My View From Las Vegas
Tuesday, May 31, 2005
not very Happy"
5/29/2005 7:01:54 PM ADT (GMT -3)
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Mark Webber?s European Grand Prix at Nurburging lasted only the distance to the first corner on the opening lap of 60, when he and McLaren-Mercedes driver, Juan Pablo Montoya, collided. Several cars became embroiled in the incident but Webber was the only lasting casualty, the BMW Williams driver sliding off into the gravel with damaged front left suspension and into early retirement.
Despite an initial good start at the lights, another poor run down to the first corner left Webber vulnerable, the 28-year old Australian having to do everything within his power to defend his position while those around him attacked.
?Obviously I?m very disappointed not to have been able to build on our result in Monaco last week,? said Webber. ?But, what we did demonstrate at Nurburgring was that the pace of the FW27 is certainly very respectable and reliable, and we can now begin to close the gap to McLaren and Renault.?
?I was very happy how qualifying went considering the strategy I was on, and so it was a shame we weren?t able to realize that potential ? it would have been an interesting race. Going out on the first lap is always the most painful thing to do. I had to protect my position heavily from Jarno Trulli and Fernando Alonso and when I arrived at turn one, there wasn?t quite enough room for both Juan Pablo and I, and unfortunately I made slight contact with the right rear tyre of the McLaren and that was enough to damage my front left suspension.?
Mark Webber
Alonso Wins 4th Grand Prix Of The Season
Alonso accepts title is in sight
EUROPEAN GP RESULT
1 F Alonso (Renault)
2 N Heidfeld (Williams)
3 R Barrichello (Ferrari)
4 D Coulthard (Red Bull)
5 M Schumacher (Ferrari)
6 G Fisichella (Renault)
7 JP Montoya (McLaren)
8 J Trulli (Toyota)
European Grand Prix winner Fernando Alonso says he is on course to become Formula One's youngest world champion.
The 23-year-old has now won four of this year's seven Grands Prix and has a 32-point lead with 12 races to go.
"If we keep this consistency, every time we will have more and more points. It seems we can do it," he said.
F1's youngest world champion so far was Brazilian Emerson Fittipaldi, who was 25 when he won his first title with Lotus in 1972.
Under the current system, it will prove very hard for anyone to catch Alonso because a driver can pick up points even if he finishes in eighth place.
A win is worth 10 points, with second place earning eight.
Then it is six points for third, five for fourth and so on down to eighth place, which receives one point.
To be probably the best car on the grid again, is probably better news for the rest of the season than winning the race
Fernando Alonso
Alonso was pleased that Renault had recovered from a poor performance last weekend in Monaco, where they were unable to keep pace with Raikkonen after suffering major tyre problems.
"I am extremely happy, more than the victory I am happy because after fourth place at Monaco the team and I were not happy at all," he said.
"We had a very good car in Monaco and we didn't take as many points as we believed were possible.
"To be probably the best car on the grid again, to manage the tyres in the race, is probably better news for the rest of the season than winning the race."
Story from BBC SPORT:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/sport2/hi/motorsport/formula_one/4591847.stm
Published: 2005/05/29 15:37:48 GMT
? BBC MMV
Alonso Wins 4th Grand Prix Of The Season
Alonso accepts title is in sight
EUROPEAN GP RESULT
1 F Alonso (Renault)
2 N Heidfeld (Williams)
3 R Barrichello (Ferrari)
4 D Coulthard (Red Bull)
5 M Schumacher (Ferrari)
6 G Fisichella (Renault)
7 JP Montoya (McLaren)
8 J Trulli (Toyota)
European Grand Prix winner Fernando Alonso says he is on course to become Formula One's youngest world champion.
The 23-year-old has now won four of this year's seven Grands Prix and has a 32-point lead with 12 races to go.
"If we keep this consistency, every time we will have more and more points. It seems we can do it," he said.
F1's youngest world champion so far was Brazilian Emerson Fittipaldi, who was 25 when he won his first title with Lotus in 1972.
Under the current system, it will prove very hard for anyone to catch Alonso because a driver can pick up points even if he finishes in eighth place.
A win is worth 10 points, with second place earning eight.
Then it is six points for third, five for fourth and so on down to eighth place, which receives one point.
To be probably the best car on the grid again, is probably better news for the rest of the season than winning the race
Fernando Alonso
Alonso was pleased that Renault had recovered from a poor performance last weekend in Monaco, where they were unable to keep pace with Raikkonen after suffering major tyre problems.
"I am extremely happy, more than the victory I am happy because after fourth place at Monaco the team and I were not happy at all," he said.
"We had a very good car in Monaco and we didn't take as many points as we believed were possible.
"To be probably the best car on the grid again, to manage the tyres in the race, is probably better news for the rest of the season than winning the race."
Story from BBC SPORT:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/sport2/hi/motorsport/formula_one/4591847.stm
Published: 2005/05/29 15:37:48 GMT
? BBC MMV
Podium: race winner Fernando Alonso with Nick Heidfeld and Rubens Barrichello
F1 > European GP, 2005-05-29 (N?rburgring): Sunday raceThe Weekly Wrap
Iceman Frozen With Finish In Sight ? May 29, 2005
Alonso Victorious On Last Lap
The final lap of a race is clearly not the safest and most secure time during a Grand Prix, especially for any Finnish driver in a Mclaren. Think back to the Spanish Grand Prix in 2001, when Mika H?kkinen was forced to retire due to a clutch failure on the last lap. Now, it was his followers turn, as Kimi R?ikk?nen was forced to hand over victory to title competitor Fernando Alonso on the last lap following a suspension failure that sent him flying off track at the beginning of the final lap of the race. Instead of closing the points gap to twenty points, the gap between first and second in the title race has sprouted open once again to 32 points.
Thankfully, I'm not the journalist who has to interview R?ikk?nen after the race, because there's probably not much fun in asking him any questions at the moment. R?ikk?nen had controlled the race from the beginning, overtaking pole-sitter Nick Heidfeld in the run-up to the first corner and never looking back. Unlike previous races, Kimi was forced to relinquish his lead during the pitstops for a matter of laps, but nonetheless was set to take his third victory in a row. Despite a strong charge from Fernando Alonso towards the end of the race, when Kimi's speed was hampered by an almost square front right Michelin, the pair entered the last lap with one and a half seconds of difference, enough to ensure the Mclaren a most probable victory.
Thus, Alonso has once again opened up his lead in the championship but, with twelve rounds to go, there's still a lot of ground to cover. The way the season is shaping up could not be any better for audiences with some of the most exciting races in modern F1 coming weekend after weekend, the European GP being no exception today. Right from the off the sparks were flying. As expected, the tight first corner provided immediate drama when a collision between Mark Webber and Juan Pablo Montoya ended Webber's race and stirred up the event for several others including Takuma Sato, Michael Schumacher and his brother Ralf. Whilst Schumacher emerged unscathed yet behind, Ralf and Sato were forced to pit for new nosecones.
David Coulthard took full advantage of the first corner m?l?? and rose from twelth on the grid to fourth place, holding a very good pace from thereon out. A penalty for speeding in the pitlane ended his hopes for a podium, which would have been realised without his drive-through as the Scot eventually finished fourth, thirteen seconds behind Rubens Barrichello. Red Bull Racing definitely proved its worth on the grid once again, and sadly was forced to miss out on another chance at a podium (one that will most certainly be achieved before the season is over), and DC even led the race for a short period of time between pitstops!
Alonso, obviously elated at the misfortune of R?ikk?nen, did not look like a great challenger early on, racing in fifth place behind Coulthard until the first pitstops. Even then, his speed was not comparable to the front running R?ikk?nen and Heidfeld, and only towards the end of the race did the threat of his Renault truly become apparent. Heidfeld, racing on a three-stop strategy, was never in the position to challenge for the win, having to make an extra pitstop very late in the race for a final spray of fuel into the Williams. Alonso, however, only increased his pace late in the race, while R?ikk?nen was clearly beginning to struggle following a pair of lockups that most certainly contributed to the tyre failure that ended his race.
Alonso was close to throwing it all away, as well. In his charge for fast laps prior to his second and final pitstop, Alonso spun at the Dunlop-hairpin and lost what at that point seemed like the deciding handful of seconds that would ensure R?ikk?nen's grip on the lead. It soon became clear that Alonso would receive another chance, when the onboard camera view from R?ikk?nen's car proved all too clearly how his tyre was falling apart lap by lap. It wasn't the most beautiful thing to watch, and anyone supporting him could only hope it would hold out for the last number of laps.
Alas, the tyre was causing such vibration in the suspension that it was the suspension which let go completely under braking for the first turn of the final lap, and Kimi was relegated back to eleventh place on the official timing sheet. Michelin will have a significant amount of explaining to do, with Felipe Massa also experiencing a tyre failure that made him lose many places in the final laps of the race. Obviously, these kinds of things happen in racing, but it will not be fun for Mclaren to look back on at the end of the year if Kimi were to lose out to Alonso in the title race by the amount of points lost at the Nurburgring. It happened two years ago, when Kimi's Mercedes let go whilst in the lead, and the Finn lost the championship to Michael Schumacher by two points.
The North American tour is up next, with the Canadian race at Montreal in a fortnight followed by the United States Grand Prix in Indianapolis a week later. Ferrari is climbing back up, with strong performances from both cars at this weekend's race, and the next two races have been friendly for their team. Historically, these races have also been successful races for the Mclaren squad, but with Alonso's current form, the Spaniard will be a tough contender to beat...
The Weekly Wrap By Jens Sorensen
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Fernando Alonso
F1 > European GP, 2005-05-28 (N?rburgring): Saturday practice 1
Alonso wins tense European GP
Racing series F1
Date 2005-05-29 (Nurburgring)
By Nikki Reynolds - Motorsport.com
Fernando Alonso took his fourth win of the season at the European Grand Prix, in what was a tense race that seemed to be going Kimi Raikkonen's way. But in the closing laps, when Raikkonen was leading, his McLaren had trouble with the right front tyre and eventually the Finn crashed out on the last lap, promoting Alonso's Renault to the lead and the victory.
Williams' Nick Heidfeld took his second consecutive second place with a strong drive that kept him in the top three throughout the race. Ferrari was finally back on the podium, as Rubens Barrichello kept himself out of trouble to come home third. The Nurburgring event was mostly about strategy and tyres -- and the notorious first corner.
Giancarlo Fisichella stalled on the grid at the start of the formation lap and the Renault appeared to be stuck in gear as the marshals couldn't move it. Eventually mechanics were allowed back onto the grid and removed the car to the pit lane on a jack, and Fisichella started from there. The rest of the pack lined up again and the first corner changed the whole look of the race.
Raikkonen got ahead of pole man Heidfeld in the run down to turn one and the trouble happened behind them. Third placed Mark Webber had another poor start in the Williams and Juan Pablo Montoya's McLaren came hurtling up along side him. Webber braked quite late and Montoya turned in, resulting in contact that sent them both off.
Meanwhile, Ralf Schumacher's Toyota hit the back of Alonso's Renault and Ralf also spun, while the Ferraris and the BAR of Takuma Sato got mixed up in it as well. Somewhere in all the confusion, David Coulthard's Red Bull went barrelling through to fourth from 12th and Sauber's Felipe Massa also made his way through, up to sixth from 11th.
Once the mess had sorted itself out, Webber was out of the race and Sato and Ralf dived in the pits for front wing changes. Webber was disappointed but did not blame Montoya. "Getting away (from the line) hasn't been one of our strengths," the Australian said ruefully.
"Both Nick and I were a little bit on the back foot down to the first corner. I was trying to defend against Jarno (Trulli) and I couldn't quite turn in at the apex, so that was a shame. It's not up to Juan Pablo to give me room -- he turned in, for sure, but he's got to get round the corner too."
After the incident, the order was Raikkonen from Heidfeld, Trulli's Toyota up one to third and Coulthard fourth. Alonso gained one place to fifth but he had the problems of Coulthard and Trulli between him and the leaders. Massa was sixth and Red Bull's Tonio Liuzzi also gained from the confusion, up to seventh, as did Jenson Button's BAR in eighth.
One of Alonso's problems was solved when Trulli got a drive-through penalty, as the Toyota mechanics had spent too long on the grid after the 15 second signal was given before the start. Bad luck for Trulli and he rejoined in ninth. Montoya had dropped back to 10th and Michael Schumacher to 11th and they both started working their way up the order.
Rubens Barrichello had also lost out at the first corner but his Ferrari got past Button after a scrap through turns one, two and three to take eighth. Montoya then homed in on Button and got past, while Fisichella had got away from the pit lane start and had made his way up to 12th.
Barrichello closed down Liuzzi and dispatched the Red Bull at the Coca-Cola curve and further down the field the Jordans of Tiago Monteiro and Narain Karthikeyan were running 13th and 14th ahead of the Sauber of Jacques Villeneuve. Raikkonen was not escaping from Heidfeld, the gap between the top two just two seconds.
Trulli's penalty had promoted Coulthard to third and Michael finally got past Button for 10th in the run up to the first round of pit stops. Barrichello was first in on lap 11, a bit earlier than most had expected, and he and Heidfeld turned out to be on three-stop strategies. Heidfeld was in on the next lap and rejoined in fourth ahead of Massa, who was doing a good job keeping the Sauber in contention.
Villeneuve got past Karthikeyan, and Montoya was closing on Liuzzi, and Raikkonen was next to pit, also earlier than expected. He rejoined third behind Alonso, which left Coulthard in the lead. Liuzzi and Montoya dived into the pits together and Juan got the jump on the Red Bull to come out ahead.
Coulthard pitted next and subsequently got a drive-through penalty for speeding in the pit lane, which dropped him to fifth after he took it. Button and Fisichella had been arguing over 11th and Fisichella won the position but then went into the pits anyway. Alonso finally took his first stop on lap 22 and the order after the shakeout was Raikkonen, Heidfeld, Alonso, Barrichello, Coulthard, Massa, Michael, Montoya.
Ralf and Sato were late stoppers but the first corner antics had dropped them outside the top ten. Raikkonen was comfortably ahead of Heidfeld but then had a mad moment and it all went a bit pear shaped. The McLaren shot across the gravel and grass after the chicane then into the gravel at the next turn, allowing Heidfeld to nip past into the lead.
Raikkonen recovered and unfortunately for Heidfeld his three-stop strategy meant he had to pit again not long after. Minardi's Christijan Albers got a drive-through for ignoring the blue flags and Ralf was next to come grief, spinning into the gravel after going wide over the kerbs, which was the end of his race.
Raikkonen was having one or two random off track excursions, locking up at turn one and going wide, and it seemed the McLaren had flat-spotted a front tyre somewhere along the way. However, there was 15 seconds between him and Alonso so he was getting away with the odd mistake or half a dozen.
The middle stint of the race was fairly static, with the points scoring positions not changing. Montoya had a go at Michael at the first corner and they came so close to banging wheels but made it through unscathed. Michael then put some distance between them and Raikkonen was the first to take his second stop, on lap 44. The McLaren's right front barge board was broken but it appeared not to be a major problem.
Alonso took the lead and promptly set the fastest lap of the race, while Monteiro got a drive-through, also for ignoring the blue flags. Massa and Montoya pitted, Massa staying ahead, and Michael beat both of them in his stop to rejoin sixth. Alonso wandered into the gravel at the hairpin and lost some time, but scrambled out and took his second stop.
Massa was struggling with his tyres and was next into the gravel, going off track for a considerable amount of time and looking more like he was rallying than circuit racing. The Sauber apparently took some damage and a couple of laps later Massa was crawling round, then his left front tyre, which was peeling, hit the front wing and he had to go into the pits for a change.
That little episode let Montoya move up one and Raikkonen was next to start displaying some rather alarming tyre behaviour. His right front was indeed flat-spotted and wobbling like mad, little strips peeling off, although not quite delaminating. Alonso was closing at a rate of over a second a lap -- seven seconds the gap and seven laps left to run?
Michael charged through the gravel as well but was far enough ahead of Fisichella to stay in fifth, and Karthikeyan followed suit, narrowly missing teammate Monterio on the rebound. At the front Alonso was storming up behind Raikkonen, the gap now just 1.5 with three laps to go. Would Raikkonen's tyre hold to the end or would McLaren pull him in for change?
Such a move would probably have dropped Raikkonen to third, which may have been an acceptable compromise but it didn't happen. Kimi stayed out and with one lap to go the inevitable happened. The tyre was so unbalanced it broke the front suspension, rather than the tyre itself failing, and Raikkonen ditched into the barrier at the first corner, narrowly missing punting Button out as well.
Alonso sailed past to take the lead and the victory. "It was a very, very good race from our side," said the Spaniard. "It is true that I lost so much at the start. I nearly finished my race at the first corner, I don?t know who pushed me in the back, and I thought that maybe something broke in the back of the car but it felt okay and obviously I lost so much I was happy with the second place."
"The car was so nice to drive, so quick, and we were pushing McLaren and Kimi so hard until the point that they had a failure in the tyres. We were very lucky today, but at the same point we were also very strong and able to push them like at the beginning of the season, not like the last two races."
Heidfeld drove confidently to second after what was a fairly uneventful race for Nick. "Obviously, we did a three-stop race and a short first stint but we just did that because we hoped to get the best result, which we in the end got with the second place," he comemnted.
"I just pushed as hard as possible in the first stint and I tried to get a gap, which worked pretty well, and I think the car was really nice but as I had to push hard at the start I lost rear tyres a little towards the end."
Barrichello also had a pretty quiet time to come home third, while Michael made it a double points finish for Ferrari in fifth. Coulthard split the scarlet pair in fourth. Barrichello believes it's the start of the Ferrari revival that many have been expecting.
"It is very unfortunate that we have been out of the podium for a long time, the car is very reliable, the engine is good and the tyres are fantastic, it is just that we had a difficult time at some point into the season but we are coming back and I feel the Ferrari team will be very strong from now to the end of the year and we are going to be winning races hopefully soon," he said.
Fisichella bravely made up the lost ground from his pit lane start to cross the line sixth, followed by Montoya and Trulli in seventh and eighth respectively. It was a shame for Massa, after running in the points all through the race until his problems, who finally finished 14th, one behind teammate Villeneuve, who didn't really make an impression at all.
Liuzzi was ninth and Button and Sato had a tough time to finish 10th and 12th. Both Jordans and Minardis made it to the line, Monteiro and Karthikeyan in 15th and 16th, Albers ahead of Patrick Friesacher for 17th and 18th. It was quite a low attrition rate considering all the on and off track incidents. Raikkonen was classed 11th.
The result will give Renault and Alonso a bit of breathing space at the top of the standings, but while Raikkonen appears to be Alonso's main rival, Trulli and Heidfeld are only two points behind the Finn. The gap between Alonso and Raikkonen is now 32 points, and between Renault and McLaren 23 points.
The question most people will be asking is should McLaren have bought Raikkonen in for a tyre change? With hindsight the answer is obviously yes but at the time it was a very tough call to make. The risk was big but so was the gain if it worked out. It didn't work out and McLaren and Raikkonen had to pay the price.
"We jointly decided to go for the win and no member of the team including Kimi regrets this decision," said McLaren team principal Ron Dennis. "The resulting suspension failure was understanedable in the circumstances."
However, it maybe casts a bad light on the one set of tyres per qualifying and race rule. Tyres have become even more of an influence this season and many times we've seen drivers struggle with degrading rubber. Raikkonen's accident, although avoidable if the team had bought him in, perhaps calls into question the safety aspect of the tyre rule.
Despite that, Raikkonen is still a force to be reckoned with and Williams is rapidly gaining ground. Renault may have taken the victory at the Nurburgring but it was by luck rather than judgement. Alonso probably would have been on the podium anyway but the win was unlikely until Raikkonen's problems.
Canada and America are the next two back-to-back races and the battle looks set to be rejoined just as fiercely. First Renault's successes and then McLaren's had people saying that one or the other was going to be dominant, but so far this season has been anything but predictable. Final top eight classification: Alonso, Heidfeld, Barrichello, Coulthard, M. Schumacher, Fisichella, Montoya, Trulli.
Andy Rash
May 29, 2005
'Vindication': Mary Wollstonecraft's Sense and Sensibility
By TONI BENTLEY
IN 1915 Virginia Woolf predicted it would take women another six generations to come into their own. We should be approaching the finish line if Woolf's math was as good as her English. A little over a century before her, another Englishwoman, Mary Wollstonecraft, declared in her revolutionary book of 1792, ''The Vindication of the Rights of Woman,'' that not only had the time come to begin the long slog to selfdom, freedom, empowerment -- or whatever current feminist term serves -- but that she would be the first of what she called, using the language of taxonomy, ''a new genus.''
It took the renegade second child (of seven) -- and first daughter -- of Edward John Wollstonecraft, a drinker, and the unhappy Elizabeth Dickson, to take this virtually unimaginable plunge into uncharted waters. And she took this leap while displaying the full measure of female unpredictablity, while the world watched, astounded, dismayed and outraged. This Mary was quite contrary, and her reputation over time, unsurprisingly, has suffered from this complexity. Surely we women have a gene -- in addition to those saucy, but ill-mannered, hormones -- for theatrics, so frequently do they puncture our inner lives and decorate our outer ones in operatic robes. But occasionally high drama is the most efficient way to break through the status quo, and Mary Wollstonecraft's radical mission called for extreme measures.
In her wonderful, and deeply sobering, new book, Lyndall Gordon, the distinguished biographer of T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Charlotte Bront? and Henry James, tackles this formidable woman with grace, clarity and much new research. Despite occasional slips into strangely purple prose (when she reproaches her lover, ''retorts -- great sprays of indignant eloquence -- would fountain from her opening throat''), Gordon relates Wollstonecraft's story with the same potent mixture of passion and reason her subject personified.
Here's how things stood for women in the world Mary was born into, the England of 1759: your property and your children were the property of your husband, divorce was impossible, and if you dared to leave your horrid -- or abusive -- husband you had to desert your children in the process and become an outlaw. Marital rape was perfectly legal, and probably frequent. (In all fairness, a new law in 1782 stated that a husband should not beat his wife with a stick wider than his thumb.)
Samuel Johnson identified the real issue: ''The chastity of women is of all importance, as all property depends on it.'' While women were not admitted to universities for another hundred years, the education they did receive was about conduct and little else. One Mrs. Barbauld, a well-known writer and former boarding-school mistress, summarized this teaching when she explained to young ladies, ''Your BEST, your SWEETEST empire is -- TO PLEASE.''
Miss Mary Wollstonecraft, however, was not interested in pleasing anyone, most especially a member of the opposite sex. She declared at 15 that she would never marry. Nor, as her life would prove, would she ever internalize her own subjugation to such frivolous teachings. This was no empty declaration, coming as it did from a girl who slept across the threshold of her parents' bedroom to protect her mother from her father's rages. Despite her mother's unloving demeanor, the young girl developed a compassion for women that became what she would call ''the governing propensity'' of her entire life. She was obsessed with educating herself against all odds, writing as a teenager, ''I have a heart that scorns disguise, and a countenance which will not dissemble.'' The prospects for a woman in her time who chose not to marry were limited to schoolteacher, paid companion, governess and prostitute -- all of which Wollstonecraft essayed except the last.
BY 1787 Wollstonecraft had landed in London, setting up house near the publisher Joseph Johnson, and was participating in intellectual circles that included William Blake (who illustrated an edition of her book ''Original Stories from Real Life'' in 1791), the naturalist Erasmus Darwin (grandfather of Charles), the painter Henry Fuseli, the radical philosopher William Godwin and Thomas Paine. Said Godwin of this outspoken woman, ''I . . . heard her, very frequently when I wished to hear Paine.''She began publishing novels and essays while doing translations (German, Italian, French), book reviews and anthologies. In her first book, ''Thoughts on the Education of Daughters,'' she gives us the 18th-century version of ''he's just not that into you,'' when she deplores women's ''susceptibility to unsuitable men.'' She declared there to be no greater misery, besides, than loving someone whom reason cannot respect.
In late 1790 Wollstonecraft's ''Vindication of the Rights of Men,'' the first counter to Edmund Burke's treatise on the dangers of the French Revolution, was published anonymously; ''all the best journals of the day discussed it.'' But when she produced ''The Vindication of the Rights of Woman'' just 14 months later, her name was on the title page and all hell broke loose. It was the most immodest emergence of a woman's voice in memory and the 32-year-old Wollstonecraft became famous. While the American statesman Aaron Burr declared ''your sex has in her an able advocate . . . a work of genius'' (and John Adams teased his wife, Abigail, for being a ''Disciple of Wollstonecraft!'') Horace Walpole's reaction was more typical. He called her a ''hyena in petticoats.''
In her masterwork, Wollstonecraft expounded in dense and literate prose -- Gordon might have quoted more extensively here -- on the necessity of women becoming less trivial and more rational and educated creatures. She suggests that women ''labor by reforming themselves to reform the world.'' A hyena, definitely.
''The minds of women are enfeebled by false refinement,'' she wrote, continuing: ''Dismissing then those pretty feminine phrases, which the men condescendingly use to soften our slavish dependence, and despising that weak elegancy of mind . . . and sweet docility of manners, supposed to be the sexual characteristics of the weaker vessel, I wish to show . . . that the first object of laudable ambition is to obtain a character as a human being.'' So begins her uncompromising polemic, a document as necessary an admonition today as in her own in its plea to the owners of wombs to invest in that invisible fortification called character before fluffing their petticoats or tattooing their bellies.
And then, astonishingly, within two years, this brilliant, focused woman moved to Paris to write about the French Revolution, lost her virginity at 34 -- yes, she was, notably, a virgin when she wrote her germinal work, and perhaps the wiser for it -- to the charismatic though clearly ''unsuitable'' American adventurer Gilbert Imlay and gave birth to their daughter, Fanny. She attempted suicide with laudanum when Imlay proved faithless. Within two weeks, Imlay persuaded her to spend several months, with baby and French nanny in tow, on a mysterious, madcap mission to Scandinavia to recover, on his behalf, ?3,500 worth of silver cargo from a treasure ship. There was no silver, no ship and, when she returned to England, no Imlay; he had taken another mistress.
Still, Wollstonecraft had written a wonderful travel book about her Scandinavian adventures. Then this woman, who so reasonably advocated reason for her own sex, lost her own, and jumped in the Thames in her second suicide attempt in five months. Miraculously, she was found, unconscious, revived and thus lived to have what Virginia Woolf considered the most fruitful experiment of Wollstonecraft's experimental life -- her love affair with William Godwin. Yes, the William Godwin who only a few years earlier had wanted less Wollstonecraft and more Paine.
It is here that one rejoices that this woman who struggled with poverty her entire life (she supported both her father, and numerous siblings, as often as she could until her dying day), who withstood a reputation as a wanton and reckless woman, the writer of an ''amazonian'' book, a cornerstone treatise for women's liberation, attains at the end of her life some experience of comfort, elation and kindness in the arms of a man she could respect.
The story of their love is all the more touching for its brevity -- 17 months. Godwin, a reserved bachelor three years her senior, wrote of Wollstonecraft in 1796: ''I found a wounded heart, &, as that heart cast itself upon me, it was my ambition to heal it.'' William Hazlitt wrote of Godwin that he has ''less of the appearance of a man of genius, than any one who has given such decided and ample proofs of it,'' while a certain Mr. Horseman proclaimed that Godwin and Wollstonecraft were undoubtedly ''the two greatest men in the world.''
After three failed attempts to consummate their attraction, recorded concisely in Godwin's diary as ''chez moi,'' ''chez elle'' (twice), victory is finally denoted by ''chez elle toute'' -- surely one of history's most succinct sexual success reports. Wollstonecraft's diary indicated that while it was not entirely ''toute'' for her -- not the ''rapture'' of Imlay, her only other lover -- it was an experience of ''sublime tranquillity.''
Once starting their affair they meticulously practiced the most sophisticated birth control of the day: abstention for three days following menstruation and then frequent sex for the remainder of the month (frequency was thought to lower the possibility of conception.) Bingo! Within a few months Wollstonecraft was pregnant and these two outspoken opponents of marriage, married, though they maintained their separate abodes and their mutual, and separate, circles of acquaintances.
Meanwhile Godwin held fast to his belief that matrimony offers ''the most fertile sources of misery to mankind,'' while Wollstonecraft softened up considerably to her new marital status, declaring, ''a husband is a convenient part of the furniture of a house, unless he be a clumsy fixture.''
Deciding to have her baby at home with a midwife -- hospitals were rife with infection -- Wollstonecraft produced, after an 18-hour labor, a girl child on Aug. 30, 1797. But the placenta had not fully expelled itself and a doctor was called in to rip out the rest -- for four hours -- without anesthesia. She said afterward that she had not known pain before. The botched operation left her with an infection that killed her 11 days later. She was 38.
Her last words were that Godwin was ''the kindest, best man in the world.'' He recorded the precise time of her death in his diary followed by three trailing blank lines. In his memoir of his wife, he wrote that she had an ''unconquerable greatness of soul.'' One does not doubt him.
And, in turn, that daughter, the future Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley, sent forth, 20 years later, in 1818, what she called ''my hideous progeny'' in the most famous horror story of all time, ''Frankenstein.'' Thus the great Mary Wollstonecraft became grandmother to the most wounded of motherless children and his cautionary fable about the hubris of men, the fears of pregnancy, the dangers of child-rearing and the destruction and despair that ensue from the unloved child. The tale is chilling as legacy alone.
Two years earlier, Mary's half-sister, Fanny (Wollstonecraft's daughter by Imlay), had succeeded where her mother had failed, and killed herself with laudanum at age 22. ''The best thing I could do,'' she wrote, ''was to put an end to the existence of a being whose birth was unfortunate. . . . You will soon have the blessing of forgetting that such a creature ever existed.'' An eerie loss -- and choice of words -- indeed.
Who can say that we women are not now all members of the new genus Wollstonecraft so brazenly constructed? Or that each of us does not benefit? Gordon's book is worthy of its subject. It is also a welcome reminder of a brave woman who lived her brief and difficult life for us, whom she never knew. Or did she? Besides, according to Virginia Woolf, we're only three generations away from the promised land. Let's hope we all make it there, and see what the visionary Mary Wollstonecraft saw for us over two centuries ago.
Toni Bentley is the author, most recently, of ''The Surrender: An Erotic Memoir'' and ''Sisters of Salome.''
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Wednesday, May 25, 2005
Gerald Herbert/Associated Press
President Bush made his opposition to the stem cell bill known yesterday at the White House, showing off month-old Trey Jones, who was born as a result of one couple?s donation of frozen embryos to another.
May 25, 2005
House Approves a Stem Cell Research Bill Opposed by Bush
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG
WASHINGTON, May 24 - The House passed a bill on Tuesday to expand federal financing for embryonic stem cell research, defying a veto threat from President Bush, who appeared at the White House with babies and toddlers born of test-tube embryos and warned the measure "would take us across a critical ethical line."
The vote, 238 to 194 with 50 Republicans in favor, fell far short of the two-thirds majority required to overturn a presidential veto, setting up a possible showdown between Congress and Mr. Bush, who has never exercised his veto power. An identical bill has broad bipartisan support in the Senate; moments after the House vote, the Senate sponsors wrote to the Republican leader, Bill Frist, urging him to put it on the agenda.
The House action is the first vote on embryonic stem cell research since August 2001, when Mr. Bush opened the door to taxpayer financing for the studies, but only with strict limits. The new bill permits the government to pay for studies involving human embryos that are in frozen storage at fertility clinics, so long as couples conceiving the embryos certified that they had made a decision to discard them.
"The White House cannot ignore this vote," said the bill's chief Republican backer, Representative Michael N. Castle of Delaware, adding, "I'm elated."
But opponents also said they were elated. Representative Joseph R. Pitts, Republican of Pennsylvania, said: "I hate to lose, but I feel pretty good about this vote. We beat a veto-proof margin by 50 votes."
The big question now is what will happen in the Senate. Dr. Frist, a heart surgeon from Tennessee who supports the existing policy, is already facing intense pressure from conservatives over the issue of Mr. Bush's judicial nominees and does not seem eager to schedule a vote on stem cell research. He said last week that he wanted to check with his colleagues before doing so.
The House vote followed an impassioned lobbying campaign by advocates for patients, including Nancy Reagan. Mrs. Reagan, who became a strong backer of stem cell research as her husband struggled with Alzheimer's disease, telephoned fellow Republicans this week urging a yes vote, Mr. Castle said.
But Mr. Bush countered with a powerful one-two punch, throwing the full weight of the White House behind the opposition. On Friday, he issued a rare threat to veto the Castle bill. On Tuesday, just hours before the vote, he appeared in the East Room of the White House with families created by a rare but growing practice in which one couple donates its frozen embryos to another.
"The children here today remind us that there is no such thing as a spare embryo," Mr. Bush said, amid the squeals and coos of babies cradled in their mothers' arms. "Every embryo is unique and genetically complete, like every other human being. And each of us started out our life this way. These lives are not raw material to be exploited, but gifts."
The parents, who worked through a Christian adoption agency, applauded enthusiastically. When Mr. Bush said that "every human life is a precious gift of matchless love," a mother behind him on stage mouthed the word "Amen."
The White House event, on what conservative Christians and the president call an important "culture of life" issue, demonstrated just how far Mr. Bush is willing to assert himself on policy that goes to what he considers the moral heart of his presidency. In another sign of how important the issue is to conservatives, the House Republican leader, Tom DeLay of Texas, managed the opposition to the bill, also casting it in stark moral terms.
"An embryo is a person, a distinct internally directed, self-integrating human organism," Mr. DeLay said, adding, "We were all at one time embryos ourselves. So was Abraham. So was Muhammad. So was Jesus of Nazareth."
He went on: "The choice to protect a human embryo from federally funded destruction is not, ultimately, about the human embryo. It is about us, and our rejection of the treacherous notion that while all human lives are sacred, some are more sacred than others."
Human embryonic stem cells, isolated from human embryos for the first time in 1998, have the potential to grow into any cell or tissue in the body, and so hold great promise for treatment of disease. But the embryos are destroyed when the cells are extracted. So Mr. Bush, intending to discourage further embryo destruction, insisted in 2001 that federal financing be limited to studies of those stem cell colonies, or lines, that had already been created.
Instead, Mr. Bush is promoting research on adult stem cells, which are drawn from bone marrow and blood, including umbilical cord blood, and have narrower implications for medicine than embryonic stem cells. On Tuesday, the House voted 431 to 1 to approve a measure that would create umbilical cord blood banks to advance adult stem cell research.
But it was the embryonic stem cell debate that inflamed the passions of the House, sounding at various times like a lesson in cell biology, a theological discourse and a personal confessional. Lawmaker after lawmaker came to the House well to recount struggles with conscience and searing personal experiences with death and disease.
Representative Jim Langevin, Democrat of Rhode Island, rolled to the microphone in his motorized wheelchair to speak of his spinal cord injury, which he said could be helped by the research. Representative Jo Ann Emerson, Republican of Missouri, told of a young man named Cody, who had been paralyzed in a car accident at age 16 and asked her to rethink her opposition to embryonic stem cell studies.
"I later wrote a note to Cody's family telling them that even after hearing his story, I couldn't do as he asked," Ms. Emerson said, "and I have regretted writing that letter ever since."
But for every supporter with a compelling personal tale, there was an opponent like Representative Dan Lungren, Republican of California, whose brother has Parkinson's disease. "I've learned a lot of things from my brother," Mr. Lungren said, "But one of the things I learned most is that there is a difference between right and wrong."
The backers of the Senate measure, Senators Arlen Specter, Republican of Pennsylvania, and Tom Harkin, Democrat of Iowa, have scheduled a news conference for Wednesday to demand quick action. "I don't understand why Mr. Bush is doing this," Mr. Harkin said, adding, "I wish he would refrain from drawing lines in the sand."
Elisabeth Bumiller contributed reporting for this article.
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Marvi Lacar for The New York Times
Rich Cohen, 36, out with Scout and an audio book
May 26, 2005
Loud, Proud, Unabridged: It Is Too Reading!
By AMY HARMON
JIM HARRIS, a lifelong bookworm, cracked the covers of only four books last year. But he listened to 54, all unabridged. He listened to Harry Potter and "Moby-Dick," Don DeLillo and Stephen King. He listened in the car, eating lunch, doing the dishes, sitting in doctors' offices and climbing the stairs at work.
"I haven't read this much since I was in college," said Mr. Harris, 53, a computer programmer in Memphis. And yes, he does consider it "reading." "I dislike it when I meet people who feel listening is inferior," he said.
Fortunately for Mr. Harris, the ranks of the reading purists are dwindling. Fewer Americans are reading books than a decade ago, according to the National Endowment for the Arts, but almost a third more are listening to them on tapes, CD's and iPods.
For a growing group of devoted listeners, the popularity of audio books is redefining the notion of reading, which for centuries has been centered on the written word. Traditionally, it is also an activity that has required one's full attention.
But audio books, once seen as a kind of oral CliffsNotes for reading lightweights, have seduced members of a literate but busy crowd by allowing them to read while doing something else. Digital audio that can be zapped onto an MP3 player is also luring converts. The smallest iPod, the Shuffle, holds roughly four books; the newest ones include a setting that speeds up the narration without raising the pitch.
"I wish I had had this feature while listening to 'Crime and Punishment,' " said Lee Kyle, 41, a math teacher in Austin, Tex., who now listens in bed instead of reading. It's more relaxing, he said, and he doesn't have to bother his wife with the light.
Audio books, which still represent only about 3 percent of all books sold, do not exactly herald a return to the Homeric tradition. But their growing popularity has sparked debate among readers, writers and cultural critics about the best way to consume literature.
"I think every writer would rather have people read books, committed as we are to the word," said Frank McCourt, who won the Pulitzer Prize for his memoir, "Angela's Ashes." "But I'd rather have them listen to it than not at all."
To make the audio version of his books more tolerable, Mr. McCourt said, he insists on narrating them himself. "Actors are always doing this phony breathing," Mr. McCourt said.
Among the questions facing audio book connoisseurs are: Which is better suited to the format, fiction or nonfiction? Can a bad narrator ruin a great book? If you've listened to a book, have you really "read" it?
Rich Cohen, the author of "Tough Jews," has found short stories are best while walking his dog on the Upper West Side, because of the likelihood of distraction, and the difficulty in rewinding.
"Sometimes your dog will attack another dog, and you're pulled completely out of the book," explained Mr. Cohen, who has experimented with various genres since discovering he could purchase audio books from Apple's online music store.
A book about string theory by the physicist Brian Greene proved entirely unable to hold Mr. Cohen's auditory attention, as did "Hamlet." With "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance," however, he had the multitasking satisfaction of digesting a book he had always been curious about but did not want to devote the time to actually reading.
David Lipsky, another New York writer and frequent dog walker, said he often "shuffles" music on his iPod, and has similarly come to enjoy jumping among chapters of, say, James Joyce, Martin Amis and Al Franken as he circles the block.
Charlton Heston reading "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" proved a dud, even if it was sandwiched between Jeremy Irons reading "Lolita" and Robert Frost reading his own poems. "You keep waiting for him to announce that Kilimanjaro's been taken over by damned dirty talking apes," Mr. Lipsky said. "Now it's hard to read 'Kilimanjaro' without hearing Heston's voice."
The novelist Sue Miller said she prefers Henry James on tape because the narrator has untangled the complex sentences for her. But she found D. H. Lawrence unbearable. His notoriously repetitive prose "doesn't lend itself to an auditory experience," she said.
Some critics are dismayed at the migration to audio books. The virtue of reading, they say, lies in the communion between writer and reader, the ability to pause, to reread a sentence, and yes, read it out loud - to yourself. Listeners are opting for convenience, they say, at the expense of engaging the mind and imagination as only real reading can.
"Deep reading really demands the inner ear as well as the outer ear," said Harold Bloom, the literary critic. "You need the whole cognitive process, that part of you which is open to wisdom. You need the text in front of you."
The comedian Jon Stewart, an author of the mock history textbook "America (The Book)," opens the audio version by lampooning the format. "Welcome, nonreader," he intones. Listeners are advised that the listening experience "should not be considered a replacement for watching television."
Audio book aficionados face disdain from some book lovers, who tend to rhapsodize about the smell and feel of a book in their hands and the pleasure of being immersed in a story without having to worry about the car in the next lane.
Gloria Reiss, 51, of St. Louis, said her officemates correct her when she mentions having read a book.
"They'll say, 'You didn't read it, you just listened to it,' " said Ms. Reiss, who switched to audio when her two jobs and three poodles made it hard to find time to curl up on the couch. Recently a colleague refused her urging to take a Stephanie Plum mystery along on a long drive.
"She goes, 'I like to read my books,' " Ms. Reiss said, "like that makes her better than me."
Most audio book lovers argue that one is not better than the other. Some say it was not until they started listening to books that they realized how much of the language they were skimming over in the books they read on paper. And then there is the sheer pleasure of being read to.
Ms. Reiss's husband, Ken, says he remembers more of books that he hears, perhaps because he's simply wired that way. Levi Wallach, 36, of Vienna, Va., says he's a slow reader, "so it's much more efficient for me to listen while I do other things."
Libraries say the growth in circulation of audio books is outpacing overall circulation. Book clubs are increasingly made up of hybrid listener-readers, and the market for children's audio books is booming. Sales at Audible, the leading provider of digital audio books, surged from $5 million in 2001 to $34 million last year. Half of its subscribers are new to audio books.
Still, a certain stigma lingers. Dan Barber, a chef, said he felt compelled to ask Louis Menand's permission to listen to his book, "The Metaphysical Club," on CD when Mr. Menand dined at his Greenwich Village restaurant, Blue Hill, last month.
Mr. Menand assented, but his dining companion, Adam Gopnik, the New Yorker writer, looked put off, Mr. Barber said. Or maybe Mr. Barber was projecting his own ambivalence about audio, as evidenced by his consumption of Mr. Gopnik's anthology, "Paris to the Moon."
"I read parts of it on tape," Mr. Barber said. "But I also read the whole book - what do you call it? Traditional-style?"
John Hamburg, 34, notes that audio books can be shared in a way that printed ones cannot. Mr. Hamburg and Mr. Barber, high school friends, were both sobbing while listening to "Tuesdays With Morrie" during a drive, Mr. Hamburg said.
Listening to authors read their own memoirs introduces an intimacy that cannot be achieved without the audio, Mr. Hamburg said. He found Bill Clinton's thick autobiography a bit daunting, for instance, but said listening to it "was kind of like being with an old friend."
Mr. Hamburg, a screenwriter, says he limits his audio habit to biography, eschewing fiction out of respect for authors whom he imagines did not intend for their creative work to be read "when you're doing 30 minutes on your elliptical trainer."
But when he came across the audio version of "The Kite Runner" online, it was hard to resist downloading it. The hardcover version of the novel, a coming-of-age story set in Afghanistan, has been sitting unopened on Mr. Hamburg's night table for weeks. It's still there.
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Ann Johnsson for The New York Times
Warner McPherson, a k a Hershey Ultra-Omni, took over the runway at the ball
Ann Johansson for The New York Times
ATTITUDE: C. J. Charles-Niles at the Ultra-Omni party.
May 22, 2005
Still Striking a Pose
By GUY TREBAY
Los Angeles
SELVIN KOOL-AID GIVENCHY was stalking the runway, letting fly his hands and his wild invective. "Work it, girls! Serve it like a legend!" said Mr. Givenchy, who is something of an underground legend himself, what with his Moms Mabley mug, his colossally oversize sweatshirt and a mouth that would make that raunchy comedian's seem snowflake pure. "Remember," Mr. Givenchy commanded the ladies, although ladies was not the word he employed. "I am in charge of the girls!"
The girls were not girls, of course, and the boys not boys. The runway was a makeshift theater on which, over the course of a long evening, the girls and the boys would stomp and pose and parade and dance attired in zoot suits or chiffon dresses or else very little at all. The gathering was a celebration of the 25th anniversary of the New York-based House of Ultra-Omni, one of the last of the original drag queen houses whose balls proliferated in the 1980's, then faded from memory and, seemingly, disappeared.
Whatever vague awareness most Americans may have of this bygone scene probably comes from Madonna's "Vogue," the influential 1990 hit that was either an act of homage to the underground that inspired it or one of creative larceny. A fuller introduction was provided by "Paris Is Burning," Jennie Livingston's 1991 documentary, a remarkably clear-eyed appraisal of the epoch and the quirky "legends" who gave it birth.
No one can say for sure when or how voguing seemed to vanish, and with it the houses that brought it into the world. Those houses constituted groups of gay men organized and run by "mothers" and "fathers," populated by "children" and named for fashion designers no one involved had ever met. Then and now, even people who were in on the scene might have been forgiven for assuming that its practitioners had moved on in the decade after "Vogue" and "Paris Is Burning," or, as likely, were now dead.
The reality, it turns out, is astonishingly different. True, AIDS decimated the ball world, carrying away many of its founders. But far from fading out, the balls survived and are being revived by a new generation that has exported them from the urban centers where they first flourished to the Sun Belt and the Midwest.
Balls are now being staged almost every weekend in cities like St. Louis, Atlanta, Philadelphia, Washington and Detroit. The House of Ultra-Omni alone has branches in 10 states. A dozen or more Web sites are devoted to the scene, which also has its own magazine and newsletter and is the subject of a new documentary that brings things vividly up to date. "How Do I Look" was filmed over the past decade by the German filmmaker Wolfgang Busch; fresh from making the rounds of an academic circuit still eager for tales from the gender front, the film will be released on DVD next month.
"People thought it all ended with 'Paris Is Burning,' " said Wayne Tanks, the father of the Wisconsin chapter of the House of Ultra-Omni. Along with dozens of other children, Mr. Tanks had traveled to Los Angeles to celebrate his house's quarter-century mark. "But we're still here."
In Los Angeles this was made abundantly clear as members arrived to represent venerable houses like Ninja, Versace, Mugler, Cavalli, Moschino, Bizarre, Blahnik, Givenchy, Balenciaga and Prestige. Mothers and fathers and children from each of these clans descended on a Westin hotel near L.A.X., curiously resplendent beings whose existence gave proof to the survival of an implausible phenomenon conjured from the raw material of hard lives.
They came to commemorate, to celebrate, to dance and posture and do serious battle on a catwalk in an overlighted banquet room. They also came, if one may borrow back a phrase from Madonna, to strike a pose.
"When I first heard about the houses, I thought, this culture is so underground," said Brandon Harp, a member of the Atlanta House of Ultra-Omni. "Then I found that, in places like Kentucky, where I had never been, people knew who I am and what my best category is."
MR. HARP arrived in Los Angeles prepared to walk in a category called Butch Queen Realness, a kind of extravagantly performed commentary on self-presentation, in which an out gay man impersonates an apparently straight or closeted gay man by wearing a costume that exaggeratedly telegraphs masculinity. Mordant social commentary has always been at the core of the voguing balls, and long before academia institutionalized the notion that gender is performance, the ball children were tartly making the same point at elaborate fetes where competing groups vied to outdo each other at caricaturing the masks of sex. Wealth and power, it should be mentioned, also tend to come in for some sharp appraisal at these gatherings, critiques the more pointed because ball children have historically possessed little of either.
Throughout their history, ball children have strutted down improvised runways in categories like "executive realness," "femme attitude" and "sex-siren effect." The costumes they donned were most memorably of the feather boa sort. But, just as often their "drag" runs to "executive" suits and wingtips or else do-rags and Timberlands worn by Down Low types.
In the past the ball children battled in gay clubs and leased Elks halls. They took trophies and earned credibility and status on a circuit that was both intricately networked and, at the same time, so seemingly informal one would think the balls were arranged ad hoc. All that has changed, Mr. Tanks said. Thirty members of his house split their time between working up ensembles for catwalk competitions and creating outreach programs promoting "awareness and prevention of H.I.V." and other forms of sexually transmitted disease.
Social service was a galaxy away from anyone's concerns at the Westin hotel on this spring evening, as the ball children tucked into a dinner of poached chicken and mesclun with slices of Brie. The meal was a marked departure from balls of the past, where the food, if there was any, tended to be chips or pretzels or anything useful at soaking up booze. If not an entirely sober occasion, the 25th anniversary of the House of Ultra-Omni was a Kiwanis picnic by contrast with the frenzied, and often drug-stoked, blowouts of earlier days.
Still, it was a serious ball, serious meaning frivolous to a nearly demented degree. As Mr. Givenchy repeated any number of times, "The girls better serve it serious, they better work, and they better come out here punishing my runway with a nasty attitude and a sickening walk." Irony being mother's milk in the ball world, words like sick and nasty and over (or "ovah") are terms of the highest approbation: Webster's take note.
Of all the contributions the ball world has made to culture, dance is probably the most durable, athough that oddly seems to have escaped much scholarly notice. "Voguing is truly an evolution of ancient African dance forms rehearsed and refined into a form of first-world party artistry," explained Muhammad Ultra-Omni, real name Salaudin Muhammad, before taking to the stage in a white linen suit and a white straw hat whose crown was cut out to allow for his fountain of dreadlocks.
Once onstage Mr. Muhammad put in play the stylized walks and poses and dips and spins and chest poppings and stupefying dead drops that have qualified him for legendary status on a scene where legend is a hard-won formal honorific.
"Break dancers get together and do stuff like this, and it's fully accepted," said Willi Ninja, surely the most celebrated dancer ever produced by the ballrooms, speaking in a mainstream sense. "If Madonna does voguing, it's O.K.," he added. "But when the ball children dance, even now, people say, 'Oh, it's a bunch of crazy queens throwing themselves on the floor.' "
Yet even the most skeptical observer would have trouble disputing that real artistry is involved when Muhammad or Ninja takes the floor. And not even a churl could keep from being charmed by the House of Cavalli, a posse of refrigerator-size men who swept into the Westin ballroom near midnight wearing demure French twists and dresses of diaphanous chiffon that had to have been cut from acre-sized bolts.
To the chanted (and entirely unprintable) exhortations of Mr. Givenchy, each performer took his thrashing, popping, stalking, prancing or whirling turn on the runway and posed and performed in a way that one contestant described as "so nasty and ovah it's sick."
The clear high point of the evening, for this observer at least, was reached when Warner McPherson, also known as Hershey Ultra-Omni, pranced onstage with his lean body oiled and naked but for a G-string kitted out with plastic Wal-Mart foliage. In a blur that lasted less than three minutes, Mr. McPherson miraculously managed to conjure the entire history of voguing in a performance so stylized and manic that inspired is hardly an adequate word. It was possessed.
"Work it, Miss Hershey! Bring it! Serve it! Show them girls how it's really done!" The voice belonged to Kevin Burrus, or Kevin Ultra-Omni, who helped found the house of that name 25 years ago in New York. "You know, seeing Hershey makes me emotional," explained Mr. Burrus, as his prot?g? performed. "After all that we have been through, with the AIDS and the drugs and the death and the homophobia, I see Hershey dancing and realize that the ball children are still strong and still out here, carrying on."
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It ain't over 'til the man in the toupee sings
Trump Is Desperate
It's not pretty.
By Daniel Gross
Posted Tuesday, May 24, 2005, at 2:24 PM PT
Is Trump over?
The Apprentice was a brilliant career move for Donald Trump, setting off a virtuous cycle of egomaniacal profiteering. The TV show brought free advertisements for his Atlantic City casino, promotions for his apartment projects in New York and Chicago, endorsements, and book deals. That moneymaking publicity, in turn, fueled the TV show.
But now, after a glorious year for The Donald, this cycle is turning vicious. Ratings have fallen, and Trump has engaged in increasingly strange publicity stunts that don't bring him any income at all and that may end up costing him money. It turns out that Trump's desperation is almost as compelling as his success.
In its first season, which ran from January through April 2004, The Apprentice was a runaway?and surprise?hit for NBC and Trump. The finale attracted a massive audience: an average of 28 million viewers. Trump moved to exploit the success and build buzz for the next season, churning out books like Stephen King. The spring of 2004 brought Trump: How To Get Rich and Trump: The Way to the Top: The Best Business Advice I Ever Received. The same month, Trump began to appear in advertisements for Visa. His assistant, Carolyn Kepcher, rushed to get Carolyn 101 into print for the fall of 2004, and it did well.
Despite all the buzz and collateral promotion, viewership dropped sharply in the second season. The September 2004 debut drew 14 million viewers. The finale, an excruciating three-hour extravaganza, drew fewer than 17 million viewers.
Trump clearly felt pressure to do something drastic to attract attention for the third season. But he didn't have a best-selling book to plug or a new endorsement gig. So Trump decided to do the promotional work himself. He married his longtime companion, Slovenian supermodel Melania Knauss. And apparently, the only weekend Mar-a-Lago was available for the nuptials was in late January 2005, just when Apprentice 3 was about to start.
The Apprentice's third season was marketed as "street smarts vs. book smarts," but the conceit failed to capture viewers' imaginations. Ratings fell again. And so as plans were laid to expand the franchise to include a Martha Stewart spinoff this fall, Trump careened from moneymaking endorsements and book deals to cheap publicity stunts.
On May 12?the same day Episode 16 aired?Trump appeared on MSNBC's Hardball with Chris Matthews (synergy, baby!) and slammed the design of the Freedom Tower proposed for the World Trade Center site. The following week, Trump engineered a classic example of what historian Daniel Boorstin labeled a pseudo-event. On May 18, Trump held a press conference at which he announced he could rebuild the Twin Towers?even though he doesn't control the site and couldn't hope to raise the funds to rebuild there. This time, the non-NBC media world played along. (In the New York Times, Jennifer Steinhauer sneaked a fine bit of sarcasm past her editors: "It was clearly a coincidence that Mr. Trump held his news conference a day before the season finale of his network reality show, The Apprentice.") The same week, Trump also succumbed to the ultimate in celebrity abasement?talking about your relationship on Larry King Live, which he and Melania did on May 17. All to no avail. The finale of Season Three attracted just 13.7 million viewers, as realityblurred.com notes. It got trounced by CSI.
While the TV franchise is listing, the collateral products are tanking. When King asked Trump how his new book of golf tips is doing, Trump responded: "It's selling like hot cakes." Yeah, like hot cakes at a convention of people suffering from celiac disease. The only thing in the six figures about Trump: The Best Golf Advice I Ever Received is its Amazon.com ranking.
So what does Trump have planned for this fall? Well, he's already starting an online university, which will offer neither degrees nor grades. And we can probably expect more desperate publicity stunts?perhaps a crisis in the marriage, to be discussed at length on Dateline. Or maybe he'll show up in Baghdad to critique the reconstruction of Iraq and offer his own expertise, an event sure to be covered by the Today Show.
And as Playbill notes, Trump, TV producer Mark Burnett, and Broadway producers Barry and Fran Weissler plan to turn The Apprentice into a musical for the spring of 2006. (That sound you hear is New York Times critic Ben Brantley sharpening his talons.) This strikes me as the most desperate move of all. Broadway is a notorious cesspool for outsiders' capital. Besides, the Great White Way already has a long-running smash hit that's a tribute to Trump: Hairspray.
Daniel Gross (www.danielgross.net) writes Slate's "Moneybox" column. You can e-mail him at moneybox@slate.com.
Fred Moore, the founder of the Homebrew Club. Apple Computer's Stephen Wozniak came to the first meeting
May 22, 2005
Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out, Start the Computer Revolution
By ROGER LOWENSTEIN
LET'S get this straight: Jerry Garcia invented the Internet while he was tripping on acid. No, actually, it was Ken Kesey, who thought computers were the next thing after drugs - which, according to John Markoff, they really were.
"What the Dormouse Said: How the 60's Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry" (Viking, 287 pages) is Mr. Markoff's hymn to the 1960's, and to the social idealists and, well, acid freaks who wanted to use computers to promote an agenda of sharing, openness and personal growth.
His brief is that the longhairs liberated computers from I.B.M. and the military industrial complex and profoundly shaped the technology that is ubiquitous today. Formerly sequestered behind forbidding glass walls, computers went on to become accessible, usable and friendly. The industry had its consciousness raised - became a vehicle of togetherness.
Grant, at least, that computers became cool. During my adolescence, computers were evil. You remember HAL - the electronic demon of "2001: A Space Odyssey." Computers made people powerless. They represented war, capitalism and grownups. Then (I think I was out for coffee) kids took over. So now computers are about freedom. As I explained to my daughter the other night, "Turn the darn thing off." Read a book, for Pete's sake.
According to Mr. Markoff, a senior writer for The New York Times and the author of other books on computers, the counterculture made it happen. He demonstrates that a good many of the electronics freaks who were working on inventing the future in the 60's and early 70's were, simultaneously, soaked in drugs, antiwar politics and weird ideas.
At the heart of his story is Doug Engelbart, a Navy veteran trained in radar during World War II who became obsessed with the idea that computers could augment human intelligence. Mr. Engelbart set up a research group at Stanford that, despite its Pentagon funding, became an outpost for young, creative and sometimes radicalized engineers.
In the 1960's, computers were machines for math - for "computing." Mr. Engelbart saw much more. His team invented or envisioned "every significant aspect of today's computing world" - point-and-click screen control, text editing, e-mail and networking. Mr. Kesey, the writer, was shown how Mr. Engelbart's computers worked and declared them to be "the next thing after acid." Even Mr. Engelbart, a white-shirted pied piper, experimented with LSD, encounter groups, Chairman Mao and est. It's a wonder he got anything done.
Actually, he didn't. In 1968, he demonstrated computer interactivity at a conference that wowed everyone and that the author, appropriately, dubs the "computing world's Woodstock." And then - nothing. Too dreamy to part with his technology until perfected, Mr. Engelbart never got around to developing commercial applications. His staff gradually defected to Xerox, which was actually interested in selling products. Xerox ultimately blew its commercial opportunity, but its technology would be widely cloned.
Occasionally, the tale splinters like an acid trip that goes on too long, with side trips and fervent hyperboles that, in a strange way, do put one in mind of the 60's. Engineers show up at Stanford, protest the war and drop out to join communes. One of them will "alter the world's politics"- by which Mr. Markoff means the engineering student staged a fast against the R.O.T.C.
Stewart Brand, one of the most interesting figures in the book, shepherds Mr. Kesey through an acid trip, an event to which Mr. Kesey invited guitarist Jerry Garcia and his band - giving rise to the Grateful Dead. Then, Mr. Brand turns up as the cameraman at Mr. Engelbart's computing Woodstock.
This is the kind of psychedelics-to-circuits connection that Mr. Markoff makes much of - sometimes too much. Anyway, Mr. Brand went on to found the Whole Earth Catalog, a very hip compendium of random information that was, as I recall, perfectly useless. But Mr. Brand had a singular insight with regard to information - "it wants to be free."
When Whole Earth got to be a drag, Mr. Brand staged a demise party, at which he stunned guests by giving away $20,000, his original investment. There was a debate over how to spend it. Came the sage investment advice, "Give it back to the Indians." It was decided that Fred Moore, an ardent pacifist of anti-R.O.T.C. fame, would safeguard the funds, which meant putting them in a tin can and burying them. Did this have anything to do with computers? Actually, it did.
Money made Mr. Moore unhappy. Computers excited him, as did a sense of community. In 1975, he founded an enthusiasts' society, the Homebrew Computer Club. Hundreds of hobbyists came to the first meeting, including Stephen Wozniak, who went on to co-found Apple Computer. The idea was that everyone would share information. Mr. Moore believed that his club "should have nothing to do with making money."
But it did. Twenty-three entrepreneurial seedlings, including Apple, would trace their roots to the club. Mr. Markoff writes, "The deep irony is that Fred Moore lit the spark . . . toward the creation of powerful information tools." This is hyperbole. Lit a spark would be fair.
The first commercial PC, the Altair 8800, had been developed - in New Mexico, 1,000 miles away - before Homebrew ever assembled. But the attendants did, excitedly, pass around a copy of software written for the Altair, which had been developed by the infant Micro-Soft, as it was then known. Bill Gates, its 20-year-old tycoon-to-be, sarcastically objected to the pirating of his product. "Hardware must be paid for, but software is something to share." Needless to say, Mr. Moore's view of sharing was not endorsed by Mr. Gates. At this point, Marx and the history of the software industry diverged.
IN Mr. Markoff's view, the PC era, which placed each user in charge of an isolated box, was a long detour from the higher aim of information sharing conceived by Mr. Engelbart. This purpose was vindicated by the Internet. The tension still persists between profit-seeking publishers and, ahem, idealists who would love to share what belongs to others - music rights, for instance. According to the author, this is today "the bitterest conflict facing the world's economy."
Such overwrought claims aside, at the core of "Dormouse" lies a valid and original historical point. Computer technology did turn out to be creative, spirited and even freeing. Most of this was a result of the fabulous advances in the power of the microchip. But perhaps, also, in the tactile clicking of the mouse, you can hear the faint strumming of a guitar.
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Tuesday, May 24, 2005
Marissa Mayer of Google says it has no plans now to track users' behavior
May 23, 2005
E-COMMERCE REPORT
With Its Home Page, Google Could Get a Bit Closer to Its Users
By BOB TEDESCHI
WILL Internet users get personal with Google?
The company began testing a service last week that lets users build a customized Google home page filled with news, stock quotes and other features that crowd similar pages on popular portals like Yahoo and MSN.
As part of this effort, Google is offering headline feeds from a narrow selection of information sites like BBC News and, in the future, it will allow users to add feeds from their favorite sites. The customized pages can also list local movies and weather, stock market quotes and driving directions, and can display a preview of a user's in-box from Google's Gmail service.
The service gives Google another potential entry point in the battle to deliver ads tailored to a user's stated or implied tastes or product searches - ads that marketers have been willing to pay far more for than they do for standard banners displayed to everyone who visits a site.
Google says it has no immediate plans to display advertisements based on, say, the user's location or clicking habits while using the service, but analysts say that such a move is not necessary, at least in the near future, for the company to capitalize on it.
"This is all about getting better search results, to keep people coming back to the site," said Charlene Li, an analyst with Forrester Research. "Right now, Google knows nothing about their users. But if they can get the user's permission for this, and give them better search results based on what stories they've read or e-mails they've gotten on the site in the past, that's where it pays off." In that respect, Ms. Li said, the personalized pages are closely aligned with another recent Google initiative, My Search History, which, with the user's permission, keeps a record of previous Google queries in an effort to deliver better search results.
Web search ads from Google, Yahoo and others represented baby steps in the direction of personalized advertising, giving marketers the means to reach prospective customers when they searched for words related to the company's products. But those ads only go so far, because Internet users who type in "Ford trucks," for instance, could be history buffs, not prospective buyers.
Google's new approach could help marketers solve that problem, by following the logic of both users' reading habits and searches on the site. If users add a feed of car reviews to their home page, and swap e-mail messages with friends about buying a new truck, for instance, Google's search results could be customized to focus on that activity. Car manufacturers, meanwhile, would be far more interested in reaching those searchers, and would likely bid higher for the right to show them ads.
The idea that Google would be analyzing the content of e-mail messages to place relevant ads next to them sparked controversy when the Gmail service was introduced. The service's privacy policy indicates that the ads are chosen based on keywords found in the currently displayed message, not on past messages. The home page effort follows closely on the heels of another Google project, the Web Accelerator, which could help it deliver highly personalized ads in the future. With that service, which the company began testing earlier this month, users download software that stores copies of popular Web pages, or pages the user repeatedly visits, on their own computers.
When users type in the address of one of those pages, it loads instantly, because it does not have to travel over the Internet to get to the computer. Because Accelerator tracks the user's surfing activity, it could be used to discern potential commercial interests and display relevant ads, perhaps in tandem with the home page service. Marissa Mayer, Google's director of consumer Web products, said the company had no immediate plans to commercialize the Accelerator service, or any of the other services that track a user's behavior.
"Thinking long term, my gut sense is that, yes, there will be a search engine that knows more about me and as a result does a better job than Google does today," Ms. Mayer said. "It's my hope that that search engine is us, but it's a further-reaching thing." But trends in the marketplace suggest that advertisers could put increasing pressure on the company to offer such services sooner. Claria, formerly known as the Gator Corporation, earlier this month said that it was developing a service that would allow any site to offer personalized Web pages, using their own content or that of other publishers.
With that service, called PersonalWeb, a site like Yahoo could allow its visitors to receive material from various online publishers or from within a publisher's site, without forcing them to be specific about which articles and sources they want to see. Instead, the service would track the users' surfing habits and automatically generate pages that reflected what they typically read. Ads, based on the user's overall surfing activity, would be shown on the user's home page, and revenues would be split between Claria and the Web site.
According to comScore MediaMetrix, an Internet statistics firm, 26 million people, or 23 percent of Yahoo's visitors in April, used its customized page service, known as My Yahoo. The service's users spent more than twice as much time at the portal as the average Yahoo visitor does, and viewed more than twice as many pages. Put another way, comScore said, My Yahoo users account for 23 percent of all Yahoo visitors, but they represent 49 percent of total time spent and 51 percent of pages viewed. Yahoo would not disclose how much advertising revenue My Yahoo brings in.
Claria said "tens of millions" of Internet users allow it to track their Web surfing - or, at least, the surfing of whoever uses their computer. The privacy policy for Claria's advertising products promises that it will never associate a user's name with surfing activity, and because the company only tracks the clicks on a computer, it cannot necessarily know who is visiting different sites from one hour to the next.
Claria's users agree to the tracking in exchange for free software that helps them fill out forms automatically or gives weather information, among other things. Assuming Claria attracts publishers willing to offer its PersonalWeb service, the incentive for users will merely be a more customized Web experience.
The same goes for Google's home page service. But some privacy advocates say they believe that as Google entices users to agree to surveillance of their online activities, it must do more to prove it deserves their trust. Ari Schwartz, a policy analyst at the Center for Democracy and Technology, a research firm, said it gives Google a pretty good picture of what people are doing online.
Mr. Schwartz said that the company had been "above the board" when disclosing privacy issues raised by some of its products. Ms. Mayer of Google pointed out that when the company released its desktop search product last year, it asked administrators of computers with multiple users - like those in cybercafes - not to download it lest they inadvertently gather their users' surfing activity. But, Mr. Schwartz added: "They need to do a better job at educating people about how this could impact their privacy."
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Start: Michael Schumacher leads the field
F1 > European GP, 2004-05-30 (Nürburgring): Sunday race
European GP: Ferrari preview
Racing series F1
Date 2005-05-24
The European Grand Prix used to move around, taking place at a variety of circuits, but it has had an almost permanent home at the Nürburgring, which has hosted this race nine times, including every year since 1997, except that in '97 and '98, just to confuse things, it was known as the Luxembourg GP.
Although the current circuit has been in use for over two decades, it is still referred to as the "New 'Ring," by those who remember the daunting 22 kilometres of the old Nordschleife track, that was eventually deemed too dangerous for modern grand prix cars.
At about the same time that the antiquated track was pensioned off, Dieter Gundel was beginning his motor racing career, working in electronics. Today he is Head of Electronics at the race tracks for Scuderia Ferrari Marlboro.
"Twenty years ago, electronics was just beginning to become the "hot item" in motor racing," says the German. "Ever since then it has developed from something that is quite useful and gives a little bit of an advantage into an element that is absolutely essential. Without electronics, nothing turns, nothing blinks, nothing does anything."
Progress on electronics was slow until the advent of the computer and the first advantages seen on the cars were chiefly in terms of providing increased power. "We have to admit that the original ideas came from road cars and it is not a case of motor racing leading the development," continues Gundel.
"The most obvious change was the switch from putting fuel in the engine with a carburettor to using fuel injection. It gave far greater control and allowed you to adjust more parameters."
The other element that moved electronic development forward was the arrival of the turbocharged engines in the 80s. The turbocharger was quite a delicate piece of equipment and needed more accurate control, for elements such as the waste-gate.
"This is how electronics muscled its way into the sport," recalls Gundel. "We had so much electronics it was a case of picking the area that gave the biggest advantage and of course one team would come up with something and the others would follow. Technology has moved at a rapid rate."
"If you compare the power of calculation we have on the car nowadays with that of twenty years ago, you could not run a small computer game for kids with the power we had on the cars back then!"
Once the miracle of electronics had reached a point where it was taken for granted, the specialists in this field came under ever increasing pressure to come up with ever more sophisticated systems that were smaller, lighter and more resistant to vibration and especially to heat.
"The amount of wiring on the car has decreased significantly over the years," says Gundel. "For example, we now use copper wires that are no thicker than a human hair for sensors for example. The wiring per metre is a fraction of what we had. We use more intelligent sensors that now communicate via digital signals, which is another technology that has come from road cars.
The hardware side has reduced in weight and size and technology means our experience has grown. In the past we used military connectors from tanks and airplanes, built to last for 5 years of use. It was good for F1 because not even we could break them. But if I came today with one of these connectors and showed it to (Chief Designer) Rory Byrne he would have a heart attack!
Today, electronics is used in every aspect of the car, but its most obvious use is in running the engine. "You have to inject fuel and you have to fire the spark," maintains Gundel. "But on top of this is all the diagnostic monitoring, the back up systems and pumps. The diagnostic side has become far more important this year with engines having to last two race weekends."
"We might have more than 20 sensors on the engine for diagnostics alone, apart from those used to actually run the engine. To be honest, for us here at Ferrari, this was not such a big change from the past, as we already had a fantastic record of reliability and that was partly down to our monitoring systems."
The new rules, with the cars staying in parc ferme in between qualifying and the race, has also made the role of electronics more important, as software changes are one of the few areas that can be worked on.
"Apart from the engine, other areas where we can tune for performance using electronics are traction control, engine braking and differential performance. These are the only legal areas where we are allowed to work," explains Gundel. "While the car is in parc ferme, we have the model of our strategies on the computer and we can tune them and are allowed to upload all our modifications into the car before the race."
"Now, we analyse the performance of our cars on Friday and Saturday and try to improve areas that were not perfect, by running simulations. We try to combine all these tunings to give an overall improvement on the car without having to run the car. It is not all down to technology though and you still need to use the human brain. Sometimes it is our best friend!"
So will this weekend on home turf at the Nürburgring be a chance for Gundel to catch up with old friends from his racing past? "Not really," he says with a hint of embarrassment. "As a child I was not at all interested in motor racing and when I started working with Bosch back in 1985, I stayed in the laboratory and did not go to the tracks. But when Data Logging and Telemetry became more common I would go to the occasional race."
"At first the racing drivers were very suspicious of Data Logging and regarded it as a spy system. Now, the good drivers know they can improve with the help of the data and they spend a lot of time studying it. But to get back to the question, no the Nurburgring will not be a special weekend for me, except that I always find it a bit disturbing because all the people around me speak German!"
-ferrari
