent over the last year, according to the National Association of Realtors.

"We think there is a bubble, and we think the risks are higher that it will burst," said Sheryl King, a senior economist at Merrill Lynch. "Even if you adjust for population growth, you're seeing numbers that are bigger than any we have seen at this point in any previous economic cycle."

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- posted by Michael P. Whelan @ 3:53 PM

 

Robert Spencer for The New York Times

Mr. Mailer said his choice of the University of Texas drew on attachments from his wartime experiences

April 25, 2005
Mailer's Miscellany
By DOUGLAS BRINKLEY

For more than five decades, Norman Mailer has been analyzing, prodding and assaulting American culture, not only in his many books, articles and screenplays but also in about 25,000 letters, all saved as carbon copies and on computer disks. And beginning in Mr. Mailer's earliest years as a writer, his mother, Fannie, relentlessly squirreled away his notebooks, family photographs, canceled checks, sales receipts and even his dogs' identification tags.

"She was formidable when it came to compiling scrapbooks," Mr. Mailer's authorized biographer, Dr. Robert Lucid, said in a phone interview. "Her view was anything that emanated from Norman had value."

Always trust a mother's instincts: on Thursday, Mr. Mailer will be in Austin, Tex., to announce the sale of his archives to the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas for $2.5 million. Stored in nearly 500 boxes weighing more than 20,000 pounds, the trove includes all manner of Mailerabilia dating back to his childhood and especially his early years at Harvard (class of '43), where he majored in aeronautical engineering and wrote an unpublished novel, "No Percentage."

When asked by e-mail how it felt to crate up his life, Mr. Mailer, now 82 and living in Provincetown, Mass., said: "I have nine children. It does remind one a bit of sending them off to college."

Glenn Horowitz, a New York bookseller who brokered the sale, said: "The time has come to acknowledge Norman's profound accomplishment. His papers need to be used by scholars. With the natural aging process the handoff was inevitable."

Mr. Mailer cited several reasons for choosing the University of Texas, including a strong bond he forged with his fellow soldiers, many of them from Texas, in the South Pacific during World War II.

"I went overseas from a Ft. Bragg artillery training unit to Leyte, where I was assigned to the 112th Cavalry," Mr. Mailer said in his e-mail. "They had been stripped of their horses, becoming, in effect, infantry. In that outfit, I learned a good bit about Texas and Texans, so that may have been a factor in choosing the University of Texas.

"However, despite a few sentimental and cultural attachments to the state, the largest part of my decision grew out of the fact that the Ransom Center at the University of Texas has one of the finest, if not the finest, collections of American literary archives in the world."

The center, founded in 1957, recently acquired the papers of several prominent writers, including James Jones, Don DeLillo, Isaac Bashevis Singer and Leon Uris. And in 2003 the university acquired the Woodward-Bernstein Watergate papers for $5 million.

"Our goals are clear," said Thomas F. Staley, director of the Ransom Center. "As we approach our 50th anniversary, we continue to keep acquiring the major writers of the 20th century like Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams in playwriting, and now Norman Mailer in everything."

Back in 1968, Mr. Mailer's mother, who died in 1985, aided by Dr. Lucid, then teaching at the University of Pennsylvania, rented space in a Midtown Manhattan high-rise to store her son's ballooning archives.

"It was pretty stark," Dr. Lucid said. "The facility was just a light bulb with a cage around it. Norman was writing like mad and it was a race just to keep up with him."

Tucked away in the cartons are more than 100 combat letters Mr. Mailer wrote to his first wife, Beatrice Silverman, which formed the backbone of his first published novel, "The Naked and the Dead."

Then there is intellectual jousting with Robert Lowell on Vietnam, Marshall McLuhan on the media, Joan Didion on literature and James Baldwin on civil rights.

But Mr. Mailer was also fond of engaging the public, battling with harsh critics and slavish admirers alike. "Norman treated fans like V.I.P.'s, challenging their assumptions or embracing their original ideas," Dr. Lucid said. "He mixed it up equally with everybody."

By the time Mr. Mailer wrote "The Executioner's Song" (1979), generating 23 boxes worth of research materials about the convicted killer Gary Gilmore, he had outgrown his Manhattan storage space. In the early 1990's the trunks were shipped to West Pittston, Pa., where Dr. Michael Lennon, an English professor at Wilkes University in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., began cataloging them.

"He and Dr. Robert Lucid convinced me of the need for an archive," Mr. Mailer said. "If it weren't for Mike Lennon and Bob Lucid, my papers would be moldering in cartons on a wet cellar floor."

Dr. Lennon, a friend and executor of Mr. Mailer's estate, called Mr. Mailer a "string-saver." According to Dr. Lennon, the archive is brimming with literary oddities: a dozen finished screenplays, including one about the Civil War general Dan Sickles; French aviation scrapbooks; mail Mr. Mailer received during his stay at the Bellevue Hospital Center, where he had been committed for stabbing his second wife; observations on New York graffiti art; and copies of C.I.A. intelligence reports he used in researching his 1991 novel "Harlot's Ghost."

The archive also includes Mr. Mailer's notes on the presidential campaigns of Henry Wallace, John F. Kennedy and George McGovern, among other candidates, and there are cartons of documents related to his run for mayor of New York in 1969. Mr. Mailer also kept thick files on icons like Muhammad Ali, Lee Harvey Oswald and Marilyn Monroe.

"Scholars writing on recent America will need to make a pilgrimage to Austin," Mr. Horowitz, the bookseller, said. "You name the person - Neil Armstrong or Robert Kennedy or Pablo Picasso - and Mailer wrote about them."

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- posted by Michael P. Whelan @ 3:29 PM

 

Jim Wilson/The New York Times

Liberace modeled his outfits on styles associated with European royalty

April 25, 2005
CONNECTIONS
Shall I Compare Thee to the King's Library?
By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN

LAS VEGAS - It might seem unfair to King George III, but recently, as I surveyed Liberace's collection of vintage automobiles, fur coats, feathered capes and antique pianos in the Liberace Museum here, I thought of the King's Library in the British Museum. In that great, neo-Classical hall - the oldest room in the world's first national museum - sea shells, astrolabes, ancient coins and chronicles of exploration fill shelves built nearly two centuries ago to house the king's 65,259 books.

Why compare such a magisterial accomplishment, which is still reflected in the hushed grandeur of these recently restored rooms, with a collection that is mostly kitsch, assembled by a gaudy pianist for the sake of fans and tax deductions and housed in a shopping mall in 1979? What do 18th-century collectors like the king, who spent about a fifth of his private income on his library, have to do with the highest-paid pianist of the 20th century, who thrilled his fans by outfitting a Volkswagen Beetle with a custom Rolls-Royce hood to carry his rhinestone-studded capes off stage?

In part, I confess, the comparison is a provocation. But it is just slightly more extreme than comparisons that have become commonplace in recent museum theory. The argument goes something like this: the "traditional museum" has extraordinary authority and prestige. But why should it? Its stature has been achieved primarily through the expenditure of money and the exercise of power. And such dominance must now end.

In one recent anthology, for example, "Reinventing the Museum," the editor, Gail Anderson, presents a chart showing a "paradigm shift" between the "traditional museum" and the "reinvented museum." The traditional is elitist; the reinvented, equitable. The traditional is ethnocentric; the reinvented, multicultural. In moving from one model to the other, "paternal" governance is replaced by "mutual respect," a "voice of authority" is replaced by "multiple viewpoints," and a "collection driven" museum is replaced by an "audience focused" one.

The British Museum may even be the archetypal "traditional museum," opening in 1759 "for the improvement, knowledge and information of all persons." Strangely enough, the Liberace Museum actually follows that model. It even adopts the traditional museum's manners, paying homage to its patron and subject, presenting the Wisconsin-born virtuoso, Wladziu Valentino Liberace (1919-1987), as "the epitome of the American dream." The capes and cars are displayed with more care than the antique pianos, but the aura of traditional reverence is intact.

Critics of the traditional museum, though, would see this emulation as a challenge to traditional claims. It is an ironic imitation: the Liberace Museum finally rejects the elitist "voice of authority" and is "audience focused." In that sense, it is "reinvented."

Its challenge may even be partly justified. After all, it is not as if the traditional museum is so sacred and otherworldly that it is untouched by vulgar concerns. Collections confer power and prestige. The British Museum grew out of private collections that reflect glory on the collectors. The king's book collection, acquired by the museum in 1823, shed its splendor even on royalty.

In fact, the king's books may have been as important to the royal reputation as Liberace's 1972 Bradley GT painted with flecks of genuine gold was to his. Liberace even nurtured a kind of cartoon extravagance echoing the indulgences of royalty. "Why don't I step out and get into something more spectacular?" he used to say as the crowds roared. Surely George III was not less aware of the benefits of public display.

Both also invoke past authorities to affirm their accomplishments. The King's Library rooms, which opened in 1828 in the new home being built for the British Museum, were designed by Sir Robert Smirke to pay resplendent homage to Greek mythology and aesthetic ideals. They invoked the honored past to affirm the collection's power in the present.

Liberace did the same. His kitschy outfits were based on styles associated with European royalty - more 18th-century French, perhaps, than 18th-century English. And he, too, had his pantheon: his trademark candelabrum was copied from Hollywood's hokey 1945 biography of Chopin, "A Song to Remember."

Moreover, neither the British nor the Liberace Museum is free from self-celebration. The Liberace Museum, one of the most popular tourist spots in Las Vegas, is a self-built monument to a pianist who was at once a talented musician and a tasteless sentimentalist. Liberace knew he was vulgar - that became his selling point - laughing, as he famously put it, all the way to the bank. His museum is a tribute to luxurious populism - Rolls-Royce hoods fitted atop Volkswagens.

As for the British Museum, it too had promotional presuppositions. It staked nationalist claims, the museum's very existence testifying to the wealth and breadth of the British Empire. There was an explicit set of ideas governing its displays and reflected in the king's collection as well. Though the books were relocated to a new home in the British Library in 1998, as if in recompense, the King's Library rooms now host a permanent exhibition about those ideas: the 18th-century English Enlightenment.

But now we are brought up short. Regardless of how tempting it might be to spin out additional parallels that show the traditional museum to be as vulgar as Liberace's and as worthy of being displaced from its superior position as the paradigm proclaimers suggests, the comparison falls apart. And this is something that polemics against the traditional museum have yet to address fully.

For the ideas of the Enlightenment were not just another set of beliefs that a small group of wealthy people decided to champion. These concepts gave birth to the very idea of the museum. The king's collection was not just a set of volumes collected for amusement or prestige, but rather an attempt to assemble a resource of universal reach, to survey the scope of human knowledge. Samuel Johnson advised the king on his acquisitions. John Adams, one of the king's colonial American nemeses, thought the collection was assembled "with perfect taste and judgment."

And now its founding ideas are put on display. The Enlightenment exhibition shows how, in the 18th century, reason and exploration became founding principles of the new museum. Excavation and experimentation became the guiding methods; collections of coins and rocks and potsherds and fossils and texts were attempts to make sense of the world.

The exhibition points out - with few hints of defensiveness - how these ambitions were themselves colored by ideas of the time. But what it also implies is that the Enlightenment - the reasoned attempt to understand the world in all its multivariate complexity - defined the project of the museum itself.

Over time, of course, interpretations were transformed. Collections were reclassified or disbanded. But the fundamental motivation remained. This was not simply to showcase wealth, broadcast power or glorify the patron. It was to discover the foundational principles underlying nature and human complexity: to examine differences, explore multiple perspectives and communicate to a public. Multicultural. Varied. Communicative. Sounds a lot like the principles of the "reinvented museum."

But contemporary "reinventions" often make the museum more narrow and restricted. And as the King's Library shows, the traditional museum hardly needs reinvention. Within it, even Liberace can find a place.


Connections, a critic's perspective on arts and ideas, appears every other Monday.

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- posted by Michael P. Whelan @ 3:19 PM

 

Alan Chin for The New York Times

The attacks in Iraq today sent a bloody reminder to the new government of the array of challenges it must tackle.

April 29, 2005
Rebels Respond to New Iraqi Coalition With Wave of Attacks
By RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr.
and ROBERT F. WORTH

BAGHDAD, Iraq, April 29 - Insurgents executed a devastating series of coordinated attacks on Iraqi forces today, just a day after the new Iraqi government was announced, detonating 10 cars bombs across greater Baghdad that killed at least 30 people, mostly members of the Iraqi security forces, and wounded 99 others.

The attacks, a direct challenge to Iraq's new Shiite-dominated government, were aimed at Iraqi police officers and national guardsmen at their bases or traveling in convoys in northern and southern Baghdad and in Madaen, 15 miles southeast of the capital. They were followed by a car-bomb attack in Diyarah, in the restive western province of Anbar, that killed two American soldiers, and another near Taji, just north of Baghdad, where one American soldier was killed and two others were wounded.

The coordinated morning strikes came after a momentous and tumultuous day for the incoming Iraqi government.

After three months of delays that American officials have said gave new strength to the insurgency, the dominant Shiite alliance won approval for a new cabinet on Thursday - but not before angering Sunni political leaders who charged that they had been shortchanged. Sunni Arabs, who dominated Iraq's Baathist government under Saddam Hussein, largely boycotted the January elections. They received 6 of the 32 cabinet appointments approved by the new National Assembly.

The Shiites also pledged a large-scale house cleaning of former Baathists from the government, a move sure to drive an even deeper wedge between the Shiites and the Sunnis, who make up most insurgent activity.

In the streets, insurgents used an increasingly common tactic today: multiple bombings designed to kill not only the victims of the initial blast but also security forces and bystanders who rushed to the aid of the wounded.

The attacks began just after 8 a.m. today, the weekly holy day for most Iraqis, with four car bombs in the Ahdamiya neighborhood, a heavily Sunni district in northern Baghdad that is home to many former Baathists and insurgent sympathizers. The attacks there killed 7 Iraqi national guardsmen, 2 policemen and 4 civilians and wounded 50 others, an Interior Ministry official said.

The first Adhamiya bomb went off next to a popular restaurant as an Iraqi convoy drove by, the police said. The blast propelled the crumpled remains of the bomber's vehicle more than 100 feet, where police at the scene pointed to what they said were body parts of the suicide bomber lodged in the charred wreckage, including bony remnants of an arm. Several pools of blood surrounded an aqua blue minivan in front of the destroyed restaurant. A child's stuffed animal, blackened from the blast, and two brands of women's sandals were strewn about the bloody debris.

"It was terrible," said Muhammad Kadham, a 27-year-old worker, who had rushed to the scene. "Human body parts were everywhere. Ambulances have been busy carrying away the injured" amid the shouting of anxious police officers and guardsmen who tried to keep people away, he said. "It was insane."

A few hours later, a car bomb aimed at a passing convoy of Iraqi National Guard troops detonated in the Ghadeer district of southern Baghdad, and 15 minutes later a second car bomb exploded in the same spot, killing a civilian and wounding four troops and four civilians, an Interior Ministry official said.

In Madaen, a flashpoint town on the Tigris River that has seen insurgent activity and intense sectarian violence between Sunnis and Shiites, three car bombers struck in a coordinated attack that left 3 Iraqi police commandos, 4 Iraqi soldiers and 2 civilians dead and 38 others wounded, the Interior Ministry official said.

The violence, which the American military said was clearly aimed at discrediting the new Iraqi government, showed that even after a lull in attacks following the successful Jan. 30 elections, the insurgents continue to possess the resources and organizational structure to mount a disciplined strike across the capital.

"Terrorists have still proven they can execute or surge their capability to conduct limited attacks," a statement issued by the United States military here said.

The network of Abu Musab al Zarqawi, Iraq's most wanted man, took responsibility in an Internet statement for several of the Baghdad suicide bombings as well as for attacks elsewhere in Iraq. Altogether, the group said, it launched a dozen attacks today, dedicating them to the memory of Omar Hadeed, an insurgent leader killed fighting American forces in Falluja in November.

The group also made public an unusual 18-minute audiotape, said to be of Mr. Zarqawi, in which the speaker offered reassurances to resistance fighters, warned against efforts to negotiate a treaty and cited Pentagon data on shortfalls in American military recruiting.

The commander of United States troops in Baghdad, Maj. Gen. William G. Webster Jr. of the Third Infantry Division, described today's attacks as "another desperate attempt to try to derail the emerging democratic government."

"Today was just another spike that comes periodically," General Webster said in an interview on CNN, adding that his "message back to Zarqawi is that he's not going to win."

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- posted by Michael P. Whelan @ 2:53 PM

 

Christie's

Picasso's "Boulevard de Clichy," to be auctioned next week

April 29, 2005
Rock, Paper, Payoff: Child's Play Wins Auction House an Art Sale
By CAROL VOGEL

It may have been the most expensive game of rock, paper, scissors ever played.

Takashi Hashiyama, president of Maspro Denkoh Corporation, an electronics company based outside of Nagoya, Japan, could not decide whether Christie's or Sotheby's should sell the company's art collection, which is worth more than $20 million, at next week's auctions in New York.

He did not split the collection - which includes an important C?zanne landscape, an early Picasso street scene and a rare van Gogh view from the artist's Paris apartment - between the two houses, as sometimes happens. Nor did he decide to abandon the auction process and sell the paintings through a private dealer.

Instead, he resorted to an ancient method of decision-making that has been time-tested on playgrounds around the world: rock breaks scissors, scissors cuts paper, paper smothers rock.

In Japan, resorting to such games of chance is not unusual. "I sometimes use such methods when I cannot make a decision," Mr. Hashiyama said in a telephone interview. "As both companies were equally good and I just could not choose one, I asked them to please decide between themselves and suggested to use such methods as rock, paper, scissors."

Officials from the Tokyo offices of the two auction houses were informed of Mr. Hashiyama's request on a Thursday afternoon in late January.

They were told they had until a meeting on Monday to choose a weapon. The right choice could mean several million dollars in profits from the fees the auction house charges buyers (usually 20 percent for the first $200,000 of the final price and 12 percent above that).

"The client was very serious about this," said Jonathan Rendell, a deputy chairman of Christie's in America who was involved with the transaction. "So we were very serious about it, too."

Kanae Ishibashi, the president of Christie's in Japan, declined to discuss her preparations for the meeting. But her colleagues in New York said she spent the weekend researching the psychology of the game online and talking to friends, including Nicholas Maclean, the international director of Christie's Impressionist and modern art department.

Mr. Maclean's 11-year-old twins, Flora and Alice, turned out to be the experts Ms. Ishibashi was looking for. They play the game at school, Alice said, "practically every day."

"Everybody knows you always start with scissors," she added. "Rock is way too obvious, and scissors beats paper." Flora piped in. "Since they were beginners, scissors was definitely the safest," she said, adding that if the other side were also to choose scissors and another round was required, the correct play would be to stick to scissors - because, as Alice explained, "Everybody expects you to choose rock."

Sotheby's took a different tack. "There was some discussion," said Blake Koh, an expert in Impressionist and modern art at Sotheby's in Los Angeles who was involved in the negotiations with Maspro. "But this is a game of chance, so we didn't really give it that much thought. We had no strategy in mind."

As Ms. Ishibashi wrote in an e-mail message to a colleague in New York, to prepare herself for the meeting she prayed, sprinkled salt - a traditional Japanese ritual for good luck - and carried lucky charm beads.

Two experts from each of the rival auction houses arrived at Maspro's Tokyo offices, where they were shown to a conference room with a very long table and asked to sit facing one another, Mr. Rendell said. Each side's experts had an accountant from Maspro sitting with them.

Instead of the usual method of playing the game with the hands, the teams were given a form explaining the rules. They were then asked to write one word in Japanese - rock, paper or scissors - on the paper.

After each house had entered its decision, a Maspro manager looked at the choices. Christie's was the winner: scissors beat paper.

"We were told immediately and then asked to go downstairs to another room and wait, while the forms went off to headquarters to be approved," Mr. Rendell said. He described the atmosphere in the room as "difficult," saying both sides were forced to "make small talk."

Christie's will sell most of the major paintings in its evening sale of Impressionist and modern art on Wednesday. It hopes the star of the group, C?zanne's "Large Trees Under the Jas de Bouffan" (1885-1887), will sell for more than $12 million.

Auction houses give each sale a code name to identify it. Christie's is sticking with "Scissors."


Makiko Inoue contributed reporting for this article from Tokyo.

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- posted by Michael P. Whelan @ 2:50 PM

 

J. Emilio Flores for The New York Times

At least one motorist, each way, was willing to pay the toll to drive the express lanes of a
California freeway

April 28, 2005
Paying on the Highway to Get Out of First Gear
By TIMOTHY EGAN

RIVERSIDE, Calif. - It is a California still life. In this land of mobile ambition and instant communities, life is on hold in the parking lot that is the Riverside Freeway, 10 miles or more going nowhere at all hours of the day on one of the most congested auto corridors in the world.

But like a mirage in the exurban desert, a narrow river of traffic moves swiftly down the middle of this highway. The fast lanes, the 91 Express, are sometimes called Lexus lanes, first class on asphalt. They can turn a two-hour commute to work into a 30-minute zip. For a solo driver, on-time arrival comes with a price: nearly $11 per round trip, a toll collected through electronic signals.

The freeway in places is no longer free. From the backed-up pools of frustration in Chicago's adjacent counties, to the farthest Virginia fringes of the commute to Washington, to Texas, where plans are under way to build a 4,000-mile network of toll roads, the United States has outgrown its highway system.

But state and federal governments, beset by deficits, say they have barely enough money to service the existing system, let alone build new roads. As a result, nearly two dozen states have passed legislation allowing their transportation systems to operate pay-as-you-go roads, and in many cases, letting the private sector build and run these roads.

Social engineering is merging with traffic engineering, creating new technologies that charge people a variable toll based on how many cars are on the road - known as congestion pricing - or reduce toll rates for high occupancy to encourage car-pooling. The White House wants to allow states to charge user fees for virtually any stretch of an interstate.

It is shaping up as one of the biggest philosophical changes in transportation policy since the toll-free interstate highway system was created under President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1956. It mirrors changes taking place overseas as well. London began charging tolls two years ago to enter the center of the city during weekday business hours.

"It's a big and important shift, and we in the Bush administration think its time has come," said Mary E. Peters, the federal highway administrator, in an interview. The administration is trying to make it easier for states to convert car pool lanes to toll lanes, and to allow private investors to build and operate highways - and charge for their use.

In just five years, the number of regular highway bottlenecks has increased by 40 percent, with 233 daily choke points across the map, according to several auto and trucking organizations. The average commuter now loses 46 hours a year sitting idle in a car. And the number of miles driven has gone up more than 80 percent over the last two decades while the number of new highway lanes has increased by just 4 percent.

So Virginia is negotiating with a private company to build and operate 14 miles of toll lanes in one of the most congested parts of the Capital Beltway. Chicago just leased its 7.8-mile skyway toll bridge to a private operator for $1.8 billion.

And the vast Trans-Texas Corridor project, which would be the largest private highway system in the country, would allow corporations to charge tolls for 50 years as a way to pay for high-speed lanes in the state.

In a sense, the trend is a throwback to when toll roads connected many major cities. Those turnpikes still charge for driving on them, and belong to the Interstate System, but they receive no federal money. As the Interstate System was built - more than 46,000 miles of interconnecting highways - it was financed with gas taxes and came with prohibitions against charging tolls.

Now the era of the big new public highway project is over, federal authorities say. But states are still crying out for new roads - or at least ways to make the old ones work - without any signs that gas tax revenue can meet their needs.

"Californians can't get from place to place on little fairy wings," said Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger in announcing a plan in January that could allow private investors to build toll roads. "We are a car-centered state. We need roads."

California adds nearly 500,000 vehicles a year to its roads, state officials say. Commuters in the Los Angeles area spend about 93 hours a year stuck in traffic - the worst of any region in the country, according to tallies kept by the Texas Transportation Institute.

Here in the far eastern edge of the Los Angeles metropolitan area, the population has tripled in 25 years, and the region is growing by 12,000 people a month. The commute, from the cheaper homes of Riverside County to the jobs of Orange and Los Angeles Counties, is known as the Santa Ana Crawl, and about 300,000 cars make it every day on the Riverside Freeway.

Charging tolls on the road's express lanes has been a big hit in this laboratory for congestion pricing. On the 91 Express, the prices vary from hour to hour in a system where traffic is constantly monitored and costs are adjusted accordingly. The car pool lanes, which are still free, are enforced by state patrol cars. But critics say it sets up a class system for motorists. Or that it amounts to a double charge, since state and federal gas taxes were levied to pay for road construction in the first place.

"We already paid for these roads," said Angela Washington, a teacher who takes the torturous commute from this sprawling bedroom community to a job in Orange County, and uses the toll lanes on occasion. "I guess the idea is you buy your way out of congestion, but you do pay."

But people say they like the fact that there are no toll booths, and they can virtually guarantee being on time - for a child's soccer match, job appointment or doctor's visit. Average peak hour speeds on the 91 Express lanes were 60 to 65 miles an hour last year, versus 15 to 20 m.p.h. on the free lanes, according to federal officials.

"It's like everything else: you can fly coach, or you can fly first class," said Caleb Dillon, an X-ray technician in Riverside whose commute is an hour each way. "I'm not a rich guy, but I like having the option of saving time when I really need it."

The tolls have also succeeded in doing what no amount of cajoling and public service announcements could do: get people to car-pool. The 91 now has the highest occupancy per vehicle of any major road in California, state officials said. The reason is that toll lanes here are still free for people who car-pool, offering an incentive to travel together - a savings in tolls of more than $50 a week.

The new tolls rely on radio technology to debit an account instantly, and they are priced to ensure maximum flow of traffic and pay for the road but still make it worthwhile for a driver to leave the free road.

"It's a big cultural shift for people all of a sudden to get used to paying for roads that were free," said Robert Poole, of the libertarian Reason Foundation. But, he said, "people are so fed up with congestion" that they are open to change. For 17 years, Mr. Poole has been the chief theorist for private solutions to gridlock. His ideas are now embraced by officials from Sacramento to Washington.

Texas has taken the most ambitious step, under Gov. Rick Perry. The Trans-Texas Corridor, pegged to cost up to $185 billion, would be financed by private investors, who expect to be repaid through tolls.

A consortium, the Spanish firm Cintra, has already been chosen to build the initial segment, from Dallas to San Antonio. The corridor would be nearly a quarter-mile wide, for rail, truck and auto traffic along with oil, gas, electric and water lines, to be built over the next 50 years. But an unusual alliance of opponents - ranging from the conservative Texas Farm Bureau to the Sierra Club - is fighting the plan, saying it will slice up farms and lead to further deterioration of declining rural towns.

The Bush administration has endorsed the Texas plan, saying it represents the future for highways.

"This is an opportunity to bring in the private sector," said Ms. Peters. "It's all about having options."

But there are some cautionary stories, based on California's experience. The 91 Express was initially run by a private consortium, which agreed to operate it with a provision that the state could not add other competing lanes of traffic. This brought a lot of anger, worsened traffic and led to a regional government buyout of the lanes, which then threw out the clause about competing lanes. The buyout cost $207 million.

Another toll road in this region, the 73 in Orange County, is facing a potential default on its bonds because it is not meeting traffic or revenue projections. Commuters say they shun it because it does not save much time compared with nearby free roads.

Some highway user groups are concerned that the toll roads will be used simply as a way to raise taxes, without any guarantee that the money will go into roads. These groups and their allies in Congress tried, unsuccessfully, to have a provision inserted into the House version of the transportation bill now moving through Congress that would allow charging for only new lanes - not converting free lanes into pay lanes.

Minnesota will do just that next month on Interstate 394, converting car pool lanes into paid express lanes on a road that carries commuters to and from the suburbs west of Minneapolis. The fee will vary according to traffic and car pools will still be free.

State officials are promoting the system as the wave of the future - an on-time auto commute, for a price.

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- posted by Michael P. Whelan @ 2:44 PM

 

Illustsration by Enlightenment @ Pocko People

From left, Marc Jacobs, Nicolas Ghesquiere of Balenciaga, Phoebe Philo of Chlo?, Stefano Pilati of Yves Saint Laurent, Olivier Theyskens of Rochas and Alber Elbaz of Lanvin

April 28, 2005
The Paris 6
By CATHY HORYN

LATE last February, over lunch in a Paris restaurant, Stefano Pilati, the new designer at Yves Saint Laurent, offered a surprising motive for putting modern-thinking women in tulip skirts and high-necked polka-dot blouses, things that had struck critics as repressively feminine. "My aim was to say, 'We're a fashion elite here,' " Mr. Pilati said. And he is determined to lead. "We should. We're supposed to."

You don't have to be a fan of the reality show "Project Runway" to appreciate that fashion has become more and more populist. This is the age, after all, of the adolescent designer, the celebrity designer, the hip-hop designer, and the claimants have been as varied as Sean Combs and Esteban Cortazar, who was 18 when he held his first show.

And though fashion, like politics, is still an insider's game, with its own addicts and agenda-setting editors, nothing, it seems, can compete with the authentic judgment of bloggers and Web viewers. Ask yourself: How elitist can fashion be when the 20 most popular fall 2005 collections on Style.com received a total of 22 million hits in 12 days?

Nevertheless, by the end of the fall shows in March, Mr. Pilati's assertion had been borne out. On the strength of an exceptional series of Paris collections, a new elite had emerged, and with it a sense that every choice these designers made, every proportion and fabric chosen or rejected, represented a superior judgment. They were acting like designers, not stylists or vintage-shop pickers. Retailers, starved for direction, saw the shows as a breakthrough. In New York, despite an influx of new talent, only Marc Jacobs had the power to influence the industry, whether an editor at Cond? Nast or the owner of an illicit handbag palace on Canal Street. Milan had Miuccia Prada. In Paris there were six.

Insiders may debate who belongs in this elite class, but they don't dispute the authority of Mr. Pilati, Olivier Theyskens at Rochas, Nicolas Ghesquiere at Balenciaga, Alber Elbaz at Lanvin, Phoebe Philo at Chlo? and Mr. Jacobs, who designs his own line and another for Louis Vuitton.

Even fashion industry analysts, who tend to be skeptical of the pronouncements of editors, acknowledge the influence of these designers, whose average age is 35. David Wolfe, the creative director of Doneger Group, which forecasts trends for stores like Nordstrom and Wal-Mart, compares it to that of the Antwerp Six, a group that included Dries van Noten and Martin Margiela, in the early 90's. "They feel the pulse of their times the same way the Belgians did," he said. "And they have the same problem. Everybody feeds off them, except now there's an expectation that your company has to be as big as General Motors. Or Tom Ford."

Is it the air, the Gallic water, les girls? What unites these six designers, only one of whom can claim French birth, and why now? The answer, as simple as it sounds, is fashion.

For several years now, the business has followed a different set of imperatives: fashion as lifestyle, fashion as art, fashion as a spree of casual Fridays. Twenty or 30 years ago, when the Japanese avant-garde designers arrived in Paris, and before that, when Yves Saint Laurent and Kenzo were telling everyone how to dress - well, back then it was only fashion as fashion.

Gradually, though, it wasn't cool to be a dictator. And anyway, designers didn't have time. They had empires of licenses to manage, yachts to squeegee. By the time Ms. Prada and Mr. Ford exploded, in the mid-1990's, nobody except a few couturiers at the top knew about hidden seams and hand-frayed edges. And if one may say so, the whole picture of dress had degenerated to a logo bag and a pierced navel.

Nowadays people are dressing better. It's as if the entire industry has been squeezed upward. As Mr. Wolfe put it, "Even the bottom feeders of the fashion food chain have Champagne tastes." Everyone wants to look posh.

Like most mainstream trends this one started with an extreme gesture, a squawk (the sound of editors' mouths popping open) at the beginning of the fashion grapevine. You can almost pinpoint the moment: Paris, March 2003, when Mr. Theyskens, a Belgian designer then just 26, showed a weird humpback dress in French lace. Weird or not, it telegraphed a message to the rest of the industry: clothes would involve more form, and more savoir-faire.

And Mr. Theyskens wasn't alone. "They're the most daring group of designers we've seen in a long while," said Julie Gilhart, the fashion director of Barneys New York. "Alber dared to be pretty, and with clothes that a lot of women can wear. Olivier changed the way we look at luxury, by focusing on extreme proportions and beautiful craft. It's now bye-bye, bling. Nicolas has influenced the street. Look at his cargo pants. People were, like, 'Baggy pants in pink and green - what?' But those pants and their copies made stores millions of dollars."

WHAT unites these designers is that they are using details and craft, often involving old modes of construction, to make an original statement. Ronnie Cooke Newhouse, an influential art director whose clients include Lanvin, says there is a dual advantage in using couture effects like draping. It makes the clothes harder to copy, and it distances them that much further from superficial, Star magazine type of fashion. "If a dress has volume, it's because Alber found a real dressmaking solution," Ms. Newhouse said. And he is thinking how to do it in a light, modern way. "It's about both form and function," Mr. Elbaz said.

Yet each designer has a highly individual look. There is no mistaking Ms. Philo's loose, romantic dresses for Mr. Theyskens's icy towers of ruffles, or Mr. Pilati's clerical references for Mr. Ghesquiere's starved-to-near-perfection silhouette. "It's not like Nouvelle Vague in the movies in the 60's," said Mr. Ghesquiere, who was born in France. "We're all different."

Mr. Pilati, a former assistant to Mr. Ford, is the least known of the group, but before fashion magazine editors could recover from the shock last fall of seeing tulip skirts, other designers had adapted his waist-defining look for the next season. Bergdorf Goodman is eager to introduce him to customers. "I'll offer him anything - lunch, a cocktail party, the windows," Robert Burke, the store's fashion director, said.

Although one can point to designers who have achieved empire without a loss of prestige among insiders - Karl Lagerfeld and Ms. Prada for sure - and to others who have remained influential through innovation, like Rei Kawakubo and Azzedine Ala?a, members of the new group have come to the fore because their influence has derived from clothes. Not marketing campaigns, accessories or chatty celebrities, but clothes. This represents an ideological break from the late 90's, and the business model of Mr. Ford and Gucci.

"I don't want a career that's like another designer's," said Mr. Ghesquiere, who took over Balenciaga in 1997. "I think I can say we have idols but no models to follow. You have to define your own model."

Not everyone has always understood him; he was fired after his first collection, but then the buzz started, and he was rehired. And though his Princess Leia look of the late 90's set off a wave of imitations, as did his anti-luxe bags with studded straps, Mr. Ghesquiere has stubbornly avoided being predictable, even conventionally pretty. (One may recall the media bashing that Jennifer Connelly received when she wore a drab beige gown of his to the Oscars.) Still, his below-the-radar approach is paying off. Balenciaga, which is part of Gucci Group, expects to be profitable within 18 months.

Making money is still a problem for most of these brands, and the media attention they receive, while deserved, can overstate the true picture. "Selling 50 pieces at Barneys is fine, but it's not a business," Ralph Toledano, the chief executive of Chlo?, said, adding that a problem for small houses like Rochas and Lanvin is that they rely too heavily on the creativity of their designers. "From a company point of view, that's totally unhealthy," Mr. Toledano said. You also need managers who can take a creative idea and turn it into a string of products.

In another sense, though, Mr. Theyskens, who showed his first Rochas collection in 2003, was probably smart to position the line at a superhigh level, with dresses that can cost $5,000. With luxury brands pushing from the top and mass merchants from the bottom, it's tough to have a business in the middle. Mr. Wolfe said there is little future in lower-priced diffusion lines because of how easily they are knocked off. Exaggerating to make his point, he said, "Marc Jacobs's diffusion line is Wal-Mart."

Few designers of his generation have understood the consumer and her impulsiveness better than Mr. Jacobs. It's a reason his look changes frequently, now a riff on Thatcherite ruffles, now an ode to Japanese volumes. In the past women stuck with the same two or three designers most of their lives. Now they simply want what's new.

The young women who work in his Paris studio are a lesson to him in this respect. "They're such shopaholics," he said. "They're into Lanvin, because it's new. This last season the one thing they wanted was YSL." Mr. Jacobs laughed. "I said, 'What happened to Alber?' "

YET while he has gained in prominence by working for Vuitton - its parent, LVMH Mo?t Hennessy Louis Vuitton, owns one-third of Mr. Jacobs's company and has helped it expand into accessories - his partner, Robert Duffy, points out proudly that ready-to-wear is still the mainspring of the company, outselling shoes and bags. And despite the popularity of its Mouse shoe (150 pairs sold each week), he and Mr. Jacobs sensed the market was tapped out, at least for them. "We were, like, 'Stop with the Mouse shoe,' " Mr. Duffy said wearily.

"It takes lots and lots of slow steps," Ms. Philo conceded, talking about the process that has made Chlo? one of the most imitated labels in the business. (Derek Lam is one designer who ought to pay royalties this spring to both Chlo? and Lanvin.) Through the efforts of Mr. Toledano, the company is now set to add lingerie and children's wear, and will open 30 new stores over the next three years, he said. Sales for the most recent fiscal year increased 60 percent.

But as Ms. Philo said: "If the clothes don't look good, then you haven't got anything. My focus is totally on the runway."

And in Paris or wherever talent presumes to be taken seriously, the runway never lies.

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- posted by Michael P. Whelan @ 2:26 PM

 

Graham Roumieu

April 28, 2005
The Tao of Skinny-Dipping
By DANA VACHON

AFTER long days spent defending their positions atop New York's most competitive fields, Manhattan's alpha males need to unwind. From mistresses to treadmills, these men have as many forms of relaxation as sources of stress. But some of the city's titans have a secret. They meet around private pools in private clubs and swim together, naked.

Men swimming together in the nude dates back to before the fall of Rome and was commonplace just 50 years ago in New York City and its affluent suburbs. Yet today the practice survives at only a handful of exclusive clubs, where members hold onto it with a fierce devotion. It is for these men a peerless form of bonding, with nostalgic links to youthful activities like group showers at prep school and skinny-dips at summer camp.

"If you meet someone swimming naked in a pool, surely you're going to do much better in an interview with them," said a 24-year-old bond trader who swims as a guest at the Racquet and Tennis Club on Park Avenue.

The Racquet Club (five recommendations needed for admission) was designed by McKim, Meade & White in the style of an Italian palazzo, its height exactly twice the width of Park Avenue to achieve an understated but unmistakable distance from the world below. It is as much of a time capsule of the Gilded Age as can be found in Manhattan, and members observe a strict code of silence about all that takes place behind its thick stone walls.

"It's a matter of the WASP ethic," said one investment banker in declining an interview about the club's swimming practices. "What goes on at the R.T.C. stays at the R.T.C. We don't want the general public having a peek at the last bastion of old-school pleasure, the last oasis."

Nude bathing is strangely like the Tao: those who know the way of it speak not of it. Nonetheless, at the Racquet Club and the University Club on Fifth Avenue, another New York outpost of nude male swimming, sympathetic members took me under their water wings, allowing me to breast stroke a few laps in their pools to observe one of the city's most curious, enduring rituals.

Inside the Racquet Club are cavernous rooms for backgammon, billiards and obscure racquet sports played since the time of the French Revolution by the kind of people against whom the French were rebelling. The walls are lined with oil paintings of polo players, fox hunters and long dead horses of undying pedigrees. The club's membership is no less distinguished. George Plimpton frequented it for decades, and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg was also a member, although he resigned in an egalitarian gesture before becoming mayor. Members include a leveraged buyout king, Henry R. Kravis, and a Greek Prince, Pavlos.

My host, a hedge fund analyst in his 20's, took me to the top floor, where we stood first in towels and then in nothing at all above a perfectly placid pool best characterized by its limitations: it was too small for serious lap swimming yet too deep for simple wading. A small vaulted ceiling provided a womblike dome for a feeling more of relaxation than of athleticism.

On the street below taxis honked, and pedestrians shouted, but all sounds were muffled by the lapping of water. An elderly man with a Churchillian physique walked to my side of the pool. He began to swim his laps, and soon came perilously close to my area of treaded water. "You've got to watch out for a naked collision," warned my host, who detailed the worst injury sufferable in modern nude aquatics. "One guy wasn't looking when he was coming out of a lap and grabbed another guy. He felt something strange, but familiar."

The disturbing possibility of such a man-on-man collision perhaps explains why those who look most disapprovingly on nude swimming are often the wives and girlfriends of its practitioners. When asked what his spouse thought of his morning dip, a private equity investor in his early 30's was brutally honest: "She just laughs and says that it's very, very, very gay."

THE roots of male nude bathing are planted at least partly in homoeroticism. Older Athenian men regarded watching the swimming of ephebes, young men undergoing physical and military training, as a great pastime. But the more modern roots of the practice seem to draw on the urban decay of the late 19th century, the historian George L. Mosse wrote in the Journal of Contemporary History (April 1982), a subject he later developed in "Nationalism and Sexuality" (1985).

At the turn of the last century, Mosse explained, naked swimming and nudism in general gained wide acceptance in Europe following centuries in which Christian modesty made the naked body shameful, and leading medical authorities advised a thick dirt patina as the best protection against sickness. "Cities were condemned as breeding grounds of immorality and moral sickness," he wrote. "The enthusiasm for nude swimming, athletics and sunbathing, even while condemning false shame, harnessed the rediscovery of the body to respectability."

The idea that nudity could be a healthful antidote to modern life traveled to America, and it was during this era that Manhattan's great bastions of nude bathing were built. First was the University Club in 1900. Then came the Yale Club on Vanderbilt Avenue in 1914, the Racquet and Tennis Club in 1919 and eventually the New York Athletic Club on Central Park South in 1929.

The city's earliest nude swimmers worked in the same broad fields - law, finance, industry - as naked bathers today, but they enjoyed far more relaxed schedules. After two hours of a three-martini lunch, a white-shoe lawyer might take an hour to soak his white bottom among other white bottoms before returning to the office.

This golden era of nude bathing ended in the 1980's, when Mayor Edward I. Koch signed a bill banning discrimination against women at private clubs. For nude swimming it was the sack of Rome all over again. The New York Athletic and Yale clubs abandoned nude bathing for coed covered swimming; the Racquet and Tennis and University clubs, along with the Harmonie Club on East 60th Street, emerged as keepers of the naked flame.

The Racquet Club was able to remain all male by arguing that so long as no business was conducted within its walls, no discrimination was practiced. The University Club, for its part, balked at the legal costs associated with continuing as an all-men's club and began admitting women in the 80's. But naked swimming was so important to the men of the University that they paid to keep it afloat.

Men at the club pay $625 for a year's access to the locker-room and fitness facilities, including the pool. Women pay only $325 and can use what they save to find suitable swimming facilities elsewhere. In this way the world remains egalitarian, and the bath stays naked.

The University Club was also designed by McKim, Meade & White just after the peak of the European nudist renaissance. The clubhouse occupies three grand stories at Fifth Avenue and 54th Street. The U., as members call it, was originally intended as a meeting place for the graduates of America's top universities. On the fourth floor is a vast library of soaring ceilings and ornate design that inspired Le Corbusier to remark that only in New York did he really learn to appreciate the Italian Renaissance.

Inside the University is a soaring lobby of pink marble and gold leaf, from which a small staircase leads down to a changing room of white wood, where spotless windows look out onto the pool. At the far end of the small slip, fresh water flows from the mouth of a brass lion's head, and above it is a ceiling painted in gentle shades of blue, a trompe l'oeil sky.

There could be no more perfect refuge from the big and dirty city. "It's really meant to be a leisure pool," said one member of the University, a real estate investor in his late 20's, who explained why the idea of swimming alongside other men doesn't strike members of these clubs as particularly strange.

"At boarding school everyone showers in gang showers," he said. "It was like a social occasion. It's not a far leap to make a connection between showering at prep school and naked swimming in New York."

I took a naked swim at the University Club with a money manager in his 60's, who shared in the schoolboy's glee at escaping from the world at large and insisted that I cut out of work to meet him for a midday dip. We swam a short lap of the pool, then rested beneath the spouting brass lion's head, where he informed me with a smile, "They're going to wonder why you smell like chlorine when you get back, you know." I didn't care. It was hard to think of much beyond the trickling of water and the pleasantness of floating in the great amniotic pool.

EVERY great secret carries with it a paradox, and nude swimming is no exception. To understand the present state of this ancient practice fully, you really have to put on a bathing suit.

The New York Athletic Club was a naked swimmer's paradise until the decision to admit women with full aquatic privileges. Older members lament the loss of naked swimming, and it is said that septuagenarians still emerge from the lockers with full manhood on display, shocking women swimmers as they shuffle toward what they remember as a perfectly good naked pool.

Yet younger generations at the Athletic Club don't seem to miss nude swimming at all. Their pool is not ornate and womblike. Indeed it seems principally designed for exercise, built along utilitarian lines at odds with the Jacuzzilike aesthetics so highly prized by nude bathers.

At the Athletic Club, Speedoed athletes swam fast laps with quick strokes, causing me to feel more self-aware in my hibiscus-print trunks than at any of the nude pools. The members were more than happy to go on record about their bathing habits and seemed almost proud to have abandoned naked swimming.

"This isn't just some blue-blood club," said Jamie LeFrak, a managing director of the LeFrak Organization, the giant developer of middle-income housing. "This is a place for serious athletes. Some of the members here have won Olympic medals."

I stepped onto the diving block and did my best to enter the pool with some semblance of athleticism, but the leisure of my nude dips had taken a softening toll. I completed one of the most aesthetically displeasing laps in the modern history of the New York Athletic Club. There was something to be missed about the warm, soothing leisure of a nude plunge, the slow pace and easy conversation of bobbing high above Park Avenue, or cozily beneath Fifth.

I soaked in a whirlpool, contemplating the future of nude aquatics. It wasn't the admission of women that ended all male nude swimming at the New York Athletic Club. After all the University Club has many women as members. Nude swimming at the Athletic Club fell as Rome did, a victim of the very things it was created to guard against and control. The frenetic pace of Manhattan simply overwhelmed the placid nude waters. All around me athletes clocked their laps, waited for lanes and looked nervously at their watches, hoping to complete the workout in time for the evening's next engagement.

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- posted by Michael P. Whelan @ 12:40 PM

 

Hiroko Masuike for The New York Times

Like others who have lost electronic items to thieves, Antonio Dominguez didn't report the theft of his iPod because he figured the chance of retrieval was slim.

April 28, 2005
Combating Gadget Theft
By JOHANNA JAINCHILL

As electronic products shrink in size, they grow in allure, not only to consumers but also to thieves. Lightweight and easy to conceal hand-helds, laptops and music players are sleek, valuable and often carried around as casually as a set of keys.

Because they can just as casually wind up in the wrong hands, a growing number of tracking-and-recovery services and other forms of coverage are available to help protect the gadget owner.

Only yesterday, the New York City police reported that a recent increase in subway crime was primarily attributable to thefts of portable devices, largely cellphones and iPods. But the phenomenon is not limited to the subway, of course - and is not always reflected in crime statistics.

Antonio Dominguez, 25, a construction project manager in New York whose iPod was stolen at his gym, was so upset that he joined a different gym. A sign in his new locker room announced that a member's iPod had been stolen there, too. Like many victims, Mr. Dominguez did not think of reporting the theft.

"I wouldn't even know where to start," he said. "It would be encouraging for me if I saw a large percentage of items returned to those who report it."

Indeed, only 6.7 percent of owners recovered their stolen hand-held computers, laptops or smart phones (cellphone organizers that are often connected to the Internet), according to a 2004 study by Brigadoon Software, which makes programs that help track and recover stolen devices. F.B.I. statistics indicate that only 3 percent of stolen laptops are recovered.

Homeowners and renters' insurance usually covers these items, but the deductibles - typically $500 to $1,000, according to the Insurance Information Institute - are generally more than the cost of the gadgets, except for computers.

There is also Safeware (www.safeware.com), a company offering theft and damage insurance for computers and smaller gadgets. In New York, a $2,000 laptop can be insured for $64 a year and a music player for as little as $52, both with no deductible.

A good option for cellphones and smart phones is coverage from the carriers, for about $5 a month on top of the service fee. Customers without insurance who need new phones are often surprised at what they cost. To sell service contracts, carriers offer phones at a sizable discount, but replacing them can cost hundreds of dollars.

Stolen items move quickly, with the help of the Internet. Property can be sold in online auctions or bazaars through unmonitored transactions. Stolen computers can fetch as much as $800, said Terrance Kawles, president of Brigadoon, and used iPods may be listed for upward of $200, with notations that they "must sell today" and for "cash only." Cellphones are sold for as little as $35 "unlocked," meaning they can be programmed with a new number and carrier.

Gideon Yago, 27, a writer and correspondent for MTV News, came home recently to discover that his locks had been broken and that a burglar had been in his apartment. He lost a G4 titanium PowerBook, an iPod, a mini DV camera and an external hard drive, in addition to jewelry and other items, worth about $10,000 altogether.

"The detective told me it's easier to solve a homicide than a burglary," he said, adding, "I'd give a nickel to anyone who could invent a LoJack system for computers," a reference to an automobile security device - a transmitter that can be activated by police to guide them to a stolen car.

It will cost more than a nickel, but such programs do exist. And Mr. Yago is not the only victim of theft who is not aware of them. Called track-and-recover software, the technology assumes that the stolen machine will eventually be hooked up to the Internet, and once online it is programmed to send a signal indicating its Internet Protocol address. That may allow the thief to be traced through an Internet service provider.

"If you have our software on your computer you have over a 90 percent chance of getting it back," said Mr. Kawles of Brigadoon (www.pcphonehome.com), which makes track-and-recover programs for computers called PC PhoneHome and MacPhoneHome.

According to the Computer Security Institute and the annual Computer Crime and Security Survey conducted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, laptop theft losses increased to more than $6.7 million in 2004. The survey looks at corporations, which are hit the hardest by computer device theft.

"It's hell to call your customers and tell them their personal information has been compromised," said Nick Magliato, chief executive of Trust Digital, a company selling mobile security software to corporations.

Trust Digital and similar companies produce software that protects information on laptops and devices like smart phones by either encrypting the data, locking the device or remotely wiping out everything on it. For companies whose employees carry sensitive digital information, the gadget itself is relatively disposable. It is the information that needs protection.

If a gadget is lost, or stolen and then discarded, services exist to help find the owner should a good Samaritan come upon it and seek to return it. Companies like StuffBak, Trackitback and SmartProtec register the electronic items and tag them with labels and serial numbers to help people return them and to deter thieves, who might think that indelibly labeled items will be hard to resell. These services vary in the reward offered and the costs to the owner.

Caution, of course, can be the best protection against theft. At the University of Rochester, Walter Mauldin, director of security services, noted that after an uptick in robberies in 2003, people became more attentive to their belongings. In 2004, the total number of campus thefts decreased.

"People are aware that taking care of these items means more than doing it occasionally," he said. "Like taking care of a baby, it's got to be a regular thing."

But many owners of portable gadgets feel that much of their appeal is taking them everywhere, with little thought.

"I'm definitely more careful now than I used to be, but basically I throw it all in my bag and don't worry about it," said Casey Brennan, 26, a freelance writer in New York whose MP3 player and cellphone were taken along with the other contents of an unwatched handbag. Ms. Brennan, who calls herself an electronics fanatic, routinely carries around a Sidekick smart phone, her second iPod, a digital voice recorder, a cellphone and a G4 iBook laptop.

The risk of theft, she said, is "the price I pay to need to have all these tiny little gadgets."

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- posted by Michael P. Whelan @ 12:26 PM

 


Phillip Toledano for The New York Times


April 24, 2005
Buried Answers
By DAVID DOBBS

When Dr. Alan Schiller's 87-year-old mother died in January, ''it took some convincing,'' Schiller says, to get his siblings to agree to an autopsy. ''They said: 'She had Alzheimer's. Let her rest.' But I told them: 'No, something seems funny to me. An autopsy is the only way to be sure.''' Schiller prevailed. A tanned, quick-minded, gregarious man in his 60's, he is naturally persuasive, and as chairman of pathology at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, he carries a certain authority regarding autopsies. The word ''autopsy,'' he reminded his siblings, means to ''see for oneself,'' and they should see what happened to their mother. Schiller's mother died in Miami, so he called his friend Dr. Robert Poppiti Jr., chairman of pathology at Mount Sinai Medical Center in Miami Beach. She was on the table the next morning.

In a living patient, Alzheimer's is a diagnosis of exclusion, one that should ideally be reached only by eliminating all testable causes of fading memory and mind. Confirming it requires directly examining the brain. The definitive markers are the tiny protein plaques and fibrous tangles that appear under the microscope in stained sections. But a good pathologist can spot advanced Alzheimer's just by looking at the whole brain. The brain will be shorter, front to back, and more squarish than normal -- a reflection of Alzheimer's neuronal decimation, which shrinks the brain up to 15 percent. This would presumably have been the case with Mrs. Schiller. But the autopsist found her brain of normal shape and size. Dissecting it, he discovered a half-dozen cystlike lesions scattered throughout -- areas darker, softer and less elastic than the buff-colored parts surrounding them.

''He called me right away,'' Schiller told me. ''He said: 'Alan, your mother didn't have Alzheimer's. She had multi-infarct dementia.' You know what that is? It's a loss of mental capacity from a series of strokes. You can tell it because these cysts show up, little areas filled with fluid that comes in after a clot cuts off blood flow and the cells die. She had had multiple strokes. She didn't have Alzheimer's at all. She'd been slowly killed by strokes.

''Now, this is useful information,'' Schiller continued. ''For one, it means I should worry less about getting Alzheimer's but maybe more about my cardiovascular health. It also means they could have been treating her for stroke. She might have had a very different life. But Alzheimer's has become a wastebasket diagnosis. You behave strangely and you're old, you have Alzheimer's. But other things, like this multi-infarct dementia, can produce the same symptoms. And no one ever checked for that.''

This is the point that Schiller, a champion of the autopsy, means to make: even in today's high-tech medical world, the low-tech hospital autopsy -- not the crime-oriented forensic autopsy glorified in television, but the routine autopsy done on patients who die in hospitals -- provides a uniquely effective means of quality control and knowledge. It exposes mistakes and bad habits, evaluates diagnostic and treatment routines and detects new disease. It is, Schiller says, the most powerful tool in the history of medicine, responsible for most of our knowledge of anatomy and disease, and it remains vital. ''Neglecting the autopsy,'' he says, ''is anathema to the whole practice of medicine.''

Yet the hospital autopsy is neglected. When Schiller went to medical school in the 1960's, hospitals in the United States autopsied almost half of all deaths, and the autopsy was familiar to medical students and practitioners alike. The United States now does post-mortems on fewer than 5 percent of hospital deaths, and the procedure is alien to almost every doctor trained in the last 30 years. Schiller has fought this. Soon after he took over Mount Sinai's pathology department 16 years ago, a time when many hospitals were closing their autopsy facilities, he built what he calls ''a beautiful new morgue,'' spending more than a million dollars. ''I wanted a grand opening, a public thing,'' he says, laughing. ''You know -- ribbons, speeches. The hospital said: 'Are you nuts? It's a morgue!''' The hospital has backed him otherwise. By pushing clinicians to ask for autopsies and by doing good autopsies that quickly give clinicians useful feedback, Schiller has lifted Mount Sinai's autopsy rates from the single digits to the midteens. But only a few hospitals, almost all of them teaching hospitals, like Mount Sinai, still do that many. Elsewhere the autopsy is dying.

Dr. George Lundberg, a pathologist who edited The Journal of the American Medical Association from 1982 until 1999 and now edits the online medical journal Medscape General Medicine, has, like Schiller, spent much of his career trying to revive the autopsy. The heart of his plaint is that nothing reveals error like the autopsy. As Lundberg noted in a 1998 article, numerous studies over the last century have found that in 25 to 40 percent of cases in which an autopsy is done, it reveals an undiagnosed cause of death. Because of those errors, in 7 to 12 percent of the cases, treatment that might have been lifesaving wasn't prescribed. (In the other cases, the disease might have advanced beyond treatment or there might have been multiple causes of death.) These figures roughly match those found in the first discrepancy studies, done in the early 1910's. ''No improvement!'' Lundberg notes. ''Low-tech autopsy trumps high-tech medicine . . . again and again.''

Lundberg doesn't fantasize that the autopsy can make medicine mistake-free; medicine poses puzzles too various and complex to expect perfection, and indeed error rates run about the same no matter how many autopsies are done. But autopsies can keep doctors from repeating mistakes, and thus advance medicine. Doctors miss things. But without autopsies, they don't know when they've missed something fatal and so are likely to miss it again. They miss the chance to learn from their mistakes. Instead, they bury them. This, Lundberg says, ''is endlessly galling.''

As Lundberg sees it, ''If you want to base your medicine on evidence, if you want to reduce error, if you simply want to know what you are doing, then you should start by evaluating the care given to your sickest patients -- the ones who die.''


The autopsy's intellectual founder was Giovanni Morgagni, a physician and professor at the University of Padua who wrote one of the most gruesome, humane and riveting early texts of modern medicine, ''The Seats and Causes of Disease Investigated by Anatomy.'' Published in 1761, when Morgagni was 79, the book describes nearly 700 autopsies he performed. His lucid, compassionate accounts demonstrated irrefutably that illness works in traceable, physical ways; medicine, therefore, should be an empirical endeavor aimed at particular physical processes rather than ''humors,'' spirits or other intangibles.

Morgagni's perspective was carried into the present era by William Osler, a Canadian who practiced and taught medicine in the United States in the late 1800's. Osler exerted more influence on 20th-century medicine than any other doctor, primarily by creating at Johns Hopkins Medical School the model for medical education still used today, with students seeing patients beginning their third year and training in internships and residencies after graduating. Osler placed the autopsy at the center of this education, performing more than a thousand post-mortems himself and insisting that staff members and students do them regularly. Tracking the necrotic footprints of their own missteps, he believed, would teach them lessons far more memorable than any text could.

Osler's argument was strengthened in the early 1910's by the work of Richard Clarke Cabot, who reviewed the records and autopsies of thousands of patients at Massachusetts General Hospital and found that the autopsies showed clinical diagnoses to be wrong about 40 percent of the time -- the finding replicated many times since. His reports helped solidify the autopsy's central role in medical education and practice. Autopsy rates began to rise. By World War II, they were nearing 50 percent, and autopsies had become standard in medical schools and many hospitals, where weekly mortality and morbidity conferences often focused on what autopsies had revealed about the diagnosis and treatment of patients' illnesses.

That midcentury peak helped drive remarkable medical progress. In 1945, for instance, the chance of survival for a patient with an aortic aneurysm was little better than it was a century earlier. But in the 50's and 60's, surgeons like Michael DeBakey, a pioneering cardiovascular surgeon, learned through trial and error -- the errors offering their lessons only through autopsy -- how to repair and replace first lower sections of the aorta in the abdomen and then, working up toward the heart, the biggest, most pressurized and most vital sections. By 1960, aortic repairs were routine. By 1970, the lessons learned helped make open-heart surgery common as well.

Autopsies similarly advanced other areas of medicine. They played central roles in diagnosing and spurring treatment for sudden infant death syndrome, Legionnaires' disease, toxic-shock syndrome, hantavirus, H.I.V., Ebola and other infectious diseases and helped make the association between lung cancer and smoking. These medical advances would have come about much more slowly without autopsies. In 1999, for instance, when four New York City residents died of what was diagnosed as St. Louis encephalitis, it was only because the city's unusually aggressive medical examiner's office insisted on autopsying them that they were discovered to be the first American victims of West Nile virus. (In most cities, the four would have been buried or cremated without autopsy.) The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention subsequently established a nationwide monitoring, control and treatment system credited with preventing scores or perhaps hundreds of deaths.

Though yet deadlier pathogens, like those that cause avian flu, mad cow disease and SARS, will almost certainly make their way to the United States, our low autopsy rates may well delay their detection. Prion diseases -- for instance, mad cow, which in humans is called variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease -- cause a neurological death that doctors could mistake for multi-infarct dementia, encephalitis or even a fast-moving Alzheimer's. A patient who died of a prion disease might go unautopsied and be cremated or buried, leaving the prion disease and its source undetected. With some 200,000 Alzheimer's and stroke patients buried unautopsied each year, this may have already happened.

After 20 years of making arguments for autopsy, Lundberg says that he feels like the football coach in the joke about the dim and unmotivated player. ''What's wrong with you, Jones?'' the coach says. ''Are you ignorant? Or just apathetic?'' To which Jones replies, ''I don't know, and I don't care.''

When Lundberg talks autopsy to doctors' groups or health-care policy makers, his audiences generally agree that we should do more autopsies. ''But nobody takes the steps to make it happen,'' Lundberg laments. They shake their heads in dismay, then return to business as usual. The forces arrayed against the autopsy -- regulatory, economic and cultural -- seem to overcome any impulse to revive it.

It starts with pathologists. Most pathologists don't like autopsies. The procedure entails two to four smelly hours at the table and as many again analyzing samples, and the work comes atop other duties -- ones that feel more urgent -- like analyzing biopsies of living patients. Autopsies seldom advance careers or status, and most hospitals don't pay pathologists for doing them or provide updated equipment to ease the job or get the most out of the sampled tissues.

Hospitals say the problem is money. An autopsy can cost from $2,000 to $4,000, and insurance won't cover it. Most patient families blanch if asked to pay for it, and many can't afford to after paying medical and funeral bills. So the hospital gets the tab. For most of the postwar period up to 1970, hospitals generally paid it, essentially because they had to: the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations required hospitals to maintain autopsy rates of at least 20 percent (25 percent for teaching hospitals), which, then and now, is the rate most advocates say is the minimum for monitoring diagnostic and hospital error. The commission eliminated that requirement in 1970. Lundberg says that this happened because hospitals, which had already allowed the rate to drop to close to 20 percent since its 1950's high of about 50 percent, wanted to let it drop further and pressured the commission. The commission's current president, Dr. Dennis S. O'Leary, says it eliminated the standard because too many hospitals were doing poor autopsies -- and often only the cheapest, simplest ones -- just to make the quota. In any event, few hospitals have paid for autopsies since then. Money is too scarce, they say, the needs of living patients too great.

But this argument fails scrutiny. For starters, hospitals do get money for autopsies: Medicare includes an autopsy allowance in the lump sum it pays hospitals for each Medicare inpatient, and those patients account for three-quarters of all hospital deaths. This money could easily finance double-digit autopsy rates. But most hospitals spend it on other things. Lundberg and others have urged the Department of Health and Human Services to make Medicare payments contingent on hospitals' meeting a certain autopsy rate. But the agency shows no interest in doing so.

The hospitals' dodge on this issue reveals less about finance than about attitude. They have the money. They don't use it for autopsies because they don't value autopsies. The hospitals that do -- teaching hospitals like New York's Mount Sinai; Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, in Lebanon, N.H.; and Baylor University Medical Center, in Dallas -- manage to absorb the costs. Their lobbies may not be as nice. But they have a much better idea where their errors are. ''People sometimes ask me how good a hospital is,'' Lundberg says. ''With most hospitals, the answer is that no one knows -- because the hospital has no way to know how many and what kinds of mistakes they make.''

Another oft-cited inhibitor is doctors' fears of being sued if an autopsy finds error. Research shows no link between autopsies and increased tendencies to sue. Patient families say this is because doctors increase trust by asking for an autopsy and encourage suspicion and acrimony when they don't request one.

Doctors seem to overestimate families' resistance to autopsies. In one survey of doctors and families of seriously ill patients, 89 percent of the physicians said they planned to request autopsies and two-thirds of the families said they would probably grant permission. ''But only 23 percent of them actually got autopsied,'' says Dr. Elizabeth Burton, a pathologist and autopsy advocate at Baylor who was one of the study's authors. ''Why? We went back and asked the families. Many were never asked. Among those who were, the biggest deciding factor was how strongly the doctor recommended it. If the doctor showed conviction and a good reason, the families almost always went for it.''

Some families do object, of course, and variations on the refrain of Schiller's siblings, ''Let her rest,'' have answered many an autopsy request. But if the doctor persists and wins approval, the family often gains a welcome sense of resolution. An extreme example of how a post-mortem is expected to resolve troubling questions surfaced in the case of Terri Schiavo; an autopsy should reveal far more precisely the extent of her brain damage, resolving whether she was truly vegetative, with only her brain stem functioning, as most doctors believed, or even minimally conscious, aware and responsive, as her parents believed. (The Pinellas County medical examiner's office in Florida had not released the results of the Schiavo autopsy as this article was going to press.) More commonly, results clarify family health issues. People who go through a miscarriage or parents whose children have died seem to especially benefit. Tracing death to a particular cause seems to ease anguish about things done or not done. Yet few doctors regularly ask to perform the post-mortem.

Perhaps the most troubling reason for the decline of the autopsy is the overconfidence that doctors -- and patients -- have in M.R.I.'s and other high-tech diagnostic technologies. Bill Pellan of the Pinellas County medical examiner's office says: ''We get this all the time. The doctor will get our report and call and say: 'But there can't be a lacerated aorta. We did a whole set of scans.' We have to remind him we held the heart in our hands.'' In fact, advanced diagnostic tools do miss critical problems and actually produce more false-negative diagnoses than older methods, probably because doctors accept results too readily. One study of diagnostic errors made from 1959 to 1989 (the period that brought us CAT scans, M.R.I.'s and many other high-tech diagnostics) found that while false-positive diagnoses remained about 10 percent during that time, false-negative diagnoses -- that is, when a condition is erroneously ruled out -- rose from 24 percent to 34 percent. Another study found that errors occur at the same rate regardless of whether sophisticated diagnostic tools are used. Yet doctors routinely dismiss possible diagnoses because high-tech tools show negative results. One of my own family doctors told me that he rarely asks for an autopsy because ''with M.R.I.'s and CAT scans and everything else, we usually know why they died.''

This sense of omniscience, Lundberg says, is part of ''a vast cultural delusion.'' At his most incensed, Lundberg says he feels that his fellow doctors simply don't want to face their own fallibility. But Lundberg's indictment is even broader. The autopsy's decline reflects not just individual arrogance, but also the general state of health care: the increasing distance and unease between doctors and patients and their families, a pervasive fear of lawsuits, our denial of age and death and, especially, our credulous infatuation with technology. Our doctors' overconfidence, less bigheaded than blithe, is part of the medicine we've come to expect.

Recently I stood in the autopsy room of a large teaching hospital waiting for a body to be brought up from the morgue. The young pathologist who would be overseeing the autopsy told me what little he knew of the morning's patient. The middle-aged man had come to an emergency room suffering seizures. A CAT scan of his head showed a lesion, possibly a tumor, in his left frontal lobe. He initially refused a biopsy, saying that he might seek a second opinion. The emergency-room doctor, worried about pressure in the patient's skull if the mass expanded, put him on anti-inflammatory steroids and sent him home. Sometime later the man came in again with stronger and more persistent seizures. Despite efforts to ease pressure in his skull, he progressed from seizures to a coma and died. Midmorning the day after that he was on a gurney on his way to the autopsy room. The man was not overweight and had no known history of serious illness. His main compromising factors were that he was an ex-drug user and a smoker. ''The drug use would suggest infection,'' the pathologist said. ''The smoking, obviously, cancer.''

So what killed him?

''Most likely he herniated,'' the pathologist said. ''Things got too tight in his skull from whatever this growth was, and the pressure builds and finally it pushes the base of the brain down through the opening where the spinal cord enters the skull. That fits with the way he died. But even if that's right, we still don't know what the lesion is.'' At this point we heard the rumbling of wheels, and the autopsy assistant pushed a gurney covered with a canvas tent into the room. ''We'll know more soon,'' the pathologist said.

He stepped out to get gowned up, and I went in to watch the assistant prepare things. By then the canvas tent was removed to reveal a body wrapped in sheets. The assistant worked efficiently but with a calm, understated respect. With no more force than necessary, he pulled the body from the gurney onto the autopsy table and unwrapped it. The patient appeared to be thinking: his eyes, slightly open, stared dreamily at the ceiling.

In addition to the pathologist, the assistant and a pathology resident, who would do the actual knife work, eight others attended, including a fourth-year medical student, two residents, three neuropathologists and a cardiac pathologist who had just dissected another patient's heart and lingered to see how the brain case played out. As people milled and talked, the assistant sank a scalpel into the flesh behind the man's ear and began cutting a high arc behind the rear crown of the skull. When he reached the other ear, he pulled the scalp's flesh away from the skull a bit, crimped a towel over the front edge of the opening he had made and, using it for grip, pulled the scalp forward over the man's head. When he was done, the man's skull lay completely exposed and his inside-out scalp covered his face down to his mouth. Now a neuropathologist, wielding the skull saw (like a cordless kitchen mixer with a rotary blade), carefully cut a big oval in the rear and top of the man's skull. He then used a hammer and chisel to tap around the seam. Finally he tapped the chisel in at the top of the cut and pried. With a sucking sound the skullcap pulled away.

The brain looked unexpectedly smooth. ''That's the swelling,'' the neuropathologist said. ''The convolutions usually show much more plainly.'' He gently pulled back the frontal lobe and slipped scissors behind the eyes to snip the optical nerves, then the carotid arteries and finally the spinal cord itself. Then he gently removed the brain and set it upside down on a table.

Even my untrained eyes could tell things weren't quite right: the left hemisphere was swollen. The growth in the left frontal lobe, less a lump than a slightly raised oval area about an inch long, was paler, yellower, firmer and more granular than the pinkish-tan tissue surrounding it. ''Could be a tumor,'' the neuropathologist said. ''Could be an infection. We'll know more in a few days.'' Similar lesions were eventually identified on both sides of the brain.

With a pair of scissors, he pointed at a bulbous area around the brain stem. ''Here's the herniation. See how it protrudes? That's where it got pushed down through the opening where the spinal cord comes through. That's the medulla that pushed through, which, among other things, controls the heart and breathing. That's just not consistent with life.''

He clipped a few samples from the lesion, and with that he was largely done. The assistant, meanwhile, worked on, and with the brain exam finished, the pathologist soon joined him. They extracted meaty lungs and a big liver. Pus oozed out when the trachea was cut. All this suggested systemic infection. ''At this point, I'd call it an even toss between infection and tumor,'' the pathologist said. ''If he tests positive for H.I.V., my money goes on infection.''

This initial exam of the organs took some 15 minutes. When they finished, the group spent another hour dissecting the organs. The exercise was now more educational than diagnostic, but the pathologist showed no sign of routine-induced boredom; on the contrary, he clearly enjoyed showing the residents the hidden adrenal glands, the chest-wall vessels sometimes used for coronary bypasses and the vagus nerve's lacy, laddered course through the chest.

The full results would take several more days to come in. But they knew by the next day that the patient was H.I.V.-positive, and by the second day that the mass was not cancerous but an infection found mainly in immunocompromised patients like this one.

These findings had multilayered implications. That the man had H.I.V., for instance, would presumably mean something to any of his sexual partners. (Many states require the primary physician to contact sexual partners in such cases.) The rest of his family might find some relief in knowing that there was no tumor and that their own cancer risk was thus not raised. Beyond that, the case's main epidemiological significance was its addition to evidence that infections form an ever-growing but oft-overlooked cause of death -- another small correction in our assessment of what kills us. And that makes for better doctors. ''You don't learn these things all at once,'' the pathologist said. ''You learn a lot all at once in med school, sure. But after that, you become a better doctor by learning a little bit at a time. Incremental adjustments. That's what makes us better doctors. And this is the place you learn them better than anywhere else.''

When a believer is in the full flush of describing autopsy's gifts, when you witness how quickly and effectively the procedure delivers them, it's easy to think that the autopsy will make a comeback. How could it not? At a time when medicine takes continuous fire regarding errors -- politicians and patient advocates outraged at studies showing that 100,000 Americans die each year from medical errors, tort lawyers chasing mistakes on which to hang huge judgments, malpractice rates jumping at triple-digit rates -- how can medicine ignore an instrument proven to detect error?

Yet it does. Other than hoping for a long shot, like Medicare or the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare setting autopsy-rate requirements, there is seemingly no quick return to routine autopsies. ''We just have to do this one hospital at a time,'' says Dr. Pat Lento, head of the autopsy service at Mount Sinai in New York. But most hospitals have no plans to revive the autopsy. And while physician organizations like the A.M.A. generally support the autopsy, most doctors don't avail themselves of it. The sad truth is that most of medicine seems to have relegated the post-mortem to a cabinet of archaic tools, as if the body's direct lessons no longer matter. In the end, the autopsy's troubles resemble those in a medical case in which the causes stand clear and a cure stands ready, but the patient doesn't take things seriously enough to pursue the fix.


Toward the end of the autopsy I saw of the man who died from an ignored infection, someone asked the assistant if he could really put him back together for a funeral. It was almost 2 p.m. and the man was in pieces. His torso was a big red bowl formed by his back ribs, his skin hung splayed on either side and his scalp was stretched inside-out over his face. The assistant smiled and said, ''Oh, sure.'' The pathologist added: ''Absolutely! This guy could go to his wake tonight.''

And so it was. Unlike most things, an autopsied body can be put back together far more easily than it can be taken apart. It took less than half an hour to replace the breastplate and sew up the man's torso; if he had a suit, it would fit as before and hide all. The skull cap all but snapped into place. The assistant rolled the man's scalp back over his head and started to suture it up. When he was done, our patient looked pretty good indeed. It was remarkable, actually, after all we had found about what ailed him, that he should still gaze at the ceiling, unchanged and none the wiser.

David Dobbs, who writes regularly on science, is the author of ''Reef Madness: Charles Darwin, Alexander Agassiz and the Meaning of Coral.''

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- posted by Michael P. Whelan @ 11:11 AM