My View From Las Vegas
Tuesday, April 26, 2005
Race winner Fernando Alonso celebrates
F1 > San Marino GP, 2005-04-24 (Imola): Sunday race
Image by LAT Photographic
San Marino GP: Winners' press conference
Racing series F1
Date 2005-04-24
San Marino Grand Prix FIA winners' press conference transcript with
1. Fernando Alonso (Renault), 1h27m41.921s
2. Michael Schumacher (Ferrari), 1h27m42.136s
3. Jenson Button (BAR), 1h27m52.402s
Q: Fernando, what a blistering final 11 laps of the race, talk us through those closing stages?
Fernando Alonso: It was probably one of the best fights I have had. I knew that Michael was more than one second faster than me so my only chance was to hold him up a little bit in the middle of the corners and then to be on the throttle a little bit earlier than him, just to have this little space for the straight and it worked well. We had a two or three corners where we were very close, and I was doing my maximum. The tyres and the car were not performing perfectly and I knew that.
Q: In the very closing stages of the race, you were quite close to slower traffic in front of you and it looked as though you were matching their pace, perhaps staying back from the traffic.
Fernando Alonso: Yes, the last ten laps I had the Red Bull and the Williams in front and I was hoping not to catch them because maybe I would lose a little bit of downforce and Michael may be able to overtake me. So in the really slow chicanes and in the slow corners I was braking more than normal, maybe, just to protect my rear tyres and just to keep a gap if possible.
Q: Was there ever a moment when a small voice said in your mind 'settle for second place, don't make a race of this, you're leading the championship?'
Fernando Alonso: No. (Laughter) I was always hoping for the win after Kimi retired and I had only one picture for the race, that I was winning the race. I was ready to fight for the last laps, I really wanted the victory here.
Q: Michael, what a day, from 13th on the grid, obviously slowed down a lot in traffic but once they came in for their earlier pit stops -- you had a longer first stint -- the race became yours.
Michael Schumacher: Yeah, indeed, that was obviously the strategy due to the weather conditions and position we had been after yesterday's qualifying. I am happy in one way for the race, I'm obviously quite excited but naturally, on the other hand, I'm a bit disappointed after what happened to me this morning. If you think what would have happened if this didn't happen it would have been the perfect day for us. But here you go, we have second place, we have stunning pace and performance, that's what we take out of this race after a tremendous effort and work from everyone in the team: test team, engineers, test drivers, Luca Badoer, Marc Gene. Everyone was just flat-out working on the limit and it paid out. I have to say a big big thank you to Bridgestone who have suffered at the start of the season from some (bad) publicity and I think they get back some very good ones pretty soon. This was the first step and there is more to come.
Q: Tell us what did happen this morning when you went wide at Rivazza in qualifying?
Michael Schumacher: Basically something similar to what happened to me on Friday during free practice. There is a little bump into this corner and due to the fact that we have a heavier fuel load we brake a bit earlier and I just hit this bump, heavily enough to unload the front wheel and you're on maximum brake pressure and it just locked up and once it is locked you are just lost, you cannot really recover. I don't think that is an excuse, that is just the facts. I am disappointed that it happened to me. In one way I should not be too worried because I don't do too many mistakes, but one is enough and it is a sad one.
Q: You passed Jenson in very spectacular fashion at the Variante Alta, but did you have any thoughts about overtaking Fernando in those closing stages? Were you looking at a specific place or just waiting for an opportunity?
Michael Schumacher: I was helped a little bit by the two Williams guys, who did a... I don't know what they did to each other into Acque Minerale, they put some dust on the circuit at some stage, and Jenson just slipped on the dust, which gave me a run at him. Otherwise I don't think it would have been possible. With Fernando it was slightly different, because he struggled with his performance in a way and he was not that quick any more in the acceleration areas. I had a couple of areas where I thought I could have had a go but it wasn't quite enough to finally do it. I tried, we got very close in a couple of corners, but he did a great race and did not make mistakes but that is why he won the race and I got second.
Q: Jenson, switching to you, great to finally be on the podium.
Jenson Button: Yeah, definitely. It has been a tough few races for us already this season. It's the same sort of situation that Michael's been in. We have all worked so hard since the last race to turn things around and we have. We are not yet on the same pace as Ferrari but they have done a fantastic job. I know they have been working night and day to turn this car around and I would just like to say thank-you to them, because it is a different car and I'm very positive that we can keep making these improvements throughout the year.
Q: How did your pace early on compare with Fernando's?
Jenson Button: We were suffering a little bit with our fuel load. When the fuel load got a bit lower we were very competitive. I don't know if Alonso was slowing down but I was able to catch him a little bit towards the end of the stints. But as soon as we put the fuel back in we were struggling again. It doesn't matter any more. I'm very happy to be here on the podium. We have got so much information from this race, it is the first one we have finished this year and so it is great to be back on the podium and I think we are going to be strong when we arrive in Barcelona.
Q: Fernando, pressure doesn't get any greater than it was today but nonetheless, the Spanish Grand Prix in two weeks' time is going to be a serious event!
Fernando Alonso: Yeah, after three victories, maybe I have a strong point for me in the championship and I hope the people enjoy the race. I know the atmosphere will be amazing, it will be completely full from Friday to Sunday and as I said before, we are at a good moment for me and the team and hopefully we can finish the race, and I am sure that with the performance we have, we can get a podium again. So I really hope it will be a big party for everyone.
Q: Fernando, three in a row, you must feel on top of the world!
Fernando Alonso: On top of the championship. On top of the world I don't think anyone can beat that. It's true that it's the third (win) for myself and the fourth for the team. We knew that here would be a difficult weekend but even without that, the performance was good. It was competitive, our race pace was not like the Ferrari but anyway, with an advantage on the grid and being conservative over the last couple of laps with Michael, I think I was able to win and this is probably the best of the three I've had so far.
Q: What did you think of the pace of McLaren early in the race?
Fernando Alonso: I don't know what fuel load he had. Obviously during the first two laps he was very quick, after that he was opening the gap at maybe two tenths a lap, not more, so probably we hope he had less fuel than us.
Q: What about those last 12 laps, what is it like to have Michael Schumacher breathing down your neck?
Fernando Alonso: Well, it was difficult but in the end I managed to be first. Obviously Michael was much quicker than me, more than one second quicker, and I knew that my only possibility was first not to catch the people in front of me and second in the corners where he had the opportunity (to pass) to brake a little bit more in the corner before and have better traction than him. I was playing this game at every corner and at the end it was OK.
Q: He had a couple of looks around you, didn't he?
Fernando Alonso: Yeah, there were two moments when we were very close but I think everything was under control. Probably my engineers were more excited than me in the car because every lap they continued to tell me four laps to go, three laps to go, two laps to go. I can do it.
Q: Michael, did you feel that you were being controlled? Was it quite frustrating behind Fernando?
Michael Schumacher: No. It would be a quite negative approach to see it that way. It was quite an exciting fight. I was quicker, I knew that, it was quite obvious, and I was trying to find my way through but we know Formula One, there are certain rules you cannot jump and either there would have been a mistake or a Hari Kiri action, none of which happened, and a bit of a good race so that is where we are.
Q: At the start of the race did you think you could be on the podium?
Michael Schumacher: No, because it was a bit far away from the podium and having known the pace we had I was not expecting to be that much quicker, although we saw some of that during free practice but normally by Sunday it levels out a bit to normal gaps we have seen in other races and if that had been the case I wouldn't have had a chance to be on the podium today.
Q: That middle stint when you were catching Jenson, the pace of the car there must give you enormous encouragement.
Michael Schumacher: It does indeed. Everyone worked extremely hard and this is the payback. Bridgestone got quite heavily criticized and all of us have done a great job to show that you should think about us, we are still there and we will continue to be there.
Q: Jenson, it must have been frustrating feeling you couldn't go any faster and he was closing on you relentlessly.
Jenson Button: Yeah, the pace of Michael and Ferrari was staggering. Everyone else seemed to be doing around the same lap times except for Michael, I mean, it was just a staggering performance. When he got past me there was no use fighting him because I knew he was stopping later than me and really I just had to hope he would catch up with Fernando and you never know then.
Q: But obviously some relief at having opened your score.
Jenson Button: Yeah, it is fantastic, I mean, it's great to get back on the podium again. We have had such a tough season. The first three races I haven't finished and it is great to be back up here and it's fantastic for the team to have two cars in the points. I think we are just going to go forward from here. We are very positive and confident we can make new improvements so I am looking forward to Barcelona.
Q: The car is obviously better, have you got bits coming that can make it better again?
Jenson Button: There are always bits, always parts to the car to improve it and we are very positive that they are going to make a difference. It has improved in a lot of areas. Obviously, we have got more downforce but it is the drivability that has changed. Now you turn into a corner with confidence that it is actually going to go in and it's not going to go backwards. So I am very happy with the car, we have just got to up our game a bit so we can challenge Ferrari.
Q: Fernando and Michael, did you believe your fight was justifiable to a new era of competition in Formula One?
Fernando Alonso: I think it was really a fight because I was first and Michael was the quickest starting from the back but I am sure it is nothing really more than one fight for the Imola Grand Prix. If Kimi was not out, maybe it would have been three in a fight. Every race is different.
Michael Schumacher: At the end of the day, that is the way it is. The only difference is that Fernando now has a car that he can compete with, which he didn't have in the past. I don't think there is a secret the three of us sitting here are good drivers, and there are some others like Kimi and so on, so it is normal. If they have the right car they fight amongst each other.
Q: Fernando, can you tell us if you really had some concerns about your engine before the race during the weekend?
Fernando Alonso: Yes, I think now we can say. From Friday we knew that maybe we had some problems with the engine so we limited the laps on Friday and Saturday morning a lot and that cost me a bit of time, in qualifying one especially because it was my third timed lap of the day. And in the race we were running very low revs and just try to finish the race. I was expecting to be in the points in the Imola Grand Prix and now I have won it. It is the first engine ever to win two Grands Prix, so I think the guys from the team on the engine side did an unbelievable job between Bahrain and here just to analyse and be ready for the Imola Grand Prix with a percentage of security in the engine.
Q: Michael, after the big improvement at Ferrari in the last few weeks, what more do you need to win a race this year?
Michael Schumacher: Maybe start a little bit further forward!
Q: Fernando, which corners were the most difficult to defend against Michael?
Fernando Alonso: The two on the straights, into turn one and in Rivazza in turn 14 because normally even if it is difficult to overtake that is where you have more possibilities. Due to the characteristics of my car at the end of the race and his car I found turn seven was more dangerous, Tosa was the corner that we were close at a few times, but I knew that corner is quite difficult to overtake on.
Q: Michael, although you didn't win will this race remain in your mind as one of your strongest and your favourites? You enjoyed it a lot I suppose?
Michael Schumacher: Indeed I did, yeah, but I have a long career behind me, so there are some other races probably of that nature. But it is honestly one of the good ones and I have said many times that it is not always you need to win a race to enjoy a race.
Q: Fernando, your tyres looked to be losing a lot of rubber towards the end of the race, particularly the rear tyres. Was it hard to defend knowing the tyres were going away, do you think they were going away?
Fernando Alonso: I think the tyres worked again perfectly for me, but as I said before I had no runs on Friday so we chose the tyres based on the other teams and a bit based on Giancarlo's running and for me it was the first time I went out with more than three laps in a long time, so the car was not perfectly ready for the long distance, maybe, or the tyres and the pressure, I don't know, but anyway I was able to push the whole race. In the last ten laps I had some difficulties, probably because I pushed the tyre quite hard due to the fact I was not able to use the whole engine in the race so I pushed the tyres a little bit more to get the timed lap.
Q: Michael, do you think Bridgestone have cured the problems they had in the first three races?
Michael Schumacher: Obviously, we have cured our problem, otherwise we would not have been able to do what we did.
-fia
Giancarlo Fisichella battles with Michael Schumacher
F1 > San Marino GP, 2005-04-24 (Imola): Sunday race
Start: Kimi Raikkonen takes the lead in front of Fernando Alonso
F1 > San Marino GP, 2005-04-24 (Imola): Sunday race
Start: Kimi Raikkonen takes the lead in front of Fernando Alonso
F1 > San Marino GP, 2005-04-24 (Imola): Sunday race
Saturday, April 23, 2005
Stuart Goldenberg
Professional Cameras, Made for the Amateur. Go Ahead, Say Cheese.
By DAVID POGUE
IT sure is convenient to divide the world into two camps. You know: you're either with us or against us; you're cool or you're uncool; you're the Apprentice or you're fired.
But very often, there's gold in the middle ground. Until recently, for example, digital camera makers saw every customer as either an amateur or a professional, and offered nothing but sub-$500 models and single-lens reflex cameras (S.L.R.'s ) for $2,000 and up. So when Canon introduced a digital S.L.R. for $1,000 - its Digital Rebel EOS 300D - it hit a sweet spot the size of the Sahara.
Now, 1.2 million Digital Rebels later, it's clear that Canon was onto something. Sure enough, Nikon's own $1,000 S.L.R., the D70, instantly became the best-selling S.L.R. (film or digital) in Nikon's history, by far. Both cameras let not-so-rich people take National Geographic-ready pictures.
This month, both cameras gained new features - and new letters tacked on to their names. Canon's new Digital Rebel XT (the EOS 350D) is aimed at eliminating the performance gap between the original Rebel and the Nikon D70. And only yesterday, Nikon struck back with the D70S, an updated version of its own consumer S.L.R. It's an Olympic game of leap-cam.
How to explain a digital S.L.R.? Let's put it this way: if all you've ever used are regular consumer digital cameras, then you've been sitting in the peanut gallery.
For example, on a digital S.L.R., shutter lag - the bane of the amateur shutterbug's existence - is essentially zero. That's right: no half-second delay after you press the shutter button. Battery life is nearly endless; the Rebel XT's new smaller battery is nonetheless still good for 600 pictures a charge, compared with perhaps 200 on a typical digital camera. The D70S's new battery extends this to a delirious extreme: each charge can power the camera for a staggering 2,500 photos. You can go weeks between charges.
By far the most important advantage of a digital S.L.R., though, is that it takes much, much better photographs. You can take supersharp portraits with softly blurred backgrounds, just as the pros do. You get good results even in terrible lighting, thanks in part to a smart self-adjusting flash. You get every manual control known to man (exposure, shutter speed and so on). And you can extend your range with interchangeable lenses (telephoto, macro, fisheye, whatever).
But you must make three sacrifices for these professional-looking results.
First, a digital S.L.R. is a big, heavy, traditional-looking thing with a long, barrelly lens and detached lens cap; buy a camera case, too. Second, these are serious photo machines that don't fool around with movies or sound recordings.
Finally, you can't compose a shot using the back-panel L.C.D. screen; you must peer through the optical viewfinder. That's because the mirror, which bends light from the lens into the eyepiece, blocks the electronic sensors except at the moment the shutter opens.
If you're still intrigued, you have a lot to look forward to. The new Canon's big three enhancements are resolution, speed and size.
The camera now takes 8-megapixel pictures (the original Rebel and both D70 models are 6-megapixel cameras). That's not a must-have feature - after all, it requires a bigger memory card and more patience when working with the results on a computer. Even so, the extra real estate can be useful when you want to crop the photo, because you'll still have enough resolution for a nice big print.
Much more important is the XT's speed. The new camera is powered up and ready to shoot in two-tenths of a second, just like the D70. (The original Rebel took a digital lifetime to rouse itself for work - three seconds - which meant a lot of missed photo ops.) The XT also transfers the pictures to your computer using U.S.B. 2.0, 10 times as fast as the original.
The Rebel's burst mode has been improved, too; instead of firing 2.5 shots a second (maximum 4 photos) like its predecessor, the new camera can sprint along at 3 a second (maximum 14). That's still not quite as good as the D70S (3 a second, maximum 144), but it's far more likely to capture an elusive smile, an athletic impact or a hyperkinetic child.
Finally, the Rebel XT's body is 15 percent smaller (and 10 percent lighter) than the original. It's the smallest digital S.L.R. on the market.
This new design has not been universally embraced among photographers, however. The shrinkage required moving the status display (which shows the camera's current settings) from the top of the camera to the back, which some people love and others ... not so much.
More important, Canon's surgeons performed most of the liposuction on the handgrip, leaving a much smaller, shallower bulge. People with biggish hands - men, mainly - wind up mashing their fingertips against the lens barrel or, worse, accidentally pressing the self-timer button (which sits, alas, right by your thumb) and losing shots to the resulting 10-second delay. Canon is taking the "women and children first" notion way too seriously.
If you can get comfortable with it, though, you'll enjoy a long list of subtle, more technical improvements, like greatly reduced "noise" (speckles) at high ISO (light sensitivity) settings, nine programmable camera settings (the original Rebel had none) and more control over the excellent autofocus system. And you now have a choice of two decorator colors for the polycarbonate (hard plastic) body: silver or black.
The original Rebel will remain on the market at a lower price: about $800 with an 18-55mm zoom lens. But resist - the huge improvements in the XT easily merit the price premium. For $1,000, the XT brings you features and photo quality that very nearly duplicate what's in Canon's step-up model, the EOS 20D (about $1,300, body only). Indeed, the list of 20D advantages is now very short. Its primary items include a five-shots-a-second burst mode, slightly better autofocus and low-light sensitivity, and a metal body.
The changes Nikon made to its flagship D70 are far less extensive. The L.C.D. screen is bigger (2 inches diagonal, versus 1.8 on the Rebels); the autofocus system is faster and better at tracking a moving subject; there's now a connector for a shutter-release cable; the flash casts a wider arc; and the menus offer a bigger font and a higher-contrast color scheme that's easy to see even in direct sunlight. (By contrast, the Rebel XT's menus turn to an opaque black slab in sunlight.)
As of this week, Nikon is retiring the original D70. The suggested price of the D70S is $900 (body only) or $1,200 with an 18-70mm zoom lens. If the D70's history is any guide - as of yesterday, it was $785 online - the price will drop once it's available online. Until then, the D70S still costs more than the Rebel XT.
In June, Nikon will address that imbalance with the D50, a new digital S.L.R. that will cost $900, lens included. It's a smaller, lighter D70 with a few high-end features shaved off - a slightly slower burst mode, fewer light-metering points and a few other crimps - but with helpful features of its own, like a fast U.S.B. 2.0 connector and a child preset for snapping fast-moving offspring. Counting Olympus's 8-megapixel eVolt 300 ($705 online, body only), there will then be at least five members of the sub-$1,000 S.L.R. party.
In the meantime, each company insists that its camera trumps the others. Canon points out that the Rebel XT has that better resolution (8.0 megapixels vs. 6.1), a lower price tag, less noise at high ISO settings and an optional battery grip. (This $170 accessory attaches to the bottom edge, making vertical shooting easier, storing additional batteries and addressing that "grip is too small" issue.) The XT also includes simple magnification buttons for playback - a less clunky solution than the two-handed salute required on the D70S - but its hypersensitive previous-next photo buttons occasionally skip over a photo.
Nikon stresses the D70S's larger screen, better battery life, faster shutter speed (an eight-thousandth of a second minimum, versus the Rebel's four-thousandth of a second), superior burst-mode endurance and easier-to-see menus. You could also argue that Nikon's $300 starter lens sometimes produces subtly sharper subjects than Canon's $100 lens.
Both companies make good points. Unless you already own lenses from one company or the other, choosing between them is an excruciating proposition. Both take pictures so good, you'll feel guilty when friends and neighbors begin asking how you became such a great photographer overnight. (You can see sample photos at www.nytimes.com/circuits.)
In making incremental improvements to their proven best sellers, Nikon and Canon wound up offering you the most important feature of all: choice.
E-mail: Pogue@nytimes.com
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company | Home | Privacy Policy | Search | Corrections | RSS | Help | Back to Top
Richard Patterson for The New York Times
PUBLIC ACCESS The beach at Shoal Bay, like all 33 beaches on the Caribbean island of Anguilla, is open to everyone
JOURNEYS
Anguilla on the Cheap
By SHERRY MARKER
IT'S easy to while away time, especially over rum punches, debating the virtues of Anguilla's beaches. At Maundays Bay the sand sifts through the toes as fine as powder, as white as snow; at Shoal and Rendezvous Bays, it shines iridescent, with a slightly gritty sheen; at Little Bay and Sandy Ground, it turns from basic beige to pink at sunset.
But in practice, setting out with a towel and beach bag, it's hard to say where one beach ends and the next begins. And as Anguilla's beaches blend into one another, its sun worshipers can cross the invisible lines, too. Thanks to local custom, all 33 beaches - even those in front of the exclusive resorts that lure celebrities and A-listers to this 16-mile sliver of limestone and coral - are open to all comers.
Plop down on the dazzling white sand at Cap Juluca, where Liam Neeson and Natasha Richardson are often among the guests, and you can stay all day. (Just don't expect the uniformed attendant to stop by your spot with one of Cap Juluca's fluffy towels.) And while Cap Juluca's real guests are spending as much as $1,000 a night, you can be paying the same amount for an entire week at a little hotel without a famous name.
Though celebrity visits to Anguilla's fabulous beach resorts are now gossip-column fare, what is less known is that the island has more than a dozen small inns and many rentable villas where accommodations are $80 to $200 a day in the peak winter months. Now, as the off-season begins, the bargains are even better. Around mid-April, many small inns slice their already reasonable rates for short stays, and they often have dazzling bargains for stays of more than a week. In one small inn, Syd-Ans, rooms that are already well priced at $75 to $125 in winter go for $65 to $95 in the off-season, which usually lasts until mid-December. In another, Harbor Lights, off-season prices go as low as $60 for a double room. There also are kitchens, a plus for cost-sensitive travelers.
At any season, the bargain-hunting traveler can find in Anguilla what may be the best of all Caribbean tradeoffs. Give up the amenities of the luxurious, self-contained resorts for a comfortable room in a more modest villa or small inn, and get lower prices, a close-up acquaintance with the hospitable island people - and your pick of the beaches, too.
"I'm pretty particular about my tropical paradises," said Jacqueline Thaw, a New Yorker who has lived in Hawaii. "Anguilla is a real one." Ms. Thaw, a professor at Rutgers, and her husband, Raphael Ben-Yehuda, an artist, spent their honeymoon in Anguilla earlier this year, happy to discover they could stay on the island without paying the high prices they had heard about. They spent $880 for eight days in the winter season at Ping's Villas in the village of North Hill, with a view all the way out to sea, spending beach time at Sandy Ground. (In May and June, the same suite will cost $660.) They found the experience "like going to a small town where people greet you like you're in your own home," Ms. Thaw said.
While budget accommodations on Anguilla may not be luxurious or directly on the beach, they are comfortable, often with balconies providing expansive views and routinely with private bathrooms. On an island three miles wide, nothing is far inland. And paradise retains its credentials in the off-season. With the exception of the late-summer hurricane season, the trade winds and rainfalls diminish in spring and summer. Calmer waters make for wonderful swimming and snorkeling, and cool evening breezes usually allow for sound sleep even in lodgings that have no air-conditioning.
Winter or summer, Americans find the island especially accessible. The northernmost of the Leeward Islands, it is just an hour by plane from San Juan, P.R., making it close enough for a short getaway. The language is English (with a distinctive Anguillian lilt), and the United States dollar is universally accepted, along with the local currency - the Eastern Caribbean dollar. After the runway at Wallblake Airport in The Valley, the Anguillian capital, was extended to 5,440 feet this winter, American Eagle put a larger carrier on its daily San Juan-Anguilla-San Juan turnaround flight.
In the 1980's, Anguilla began marketing itself at the top end of the rapidly expanding Caribbean tourism market. By the 1990's, it had a number of small luxury resorts. Three on the island's west side regularly turn up on lists of the best places to stay in the Caribbean: Cap Juluca, with 72 rooms and suites and 6 private-pool villas; Malliouhana Hotel & Spa, with 55 rooms and suites - some in villas - on a seaside bluff; and Covecastles, 16 futuristic beachside villas designed by the architect Myron Goldfinger. At least a dozen major resorts, including the popular CuisinArt Resort & Spa, have been added in the last few years.
Yet the egalitarianism at the beaches still feels natural. This is a quirky, independent island of 11,000 inhabitants that insisted on breaking off from neighboring St. Kitts in 1967, becoming a separate British overseas territory. No one has a street address - people just know where to find one another. Sir Emile Gumbs, a former chief minister, as the national leader is called, will give you a guided tour of his neighborhood. Diners at Ripples, a hangout among the British expatriates and just about everyone else, found themselves sitting near Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston the night before they announced their split. ("Couldn't have looked happier," the restaurant's owner, Jacquie Ruan, said, shaking her head in disbelief at the separation announcement the next day.)
THIS sinuous island, which Columbus named Anguilla (Italian for eel), is reliably sunny; it gets only 30 inches of rain a year, and there are as many rainbows (often double rainbows) as downpours. The beaches, protected by offshore reefs, draw swimmers, snorkelers and sunbathers. The island is known for its music, accessible to everyone in the bars where local reggae and jazz bands play. Boat racing, the national sport, is not just for the rich, but a passion that brings everyone together to cheer favorite crews.
Anguilla has more cactuses than palm trees, and almost as many art galleries and resident artists as cactuses. Recent paintings by Lynne Bernbaum, a former Texan, at her gallery in George Hill Landing, depict the island's red-topped Turk's-cap barrel cactuses, which she thinks of as living "in little communities, with lots of character" - a description that might also fit the Anguillians themselves.
Half the population lives in The Valley, an agglomeration of government buildings and mostly low concrete shops, offices and houses. One charming street, Crocus Hill Road, runs steeply uphill through an avenue of mahogany trees. Along the way are a cluster of early-20th-century gingerbread cottages, several old-fashioned bake ovens and gardens edged with pink conch shells. At the top of the hill is Anguilla's first hotel, Lloyd's Guest House, with a pleasantly old-fashioned parlor and double rooms, with breakfast, for $85 all year.
Other villages are scattered across the island. Many inland hamlets still have farms, with herds of goats and the occasional cow. Fishing boats go out from villages like Island Harbor and Blowing Point.
Sandy Ground, on the north coast, has always been important because of its deep natural harbor, where cargo and fishing boats still put in, along with the sleek yachts and sailboats that anchor near a string of harborside beach bars and restaurants. It's a place that wraps willing visitors in a kind of timeless island charm. Dogs bark and roosters crow. Meandering goats seem to have the right of way.
If you join the evening crowd sipping rum punch at the beachside outdoor tables at Johnno's, you'll hear a lot of can-you-top-this Anguilla stories, like the one told by an English couple, Jack and Liz Panzetta. At the end of their first visit to Anguilla, Mr. Panzetta left his wallet in the cab on the way to the airport. "I thought it was gone forever," he said. "But when we got back to England, the phone rang." It was the manager of the couple's Anguilla hotel, telling them he had it.
"I told him just to hold onto it," Mr. Panzetta said. "I knew we'd be back." That was in 1986, and the Panzettas have been back every year since, usually staying in the Sea View Apartments in Sandy Ground.
Sandy Ground is also where Sir Emile gives weekly tours. The tour circles the Salt Pond, used in salt processing from the 17th century to the 1980's, and includes a site occupied by Indians. Sir Emile lives in a photogenic pitched-roof wood-frame house built by his grandfather in 1904. It is framed by yellow bougainvillea and a tall hedge of scarlet oleanders. "Oleanders have three virtues," Sir Emile explained. "They bloom all year, they are drought resistant, and goats won't eat them."
A few miles away, at Uncle Ernie's in Shoal Bay, where the ribs are succulent and the cole slaw is tasty, there were no celebrities in sight one Sunday afternoon in January. But the cheerful patrons, taking a break from the beach, didn't seem to miss them.
The mood was summed up by a sunburned visitor wearing a sleeveless Uncle Ernie's T-shirt. Alternating sips of Red Stripe beer with licks of a dark chocolate Dove Bar, he murmured reverently, "It just doesn't get any better than this."
The Island of Good Deals
WALLBLAKE Airport in Anguilla is served by American Eagle, LIAT, Caribbean Star and Winair and is one hour by air from San Juan, P. R. Ferry service from St. Martin lands at the small village of Blowing Point.
American currency is accepted everywhere on Anguilla, and all prices below are in United States dollars. Prices generally do not include a 10 percent government tax or a 10 percent service charge that are usually added. Many, but not all, hotels lower their prices in the off-season.
Syd-Ans Apartments (Sandy Ground, 264-497-3180; www.inns.ai/sydans) overlooking a 93-acre salt pond, has 14 rooms and suites for $65 to $95 a day from mid-April to November and $75 to $125 in high season.
Sea View Apartments (Sandy Ground; 264-497-3397; www.inns.ai/seaview) has a one-bedroom unit for $60 year-round and a two-bedroom for $110 ($100 in summer). Ping's Villas (North Hill, 264-497-2928) has two-bedroom, two-bathroom units for $110; or $60 from May to November. Harbor Lights (264-497-4435; www.harborlightsanguilla.com) has doubles with kitchens from $60 to $100; $80 to $130 from about mid-December to May. Lloyd's Guest House (The Valley, 264-497-2351; lloyds.ai) has nine doubles for $85 a day year-round.
Anguilla's premier resorts also have off-season specials, cutting hundreds of dollars off their rates and offering off-season packages. A double room at Cap Juluca (Maundays Bay, 264-497-6666; www.capjuluca.com) that goes for $780 a day in high season is $420 May 1 to Nov. 11. A five-day, four-night package for two drops to $2,615 from $4,825.
Sir Emile Gumbs's historical tours of Sandy Ground are given most Tuesdays at 10 a.m.; for reservations, call (264) 497-2711. The $10 fee goes to the Anguilla Archaeological and Historical Society.
Entrees at Ripples (Sandy Ground, 264-497-3380) are $10 to $30 and include cottage pie, popular with the British expatriate community, as well as hamburgers, fresh fish and pasta .
The Palm Grove Bar & Grill (Junks Hole, 264-497-4224), known for lobster, has entrees from $9 to $40.
Johnno's (264-497-2728) and the Pumphouse (264-497-5154), both in Sandy Ground, serve fish, salads and potent rum punches. Dinner with drinks starts at about $20.
Uncle Ernie's (Shoal Bay, 264-497-3907) has hamburgers, ribs and fresh fish from $6.
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In a photo supplied by the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department Anna Ayala is shown. Ayala, the woman who claimed she found a finger in her bowl of Wendy's chili last month was arrested, Thursday, at her Las Vegas home on a warrant out of San Jose, Calif. alleging grand larceny and attempted grand larceny, Las Vegas Police Sgt. Chris Jones said. (AP/Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department)
Police arrest Las Vegas woman who said she found a finger in a Wendy's chili
Kim Curtis
Canadian Press
Saturday, April 23, 2005
SAN JOSE, Calif. (AP) - Police investigating how a human finger ended up in a woman's bowl of Wendy's chili declared the claim a hoax Friday and arrested her on charges of attempted grand larceny.
The arrest of Anna Ayala at her home outside Las Vegas was the latest twist in a case that has become a late-night punch line, taken a bite out of Wendy's sales and forced the fast-food chain to check its employees for missing fingers.
Ayala, 39, claimed she bit down on the well-manicured, four-centimetre finger in a mouthful of her steamy chili on March 22 in San Jose. She had hired a lawyer and filed a claim against the Wendy's franchise owner, but dropped the lawsuit threat soon after suspicion fell on her.
When asked whether police considered Ayala's claim a hoax, David Keneller, captain of the San Jose police department's investigations bureau, said yes.
"What we have found is that thus far our evidence suggests the truest victims in this case are indeed the Wendy's owner, operators and employees here in San Jose," police Chief Rob Davis said.
At a news conference, police refused to say where the finger came from and exactly how the hoax was carried out.
But according to a person knowledgeable about the case who spoke on condition of anonymity, the attempted larceny charge stemmed from San Jose police interviews with people who said Ayala described putting a finger in the chili. The source said the interviews were with at least two people who did not know each other and independently told similar stories.
The source added that investigators still did not know where the finger came from.
Ayala - who has a history of bringing claims against big corporations - has denied placing the finger in the chili.
"We're thrilled that an arrest has been made," Tom Mueller, president and chief operating officer of Wendy's North America, said in a statement.
During the investigation, police and health officials failed to find any missing fingers among the workers in the restaurant's supply chain. Wendy's hired private investigators, set up a hotline for tips and offered a $100,000 US reward for information leading to the finger's original owner.
The furor caused sales at Wendy's to drop, forcing layoffs and reduced hours in Northern California. Joseph Desmond, owner of the local Wendy's franchise, called the ordeal a nightmare.
"It's been 31 days, and believe me it's been really tough," he said. "My thanks also go out to all the little people who were hurt in our stores. They lost a lot of wages because we had to cut back because our business has been down so badly."
Earlier Thursday, Ohio-based Wendy's announced it had ended its internal investigation, saying it could find no link between the finger and the restaurant chain.
Ayala has filed claims against several corporations, though it is unclear whether she received any money. She said she got $30,000 from a Mexican food chain after her 13-year-old daughter got sick at one of its restaurants, but the chain denied it paid her anything.
Ayala also was arrested on a warrant alleging grand larceny - a charge not related to the discovery of the fingertip. The police chief said the grand larceny allegation stemmed from a 2002 incident in which Ayala allegedly tried to sell a mobile home in San Jose that she did not own. The victim lost $11,000.
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On the Net: http://www.wendys.com
© The Canadian Press 2005
Friday, April 22, 2005
Start: Giancarlo Fisichella takes the lead ahead of Jarno Trulli and Mark Webber
Over the Wall
Formula Mosley
2005-03-21
Burd Phillips
Warning: Handle with care! What you are about to read may twist your perception of reality, or may not have any correlation at all with real people or real events. Unless, of course, you are reading this in an alternate universe with a different version of reality, in which case all bets are off. Don't say you weren't warned ...
As I sat contemplating the Formula One starting grid prior to the season opening race in Australia, I began to feel a very uncomfortable sensation in the pit of my stomach. I got up and went to the bathroom, but when I came back the uncomfortable feeling was still there. What the hell was I looking at? A Toyota on the front row? The struggling Jacques Villeneuve sitting P4 in a Sauber? Was Christian Klien really quicker than the likes of Michael Schumacher, Kimi Raikkonen, Rubens Barrichello, Fernando Alonso and Juan Pablo Montoya?
Obviously something wasn't quite right. This Frankenstein of a lineup was not a result of the natural order of things in F1, but rather a freakish fabrication created by FIA President Max Mosley with a little help from the Aboriginal rain gods. Mosley had finally succeeded in his tireless quest to "shake up the grid." One can only imagine what other sorts of shakeups the FIA's mad scientist has in store for our beloved sport.
Once you're done with your imagining, please rejoin the article at the next sentence.
All done? Good. Now for the facts. Being a hack writer, I have access to a marvelous little thing called an "inside source." Yes, that's right. While you sit around blinking and imagining a bunch of nonsense, I actually know what Mosley is planning. Fortunately for you, I am willing to risk my own personal financial and physical wellbeing to share this information with the rest of the world. But be forewarned -- it isn't pretty.
From the desk of Max Mosley, FIA President
Proposed Changes for the 2006 Formula One World Championship
1) Engines will be restricted to eight cylinders and must be powered by my Aunt Zapora's delicious homemade mayonnaise. Refueling rigs will be replaced with giant spatulas.
2) All mechanics must be named "Karl." This will drastically improve safety in the pitlane in the event of a fire. Instead of the team managers having to call out to each mechanic individually to warn him or her of a fiery outburst, they can just yell, "Look out, Karl! There's a fire!" and everyone will immediately spring into action at once.
3) Qualifying will consist of 13 separate single-lap sessions, with the final session taking place immediately after the race has been completed. Each driver will roll a pair of 13-sided dice to determine which two of his laps will count toward his final qualifying time. This time will be calculated by multiplying the sub-numeric cotangent of the driver's first selected lap by the Hippocratic square root of his second selected lap divided by my pants size. In the event that I am not wearing any pants, my shoe size will be used instead.
4) To clarify and enhance the team radio broadcasts, drivers will be required to make their own racing noises at all times. The following sound effects will be used: straightaway sound (EEEEEYYYYOOOWWWW!!), cornering sound (RRRRRUUURRRRCH!!), rumble strip sound (BRDBRDBRDBRDBRD), and the running over the foot of the lollipop guy while exiting the pit box sound (SSSCCCRREEEE-GRUNCH-AAUGGHH!).
5) Charlie Whiting, the current FIA Formula One race director, will be replaced by Mr. Peckit, the invisible transsexual rooster that lives behind my left knee.
6) The team that achieves the lowest combined finishing positions during each race will be responsible for cleaning my pool the following weekend.
7) Pre-race drivers' meetings will begin with me sitting alone behind a large table at the front of the room. The table will be completely empty save for a large red telephone. I will make a fake ringing sound, pick up the receiver and say into it with an exaggerated Swedish accent, "Yar? No! Truly? Sorry, but we don't want any." I will then hang up the phone. Everyone in the room will laugh hysterically for at least 60 seconds while I good-naturedly try to calm them down so we can start the meeting. Jarno Trulli will look somewhat abashed at first, but he will eventually come around and laugh harder than anyone else, realizing what a great joke it was.
8) Each driver's underpants must last for the duration of five races. If a driver suffers a "blowout" during an event and fails to see the checkered flag as a result, he may wash his underpants without penalty providing he doesn't use too much bleach. Two cups is more than enough for even the toughest ground-in stains.
9) Jean Todt will wear a traditional Bavarian dancing dress and a blonde pigtailed wig. I will call him "Froo-Froo" and we will hold hands while traipsing through the woods and... (We can't print the rest of that one because it becomes rather lewd, but you get the general idea.)
There are 4,622 more suggestions in this document, the last half of which intricately detail Mosley's plans to construct a deep-sea retirement facility for invisible transsexual roosters. Is it any wonder that only one of the ten team bosses (Jean Todt) showed up for his latest proposal meeting in late January?
Midway through the 2004 season, Mosley announced on a whim that he was going to step down from his post as FIA President after the final race in October. For some strange reason the FIA senate convinced him to stay on. If he offers to split again this year, I'm assuming no one will stand in his way. Who, then, would take his place?
I personally recommend David Coulthard. Yes, that's right, David Coulthard. He did a pretty good job of pointing out the obvious regarding the state of F1 in an interview following the Australian GP. I particularly liked his idea of returning to the old qualifying format with the proviso that each driver must run at least one lap every 15 minutes in order to cut down on dead track time. This is the same concept that a certain hack writer outlined in an article for motorsport.com almost two years ago.
Christopher Sleboda
SKIN DEEP
Miles of Floss for Whitened Teeth: Spinach Specks Beware
By ELIZABETH HAYT
SINCE last summer, when Brian Rothschild spent several thousand dollars on cosmetic dentistry to replace old fillings, cover a crooked front tooth with a veneer, and bleach his teeth, he started flossing twice daily: more than twice as much as he had before. His new regimen requires three pieces of equipment: mint-flavored string floss, tiny brushes to excavate debris from the wider spaces and a rubber-tipped gum stimulator to finish the job.
"Sometimes I get a little obsessive," he admitted.
Sherry Bauman also flosses frequently to protect her cosmetically enhanced teeth. Six years ago Ms. Bauman - a homemaker from Sands Point, N.Y., whose picture-perfect smile once landed her a job as a toothpaste model - got veneers to lighten up lower teeth that had darkened with age, and since then she has flossed two or more times a day.
"You spend so much on your teeth and want to keep them for the rest of your life," Ms. Bauman said. To skip flossing, she added, would be "like spending $100,000 for a car and driving around with it dirty."
Apparently the rage for tooth-whitening - a $600 million industry that grows 15 to 20 percent a year, according to the American Academy of Cosmetic Dentistry - may accomplish what decades of admonitions from dentists have not been able to do: make people enthusiastic about flossing. After fiddling with whitening strips twice a day for a week, spending a good part of a paycheck on bleaching or emptying a savings account to pay for veneers, flossing suddenly seems like a great way to protect the investment.
The number of people who floss is rising only moderately - in 2003, 50 percent of the population flossed, up from 45 percent in 1997, according to the American Dental Association - but the number who do so more than once a day has tripled to 9.5 percent, from 3.2 percent. And dentists say most of these new enthusiasts have had bleaching or cosmetic dentistry.
Some may even be going overboard with frequent, strenuous flossing that digs too deeply into the gums, dentists say.
Floss makers have responded by expanding their offerings. No longer limited to waxed or unwaxed, today's choices verge on the exotic: flavored flosses in spearmint, cinnamon and peppermint; anti-plaque, antibacterial and fluoride-coated flosses; shred-resistant flosses; ribbon floss, with a wider surface; threader floss to get under braces; floss picks; whitening flosses; and flosses coated with zinc, eucalyptus and thymol, ingredients said to fight bad breath.
A new generation of gadgets has also come along, including handheld floss holders and battery-operated "power" flossers.
In an apparent attempt to cash in on the trend, Listerine recently claimed in advertisements to be "as effective as floss." Listerine does kill the bacteria that cause plaque and gingivitis, but apparently, nothing works as well as flossing.
In January a federal judge ruled the ads misleading and instructed Pfizer, which makes Listerine, to stop using them.
Although flossing may not make teeth whiter, it can help keep white teeth from yellowing by getting rid of food particles and preventing the buildup of plaque, said Dr. Matt Messina, a dentist in Cleveland who is the consumer adviser for the American Dental Association. "When you vacuum the carpet of your house, it doesn't change the color of the carpet, but by taking the dust out, it makes the carpet look brighter," Dr. Messina said.
Whitening floss is designed not to bleach tooth enamel but rather to do a better job than regular floss of cleaning between teeth. Reach Whitening Floss by Johnson & Johnson is coated in silica, a fine abrasive. And Supersmile floss is treated with calcium peroxide, which dissolves pellicle, a protein deposited on the teeth by saliva. The pellicle can attract stains, said Dr. Irwin Smigel, the New York dentist who created Supersmile.
But many dentists say flossing's greatest virtue is that it keeps teeth and gums healthy. Even the most dazzling teeth will not look pretty if the gums are inflamed by gingivitis, which daily flossing prevents.
Yet too much flossing may also harm perfect smiles. "If you destroy the gumline by incorrect or over-flossing, you can make a tooth look longer, and that's not aesthetically appealing," said Lawrence Addleson, a San Diego dentist who is president of the American Academy of Cosmetic Dentistry.
Periodontists warn that excessive flossing can leave lasting damage. "If you saw back and forth with the floss, you can actually notch the tooth on the root surface," said Dr. Susan Karabin, a periodontist in New York.
Fanatics are not shy about unrolling their floss in front of others. "If I'm in a restaurant or the movies, I'll go to the restroom and floss without shame," said Ilona Price, a Manhattan magazine editor who has been flossing two or three times a day since Dr. Marc Lowenberg, a cosmetic dentist in New York, bleached her teeth and covered some with veneers five years ago.
And this public flossing may be contagious. Encouraged by the sight of an officemate flossing after lunch, Francois Mobasser, 36, a Los Angeles entertainment lawyer, upped his own flossing from once to three times a day.
"I don't ever want to be the guy with a green leaf blanketing his teeth," he said. "If I didn't floss, I wouldn't be able to sleep at night."
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Thursday, April 21, 2005
Tony Cenicola/The New York Times
From left: Tsubi, $319; True Religion, $359; Blue Blood, $272; Chip & Pepper, $275.
Who Pays $600 for Jeans?
By GUY TREBAY
COLLETTE LEONARD would probably be the first to tell you that the premium denim thing is a little out of hand. She is aware of how loopy it is to lose one's senses in the quest for a neatly packaged posterior. She knows there is something fundamentally silly in indulging an obsession with foraging obsessively for the best, newest, most underground pair of five-pocket cotton trousers, of hoping to unearth the holy grail, jeans made by a label never yet photographed on Jennifer Aniston.
"It's just a pair of jeans, I realize that," said Ms. Leonard, who works for a liquor distributor in Manhattan. "But I wear two pairs every day, and I'd much rather go out and find something unique that you're not going to see on every girl in New York."
That is why Ms. Leonard was elated to uncover some import jeans sewn by a London label so obscure it is barely available on these shores.
The trousers, by All Saints, had slim straight legs and a stylized leather cross appliquéd just below the hip. Tea-stained lace trim adorned the hems and pockets. Without question there are people who would consider the price, a hefty $375, a deterrent. Ms. Leonard is not one of them.
"I don't balk at $500 for a pair of shoes," explained Ms. Leonard, who was shopping last month at Atrium, a boutique on Lower Broadway that is to premium denim what Barney Greengrass is to lox. "Why should I balk at that price for jeans that are special. "
Since the advent a half decade ago of the jeans category termed "premium" or "luxury" denim, referring to trousers that cost $75 or more, the price of what were once quaintly known as dungarees has spiked so precipitously it is now in cloud-cuckooland. More curious still, blue jeans have suddenly shed their proud proletarian roots and turned into what retailers call a status buy.
"For four years running, luxury denim has been the fastest growing category at the bottom part of the apparel business," said Marshal Cohen, the chief industry analyst at the NPD Group in Port Washington, N.Y., which tracks clothing sales. Although no figures exist dividing the $14.2 billion denim market according to price, it is Mr. Cohen's qualifier - "bottom part" - that gives one pause.
There may have been a time when it was possible to consider oneself stylish in a pair of $100 jeans from, say, 7 For All Mankind, the label widely credited with helping ready the mass market for a new age in blue jeans. In cash register terms, at least, that time is gone. A stroll through the jeans bars that are now a ubiquitous element of the retail landscape has lately become a masochistic exercise in sticker shock.
Far from being rarities, jeans with price tags of $200 are now everywhere, the retail equivalent of dandelions after spring rain. And it no exaggeration to say that a pair these days can easily cost as much as an iPod (Tsubi, $319), a Motorola Razr (Levi's vintage, $325), or a desktop computer with the printer thrown in. (Nudie vegetable dye jeans, $428.)
As jeans have become an increasingly acceptable component of business and evening wear, a wardrobe staple suitable for any occasion (including board meetings, if one happens to be Steve Jobs), out of place nowhere except, possibly, funerals, the appetite for premium jeans has grown beyond a cowboy's wildest imaginings.
"Ten years ago nobody had ever heard of the category," said Robert Burke, the fashion director of Bergdorf Goodman, the longtime supplier to the carriage trade. "Now that premium is a fashion staple, everyone is wondering one thing," Mr. Burke added. "How high is high?"
Some other obvious questions follow. What exactly are premium jeans? And why are they different from the millions of ordinary pairs sold all the time? How much of the premium denim phenomenon is hype and how much real value is there in obscure attributes like ring-spun denim, triple-needle stitching, bleach "whiskers," or special treatments that abrade, distress and generally torture a pair of trousers until it has achieved just the right luxuriantly ratty patina of something that has been dragged behind a truck? It is exactly features like these that customers use to justify denim at $200 and up.
"Everybody is into a particular brand, and everybody knows exactly what they're looking for," said Jamie Mazur, a founder of Underground Denim, a blue jeans road show that visits 50 campuses in 35 states each year selling Blue Cult, AG, Rock & Republic, Antik and other arcane denims to students who, Mr. Mazur said, "know all the brands" long before the Underground Denim trailer pulls into town.
"We just came from Duke University," Mr. Mazur said, "and everyone there was dying for True Religion."
True Religion of course is not an evangelical sect but a hot new niche jeans label. And niche, as John Seely Brown, a marketing expert who is a visiting scholar at the Annenberg Center at the University of Southern California, recently prophesied, is the future of consumer marketing.
Both the surfeit and the numbing sameness of goods on the market have conspired to produce a nascent cult of connoisseurship, experts like Mr. Brown say. In this new marketing sphere, even ordinary objects can be told apart by consumers whose extreme discernment becomes a subtle way of signaling status. Like Luis Buñuel's Tristana, Mr. Brown's new niche consumer can see three peas on a plate and know instantly which is the best.
"Every consumer decision now carries with it class and status implications in a way it didn't used to," said Barry Schwartz, the author of "The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less" (Ecco Books, 2005). "As you add dimensions to goods, you add ways in which people can distinguish themselves." Thus is created a perpetual chase after status and cool.
"You can never relax," Mr. Schwartz said.
So it makes a perverse sense that a no-nonsense form of cotton work trousers should unexpectedly be transformed into an insider emblem of high style. Designed in 1873 by the Levi Strauss company as "hard-wearing work wear" for California miners, and available universally and cheaply for the next century, jeans in their latest "premium" incarnation are like the punch line to some elaborate Veblenesque joke.
What, after all, could be a more glaring example of conspicuous consumption than the stratospherically priced Japanese cult jeans from Evisu, favorites of hip-hop performers like Snoop Dogg and the Game?
Founded in 1991 by a Japanese tailor weary of paying outlandish prices for the vintage American jeans he admired, Evisu jeans make so strenuous a fetish of simplicity that they are like the apparel form of heirloom tomatoes, good the way things used to be, but at 10 times the price.
To start with, Evisu weaves its cloth on shuttle looms that, unlike the projectile type in widespread industrial use, leave clean edges on the fabric. They are then dyed using what the label's Web site terms "rare and ancient" equipment, meaning machines that are roughly 40 years old.
Each Evisu garment is given 16 and sometimes as many as 30 "dips" to achieve the proper rich shade of deep indigo blue. And, because the old looms are narrow, each pair of Evisus requires at least three yards of fabric. The end result, with a stylized gull stitched onto the rear pocket, costs in the vicinity of $635. Not for nothing, it would seem, is Evisu named after the Japanese god of loot.
"We sell through everything we get," Joseph Laurenti, the manager of Atrium in New York, said, adding that other brands like Nudie, True Religion, Antik, Slab by Rick Owens and All Saints spend only the briefest time on the shelves before migrating onto some of Manhattan's more fashionable backsides.
"We're known for novelty and people willingly pay extra for that," Mr. Laurenti said.
Thomas George, who owns E Street Denim in Highland Park, Ill., has watched the various styles enjoy their brief moments of must-have status and then inevitably fade out. "Everybody adds a story, a trick, a gimmick, a hook, a twisted seam, a nontwisted seam, a selvage detail, chasing the next thing out there that is that much better, they think," he said. "But the reality is that there's nothing left to design in a jean."
The truth of that observation has proved no deterrent to industry Goliaths like OP or Calvin Klein Jeans, a division of the Warnaco Group, both of which have announced plans to introduce luxury denim to their labels.
"It's a relatively small factor in the scheme of things," Tom Murry, the chief operating officer of Calvin Klein, said, referring to the multibillion dollar jeans market dominated by behemoths like Wal-Mart and Sears.
"If we're fortunate, it will maybe be a $50 million business for us," Mr. Murry said. "That number may not move our needle corporately, but the consumer is there, it's a growing part of the business for every retailer I talk to, and so it's going to be an important component of Calvin Klein."
And wasn't it, after all, Calvin Klein who wrote the recipe for premium jeans in the first place, using some not-so-secret ingredients? It turns out that the "nothing" that famously came between Brooke Shields and her Calvins was the very thing the marketplace was looking for then. It still is.
"Right now you could have a pair of jeans that cost $1,000, and people would buy them," Lawrence Scott, the owner of Pittsburgh Jeans Company, said last week. What, Mr. Scott was asked, is the indispensable element in the making of a perfect pair of luxury jeans?
"Same as always," he said. "It's going to come down to how your behind looks when you pour yourself into them. No matter how good the wash or the detail or the label, if it doesn't look good on a behind, it won't sell."
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Wednesday, April 20, 2005
Michael Schumacher on the starting grid
F1 > Bahrain GP, 2005-04-03 (Bahrain International Circuit): Sunday race
Image by xpb.cc
San Marino GP: Ferrari preview
Racing series F1
Date 2005-04-20
Not so many years ago, the first races of the season, outside Europe, usually in North and South America or South Africa, were considered nothing more than an 'hors d'oeuvre,' or given that Scuderia Ferrari Marlboro is an Italian team, an 'anti-pasta' to the season proper. The championship only really got underway when the teams returned to Europe and the San Marino Grand Prix.
However, today, the pace of technical development is so frenetic that every race is an equally important opportunity to score points and no team can allow itself the luxury of cruising through the first few rounds of the series. Nevertheless, there will still be a sense of a new beginning, when the teams arrive at the Dino e Enzo Ferrari circuit for Round 4 of the championship.
For a start, it marks the start of the first run of four European races and that means a more conventional paddock, with team trucks and motorhomes making their seasonal debut, cooler conditions than we have seen so far and a much more crowded old-fashioned paddock, with many F1 people making their first appearance of the year.
Certainly Ferrari will be hoping that this weekend represents a new beginning, after a somewhat disappointing start to the season, with just one podium finish so far, courtesy of Rubens Barrichello's second place in the Australian Grand Prix. "Arriving in Imola not leading the world championship, as was the case two years is an extra reason to tackle this race in a positive frame of mind," said the Scuderia's sporting director, Stefano Domenicali.
"I think that after such a start to the season, for a team like ours, the motivation will be stronger than ever. It will be even more important to show all our fans that we are still fighting. Our approach to the San Marino Grand Prix is based on the principal that our objectives and our goals have not changed. This applies to all the races, but of course Imola is a big event for us."
As the nearest venue to the Ferrari factory in Maranello, one would expect massive support for the Reds, however that has not always been the case over the past couple of years. "Unfortunately two years ago the crowd was the lowest in terms of numbers and I should know, because I have been going to Imola for years since I was a child to watch Formula 1, motorbikes and all sorts of race meetings," lamented Domenicali. "It was probably because the race was over the Easter weekend. Last year was better and I hope this year the public will respond and come to support us with flags everywhere to give us a boost."
With the F2005 car still in its infancy, Domenicali reckons there will be other advantages apart from local support in racing near the factory. "For sure, having raced the new car for the first time in Bahrain and then tested with it over a couple of weeks before Imola, there will be movement between the track and our factory. This is an advantage we will have from being so close to the track and we will need to make the most of it."
That pre-Imola testing the sporting director refers to has certainly been intensive, with the two race drivers and both testers hard at work at three circuits; Barcelona, Mugello and Fiorano. "We could have tested at Imola itself, as there is no current testing agreement in place," revealed Domenicali.
"Although we have a different approach to the testing agreement, we opted not to run at Imola as we respect the principle of not testing at a grand prix venue just prior to the race. That is our decision. We want to respect the idea we set with the other teams."
Schumacher and Barrichello will be using the same engines they had in Bahrain and this new engine rule presents an interesting learning curve for Ferrari and the other teams. "In Bahrain, the climate and track conditions meant the engine was stressed a lot," said Domenicali.
"We had to save the engine as much as possible, because Imola is another circuit which is tough on engines, especially in terms of delivering the power in the right way to punch out of the corners, as the track layout is quite stop-start with all the chicanes and you need good traction after braking very heavily for these corners. With this new two race engine rule, we have all had to adopt a new approach."
"We plan to use an engine in terms of the laps we have to do. The more the season progresses, the more we learn and that means we will be able to apply this knowledge to our engine utilisation strategy. We don't divide engine useage equally between two races. It depends on the characteristics of the two tracks. Some races might put an equal stress, others put more stress on the first or second race of an engine's life, so it is a question of balance."
There will be a large Ferrari presence at Imola. "For our home grand prix, as usual we will have our own grandstand for all our staff at the exit to the Rivazza corner," revealed Domenicali. "We are bringing around 1300 people every day and this is a great motivation for them, as they live the spirit of the grand prix weekend. Secondly, we will have people in the pits and garage who do not usually come to races."
"Mechanics and engineers will be brought along to Imola to experience our approach to a race. It gives them a chance to see how the race team operates, but equally importantly, they might be able to bring some of their own work methods to bear on what we do. It is important not to take a narrow view on how we work at the track, but to be open to new suggestions. These people might have a different method which is worth considering and we have to record everything that goes on."
On a personal level, this weekend is a special occasion, as Imola is his home town. "It really is my home grand prix and so it is a very important weekend for me. I meet up with a lot of friends as it's my home. I even cycle into the track every morning from my home, which makes a nice change from staying in a hotel. Friends used to ask me for tickets, but they seem to have got the message and, as it is so hard to get passes, my answer unfortunately is always in the negative!"
Alice Fiorilli for The New York Times
Milan Furniture Fair
Milan is always about new ideas, but more than in recent memory showed a restlessness this year to get on to the next big thing
Which Way Design?
By JULIE V. IOVINE
Milan
THE 44th International Furniture Fair, known as I Saloni, which took place here at midmonth in rundown palazzi, cobbled courtyards and the sprawling fairgrounds, offered enough eye-blink moments and tipping points to drive even professional trend-watchers to distraction.
Designers in buddy-system packs swarmed over anything that was laser-cut or polycarbonate. On the prowl with their BlackBerrys, buyers kept up the hunt among 1,630 fair exhibitors, plus hundreds more off-site, for tasteful (in other words saleable) elegance, demanding furnishings flexible enough to fit into both home and office. Some 3,000 journalists - three times as many as attend the fashion shows here - ferreted out this year's trends: it's low; it's ethnic; it's orange.
Milan is always about new ideas, but more than in recent memory showed a restlessness this year to get on to the next big thing. In the absence of a driving design movement, individual statements trumped aesthetic consensus. At Driade, the furniture giant, Naoto Fukasawa made a big white leather pouf, a replica (but 41 times as large) of a stone he found beside a river; Hella Jongerius hand-dipped porcelain; and the Bouroullec brothers made bits of coral-shaped plastic for people who might want to fashion wall screens in any size or color.
"I'm looking for anti-design," said Tom Dixon, creative director of Habitat, the British furnishings chain. "The D word has been misattributed to things that are just styling. You can go around in circles looking at color, pattern and flavor, but unless you can find the real point of difference, it's confusing."
Exports to the United States and Germany, the two leading markets for Italian furnishings, were down last year by 12.7 percent and 6.4 percent, respectively, although the overall export market rose by 1.5 percent, to roughly $16 billion. So all were hoping that this year would produce a few more solid winners.
The headlong pursuit of individual design statements made for some splashy displays, none more flamboyant than Philippe Starck's gold-plated gun-shaped lamps for Flos. Predictably, there was outrage along with the chuckles, as viewers debated whether the collection, "Guns," with pale graveyard crosses drawn on its shades, was antiwar décor suitable for the living room, collectible art or publicity stunt.
Of course Mr. Starck wasn't alone in offering razzle-dazzle in place of substance. At Moooi, Marcel Wanders, the Dutch designer, had his girlfriend, a choreographer, swing by her legs in a white bikini from his Living Chandelier. Chances are that not a few viewers were too distracted to notice the collection of wallpaper-embossed metal bureaus and sheep's-wool couches.
Such stunts tended to obscure quieter design achievements, such as Kris Ruhs's lacquer-finished three-legged stools for Cappellini and Jean Nouvel's aluminum table with flush wood surface at Unifor. But if Mr. Starck's guns smacked of gimmickry, there were also more earnest efforts to address anxiety and fear.
In a small exhibit at the Paul Smith showroom sponsored by the Design Museum of London, Matthias Megyeri, a 2003 graduate of the Royal College of Art, took on matters of safety and design. His lace curtain woven to look like a security fence would probably fool any burglar at a distance, while a formidable cast iron fence bore spikes with cast aluminum cartoon heads. "People have a huge desire for cuteness in their lives - thus the smiley face - but there is also this immense paranoia and fear of terrorism," said Mr. Megyeri, 31.
Since appearing on the Internet at his Web site (www.sweetdreamssecurity.com), his fencing has attracted attention from, among many others, homeowners in Pakistan and fashion shops in Tokyo. Mr. Megyeri's designs - he calls them "placebo products" - were snatched up by Paola Antonelli, a curator at the Museum of Modern Art, for a show on "emergency design."
Apart from bravura design statements, plenty of serious rethinking of home design was in evidence, especially in a new collection by Vitra, long associated with such designers as Charles and Ray Eames and George Nelson, who understood that true innovation need not shout for attention. Last year, after a long detour into office design, Vitra returned with a home collection that now includes new work by Frank Gehry (a paper cloud lamp) and Herzog & deMeuron (an African-inspired stool), as well as such younger talents as the Bouroullec brothers, Werner Aisslinger and Hella Jongerius.
Focusing on technology, Vitra had over the years retreated from the home front, said Rolf Fehlbaum, its chairman. "But now that technology and work and leisure are all fusing together,'" he said, "the home has become a more interesting and active place again."
Some of the strongest work on display melded technology in invisible ways with appealing soft-edged form and often a sense of craftsmanship. Many of these designs were by women, whose influence even in the challenging realm of high-tech plastics has grown steadily in recent years. The Milan fair - and design in general - has always been dominated by men. "Design is a macho field," said Patrizia Moroso of Moroso, who is a daughter of the company founders. "And so women have to work that much harder to make a difference. Their work is often more surprising, in more subtle ways."
She might have been speaking of the Aqua Table by Zaha Hadid, who last year became the first woman to earn a Pritzker architecture prize. Manufactured by Established & Sons, a new company dedicated to British design and local production, the conference-size all-white table looked both molten and tough, with legs that seemed to ooze like droplets. Made of fiberglass, it was entirely molded and sculptured by computer. An optional gel mat turns the surface irresistibly tactile.
Ms. Moroso could just as easily have been speaking of Patricia Urquiola, a Spanish designer who lives in Milan and has emerged as a powerhouse designer with Moroso and B&B. Her T-Table for Kartell has a one-inch slab of polycarbonate, either crystal clear or shiny black; it is ornately carved, casting a fantastical pattern on the floor. "I was thinking about fossils or even Baccarat," Ms. Urquiola said. (The T-Table, in four sizes and four heights, will cost $400 or $500 for the smallest to $1,200 for the dining table; www.kartell.com)
Hella Jongerius, the Dutch designer, works with technology in subtler ways. Equally adept at harnessing new methods and manipulating experimental materials, as in her squishy rubber sink for Droog some years ago, she is at her best when transforming everyday essentials by making their debt to craftsmanship visible.
For the Dutch porcelain maker Royal Tichelaar Makkum (www.tichelaar.nl), she made a series of majolica plates, partly stone-glazed and partly painted to reveal that they were hand-dipped. At Vitra she presented a sofa with tufted buttons sewn on irregularly as if by someone's granny in a big rush.
"I hate sofas," Ms. Jongerius said. "They are so expensive. You have to be careful what you buy, because you're going to have it for a long time. That's why everyone gets the exact same thing. They are afraid to make too much of a statement. But why shouldn't sofas have a little character?" Her sofa is made in five shades of green, with one arm wide enough to perch on and each feather-filled cushion a slightly different size.
As designers and architects tried many roads to good design this year, one thing seemed clear: the best new furniture has a sense of technology as well as of craft; a suggestion of ornament, but not at the expense of modesty; a grasp of function; and a whiff of surprise. In the meantime beware the gold-plated gun lamp and other fleeting blinks of the eye.
But New Yorkers don't have to go to Milan. This year for the first time a traveling version of I Saloni, featuring 60 of the most recognizable names in Italian manufacturing, will be exhibiting the latest wares on Piers 90 and 92 from May 14 through 17, to coincide with the International Contemporary Furniture Fair at the Javits Convention Center (www.isaloniworldwide.com).
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Vegas: English Double-Decker Buses to Make Strip Debut
LAS VEGAS, Nevada -- As reported by the Reno Gazette Journal: "A fleet of 50 double-decker buses imported from Great Britain, like the ones used in London, Hong Kong, Singapore and New York, are set to begin operating on the Strip in May as part of an effort by the Regional Transportation Commission to ease traffic and bus congestion on the boulevard.
"The buses, made by the firm Transbus, the largest bus builder in Britain, cost about $560,000 apiece, according to the commission. Las Vegas will join San Francisco and Vancouver as the only North American cities that have ordered the company's two-floor vehicles.
"Under the commission's plan approved last year, the buses will run along the Strip first and could eventually extend to western and eastern Las Vegas and 40 miles southwest to the border town of Primm on Interstate 15..."
Don Hewitt
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
News With Views
By DON HEWITT
BECAUSE all three of the networks' early-evening newscasts, as good as they are, generally follow an hour or so of local news and are fed into households already saturated with news from CNN, Fox or MSNBC (which they didn't use to be), and because the adults the broadcasts are aimed at probably know all they want to know from the all-news radio station they listened to in the car coming home from work, and because their children are more interested in the Internet than they are in television and spend more time playing video games than watching videotape, the networks are thinking of ways to overhaul how they do news.
So, as someone who was privileged to be the executive producer of the first 30-minute network newscast in 1960, let me suggest that what's missing from network newscasts is opinion - the kind of personalized, highly subjective material that people turn to the commentary page of their newspaper for after they've finished with the front page.
Why couldn't a newscast follow a newspaper's example and include commentary by bright, attractive articulate men and women of various political and ideological persuasions, with whom viewers - like newspaper readers - can agree, disagree, laugh at, sneer at or argue about when the newscast is over? Jim Lehrer regularly includes a diversity of opinion in his "NewsHour" on PBS; CBS, NBC and ABC aren't reluctant to offer opinion in their Sunday talk shows, though they shy away from it on their newscasts.
Sure, traditions like the one CBS's Walter Cronkite and NBC's Chet Huntley and David Brinkley pioneered more than 40 years ago die hard but they do sometimes die. To keep them going, the broadcasts need something new. We were lucky enough to hit on something fresh at CBS in 1968 with "60 Minutes," which included a great attention-getter called "Point Counterpoint" that was later supplanted by an equally popular closing feature called "A Few Minutes With Andy Rooney."
Now, if the networks are looking for ways to re-energize their news, the formula may be as simple as taking a page from the "60 Minutes" book and offering some audacious commentary.
Don Hewitt is the creator of "60 Minutes."
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Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Rooting for the Good Guys
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
On the surface, the dramas playing out among Israeli Jews - over whether to withdraw from the Gaza Strip - and among Iraqi, Lebanese and Palestinian Arabs - over how to share power - may seem totally disconnected. But in fact they are all variations on a theme: can democracy really take root or thrive in the Middle East?
Lord knows, I am rooting for the good guys here. For me, the war in Iraq was always about democracy and the necessity of helping it emerge in the Arab-Muslim world. I am thrilled that things have come this far. This is the most interesting drama in the world today, but it's not over, because the forces opposing it are deep and virulent - virulent enough to stall it in the Arab world and to make it dysfunctional in Israel.
In Israel, the question is whether its democratic system can sustain the monumental decision to withdraw unilaterally from the Gaza Strip and all the Israeli settlements there. For the Iraqis, Palestinians and Lebanese, the question is whether these multiethnic communities can produce, through horizontal dialogues, a political arena where monumental decisions can be taken - decisions that are essential if these societies are to progress in the modern age. In short, can Arab society give birth to infant democracy in order to get healthy, and can Israel's adolescent democracy survive a monumental decision required for its society to stay healthy?
Let's start with the Jews. One of the criticisms leveled at Ariel Sharon over his decision to withdraw unilaterally from Gaza is that he has never fully spelled out the reasons for his epiphany. After all, Mr. Sharon not only helped build many of these settlements, but he consistently proclaimed the need to hold onto them, for security reasons, forever.
A leading Israeli columnist, Nahum Barnea of Yediot Aharonot, once described Mr. Sharon's sudden turnaround by quoting a lyric from a famous Israeli pop song: "What you see from here, you don't see from there."
What Mr. Barnea meant was that when Mr. Sharon finally became prime minister, with full responsibility for the Jewish state, he had to face squarely the reality that his predecessors had faced: the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza was eroding the moral fiber of the Israeli Army, and, if sustained, would result in an apartheid situation - a minority of Jews would be ruling over a majority of Arabs between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.
The Jewish settler movement in Israel has always been a minority. The Israeli majority went along with it - as long as there was no price. But now the price has become inescapable.
"There is something quite stunning when you think about it," the Israeli political theorist Yaron Ezrahi remarked. "Three Israeli prime ministers, [Yitzhak] Rabin, [Ehud] Barak and Sharon - all of them army generals, two from Labor one from Likud - all came to the same conclusion: that the occupation was unsustainable [from the point of view of] Israel's national defense." As a result, they all shifted from focusing on "wars of necessity to focusing on a peace of necessity," Mr. Ezrahi added. Mr. Sharon doesn't want to explain this about-face publicly, in part, I assume, because it suggests weakness - that Israel can't keep doing what it has been doing, and knows it.
But this withdrawal is a threat to the Jewish religious nationalists. Their goal is not peace, but to conquer Israeli society with their messianic vision and biblical map. They killed Mr. Rabin for getting in their way and have threatened to do the same to Mr. Sharon. Some of these settlers will not go down quietly.
Ditto in the Arab world. Democratic politics in the West is about horizontal bargaining between parties and civil organizations. Politics in places like Iraq and Palestine have been based for decades on "Oriental despotism" - top-down monologues by dictators buttressed by a politics of fear. What Iraqis and Palestinians are trying to do is make a transition from one system to the other. But the fundamentalists and Nasserites within their societies - who for years have been nourished by their Oriental despots as a way of keeping the people backward, divided and focused on the wrong things - are still powerful and virulent. They, too, will not go quietly. The more they are seen to be losing, the crazier they will get.
So this story is not over by a long shot. The birth of democracy in the Arab world and the sustaining of democracy in Israel are now on the table. I am an optimist about both in the long run - but brace yourself for the short run.
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Valérie Belin
MATTER
Sleeping Beauty
By LYNN HIRSCHBERG
Every dress has a story, a narrative that illuminates the necessary elements of fabric and cut. Like people (or dogs or any work of art), some dresses are simply more interesting than others: their history is complex or they are particularly revealing of a moment or just heartbreakingly beautiful. Some combination of these traits was immediately apparent when I saw what first looked like a big pile of navy netting spread on the wooden table in my dressmaker's workshop. Irene Cherniakhovsky, along with her associates at Silhouettes and Profiles, is a brilliantly gifted seamstress, able to imagine, and then restore, a garment's shape and character. Among more mundane alterations like hems and side seams, she has rebeaded 20's flapper dresses and repaired the delicate lace on 30's gowns. At first it was hard for me to figure out what she was doing with this small mountain of net until Cherniakhovsky smoothed it out to show off the contours of what was in fact a dress.
The indigo floor-length gown was designed by Gabrielle (Coco) Chanel, probably in 1937. It had a tight silk bodice that was covered in silver stars. The ribbon trim at the neckline was severely frayed, and the small net sleeves, which would flutter over the upper arms, were gone altogether. The full dance skirt, with its own glittery constellation, was intact, and Cherniakhovsky had encased it in a large net bag. Every 20 minutes, she washed her hands, as is her practice when working with very special pieces. ''The dress is very delicate,'' she said. ''It's strange -- the right side is in better shape than the left side. Usually the right side is worse. Maybe that's because the heart is on the left side of the body.'' Cherniakhovsky pondered this. ''I would guess that this woman was a little heartless.''
It would take Cherniakhovsky a full 13 hours to repair the Chanel gown -- stars needed to be resewn by hand; the shredded ribbon had to be replaced. There was a deadline for all this restoration: the gown was heading to the Metropolitan Museum of Art for its Chanel exhibition, which opens on May 5. And yet, even in tatters, the loveliness of the dress was evident. The smallness of its top erupting into that sea of stars summoned up images of summer dances and romantic escapades. Like many Chanel gowns, the dress had a sexual component -- a woman could not wear a corset or a bra under this garment. The plunge of the back was daringly low, meaning that the woman who wore this dress was bold and sensual. She wanted to feel a man's hand on her bare back when they danced or kissed.
''I bought the dress at auction in 1997,'' Mark Walsh explained a few weeks later. Walsh is a well-known collector and vintage dealer, specializing in pre-World War II couture. In his house in Yonkers, he has six rooms full of boxes containing dresses and gowns from Jean Patou, Schiaparelli, Vionnet, Chanel, Dior and others. (''Unless you're a professional, you don't want to go up to Mark's,'' said Harold Koda, curator of the Costume Institute at the Met. ''It's chockablock with stuff, and it does not exactly conform to museum conventions.'') Walsh bought this dress as part of a lot of Chanels owned by a woman who sold them anonymously. ''The ribbon at the top was frail, and I knew I'd have to replace it,'' he said.
Walsh stashed the dress away in a box and hunted for the navy silk faille ribbon. He gave a two-millimeter swatch to his friend Lars Nilsson, who is now the creative director of Nina Ricci and is very familiar with trim manufacturers in Paris. Nilsson carried the ribbon in his wallet for nearly three years, searching for a match. Finally, Walsh had the ribbon woven anew in Japan. ''Now I have enough ribbon to go from Yonkers to the Rue Cambon in Paris, where Chanel had her atelier,'' he said.
Twenty or so star sequins were also missing from the gown, and Walsh had those laser-cut in India. The stars were then antiqued by a conservator. ''I love this part of collecting,'' said Walsh, who began amassing electrical insulators made by New England glass companies when he was still in grade school. ''I have always been obsessive. I also collected Steiff stuffed animals. But I always liked costumes and textiles. I look for dresses that move me, that announce themselves. The iconography of a garment is important to me. I was attracted to this Chanel dress because of the stars, which along with bows and camellias is one of her trademarks.''
When Walsh told Harold Koda about the star dress, it had not yet been restored to its former glory. ''I was excited because of the star iconography,'' Koda said. Chanel had an edict: Be a caterpillar by day and a butterfly by night. This dress is a beautiful specimen of Chanel butterfly.
Koda sees the gown as ''a double memory'' -- an evocation of both Chanel and the woman known for wearing a strikingly similar model, Roussadana (Roussi) Mdivani Sert, the beautiful second wife of Jose Maria Sert, a Spanish painter who was part of Chanel's set in 20's Paris. The second Mrs. Sert (unlike the first) was a great beauty with a slim, streamlined build. ''Clearly Mdivani Sert liked a small transgression here and there, especially when it came to her personal style,'' Koda said. ''She was probably an exciting woman who acknowledged the gaze of men but who also wanted to dress appropriately.''
What's most notable about the gown is its timelessness. Now perfectly restored, the dress could have been designed last week. It will have a second life while under view at the Met and then another, when some lucky woman purchases it from Mark Walsh. Hopefully, she will live the life it dictates.
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Ferrari ready to fight for Imola win
Racing series F1
Date 2005-04-20
Before the start of the San Marino Grand Prix weekend, Michael Schumacher reflected on the Scuderia Ferrari Marlboro situation: "Imola is important in many ways this year: first of all it is our home-race, which naturally makes it a race that we want to show a good performance at."
"This year, the start of the European leg of the season is also somewhat of a new beginning for us: we want to begin fighting for the championship title again now, and we believe that our chances are quite good."
"The Grand Prix of San Marino has always been a good turf for us. I have a lot of fond memories of this circuit, and I'm quite confident that there are more to come."
"Our F2005 has the most important requirement: it is fast enough. We saw that when our car made it's debut at Bahrain. We were unable to finish the race, but I think that we've solved that problem during all the extensive testing we did last week."
"The circuit at Imola is especially demanding on the brakes and the gear-box, but that's manageable. Just like most of the other teams we have new aerodynamic-components on the car and spent most of last week preparing especially for this race."
"I'm confident that we can fight to win -- and I'm absolutely sure that everyone at Ferrari will do their best. We're all looking forward to our home-race and to our Tifosi's support."
-ferrari-
Madison Square Garden, New York City
ON SECOND THOUGHT
SECRET GARDEN
by David Blum
Issue of 2005-04-25
Posted 2005-04-18
The New Yorker
It seems difficult to imagine that the owners of Madison Square Garden, who refer to it, rather boisterously, as the World?s Most Famous Arena, would object to the release of a documentary about the Garden that had been filmed, with their consent and coöperation, by one of the world?s most acclaimed directors. But then these owners?the Dolan family, under the aegis of the Cablevision Systems Corporation?are an odd lot, evidently as fond of discord as they are leery of the bad press that arises from it. And the director, Frederick Wiseman?who made such withering documentaries as ?Titicut Follies? and ?Hospital??certainly has a history of inspiring what you might call coöperation regret.
More than a decade ago, Wiseman had the idea of chronicling the goings on at the Garden. ?I?d always been fascinated by this place where so many different forms of entertainment came together under one roof,? Wiseman, who is seventy-five, explained last week. ?Hockey, basketball, wrestling, the circus?it?s unique in American culture.? In 1997, Wiseman made a formal approach to an acquaintance who had become a Garden executive. Before long, David Checketts, who was the Garden?s chief executive at the time, and who was not familiar with Wiseman?s work, signed off on the idea and granted him full access. During February and March of 1998, Wiseman, under the watchful eye of the Garden?s p.r. chief, Barry Watkins, shot more than a hundred hours of 16-mm. footage, recording the bustle and tedium surrounding such events as the N.B.A. All-Star game, the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, and the Westminster dog show, as well as Rangers and Knicks games.
The result, which is called, with characteristic concision, ?The Garden,? is standard-issue Wiseman cinéma vérité: clever juxtapositions forming a subtle commentary on American life, no narration necessary. The film opens with a four-minute sequence of circus elephants parading through the streets of New York at night, on their way into the Garden; the viewer, once inside, almost never leaves, except for occasional exterior shots of homeless people and passersby. We see employee training sessions, locker-room meetings, cat-show preparations, and, in painstaking detail, the process of converting the Garden floor into a sheet of ice for a hockey game.
Wiseman?s cameras also capture three closed-door meetings in which Garden management discusses its strategy for labor negotiations. These sequences were apparently what jarred Garden executives after Wiseman sent them a videotape of the movie, last November. Back in 1997, Wiseman had agreed in writing that the Garden would have final approval over the film, although the contract, he said last week, stipulated that approval could not be ?unreasonably withheld? and had to do only with issues of confidentiality. Wiseman needed the Garden to sign off on the movie within weeks; the Sundance Film Festival was planning to give ?The Garden? its American première on the afternoon of January 22nd, and the movie was scheduled to be shown soon thereafter at a retrospective in Vienna, at the Berlin Film Festival, and, in March, on PBS.
After a couple of weeks, Wiseman got a letter from a Garden attorney, Robert Brandon, saying that the company would withhold permission for its release unless Wiseman agreed to make some changes. The lawyers wanted him to cut dialogue from the management-meeting scenes, on the ground that it revealed proprietary information about business strategy. ?They only wanted a few lines removed, but they were the kinds of lines that would have made all the scenes meaningless,? Wiseman explained. (One disputed line, delivered by Robert Russo, then the general manager of the Garden: ?In the labor negotiations I would like you to think outside the box.?) When discussions between the two sides went nowhere, the Garden made it plain that Wiseman had to withdraw his movie from Sundance?and everywhere else he planned to show it?or face the prospect of a lawsuit. Cablevision can be a stubborn and litigious adversary; it has, for example, spent millions of dollars to fight the New York Jets? proposed two-billion-dollar stadium on the far West Side of Manhattan. ?I couldn?t afford that kind of legal battle,? Wiseman said.
Wiseman withdrew ?The Garden? from Sundance the night before the première, citing ?unresolved issues? between him and the Garden. He also pulled it from Vienna and Berlin. So far, aside from Garden management, only a handful of curators and critics have seen it. ?It?s an homage, really,? said Christoph Huber, a film critic for Die Presse, a daily newspaper in Vienna, who saw it on videocassette. ?It makes no sense to me at all that Madison Square Garden wouldn?t want it shown.?
It is also more than three hours long, seven years out of date, and, by Michael Moore standards, a little slow, and therefore unlikely to find a wide audience outside the festival circuit. Still, the Garden apparently continues to object to its release, citing, in an official statement, ?certain matters that were to have been discussed between the parties prior to the film?s exhibition? and saying that ?that process has yet to be completed.? There also seems to be some dispute over who was responsible for obtaining permission from the various teams, leagues, and performers who appear in the film. One theory, advanced by a former Garden executive who knows the byzantine inner workings of the place, is that James Dolan, the C.E.O. of Cablevision and the chairman of the Garden, learned of the movie and, without having seen it, ordered that it be made to go away. Wiseman believes that, among Garden executives, only Barry Watkins and Robert Brandon have watched the movie from beginning to end, and, he added, ?I?m guessing they probably fast-forwarded through a lot of it.?
It is unusual for Wiseman to give a subject the right to view and approve a film he is making. After the release, in 1967, of ?Titicut Follies,? a documentary about frightening conditions at the State Hospital for the Criminally Insane in Bridgewater, Massachusetts, questions were raised in the state legislature about how Wiseman got permission to film the inmates, and Elliot Richardson, who was then the Massachusetts Attorney General, and who had originally approved the film, got a restraining order that prevented the film from being shown publicly. That decision wasn?t overturned until 1992, by which time Wiseman had wormed his way into dozens of American institutions with his 16-mm. camera and had been richly rewarded by critics for doing so. Wiseman has never cut anything from his films at the request of a subject. As for what will happen to ?The Garden,? he said, ?I honestly don?t know. All I know is that I made a movie and I want the public to see it.?
Illustration / TOM BACHTELL
Tom DeLay
COMMENT
WITHOUT DELAY
by Hendrik Hertzberg
Issue of 2005-04-25
Posted 2005-04-18
The New Yorker
A current Washington joke, in the mordant style that used to be a Moscow specialty, has it that Republicans and Democrats have finally found something they can agree on: Tom DeLay must stay as the Majority Leader of the House of Representatives.
The DeLay Must Stay movement, like all popular fronts and uneasy alliances, brings together participants of varying motives. Republican members want to continue being led by the Texas bug exterminator turned hard-right Christianist crusader because they agree with him on the great political and religious issues of the day; because he is nice to them, feeding them pizza when they have to work late and finding places for the smokers among them to indulge without having to shiver on the Capitol steps; because they are terrified of him, on account of his well-deserved reputation for vengefulness; because he saved them from losing House seats in the 2004 election by persuading Texas to adopt a precedent-breaking mid-decade gerrymander that netted their party an overall gain of three seats; because he has raised millions for their campaigns, mostly from business interests that have reaped billions and expect to reap billions more from the policies he promotes; and because, using threats and inducements, he has insured that the choicest, highest-paying, most enviable lobbying jobs on Washington?s K Street corridor go overwhelmingly to Republicans in general and DeLay loyalists in particular. Democrats don?t mind if DeLay stays a while, because he is so repellent. Self-righteous, humorless, resentful, scowling, perpetually angry, he has many of the irritating qualities of his former colleague Newt Gingrich without any of the latter?s childlike charms. (There are no DeLay equivalents of Gingrich?s boyish enthusiasms for dinosaurs, sci-fi fantasies, and big, shiny theories of History.) And then there are the scandals, which cling to the Majority Leader like flakes of dandruff.
DeLay?s ethical lapses center on campaign-finance chicanery, with sidelines in petty nepotism and lavish trips to exotic locales near golf courses. The details tend to be numbingly dull?there are no Monicas or burglaries to spice them up?but the lapses themselves are real enough. Last year, three of them attracted the attention of the House ethics committee, which formally (though toothlessly) ?admonished? him, making him one of only three representatives, and the only repeat offender, to be disciplined in the past three years. DeLay has since had the three most unreliable Republicans removed and replaced with stooges, and the ethics committee has devolved from torpid to moribund. But various newspapers (not just bastions of the coastal ?liberal media? like the Times and the Washington Post but also red-state gazettes like the American Press, of Lake Charles, Louisiana) have continued to make inquiries, as has the (Democratic) district attorney for Austin, Texas, Ronnie Earle, who has already indicted three of DeLay?s closest associates and eight of their corporate donors. So far, only one serving Republican congressman?Christopher Shays, of Connecticut?has openly called upon DeLay to give up his leadership post. But cracks are beginning to appear in the outer wall. ?delay must go? was the title last week of an editorial in the staunchly Republican Richmond Times-Dispatch. The editorialists of the Wall Street Journal, who last year dismissed ethics criticisms of DeLay as ?amusing,? now write sternly, ?Mr. DeLay, who rode to power in 1994 on a wave of revulsion at the everyday ways of big government, has become the living exemplar of some of its worst habits.? The headline on that one was ?smells like beltway.?
What is most odiferous about DeLay, however, is not his Tammany-like antics but his Torquemada-like ones. The current fuss reached the boiling point on March 31st, when, after the body of Terri Schiavo was allowed to expire, DeLay?in a prepared statement, not an off-the-cuff remark?warned ominously, ?The time will come for the men responsible for this to answer for their behavior, but not today.? The anodyne interpretation of this is that DeLay was talking about the hereafter, where various members of the Florida and federal judiciaries, having died of presumably natural causes, will stand before their Maker, who will proceed to drop-kick them into the fiery pit. Some observers, noting the recent spate of actual, attempted, and threatened assassinations of judges, perceived a touch of this-worldly incitement; Senator Frank Lautenberg, of New Jersey, suggested that DeLay might have violated a statute outlawing such threats against federal judges.
Meanwhile, as new ethics allegations surfaced, DeLay huddled with colleagues from the other body for a strategy session. According to the Associated Press:
His private remarks to Senate Republicans were in keeping with the response frequently offered on his behalf by House Republicans: Blame the Democrats and occasionally the news media for the scrutiny he faces. House Republicans intend to follow the script later in the week, hoping to showcase passage of bankruptcy legislation and estate tax repeal as a counterpoint to Democratic charges that they are merely power-hungry.
The hope, evidently, was to deflect charges of being merely power-hungry by inviting charges of being?on behalf of wealthy contributors?merely money-hungry. (The bankruptcy bill, which has since passed, is a gift to the banking and credit-card industries; estate-tax repeal, still pending in the Senate, would be an even bigger gift to the superrich.) Where DeLay is concerned, at least, the ploy hasn?t worked. Gingrich, of all people, has now called upon DeLay to account for himself. (?DeLay?s problem isn?t with the Democrats,? the former Speaker told the ?CBS Evening News? last week. ?DeLay?s problem is with the country.?)
Finally, last Wednesday, DeLay expressed regret for the style of his March 31st remarks. ?I said something in an inartful way, and I shouldn?t have said it that way, and I apologize for saying it that way,? he said at a news conference. No apologies for the substance, though. ?I believe in an independent judiciary,? he said, and went on to explain what he meant: ?We??Congress??set up the courts. We can unset the courts. We have the power of the purse.? He declined to say whether the judges in the Schiavo case should be impeached, though that particular remedy for ?judicial activism? is one that he has been advocating since 1997.
Earlier that day, DeLay had given an interview to the Washington Times, the far right?s daily organ in the capital. For the most part, he was careful to avoid getting himself in more trouble. ?I?m not sure I want to go there,? he said in answer to a question about which bits of the government he?d like to abolish. And, to a question about Israeli settlements in the West Bank: ?You?re not going to get me in a fight with the President.? But when asked who is to blame for ?activist judges,? he was jaw-droppingly candid:
I blame Congress over the last fifty to a hundred years for not standing up and taking its responsibility given to it by the Constitution. The reason the judiciary has been able to impose a separation of church and state that?s nowhere in the Constitution is that Congress didn?t stop them. The reason we had judicial review is because Congress didn?t stop them. The reason we had a right to privacy is because Congress didn?t stop them.
So there you have it, the DeLay agenda: no separation of church and state, no judicial review, no right to privacy. Next to this, the President?s effort to repeal the New Deal social contract by phasing out Social Security is the mewing of a kitten. DeLay may stay or DeLay may go. But the real danger is not DeLay himself. It?s DeLay?s agenda. It?s his vision. It?s his ?values.?
George Booth
Married With Problems? Therapy May Not Help
By SUSAN GILBERT
Each year, hundreds of thousands of couples go into counseling in an effort to save their troubled relationships.
But does marital therapy work? Not nearly as well as it should, researchers say. Two years after ending counseling, studies find, 25 percent of couples are worse off than they were when they started, and after four years, up to 38 percent are divorced.
Many of the counseling strategies used today, like teaching people to listen and communicate better and to behave in more positive ways, can help couples for up to a year, say social scientists who have analyzed the effectiveness of different treatments. But they are insufficient to get couples through the squalls of conflict that inevitably recur in the long term.
At the same time, experts say, many therapists lack the skills to work with couples who are in serious trouble.
Unable to help angry couples get to the root of their conflict and forge a resolution, these therapists do one of two things: they either let the partners take turns talking week after week, with no end to the therapy in sight, or they give up on the couple and, in effect, steer them to divorce.
"Couples therapy can do more harm than good when the therapist doesn't know how to help a couple," said Dr. Susan M. Johnson, professor of psychology at the University of Ottawa and director of the Ottawa Couple and Family Institute.
One couple, in Boonton, N.J., saw two marriage counselors over 13 years.
"One therapist hurt our marriage and actually a caused our separation," said the husband, Jim, who did not want his last name used out of concerns for his privacy.
"She told my wife, 'You don't have to put up with that,' " referring to his battle with alcoholism, he said.
To be sure, many couples credit counseling with strengthening their marriages. And therapists say that they could save more marriages if couples started therapy before their relationships were in critical condition.
"Couples wait an average of six years of being unhappy with their relationship before getting help," said Dr. John Gottman, emeritus professor of psychology at the University of Washington and executive director of the Relationship Research Institute in Seattle. "We help the very distressed couples less than the moderately distressed couples."
In the last few years, efforts to find ways to save more marriages and other long-term relationships have increased.
With an experimental approach called integrative behavioral couples therapy, for example, 67 percent of couples significantly improved their relationships for two years, according to a study reported in November to the Association for the Advancement of Behavior Therapy.
Instead of teaching couples how to avoid or solve arguments, as traditional counseling techniques do, the integrative therapy aims to make arguments less hurtful by helping partners accept their differences. It is based on a recent finding that it is not whether a couple fights but how they fight that can destroy a relationship.
Especially encouraging, all of the couples in the study were at high risk of divorce. "Many had been couples therapy failures," said Dr. Andrew Christensen, a professor of clinical psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles and the lead author of the study.
But some experts who were trained as couples therapists have now become so disillusioned that they question the value of couples therapy in any form. They say that couples are better off taking marriage education courses - practical workshops that teach couples how to get along and that do not ask them to bare their souls or air their problems to a third party.
Two large nationwide marriage education programs, Practical Application of Intimate Relationship Skills and the Prevention and Relationship Enhancement Program, offer such workshops.
"When I was a practicing therapist, I was like a judge listening to each partner tell why the other was ruining the marriage," said Diane Sollee, a former couples therapist who founded Smartmarriages, a clearinghouse of marriage education programs. "There was a lot of crying. Marriage education classes are more empowering."
Developed several decades ago mainly to prevent marital problems in newlyweds or engaged couples, marriage education programs are now attracting couples who have not been helped by couples therapy but who want to try one last thing before deciding to divorce.
How effective these programs are is unclear.
Some studies indicate that couples who take marriage education classes have a lower divorce rate than couples who do not take the classes.
But Dr. Gottman, who uses marriage education workshops and couples therapy, has found that workshops alone are insufficient for 20 percent to 30 percent of couples in his research. These couples have problems - like a history of infidelity or depression - that can be addressed only in therapy, he said.
Couples therapy, also called marriage counseling and marriage therapy, refers to a number of psychotherapy techniques that aim to help couples understand and overcome conflicts in their relationship.
It is conducted by psychologists, psychiatrists and social workers, as well as by marriage and family therapists.
Three types of couples therapy have been found to improve people's satisfaction with their marriage for at least a year after the treatment ends.
The oldest approach, developed more than 20 years ago but still widely used, is behavioral marital therapy, in which partners learn to be nicer to each other, communicate better and improve their conflict-resolution skills.
Another, called insight-oriented marital therapy, combines behavioral therapy with techniques for understanding the power struggles, defense mechanisms and other negative behaviors that cause strife in a relationship.
With each method, about half of couples improve initially, but many of them relapse after a year.
A relatively new approach that studies have found highly effective is called emotionally focused therapy, with 70 to 73 percent of couples reaching recovery - the point where their satisfaction with their relationship is within normal limits - for up to two years, the length of the studies.
Dr. Johnson, who helped develop emotionally focused therapy in the 1990's, said that it enabled couples to identify and break free of the destructive emotional cycles that they fell into.
"A classic one is that one person criticizes, the other withdraws," she said. "The more I push, the more you withdraw. We talk about how both partners are victims of these cycles."
As the partners reveal their feelings during these cycles, they build trust and strengthen their connection to each other, she said.
Surprisingly, Dr. Johnson said, until emotionally focused therapy came along, therapists were so intent on getting couples to make contracts to change their behavior that they did not delve into the emotional underpinnings of a relationship.
"It was like leaving chicken out of chicken soup," she said.
Dr. Johnson's latest research, completed in January, included 24 of the most at-risk couples, people who were unable to reconcile because their trust in each other had been shattered by extramarital affairs and other serious injuries to their relationship.
"These injuries are like a torpedo," she said. "They take a marriage down."
The study found that after 8 to 12 sessions, a majority of the couples had healed their injuries and rebuilt their trust.
Most important, these gains lasted for three years. "It's very satisfying to know that we can make a difference with these couples and that it sticks," Dr. Johnson said.
Alice, a library program coordinator in Honesdale, Pa., credits her couples therapy, which focused on emotional issues, with getting her and her husband to reunite after a yearlong separation.
"The marriage counselor brought us back together," she said.
Alice, who did not want her last name used out of privacy concerns, said an important catalyst for their reunion was the therapist's asking each to think about the ways that the other person wanted to feel appreciated and loved. Gradually, she said, she has come to see that her husband's needs were different from her own.
"Going back to this exercise is one thing that has gotten us through hard times," she said.
Researchers have begun to identify which qualities in a couple make for a lasting relationship. The findings challenge some common assumptions - that couples who fight a lot are beyond help, for example.
Over more than two decades of videotaping and analyzing the behavior of happy and unhappy couples, Dr. Gottman has found that all couples fight and that most fights are never resolved. What is different between happy and unhappy couples is the way they fight.
The happy couples punctuate their arguments with positive interactions, he said, like interjecting humor or smiling in fond recognition of a partner's foibles. The unhappy couples have corrosive arguments, characterized by criticism, defensiveness and other negative words and gestures.
Of course, even the happiest of couples can get nasty sometimes. But Dr. Gottman has found that as long as the ratio of positive to negative interactions remains at least five to one, the relationship is sturdy. When the ratio dips below that, he says, he can predict with 94 percent accuracy that a couple will divorce.
Dr. Gottman says that couples therapists can use this information to help keep couples together. "You can't just teach a couple to avoid conflict," he said. "You have to build friendship and intimacy into the relationship. If you don't, the relationship gets crusty and mean."
But not all marriages are salvageable, therapists say. "Some people are fundamentally mismatched, and they can't benefit from therapy," Dr. Gottman said.
Others - beyond the scope of couples therapy or marriage education programs - are people with personality disorders and relationships marred by violence and intimidation.
"We have nothing to offer them," he said.
Couples therapy is designed to be relatively short term: 26 weeks or less.
"The vast majority of my patients do better after 5 to 10 sessions and are satisfied. The cycle of blaming is interrupted," said Dr. John W. Jacobs, a psychiatrist in New York and author of the 2004 book "All You Need Is Love and Other Lies About Marriage."
But even when a therapist loses hope in a couple's future, the couple may not give up. Many couples, determined to avoid becoming yet another divorce statistic, keep searching for new therapists or programs to help them stay together.
After two rounds of couples therapy and one separation, Jim, of Boonton, and his wife, Valerie, decided to try Retrouvaille, a program of intensive weekend workshops and follow-up seminars affiliated with the Roman Catholic Church and geared to couples who are on the verge of divorce or separation.
"There are talks on various subjects, like disillusionment, forgiveness and the sacrament of marriage, and then you write about them," Jim said. "The big focus is on feelings. You end up feeling what your partner feels."
Another advantage for Jim is that Retrouvaille did not have the stigma of therapy.
"Regular people get up and tell their stories about infidelity, overspending and other problems," he said. "There's comfort in numbers. It takes away some of the embarrassment and shame."
Six years after their Retrouvaille weekend, Jim and Valerie now lead Retrouvaille sessions, symbols of hope to couples on the edge. But they still struggle with their own marriage.
"We both realize that our marriage is something that needs to be worked on," Jim said. "But we're committed to staying together."
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company | Home | Privacy Policy | Search | Corrections | RSS | Help | Back to Top
Monday, April 18, 2005
David Chelsea
MODERN LOVE
Me? I'm Just Fine (Whimper). Really (Sob).
By JESSICA GROSE
SINCE I know what it's like to sob on nearly every single form of public transportation in the New York metropolitan area, I can tell you with authority that crying on the subway is the most cathartic. I suppose I'm not a full-fledged expert in local mass transit emoting; I have yet to cry on the Staten Island Ferry or the tram to Roosevelt Island. But I've only lived here nine months.
I have a storied history of transitory tears. I've cried on Amtrak between New York and Rhode Island, on a flight from Mexico, and on a school bus home from a field hockey game. For some reason crying in public comes easily to me. Maybe I like being the center of attention. Or maybe it's more that I can't keep it together in the face of romantic rejection.
Ian broke up with me at his apartment in Windsor Terrace in Brooklyn. Since I had been living at his place, my only option was to return to my parents' house in Irvington, N.Y., a bus, subway and commuter train ride away. After a three-hour pleading, dignity-free gamble to win him back, I got down on my knees and began picking through the bachelor-pad detritus (empty beer bottles, broken guitar amps, yellowing newspapers) in search of my black Converse sneakers, copies of The New Yorker and other items I could clearly identify as mine. I threw everything I could grab into my giant suitcase and made my graceless exit, yanking my wobbly suitcase onto the stoop before pulling his door closed behind me.
I wasn't crying when I first got on the bus. But as it headed up Seventh Avenue in Park Slope, I saw the site of our first date, a place called Donuts, where Ian and I had split a chocolate glazed. I remembered looking into his almond-shaped blue eyes and marveling at the perfect shape of his WASPy nose. He told me about his interest in Buddhism. He said his younger brother was his best friend. Afterward he let me watch "South Park" at his apartment, even though, as I later came to discover, he hates cartoons.
I recalled the weekend we spent writing a song about cupcakes. He wrote the music, which he played on his acoustic guitar. I was embarrassed because I'd never written a song before, and I thought my lyrics sounded girly and moony. But he said he loved them.
Now suddenly my breathing went staccato, and my mouth dried up. There was only a smattering of people on the bus: several old ladies with their hair wrapped in waterproof bonnets, a mother with a sleeping baby perched on her right knee.
When I started to cry, the old ladies looked my way. One with a pink rain hat seemed especially sympathetic, and when she got off at Flatbush Avenue, she smiled benignly in my direction. This hint of kindness quelled my tears, at least until I got off to take the No. 4 train at Borough Hall.
As the bus doors opened, the cold air hit me with a whoosh, and at the sight of the White Castle on Willoughby Street I started crying again. Ian loved White Castle. The fact that I was now being brought to tears by the purveyors of low-quality midget hamburgers made me feel even more pathetic, and my crying reached keening levels.
I made it to the 4 train platform where, thankfully, only two people - both men - were in my immediate vicinity. One asked if I was O.K., and I nodded while wiping my nose with the back of my jacket sleeve. He smiled politely and walked to the other end of the platform.
The second man, a hulking figure with a ribbed green cap, was more persistent.
"What's wrong, sugar?" he asked with a slight West Indian accent.
"Muh-muh-my b-b-oyfriend just broke up with me-he," I said, trying to suck the water back into my mouth and nose.
"Aw, that fool must be crazy," he said. "To give up a cute young thang like yourself?"
"Thanks," I said as the train pulled up. We got onto the same subway car, and he sat across the aisle from me.
"Did you cheat on him?" he asked.
I shook my head. "Everything was perfect. He told me he was breaking up with me for no reason."
That weekend Ian and I had driven to Coney Island, where I'd taught him to play Skee-Ball. He had taken a series of pictures of me chasing gulls around the snow-splattered sand and kissed me underneath the Cyclone. Things weren't just perfect, they were puke-worthy adorable.
Three days later I went over to his house after work to make dinner with him. When I walked in the door, he looked stricken. I asked him what was wrong.
"I have to tell you something," he said, looking down at the carpet. "But I don't know how to."
"You want to break up."
"Yep."
I led him by the hand into his room and sat down on his bed. He stood near the door and said in a measured voice, "I have no reason. Things just don't feel right."
"How long have you felt this way?" I asked, my voice starting to break.
"A few days."
"A few days? Don't you think you're being a little hasty?"
"No. My feelings for you have plateaued."
"What does that even mean?"
"I don't know. I just, I just can't do this anymore." He kept standing in the corner, his arms crossed.
"Maybe we just moved too fast," I said. "I mean, it's your first big relationship, maybe the honeymoon period is just over, and you need space."
"I'm sorry. I just can't."
I STARTED to cry, and I reached out to him from the bed."I can't comfort you right now," he told me. I wondered where the sweet man who stroked my hair had gone. The one who thought that the fact that I drooled in my sleep was "darling." The one who bought me flowers when my grandfather died. I could find no evidence of him in the pursed lips before me.
The West Indian man interrupted my mental breakup rehash. "One time I was cheatin' on this woman. She was the sweetest thang in the world. I don't know what came over me. You have kids?"
"No, no. I'm only 22."
"Then it's no problem," he said. "You'll have a new man by tomorrow." He stood up to get off at Fulton Street. "Take care, girl."
I had stopped crying by then, and my breathing had almost returned to normal by the time I emerged from the subway at Grand Central. Then I saw I only had three minutes to catch the 9:20 and started sprinting toward Track 41 with my giant rolly-wheel suitcase in tow.
I usually get to Grand Central Terminal at least 20 minutes early, so I have time to buy an Us Weekly to mindlessly peruse while the Hudson ebbs and flows outside my window.
I was panting when I boarded and the door closed behind me, nearly catching my sherpa-pack in its grip.
I sat down in a window seat on the west side of the train. If you ride the Hudson line with any regularity, you know to take a seat with the best view of the river. A man in a slightly rumpled expensive-looking suit sat down next to me, leaving a seat in between, and immediately took out his BlackBerry and started tapping furiously at the screen.
I stared out the window at the intermittently lighted concrete walls with occasional spurts of spray paint. Sitting in the quiet without my cheesy celebrity rag made me remember that the last time I'd been on the commuter rail was with Ian.
We were going skiing for the weekend, and I had to go back to my parents' house to get my car. He held my hand for the entire trip, until our palms were clammy. He bounced his knees up and down in anticipation of meeting the folks who spawned me. I told him stories about my family's pseudo-educational epic car trips up and down the Eastern Seaboard, where we'd stop in places like Glass Town (Corning, N.Y.) and Shaker Country (Western Massachusetts). He told me about his family's trips to Canada to visit his gay uncle.
Remembering the fondness with which he spoke of his uncle's partner made me start crying again for some reason. I don't know why, I guess it was the openness of his pinkish cheeks when he was recalling his extended family, or maybe it was just the knowledge that now I'd never get to meet his uncle, even though he'd seen pictures of me.
I started crying heavily again and continued to cry from Harlem to Yonkers until I was interrupted by the tight-lipped BlackBerry man next to me. "Excuse me," he said, "but I can barely hear myself think with you carrying on like that."
My mouth dropped open for a second, but I said nothing. I looked away from him and out the window and tried to hold it in.
When he got off at Hastings, I promptly started crying again, quietly this time. I watched the lights of the Tappan Zee Bridge approach in the dark of late evening. A few minutes before Irvington, I stopped crying. I was returning to the arms of people who loved me unconditionally, who would like nothing more than to take me in their grown-up arms and pat my little back and tell me it would be O.K.
As the train pulled up to the station, I saw my mother waiting on the platform. Her closely cropped black hair was covered by a little fur cap. She looked worried. Once she registered me coming toward her, she opened her arms. I rushed to her and buried my face into the lapels of her down jacket.
By the time we arrived home, my face was dry.
Jessica Grose is an M.F.A. candidate at Columbia and the editorial assistant at Spin.com. She lives in Brooklyn.
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company | Home | Privacy Policy | Search | Corrections | RSS | Help | Back to Top
David Atlas/Retna Ltd. May 5, 2002
Phil Lesh, in 2002, has been the Grateful Dead's bassist for four decades.
Now the Dead Will Always Be With Us
By SETH MNOOKIN
TEN years ago, Jerry Garcia - morbidly obese, addicted to heroin and increasingly disconnected from both the other members of the Grateful Dead and the outside world - died in his sleep at Serenity Knolls, a drug treatment facility in Northern California. As the Dead's zealous fans mourned Garcia's loss, few people predicted a robust future for the rest of the band. Since its acid-drenched inception, Garcia had been the central force behind the world's most famous traveling psychedelic road show. He wrote the music for classic songs like "Uncle John's Band," "Eyes of the World" and "Terrapin Station." Garcia's wide-ranging, pointillistic guitar playing defined - for the outside world, anyway - the Grateful Dead's restless approach to live performances, and his Buddha-like stage presence and reedy tenor anchored what had become one of the biggest touring draws in the rock 'n' roll world.
But since Garcia's death, Phil Lesh, a founding member of the Grateful Dead and its bassist for four decades, has been reshaping both the band and the public's understanding of its legacy. Tomorrow the 65-year-old will release "Searching for the Sound" (Little, Brown), a frank memoir that discusses how destructive - murderous, even - substance abuse was to the band he devoted his life to. And in the six and a half years since Mr. Lesh's hepatitis C necessitated a life-saving liver transplant, he has been reinvigorating the Dead's catalog. Next Tuesday, he'll be the host of the Jammy Awards, the annual celebration of the type of searing, improvised live music the Dead helped pioneer. Come fall, he'll hit the road with Phil & Friends, the loose-knit group he's led since shortly after Garcia's death. (The Black Crowes' Chris Robinson is now the lead singer; the Allman Brothers guitarist Warren Haynes has also played with the band, as have members of the now-defunct Phish.)
"People who had not necessarily played a lot of the music could help make these songs unique, beautiful and absolutely fresh and new," Mr. Lesh says of his new outfit. Finally, along with the remaining members of the Dead - they dropped the "Grateful" after Garcia's death - he has toured for the last several years with guests filling in on vocals, guitars and keyboards; last summer they played 35 dates.
Mr. Lesh's gradual emergence as the keeper of the post-Garcia flame shouldn't come as that much of a surprise. In the late 1960's, Mr. Lesh, a precocious jazz and classical trumpeter who had never played bass before joining the Dead, developed a distinctive style of performing that helped define the band's sound. Instead of thrumming root notes on the downbeat - the typical approach to rock bass - he often played slowed-down variants of the main melody lines, helping to create a layered, fractal-like soundscape. His six-string bass (most basses have only four strings) let him range unusually high and low, and the band's polyrhythmic, two-drummer configuration let him stray far off songs' normal pulse.
What might surprise more people is his brutal honesty about the band's drug abuse. While members of the Dead have never denied the inspiration they took from psychedelics, they've been reticent about the destructive effect of addiction. (Garcia himself was usually opaque about his drug use and almost never discussed his heroin use either publicly or privately.)
The first two-thirds of "Searching for the Sound" are devoted to Mr. Lesh's endearingly enthusiastic depiction of the Dead's first years, during which they would sometimes practice for seven hours a day and hone their sound at hundreds of live shows. The band's almost religious belief in the mind-expanding powers of LSD and its unusually intense connection with its audience served as powerful inspiration. But as time went on - and especially after 1987, when Garcia and the Dead scored an unlikely megahit with "Touch of Grey" - the Dead had to move from amphitheaters to stadiums, losing some of the intimate connection with fans; what's more, Mr. Lesh writes, larger and larger proportions of the crowd began showing up solely with the expectation of scoring drugs.
In his book, Mr. Lesh publicly addresses for the first time the toll his alcoholism took on the band. (During one show, he simply sat down on stage; one of the Dead's drummers played paradiddles on his head to get him moving.) Mr. Lesh was, he says, "pretty much drunk throughout" the band's trip to Egypt in the late 1970's, when they played at the foot of the pyramids. During the late 1970's and early 1980's, his alcoholism, Garcia's budding heroin addiction, and mountains of freely available cocaine turned a once-cohesive unit into a group whose main form of communicating became playing music with, and sometimes at, one another onstage.
"It wasn't easy to write about the whole addiction syndrome," says Mr. Lesh in an interview from his home in California, where he lives with his wife and two children. (Mr. Lesh quit drinking in the early 1980's.) "It really involved facing up to the fact that the tools we had been using for exploration and for the coalescence of the group mind had been superseded by tools for self-medication," he said. "Basically, the whole drug experience turned on us - and started killing us off, one by one."
Mr. Lesh's passages about the mid-1990's are tinged with regret; despite the realization that Garcia's life was at risk, the Dead stayed on the road. "We became determined we were going to play the best we could," Mr. Lesh said. As Garcia was spacing out on words he had been singing for years, "we would try to engage Jerry, try to make it as good as it could be."
Today, the situation has changed. When the Dead resumed touring several years ago, Mr. Lesh became the unspoken leader of the anarchic outfit, the member who would call out stop-on-a-dime time or key changes during newly focused jams.
"With the Grateful Dead, you had guys playing together for 20 or 30 years," says Steve Bernstein, the publisher of Relix, a magazine that covers the Dead and its progeny. "That can be wonderful, but it can also get boring." Now, Phil & Friends and the Dead still have "a heavy element of improvisation, but with a lot tighter focus," he said. Despite the absence of Garcia's haunting vocals, the Dead are making much more consistently rewarding music than they did during his last years. (At some point before the end of the year, the Dead will soon have a 40th anniversary celebration, although, Mr. Lesh admits, "In typical fashion, we don't know what we're going to do yet.")
Today, Cameron Sears, the president and chief executive of Grateful Dead Productions, says the company is down to about a dozen employees (from more than 60 at its peak), with an overhead dramatically lower than the $12 million the band was spending annually in the 1990's. The company focuses mainly on merchandising, and most of its revenue comes from selling archival recordings of concerts.
Mr. Lesh, meanwhile, is helping to pave the road for a future when the Grateful Dead's music could continue without any of the original band members. With Phil & Friends, he says, "I wanted to treat the body of work the Grateful Dead had created like repertory, like a Shakespeare play or a Beethoven quartet." So many people have either played with an incarnation of the Dead or sat in on some shows - the keyboardist Bruce Hornsby, the saxophonist Branford Marsalis, the singer Joan Osborne, to name a few - it's not hard to imagine a time 10 or 15 years in the future when the music of the original "band beyond description" keeps on truckin' along without any original members at all.
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Franck Prevel/Associated Press
Lance Armstrong pedaled down the Champs-Élysées as the winner of the Tour de France for a record sixth time, winning the 2,106-mile race by more than six minutes.
Armstrong Will Retire After Tour De France
By TIMOTHY WILLIAMS
Lance Armstrong, one of the greatest competitive cyclists of all-time, announced today that this year's Tour de France would be his final professional race, saying that "my time has come."
"I have thought a lot about it, and I've gone back and forth," said Mr. Armstrong, his voice cracking with emotion at times. "I'm 100 percent committed, and the decision is final."
Mr. Armstrong, 33, has won the Tour de France, cycling's most prestigious race, a record six times, all consecutive victories.
A survivor of a bout with cancer that nearly killed him in the 1990's, Mr. Armstrong's charisma and intense cycling style, particularly on steep mountain inclines during the rigorous three-week Tour, has made him an international icon, transcending the world of cycling and making him one of the most recognizable athletes in the world.
Rumors of Mr. Armstrong's retirement have been circulating for several months, and Mr. Armstrong has said several times that he was finding it increasingly difficult to be away from his young children for the intense training regimen required of an elite cyclist.
During the news conference today in Augusta, Ga., where he will race this week, Mr. Armstrong again cited time spent away from his children as a determining factor in his decision to retire after the Tour de France, which starts July 2 and ends July 24.
"My children said, 'It's time to come home,' " he said. "They're at an age where they change daily, if not hourly. To be away now for one month is grueling. It's time for me not to miss key moments in their lives."
In addition to his children, Mr. Armstrong thanked his teammates, his sponsor, the Discovery Channel, and his companion, the singer Sheryl Crow, whom he called "a great partner." Mr. Armstrong and his wife, Kristin Armstrong, are divorced.
In 1996, at age 25, Mr. Armstrong was the top-ranked cyclist in the world when he was told he had advanced testicular cancer that had spread to his lungs and brain. He underwent chemotherapy and surgery to remove the malignant testicle, and later, brain surgery. Once he recovered, he called getting cancer "the best thing that ever happened to me," and "a special wake-up call" because it had forced him to mature and focus.
He also started the Lance Armstrong Foundation, which has raised millions for cancer research and education. The foundation's yellow "Live Strong" bracelets have become ubiquitous in many places.
Mr. Armstrong married in 1997, and three years after his cancer was diagnosed, he fathered the first of his three children and won the 1999 Tour de France by seven minutes, beginning his extraordinary string of his six consecutive Tour victories.
Today, Mr. Armstrong said he would fulfill public promises he made earlier this year and would try for a seventh Tour victory beginning July 2, and then he will leave, "win or lose."
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Helene Silverman; photo by Raeanne Giovanni-Inoue
The Body Heretic: It Scorns Our Efforts
By GINA KOLATA
THE promises are everywhere. Sure, you smoked. But you can erase all those years of abusing your lungs if you just throw away the cigarettes. Eating a lot of junk food? Change your diet, lose even 5 or 10 pounds and rid yourself of those extra risks of heart disease and diabetes. Stay out of the sun - who cares if you spent your youth in a state of bronzed bliss? If you protect yourself now, skin cancer will never get you.
Maybe it should be no surprise that America's popular and commercial cultures promote the idea of an inexhaustible capacity for self-rejuvenation and self-repair. After all, if America as an idea has meant anything, it has meant just that - the possibility of continual transformation - becoming wealthier, more spiritual, more beautiful, happier and feeling younger.
That optimism has helped create a society of unmatched vitality - a source of bewilderment, alarm and envy to the rest of the world. But Americans often forget, or aren't aware, of how unusual they are in this respect, notes Dr. Daniel Haber, director of the cancer center at Massachusetts General Hospital.
"I grew up in Europe and I travel in Europe," he said. "And there's an amazing contrast." Europeans are far more fatalistic about their lives, he said. They believe "you need to enjoy life," so they smoke, they bask in a sun, they take pleasure in a leisurely, indulgent meal and they don't feel compelled to go to a gym.
Americans, Dr. Haber says, believe in control - of their bodies, their mental faculties and their futures. So shedding some pounds or some unhealthy habits is not merely sensible. It suggests a new beginning, being born again.
Maybe that is why people may feel betrayed when Peter Jennings explains that he stopped smoking, at least for a while, and still got lung cancer. Or why, two decades after his death, people still talk about Jim Fixx, the running guru who lost weight, stopped smoking, ran every day and dropped dead of a heart attack.
In fact, science is pretty clear on all of this: There are real limits to what can be done to reverse the damage caused by a lifetime of unhealthy living. Other than lung cancer, which is mostly a disease of smokers, there are few diseases that are preventable by changing behavior in midlife.
But that is not what most people think, said Dr. Barnett Kramer, the associate director for disease prevention at the National Institutes of Health. Instead, they believe that if you reform you'll erase the damage, in part because public health messages often give that impression. "It is easy to overestimate based on the strength of the messages," Dr. Kramer said. "But we're not as confident as the messages state."
Eating five servings of vegetables and fruit has not been shown to prevent cancer. Melanoma, the deadly skin cancer, occurs whether or not you go out in the sun. Gobbling calcium pills has not been found to prevent osteoporosis. Switching to a low-fat diet in adulthood does not prevent breast cancer.
At most, Dr. Kramer said, the effect of changing one's diet or lifestyle might amount to "a matter of changing probabilities," slightly improving the odds. But health science is so at odds with the American ethos of self-renewal that it has a hard time being heard. Here, where people believe anything is possible if you really want it, even aging is viewed as a choice.
"It's hard to find an American who doesn't believe that, with enough will, he or she can achieve anything - we've been brought up to believe that," said Dr. Barry Glassner, a sociology professor at the University of Southern California. Health, he emphasized, is no exception: "It's the same whether you're 40, 50 or 80. It doesn't matter whether you are male or female, black or white. "
But in matters of health, the strongest willed person simply cannot wipe the slate of life clean and begin again. This is true even with lung cancer and smoking. Those who quit may greatly reduce their risk of lung cancer. But they cannot eliminate it.
"The best you can be is a former smoker - you can't be a 'never smoker,' " said Dr. Kramer. "It's not all or none. It's a matter of changing probabilities."
In fact, in every area of desired physical self-renewal, the probabilities make it hard to argue that life allows one to start over.
At health clubs, pear-shaped people in their 40's and 50's obsessively lift weights, trying for those defined muscles that, even in youth, come only to those with a certain genetic predisposition. But by middle age, the overweight tend to stay that way, and the body has a harder time increasing muscle mass. So even the greatest personal trainer will not produce rippling abs.
At the cardiologist's office, middle-age men, learning that their arteries are starting to clog, swear they'll never eat chips and hamburgers again, and that they will take up jogging. Some do and a small percentage even stick with it. But no amount of exercise or diet change will make the plaque in their arteries disappear. Despite common public health recommendations, walking for half an hour a day, five days a week probably won't make most people lose weight. And while a regular regimen of walking or running will likely improve your stamina and cardiovascular fitness, there is no guarantee that it will reverse heart disease, prevent or forestall a heart attack or in any way extend your life.
The effects of other measures, like changing lifestyle or switching to a diet rich in raw vegetables, are even less clear when it comes to preventing cancer, said Dr. Kramer. "Even if they do affect the cancer," he said, " it may be that it's over an entire lifetime."
So what are Americans, with their faith in starting over, to do? When it comes to making oneself over, said Dr. Glassner, they have two options. One, he said, "is that you can consider yourself inadequate or inferior" for failing to force the years to melt away. The other is to shift the definition of rejuvenation from a arduous restructuring of the self to a paint job.
"Now, instead of losing the weight you're going to go for cosmetic surgery," Dr. Glassner said.
That is not really an answer. Collagen injections or surgery may give people more youthful looking faces, but only for a while. And liposuction won't help for long if the body restores the fat that was suctioned off the patient's arms or buttocks.
Then there is a third possibility for the resourceful, Dr. Glassner said. An overweight person can simply redefine himself as a "food adventurer."
There is one group, however, for whom a strong sense of control over the future may be an unalloyed good: the sick.
"Protective illusions," says Dr. Shelley Taylor, a psychology professor at the University of California at Los Angeles, can be a good thing. In her research, she found that among people with serious diseases, those who felt they still had control over their lives coped better with their illnesses.
The optimists fared better psychologically even when they became more ill - shattering the illusion of control. "What you often see is people use something like cancer as an opportunity to discover value in their lives, and meaning," Dr. Taylor said. "They reorder their priorities. They focus on relationships more. Control and optimism shift to things that can be dealt with."
For those in good health, there is still another option, though it is decidedly a minority position. This is simply to scale back on one's self-engineering and take more pleasure in simply getting from day to day.
The American essayist Joseph Epstein nicely expressed this view in an essay, written when he hit the age of 60, which he gave the mordant title, "Will You Still Feed Me?" In it, Mr. Epstein expresses the virtue of just enjoying the ride.
"At 60," he writes, "one probably does well not to expect wild changes, at least not for the better. Probably best not even to expect a lot in the way of self-improvement. Not a good idea, I think, at this point to attempt to build the body beautiful. Be happy-immensely happy, in fact-with the body still functional."
Of course, many in midlife will still decide to hit the gym, to eat better, drink less, relax more. And that's a good thing, if only because they will feel better for being fitter. But they shouldn't expect it to erase the effects of all those years that came before.
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Ted McGrath
There's Nothing Deep About Depression
By PETER D. KRAMER
Shortly after the publication of my book ''Listening to Prozac,'' 12 years ago, I became immersed in depression. Not my own. I was contented enough in the slog through midlife. But mood disorder surrounded me, in my contacts with patients and readers. To my mind, my book was never really about depression. Taking the new antidepressants, some of my patients said they found themselves more confident and decisive. I used these claims as a jumping-off point for speculation: what if future medications had the potential to modify personality traits in people who had never experienced mood disorder? If doctors were given access to such drugs, how should they prescribe them? The inquiry moved from medical ethics to social criticism: what does our culture demand of us, in the way of assertiveness?
It was the medications' extra effects -- on personality, not on the symptoms of depression -- that provoked this line of thought. For centuries, doctors have treated depressed patients, using medication and psychological strategies. Those efforts seemed uncontroversial. But authors do not determine the fate of their work. ''Listening to Prozac'' became a ''best-selling book about depression.'' I found myself speaking -- sometimes about ethics, more often about mood disorders -- with many audiences, in bookstores, at gatherings of the mentally ill and their families and at professional meetings. Invariably, as soon as I had finished my remarks, a hand would shoot up. A hearty, jovial man would rise and ask -- always the same question -- ''What if Prozac had been available in van Gogh's time?''
I understood what was intended, a joke about a pill that makes people blandly chipper. The New Yorker had run cartoons along these lines -- Edgar Allan Poe, on Prozac, making nice to a raven. Below the surface humor were issues I had raised in my own writing. Might a widened use of medication deprive us of insight about our condition? But with repetition, the van Gogh question came to sound strange. Facing a man in great pain, headed for self-mutilation and death, who would withhold a potentially helpful treatment?
It may be that my response was grounded less in the intent of the question than in my own experience. For 20 years, I'd spent my afternoons working with psychiatric outpatients in Providence, R.I. As I wrote more, I let my clinical hours dwindle. One result was that more of my time was filled with especially challenging cases, with patients who were not yet better. The popularity of ''Listening to Prozac'' meant that the most insistent new inquiries were from families with depressed members who had done poorly elsewhere. In my life as a doctor, unremitting depression became an intimate. It is poor company. Depression destroys families. It ruins careers. It ages patients prematurely.
Recent research has made the fight against depression especially compelling. Depression is associated with brain disorganization and nerve-cell atrophy. Depression appears to be progressive -- the longer the episode, the greater the anatomical disorder. To work with depression is to combat a disease that harms patients' nerve pathways day by day.
Nor is the damage merely to mind and brain. Depression has been linked with harm to the heart, to endocrine glands, to bones. Depressives die young -- not only of suicide, but also of heart attacks and strokes. Depression is a multisystem disease, one we would consider dangerous to health even if we lacked the concept ''mental illness.''
As a clinician, I found the what if challenge ever less amusing. And so I began to ask audience members what they had in mind. Most understood van Gogh to have suffered severe depression. His illness, they thought, conferred special vision. In a short story, Poe likens ''an utter depression of soul'' to ''the hideous dropping off of the veil.'' The questioners maintained this 19th-century belief, that depression reveals essence to those brave enough to face it. By this account, depression is more than a disease -- it has a sacred aspect.
Other questioners set aside that van Gogh was actually ill. They took mood disorder to be a heavy dose of the artistic temperament, so that any application of antidepressants is finally cosmetic, remolding personality into a more socially acceptable form. For them, depression was less than a disease.
These attributions stood in contrast to my own belief, that depression is neither more nor less than a disease, but disease simply and altogether.
udiences seemed to be aware of the medical perspective, even to endorse it -- but not to have adopted it as a habit of mind. To underscore this inconsistency, I began to pose a test question: We say that depression is a disease. Does that mean that we want to eradicate it as we have eradicated smallpox, so that no human being need ever suffer depression again? I made it clear that mere sadness was not at issue. Take major depression, however you define it. Are you content to be rid of that condition?
Always, the response was hedged: aren't we meant to be depressed? Are we talking about changing human nature?
I took those protective worries as expressions of what depression is to us. Asked whether we are content to eradicate arthritis, no one says, ''Well, the end-stage deformation, yes, but let's hang on to tennis elbow, housemaid's knee and the early stages of rheumatoid disease.'' Multiple sclerosis, acne, schizophrenia, psoriasis, bulimia, malaria -- there is no other disease we consider preserving. But eradicating depression calls out the caveats.
To this way of thinking, to oppose depression too completely is to be coarse and reductionist -- to miss the inherent tragedy of the human condition. To be depressed, even gravely, is to be in touch with what matters most in life, its finitude and brevity, its absurdity and arbitrariness. To be depressed is to occupy the role of rebel and social critic. Depression, in our culture, is what tuberculosis was 100 years ago: illness that signifies refinement.
Having raised the thought experiment, I should emphasize that in reality, the possibility of eradicating depression is not at hand. If clinicians are better at ameliorating depression than we were 10 years ago -- and I think we may be -- that is because we are more persistent in our efforts, combining treatments and (when they succeed) sticking with them until they have a marked effect. But in terms of the tools available, progress in the campaign against depression has been plodding.
Still, it is possible to envisage general medical progress that lowers the rate of depression substantially -- and then to think of a society that enjoys that result. What is lost, what gained? Which is also to ask: What stands in the way of our embracing the notion that depression is disease, nothing more?
This question has any number of answers. We idealize depression, associating it with perceptiveness, interpersonal sensitivity and other virtues. Like tuberculosis in its day, depression is a form of vulnerability that even contains a measure of erotic appeal. But the aspect of the romanticization of depression that seems to me to call for special attention is the notion that depression spawns creativity.
Objective evidence for that effect is weak. Older inquiries, the first attempts to examine the overlap of madness and genius, made positive claims for schizophrenia. Recent research has looked at mood disorders. These studies suggest that bipolar disorder may be overrepresented in the arts. (Bipolarity, or manic-depression, is another diagnosis proposed for van Gogh.) But then mania and its lesser cousin hypomania may drive productivity in many fields. One classic study hints at a link between alcoholism and literary work. But the benefits of major depression, taken as a single disease, have been hard to demonstrate. If anything, traits eroded by depression -- like energy and mental flexibility -- show up in contemporary studies of creativity.
How, then, did this link between creativity and depression arise? The belief that mental illness is a form of inspiration extends back beyond written history. Hippocrates was answering some such claim, when, around 400 B.C., he tried to define melancholy -- an excess of ''black bile'' -- as a disease. To Hippocrates, melancholy was a disorder of the humors that caused epileptic seizures when it affected the body and caused dejection when it affected the mind. Melancholy was blamed for hemorrhoids, ulcers, dysentery, skin rashes and diseases of the lungs.
The most influential expression of the contrasting position -- that melancholy confers special virtues -- appears in the ''Problemata Physica,'' or ''Problems,'' a discussion, in question-and-answer form, of scientific conundrums. It was long attributed to Aristotle, but the surviving version, from the second century B.C., is now believed to have been written by his followers. In the 30th book of the ''Problems,'' the author asks why it is that outstanding men -- philosophers, statesmen, poets, artists, educators and heroes -- are so often melancholic. Among the ancients, the strongmen Herakles and Ajax were melancholic; more contemporaneous examples cited in the ''Problems'' include Socrates, Plato and the Spartan general Lysander. The answer given is that too much black bile leads to insanity, while a moderate amount creates men ''superior to the rest of the world in many ways. ''
The Greeks, and the cultures that succeeded them, faced depression poorly armed. Treatment has always been difficult. Depression is common and spans the life cycle. When you add in (as the Greeks did) mania, schizophrenia and epilepsy, not to mention hemorrhoids, you encompass a good deal of what humankind suffers altogether. Such an impasse calls for the elaboration of myth. Over time, ''melancholy '' became a universal metaphor, standing in for sin and innocent suffering, self-indulgence and sacrifice, inferiority and perspicacity.
The great flowering of melancholy occurred during the Renaissance, as humanists rediscovered the ''Problems.'' In the late 15th century, a cult of melancholy flourished in Florence and then was taken back to England by foppish aristocratic travelers who styled themselves artists and scholars and affected the melancholic attitude and dress. Most fashionable of all were ''melancholic malcontents,'' irritable depressives given to political intrigue. One historian, Lawrence Babb, describes them as ''black-suited and disheveled . . . morosely meditative, taciturn yet prone to occasional railing.''
In dozens of stage dramas from the period, the principal character is a discontented melancholic. ''Hamlet'' is the great example. As soon as Hamlet takes the stage, an Elizabethan audience would understand that it is watching a tragedy whose hero's characteristic flaw will be a melancholic trait, in this case, paralysis of action. By the same token, the audience would quickly accept Hamlet's spiritual superiority, his suicidal impulses, his hostility to the established order, his protracted grief, solitary wanderings, erudition, impaired reason, murderousness, role-playing, passivity, rashness, antic disposition, ''dejected haviour of the visage'' and truck with graveyards and visions.
''Hamlet'' is arguably the seminal text of our culture, one that cements our admiration for doubt, paralysis and alienation. But seeing ''Hamlet'' in its social setting, in an era rife with melancholy as an affected posture, might make us wonder how much of the historical association between melancholy and its attractive attributes is artistic conceit.
In literature, the cultural effects of depression may be particularly marked. Writing, more than most callings, can coexist with a relapsing and recurring illness. Composition does not require fixed hours; poems or essays can be set aside and returned to on better days. And depression is an attractive subject. Superficially, mental pain resembles passion, strong emotion that stands in opposition to the corrupt world. Depression can have a picaresque quality -- think of the journey through the Slough of Despond in John Bunyan's ''Pilgrim's Progress.'' Over the centuries, narrative structures were built around the descent into depression and the recovery from it. Lyric poetry, religious memoir, the novel of youthful self-development -- depression is an affliction that inspires not just art but art forms. And art colors values. Where the unacknowledged legislators of mankind are depressives, dark views of the human condition will be accorded special worth.
Through the ''anxiety of influence,'' heroic melancholy cast its shadow far forward, onto romanticism and existentialism. At a certain point, the transformation begun in the Renaissance reaches completion. It is no longer that melancholy leads to heroism. Melancholy is heroism. The challenge is not battle but inner strife. The rumination of the depressive, however solipsistic, is deemed admirable. Repeatedly, melancholy returns to fashion.
As I spoke with audiences about mood disorders, I came to believe that part of what stood between depression and its full status as disease was the tradition of heroic melancholy. Surely, I would be asked when I spoke with college students, surely I saw the value in alienation. One medical philosopher asked what it would mean to prescribe Prozac to Sisyphus, condemned to roll his boulder up the hill.
That variant of the what if question sent me to Albert Camus's essay on Sisyphus, where I confirmed what I thought I had remembered -- that in Camus's reading, Sisyphus, the existential hero, remains upbeat despite the futility of his task. The gods intend for Sisyphus to suffer. His rebellion, his fidelity to self, rests on the refusal to be worn down. Sisyphus exemplifies resilience, in the face of full knowledge of his predicament. Camus says that joy opens our eyes to the absurd -- and to our freedom. It is not only in the downhill steps that Sisyphus triumphs over his punishment: ''The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.''
I came to suspect that it was the automatic pairing of depth and depression that made the medical philosopher propose Sisyphus as a candidate for mood enhancement. We forget that alienation can be paired with elation, that optimism is a form of awareness. I wanted to reclaim Sisyphus, to set his image on the poster for the campaign against depression.
Once we take seriously the notion that depression is a disease like any other, we will want to begin our discussion of alienation by asking diagnostic questions. Perhaps this sense of dislocation signals an apt response to circumstance, but that one points to an episode of an illness. Aware of the extent and effects of mood disorder, we may still value alienation -- and ambivalence and anomie and the other uncomfortable traits that sometimes express perspective and sometimes attach to mental illness. But we are likely to assess them warily, concerned that they may be precursors or residual symptoms of major depression.
How far does our jaundiced view reach? Surely the label ''disease'' does not apply to the melancholic or depressive temperament? And of course, it does not. People can be pessimistic and lethargic, brooding and cautious, without ever falling ill in any way. But still, it seemed to me in my years of immersion that depression casts a long shadow. Though I had never viewed it as pathology, even Woody Allen-style neurosis had now been stripped of some of its charm -- of any implicit claim, say, of superiority. The cachet attaching to tuberculosis diminished as science clarified the cause of the illness, and as treatment became first possible and then routine. Depression may follow the same path. As it does, we may find that heroic melancholy is no more.
In time, I came to think of the van Gogh question in a different light, merging it with the eradication question. What sort of art would be meaningful or moving in a society free of depression? Boldness and humor -- broad or sly -- might gain in status. Or not. A society that could guarantee the resilience of mind and brain might favor operatic art and literature. Freedom from depression would make the world safe for high neurotics, virtuosi of empathy, emotional bungee-jumpers. It would make the world safe for van Gogh.
Depression is not a perspective. It is a disease. Resisting that claim, we may ask: Seeing cruelty, suffering and death -- shouldn't a person be depressed? There are circumstances, like the Holocaust, in which depression might seem justified for every victim or observer. Awareness of the ubiquity of horror is the modern condition, our condition.
But then, depression is not universal, even in terrible times. Though prone to mood disorder, the great Italian writer Primo Levi was not depressed in his months at Auschwitz. I have treated a handful of patients who survived horrors arising from war or political repression. They came to depression years after enduring extreme privation. Typically, such a person will say: ''I don't understand it. I went through -- '' and here he will name one of the shameful events of our time. ''I lived through that, and in all those months, I never felt this.'' This refers to the relentless bleakness of depression, the self as hollow shell. To see the worst things a person can see is one experience; to suffer mood disorder is another. It is depression -- and not resistance to it or recovery from it -- that diminishes the self.
Beset by great evil, a person can be wise, observant and disillusioned and yet not depressed. Resilience confers its own measure of insight. We should have no trouble admiring what we do admire -- depth, complexity, aesthetic brilliance -- and standing foursquare against depression.
Peter D. Kramer is a clinical professor of psychiatry at Brown University and the author of ''Listening to Prozac.'' This essay is adapted from his book ''Against Depression,'' which Viking will publish next month.
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Hiroko Masuike for The New York Times
Robert Dimin, center, at Downtown Cipriani with two friends.
Here's to the Loafers Who Lunch
By ERIKA KINETZ
NEW YORK is a city of professionals and predawn discipline, an empire meant to be conquered not by wanderers but by the lusty achievement of the hyperemployed. Languorous weekday afternoons are the province of those deemed to be lacking in power.
Still, a fair portion of the city's employable population can be found, midweek, far from any office, whiling away the hours in restaurants and cafes. Unlike the corps of freelance writers with their laptops, these loiterers do not appear to be engaged in any income-producing work. Call them flâneurs, if you want to romanticize them with a French name. Some are princes of leisure, who clearly have never learned that a bank account may approach zero. Others are conscientious objectors to the rat race, who have decided that their personal freedom is worth more than the compromises that might gain you a flat-screen TV.
All of them - superrich, rich or merely upper middle class - have somehow inoculated themselves against the fiscal anxiety that drives most unemployed people to try to get a job. And they have enough disposable income to afford the minimum entry (a cup of coffee) into one of the precious places that allows low-revenue loafing.
Scattered throughout this alternative ecosystem of cafes, these people off the city grid appear to be upstanding folks with open wallets and nice footwear. But who are they? Why are they not working? And how on earth can they afford those shoes?
Downtown Cipriani
3:30 p.m. on a Wednesday The outside tables at Downtown Cipriani, on West Broadway in SoHo, were packed. Robert Dimin, an artist; Justin Melnick, a young entrepreneur; and Nicole Trunfio, a model, sat inside, around a bottle of Acqua Panna ($9) and lemonades (at $5.50 each).
Mr. Dimin wore a black baseball cap with an orange Princeton "P" pulled low over his forehead. "It's the only time to come here," he said. "Weekdays, when everyone else is working."
Ms. Trunfio got up to leave, and Mr. Melnick walked her out. They stood by his black Vespa, which has custom black matte rims, racing tires and a pipe that makes it sound like a Harley.
"Tomorrow is my birthday," Mr. Dimin said. "I turn 25. That's old." He swore he had nothing fabulous planned, just a private party at Lotus.
"I view myself as a downtowner," said Mr. Dimin, who grew up on the Upper East Side but now lives in Princeton. He said he had studied photography at Parsons but did not graduate. His fiancée, Elizabeth Kessler, is working toward a Ph.D. in archaeology at Princeton University, and he is not, at present, employed.
"I only want to make my own projects," he said. "I get yelled at every day by my family: 'Get a job. Go work for The A.P. Use your skills.' I can't. I have to do it my way."
He was wearing a black Burberry piqué shirt and striking orange Nikes. How could an idealist afford such stuff? "My $150 Nikes that should have cost $35?" Mr. Dimin said. "A lot of gifts. And my art sells for a lot of money."
Mr. Dimin's work, shown at CVZ Contemporary, includes photographs of nubile young women and an American flag fashioned of gray-and-blue fatigued cloth - much like the material of Mr. Dimin's baggy shorts - and stripes of the same thin Prada red that graces his beat-up wallet.
"I don't like money," Mr. Dimin insisted. "I'm not rich like a lot of people I know, like the 'Born Rich' movie. That's an entirely different ballgame. I'm the poorest kid of the rich kids."
Mr. Melnick, 24, came back inside and put an NTB herbal cigarette in his mouth, but didn't light it. "I'm quitting," he said.
Mr. Melnick, who said he dropped out of the University of Denver to help open a restaurant, explained that he split his time among New York, Los Angeles and Paris, running a nightclub and restaurant consultancy. He is also developing a line of surfer clothing. "For me the most depressing thing would be to make $10 million and have it be a Von Dutch," he said, referring to a popular clothing line.
He gazed at a photo of the 25-foot climbing wall at his old high school, the White Mountain School, in New Hampshire. "I wanted to expand the climbing program," he said. "So I raised the 15 grand it cost to build it." When pressed for details, Mr. Melnick explained, "The way my father looked at it was as a tax write-off." (School officials said that Mr. Melnick's father contributed $9,000; they raised the rest.)
The bill for the lemonades, which numbered about 10, was left on the table unexamined. Mr. Melnick simply announced, "I'm buying."
Doma
3:00 p.m. on a Friday Doma Cafe and Gallery, on Perry Street, was packed. Lee Bob Black, 31, moved through the place like a prince in his court. He seemed to know a quarter of the 20 people in the cafe.
He settled briefly by the window to discuss weekend plans with Edwin John Wintle, 43, a former lawyer and author of the coming memoir "Breakfast With Tiffany." "I wrote a good portion of my first book here," said Mr. Wintle, who works part-time. "If I don't sell another book, I'll be poor in less than six months."
"I'm just an unpublished writer," Mr. Black said. "I made a bunch of money at Morgan Stanley, and I haven't worked in a year." He said his first literary effort had been rejected by 60 agents. He spent only $1.63 on coffee that afternoon, and his black Skechers looked worn beyond their four months. "I don't have expensive tastes," he said.
Nearby, at a large wooden table, sat Brian Moore, 35. To look on him is to think "wage earner." Formerly a compensation analyst at Genentech in San Francisco, Mr. Moore had moved to New York seven months earlier to be with his fiancée, a resident at St. Vincent's Hospital.
Tired, he said, of PowerPoint and e-mail, he decided to study for a commercial pilot's license, and he spent most of the afternoon hunched over a training manual.
Waywardness does not sit easily. "It's a little unnerving," he said, referring to his slightly adrift afternoons. "I've tended to seek steady pay and security. Now I'm going off on an adventure. There are days when I think, 'What am I doing?' Other days I think, 'You only have one life to live.' "
He's living, in part, off his Genentech stock, but he said he was at a point at which he had to differentiate needs from wants. A flat-panel television? Definitely a want.
A friend at an investment bank had offered to help find him a job at her company, Mr. Moore said, but he said he cannot conceive of it. "I'd have to get a $10,000 signing bonus just for the wardrobe," he said.
Via Quadronno
3:45 p.m. on a Friday The small tables at Via Quadronno were packed. Paolo Della Puppa, an owner of the restaurant, on East 73rd Street, sat in back, discoursing on the origins of the European cafe and the European coffee, a trajectory that touched on Turks, Yemenis and the Habsburg dynasty.
Mr. Della Puppa is Italian, and many of his patrons share his European roots. "American rich, you are a C.E.O., you have no time," he said. "Italian rich, they live like rich people. They go to work at noon. They enjoy life."
Via Quadronno is host to a rotating assortment of diplomats, guests of the nearby Carlyle hotel, private-school moms, members of the Agnelli family and the occasional teenager possessed of a black American Express card.
Yet Sue Ventura and her husband, Lou, are also regulars. Mrs. Ventura, a student at the New York School of Interior Design, did not enter the world of the $4 afternoon cappuccino until middle age. In 1994 - in honor of her 40th birthday - she quit her job as a bond trader after 15 years on Wall Street. "My liberation," she said, beaming. Her husband still works as a senior managing director at Bear Stearns, though he joins her there after work most days.
Now, instead of eating at her desk, she practices Italian with the staff at Via Quadronno. But stepping out of a life of hyperproductivity, she says, where one's value is as quantifiable as one's trading powers, was as unsettling as it was glorious.
She has reconciled herself to slowness. "Life is fleeting," she said. "You've got to step back every once in a while."
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Saturday, April 16, 2005
Drawings from the Maurice Sendak Collection/Rosenbach Museum and Library
An illustration from "In Grandpa's House" (1985), a memoir by Mr. Sendak's father, Philip.
Sendak in All His Wild Glory
By JULIE SALAMON
One week before the official opening today, final touches were being put on the Maurice Sendak exhibition at the Jewish Museum. The pictures had been hung, but there was much to do, and not just by the construction crew and museum people bustling through the galleries. A costume designer, plopped on the floor next to a cheerfully scary 12-foot-high monster, was urgently sewing a tail onto a wolf suit resembling the one worn by Max, hero of "Where the Wild Things Are." Nearby, the suit - inhabited by a person - could be seen dancing on a video monitor, in a ballet based on Mr. Sendak's most famous children's book.
The eye-popping frenzy was an appropriate introduction to "Wild Things: The Art of Maurice Sendak," which aims to capture not just the peripatetic scope of the artist's work but the many impulses that feed it: psychological, musical, historical, cinematic and operatic. Exuberance and angst, whimsicality and grace reverberate in the original drawings on display, along with preliminary sketches, artwork for posters, and theatrical sets and costumes created from Sendak designs. It can be exhausting just to consider the range of influences: Blake and Mozart, Laurel and Hardy, Herman Melville and Emily Dickinson, Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse and Art Spiegelman's "Maus."
Not to worry. It's safe to bring the children. The exhibition even includes a reading room inspired by Max's imaginary bedroom in "Wild Things." The designers have created a charming space outfitted with a forest, stars and the moon, plus pillows scattered on a comfy green shaggy rug to lie on. And of course, there will be Sendak books to read or thumb through.
Almost all of the original drawings (99 of 112) come from the Rosenbach Museum and Library in Philadelphia, which specializes in quirky rarities, and which Mr. Sendak has made the official repository of his work. There is a lot of it. Mr. Sendak, who will be 77 in June, has illustrated more than 100 books and written the stories for many of them, including "Wild Things."
With the exhibition at the Jewish Museum, Claudia Nahson, an associate curator, wanted to replicate her reaction on encountering the 10,000 pieces in the Rosenbach's archive. "I think I opened my mouth in the morning and didn't close it until I came home," she said, as she watched the designer attach Max's tail to the costume.
It wasn't just the quantity that caused Ms. Nahson to gape, but the diversity and audacity. Unlike that other children's-book genius, Dr. Seuss, Mr. Sendak has declined to stick to one style of drawing, constantly pushing himself to find new ways to give stories additional dimension. In "The Art of Maurice Sendak," published in 1980, Selma G. Lanes quotes the artist saying: "There are basically two approaches to illustration. First, there is the direct, no-nonsense approach that puts the facts of the case into simple, down-to-earth images: Miss Muffet, her tuffet, curds, whey, spider and all. Then there is, for want of a better term, illumination. As with a poem set to song, in which every shade and nuance is given greater meaning by the music, so pictures can interpret texts."
The Jewish Museum's show provides an unusual opportunity to see a large quantity of Mr. Sendak's original drawings, to observe firsthand the fine crosshatching that is never fully reproduced on the printed page. It is fascinating to peek inside Mr. Sendak's process, to see the painstaking effort that goes into even his most insouciant-seeming works.
The Rosenbach Museum regularly puts out samplings in its own small rotating exhibitions, but is reluctant to lend the drawings very often. "These works were means to an end, meant to be used by printers to create a book," Derick Dreher, the director of the Rosenbach, said in an interview. "They would be sent off to the printing house, where they would be Scotch taped to a wall or a board or written on and trimmed so when they came back they looked a little bit war-torn. We are anxious not to expose them to too many stresses."
The large New York exhibition aims to interpret Mr. Sendak through his Jewish identity, which means that favorite characters from "The Nutshell Library" and "Little Bear" make only cameo appearances. Still, narrowing the focus is a useful and relevant - make that primal - way to digest the volume of images, ideas and emotions that suffuse these pictures.
Sometimes the Jewish references are obvious. The carefully wrought drawings for Isaac Bashevis Singer's stories in "Zlateh the Goat," and for "In Grandpa's House," a memoir by Mr. Sendak's father, Philip, pay homage to the artist's Eastern European shtetl roots. The entire final gallery is given over to his stage setting for "Brundibar," the 1938 opera by Hans Krasa, a Czech-Jewish composer, that has become known for having been performed by children at the Terezin concentration camp.
Elsewhere, the reference is more subtle. Mr. Sendak's extravagantly layered illustrations for "Dear Mili," a Brothers Grimm story about a child sent away by her mother to spare her from war, incorporates images of French Jewish children before being deported to Auschwitz and Jewish tombstones tucked into a lush, overgrown garden.
Mr. Sendak has the gift of connecting with his childhood fears and pleasures in ways that make his most screwball concoctions feel perfectly plausible and universal. He was a sickly child of protective parents, so fears tended to dominate. He was afraid of being kidnapped like the Lindbergh baby, who was taken from his parents in 1932, when Mr. Sendak was 4. He was scared by movies, by books, by the vacuum cleaner. He was afraid of his family, the Eastern European immigrants whom he transformed into the monsters in "Wild Things."
In the Sendak world, stories unfold like dreams, where images connect emotionally and serendipitously, not by the logic imposed by grown-ups when they are awake. In much of his work, beauty and sorrow walk hand in hand.
"That's the tradition into which Sendak was born," John Cech, author of "Angels and Wild Things: The Archetypal Poetics of Maurice Sendak," and a professor of children's literature at the University of Florida in Gainesville, said in an interview. "His whole life's work in some way is an attempt to understand and fathom the complexity of that heritage, with its almost unbearable legacy of loss."
Don't misunderstand. There is far more pleasure than pain in this exuberant exhibition. Suffering isn't part of the blithe diva's charm of "Really Rosie," the Sendak heroine modeled after an Italian girl who lived in his Brooklyn neighborhood. (Mr. Sendak refers to the Italian-Americans of his childhood as "the happy Jews.") Gleefulness is the motif running through the image-packed drawings from "In the Night Kitchen," about a boy's odyssey through a New York skyline transformed into a surreal baker's pantry. When the book was published in 1970, it was banned in some places because the boy jumps out of bed naked.
The nudity is hardly clinical, and, as Mr. Sendak once commented, parents take their children to museums where they see Roman statues whose genitals have been broken off. "You'd think that would frighten them more," he said. "But 'Art' is somehow desexualized in people's minds. My God, that would make the great artists vomit."
Mr. Sendak may celebrate wild things, but he is a meticulous craftsman. The playwright Tony Kushner wrote about his methodology in "The Art of Maurice Sendak: 1980 to the Present," the sequel to Selma Lanes's illustrated biographical study.
"I've been moved and have felt privileged to observe firsthand how deeply Maurice suffers a picture book," wrote Mr. Kushner, a close friend who collaborated with him on "Brundibar," both the opera and a children's-book version published in 2003. "He has drawn 'Brundibar' twice now; he produced an entire set of sketches and then, losing faith in the approach he had taken, considered abandoning the book." This after a half-century of doing professional work.
The exhibition shows early drafts of "Where the Wild Things Are," when it was going to be something else, called "Where the Wild Horses Are." His editor loved the story, but then it turned out that Mr. Sendak, for all his talents, wasn't very good at drawing horses.
He appears to be his own most demanding critic. On view is a preliminary manuscript for the "Wild Things" text, written on lined paper from spiral notebooks. It is written by hand, with lots of cross-outs. Around one entire section Mr. Sendak placed brackets and scrawled in pencil, "All bad!"
But Mr. Sendak doesn't need to have the last word - at least not on other people's interpretations of his work. He offered meticulous notes to Carole King, who composed the music for the animated version of "Really Rosie" shown on CBS television in 1975. He concluded, "Take what you like and dump the rest."
Mr. Sendak grew up in Brooklyn, came of age as an artist in Greenwich Village and moved to rural Connecticut in the early 1970's. His work became more melancholy as the Holocaust began emerging as a more powerful force - sometimes overtly, sometimes less so. Logically, the exhibition concludes with a set from "Brundibar," the opera performed by children at Terezin, about two children who must find milk to save their ailing mother. Encouraged by a sparrow, a cat and a dog, they defeat Brundibar, the bully who has terrorized the town.
This is emblematic Sendak: giving children the power to conquer through art and ingenuity, reminding parents of the complicated responsibility that requires them to be hopeful but realistic about the terrible wild things out there.
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Thursday, April 14, 2005
Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times
Dr. Lloyd I. Sederer, the director of mental health services in New York, hopes to set an example for the nation by screening for depression.
Depressed? New York City Screens for People at Risk
By MARC SANTORA and BENEDICT CAREY
Doctors in New York City have begun to use a simple questionnaire to determine if a patient is at risk for depression, a practice that health officials hope will become a routine part of primary care, much like a blood pressure test or cholesterol reading.
The new program is the first to carry out depression screening using a scored test on a wide scale. It comes amid a spirited national debate among psychiatrists, policy makers and patient-advocacy groups on the wisdom of screening for mental disorders, especially in children.
In 2003, an expert panel convened by President Bush recommended expanding mental health screening, and Congress budgeted $20 million in supporting money for state pilot programs for this year. Several states, including populous states like Florida and Illinois, have begun to investigate large-scale screening plans, and scores of schools and other youth centers throughout the country have used instruments to test youngsters for suicide risk.
But some politicians and advocates for patients argue that testing people broadly for mental conditions is an invitation to overdiagnosis, unnecessary treatment and lifelong stigmatization.
In New York, no federal money is being used for the program, which is under way in hospitals run by the city. The test, which is being given to adults only, derives a depression score from the answers to nine questions. It is not meant to yield a formal diagnosis, but a high score would lead a doctor to recommend a more thorough clinical screening.
The test includes questions about mood and behavior.
For instance, patients are asked if over the past two weeks they have felt "down, depressed or hopeless." They can answer by checking one of four categories: not at all, several days, more than half the days or nearly every day. Dr. Lloyd I. Sederer, who heads the mental health division of the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, which is leading the New York effort, said he hoped the screening would set an example for other doctors in New York and around the country.
"It is our hope to have this become a standard practice," Dr. Sederer said.
Health officials in New York City are working with the Health and Hospitals Corporation to put their screening program into effect. So far, only about a dozen primary-care physicians are using the test, which was developed using research from the RAND Corporation. The goal is to have every primary-care physician in the city hospital system using the test within the next two or three years. One in every four New Yorkers uses city hospitals for basic health-care treatment, meaning the program could soon involve millions of patients.
Dr. Sederer said that a similar screening test could be developed for adolescents and that if the testing of adults gained acceptance, it would be easier for doctors to use a screening procedure for patients of any age.
Psychiatrists and other proponents say mental health screening is long overdue. They argue that millions of people with serious mental disorders never get help, and that heightened vigilance would not only allow doctors to head off much worse mental problems later, but would also reduce the tremendous costs of untreated illness.
Surveys have found that about 16 percent of Americans - or as many as 46 million people - suffer from depression at some point. And by some estimates, depression costs the nation $44 billion a year in lost work and disability - more than any other illness, including heart disease.
But opponents say that depression is not always easy for primary-care doctors to recognize, even in people who seek help, and they argue that a screening score of any kind could needlessly confuse or worry patients.
"When you label people as having a mental problem, such a label stays with them for their entire lives, whether or not it's accurate," said Vera Hassner Sharav, president of the Alliance for Human Research Protection, a patient-advocacy group that has been campaigning to block screening for mental health.
Critics like Ms. Sharav contend that screening tests will also increase the use of psychiatric drugs, including antidepressants like Zoloft and Prozac, whose use in children and adolescents has recently come under scrutiny by regulators.
Representative Ron Paul, a Texas Republican and a gynecologist, introduced an amendment last fall to block federal financing for screening programs, in part because of worries about overmedicating schoolchildren. The plan was rejected.
"We already have a tremendous number of kids being put on drugs like Ritalin and Prozac," Dr. Paul said, "and I think if these screening programs grow, you're going to see a lot of people pushed into medication programs for behavioral problems."
Dr. Sederer and psychiatrists, psychologists and administrators around the country who favor screening say these concerns are overblown and obscure a much larger problem: a dismissive public attitude toward mental illness.
Bill Emmet, coordinator for the Campaign for Mental Health Reform, a coalition of organizations working to build support for screening and other mental health programs, said: "Are people sometimes misdiagnosed? Of course. But the fact is that there are whole segments of the population that for a variety of reasons are not being diagnosed with problems they do have, and that is the far greater problem."
Dr. Sederer said that once doctors were convinced that a quantitative score worked in recognizing depression, they would be more open to using similar measures for other areas of mental health.
Still, he acknowledged that "nobody likes to be measured" and said that there had been some resistance from doctors who worried that this would take away from already limited time with patients and add to their workload. The science behind screening is mixed. In studies of patients who belong to health maintenance organizations in California and Washington, researchers have found that screening, when combined with programs that coordinate treatment, does help many adults who are struggling with depression and who would otherwise receive little or no care.
But in May, the Preventive Services Task Force, a federal panel of experts that advises doctors and the government on screening guidelines, concluded that there was not enough evidence to recommend a similar kind of screening for suicide risk. The controversy is not likely to be settled soon.
"I have been getting a lot of attention on this, and it runs across the political spectrum, from civil libertarians on the left to Christians on the right," Representative Paul said. "I think the idea of screening people, of asking these kinds of questions, rubs people the wrong way, and particularly when it's their children."
Officials in New York, however, defend their initiative.
"Depression is a leading illness in New York City, but it can be effectively treated," said Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, the city's health commissioner. "Our surveys show that there are an estimated 400,000 New Yorkers with depression; many have not been accurately diagnosed or effectively treated."
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Stuart Goldenberg
Vaults That Let You Store (and Show) Your Photos, and Keep Shooting
WHEN you really stop to think about it, memory cards are a pretty delicate storage format for something as important as your digital photos. So many things can happen to memory cards: they can get lost, stolen, corrupted or, in the case of those little tiny xD-Picture cards, blown into the next ZIP code when you sneeze.
The point, of course, is that memory cards are designed for temporary storage inside the camera. Once the card is full, your photos desperately want to be transferred to some larger, safer, more permanent home.
Of course, for most people, that home is a computer. But hauling a laptop around on your sightseeing trips isn't always practical. Besides, it's like wearing a T-shirt that says, "I'm a Tourist - Rob Me."
You could buy a whole bunch of memory cards, but that gets expensive. You could also buy a portable CD recorder (about $275) that burns photos right from the card, but that's bulky and slow.
But hey, this is the era of tiny hard drives (see also: iPod). Why can't someone invent a hand-held gadget that slurps photos off a memory card and onto a hard drive, so you can wipe the card clean and get back to shooting?
Fortunately, several someones have invented just that: gadgets variously called photo vaults, photo wallets, digital photo viewers and mobile media hard drives. Or, if you have an iPod music player, you can turn it a photo vault, too, using adapters sold by Belkin and Apple, which has just introduced something called the iPod Photo Connector.
The dedicated photo vaults (from Epson, Archos, Nikon, SmartDisk, Jobo and others) have several advantages over the iPod adapters. First, they have much bigger screens, making it easy to show your pictures to your friends and delete the losers. (The photos, that is, not the friends.)
Second, they can also play music and sometimes movies, although in a limited number of file formats; for example, most can't play copy-protected songs you buy off the Internet. (When connected to a Mac or PC through a U.S.B. cable, these devices act like external hard drives - that's how you load music and movies - and memory-card readers.)
Third, you can hook up any of these players to a television, the better to elicit oohs and aahs from your entourage.
Finally, these devices have their own battery packs and memory-card slots. When you transfer the pictures, in other words, you're not draining your camera's battery (as you would when connecting it to a laptop). That's important because when you're out and about, camera-battery juice is a precious resource.
The photo vaults in this roundup - the Epson P-2000, Jobo GigaVu Pro, Archos AV420 and SmartDisk FlashTrax - present a wide range of choice in size, shape, bells and whistles.
(Nikon, whose compact Coolwalker MSV-01 is intended for use with Nikon cameras, declined to provide a unit for evaluation. This roundup also omits screenless models, which deprive you of half the fun.)
Most have a slot only for Compact Flash cards. If your camera uses a smaller type, you're expected to provide your own card adapter. Only the Epson P-2000 also offers a slot for SD cards.
Nor is that the only virtue of the sleek black Epson ($500 online). The size, brightness and clarity of its 3.8-inch screen blows its competition off the equipment rack. Thanks to its supercrisp 640 by 480 pixels (four times the resolution of its rivals), photos look like glossy drugstore prints. Photo transfer is fast: just under two minutes for a 256-megabyte memory card filled with 103 pictures.
This is also the only photo vault that's serious about slide shows: you can choose background music, and you can opt for gentle animated panning and cross-dissolving effects that lend a sweet, soft-focus, Hallmark Hall of Fame feeling.
But at 5.8 by 3.3 by 1.2 inches, the Epson is not what you'd call petite. If you'd prefer something more compact, investigate the genuinely pocketable Archos AV420 (4.9 x 3.1 x 0.8).
Now, the Archos ($450) was never intended to be a photo wallet; it began life as a pocket multimedia machine, capable of, for example, recording television shows (even unattended) so you can watch them on the road. But because it's so slim, so capacious (up to 100 gigabytes) and fast (1 minute 40 seconds to transfer that 256-meg card), photographers have begun adopting it for photo-offloading use.
It's nowhere near as good as the Epson at that task, though. The 3.5-inch screen is only 320 by 240 pixels; there's no dedicated Transfer Photos command or button; it can't display RAW files of any type; and you don't get any kind of progress indicator or thumbnails of incoming photos while you're importing. But did I mention that it's small?
Small is not the word for the bulbous Jobo GigaVu Pro (5.7 x 4.2 x 1.5 inches). This device seems aimed at more serious photographers, both in its price ($500 for the 40-gigabyte model), its handling of advanced photo formats like RAW and TIFF, its speed (3:09 for the 256-meg test) and, alas, its confusing operating system. (Why, for example, don't the unavailable options grow dim or disappear, as on any self-respecting operating system?) The protective lid, which you can snap underneath when you're using the thing, is a nice touch, but most people would be happier with the Epson.
SmartDisk's FlashTrax protects its own screen, too: you flip it up to use it, as though it's the Terminator's makeup compact. This device is remarkably devoted to its task: without knowing a thing about the Windows-esque filing system, you insert your memory card, press the Copy button, and the deed is done. Other grace notes include a swappable battery, and the ability to play back your digital camera's movies.
The FlashTrax is also notable for its price: $280 for the 20-gigabyte model, or $350 for 40 gigabytes (both prices reflect a $50 rebate good through April 30). Note, however, that much of the economy comes from the inclusion of the homeliest, most washed-out screen of the lot.
Now, if you have an iPod music player, you're already carrying around a 10- or 60-gigabyte hard drive, and in a unit that's much smaller than any standalone photo vault.
Belkin offers two camera-to-iPod transfer adapters. The Digital Camera Link (about $56 online) is a white plastic box that connects your camera (through its U.S.B. cable) directly to the iPod. The transfer is slow (6:45 for the 256-meg card), the device is bulky (the size of the iPod itself), it drains your camera's battery, and it eats up its own AA batteries like there's no tomorrow. And on black-and-white iPods, you don't actually see the photos; each transfer is identified on the iPod screen only by name, date, file sizes and number of pictures.
The Belkin Media Reader ($100) is another, even bigger white plastic box (3.4 x 4 x 0.8 inches), this time loaded with four AAA batteries. The transfer is even slower - over 9 minutes for that 256-meg card test - but this time, you don't drain your camera's battery, because you put the memory card directly into the Belkin.
In both cases, your Mac or PC imports the photos from the iPod exactly as you would from a digital camera.
Life is much sweeter if you have Apple's iPod Photo ($350 for the 30-gigabyte model), which has a color screen. In that case, you can use Apple's new iPod Photo Connector ($30), a tiny, white plastic doohickey that snaps directly onto the iPod. When you connect your camera's U.S.B. cable to it, the iPod cheerfully offers to import the photos. During the importing process, you see each photo as it comes in, along with helpful progress indicators and a choice of "Stop and Save" and "Cancel" buttons.
The charms of this solution, of course, include its extreme tininess, very low cost and compatibility with those big RAW files and digital movies (which the iPod can import but not display).
The drawbacks are considerable, though. The transfer is very slow (10.5 minutes for that 256-meg card), and the iPod's battery takes quite a hit. Note, too, that although you can view the imported photos on the screen, the iPod Photo can't display them on a television - one of the device's best features - until you've returned home and synched them with your Mac or PC, which puts them back on the iPod in the proper format.
Thanks to an annoying little thing called physics, you can't have fast, cheap, small body, big hard drive and big screen all in one gadget.
If you prefer small and capacious, though, an iPod Photo with the little adapter represents the tiniest photo-wallet system you can buy - and, oh yeah, you get a really great music player at no extra charge. For savings and ruggedness, choose the SmartDisk FlashTrax. If you prefer a big screen and speed, you'll be thrilled by the spectacular display on the Epson P-2000. Any way you go, the next time you're traveling, you'll sleep better knowing that your photos are safely snuggled into a little digital hotel room of their very own.
E-mail: Pogue@nytimes.com
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company | Home | Privacy Policy | Search | Corrections | RSS | Help | Back to Top
John Lei for The New York TImes
Marni, a new boutique at Saks.
A Fifth Avenue Matron Vamps It Up
IT may be a renovation in midstream, but with the changes that are taking place at Saks Fifth Avenue - new designers on every floor, a more knowledgeable sales staff, less clutter - the store is beginning to resemble its uptown rival Bergdorf Goodman. And that is no accident, for over the last few months Saks has been plotting to win back its upscale clientele.
"I used to shop here a lot, but I hadn't been for years," said Kim Hicks, a designer, who arrived at Saks on Monday night to attend a party there and ended up a shopper. "I have to say, the store is more elegant than it had been for a while."
Ms. Hicks was among the guests who had come to christen a boutique for Roger Vivier, the French shoe and handbag label. The shoe department is on the fourth floor, but Vivier was offered prime real estate facing a Christian Dior boutique on the third floor as an incentive to bring the brand - a hot label of the moment - to Saks. It was an offer that appealed to Bruno Frisoni, Vivier's design director. "There are a lot of great department stores in New York," Mr. Frisoni said. "But this one is moving forward."
Those will be heartening sentiments for Saks. Over the years a series of management and ownership changes had led to bloated selling floors with no real point of view. And although sales at the chain have improved in recent quarters, its earnings have been limited by the costs of the makeover.
"We're not waiting for the full renovation to move forward," said Ronald Frasch, the store's vice chairman and chief merchant, who was formerly the chief executive of Bergdorf. In the last month the store has played host to parties for a line of children's clothing by Lucy Sykes, the Edun label of ecofriendly fashion and the evening wear collection of Monique Lhuillier. New additions include Ruffian women's wear; Victor & Rolf's fragrance, Flowerbomb; and the Italian label Marni, which is presented on swooping silver sculptures.
A few weeks ago, when Valextra, another new label, was brought into the New York and Beverly Hills stores, several handbags, including a $15,000 crocodile model, were sold as they were being unpacked.
While the fashion industry has taken note of changes in the New York flagship, which is also scheduled for a structural overhaul in 2007, the transition of Saks stores around the country is expected to take longer. Those plans could be affected by the sale of the chain by its parent company, Saks Inc., which has been rumored in recent weeks.
That caveat has not diminished the surprise of longtime Saks shoppers. Adrienne Vittadini, who retired from her knitwear business in 1998, was at Saks on Monday. "It's amazing to see how much wonderful novelty there is, as so many things in fashion are flat," she said. "I want to come back tomorrow and be a consumer."
Dunhill's Roots
RICHARD JAMES'S tailored suits can be found on Savile Row, his shirts are carried at Saks, and now his designs can be found in an unexpected spot: Alfred Dunhill shops around the world.
Mr. James is one of a team of British designers who have been hired by Dunhill to reconnect the brand to its 19th-century roots. "This gives us an English identity we hadn't had for a long time," said Simon Critchell, Dunhill's chief executive.
To that end Mr. James is designing suits with slanted pockets and narrow waists; Bill Amberg is redesigning the accessories with canvas messenger bags and computer cases trimmed with leather; Nick Ashley is creating sportswear inspired by Dunhill's motoring history, which translates into slim leather biker jackets; and Tom Bolt, who owns a vintage-watch company in London, has designed timepieces that hint at the Dunhill heritage in the smallest detail: a crown that is based on the design of a gearshift.
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Rahav Segev for The New York Times
Kim Gordon, left, and Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth, at the Hiro Ballroom on Monday.
ROCK REVIEW | SONIC YOUTH
Sailing Sublimely Along, With Flotsam as a Schooner
By BEN RATLIFF
Through nearly 25 years the members of Sonic Youth have annexed themselves to an upmarket, international visual art world, collaborating with artists like Mike Kelley and Dan Graham. But they also hold to an ideal of flotsam-art: cheap neutral objects that acquire artifact status in culture's self-promotional underground, practicalities touched by ambition and desire.
On Monday night when the band played at the Hiro Ballroom in the Maritime Hotel in the meatpacking district of Manhattan, the concession table held official T-shirts with images by Raymond Pettibon and Richard Prince, as well as $8 copies of "Nice War," a signed and numbered book of stapled-together poems by a member of Sonic Youth, Thurston Moore. (Also for sale were homemade CD's by the Cops, the evening's artless, slightly hostile joke of an opening act.) For a band like this, gigs are like flotsam, or can be. They are advertisements, sometimes honest ones. They can also be sublime. But there's always another coming, and there's no such thing as a perfect one.
Sonic Youth, now between albums, played a string of small club gigs this past week, some in unusual places. The Hiro is a large, Japanese-themed bar with a stage. The night before the band played at La Oveja Negra, a Spanish restaurant in Astoria, Queens. (They will be at the Academy of Music in Northampton, Mass., tomorrow night. There are two shows on Saturday at Maxwell's in Hoboken, N.J., but both are sold out.)
Monday's show was more or less standard recent Sonic Youth. And it was, pretty much, sublime: an astonishingly good performance from a band that won't and shouldn't quit. About six years ago Jim O'Rourke became Sonic Youth's fifth full-time member, helping the band to play its floppy, trippy music a little more as strict compositions and also a little more as pop songs. He works in the middle of the music's aural space, either on bass or organ or third guitar beside Lee Ranaldo and Mr. Moore, who both play blends of rhythm and lead. As a result, the music's frontline has become tied much more tightly to its rhythm section. Old songs like "Eric's Trip," "Teenage Riot" and "Catholic Block" are fuller, with more effective tempos and lots of small embellishments of rhythm or counterpoint. On Monday those songs, as well as the new ones from the group's last album, "Sonic Nurse," reflected the obsessive detail of a recording, down to matters of editing and mixing.
Part of their job is organizing indeterminacy: at the beginning of "Pacific Coast Highway" the four guitarists at the front of the stage stood with their backs to the audience, creating feedback improvisation. It was long, textured and harmony-rich. The musicians moved their bodies a centimeter to the left or the right, altering little currents within the sound.
Has Sonic Youth lost the untethered, nearly sloppy feeling it had in the 1980's, with those billowy passages of improvised overtone noise, guitars in odd tuning and the tribal drums walloping? Has it become sanitized? No. The tightening of the sound has freed Kim Gordon and Mr. Moore in particular. The second half of the show nearly became the Kim Gordon Quintet: she sang song after song with the same coolly chanted recitations that have become more commanding over time. For his part, Mr. Moore began "Paper Cup" with an old avant-garde idea from the early 50's: the transistor-radio improvisation. (We heard a snippet of a radio review of the movie "Sin City.") Then he started a solo by caressing his guitar, rubbing it suggestively against his body, holding it in front of his head. Later he was out in the crowd, rubbing the guitar against people in the audience.
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Wednesday, April 13, 2005
Junior guard Randy Foye is being awarded the Villanova Basketball Award for his contributions during the 2004-05 season
Foye and Sumpter to Receive Top Honors at Banquet
Players honored for excellence throughout the 2004-05 season
April 13, 2005
VILLANOVA, Pa. - A pair of Villanova juniors top the list of award recipients for this evening's 2005 Men's Basketball Banquet that is to be held on campus at the Connelly Center.
Guard Randy Foye (Newark, N.J.) will receive the Villanova Basketball Award. This honor is presented to the player who "best exemplifies the characteristics of a Villanova basketball player. This player truly embodies the essence of Villanova Basketball: play together, play smart and play with pride. This is a Villanova basketball player's highest honor."
Foye averaged 21.2 ppg in five postseason games and was named to the Big East and NCAA Syracuse Region all-tournament teams.
Forward Curtis Sumpter (Brooklyn, N.Y.) is the recipient of the Most Outstanding Player award. Sumpter was named second team all - Big East in 2004-05 and averaged 15.3 points and 7.2 rebounds per contest.
Junior Jason Fraser (Amityville, N.Y.), who battled injuries throughout 2004-05, was named winner of the Jake Nevin Award. This award goes to the athlete whose "selflessness provided an outstanding example to his teammates."
The Paul Arizin Award, given to the Wildcat who demonstrates the most improvement, goes to sophomore Will Sheridan (Bear. Del.). Junior Allan Ray (Bronx, N.Y.) and sophomore Mike Nardi (Linden, N.J.) shared the Alex Severance Award.
Former Villanova forward Barry Bekkedam is to receive the Alumni Appreciation Award while a Special Recognition Award goes to Villanova University alums Bill Davis and Jim Davis.
Villanova completed the 2004-05 campaign with a 24-8 record and advanced to the Sweet 16 of the NCAA Tournament for the first time since 1988. It was ranked No. 13 in the final ESPN/USA Today coaches' poll.
Frank Rich
April 10, 2005
OP-ED COLUMNIST
A Culture of Death, Not Life
By FRANK RICH
IT takes planning to produce a classic chapter in television history. "We've rehearsed," Thom Bird, a Fox News producer, bragged to Variety before Pope John Paul II died. "We will pull out all the stops on this story."
He wasn't kidding. On the same day that boast saw print, a Fox anchor, Shepard Smith, solemnly told the world that "facts are facts" and "it is now our understanding the pope has died." Unfortunately, this understanding was reached 26 hours before the pope actually did die, but as Mr. Smith would explain, he had been misled by "Italian reports." (Namely from a producer for Sky Italia, another fair-and-balanced fief of Rupert Murdoch.) Fox's false bulletin - soon apotheosized by Jon Stewart, now immortalized on the Internet - followed the proud tradition of its sister news organization, The New York Post, which last year had the scoop on John Kerry's anointment of Dick Gephardt as his running mate.
Yet you could also argue that Fox's howler was in its way the most honest barometer of this entire cultural moment. The network was pulling out all the stops to give the audience what it craved: a fresh, heaping serving of death. Mr. Smith had a point when he later noted that "the exact time of death, I think, is not something that matters so much at this moment." Certainly not to a public clamoring for him to bring it on.
Mortality - the more graphic, the merrier - is the biggest thing going in America. Between Terri Schiavo and the pope, we've feasted on decomposing bodies for almost a solid month now. The carefully edited, three-year-old video loops of Ms. Schiavo may have been worthless as medical evidence but as necro-porn their ubiquity rivaled that of TV's top entertainment franchise, the all-forensics-all-the-time "CSI." To help us visualize the dying John Paul, another Fox star, Geraldo Rivera, brought on Dr. Michael Baden, the go-to cadaver expert from the JonBenet Ramsey, Chandra Levy and Laci Peterson mediathons, to contrast His Holiness's cortex with Ms. Schiavo's.
As sponsors line up to buy time on "CSI," so celebrity deaths have become a marvelous opportunity for beatific self-promotion by news and political stars alike. Tim Russert showed a video of his papal encounter on a "Meet the Press" where one of the guests, unchallenged, gave John Paul an A-plus for his handling of the church's sex abuse scandal. Jesse Jackson, staking out a new career as the angel of deathotainment, hit the trifecta: in rapid succession he appeared with the Schindlers at their daughter's hospice in Florida, eulogized Johnnie Cochran on "Larry King Live" and reminisced about his own papal audience with MSNBC's Keith Olbermann.
What's disturbing about this spectacle is not so much its tastelessness; America will always have a fatal attraction to sideshows. What's unsettling is the nastier agenda that lies far less than six feet under the surface. Once the culture of death at its most virulent intersects with politicians in power, it starts to inflict damage on the living.
When those leaders, led by the Bush brothers, wallow in this culture, they do a bait-and-switch and claim to be upholding John Paul's vision of a "culture of life." This has to be one of the biggest shams of all time. Yes, these politicians oppose abortion, but the number of abortions has in fact been going down steadily in America under both Republican and Democratic presidents since 1990 - some 40 percent in all. The same cannot be said of American infant fatalities, AIDS cases and war casualties - all up in the George W. Bush years. Meanwhile, potentially lifesaving phenomena like condom-conscious sex education and federally run stem-cell research are in shackles.
This agenda is synergistic with the entertainment culture of Mr. Bush's base: No one does the culture of death with more of a vengeance - literally so - than the doomsday right. The "Left Behind" novels by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins all but pant for the bloody demise of nonbelievers at Armageddon. And now, as Eric J. Greenberg has reported in The Forward, there's even a children's auxiliary: a 40-title series, "Left Behind: The Kids," that warns Jewish children of the hell that awaits them if they don't convert before it's too late. Eleven million copies have been sold on top of the original series' 60 million.
These fables are of a piece with the violent take on Christianity popularized by "The Passion of the Christ." Though Mel Gibson brought a less gory version, with the unfortunate title "The Passion Recut," to some 1,000 theaters for Easter in response to supposed popular demand, there was no demand. (Back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that at many screens the film sold fewer than 50 tickets the entire opening weekend.) "Passion" fans want the full scourging, and at the height of the protests outside the Schiavo hospice, a TV was hooked up so the assembled could get revved up by watching the grisly original on DVD.
As they did so, Mr. Gibson interjected himself into the case by giving an interview to Sean Hannity asserting that "big guys" could "whip a judge" if they really wanted to stop the "state-sanctioned murder" of Ms. Schiavo. He was evoking his punishment of choice in "The Passion," figuratively, no doubt. It was only a day later that one such big guy, Tom DeLay, gave Mr. Gibson's notion his official imprimatur by vowing retribution against any judges who don't practice the faith-based jurisprudence of which he approves.
This Wednesday the far right's cutting-edge culture of death gets its biggest foothold to date in the mainstream, when NBC broadcasts its "Left Behind" simulation, "Revelations," an extremely slick prime-time mini-series that was made before our most recent death watches but could have been ripped from their headlines. In the pilot a heretofore nonobservant Christian teenage girl in a "persistent vegetative state" - and in Florida, yet - starts babbling Latin texts from the show's New Testament namesake just as dastardly scientists ("devil's advocates," as they're referred to) and organ-seekers conspire to pull the plug. "All the signs and symbols set forth in the Bible are currently in place for the end of days," says the show's adult heroine, an Oxford-educated nun who has been denounced by the Vatican for her views and whose mission is underwritten by a wealthy "religious fundamentalist." Her Julie Andrews affect notwithstanding, she is an extremist as far removed from the mainstream as Mel Gibson, whose own splinter Traditionalist Catholic sect split from Rome and disowned the reforms of Vatican II, not the least of which was the absolution of Jews for collective guilt in the death of Jesus.
It's all too fitting that "Revelations," which downsizes lay government in favor of the clerical, is hijacking the regular time slot of "The West Wing." Perhaps only God knows whether it will prove as big a hit as "The Passion." What is clear is that the public eventually tires of most death watches and demands new meat. The tsunami disaster, dramatized by a large supply of vivid tourist videos that the genocide in Darfur cannot muster, was so completely forgotten after three months that even a subsequent Asian earthquake barely penetrated the nation's Schiavo fixation. But the media plug was pulled on Ms. Schiavo, too, once the pope took center stage; the funeral Mass her parents conducted on Tuesday was all but shunned by the press pack that had moved on to Rome. By the night of his death days later, even John Paul had worn out his welcome. The audience that tuned in to the N.C.A.A. semifinals on CBS was roughly twice as large as that for the NBC and ABC papal specials combined. The time was drawing near for the networks to reappraise the Nielsen prospects of Prince Rainier.
If there's one lesson to take away from the saturation coverage of the pope, it is how relatively enlightened he was compared with the men in business suits ruling Washington. Our leaders are not only to the right of most Americans (at least three-quarters of whom opposed Congressional intervention in the Schiavo case) but even to the right of most American evangelical Christians (most of whom favored the removal of Ms. Schiavo's feeding tube, according to Time magazine). They are also, like Mel Gibson and the fiery nun of "Revelations," to the right of the largely conservative pontiff they say they revere. This is true not only on such issues as the war in Iraq and the death penalty but also on the core belief of how life began. Though the president of the United States believes that the jury is still out on evolution, John Paul in 1996 officially declared that "fresh knowledge leads to recognition of the theory of evolution as more than just a hypothesis."
We don't know the identity of the corpse that will follow the pope in riveting the nation's attention. What we do know is that the reality show we've made of death has jumped the shark, turning from a soporific television diversion into the cultural embodiment of the apocalyptic right's growing theocratic crusade.
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Susan Farley for The New York Times
At the Fashion Accessories Center on West 33rd Street, Ronald Gordon, left; David L. Levy, center, of the real estate firm Adams & Company; and Daniel M. Friedman pay homage to a common theme, the handbag.
REGIONAL MARKET / MANHATTAN
Showrooms That Fit Like a Glove
By C. J. HUGHES
The Fulton Fish Market is packing up and moving to the Bronx. The butter-and-egg district vanished decades ago, well before the area became known as TriBeCa. Only a handful of advertising agencies still call Madison Avenue home. And steep rents in a newly fashionable residential neighborhood are putting the squeeze on the tiny Flower District near Chelsea.
As the list grows, finding Manhattan blocks that are tied tightly to one industry is getting as hard as finding a T-shirt tag that reads "Made in U.S.A."
Yet an effort to group like-minded businesses in the Garment District seems to be flourishing, although such groupings are not splayed out but arranged under single roofs.
Seven specialty buildings managed by Adams & Company, a Manhattan real estate firm, dedicate 1.9 million square feet of commercial space to specific segments of the fashion industry: coats, for example; or accessories like gloves, hats and jewelry; or children's clothes.
The buildings are some 99 percent leased, according to the company, although it has taken a while. For years, Adams struggled to condense the children's clothes industry from three locations into the Children's Wear Center at 34 West 33rd Street, and after some money-losing years has recently brought the building close to full occupancy.
Typically, businesses might cluster to realize economies of scale. Buying raw materials like copper or cotton in bulk instead of individually, for instance, could save each manufacturer lots of money.
Here, though, almost none of the 290 tenants still makes clothes on site, and the philosophy seems closer to that in locating a Burger King near a McDonald's, or clustering theaters and restaurants: to succeed, you need to make the options easy for the customer.
In the Garment District, there are buyers for stores from around the world. "They don't want to spend their week in New York running from building to building," said David L. Levy, a principal of Adams & Company. "They like the idea of just hopping an elevator to go to their next appointment."
For women's handbags, a buyer would head to the Fashion Accessories Center, a 13-story, 319,200-square-foot 1920 building at 10 West 33rd Street, where the "list by type of product" option on the lobby's touch-screen kiosk directs him or her to the right floor.
After extensive renovations, the offices within the Fashion Accessories Center sport tall windows and shiny oak floors, and pinpoint track lights have replaced dingy drop ceilings.
The spaces vary from 900 square feet to 20,000 square feet, though most are in the 2,500-square-foot range, and they lease for $35 a square foot annually in 3- to 10-year leases. That price, real estate professionals say, is 50 percent higher than the market rate in the neighborhood for Class B buildings, meaning somewhat dated properties with less than splendid addresses.
Smaller tenants, like the handbag makers Chinese Laundry, Hobo International and Barganza, value these clean, bright spaces because they work well as showrooms.
"Our space used to have a Willy Loman look," said Linda DeRosa, likening her old linoleum-layered showroom to a set piece in "Death of a Salesman."
In 2000, Ms. DeRosa moved her handbag-and-belt business at 320 Fifth Avenue, where she had been for years, to a 1,600-square-foot space on the 10th floor of the Fashion Accessories Center. Her rent rose about 10 percent, but she says that the change was worth it.
"It's more sparse here, so the merchandise can speak for itself," she said.
Adams likes the spaces' modular nature. Because these tenants tend not to customize their offices, they can be easily swapped in and out.
At the Outerwear Center at 463 Seventh Avenue, a 22-story, 408,511-square-foot building that was constructed in 1925, there are 54 tenants, just one shy of full occupancy. They pay $30 a square foot for spaces that range from 1,000 square feet to 22,000 square feet, Mr. Adams said.
Other buildings command less rent per square foot, but mostly because the tenants take larger spaces. In the Menswear Center, a 19-story, 160,000-square-foot building at 42 West 38th Street, for example, tenants like Perry Ellis pay $27 a square foot, Mr. Levy said. Larger tenants do tend to customize their spaces.
Adams takes a piecemeal approach to renovation, sprucing up spaces only as leases expire, part of a $30 million process that has been going on since the firm took over the properties in 1999. Other touches have included installing new elevators and electrical systems, and repainting hallways.
"They were in tough shape," Mr. Levy said.
The transition from old to new fashion businesses - from noisy, cramped factories to hushed, airy front offices - has created some interesting bedfellows at the Contemporary Fashion Building at 231 West 39th Street. Orderly showrooms for Hard Tail Forever and James Perse are down the hall from Gelberg Braid, whose looms have been clattering away since 1930.
This is something of an anomaly. For the most part, fashion houses in the Garment District have outsourced pattern making, cutting and storage to companies overseas - the neighborhood suffered a 31 percent drop-off in clothing factory jobs from 1988 to 2000, and a 61 percent decline in textile factory jobs in the same period, according to figures from the Fashion Center Business Improvement District, which leases space in an Adams building.
This means that Garment District fashion houses require a lot less space, so they can move from the avenues - their longtime locations - to smaller spaces on the side streets. In fact, two old garment buildings, 1350 Broadway and 1328 Broadway, are now being converted to office space, forcing tenants to look elsewhere, a situation that has benefited Adams, Mr. Levy said.
But as SoHo discovered long ago, there are also aesthetic benefits to setting up shop in former factories. "These open spaces have a creative and artsy identity, which appeals to young designers," said Barbara Randall, the business improvement district's executive director.
John Powers, regional chairman of the real estate firm CB Richard Ellis, who sees many examples of decentralization by Manhattan industries, said the fashion business was bucking the trend, becoming more centralized instead of less.
"The competitive advantages of being clustered together have been offset over time by functionality and cost," Mr. Powers said. "But fashion operates more like a retail business, so it's still beneficial."
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Rob Kells/Wills Wing
THE GOODS
High and Higher: One More Way to Ride the Wind
By BRENDAN I. KOERNER
GIVEN the hazards of hang gliding, it is a bit disquieting to hear Mike Meier, an owner of the glider manufacturer Wills Wing, say that the trial and error method is integral to the company's design process. Rest assured, however, that Mr. Meier was not implying that test pilots are placed in unnecessary peril. The minor errors to which he referred affect in-flight speed and handling, not safety.
The 32 years spent correcting such flaws have led to the company's T2 model, which will soon replace Will Wing's previous top-of-the-line hang glider, the Talon. Though the two gliders are tough to distinguish from each other with the naked eye, Mr. Meier said that the T2 offered approximately 1 percent better overall performance than its predecessor.
That may mean little to a hang-gliding neophyte, whose main goal is to enjoy an unpowered flight without dying. But to a veteran hang-gliding competitor, 1 percent can mean the difference between a world distance record and an ignominious defeat.
The main problem with the Talon, Mr. Meier said, was that it had trouble maintaining appropriately high speeds between "thermals," the bubbles of warm, rising air that push up a descending glider. Competition courses are plotted around thermals, so that participants can keep gliding for hours. The key is to hit each thermal at just the right speed - usually 35 to 55 miles per hour - to take maximum advantage of the altitude bump.
To improve the pilot's control of the glider's speed, the T2 was outfitted with a slightly flatter, lighter frame than its predecessor. Wills Wing also smoothed out the surface of the sail, or fabric component, which has long been one of the toughest obstacles to improving hang-glider performance.
"What you're trying to do is take a fabric material and make it conform to a shape which is full of very complicated mathematical curves," said Mr. Meier, who in 1978 bought a controlling interest in the company after one of its founders, Bob Wills, died in a hang-gliding accident. "You want it to sit on the frame without any bumps or ripples or discontinuities that might interrupt air flow."
Wills Wing, based in Orange, Calif., used three-dimensional computer modeling to approximate the perfect sail shape for the T2. Then it built several prototypes. Unable to afford NASA-style wind tunnel testing, it relied instead on a pickup truck outfitted with a steel boom. After a prototype was suspended from the boom, the truck would be driven at speeds up to 80 m.p.h. Test loads weighing six to eight times more than a human were dangled from the frame to ensure that the glider was plenty strong.
The final tests of the T2 involved an estimated 125 flights, carried out by Mr. Meier and Steven Pearson, Wills Wing's head designer, along with a few other plucky employees. In addition, a company pilot flies each Wills Wing hang glider before it goes to a retail store. And the store owners often fly the glider once more for good measure before selling it.
The first 12 T2's are being shown at the company's annual demonstration show, which ends today outside Orlando, Fla. The glider will be available later this spring at 150 authorized dealers nationwide at a suggested retail price of $6,275.
Wills Wing does not sell gliders directly to customers. "We don't want these products delivered to people for whom it has not been verified that they have the skills to use it safely," said Mr. Meier, who estimated that 150 to 250 T2's would be sold each year.
The T2 is absolutely not intended for beginners - or for faint-of-heart experts, for that matter. Hang gliders intended for novices are much less sensitive to pilot maneuvering than the T2. Make a mistake in say, Wills Wing's Falcon 2, which is designed for new fliers, and you won't suddenly go into a nose dive or yaw sharply the wrong way.
But it's a different story with the ultrasensitive T2. One imprecise shift of body weight, Mr. Meier said, and the T2 "will do something that the pilot doesn't want it to do." And while trial and error may be a fine approach in designing a tightly fitted sail, it's not recommended while flying.
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Randy Foye
Nova Notebook: This Happiness Feels Wright
VU's head coach discusses last season and what's ahead
April 12, 2005
The Nova Notebook, by Villanova director of media relations Mike Sheridan, appears each week beginning in the fall and continues through the basketball regular season. In April through August, there are monthly entries. For our April edition, we sat down with Wildcats head coach Jay Wright to discuss a wide range of topics pertaining to Villanova basketball.
NOTEBOOK: You have often stated a preference for evaluating a season when it is complete. Having had several weeks to reflect on the 2004-05 campaign, what are your thoughts?
WRIGHT: I'm really happy for our players and fans. I had almost forgotten how much it means to all of the people at Villanova for this program to have the kind of success we did. I think it's especially important to basketball alums. All through the NCAA Tournament we received calls and notes from our former players. In each instance they mentioned how much pride they took in the program, how hard the guys played and how they conducted themselves.
We're just a small part of this great tradition and it just feels so good to see everyone in the Villanova family enjoying this.
NOTEBOOK: The Final Four is a gathering place for many prominent basketball people, including coaches. What was the response you received from some of those people when you attended this year's event in St. Louis?
WRIGHT: The response brought a great sense of pride to our staff. Every basketball coach we met, be it a Division II or III coach or one of the top Division I guys, commented to us about how hard our guys played and that our team was enjoyable to watch play. It gave our staff a great sense of accomplishment.
But it was funny, too. I would be standing in the coaches lobby and another coach would spot me, walk up and say, "You guys got robbed." That's how they would start a conversation. Jerry Tarkanian said it on a radio show. But after that they all went on to talk about the way our guys competed and, as a coach, that's something that you take a lot of pride in.
The overwhelming sentiment was that people were impressed with our guys' toughness and their togetherness.
NOTEBOOK: The official's whistle in the final moments against North Carolina has, as you mentioned, received a lot of notice. Yet there also has been a lot of attention paid to how the team handled the circumstances of the defeat. Is that something people outside Villanova took note of?
WRIGHT: That's something I failed to mention earlier. Everyone I spoke with was very complementary to me about the way we dealt with that. I received nice letters from alums and the coaches all mentioned that as well. People told me our players were outstanding and that they just exuded class after the North Carolina game.
That's something we all want to do. We all realize that we represent something larger than just ourselves. We represent Villanova University and Villanova Basketball. It wasn't anything calculated - it's the way our guys conducted themselves all season. They had been through enough adversity that they had plenty of practice to deal with those situations.
I was very proud of them. We never addressed how to handle the media in the locker room after the game. We just said that there are things you can control and things that are out of your control. We made some mistakes in the game. There were things we could have controlled in the game that would have made that call less a part of the outcome than it was. But I told the guys I was still proud of them and loved their effort.
NOTEBOOK: Randy Foye excelled in the five postseason games, averaging 21 ppg and being named to the Big East and Syracuse region all-tournament teams. Did he take a step forward in your mind over the last six weeks of the season?
WRIGHT: Randy really has played himself into a great position. He came to Villanova as a highly touted player and in his three years here has really developed into an all-around player, one of the top college basketball players in the country. He's been very coachable and has shown a willingness to adjust his game. It was really nice for him to be able to show that on a national stage.
Randy has really set the tone for our program. Great players can see that if you come to Villanova, you are going to get better and you are going to be surrounded by good people, not just coaches, but players.
NOTEBOOK: Can you offer us a health update on Randy, Curtis Sumpter (torn ACL in his right knee) and Jason Fraser (knees)?
WRIGHT: Randy is fine. He has a fracture of a tiny bone in his hand and it was something he played with throughout the season. It was decided to put him in a cast for a few weeks just because we can do it now. I expect him to be ready to participate in our individual workouts later this month.
Curtis has gone through an extensive pre-hab program. He has really worked hard to put his body into an advantageous position going into surgery. We think this will allow him to recuperate more quickly after he has the surgery, which is scheduled for April 15.
Jason has a decision to make. He can have surgery on both of his knees, which would probably help him long-term with a professional career. Or he can opt to not have surgery, and play in the limited manner he did this season for the next couple of years. We are trying to investigate the options we have and that's what we are in the process of doing right now.
NOTEBOOK: Do you anticipate that any of the players will have the opportunity to compete in international competition or in other events, as several did last year?
WRIGHT: We have some great opportunities coming up for our guys this summer. Our summer program is very important to us. A lot of the opportunities come as a result of alumni donations. Our guys have to actually solicit alumni to sponsor them on a summer tour. It's a very critical component of their development.
Randy will have an opportunity to try out for the World University Games team. We will probably have some guys attend the Pete Newell Big Man Camp. It will be a very busy summer for our guys. They will have the opportunity to get out and expand their games.
NOTEBOOK: Do you expect Randy Foye to participate in June's National Basketball Association Draft Camp in Chicago?
WRIGHT: Right now we are looking into that opportunity for Randy. At this point, it looks like he would go to test the waters. He would not retain an agent. He would go as much for the experience of working out against the best players in the country as he would to find out where he stands.
Randy is in no hurry to go to the NBA. He is in a position where he could get a great experience and find out exactly where he stands.
NOTEBOOK: One of the original members of your staff, Fred Hill, departed last week to become the associate head coach at Rutgers. What are your thoughts about Fred's exit and what that loss means to the program?
WRIGHT: We want every one of our assistants to move on to become head coaches. Being at Villanova enhances your career and it has throughout this program's history. We want all of our guys on staff to be in a position to move up and improve themselves.
Both Freddie and I viewed this as a great opportunity to advance his career. The people at Rutgers have indicated to Freddie that there is a very good chance he could become the head coach there at some point. When we heard that, we thought this was a great spot for him because it is home and his father is the head baseball coach there. Freddie's been connected to Rutgers for a long time.
We will sorely miss Freddie. But as is the case with every member of our Villanova family, when there is a chance for someone to improve their situation, we always want to encourage them. We're happy for Freddie and his new opportunity.
NOTEBOOK: Is there a timetable to fill that vacancy on the staff?
WRIGHT: We are going to put Pat Chambers on the road temporarily. We will not be down a man in recruiting.
We will take our time in the next month or so to find who the best fit for our program is.
NOTEBOOK: What was your message to the team at the close of the season?
WRIGHT: We put an inordinate emphasis during the season on focusing only on the next game. We try not to look at the past or beyond the next game. Our idea is to sit back and look back at what we accomplished when it is all over.
When we had our final meeting of the season I encouraged our guys to look back at what we accomplished and the bumps along the road. I wanted them to sit back and look at the times of despair as well as the good times. Then we discussed them relaxing. I really wanted them to take the three weeks at the end of the season to decompress. We start in the spring and are so intense, it's good to take a break.
On Monday (April 18) we will start up again with individual instruction. It starts a new cycle. We will start from ground zero. We haven't proven anything. With all of our accomplishments we have, in a sense, become new people. Even though we don't lose anyone other than Tom (Grace), we are all new people. Now we have to mesh all those people to become the team we are going to be next season.
Susan Schiff Faludi/Three Lions/Getty Images
J. Lawrence Cook, a piano roll arranger, examining a just-completed roll about 1950.
April 7, 2005
ECONOMIC SCENE
File-Sharing Is the Latest Battleground in the Clash of Technology and Copyright
By HAL R. VARIAN
LAST week, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios v. Grokster, a case that has important implications for the future of online innovation.
Grokster makes software that enables Internet users to share computer files on peer-to-peer networks. The technology has been used to distribute many kinds of content, including copyrighted digital music.
MGM and other entertainment companies want to hold Grokster liable for the copyright infringement that occurs when users download copyrighted music without paying for it. Grokster argues that there are many legitimate uses for its technology and that it is not responsible for those who use it to violate copyrights.
This is just the latest installment of a longstanding battle between technology companies and copyright holders. It is useful to look at the history of some of these past innovations in trying to understand what policies may be appropriate today.
In the early 1900's, the disruptive technology was player pianos. Manufacturers of player piano rolls purchased a single copy of the sheet music of a song, hired someone to record the music and then sold these mechanical reproductions to consumers. The songwriters held that this was copyright infringement, while the piano roll manufacturers pointed out that they had paid the appropriate copyright fees when they purchased the sheet music.
In 1908, the Supreme Court found in favor of the piano roll manufacturers, but practically invited Congress to consider new legislation on the issue. Congress responded with the Copyright Act of 1909, which created a new form of intellectual property, mechanical reproduction rights.
The new law required piano roll manufacturers to pay songwriters a fee for each song. Subsequently, mechanical reproduction fees have been extended to new technologies like phonographs, audio tapes, CD's and online streaming digital music.
In the 1908 case, songwriters did not try to ban player piano technology. They clearly recognized that the additional distribution of their songs was potentially advantageous. Their goal was simply to get a fair share of the proceeds from the piano roll sales.
Another directly relevant Supreme Court decision is Sony v. Universal City Studios, a 1984 case involving the use of video recorders in the home. The film studios argued that Sony should be liable for copyright infringement since its video recorders could be used to copy movies and television programs illegally.
The Supreme Court held that Sony was not liable since the VCR technology had "substantial noninfringing uses."
This phrase has since become the legal test of whether liability can be imposed. Under this doctrine, a company that sells a technology whose only use is to violate copyright could potentially be liable for infringement, but as long as there are substantial noninfringing uses there would be no liability.
The studios lost the Sony case, but it forced them to take the home video market seriously.
Their first instinct was to set a $50 to $60 price for videocassettes. But by choosing a high price, they stimulated the development of the video rental market, giving users inexpensive access to movies.
On the other hand, the availability of rentals stimulated the demand for VCR's. As VCR prices declined, more people bought them and the video rental industry flourished, creating a new, rapidly growing outlet for studio productions.
In the late 1980's Disney began to experiment with lower prices for videos, hoping to bypass the rental stores and sell directly to home users. Disney's 1987 video release of "Lady and the Tramp" was priced at $29.95 and sold over 3.2 million copies, making it the best-selling video as of that date. Its record was soon eclipsed by "E.T.," which sold 14 million copies at $19.95 apiece.
These examples convinced Hollywood that if it priced its product low enough it could successfully compete with the rental market. When DVD technology came along in 1996, Hollywood understood that pricing under $20 was critical. DVD technology has been hugely successful because the prices of the players and discs have continued to decline, making it highly affordable and widely used.
The critical lesson from the history of the VCR is this: If consumers have ways to share content, either via rental markets or via the Internet, you will have to set low prices to induce them to buy. But low prices may well stimulate enough volume to make up for the lost revenue.
Apple's iTunes, with its 99-cent price for songs, has driven this lesson home, but there are those who argue that prices should be even lower.
In 2004, RealNetworks experimented with charging 49 cents for digital songs and sold more than three million downloads in a three-week period. The chief executive of RealNetworks, Rob Glaser, says that "the pricing that will result in the biggest overall market for music will involve some kind of tiered pricing," with "new mainstream songs for 99 cents retail, and up-and-coming artists and back catalog artists at a lower price."
It is worth observing that this is similar to the pricing strategy used in the video industry in the 1980's: a high price for the videos that were likely to be viewed only once, making them natural candidates for the rental market, and a low price for videos that warranted repeat viewing, making them candidates for purchase.
So what should the policy be for new technologies like Grokster? I advocate the Pizza Principle: If you want everybody to get as big a slice as possible, you first have to figure out how to bake as big a pie as possible. Once you have a nice big pie, you can let people fight over how they slice it up.
With respect to technology, the Sony decision got it right: encourage technologies that create more total value. Then, let companies fight to find business models that deliver that value to consumers. They can be awfully creative when they are forced to be.
Hal R. Varian is a professor of business, economics and information management at the University of California, Berkeley.
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Monday, April 11, 2005
Timothy A. Clary/Agence France-Presse--Getty Images
Before outdueling DiMarco, Woods had gone 10 events without winning a major, matching the longest drought of his career
SPORTS MEDIA AND BUSINESS
Woods Leaves Exclamation Points Floating in the Air
By RICHARD SANDOMIR
Cue the tinkling music.
Cue the birdies.
"I feel tingly," Lanny Wadkins of CBS said.
It is the Masters.
To CBS's credit, it did great justice to Tiger Woods's playoff victory yesterday over Chris DiMarco, no more so than on the 16th hole, when Woods's chip from beyond the fringe of the green stopped a sliver of turf short of the hole, but after a two-second intermission, plopped in.
"In your life, have you seen anything like that?" said Verne Lundquist, who would add, after catching his breath, "That's breathtaking."
On the playoff hole, at the 18th, CBS tracked Woods's winning putt from a camera above the hole. The birdies tweeted. The crowd was hushed.
"Look out, what a finish," Jim Nantz said. "Number four for Tiger." He added that the putt was "center cut and it was flying."
A Tiger Woods-led tournament usually grants a network permission to give the golfer trailing him secondary treatment.
"He hasn't given up," Peter Oosterhuis said at one point about DiMarco. "But ominous signs are coming from Tiger."
That was true early in the fourth round; Woods led by three strokes after making up a four-stroke deficit against DiMarco during the restart of the third round in the early morning.
Viewers were unable to see the completion of the third round, which began at 8 a.m. Eastern, when Woods wrested control from DiMarco. Highlights were seen on USA Network's "PGA Tour Sunday"; LeslieAnne Wade, a CBS Sports spokeswoman, would not say if a request was made to add coverage. "We came on at our scheduled time," she said.
Woods, Bobby Clampett said, "is about taking it to perfection."
On numerous holes, CBS made it clear that, like all other networks, showing Woods contemplate his putts, no matter how long it requires, is preferred to cutting temporarily to another golfer's shot. Woods is not a fidgety, Ed Norton-like golfer, but he is surely a contemplative one.
On the fourth, CBS let us observe Woods in his preputt mode for 2 minutes 12 seconds, to DiMarco's 30 seconds. On the seventh, the score was Woods 1:54, DiMarco :20. On the eighth, it was Tiger 1:49, DiMarco :15.
The commentators harped on DiMarco's lack of aggressiveness in his putting; at one point, Peter Kostis showed the recoil in his putting stroke.
"We're getting quite a separation," Nantz said as Woods's lead grew.
But the criticism would equal out. Commentators said that Woods had hit too many of his tee shots too hard, had lost his early aggressiveness, had turned as tentative in his putting as DiMarco in the early holes, and had, as Wadkins said, laid up on one hole "30 or 40 yards from where he should be."
Kostis described it as an opportunity for Woods "to end all the criticism about his marriage and his swing."
Later, Wadkins said that "Tiger is on cruise control, which is not the way to win."
Eventually, CBS turned DiMarco into a hero, the plucky, never-say-die son of a St. John's basketball player, for not surrendering to the pressure of chasing Woods, who improved to 31-3 after leading a tournament after 54 holes and 7-0 in majors.
A two-man race to the finish, when other golfers have fallen away, is a challenge to any network. Cutting to anyone else seems inconsequential, but necessary. It was poignant that nearly every time CBS cut to the defending champion Phil Mickelson, he was far less than what he was last year. "Wow!" Lundquist said, as Mickelson double-bogeyed the 16th. "The defending champion with a four-putt."
From that moment until Mickelson wrapped up, the Amazon.com ranking of his book, "One Magical Sunday," fell to 372nd from 329th.
And while Trevor Immelman was out of the running and would not normally matter in the heat of a two-golfer denouement, CBS correctly replayed his hole in one on the 16th twice.
Cut the tinkling music.
Silence the birdies.
The Masters is over.
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Editing Saul Bellow
The novelist was a wizard with a dark side.
By Elisabeth Sifton
Posted Friday, April 8, 2005, at 4:03 PM PT
When the Viking Press published Mr. Sammler's Planet in the fall of 1971, I happened to be the new kid on the Viking editorial block. I guess all of us knew, and I learned quickly, that the great man liked to read proofs in-house when he could, turning up to attend to this or that when he was in New York in the peri-publication period. Since he revised his texts heavily in the late stages (sometimes with up to four sets of proofs), he was around plenty.
The final revisions were astounding. "Look at this," said a colleague, an editor who greatly admired Bellow's novels but disliked him personally. He was keeping an eye on the proofs of Mr. Sammler's Planet during the brief summer absence of Bellow's then-editor, Aaron Asher. He threw down on my desk a single long sheet from the second chapter, with scrawled lines defacing a paragraph at the top and new phrases and clauses sprouting at the end, all this in a clear, decisive hand and bright black ink. "Just read that," he repeated. "Read it! He took a perfect sentence, the bastard, and he made it even better." In the summer of 1973, when I was assigned to be Saul Bellow's editor for his forthcoming books?the first was Humboldt's Gift?I had scarcely talked to him, but he nailed me as his co-conspirator in the work to be done, and we plunged in. I kept him company while he pawed through the many drafts, options, and alternatives of a fiction that, I learned, he'd been concocting for years.
Reading through the folders of possible sections in the book was like finding a box of sparkling unset jewels; many of them never saw the light of day. I had to be what movie people call the continuity girl; he expected me to read the text closely so that he could have someone to talk to as he worked on finishing it, to opine, query, schmooze, then query again. I was shocked, at first, that he gave a hoot about my opinion; he had written so many great novels already, he'd won three National Book Awards; who was I to pass judgment on this manuscript? But we went over many a sequence, incident, chapter break, transition?then over and over them again. He seemed, sometimes, uncertain of his powers, even as he demonstrated them in the unflagging, keenly focused attention he gave to every detail. He wanted me to pay attention, too. Auden says that paying attention is a form of love; well, then, I tried to love Saul Bellow.
The final revisions of the typescript became almost grotesquely complex. Saul laughed happily to think that no future graduate student would ever figure out what the hell had been going on. I think he enjoyed being copy-edited, though, even when the queries drove him nuts. On Page 4 came a marginal notation that the glamorous cars belonging to Humboldt's father in the 1920s actually weren't made until the 1930s; he grumbled, settled for a Pierce-Arrow and a Hispano-Suiza, and carried on. I went off to the loo, and when I came back he was standing in the door of my office glaring up and down the hall. A timeline inconsistency had been spotted, and he'd been requested to fix it. "I will not, NOT, be stretched on the procrustean bed of American social realism!" he all but shouted, pacing around my room and expostulating. He crossed out the query?yet made the adjustment, I noticed?and kept going. We missed a grievous error in the very last pages; he was more than peeved later, when a reviewer mocked him for attributing the aria "In questa tomba oscura" to Verdi's Aida when any civilized person knew that Beethoven had written it. How could the copy editor and I have let him slip like this?
He'd work long hours, stopping only for a sandwich at lunch, now and again a five-minute yogic headstand against the bookcase, maybe tea in the afternoon. We know that stamina and persistence are essential ingredients of great art, don't we? Saul was in fighting trim. That gorgeous prose, with its sinewy elegant hilarity and syncopated rhythmic intensity?you don't think it was composed by a slob with poor muscle tone, do you? Still, there was plenty of time for unwinding and for talk. About everything under the sun?art, music, politics, cats and dogs, friends and enemies, and of course novels and novelists. He was scandalized I hadn't yet read Frank Norris, or Kawabata, and followed up to make sure I remedied the lack. A magical teacher.
The revisions began in earnest when the book was in proof. He told me he couldn't take his writing seriously when it was still a manuscript, that it was only an "undergraduate effort" until typeset. We talked about the moral power of the justified right margin. He'd beef up passages he found slack, alter effects that had charmed him in manuscript and now put him off, cross out whole passages and add new paragraphs. Polishing, polishing. Grammar, syntax, punctuation. I complained about some repetitions, and he stopped in his tracks, amazed at my dimwitted slowness. "Kiddo, this book is constructed like the Chicken Little story, haven't you seen that yet? Of course there are repeats. Da capo." Then he intensified the repetitions. And we laughed a lot at the jokes.
In the same way, he revised the shorter text of To Jerusalem and Back, his first nonfiction book and the occasion of his first publication in The New Yorker. Saul was still smarting about the magazine's treatment of his books over the decades; they'd never taken any of his stories, either. He'd recite by heart passages from reviews whose faint praise suggested, he thought, anti-Semitic condescension: "They think it's remarkable that I write as I do seeing as how it isn't my native language. That's the implication. Their idea of a Jewish writer is Isaac Singer?shtetls, exotic Polish ambience, magic, curious folkways. Believe me, I know whereof I speak. They never wanted stuff of mine." He was being paranoid, I told him, but privately I thought he was right.
William Shawn's having accepted this big piece on Bellow's trip to Jerusalem was a big deal, therefore, and it pleased him. But he was on guard, especially whilst his text was submitted to The New Yorker's elaborate editorial and fact-checking procedures, and I remember the glee with which he trumped them. For example, he had written that his first publisher-editor at Viking?the much-loved, revered Romanian Jewish Pascal Covici?had started out life in America as a grapefruit salesman in Florida. The fact-checkers asked three different people to verify this implausible statement; all three said that the only living person who would know that detail was Saul Bellow. We talked about verifiability, about the meaning of factual truth, about trusting the writer, about seeing trees and not understanding forests, especially when the landscape was Israeli.
The Pulitzer arrived. The Nobel. We were patient handmaidens in the ceremonies of his fame. Waves of praise came crashing in on the beach. He was used to this, of course, but the tide was rising and the sound of the surf almost deafening. He maintained his outward poise but seethed. Reviewers who had once dealt harshly with his earlier novels were now coming around, he noted with scorn. "Oh, these critics, with their cork heads and cork bottoms, bobbing to the convenient surface," he said to me. He couldn't bear their elaborate interpretations of the evident trajectory of his work from novel to novel with its culmination in Humboldt's Gift. Reviewers love to offer these mega-interpretations, but they were mostly inane. "Kiddo," he said wearily, "don't they understand that we're making it up as we go along?" He treasured the unexpected letter that came from his friend John Cheever, who had understood what he was up to in the book and described it so lovingly. We at Viking did our best to help him cope with the mounting flood of requests, demands, and expectations, and we marveled at the dismaying, boundless inanity of American celebrity culture. "They're blood-suckers," he said as he riffled through the letters asking him to give this honorary lecture, accept that prize, open this conference, close this colloquium.
It came to an end, all this. A few years later, for tangled reasons, Bellow left the Viking Press. I never worked with him again, though I saw him often enough in New York over the next decades. His departure hurt, naturally. A civil, affectionate letter assured me I had nothing to do with his decision to be published elsewhere and noted poignantly that his relationship with Viking had been "as close to monogamy as I've ever been." Well, OK, so we joined all the ex-wives, ex-girlfriends, ex-friends, ex-publishers. There was a large community of ex-intimates well-acquainted with the cruelty in Saul's self-torturing perfidies. He'll die alone, a mutual friend said; it was a judgment on Saul's soul, not a prediction. We wondered what ancient injuries required this generous, wise person to turn skittishly mean. I became hypercritical. I asked Irving Howe what he thought of a story of Saul's published around this time, and agreed when he said, "From any other writer it would be a major accomplishment. But this is Saul writing with his left hand. It's a nothing. From him."
I kept on reading?all the later books, especially Ravelstein, since Saul and I had gabbed so often about Allan Bloom, David Grene, and his buddies on the Committee on Social Thought. I was happy to run into Bellow with his new wife, to learn of his new publishing arrangements. I couldn't stop paying attention to him. He had become a constant presence for me in a different way. I never tried?still don't want?to escape his influence, to lose his incomparable, uproarious, devastating comprehension of the mess we're in. I hear a new joke or learn of some crazy new detail in our national life or meet a new kind of phony, and I need Saul Bellow. Wherever we are, it's somewhere Saul has been before us, and I can't help registering the ways that his novels transformed our ordinary American scenery into radiant loci of intense human meaning. Without him? It can never be.
It was terrible to hear of his death. Yet it was wonderful to know that in the end he was not alone after all but with his wife and child, that he left this world knowing his love was shared and reciprocated. He deserved no less.
Elisabeth Sifton, senior vice president of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, is the author of The Serenity Prayer: Faith and Politics in Times of Peace and War.
Doug Mills/NYT, left; Vincent Laforet/NYT
David Ortiz of the Boston Red Sox showed his new ring to fans while the Yankees looked on from the visitors dugout.
Red Sox Get Their Rings
By BLOOMBERG NEWS
April 11 -- The Boston Red Sox officially marked their first World Series title in 86 years today, receiving rings and raising the Major League Baseball championship banner at Fenway Park.
The ceremonies were held before Boston's home opener against the New York Yankees, the Red Sox's fiercest rivals and the team they beat in an historic comeback to win the American League pennant last October.
The Red Sox started the season on April 3 in New York, then played in Toronto. Postseason rings and pennants generally are presented at the team's first home game of the next season, with baseball setting the schedule.
Yankee manager Joe Torre said since the ceremony was announced in February that it was up to individual team members whether they watched from the visitors' dugout.
Most of them chose to be there, and Torre tipped his cap to Boston manager Terry Francona, who returned to the team after being hospitalized last week because of chest pains.
The World Series flag was raised as dozens of former Red Sox players looked on. Hall of Famer Carl Yastrzemski and former All- Star infielder Johnny Pesky helped pull the rope that hoisted the banner up the stadium flagpole.
Boston will start Tim Wakefield against New York's Mike Mussina in today's game. Fenway Park, the oldest and smallest ballpark in the majors, will be sold out for the 146th straight game dating back to the 2003 season.
The celebration comes six months after the Red Sox became the first major-league team to win a seven-game postseason series after losing the first three contests. After that pennant-winning performance against the Yankees, Boston swept the St. Louis Cardinals for the World Series title.
The Red Sox-Yankees rivalry dates back to the year after Boston's last Series' win, when it sold Babe Ruth to New York. Ruth became the first player to hit 60 home runs in a season and 700 in his career, and the Yankees won a record 26 World Series championships.
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Woods won the Masters after a birdie on the first hole of the playoff. He earned his fourth green jacket and his ninth major.
SPORTS OF THE TIMES
Woods Was at His Best With Masters on the Line
By DAVE ANDERSON
Augusta, Ga.
TIGER WOODS's confidence was never more apparent than when he was asked if he ever thought he would be only four strokes off the Masters lead Saturday night. After all, he had made an embarrassing bogey at the 13th hole in Thursday's opening round when his 20-foot putt scooted off the green, his ball hopping across damp dirt into a tributary of Rae's Creek.
"Yes," he said quickly.
"You did?" his questioner asked.
"Mm, hmm."
"You're that confident?"
"Yes," he repeated.
In his firm face, one could see this was the Tiger Woods of three and four years ago, when he streaked to four consecutive major titles while winning 7 of 11 majors. And in completing his third round here early Sunday morning, he rode that confidence to four consecutive birdies (for a Masters record-tying streak of seven over two days) and a three-stroke lead over Chris DiMarco going into the final round.
It's all over, many people thought. In Woods's eight previous victories in major championships, he had never lost after having held or shared the lead after 54 holes. And surely it was over when he birdied the first two holes of the final round for a four-stroke lead.
It wasn't. The more the slanting sun draped the pine trees' long shadows across Augusta National's back nine, the more it seemed to drain the confidence from Woods's face and game.
When he bogeyed the 17th and 18th holes (after a spectacular slithering chip-in for birdie at the 16th), he had stumbled into a sudden-death playoff with DiMarco. His confidence had dissolved into a mask of desperation sometimes punctuated with a shout of profanity.
But suddenly, Tiger Woods reproved one of sport's oldest truths: when you want to see a great athlete at his best, see him when he's getting beat.
And before their tee shots on the first playoff hole, the 18th, Woods was getting beat. DiMarco had outplayed him on the back nine, 34 to 37, and had rebounded from that chip-in on the 16th to par the last two holes as Woods bogeyed both for a 71 to DiMarco's 68. But when Woods suddenly had a 15-foot birdie putt to win the playoff, his ball hurried into the hole like a field mouse.
"I just tried to hang in there," Woods said later. "In the playoff, I hit two of the best golf shots I hit all week. It was pretty sweet. The 3-wood was perfect and the 8-iron I hit in there was flush. I made a nice little putt there, too."
When he won, Tiger Woods flashed his third face, the face with the wide wonderful little-boy smile that has charmed millions. He had not merely won his fourth Masters, he had won it after he thought he might lose it.
More important, Woods had not merely joined Arnold Palmer as a four-time Masters winner (two behind Jack Nicklaus's record), he had ended his drought of 10 consecutive major disappointments, if not embarrassments. With 9 victories in his first 33 majors as a pro, he is now 4 up in his ambition to surpass the 18 majors of Nicklaus, who did not win his ninth until his 37th major.
During Woods's similar 0-for-10 drought in the majors several years after winning the 1997 Masters by a record 12 strokes as a rookie pro, he struggled because he was trying to make his swing even better. And much of his recent drought occurred as he tried to improve his swing under the tutelage of his new guru, Hank Haney, while learning to trust it in the pressure-cooker of tournament golf.
"I feel the work I've done with Hank has turned things in the right direction," he said. "I hit some beautiful golf shots this week."
Now that Woods has won another major, which regained the No. 1 perch for him in the world rankings, it will be interesting to see if he will be as dominant as he was during his reign of seven majors from the 1999 P.G.A. Championship to the 2002 United States Open at Bethpage Black.
Whenever Woods wins the Masters, he, like Nicklaus before him, knows he will be burdened by the possibility of sweeping golf's grand slam this year - adding victories in the United States Open at Pinehurst No. 2, the British Open at St. Andrews and the P.G.A. Championship at Baltusrol.
In 2002, after winning his third Masters and his second United States Open at Bethpage Black, Woods's chance for a slam ended with a rain-soaked 81 in the third round of the British Open at Muirfield, the same Scottish course where Nicklaus's grand-slam bid ended in 1972.
Now, at 29, Woods, his confidence reborn with a fourth green jacket, will be on a grand-slam quest again when he arrives at Pinehurst, where he had a chance to win the 1999 Open, finishing in a tie for third behind the winner, Payne Stewart, and Phil Mickelson.
But what Woods, in his green jacket, seemed to cherish was that he was the first to accomplish something else.
"I'm the first to win four Masters before the age of 30," he said with that little-boy smile. "That's pretty neat."
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Saturday, April 09, 2005
Jeffrey Toohig, left, and Armen Meyer having dinner at the Lemongrass Grill in New York without a televised football game in sight.
The Man Date
By JENNIFER 8. LEE
THE delicate posturing began with the phone call.
The proposal was that two buddies back in New York City for a holiday break in December meet to visit the Museum of Modern Art after its major renovation.
"He explicitly said, 'I know this is kind of weird, but we should probably go,' " said Matthew Speiser, 25, recalling his conversation with John Putman, 28, a former classmate from Williams College.
The weirdness was apparent once they reached the museum, where they semi-avoided each other as they made their way through the galleries and eschewed any public displays of connoisseurship. "We definitely went out of our way to look at things separately," recalled Mr. Speiser, who has had art-history classes in his time.
"We shuffled. We probably both pretended to know less about the art than we did."
Eager to cut the tension following what they perceived to be a slightly unmanly excursion - two guys looking at art together - they headed directly to a bar. "We couldn't stop talking about the fact that it was ridiculous we had spent the whole day together one on one," said Mr. Speiser, who is straight, as is Mr. Putman. "We were purging ourselves of insecurity."
Anyone who finds a date with a potential romantic partner to be a minefield of unspoken rules should consider the man date, a rendezvous between two straight men that is even more socially perilous.
Simply defined a man date is two heterosexual men socializing without the crutch of business or sports. It is two guys meeting for the kind of outing a straight man might reasonably arrange with a woman. Dining together across a table without the aid of a television is a man date; eating at a bar is not. Taking a walk in the park together is a man date; going for a jog is not. Attending the movie "Friday Night Lights" is a man date, but going to see the Jets play is definitely not.
"Sideways," the Oscar-winning film about two buddies touring the central California wine country on the eve of the wedding of one of them, is one long and boozy man date.
Although "man date" is a coinage invented for this article, appearing nowhere in the literature of male bonding (or of homosexual panic), the 30 to 40 straight men interviewed, from their 20's to their 50's, living in cities across the country, instantly recognized the peculiar ritual even if they had not consciously examined its dos and don'ts. Depending on the activity and on the two men involved, an undercurrent of homoeroticism that may be present determines what feels comfortable or not on a man date, as Mr. Speiser and Mr. Putman discovered in their squeamishness at the Modern.
Jim O'Donnell, a professor of business and economics at Huntington University in Indiana, who said his life had been changed by a male friend, urges men to get over their discomfort in socializing one on one because they have much to gain from the emotional support of male friendships. (Women understand this instinctively, which is why there is no female equivalent to the awkward man date; straight women have long met for dinner or a movie without a second thought.)
"A lot of quality time is lost as we fritter around with minor stuff like the Final Four scores," said Mr. O'Donnell, who was on the verge of divorce in the mid-1980's before a series of conversations over meals and walks with a friend 20 years his senior changed his thinking. "He was instrumental in turning me around in the vulnerability that he showed," said Mr. O'Donnell, who wrote about the friendship in a book, "Walking With Arthur." "I can remember times when he wanted to know why I was going to leave my wife. No guy had ever done that before."
While some men explicitly seek man dates, and others flatly reject them as pointless, most seem to view them as an unavoidable form of socializing in an age when friends can often catch up only by planning in advance. The ritual comes particularly into play for many men after college, as they adjust to a more structured, less spontaneous social life. "You see kids in college talking to each other, bull sessions," said Peter Nardi, a sociology professor at Pitzer College in Claremont, Calif., who edited a book called "Men's Friendships." "But the opportunities to get close to another man, to share and talk about their feelings, are not available after a certain age."
The concern about being perceived as gay is one of the major complications of socializing one on one, many straight men acknowledge. That is what Mr. Speiser, now a graduate student at the University of Virginia, recalled about another man date he set up at a highly praised Italian restaurant in a strip mall in Charlottesville. It seemed a comfortable choice to meet his roommate, Thomas Kim, a lawyer, but no sooner had they walked in than they were confronted by cello music, amber lights, white tablecloths and a wine list.
The two exchanged a look. "It was funny," Mr. Speiser said. "We just knew we couldn't do it." Within minutes they were eating fried chicken at a "down and dirty" place down the road.
Mr. Kim, 28, who is now married, was flustered in part because he saw someone he knew at the Italian restaurant. "I was kind of worried that word might get out," he said. "This is weird, and now there is a witness maybe."
Dinner with a friend has not always been so fraught. Before women were considered men's equals, some gender historians say, men routinely confided in and sought advice from one another in ways they did not do with women, even their wives. Then, these scholars say, two things changed during the last century: an increased public awareness of homosexuality created a stigma around male intimacy, and at the same time women began encroaching on traditionally male spheres, causing men to become more defensive about notions of masculinity.
"If men become too close to other men, then they are always vulnerable to this accusation of, 'Oh, you must be gay,' " said Gregory Lehne, a medical psychologist at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine who has studied gender issues. At the same time, he added, "When you have women in the same world and seeking equality with men, then all of a sudden issues emerge in the need to maintain the male sex role."
And thus a simple meal turns into social Stratego. Some men avoid dinner altogether unless the friend is coming from out of town or has a specific problem that he wants advice about. Otherwise, grabbing beers at a bar will do just fine, thank you.
Other men say dinners may be all right, but never brunch, although a post-hangover meal taking place during brunch hours is O.K. "The company at that point is purely secondary," explained Steven Carlson, 29, a public relations executive in Chicago.
Almost all men agree that beer and hard alcohol are acceptable man date beverages, but wine is risky. And sharing a bottle is out of the question. "If a guy wants to get a glass of wine, that's O.K.," said Rob Discher, 24, who moved to Washington from Dallas and has dinner regularly with his male roommate. "But there is something kind of odd about splitting a bottle of wine with a guy."
Other restaurant red flags include coat checks, busboys who ask, "Still or sparkling?" and candles, unless there is a power failure. All of those are fine, however, at a steakhouse. "Your one go-to is if you go and get some kind of meat product," explained James Halow, 28, who works for a leveraged buyout firm in San Francisco.
Cooking for a friend at home violates the man date comfort zone for almost everyone, with a possible exemption for grilling or deep-frying. "The grilling thing would take away the majority of the stigma because there is a masculine overtone to the grill," Mr. Discher said.
And man dates should always be Dutch treat, men agree. Armen Meyer, 28, a lawyer in New York who is an unabashed man dater, remembers when he tried to pay for dinner for a friend. "I just plopped out the money and didn't even think about it," Mr. Meyer said. "He said, 'What are you doing?' And I'm like: 'I was going to pay. What's the big deal?' And he said something like, 'Guys don't pay for me,' or 'No one pays for me.' There was a certain slight power issue."
When attending a movie together - preferably with explosions or heavy special effects, never a romantic comedy - guys prefer to put a nice big seat between each other. (This only sounds like an episode of "Seinfeld.") "Going to the movie with one other guy is sort of weird, but you can balance it out by having a seat space between you," explained Ames McArdle, a financial analyst in Washington.
Men who avoid man dates altogether are often puzzled by the suggestion that they might like to spend time with male friends. "If you're buddies with another guy, there shouldn't be any work involved," Mr. Halow of San Francisco said. Which is why many men say that a successful man dates requires a guy to demonstrate concern for his friend without ever letting on. "The amount of preparation that the other guy is making is directly proportional to how awkward it is," Mr. McArdle of Washington said.
When man daters socialize with non-man daters, the activities always fall to the lowest common denominator. Mr. Meyer of New York remembers how he would ask his roommate Jonathan Freimann out for dinner by himself. But Mr. Freimann would instinctively pre-empt, by asking other guys along.
"If I had known he wanted to spend one-on-one time, I would have," Mr. Freimann explained, adding that group dinners had simply seemed "more fun." (The two had dinner in San Diego last week.)
Jeffrey Toohig, 27, is a more reliable bet for Mr. Meyer. They regularly have dinner together to discuss women, jobs and whatever else is on their minds, because, as Mr. Toohig put it, "the conversation is more in-depth than you can have at a bar." Mr. Toohig, who is looking for a job helping underdeveloped countries, divides his male friends into two groups: "good friends who I go out one on one with, and guys I go out with and we have beers and wings." And, he pointed out, dinner with Mr. Meyer has the advantage of not making his girlfriend jealous, the way dinners with his female friends do.
All men, however, agree that one rule of guy-meets-guy time is inviolable: if a woman enters the picture, a man can drop his buddies, last minute, no questions asked.
A romantic date always trumps a man date.
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Jimmy Fallon and Drew Barrymore
in "Fever Pitch."
(Ava Gerlitz/20th Century Fox)
MOVIE REVIEW | 'FEVER PITCH'
Discovering Her Man Is a Boy of Summer
By MANOHLA DARGIS
To watch "Fever Pitch," the new, thoroughly winning if not especially good film by Peter and Bobby Farrelly, is to appreciate, yet again, that the great loves of our lives are rarely perfect. That is, of course, not big news. If Hollywood has taught us anything over the last century it is that every so often a seemingly ordinary commercial enterprise can afford us fleeting access to the sublime. And for my money, there are few movie moments right now more sublime than the image of Drew Barrymore running across a major league baseball field and, with that famous jaw jutting into the wind, dodging ballplayers and storybook clichés to save the windup of this imperfectly true romance.
Written by the industrial-strength team of Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel ("Splash," "City Slickers") and loosely based on the Nick Hornby memoir of the same title, "Fever Pitch" is one of the few Farrelly movies that the brothers didn't also (officially) write. And while it features a lengthy sequence involving regurgitation - mind you, an unabashedly romantic sequence involving regurgitation - this is the first of their films that doesn't lean on sight gags and the various insults and humiliations that come with having an all-too-human body. When Ms. Barrymore's character, Lindsey Meeks, turns an alarming shade of green after a bout of food poisoning, the Farrellys sneak in some delightful business with a dog and an electric toothbrush, but otherwise keep an uncharacteristically discreet distance.
For longtime Farrelly fans, this turn to relative discretion may set off alarms. Ever since their first movie, the gleefully stupid "Dumb and Dumber," the brothers have been doing their part to flush American comedy down the toilet. In contrast to many of their barf-bag brethren, however, who seem stuck in the anal and oral stages, content to manufacture poop jokes and sail along on their own flatulence, the Farrellys have consistently pushed their comedy into new territory, including fatherhood, brotherly love and romance. Equal parts Three Stooges and classic screwball comedy, "There's Something About Mary" was a crudely funny valentine of a movie, but a valentine nonetheless. In their last comedy, "Stuck on You," a story about conjoined twins with conflicting desires, the brothers sent another valentine, this time to each other.
"Stuck on You" didn't fully work and neither does "Fever Pitch," but it's good to see the Farrellys pushing their own comedy comfort level, if only because they're running out of body fluids to exploit. Ms. Barrymore's character is an alpha-gal Bostonian with designer tastes, a high-stakes consultant who crunches numbers for high-end clients. One day at work, she finds herself performing career show-and-tell for some elementary school math nerds and their equally nerdy teacher, Ben Wrightman (Jimmy Fallon). After some hemming and hawing, he asks her out and she hesitantly agrees. It isn't that he isn't cute (with his fluttery lashes and tentative smile, Mr. Fallon has cute down). The problem, one of her friends suggests, may be that she makes more money. After all, when it comes to most men, "It's like you're dating yourself."
But Ben isn't like most men and it's the very specific way in which he stands apart from the herd that's meant to give "Fever Pitch" its singular kick. What makes Ben special isn't his love for teaching, the way he never tucks in his shirt or any of the little things that make up the sum of a person; it's that he is a major league Red Sox fan, an obsessive, a true believer, a nut. Having been inducted into the Sox cult at the impressionable age of 8, Jimmy has turned the team into his church and his home. A reproduction of the Green Monster - the left field wall in Fenway Park - covers half his living room. He sleeps in a Sox T-shirt, buys beer with a Sox credit card. He even uses Yankees toilet paper.
For Lindsey, who first falls for the man she calls Winter Guy only to end up a few months later with the single-minded demon she comes to know as Summer Guy, the road to happiness (or maybe madness) may be lined with team jerseys, Johnny Damon bobble-head dolls and countless iterations of red-and-white socks. Working off of Mr. Hornby's memoir, which recounts his lifelong obsession with a soccer team, the filmmakers try to attenuate Ben's fixation and balance the lopsided relationship by turning Lindsey into a workaholic. But her friendships have nothing to do with work and her apartment doesn't resemble a 12-year-old's rumpus room. Other than the fact that she looks like Drew Barrymore and is impossibly beautiful, Lindsey is just like any other overworked single woman who has ever turned a blind eye to a beer gut, a receding hair line and years of indulgent mothering for a date.
Try as they might, the Farrellys don't seem wholly comfortable with this material. Unlike Chris and Paul Weitz, who translated Mr. Hornby's novel "About a Boy" to the screen with such fluidity, the Farrellys have a hard time finding the right rhythm for their film, perhaps because for once the actors aren't spinning in circles. This is the first Farrelly movie not stuffed to the gills with comic bells and whistles and booming yuks, which may explain why the first 20 minutes are so excruciating. The film has the flat lighting and sound of canned television, and the actors look as if they have been dropped on the set without instruction. Things improve as the story unfolds, or maybe I was just too eager to see it all work out to continue fussing about the filmmaking.
Still, despite the visual clumsiness and the production's tattered seams, I found myself rooting for this movie anyway, partly because Lindsey and Ben make a nice fit, as do the actors playing them, partly because the Farrellys bring so much heart to their movies, and partly because Ms. Barrymore inspires more goodwill than any other young actress I can think of working today in American movies. She doesn't give a performance for the ages in "Fever Pitch" (we may have to wait for her movie with Curtis Hanson, "Lucky You," to see what she is capable of), but she does enough. Like a loyal Sox fan, you root hard for her to make it across that baseball field, just as you root hard for the Farrellys, hoping against hope that they have hit another one out of the park.
"Fever Pitch" is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). It includes mild adult humor and very discreet lovemaking.
'Fever Pitch'
Opens today nationwide.
Directed by Peter Farrelly and Bobby Farrelly; written by Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel, based on the book by Nick Hornby; director of photography, Matthew F. Leonetti; edited by Alan Baumgarten; music by Craig Armstrong; production designer, Maher Ahmad; produced by Alan Greenspan, Amanda Posey, Gil Netter, Drew Barrymore, Nancy Juvonen and Bradley Thomas; released by Fox 2000 Pictures. Running time: 98 minutes. This film is rated PG-13.
WITH: Drew Barrymore (Lindsey), Jimmy Fallon (Ben), Jason Spevack (Ben in 1980), Jack Kehler (Al), Scott H. Severance (Artie) and Jessamy R. Finét (Teresa).
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CASES
In a Pile of Papers, the Ghost of a Once-Healthy Child
By PERRI KLASS, M.D.
I was about to go on vacation, so I was winnowing my guilty pile of patient follow-up papers, trying to act on anything that looked time-sensitive, when I came across a printout, a lab test result, and found myself wondering why this was even in my pile: a completely normal blood count on a 2-year-old from months and months ago.
This wasn't a child who needed to start taking iron drops; all the indices were normal, reflecting a proper number of normally sized and pigmented red blood cells. I couldn't have kept the paper on my desk to remind me to talk to a hematologist because nothing looked out of whack. The numbers would have long ago been entered automatically into the computerized record. Why had I held on to the paper backup record? Was this my clumsy way of reminding myself that this child needed follow-up for some other reason? His name rang no particular bell; common first name, common surname. I looked at his blood count irritably - what did I need with normal test results? But I clicked my way into the medical record and clicked in his number, and waited for his chart to appear on the screen.
In the microseconds while the computer called him up, I remembered who he was: he was the 2-year-old who had died in a house fire, the 2-year-old whose family had awakened smelling smoke, whose father had grabbed him up and leaped with him out of an upper-story window.
The father was injured, the son was killed in the fall. Other children in the family were badly hurt by smoke inhalation. And only a day or two before all this happened, my 2-year-old patient had come to see me for a checkup, and as part of the checkup, I had sent him to have his blood drawn.
By the time the official printout came into my box, the child was dead, and I hadn't known what to do with the piece of paper. I should have initialed it and dropped it into the medical records box for filing. But I couldn't sign off on it. It was like holding on to one last tiny thread linking me to the vigorous 2-year-old who had let me listen to his heart and lungs and then protested loudly when I tried to look into his ears, who had looked at me with profound suspicion from the safety of his father's arms the 2-year-old whose suspicions I had, of course, then justified completely by sending him off to the lab to have his blood drawn.
I had done the test because this was a child who had in the past been quite anemic. At his 18-month visit, I had checked his hematocrit, a simpler, cheaper test requiring less blood, and a routine test for children this age. Children are particularly vulnerable to iron-deficiency anemia from just before their first birthday to the age of 2 or 3, especially those who are still getting much of their protein and other nutrition from milk.
So we check the blood count at 9 months and at 18 months, and when it's low, I start the children on iron drops and talk to the parents about adding iron-rich foods to the child's diet. I say, "Start the children on iron drops," as if it were no sooner said than done. The fact is, it's a rare child who likes the taste of any of the available iron preparations, and a rare parent who is up to what is supposed to be a dosing schedule of two or three times a day. And just to make the whole thing more appealing, many children get constipation from the iron supplements.
So I calculate the iron doses carefully, and I write the prescriptions, and I know that many parents try their best, but often the child comes back for the next visit and the hematocrit hasn't budged and the parent admits, sheepishly, that the iron has not been a regular daily feature.
But not this child. His father had told me proudly at the checkup that he had given the iron drops faithfully, day in and day out. That he had decreased the number of daily milk bottles, and started letting the boy feed himself a variety of table foods. And so I sent him off for the more complete blood test, thinking that he had now had a fair trial of iron, and I wanted to see what his hematologic indices looked like.
They looked terrific. The iron drops and the changed diet had worked. He was no longer anemic. A tiny everyday pediatric victory, a small step for parental commitment and consistency. The only thing was, by the time I got those encouraging lab results, the child was dead.
I held on to the lab results - and I'm still holding on to them because I couldn't bear to let them go. I guess they said something to me about the daily work and trouble of being a parent, of tending a 2-year-old, about the ways that love translates itself into detail and caretaking. Or maybe they said something about the twists and ironies of life - that the worries that preoccupy you are not necessarily the dangers that are actually lying in wait, or about the strange juxtapositions of parental power and parental powerlessness.
I thought about that bitter medical student joke, the "Harvard death," in which all the lab results are perfect, all the electrolytes and body chemistry numbers "in the boxes" - as the patient dies.
But mostly, I suppose, I held onto those lab results because right after the child died, when I could still remember so clearly his healthy 2-year-old vigor in my exam room, I didn't want to see this last tiny medical link disappear.
So I put the paper on my pile, and then months went by, and more children passed through the exam room, and my memories faded, and whatever faint link I might have claimed faded, so much so that I blanked when I looked at the lab sheet and initially couldn't even remember the story that went with it.
He was a little boy who drank too much milk and developed iron deficiency anemia, and his parents treated him and he got better. They tended him and protected him because that is what parents do - that is what I am supposed to help parents do.
We all did our jobs, including the 2-year-old, who ate his iron-fortified cereals and his spinach, swallowed his iron drops and protesting, yielded up a little blood for us to test. But by the time I got my piece of paper, the story was over.
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Las Vegas Locals Forego Convenience Store Gambling
LAS VEGAS -- A study from the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority shows that one in four Clark County residents who gamble play in convenience stores, grocery stores or gasoline stations, the Las Vegas Sun reported.
That number is down significantly from a similar study conducted in 2001-02 when one in three gamblers played at those locations.
The results are based on interviews with 1,200 randomly selected Clark County residents, and the survey had a margin of error of plus or minus 2.8 percent.
Anthony Curtis, who publishes the Las Vegas Advisor, a newsletter for visitors to Las Vegas, said the fact that the study shows that there are fewer players at convenience stores, grocery stores and gas stations now than two years ago is an indicator that locals are getting more savvy about their gambling.
"I've been into some stores and have seen [pay] schedules that were good," Curtis said. "I've seen some progressives in supermarkets that were literally positive, but those are few and far between. That sector tends to be very poor in terms of return percentages."
But Curtis concurred that 26 percent is still a substantial number of players on machines in those locales.
"They play because of the convenience of them being there," he said. "That's the reason those machines are there in the first place."
Curtis also said people tend to discount the value of their change.
"After making their purchase, they decide to take a shot at turning that change into some folding money," he said. "The opportunity to do it is what pushes them."
Of the 26 percent of residents who gamble in convenience stores, grocery stores or gas stations, an estimated 75 percent of them say they play there at least once or twice a month, with 21 percent saying they play twice a week or more.
The study also said men (31 percent) were more likely than women (22 percent) to say they have gambled at those locations, as were respondents with a high school education or less (30 percent) compared with college graduates (19 percent).
Pool Photo by Darren Staples
The couple greeted well-wishers gathered outside St. George's Chapel today.
April 10, 2005
Charles and Camilla, Married, Without a Hitch
By SARAH LYALL
WINDSOR, England, April 9 - Given all the twists of fate and circumstance that have conspired against it, perhaps the most wondrous thing about the wedding on Saturday between Prince Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles was that it took place at all.
But it did, and nothing went wrong. On Saturday, after 33 star-crossed and often unhappy years, through other marriages, bitter divorces, violent public opprobrium and familial dismay, Charles and Camilla finally married.
When the civil service was over and the couple emerged arm in arm from the Guildhall in the middle of this Berkshire town, Camilla had become not only the wife of the heir to the throne, but also a member of the royal family. Hereafter (unless she becomes queen, which she has said she does not want to be) the former Mrs. Parker Bowles will be known officially as Her Royal Highness, the Duchess of Cornwall.
The crowds were nothing like those that turned out on that long-ago day when Charles married Lady Diana Spencer in a wedding that captivated the world and seemed to fill everyone's heart with hope. This was different. If there was a general mood in the air throughout the long day, which included a blessing of the wedding at St. George's Chapel in Windsor Castle, it was one of sympathy for comfortable middle-aged love, and a recognition of its differences from the heady but often unknowing love of youth.
"When these vows are made by people who have been battered by life, they somehow have more force and impact than when they are made by people in their twenties, when it's easier to say such things," the novelist Robert Harris told The Daily Telegraph, which on Saturday printed a page full of tributes to Charles and Camilla from various friends.
Ann Fitzpatrick, who had come to Windsor to catch a glimpse of the couple, said that she was not particularly fond of the monarchy or even of Charles, but that she wanted to show support for a late-in-life marriage.
"You go through it with more maturity, and not as much ignorance," said Ms. Fiztpatrick, 47. (She herself is hoping to marry her longtime partner, the father of her two children, she said, and maybe Charles's wedding will help nudge him on.) "They've had so many problems," Ms. Fitzpatrick said of the royal couple. "They're not aiming at perfection, just happiness."
The contrast with the prince's first wedding could hardly have been more striking. Charles and Diana married in an enormous church in front of hundreds of people, in a ceremony watched by millions around the world; Charles and Camilla were married in a modest room barely big enough for themselves and their two dozen or so guests.
The first time, Charles was an inexperienced 32-year-old, and his bride was a strikingly unworldly 20-year-old. This time, the prince is 56, his wife is 57, and they have been around the block and back. Each has married and divorced, and each has two children, all of whom attended the civil service (Prince William, nervously checking the pocket of his waistcoat for the rings as he went into the Guildhall, served as best man).
In the wedding 24 years ago, Diana was all but swallowed up by her huge, frothy, meringue-like extravaganza of a dress, with sleeves that puffed out like cotton candy and a train that seemed wearyingly to go on forever. For his part, the groom looked like he was going to a costume party, wearing an almost foppishly elaborate military uniform, complete with a sword.
This time around, the bride was in an elegant cream suit and broad-brimmed hat, and the groom wore the sort of smart morning suit that makes even the most awkward Englishman look dashing. He had been a young, overdressed man in a costume before; suddenly, he had morphed into something approximating Mr. Darcy.
The couple seemed to grow in confidence and happiness as the day went on. It is always hard to tell what members of the royal family are actually thinking; they come and go so quickly, and regular people see them only at odd, snatched moments. But in his public appearances early in the day, Charles wore his familiar look of slightly shifty unease.
He and Camilla entered the Guildhall behind members of their families - including their children and her 88-year-old father, but not his parents, the queen or Prince Philip - and left quickly, slipping into a Rolls Royce loaned to them by the queen for the short drive up the hill to Windsor Castle.
Once in the church, surrounded by some 800 friends, listening to music and readings that he had helped pick out, reciting the tough prayer of penitence at the feet of the archbishop of Canterbury, Charles seemed to take heart.
Camilla looked pretty relaxed, too, having by now changed into a long, swishy dress of pale blue silk. The couple were openly affectionate during the service, lovingly caressing each other's hands. Camilla beamed and Charles looked almost beside himself with joy (by his standards) afterward, as they walked down the aisle together.
The queen, by contrast, who joined the couple at the blessing ceremony, did not appear to be thrilled. Leaving St. George's Chapel behind her son and new daughter-in-law, she seemed to be making a concerted effort not to stand next to them on the front steps. Instead, she hovered behind, turning around to talk to other members of the royal family who were massing in the back.
Meanwhile, Prince Philip, who is said not to get along with his son, considering him self-pitying and self-indulgent, loomed far off to the side, leaving a two-person-wide gap between himself and Camilla.
After a two-hour reception of finger food and a buffet, the couple will repair to the prince's estate in Scotland for a honeymoon, where they will make a house party of it, with various friends and relations joining them.
With the new, pro-Charles mood in the air, even Piers Morgan, the cynical former editor of The Daily Mirror and a onetime fan and confidant of the late Princess of Wales, was moved to enthusiasm for the wedding.
"I think this is turning into a great royal occasion," Mr. Morgan told the BBC.
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John D. McHugh/Associated Press
Camila Parker Bowles' children, Laura and Tom, leave Guildhall after the marriage ceremony.
Andrew Parsons/Associated Press
Photographers from all over the world waited for a glimpse of Prince Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles.
Prince Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles were married in a civil service today at the Guildhall in Windsor, England
Dave Caulkin/Associated Press
Prince William and Prince Harry after the wedding of their father, Prince Charles, and Camilla Parker Bowles.
Goodbye to Privacy
By WILLIAM SAFIRE
NO PLACE TO HIDE
By Robert O'Harrow Jr.
348 pp. The Free Press. $26.
CHATTER
Dispatches From the Secret World of Global Eavesdropping.
By Patrick Radden Keefe.
300 pp. Random House. $24.95.
YOUR mother's maiden name is not the secret you think it is. That sort of ''personal identifier'' being used by banks, credit agencies, doctors, insurers and retailers -- supposedly to protect you against the theft of your identity -- can be found out in a flash from a member of the new security-industrial complex. There goes the ''personal identifier'' that you presume a stranger would not know, along with your Social Security number and soon your face and DNA.
In the past five years, what most of us only recently thought of as ''nobody's business'' has become the big business of everybody's business. Perhaps you are one of the 30 million Americans who pay for what you think is an unlisted telephone number to protect your privacy. But when you order an item using an 800 number, your own number may become fair game for any retailer who subscribes to one of the booming corporate data-collection services. In turn, those services may be -- and some have been -- penetrated by identity thieves.
The computer's ability to collect an infinity of data about individuals -- tracking every movement and purchase, assembling facts and traits in a personal dossier, forgetting nothing -- was in place before 9/11. But among the unremarked casualties of that day was a value that Americans once treasured: personal privacy.
The first civil-liberty fire wall to fall was the one within government that separated the domestic security powers of the F.B.I. from the more intrusive foreign surveillance powers of the C.I.A. The 9/11 commission successfully mobilized public opinion to put dot-connection first and privacy protection last. But the second fire wall crumbled with far less public notice or approval: that was the separation between law enforcement recordkeeping and commercial market research. Almost overnight, the law's suspect list married the corporations' prospect list.
The hasty, troubling merger of these two increasingly powerful forces capable of encroaching on the personal freedom of American citizens is the subject of two new books.
Robert O'Harrow Jr.'s ''No Place to Hide'' might just do for privacy protection what Rachel Carson's ''Silent Spring'' did for environmental protection nearly a half-century ago. The author, a reporter for The Washington Post, does not write in anger. Sputtering outrage, which characterizes the writing of many of us in the anti-snooping minority, is not O'Harrow's style. His is the work of a careful, thorough, enterprising reporter, possibly the only one assigned to the privacy beat by a major American newspaper. He has interviewed many of the major, and largely unknown, players in the world of surveillance and dossier assembly, and provides extensive source notes in the back of his book. He not only reports their professions of patriotism and plausible arguments about the necessity of screening to security, but explains the profitability to modern business of ''consumer relationship management.''
''No Place to Hide'' -- its title taken from George W. Bush's post-9/11 warning to terrorists -- is all the more damning because of its fair-mindedness. O'Harrow notes that many consumers find it convenient to be in a marketing dossier that knows their personal preferences, habits, income, professional and sexual activity, entertainment and travel interests and foibles. These intimately profiled people are untroubled by the device placed in the car they rent that records their speed and location, the keystroke logger that reads the characters they type, the plastic hotel key that transmits the frequency and time of entries and exits or the hidden camera that takes their picture at a Super Bowl or tourist attraction. They fill out cards revealing personal data to get a warranty, unaware that the warranties are already provided by law. ''Even as people fret about corporate intrusiveness,'' O'Harrow writes about a searching survey of subscribers taken by Conde Nast Publications, ''they often willingly, even eagerly, part with intimate details about their lives.''
Such acquiescence ends -- for a while -- when snoopers get caught spilling their data to thieves or exposing the extent of their operations. The industry took some heat when a young New Hampshire woman was murdered by a stalker who bought her Social Security number and address from an online information service. But its lobbyists managed to extract the teeth from Senator Judd Gregg's proposed legislation, and the intercorporate trading of supposedly confidential Social Security numbers has mushroomed. When an article in The New York Times by John Markoff, followed by another in The Washington Post by O'Harrow, revealed the Pentagon's intensely invasive Total Information Awareness program headed by Vice Admiral John Poindexter of Iran-Contra infamy, a conservative scandalmonger took umbrage. (''Safire's column was like a blowtorch on dry tinder,'' O'Harrow writes in the book's only colorful simile.) The Poindexter program's slogan, ''Knowledge Is Power,'' struck many as Orwellian. Senators Ron Wyden and Russell D. Feingold were able to limit funding for the government-sponsored data mining, and Poindexter soon resigned. A Pentagon group later found that ''T.I.A. was a flawed effort to achieve worthwhile ends'' and called for ''clear rules and policy guidance, adopted through an open and credible political process.'' But O'Harrow reports in ''No Place to Hide'' that a former Poindexter colleague at T.I.A. ''said government interest in the program's research actually broadened after it was apparently killed by Congress.''
The author devotes chapters to the techniques of commercial data gatherers and sellers like Acxiom, Seisint and the British-owned LexisNexis, not household names themselves, but boasting computers stuffed with the names and pictures of each member of the nation's households as well as hundreds of millions of their credit cards. He quotes Ole Poulsen, chief technology officer of Seisint, on its digital identity system: ''We have created a unique identifier on everybody in the United States. Data that belongs together is already linked together.'' Soon after 9/11, having seen the system that was to become the public-private surveillance engine called Matrix (in computer naming, life follows film art), Michael Mullaney, a counterterrorism official at the Justice Department, told O'Harrow: ''I sat down and said, 'These guys have the computer that every American is afraid of.' ''
Of all the companies in the security-industrial complex, none is more dominant or acquisitive than ChoicePoint of Alpharetta, Ga. This data giant collects, stores, analyzes and sells literally billions of demographic, marketing and criminal records to police departments and government agencies that might otherwise be criticized (or de-funded) for building a national identity base to make American citizens prove they are who they say they are. With its employee-screening, shoplifter-blacklisting and credit-reporting arms, ChoicePoint is also, in the author's words, ''a National Nanny that for a fee could watch or assess the background of virtually anybody.''
From sales brochures that ChoicePoint distributed to its corporate and government customers -- as well as from interviews with its C.E.O., Derek V. Smith, the doyen of dossiers, who claims ''this incredible passion to make a safer world'' -- The Post's privacy reporter has assembled a coherent narrative that provides a profile of a profiler. As if to lend a news peg to the book, ChoicePoint has just thrust itself into the nation's consciousness as a conglomerate hoist by its own petard. The outfit that sells the ability to anticipate suspicious activity; that provides security to the nation's security services; that claims it protects people from identity theft -- has been easily penetrated by a gang that stole its dossiers on at least 145,000 people across the country.
ON top of that revelation, the company had to admit it first became suspicious last September that phony companies were downloading its supposedly confidential electronic records on individual citizens. Not only is the Federal Trade Commission inquiring into the company's compliance with consumer-information security laws, but the Securities and Exchange Commission is investigating prearranged sales of ChoicePoint stock by Smith and another top official that netted a profit of $17 million before the penetration was publicly disclosed and the stock price plunged.
''ChoicePoint Data Cache Became a Powder Keg'' was The Washington Post headline, with the subhead ''Identity Thief's Ability to Get Information Puts Heat on Firm.'' This was followed by the account a week later of another breach of faith at a competing data mine: ''ID Thieves Breach LexisNexis, Obtain Information on 32,000.'' Now that a flat rock has been flipped over, much more scurrying about will be observed. This will cause embarrassment to lobbyists for, and advisers to, the major players in the security-industrial complex. ''No Place to Hide'' names famous names, revealing associations with Howard Safir, former New York City police commissioner; Gen. Wesley Clark, former NATO commander; and former Senator Dale Bumpers of Arkansas. (If you hear, ''This is not about the money'' -- it's about the money.)
More of the press has been showing interest, especially since Congressional hearings have begun and data is being disseminated about the data collectors. A second book -- not as eye-opening as O'Harrow's original reporting but a short course in what little we know of international government surveillance -- is ''Chatter: Dispatches from the Secret World of Global Eavesdropping,'' by Patrick Radden Keefe. This third-year student at Yale Law School dares to make his first book an examination of what he calls the liberty-security matrix.
Chatter, he notes, is a once innocuous word meaning ''gossip . . . the babble of a child'' that in the world of electronic intelligence has gained the sinister sense of ''telltale metabolic rhythm: chatter; silence; attack.'' The flurry of ''sigint'' -- signals intelligence, picked up by the secret listening devices of our National Security Agency -- sometimes precedes a terrorist attack, and almost always precedes an elevation of our color-coded security alerts.
Keefe does what a brilliant, persevering law student with no inside sources or a prestigious press pass should do: he surveys much of what has been written about sigint and pores over the public hearing transcripts. He visits worried scientists and some former spooks who have written critical books, and poses questions to which he would like to get answers. He doesn't get them, but his account of unclimbable walls and unanswered calls invites further attempts from media bigfeet to do better. Keefe is a researcher adept at compiling intriguing bits and pieces dug out or leaked in the past; the most useful part of the book is the notes at the end about written, public sources that point to some breaks in the fog.
''Chatter'' focuses on government, not commercial, surveillance, and thereby misses the danger inherent in the sinister synergism of the two. Moreover, the book lacks a point of view: at 28, Keefe has formulated neither a feel for individual privacy nor a zeal for government security. It may be, as Roman solons said, Inter arma silent leges -- in wartime, the laws fall silent -- but the privacy-security debate needs to be both informed and joined. This is no time for agnostics.
For example, what to do about Echelon? That is supposedly an ultrasecret surveillance network, conducted by the United States and four other English-speaking nations, to overhear and oversee signals. ''We don't know whether Echelon exists,'' Keefe writes, ''and, if it does exist, how the shadowy network operates. It all remains an enigma.'' Though he cannot light a candle, he at least calls attention to, without cursing, the darkness.
Keefe's useful research primer on today's surveillance society, and especially O'Harrow's breakthrough reporting on the noxious nexus of government and commercial snooping, open the way for the creation of privacy beats for journalism's coming generation of search engineers. A small furor is growing about the abuse of security that leads to identity theft. We'll see how long the furor lasts before the commercial-public security combine again slams privacy against the wall of secrecy, but at least Poindexter's slogan is being made clear: knowledge is indeed power, and more than a little power in unknowable hands is a dangerous thing.
William Safire writes the On Language column for The Times Magazine.
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Friday, April 08, 2005
Filippo Monteforte/Agence France-Presse ? Getty Images
The vicar of Rome, Cardinal Camillo Ruini, pronounced a prayer before the coffin of Pope John Paul II during the funeral
A Time for Mourning, but Also for Study and Very Quiet Politics
By DANIEL J. WAKIN
ROME, April 8 - Pope John Paul II's funeral Mass on Friday began nine days of spiritual mourning, but it also opened a political chapter - the subtle campaigning before the gathering of cardinals in a conclave starting April 18 to elect a successor.
Each day of mourning is marked by a Mass, several of which will be celebrated by cardinals - whose voices will be listened to closely for any hints about what direction they are moving in. The first is on Saturday afternoon, to be celebrated by Cardinal Francesco Marchisano, a career Vatican official who is the archpriest of St. Peter's Basilica.
In the days before the conclave begins, it is very likely that the cardinals will begin to conduct quiet research on who they think would make the best leader of the church. Some may even, in the softest of Roman ways, lobby for the job, although any sign of eagerness could have a negative effect.
Others, particularly cardinals from countries far from Italy or those who do not travel much, will be using the time to get acquainted with one another. Members who speak the same language could very well caucus, suggested Cardinal Avery Dulles, a theologian who teaches at Fordham University in New York. Those who are not native to the same language will probably communicate in Italian, said Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, the archbishop of Westminster.
He said he "sometimes struggles with names," but he knew most of the cardinals from sitting on a number of Vatican congregations and taking part in frequent meetings with many of them. Cardinal Murphy-O'Connor also said that the cardinals were certainly "grateful to be part of history." Indeed, all eyes will be on them.
Almost all of the 117 cardinals who will place their ballots in a special vessel in the Sistine Chapel were in Rome on Friday. They are living in their national or regional seminaries, like the Pontifical North American College, religious order residences or hotels. Cardinal Edward M. Egan, archbishop of New York, is staying at the elegant Grand Hotel de la Minerve as a guest of the owner, a friend. It is his usual haunt in Rome.
Until the conclave starts a week from Monday, with a morning Mass and afternoon procession from the Hall of Benedictions in the Apostolic Palace to the Sistine Chapel, they have free rein of the city and the Vatican. When the conclave starts, they will be sequestered in the Vatican's Santa Marta residence, which John Paul had built to provide some comfort for cardinals in conclave.
Once in Santa Marta and engaged in the election, they can go outside, Vatican officials said, but must stay on Vatican grounds and take care not to come into contact with any outsiders, Archbishop Piero Marini, the master of papal ceremonies, told reporters during the week.
In previous conclaves, the cardinals stayed in temporary quarters in the Apostolic Palace, sleeping in divided rooms and sharing bathrooms.
For now, the cardinals have other ways to communicate apart from chance meetings or social encounters. They will continue to meet as a body every morning, as they have since the pope's death, to conduct church business. And each day, many will probably attend the Masses of mourning, in the period before the conclave called the Novemdiales.
Each Mass will be celebrated by a cardinal or archbishop, including Cardinal Bernard Law, formerly of Boston, whose appointment caused a stir among American Catholics because of his role in dealing with the priest sex abuse scandal.
The other cardinals celebrating the Masses are Camillo Ruini, the pope's vicar for Rome and one of the most influential Italian bishops; Jorge Arturo Medina Estévez, the former prefect in charge of liturgy; Eugênio de Araújo Sales, the former archbishop of Rio de Janeiro; and Nasrallah Pierre Sfeir of Lebanon, the patriarch of the Maronite Church. The latter two cardinals are older than 80, making them ineligible to vote.
Also celebrating Masses are Archbishop Leonardo Sandri, a high official in the office of the secretary of state, and Archbishop Piergiorgio Silvano Nesti, the secretary of the Vatican department in charge of religious orders.
The cardinals' homilies in those Masses could be rare opportunities to hear from them. They were fairly accessible to the news media in the week after the pope's death. But several cardinals said there was a general opposition to giving interviews next week. Italian newspapers reported that Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the dean of the cardinals, suggested they keep silent, to avoid speculation.
"It is a time for spiritual reflection and special prayer," said Cardinal Justin Rigali, the archbishop of Philadelphia.
The cardinals have another important appointment next week. John Paul, in his 1996 blueprint for handling papal transitions, said two churchmen must deliver to the cardinals "well-prepared meditations on the problems facing the church at the time and the need for careful discernment in choosing the new pope."
The Vatican announced that the first, the Rev. Raniero Cantalamessa, the preacher of the papal household, would deliver his talk on Thursday. Father Cantalamessa entered the public eye on March 25, Good Friday, when he spoke during a service in St. Peter's Basilica, when the pope was gravely ill, saying: "Come back soon, Holy Father. Easter isn't Easter without you."
The other will be given by an eminent theologian, Cardinal Thomas Spidlik, a Czech-born Jesuit, on the conclave's first day. Cardinal Spidlik, at 85, is too old to vote. He was elevated to cardinal two years ago.
The cardinals will also have scripture and other religious writings to reflect upon, but they may bring other reading material, too.
Cardinal Murphy-O'Connor said he would certainly be bringing "pious" books, but also some secular works. "It'll be a sort of Brontë," he said, "or Jane Austen."
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Saul Bellow waiting for the subway in 1975. He spent relatively little time in New York City, but wrote about it often
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
Master of the Universe
By IAN MCEWAN
London
WHEN a great writer dies - an unusual event, for this is a rare breed - we pay our respects by a visit to our bookshelves, library or bookshop; mourning and celebration merge honorably. It will be some time before we have the full measure of Saul Bellow's achievement, and there is no reason we should not start with a small thing, a phrase or sentence that has become part of our mental furniture, and a part of life's pleasures. After all, good readers, Nabokov advised his students, "should notice and fondle details."
Bellow lovers often evoke a certain dog, barking forlornly in Bucharest during the long night of the Soviet domination of Romania. It is overheard by an American visitor, Dean Corde, the typically dreamy Bellovian hero of "The Dean's December," who imagines these sounds as a protest against the narrowness of canine understanding, and a plea: "For God's sake, open the universe a little more!" We approve of that observation because we are, in a sense, that dog, and Saul Bellow, our master, heard us and obliged.
In fact, the very freedom that Henry James claimed for the novelist in his essay "The Art of Fiction" ("All life belongs to you") was generously embraced by Mr. Bellow; he set himself, and succeeding generations, free of the formal trappings of modernism, which by the mid-20th century had begun to seem a heavy constraint.
He had no time for Virginia Woolf's assertion that in the modern novel character is dead. Mr. Bellow's world is as densely populated as Dickens's, but its citizens are neither caricatures nor grotesques. They sit in memory like people you could convince yourself you have met: the hopeless racketeer Lustgarten ("partly subtle, partly ill") in "Mosby's Memoirs," who brings financial ruin to his family by importing a Cadillac into postwar France; the excitable low-lifer, Cantabile, waving a gun in "Humboldt's Gift" - in his agitation he suddenly needs to defecate, and forces his victim, Charlie Citrine ("a man of culture or intellectual attainments") into the stall with him. Citrine distracts himself with reflections on ape behavior while Cantabile "crouched there with his hardened dagger brows."
And most vivid of all, for me at least, Moses Herzog, Mr. Bellow's most achieved dreamer, the least practical of men in an America of vigorous, material pursuits. In "Herzog," Mr. Bellow brought to perfection the art of fictional digression. When the hero goes to visit his lover, the lovely Ramona, he waits on the bed while she goes off to change into what Martin Amis would call her "brothel wear."
In those moments Herzog reflects on the way the entire world presses in on him, and Mr. Bellow seems to set out a kind of manifesto, a ringing checklist of the challenges the novelist must confront, or the reality he must contain or describe. It also serves as a reader's guide to the raw material of Mr. Bellow's work. I came to know this passage by heart through re-reading, and borrowed it for the epigraph of a novel. It was a risk, because the pulse of this prose was likely to make my own sound puny.
"Well, for instance, what it means to be a man. In a city. In a century. In transition. In a mass. Transformed by science. Under organized power. Subject to tremendous controls. In a condition caused by mechanization. After the late failure of radical hopes. In a society that was no community and devalued the person. Owing to the multiplied power of numbers which made the self negligible. Which spent military billions against foreign enemies but would not pay for order at home. Which permitted savagery and barbarism in its own great cities. At the same time, the pressure of human millions who have discovered what concerted efforts and thoughts can do. As megatons of water shape organisms on the ocean floor. As tides polish stones. As winds hollow cliffs..."
Mr. Bellow's city, of course, was Chicago, as vital to him, and as beautifully, teemingly evoked, as Joyce's Dublin; the novels are not simply set in the 20th century, they are about that century - its awesome transformations, its savagery, its new machines, the great battles of its thought systems, the resounding failure of totalitarian systems, the mixed blessings of the American way. These elements are not dealt with in abstract, but sifted through the vagaries of character, of an individual trying to figure where he stands in relation to the mass of which he is a part. And always, the past is pressing in, memories of childhood, the crowded streets and tenements, shared rooms, overbearing and eccentric relatives and neighbors - the immigrant poor, attending to the call to American identity.
The American critic Lee Siegel wrote recently that every British writer with an intellectual or emotional connection to America wants to lay claim to Mr. Bellow, saying, "He is their Plymouth Rock, or maybe their Rhodesia." There is some truth to this.
What is it we find in him that we cannot find here, amongst our own? I think what we admire is the generous inclusiveness of the work - not since the 19th century has a writer been able to render a whole society, without condescension, or self-conscious social anthropology. Seamlessly, Mr. Bellow can move between the poor and their mean streets, and the power elites of university and government, the privileged dreamer with the "deep-sea thought." His work is the embodiment of an American vision of plurality. In Britain we no longer seem able to write across the crass and subtle distortions of class - or rather, we can't do it gracefully, without seeming to strain or without caricature. Mr. Bellow appears larger, therefore, than any British writer can hope to be.
Another reason: in a literary culture that has generally favored the whole scheme of a novel against the finely crafted sentence, we honor the musicality, the wit, the lovely beat of a good Bellovian line. An example, rightly favored by the critic James Wood, is the description of Behrens, the florist in the story "Something to Remember Me By": "Amid the flowers, he alone had no color - something like the price he paid for being human." Another example, of special significance to me because I paid tribute to Bellow by making a variation on it: in "Herzog," we read of Gersbach with his wooden leg, "bending and straightening gracefully like a gondolier."
It is not surprising then that some of the best celebrations of Mr. Bellow's writing have originated in Britain. Certain essays may already be on your shelves, and in this time of taking stock, it might be enlivening to reach for them. One of them is Martin Amis's magnificent advocacy of "The Adventures of Augie March" as the definitive Great American Novel in the introduction to the Everyman edition; another is James Wood's introduction to Penguin's "Collected Stories," in which joy is a central element in his response to the work.
Writers we admire and re-read are absorbed into the fine print of our consciousness, into the white noise of our thoughts, and in this sense, they can never die. Saul Bellow started publishing in the 1940's, and his work spreads across the century he helped to define. He also redefined the novel, broadened it, liberated it, made it warm with human sense and wit and grand purpose. Henry James once proposed an obvious but helpful truth: "the deepest quality of a work of art will always be the quality of the mind of the producer." We are saying farewell to a mind of unrivalled quality. He opened our universe a little more. We owe him everything.
Ian McEwan is the author, most recently, of "Saturday."
Culture of strife
Bush is exploiting the American Catholic Church's polarization to consolidate his conservative social agenda.
By Sidney Blumenthal
April 7, 2005 |
For the first time, an American president has lowered the American flag to half-staff for the death of a pope and, also for the first time, will attend a papal funeral. George W. Bush, a militant evangelical Protestant, deliberately inflects his political rhetoric with Catholic theological phrases, in particular the "culture of life," words he used to justify his unprecedented imposition into the case of Terri Schiavo, the brain-damaged woman whose feeding-tube removal was upheld 19 times by state and federal courts.
In the 2004 election Bush's campaign helped organize the attack on John Kerry's Roman Catholic authenticity by conservative bishops, who threatened to deny him communion. The White House coordinates both policy and personnel in line with right-wing Catholicism -- vetting not only issues like international population control, reproductive health and women's rights but also appointments. Only Catholics who meet the litmus tests receive jobs.
Since the accession of Pope John Paul II the conservative mobilization within the American Catholic Church has been a microcosmic version of the ascendancy of the conservative movement in America generally. The dual reactions against liberalism have paralleled each other and intersected. As the Vatican marshaled its authority on behalf of conservatives, the Republican right adopted those positions as its own in order to capture Catholic votes. Now the social agendas of conservative Catholics and Republicans are indistinguishable.
John Paul II admired and welcomed American democracy as a counter to communism, but he had no experience with democracy of any kind. He envisioned his mission as restoring the traditional authority of the church. America appeared to him as a Platonic ideal of moral debauchery, a liberal inferno -- Americans, he lectured U.S. bishops last year, were "hypnotized by materialism, teetering before a soulless vision of the world."
The pope firmly asserted his control over the American church in 1984 with his naming of arch-conservatives as archbishops of Boston and New York, Bernard Law and John O'Connor, who became his chief agents. At the same time, the Vatican refused to deal with the elected officers of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, who were largely imbued with the liberalizing spirit of Vatican II. While the pope articulated positions on poverty, war and capital punishment, conservatives elevated his stands on abortion, contraception, and later stem cell research and gay marriage above all others for the protection and propagation of the faith.
The late Cardinal Joseph Bernardin of Chicago was generally acknowledged as the leader of the bishops and represented the broad progressive tradition of the American church. He articulated the concept of Catholicism as a "seamless garment" in which abortion was only one among many important issues. In 1994, he announced a Common Ground Initiative subtitled "Church in a Time of Peril," calling on the church to overcome its polarization and suppression of discussion on the issues tearing it apart, from women's changing roles to the fact that most Catholics did not accept most church teachings on sexuality to the declining numbers of priests. Bernardin was a consensus builder and believed he had touched all bases with the Vatican before unveiling his project. But the day the initiative was announced, Cardinal Law, clearly acting with Vatican authority, denounced it: "The fundamental flaw in this document is its appeal for 'dialogue' as a path to 'common ground.'"
Bernardin died months later and was replaced by a protégé of Law's. In 2002, the Boston Globe began running the first of more than 250 stories on rampant pedophilic molestation by parish priests. Law resisted investigating the sex scandal and faced potential criminal prosecution for his coverups. The pope rescued him with a sinecure in the Vatican. In the aftermath of the scandal, conservatives under siege lashed out more ferociously. As they saw it, their failure to overturn the law on abortion demonstrated that they had not been hard-line enough. Thus the sex scandal set the stage for the right-wing Catholic offensive on behalf of Bush in the 2004 campaign.
With the pope's death, American Catholics yearn for discussion and change. According to a recent Gallup poll, 78 percent want the next pope to allow Catholics to use birth control, 63 percent say he should let priests marry, 59 percent believe he should have a less strict policy on stem cell research, and 55 percent think the next pope should allow women to become priests.
But Republicans are moving even more aggressively on their conservative social agenda. This week, Kansas banned gay marriage in a referendum. Four states have passed bills permitting pharmacists to refuse to fill prescriptions for contraceptives. The governor of Illinois has felt compelled to issue an emergency order to ensure that pharmacists fill all prescriptions, and California's Legislature is debating a law to require druggists to fill doctors' orders.
By centralizing and consolidating power the pope believed that he was strengthening the church. Now conservatives want a post-John Paul papacy to extend his stringency. Others want moderation, openness and a loosening of the authoritarian grip. After John Paul, Catholics in America do not hold the same principle of hope. No one monitors the church's crisis more closely than the Bush White House, and no one plots to exploit its division more ruthlessly. Religion is politics under red robes. So Bush travels to Rome.
About the writer
Sidney Blumenthal, a former assistant and senior advisor to President Clinton and the author of "The Clinton Wars," is writing a column for Salon and the Guardian of London.
The bully pope
John Paul II ruled the Catholic Church as an autocrat, and those who crossed him often suffered greatly for it.
By Colman McCarthy
April 8, 2005 | As the secretly elected leader of a male-run, land-rich, undemocratic, hierarchic, dogmatically unyielding organization headquartered in a second-rate European country, Pope John Paul II had few, if any, worries about accountability. He ruled, accordingly, as an autocrat. Organizationally, who could challenge him? Institutionally, he projected an image of a loving shepherd endlessly traveling to distant pastures to bless the flock.
Watch out, though, if he thought you were straying. Then John Paul would "crook" you by the neck and dispatch you to a stony field where black-sheep dissidents could do penance.
He found victims early in his papacy. Enthroned only two years, the pope decided in 1980 that the Rev. Robert Drinan, a 10-year member of Congress from Massachusetts' 4th District, should get out of politics. Drinan, a Jesuit priest in the Gene McCarthy-Philip Hart wing of the Democratic Party, championed human rights and programs for the poor, and opposed Pentagon militarism. But his voting record on abortion bills wasn't strictly pro-life.
The archbishop of Boston had no problem with Drinan's being in politics. His Jesuit superiors had no problem. Paul VI, the previous pope, had no problem. Nor did the voters. But John Paul did. Drinan, who vainly asked the pope to reconsider his decree, obeyed and left Congress.
In 1980 John Paul had other troublesome priests on his hit list. Archbishop Oscar Romero was one. A former conservative who moved to the liberation-theology left when he saw up close the poor killing the poor in El Salvador, Romero was under surveillance by the Vatican. Jonathan Kwitny, a Wall Street Journal investigative reporter and author of "Man of the Century: The Life and Times of Pope John Paul II," wrote that the pope "was disturbed about Romero." Cardinals in the Vatican plotted to reassign Romero elsewhere in Latin America. Days after Romero's March 24, 1980, murder, John Paul telegrammed the president of the Salvadoran Episcopal Conference to express grief at the "sacrilegious assassination." "Not one word of praise," wrote Kwitny, was offered "for the slain archbishop." Speaking to crowds in St. Peter's Square, the pope then expressed heartfelt grief for Catholic martyrs -- in Chad, not El Salvador. Kwitny wrote: "John Paul's treatment of Archbishop Romero, and his continued treatment of Romero's memory, are an injustice like no other he has done anyone."
Another victim of papal wrath was the Rev. William Rewak, a Jesuit who served for more than 20 years as president of two colleges. In September 1998, his order appointed him president of the Jesuit School of Theology in Berkeley, Calif. Neither they nor Rewak foresaw any objections from the Vatican, which had final hiring and firing power because the school offers pontifical degrees. But papal underlings uncovered some 20-year-old writings of Rewak's on married clergy and women's ordination that differed mildly from the pope's view. It was enough to quash the pending appointment, even after Rewak left a college presidency to take the job.
John Paul was a Catholic fundamentalist. Small wonder he is being hailed by Pat Robertson, Patrick Buchanan and George W. Bush. The same ruler who bullied Drinan, Romero and Rewak -- only three of many, many -- had no objections when prelates of his own stripe dabbled in politics. During last year's U.S. presidential campaign, for instance, Bishop Michael Sheridan of Colorado Springs, Colo., thundered to his 120,000-member diocese: "Anyone who professes the Catholic faith with his lips while at the same time supporting legislation or candidates that defy God's law makes a mockery of that faith and belies his identity as a Catholic." Voters who defy church teachings "jeopardize their salvation."
Not only could John Kerry, Ted Kennedy, Patrick Leahy and other Catholic pro-choice senators spend eternity in hell but voters might burn with them.
The sorriest scandal during John Paul's long stint was his refusal to transform Roman Catholicism into a peace church. It remains polluted by the just-war theory, devised by Augustine in the fifth century and advanced by Thomas Aquinas in the 13th. The pope opposed the two U.S. invasions of Iraq, but he never renounced the notion that war can be justified. French Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran said during the start of the second Iraq war that "the Holy See is not pacifist." The church has more than 1,500 canon laws. Not one applies to war-making.
With large numbers of American Catholic priests, nuns and lay people imprisoned for antiwar civil disobedience during the 27 years of his papacy, John Paul never once spoke out in their support. Nor did he visit any of them in prison during his seven trips to this country. Those Catholics who want membership in a peace church have a better chance with the Quakers, Mennonites or Church of the Brethren.
These old-line peace churches aren't much for dogmas, decrees, doctrines or other rubrics favored by John Paul. They favor loving their enemies, laying down their swords, sharing their wealth and doing good to those who harm them -- odd notions indeed, but ones that helped an upstart religion get footing 2,000 years back.
At best the chances are slim that the next pope, either spiritually or organizationally, will be able to undo the deep factionalism created by John Paul. Recent years have seen shelves sagging under the weight of books about the church's problems. A partial listing includes "Catholics in Crisis" by James Naughton, "The Dysfunctional Church" by Michael Crosby, "Toward a New Catholic Church" by James Carroll, "The New Anti-Catholicism" by Philip Jenkins, "Will Catholics Be Left Behind?" by Carl E. Olson, "Papal Sin" by Garry Wills, "Goodbye, Good Men" by Michael Rose, "Goodbye Father" by Richard Schoenherr, "Tomorrow's Catholics/Yesterday's Church" by Eugene Kennedy, "In Search of American Catholicism" by Jay Dolan, "A People Adrift: The Crisis of the Roman Catholic Church in America" by Peter Steinfels, "The Coming Catholic Church" by David Gibson and "Why Catholics Can't Sing" by Thomas Day.
The most prominent faction, at least at the moment, is the traditionalist one that has been summoned by the media to the airwaves and Op-Eds, there to hail the late pope as having been the fearless defender of all the rules that make The One True Church still true and still one. This faction, ever rankled at what Pope John XXIII wrought with the Second Vatican Council of the early 1960s -- every loony idea from altar girls to the handshake of peace at Mass -- saw in John Paul a no-nonsense leader. They cheered him for not yielding on the below-the-waist issues: artificial birth control, abortion, homosexuality, gay marriage. The traditionalists tend to be both theologically and politically conservative, with Antonin Scalia, Rick Santorum, Patrick Buchanan, William Bennett, Sean Hannity, Robert Novak, William F. Buckley, Phyllis Schlafly and Mel Gibson side by side in the pews.
The spiritual Catholics are those who see the papacy as irrelevant to their lives. When they pray, it isn't the prayer of asking, as though God, or Mary hailed by rote, dispensed favors, but the prayer of cooperation: Cooperate with the gifts you've been given and use them to become someone who is other-centered, not self-centered. If anyone speaks for them, it may be Leo Tolstoy in "The Kingdom of God Is Within You": "Christ could certainly not have established the Church. That is, the institution we now call by that name, for nothing resembling our present conception of the Church -- with its sacraments, the hierarchy, and especially its claim to infallibility -- is to be found in Christ's words or in the conception of the men of his time."
The pragmatic Catholics stay grounded in early church Christianity, when it was the works of mercy and rescue that kept the community together and when people practiced communism -- the pure communism of the commune. The lines from the Acts of Apostles speak to them: "All believers were together and had all things in common. And those who had possessions sold them and divided to each person according to need: Not one of them spoke of the property he possessed as his own."
These are the Catholic Worker Catholics, those who carry on the labors of Dorothy Day, who opened not homeless shelters but houses of hospitality. More than 100 of these houses can be found today, 25 years after Day's death, in both large cities and rural farming towns. Pragmatic Catholics remain loyal to the Christ described by Phillips Brooks in 1883: "In the best sense of the word, Jesus was a radical: His religion has so long been identified with conservatism that it is almost startling sometimes to remember that all the conservatives of his own times were against him, that it was the young, free, restless, sanguine, progressive part of the people who flocked to him."
Better than anyone, pragmatic Catholics understand the long-standing quip "Jesus came preaching the Gospel and ended up with the church."
John Paul, the traveling man, was helpless to keep American Catholics in line, however hard he tried. Who else did he have in mind in his railings against consumerism and hedonism? Had he stopped fuming about the rebellious Americans, he might have noticed that, with some millions attending Mass regularly in 19,000 parishes and giving more than $7 billion annually to the Catholic Church, the United States has the flock with the strongest faith in the developed world. David Gibson, a Protestant-born journalist who once worked for Vatican Radio, wrote accurately: American Catholics "are the most religiously observant Catholics in modern-day Christendom, attending church and supporting the pope to a degree that has no parallel in the industrialized world."
Someone might want to clue in the new pope.
About the writer
Colman McCarthy, a former Washington Post columnist, directs the Center for Teaching Peace in Washington. His most recent book is "I'd Rather Teach Peace."
Lefteris Pitarakis/Associated Press
Twelve pallbearers with white gloves, white ties and tails then carried the coffin on their shoulders back inside for burial, after holding the coffin to face the multitude for a prolonged moment, as the great bell of St. Peter's pealed, and waves of applause swept through the audience.
A Huge Throng Gives Waves of Applause to a Beloved Pope
By IAN FISHER
VATICAN CITY, April 8 - Pope John Paul II was buried in St. Peter's Basilica today after an outdoor funeral Mass witnessed by hundreds of thousands, the important and the ordinary alike, and watched by millions more on television.
"None of us can ever forget how, in the last Easter Sunday of his life, the holy father, marked by suffering, came once more to the window of the apostolic palace and one last time gave his blessing," Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who knew the pope for nearly three decades, said in his homily as he pointed up from St. Peter's Square to the window of the papal apartment.
"We can be sure that our beloved pope is standing today at the window of the Father's house, that he sees and blesses us," Cardinal Ratzinger added. "Yes, bless us, holy father."
The crowd, which filled St. Peter's Square and flowed down to the Tiber River, broke out into applause, in a breeze that billowed flags from around the world, caught the red hats of cardinals and flipped the pages of the book of the Gospel resting on John Paul's plain cypress coffin. Amid tight security and worry over a terror attack, helicopter rotors chopped through the sound of Latin hymns throughout the three-hour ceremony.
It was the biggest funeral for a pope in the 2,000 or so years of the office.
To the coffin's right were heads of state from more than 70 countries, an unprecedented collection of power from five continents for a papal funeral: In the second row, the first American president to attend a papal funeral, George W. Bush, sat with his wife, Laura. Prime Minister Tony Blair and Prince Charles of Britain, President Aleksander Kwasniewski of Poland, President Mohammad Khatami of Iran and President Moshe Katsav of Israel all attended, along with four kings and six queens and the United Nations secretary general, Kofi Annan.
There were also representatives from all the world's major religions.
Behind the coffin, in bright red robes, sat more than 100 cardinals - one of whom is almost certain to become pope in the coming weeks.
And on the streets, the massive pilgrimage that has swamped Rome since John Paul died last Saturday at age 84 continued in force around St. Peter's, though not in the same extraordinary numbers as during the four days his body was on display inside the basilica.
An estimated two million people filed past his corpse after it was placed on public view on Monday, and Italian officials estimated that three million or more people had made the pilgrimage to Rome to be present in some way as the little-known Polish cardinal who was elevated to pope in 1978 was finally laid to rest.
But today, with so many world leaders present and the potential for trouble high, the Italian authorities all but shut down central Rome, making it difficult to get to St. Peter's Square. Car and truck traffic was banned - as V.I.P. motorcades zipped into and then out of town - and schools and public offices were closed. Security helicopters and fighter jets flew around airspace closed to private planes.
Rather than march downtown, tens of thousands of people watched the funeral on nearly 30 huge TV displays around Rome. Italian officials said that in all, about one million people watched the service in public settings around the city. The Mass was also broadcast worldwide on television and radio.
But no amount of security or hardship could keep away from St. Peter's the most devoted, including perhaps several hundred thousand Poles who had driven to Italy, many forsaking sleep for several days and a place to stay. Red-and-white Polish flags, many topped with black ribbons of mourning, waved in huge numbers in the plaza.
"He broke Communism and he loved peace," said Tom Czuwara, 17, who had come from Warsaw, explaining why he and 50 schoolmates drove 30 hours to be at the funeral.
Kyrian Atuogo, 27, spent nearly a year's salary to come to Rome from Nigeria, and came to the funeral with a friend carrying a huge green-and-white Nigerian flag.
"He is like the president of the world," Mr. Atuogo, a civil servant, said of the pope. "He was so nice to us, so we decided to spend our money to give him our last respects."
Some carried huge banners reading in Italian: "Santo subito" - a plea to make John Paul a saint immediately.
It was, in all, a day of extraordinary spectacle and tradition, played out on the ancient streets around the Vatican, in piazzas around Rome and, above all, in St. Peter's Square, enfolded in the ellipse of Bernini's graceful colonnade, in the company of the obelisk dragged from Alexandria by the Emperor Caligula and a dome designed by Michelangelo.
The last major papal funeral was for Pope Paul VI in August 1978, and it attracted as many as 100,000 people, a number that the Vatican said had been the largest papal funeral ever. Ninety-five nations were represented then but only a handful of heads of state. (The October 1978 funeral of John Paul I, whose papacy lasted barely a month, followed the same protocol as the rituals for Paul and John Paul II, but because it had been such a brief papacy was on a far more modest scale.)
The funeral for John Paul II - who had himself traveled to 129 countries as pope - was of a different order, in size, in the guest list from many of the countries he had visited, in the outpouring of affection, even among those who differed with him on many issues.
"He followed doctrine too much," Francesca Tatoli, 20, a student, who nonetheless traveled enthusiastically from the southern Italian city of Bari to attend the funeral. She said she disagreed strongly with John Paul's condemnation of contraception, because she believes condoms help fight the spread of AIDS.
"At the same time, he was a good man," she added, "and that's why all these people are here."
In fact, the funeral itself - with its many guests who normally have much to argue about among themselves - stood as a distinctive testament to John Paul: that people around the world found things in him and his long and eventful pontificate to admire, and, perhaps especially in death, they were willing to overlook what they disagreed with.
Without modifying church doctrine on Jesus as the Christ, the only true mediator of salvation, John Paul reached out like no other pope to Jews and Muslims - an effort attested to today by the number and diversity of political and religious leaders who came to his funeral, including, for example, dignitaries from Israel and Saudi Arabia alike.
John Paul's views on abortion and the sanctity of human life resonated with President Bush's conservative politics, even if the pope's outspoken opposition to capital punishment and both American-led wars in Iraq did not. And his forceful stance on Iraq helped his standing among Muslims.
Many Italians, like liberal Catholics in the United States and elsewhere, were attracted by his warmth and concern about poverty and social justice, even if they ignored his teaching on issues like contraception, divorce or abortion.
The guest list today also reflected several problems for the church: the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, did not attend, nor did any top patriarchs of the Russian Orthodox Church, which has ongoing conflicts with the Roman church.
China did not sent a delegation because the Vatican has no official ties with the state-sponsored Catholic church there.
Although John Paul was the most traveled pope in history, he never got to fulfill his expressed wish to visit Russia and China.
In his homily today, Cardinal Ratzinger, 77, sketched out the life of John Paul, saying that the key to understanding him was the words Christ spoke to Peter after his resurrection: "Follow me." He spoke of John Paul's loss of his mother at a young age; his working in a chemical plant in Poland; his love as a young man of philosophy, theology and poetry; his pastoral work as a priest.
But the homily focused more tightly on what John Paul II had accomplished as pope in 26 years. And Cardinal Ratzinger, a conservative expected to play a major role in selecting the next pope, said it was the pope's charisma as well as his doctrinal clarity that gave preaching the Gospels "a new vitality, a new urgency."
"He roused us from a lethargic faith, from the sleep of the disciples of both yesterday and today," he said.
The cardinal also spoke of John Paul's illness and age, repeating what many in the Vatican had said as the pope's health, and in the end his voice, failed: that in his last years, his papacy stood as an important symbol of dignity in suffering.
"The pope suffered," he said, "and loved in communion with Christ, and that is why the message of his suffering and his silence proved so eloquent and so fruitful."
For all that was unprecedented about John Paul's funeral, the basics followed centuries of Vatican tradition. It was a Mass, if one that alternated among 10 languages, and so there were no other speakers or testimonials apart from Cardinal Ratzinger's homily.
This morning, as guests gathered for the funeral, John Paul's body was sprinkled with holy water and his face was covered with a white veil. He was sealed in a cypress coffin along with some Vatican coins, then carried out of the basilica by 12 pallbearers dressed in black.
The crowd erupted in applause when the coffin - marked with a cross and an M for the Virgin Mary - came out into the sun and was placed at the top of the stairs.
After the mass, the coffin was carried into the grottoes beneath the basilica, built over the spot where tradition holds is the tomb St. Peter, who brought Christianity to Rome. There, among the bodies of more than 70 of the 264 popes, the Vatican camerlengo, or chamberlain, Cardinal Eduardo Martinez-Somalo, who administers the business of the church until a new pope is chosen, presided over a ceremony in which the cypress coffin was placed inside a zinc coffin, which was then closed inside an oak casket.
In his last testament, made public on Thursday, John Paul requested that he be buried in the earth, not interred above ground. He was buried in the spot that had held the body of Pope John XXIII, which was moved to a sepulcher inside the basilica in 2001.
But before the coffin was taken to the grottoes, the pallbearers lifted it up off the basilica steps, then, carefully turning around, held it out to face the tens of thousands of pilgrims in the crowd for a prolonged moment. The bell of St. Peter's tolled. Waves of applause swept through the people in the crowd, many of them weeping.
"I knew the ceremony today would be majestic, but I didn't realize how moved I would be by the service itself," President Bush told reporters on Air Force One as he flew home. "Today's ceremony, I bet you, was a reaffirmation for millions."
Jason Horowitz and Elisabetta Povoledo contributed reporting for this article.
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James Hill for The New York Times
Cardinals of the church filed to their seats as great numbers in the crowd stood watching at full attention
Olivier Hoslet/European Pressphoto Agency
The funeral began this morning in St. Peter's Square before a somber throng of national and religious leaders and pilgrims from around the world.
On Not Mourning the Pope
Thoughts over the grave of John Paul II.
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Friday, April 8, 2005, at 9:10 AM PT
It seems only a year or so since every talk-show host and pundit in the country was telling us that Ronald Reagan had personally demolished communism in Eastern Europe. Now we come to the end of an entire week when the mass media behaved as if we all lived in a Catholic country and were united in mourning the Dear Leader, in which this historic achievement of freedom was credited to "the Polish Pope." That isn't necessarily a contradiction: The two men might possibly have shared the work. And it's perhaps thinkable, though not apparently mentionable, that the Polish workers and Warsaw's dissident intellectuals might have had some part in the victory. I can even remember visiting one or two of the latter, such as Jacek Kuron and Adam Michnik, who operated in a mainly secular and partly Jewish milieu, and who thought of Cardinal Glemp of Warsaw as one of their main enemies. But I'll have to postpone this reflection to another time, when we are less servile and less saturated with the notion of deliverance from on high.
What strikes one now is the similarity between the predicament of the Vatican and the predicament of the Kremlin about 45 years ago. Between the death of Stalin and the end of Khrushchev, the crucial question was: How much heresy and revisionism and autonomy can be permitted, without endangering the entire ideology of the regime? We know now how that issue was decided in the material world. Is the supposedly spiritual world immune from similar strains?
Without, it seems, quite noticing what they are saying, the partisans of the late pope have been praising him for his many apologies. He apologized to the Jewish people for the Vatican's glacial coldness during the Final Solution, and for historic filiations between the church and anti-Semitism. He apologized to the Eastern Orthodox Christians, and to the Muslims, for the appalling damage done to civilization by papal advocacy of the Crusades, and by forced conversion and massacre in the Balkans during the church's open alliance with fascism during World War II. He apologized to the world of science and reason by admitting that Galileo should not have been condemned by the Inquisition. These are not small climb-downs, and they do not apply just to the past. They are and were admissions that the Roman Catholic Church has been responsible for the retarding of human development on a colossal scale.
However, "be not afraid." The God-given right of the papacy to make and enforce absolute judgments is not at all at stake. Popes may have been wrong on everything, but they were right in general. By the time the church apologizes for saying that condoms are worse than AIDS, or admits that it was complicit at best in the mass murder in Rwanda, another few generations will have died out. This is almost exactly the sort of stuff with which Communists and their fellow travelers once had to content themselves. There had indeed been "spots on Stalin's sun," as one hack so prettily phrased it. But the leading role of the party was still a sure thing.
Sensing, perhaps, that so many admissions and confessions might sow doubt and unease, Pope John Paul threw himself into the sort of reinforcement that unifies and heartens the flock, or the base. The special sign of this was the mass production of saints and the removal of all obstacles to near-instant canonization and beatification. This is especially handy for beefing up the faith in outlying regions, where a local hero is considered good for morale. Alas for those who value consistency, some of those canonized were at odds with the larger purpose served by the famous apologies. Cardinal Stepinac of Croatia, for example, had been a clerical ally of the Nazi puppet regime of Ante Pavelic, and had known full well of the vile treatment of Orthodox Christians and Jews under this dispensation. Jose Maria Escriva de Balaguer, the creepy founder of Opus Dei, was celebrated for his closeness to Gen. Franco. To make saints of such riffraff is the most obvious form of opportunism.
Seeking to cloud a difficult situation with even more of the fragrance of obscurantism, the pope also resorted to an almost wholesale appropriation of the cult of the Virgin. He openly announced that the bullet that hit him was prevented from taking his life not because of the skill of his physicians, but because its trajectory had been guided by Our Lady. She let the assassin fire and hit, in other words, and only then took action. (This reminds me of Bertrand Russell's comment on the practice of placing covers on the baths in convents so as to avoid offending the sight of God. The creator can see through the roof of the convent, and down into the bathrooms in the basement, but is hopelessly baffled by a sheet of canvas.) Sites such as Fatima, which had been frowned upon by serious Catholics for some years, became objects of adoration and pilgrimage and hysteria. The veneration of the Virgin, and the endlessly repeated mantra of "Totus Tuus" ("Everything for Thee") seemed to many veteran believers to depose Jesus in favor of a Marian idolatry, and even to violate the commandment against graven images.
Finally, if the pope is to have so much credit for the liberation of Eastern Europe, he ought to accept his responsibility for the enslavement of the Middle East. He not only opposed the removal of Saddam Hussein in 2003, but the use of force to get him out of Kuwait in 1991. I have never read any deployment of Augustinian argument, in the latter case, that would not qualify it as a just war. Moreover, the pope made a visit to Damascus not long ago, and sat quietly outside the Grand Mosque while the Assad regime greeted him as one who understood that Muslims and Catholics had a common enemy?in the Jews who had killed Christ. (That he may already have been senescent at this point is not an answer: It is a problem, though, for those who believe that he was Christ's vicar on earth.)
Unbelievers are more merciful and understanding than believers, as well as more rational. We do not believe that the pope will face judgment or eternal punishment for the millions who will die needlessly from AIDS, or for his excusing and sheltering of those who committed the unpardonable sin of raping and torturing children, or for the countless people whose sex lives have been ruined by guilt and shame and who are taught to respect the body only when it is a lifeless cadaver like that of Terri Schiavo. For us, this day is only the interment of an elderly and querulous celibate, who came too late and who stayed too long, and whose primitive ideology did not permit him the true self-criticism that could have saved him, and others less innocent, from so many errors and crimes.
Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair and a regular contributor to Slate. His most recent book is Love, Poverty and War. He is also the author of A Long Short War: The Postponed Liberation of Iraq and of Blood, Class and Empire.
Wednesday, April 06, 2005
Pat Hemingway, 76, a son of Ernest Hemingway, spent much of his life in Africa, but now lives in Montana
April 3, 2005
OUTDOORS
Old Man and the River: A Hemingway at Home
By PETE BODO
Craig, Mont.
It is the new generation of guides that gets Pat Hemingway's goat - the articulate, hip, Starbucks cowboys and aspiring screenwriters whose voices sometimes carry across the Missouri River and the railroad tracks that go right by Hemingway's house in this enclave of matchbox-sized homes and trailers. This is a place that nobody would ever mistake for that more glitzy Hemingway family haunt, Ketchum, Idaho.
"Sound travels ," said Hemingway, whose dark eyes glitter merrily despite his 76 years. "And especially when there's a pretty girl to impress in the boat, how often have I heard a guide say, 'Oh, this isn't really me, I'm just doing this for now.' My God, can't these guys even stand up for their profession?"
Hemingway spent the better part of his life as a hunting guide and wildlife manager, in Tanzania and Kenya. It is impossible to wade through any hunting-related article on Africa without bumping into a reference to Hemingway's famous father, Ernest, as if he were a misplaced coffee table in a dark room. But the great writer made only two trips to Africa in his entire life.
For the record, the Hemingway who knew Africa intimately is Pat, the one who most diligently avoided the public eye. He now lives in Montana and said of his career, "I take pride in being the Hemingway son who got a job at 21, worked all his life and retired with a pension."
"Big Two-Hearted River," the unforgettable Ernest Hemingway fishing story, opens with Nick Adams, the protagonist, walking the tracks. Growing up, Pat Hemingway and his older half-brother, Jack, armed with .22-caliber rifles given to them by their father, hunted rabbits on the railway spur near their Sun Valley home. Among other adventures, Pat remembers accompanying Papa Hemingway and a driver to North Dakota for a pheasant hunt, father and son sitting on either warm fender of an ordinary sedan as it jounced along abandoned grain fields, flushing the colorful birds, left and right.
Papa's passion for the blood sports proved more heritable than his literary achievements, and that probably was a good thing. Pat never experienced his father's genius as a millstone; he had a greater interest in mathematics and painting than in literature. In fact, father and son commiserated about the truth behind the brutally frank phrase Lord Chesterfield reputedly uttered to his son: "You have no possibility of becoming anybody except through me."
Oddly enough, though, it was Pauline Hemingway, Pat's glamorous, social mother, who strove to impress upon Pat the more concrete pitfalls of growing up in the privileged set. "I'd studied art history, but I didn't want to work in a museum," Pat said. "My mother had warned me about turning out like some of the other kids - a perfect, effete, young gentleman."
Instead, shortly after Pauline died in 1951, Pat took his inheritance and lit out for Africa. Hemingway intended to be a rancher in Kenya, but the unrest caused by the Mau-Mau rebellion ruled that out. He made his way to Tanzania (then, Tanganyika) and rode the tracks to Arusha Station, where he wound up working for two years for Tanganyika Tourist Safaris before putting out his own shingle as a professional hunter (he named the company Hemfar).
After nearly a decade - and one, memorable hunting trip with his father - he accepted a position as a teacher and trainer at the United Nations-sponsored College of African Wildlife Management at Mweka, near Dar es Salaam, and worked there until he retired - with a pension. He returned to the United States in 1975.
Shorter than his father but just as stout, Pat Hemingway enjoys telling stories of Africa, punctuating them with bursts of wicked laughter. His urbanity - this is a man who is fascinated by Byzantine civilization, and who says things like, "There are two awful words, 'consumer' and 'fan;' God help me if I'm either" - seems a maternal legacy.
But it is all Papa Hemingway when he says, "The truth about African hunting is that the local guides and trackers are the ones with the real knowledge. Some professional hunters covertly had the trackers tap them on the left or right side to cue them on which tracks to follow."
Pat Hemingway is a founding member of the Society of Range Management. He also made a contribution to game management, employing his gift for mathematics to develop the line-transect system, a reliable, statistically based method for estimating animal populations in the wild. He also spends a fair amount of time handling Hemingway family affairs, which include overseeing a forthcoming Cambridge University Press volume of his father's complete correspondence. It is a daunting job, as Ernest was a prolific letter writer.
The father Pat knew was not the glamorous figure who epitomized a mid-20th century ideal of masculinity. It was the man whose best qualities, in his son's eyes, included an aversion to corporal punishment; the quiet, solid presence who, by Pat's estimate, spent 65 percent of his life piloting nothing more romantic than a desk. It was the man whose own eyes momentarily betrayed a bit of hurt when Pat returned from college one year and blithely declared, "English is a lousy language compared to French or Italian."
Pat took up fly-fishing in 1991, when he and his wife, Carol, built their second home here. It is a tasteful house that fits nicely in this unprepossessing haven for anglers and hunters. Although he finds something "finicky" and "overcommercialized" about fly-fishing these days, there is something about this home near Lewis and Clark's gates to the west.
Perhaps it is the tracks, running right by the door.
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Don Curry, watched by other surfers, made the finals of a big-wave contest for his efforts at Ghost Trees, a reef just off the 18th hole at Pebble Beach where waves can exceed 60 feet.
April 3, 2005
SURFING
For Daring, Ghost Trees Is Ultimate Thrill Ride
By CHRIS DIXON
On March 9, sleeping giants awoke off the shores of Carmel, Calif.
Pushed in by a massive late-season ocean storm, huge waves marched across a boulder-strewn reef nicknamed Ghost Trees, just off the 18th hole of the Pebble Beach golf course.
These frigid waves, some measuring greater than 60 feet, proved irresistible to a few surfers who knew that such an opportunity presented itself only a few times a year.
On Friday, two of those surfers learned that they had become finalists in the Billabong XXL Global Big Wave awards - the Oscars of the surfing world. The winner is paid $1,000 a foot for riding the year's biggest wave.
"In high school, we would just go out there on big days and be in total awe," said Don Curry, 45, one of the five finalists. "It was one of the only places where you could stand on the beach and literally feel the waves shaking the ground."
Standing on the breezy bluff above Ghost Trees, Curry, now a personal fitness trainer, pointed to the giant rock outcroppings that await surfers who crash. He recalled his spectacular ride in March.
"If you don't make the drop," he said, "you basically are dead. On that wave, I was just going, 'Survive, survive, survive,' then I looked up and knew I was going to get obliterated. All the sudden, I just came out of it."
If Curry's wave wins the competition - the winner will be announced April 22 - he and his surfing partner, Ed Guzman, could make more than $60,000.
The stocky Curry said he spent the past decade paddling into the monster waves at Mavericks, a notorious shark-infested spot about 100 miles to the north in Half Moon Bay. Then three winters ago, a crew from Santa Cruz, Calif., using personal watercraft, first towed into huge Ghost Trees waves.
At Ghost Trees, the waves move so fast that paddling to catch them is essentially impossible.
"I was jealous," Curry said, "and champing at the bit. I finally looked at my wife and said, 'If I don't get into this sport, I'm going to be the worst crank on the planet.' She said O.K. Now when she watches me, she's scared to death."
Ken Collins, a 37-year-old professional surfer from Santa Cruz, was one of the targets of Curry's jealousy, having been a Ghost Trees pioneer.
On March 9, as he surfed with Curry and his friends Tyler Smith and Noah Johnson, he said he was astonished at the power of the waves, which broke the leg of one surfer, Justin Allport, in four places and tore Smith's rotator cuff that day. Each injury required a harrowing rescue by fellow surfers.
Ghost Trees, Collins said, rivaled anything at Mavericks or Jaws, a crowded, dangerous tow-surfing spot he had ridden two days earlier on Maui's north coast in Hawaii.
"These were big waves," he said of Ghost Trees. "Rogue waves. Some of the biggest I've ever surfed. It could be one of the biggest waves in the world at this point."
Big or not, the future of surfing in the shadow of Pebble Beach's storied links and at Mavericks to the north is in question. In the late 1990's, as the use of personal watercraft began to proliferate in surfing, incidents between paddle and tow-in surfers at Mitchell's Cove in Santa Cruz and Mavericks raised the ire of paddle surfers.
Environmentalists also argued that the noisy machines, which at that time were largely powered by polluting two-stroke engines, harmed wildlife. Many argued that the machines should be banned from the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary, which stretches from Cambria, Calif., north to San Francisco.
Although two-seat and stand-up personal watercraft had been banned from the sanctuary, larger three-seat models were not. This is the loophole that tow-surfers use to this day.
But Dan Haifley, a Monterey Bay Sanctuary Advisory Council member, said that loophole was unlikely to remain as new regulations were adopted.
Haifley said that the Sanctuary Advisory Council recognized that Mavericks was a unique spot for surfing and that some exceptions were likely to be made for tow-surfing there. Ghost Trees, he said, was such a newly recognized spot that it was unlikely to be included so late in the rules-making process.
Surfers like Collins and Curry said that their new four-stroke personal watercraft were clean-burning and that tow surfers had learned to police themselves. They added that marine mammals and other wildlife were nowhere to be seen in huge waves.
Regardless of rule changes, they said, towing will most likely continue, even if it's with craft like inflatable motorboats or jet boats, whose usefulness in dangerous situations is less certain.
"You know what these rules would do? Make it more dangerous to tow surf," he said. "The reason I'm risking my life out here is for three letters, F-U-N. It's an adrenaline sport. And in any adrenaline sport, you're going to find a junkie."
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Tuesday, April 05, 2005
A red diamondback rattlesnake bares its fangs
Open Wide: Decoding the Secrets of Venom
By CARL ZIMMER
The inland taipan, a nine-foot-long Australian snake, is not the sort of creature most people would want to bother. Drop for drop, its venom is the deadliest in the world, 50 times as potent as cobra venom. Its fangs are so long they can poke through the snake's lower jaw. Its victims collapse in seconds and suffer a quick death.
Dr. Bryan Fry, a biologist from the University of Melbourne, will readily admit he is not like most people. He not only bothers inland taipans; he hunts them down in dense cane fields, pins them down and bags them. Later he grabs them by the head and squeezes venom from their fangs.
Besides inland taipans, Dr. Fry collects venom from death adders, rattlesnakes, king cobras, sea snakes and many others. He estimates that he handles 2,000 to 3,000 snakes a year.
"Working with some of these snakes is the biggest adrenaline rush you could ever do," he admitted. "I used to do extreme ski jumping and big wave surfing, but none of that can touch working with some of these animals."
Ultimately, this rush is not what drives Dr. Fry, who is 34. His goal is to decipher the evolution of snake venoms over the past 60 million years. Reconstructing their history will help lead to medical breakthroughs, Dr. Fry believes. For the past 35 years, scientists have been turning snake venoms into drugs. Just this February, Dr. Fry and his colleagues filed a patent for a molecule found in the venom of the inland taipan that may help treat congestive heart failure.
Understanding the evolution of snake venoms will speed up these discoveries immensely, Dr. Fry predicted. "You need a good road map to get your research going," he said.
Snakes produce venom in special glands on either side of their upper jaw. When they strike their prey, they squeeze the gland, causing the venom to spurt out. In some species, the venom simply pours into the wound. In other species, like cobras and inland taipans, the venom first flows into hollow fangs and then into the prey.
Once venom molecules enter a snake's prey, they become intimate assassins. Their intricate shapes allow them to lock onto particular receptors on the surface of cells or onto specific proteins floating in the bloodstream.
Some venom molecules can plug the channels that muscle cells use to receive signals from neurons to contract. Without the signals, the muscles go slack, leading to asphyxiation. Other venoms send the immune system into a tailspin, making it attack the prey's organs. Still others loosen blood vessel walls, leading to shock and bleeding. Rather than rely on one of these attacks, most venomous snakes produce a cocktail of molecules.
Dr. Fry says he has been fascinated by venomous snakes ever "since I could walk." By the time he started his dissertation research on the inland taipan in the late 1990's, he was already experienced at catching snakes and milking their venom. To find new toxins, he would weigh the molecules in the venom, and when he found molecules that were close in weight to known venoms, he would isolate them for a closer look.
As Dr. Fry discovered more venoms, he began to wonder how they had evolved. "It's been an area of great controversy," he said. Many researchers have argued that different lineages of venomous snakes, like rattlesnakes and cobras, evolved venom independently. They observed that the closest relatives of these venomous snakes were nonvenomous.
Dr. Fry discovered that they were wrong. "Most of the snakes that we think of as nonvenomous are actually venomous," he explained. Garter snakes and many other supposedly nonvenomous snakes actually produce tiny amounts of venom.
Dr. Fry is quick to point out that this does not mean that garter snakes are dangerous. "All they need to do is stun a frog or slow it down a bit, and it's enough to help them," he said.
These discoveries prompted Dr. Fry to carry out a large-scale study of the evolution of snake venom. His project would have been impossible a few years ago, because traditional methods for identifying new venoms are painfully slow. But the technology developed for the Human Genome Project has changed all that.
"Instead of spending a couple months and getting two or three protein sequences done, in a month I can get up to 2,000 sequences done," Dr. Fry said. "It's an amazing increase in efficiency."
"Fifteen years ago, this wouldn't even be thought of," said Alejandro Rooney, a molecular evolutionist at the National Center for Agricultural Utilization Research in Peoria, Ill., who has collaborated with Dr. Fry on some of his venom research.
Dr. Fry is able to identify all of the genes that are active in venom gland cells, and then read their DNA sequence. About half of the genes that are active in a venom-gland cell produce well-known "housekeeping" proteins that are essential to any animal cell. Most of the others are venoms.
After identifying new toxins, including many that represent entirely new types of venom, Dr. Fry said, "I think we've just scratched the surface."
Dr. Fry has constructed evolutionary trees of these venom genes, and his results indicate that venom actually evolved only once in snakes. It started out being produced at low levels, as illustrated today by garter snakes. Later some lineages evolved a more deadly bite.
"It's been the most important adaptation in the history of snakes," Dr. Fry argued. The snakes that evolved venom no longer had to rely solely on constriction or other ways of physically subduing their prey. "It's freed them up from having to be big-muscled and slow-moving and killing their prey using constriction," he said. "They can be light, agile, athletic, and they can occupy any niche from the bottom of the ocean to the top of the tallest tree."
Dr. Fry's research has also shed light on the origin of venom molecules. A number of researchers have suggested that venom toxins are modified saliva proteins. They point out that ordinary saliva proteins are able to start breaking down food in the mouth. Perhaps some tinkering was all that was necessary to turn them into lethal poisons.
As Dr. Fry reports in the March issue of Genome Research, the DNA of venom genes goes against this idea. He constructed evolutionary trees of 24 venom genes, searching through online databases for their closest relatives among nonvenom genes. In only two cases did he find that venom genes evolved from saliva genes. In almost all the other cases, venom genes evolved from ones that were active outside the venom gland - in the blood, for example, as well as the brain and liver.
The evidence indicates that the evolution of a typical venom gene may begin with the accidental duplication of a gene that is active in another organ. In a process known as gene recruitment, one of these copies then mutates in such a way that it begins producing proteins in the venom gland.
In some cases, these borrowed proteins turn out to be harmful when injected into a snake's prey. Natural selection then favors mutations that make these proteins more lethal.
"The snakes have harnessed these proteins, changed them and thrown them right back at us, which is a pretty elegantly evil way of doing it," Dr. Fry said.
Previous research on venom had offered hints that some toxins might have evolved this way, but nothing more. For example, Dr. Elazar Kochva, a zoologist at Tel Aviv University, and his colleagues had noted some similarities between the venom of burrowing asps and certain enzymes in mammals. "We alluded to it, but Bryan Fry said it loud and clear and with a lot of evidence," Dr. Kochva said.
The concept of gene recruitment is not new, Dr. Rooney pointed out. Scientists have found evidence that it has played a role in the evolution of other organs, including the eye. "With venom, it seems to have occurred on a much grander scale," Dr. Rooney said.
As new lineages of snakes evolved, their venom evolved as well. New genes were borrowed to produce new venoms, while existing venom genes duplicated many times, producing a huge diversity of molecules.
This high-speed evolution allows snake venom to adapt to particular sorts of prey. Green mambas and black mambas, for example, are closely related species, but the green mambas live in trees while the black mambas live on the ground. "Not surprisingly, the black mamba venom is more potent against rats than against birds," Dr. Fry said, "while the green mamba venom is more potent to the birds than against rats."
This rapid evolution has produced a wealth of complex molecules that researchers have barely begun to investigate. Evolutionary trees can serve as guides, speeding the search for new venoms and shedding light on how venoms work. "Just looking by chance is very difficult and not economical," Dr. Kochva said.
The venom molecules that Dr. Fry has isolated from the inland taipan is a case in point. He has established that they evolved from a family of proteins known as natriuretic peptides. In snakes, humans and other vertebrates, these peptides relax the muscles around the heart.
In the ancestors of the inland taipan, the genes for natriuretic peptides began producing these proteins in the venom glands. Over time, their muscle-relaxing ability increased. Now they can stop their prey's aorta from contracting at all.
"They drop the blood pressure, which will knock the prey out," Dr. Fry said. "That gives the slower, but more lethal toxins a chance to exert their effects." These slower toxins create swarms of clots in a prey's bloodstream, setting off a vast number of strokes. "It's a good one-two punch."
Dr. Fry and his colleagues report their study of these toxins in the Feb. 25 issue of Biochemical and Biophysical Research Communications.
They are investigating the heart-relaxing toxins for treatment of congestive heart failure. By making blood vessels around the heart relax, it may be possible to increase the flow of blood out of the heart.
Understanding the evolution of these venoms helps Dr. Fry and his colleagues figure out how they work. Because they have evolved from proteins that only act on the heart, they probably will not pose a risk to other parts of the body.
"If you want to use a venom for some kind of drug, you'd better look back and see where it came from," Dr. Kochva said.
Dr. Fry knows that few people are as fond of deadly snakes as he is. But he hopes that these sorts of discoveries help lead to the protection of the world's snakes.
"If you kill off the snakes, you could be killing the next wonder drug," he said.
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A stylish guest at Hiro, the nightclub in the basement of the Maritime Hotel
The Clubgoer's Guide to Looking the Look
By JOSH PATNER
Behind the Velvet Ropes
Getting dressed for a night out at a club means dressing for the dream.
New York is the mother ship of possibility, a city where dreams are expected to come true. You need only look at the fashion show that goes on after dark, when getting dressed for a night out at a club means dressing for the dream. After some rough years for the industry following 9/11, clubs once again fill the city: fancy cocktail bars, Latin spots, wacky club-kid parties, big-box dance palaces, lounges filled with stylish groovesters or gay men.
It is easy to be flummoxed when considering outfits that will pass a doorman's head-to-toe inspection, especially when dress codes are mainly unstated. But an after-dark tour of about half a dozen popular clubs proved that their house styles can be decoded with a little study and a discreet debriefing of the doorman.
FREDERICK'S is a chic basement lounge in the shadow of Bergdorf Goodman on 58th Street, and the preferred look is just plain rich. "We wanted to create a place going back a few years when people took pride and made an effort," Frederick Lesort said of the club, his namesake. For women that means tend to your hair, and dress as though you already have the money, not as though you're looking for it. For men, suits are an obvious bet.
But the key look for men - expensive blazer, dress shirt, elegant shoes and jeans - suggests David Beckham and his "far too rich and good-looking to worry about anything" style.
"Up here you get a lot of nicely dressed people," Irv, a doorman for Mr. Lesort, said. "But it's more about what you bring to the place. In this ZIP code you'll always find people with style. But a bunch of well-dressed people with a bad attitude is a bad party."
MARQUEE The style at this celebrity-friendly megaclub on 10th Avenue near 26th Street is pure high-roller Hollywood on the Hudson. You see suits (read rising mogul), sparkling jewelry (read rising starlet) and pimp-style hats, dark shades and 5 o'clock shadow (read just rising from bed).
But Marquee is no fashion free-for-all. Wass, a slickly dressed doorman, has rules. "For men, no warm-up suits, sweat pants or gold chains unless you are a chart-topping rap star," he said. "For women I like to call it the Rule of Three: never show more than two of your areas. You can tastefully show some midriff and some leg, but hide your chest."
Frankie Pino, a 22-year-old Rutgers student who made the cut, said: "I try not to be too trendy. Just mature and fashionable. Nothing too over the top." He looked swell in a vintage velvet blazer, white shirt, Diesel jeans and Converse sneakers. Of course, there can be something exhausting about a club full of people trying really hard to look as if they're not trying really hard.
Cain Most club looks, of course, offer the promise of sex. At Cain, a dance club in west Chelsea with a safari décor, notable outfits somehow manage, like the club itself, to reek of sex without actually smelling. Although men wear the expected variations on current themes - untucked dress shirts with baggy jeans or preppy blazers, a combo that suggests Tobey Maguire's bookish sex appeal - their hips-first bearing suggests lust more than luxe.
Wardrobe essentials for the look-alike ladies at Cain and other such places, including Aer - a meatpacking district club with pink lap-dance lighting and a glossy black floor - are minuscule jersey tops, painted-on pants, thong-revealing skirts, lots of sparkling jewelry, stiletto heels and tarty fur stoles. The women's obvious muses are Sarah Jessica Parker and Paris Hilton.
"I like to be very sexy," a young woman at Cain said, nodding down toward her overflowing black lace bustier. "I try to go braless. And tight, tight pants or a short, short skirt. What else do girls wear?"
HIRO The odd but rather fabulous task of dressing with a lot of style but absolutely no sex appeal falls - as it has since the late 1980's - to club kids. The "runway as cabaret" spirit lives on Sunday nights at Hiro, in the basement of the Maritime Hotel at 16th Street and Ninth Avenue. Crowds dressed in any combination of fishnets, bow ties, S-and-M leather, taffeta gowns, white briefs and platform shoes are certainly looking for attention, but not - to hear them tell it - of the sexual variety.
"I haven't had sex in two and half years," said Aimee Phillips, 22, the studio manager of the downtown label Heatherette, who was at a Sunday night party at Hiro. Ms. Phillips's look - a strapless patchwork concoction nicked from a rack at work, white stilettos with knee socks and a Kabukilike design of glittering stones on the face - evoked a Japanese superhero dressed for a hillbilly ball.
THE BOYS ROOM and OPALINE If club-kid style evokes chastity in sacrifice to a style god, dressing with the opposite intention - pick up or lose out - has long been the domain of gay clubgoers. To fetishizers of such macho icons as blue-jeans-wearing cowboys and leather-clad bikers, the gay scene's newest look comes as a surprise: small-town America.
There's an appeal to the 50's greaser's worn-out T-shirt, tight jeans and slicked-back hair now favored by gay Manhattanites. But who would expect guys at Opaline (Avenue A and Sixth Street) or the Boys Room (Avenue A and First Street), two bars, to look squeaky clean? Matthew Sandager, a photographer dressed in all-American Wrangler jeans and Red Wing work boots on a bar crawl, called the look "Abercrombie & Fitch meets 'Leave it to Beaver.' " You might think you'd seen Richie Cunningham cruising Fonzie.
A seemingly unending line of pilgrims, estimated at 18,000 an hour, came Tuesday to pray briefly at the bier of John Paul II, lower left.
Influx of Pilgrims to See Pope Puts Strains on the Italians
By DANIEL J. WAKIN and IAN FISHER
ROME, April 5 - The outpouring of mourning for Pope John Paul II blossomed into a vast religious pilgrimage on Tuesday, with hundreds of thousands flocking to St. Peter's Square by the end of the first full day of public grieving over the pope's body.
The influx, which has both amazed and alarmed Italian and Vatican officials, began straining the city's security and emergency services, with three days to go before the pope's funeral on Friday.
On Tuesday, a river of humanity rolled slowly through the medieval cobblestone streets around St. Peter's Basilica, with 600,000 paying their respects on Tuesday, according to government figures. On Monday 400,000 people were in St. Peter's Square, when the pope's body was carried briefly through the crowd.
"I have been able to measure the depth of emotion that this pope has stirred in people," said Rome's mayor, Walter Veltroni.
Joaquín Navarro-Valls, the pope's spokesman, said at a news conference on Tuesday that 88 of the 183 cardinals met in the Apostolic Palace; the number will increase as more arrive for the funeral. They had not yet been read the contents of the pope's will, possibly because it was still being translated from Polish into Italian, as newspapers here speculated.
No date for the start of the conclave to elect the pope - which must come 15 to 20 days after his death - was announced. The date is one of the most important of the cardinals' early decisions.
Only cardinals under 80 can vote for pope, and there are 117 in that category. Only three of those have taken part in a previous conclave, and many do not know each other. The daily meetings, called general congregations, have therefore become get-acquainted sessions and, many Vatican watchers say, the informal start of conversations about who among them will become the next pope.
"We say to each other, 'Who is that?' and, 'Who is that?' " Cardinal Theodore E. McCarrick of Washington said in an interview, pointing his finger. He later told reporters that one of the three with conclave experience, Cardinal Jaime Sin of Manila, might not be able to attend.
Inside the Vatican, the cardinals into whose hands the church has now been entrusted met for a second day to deal with matters according to a papal transition plan written by John Paul in 1996. They appeared to be operating at a deliberative pace.
Some details of the pope's burial, and the election of his successor, did emerge.
In a departure from ancient ritual, the announcement of a new pope - traditionally signaled by white smoke - would be driven home by the ringing of bells. In the past, a muddled color of smoke had caused confusion.
"This way even journalists will know," said Archbishop Piero Marini, the master of papal liturgical ceremonies.
Dr. Navarro-Valls confirmed that John Paul would be buried in the earth - which he said was the pope's wish - beneath where the tomb of John XXIII was once in the Vatican grottoes, where more than 70 of the 264 popes are buried. John's body was moved into the basilica in 2000 to accommodate the crowds of visitors after his beatification.
Given the adulation in St. Peter's Square, it was perhaps no surprise that the issue of sainthood for John Paul would come up. At a news conference on Tuesday, Cardinal Francis E. George of Chicago said he had no doubt such an effort would arise. He also took note of John Paul's dedication to prayer.
"If that's sanctity, and that's what it means, he was obviously a holy man," Cardinal George said.
The contents of the pope's will were not the only mystery. In 2003, in appointing a batch of cardinals, John Paul said one had been given the honor "in pectore," or "close to the heart" - meaning his name would be kept secret, often the practice for a cardinal in a country where Catholics face oppression.
Dr. Navarro-Valls was asked whether the pope had revealed the cardinal's identity, and he said, "We know nothing about this." The spokesman said that if the pope had given permission in his will for the name to be released, it would be.
Dr. Navarro-Valls confirmed that the pope had not been embalmed but "prepared" for viewing. He did not elaborate. Archbishop Marini said the pope would be buried with a small bag of commemorative medals as well as a lead tube containing a brief account of his life.
At the Vatican news conference, Archbishop Marini seemed eager to assure the world that the Catholic Church was in good hands during the period between popes.
"It is a strong, strong period of faith for the church," bolstered by the pope's plan and procedures spelled out by his predecessors, the archbishop said.
On Tuesday, the line of those waiting to pay homage to the pope wound through the streets near the Vatican, curved around the old city walls and through arches and filled the grand boulevard, Via Della Conciliazione, leading to St. Peter's Square. Security officials kept open gaps; when enough space opened up with the advance of the line, they allowed a portion to advance. People trotted forward happily. The mood was generally light, almost celebratory.
Nearby pizzerias had their counters swept clean and the souvenir shops selling papal postcards, calendars and rosaries reported their busiest day ever. Men from Poland in ceremonial military uniforms marched in groups. Umbrellas, including one with a reproduction of Sistine Chapel cherubs, dotted the crowd as protection against the sun.
"I've never seen anything like this in Rome before," said Bianca Maria Ricucci, 66, who lives near the Vatican. "It is his first miracle to have attracted all these people here."
While most of the people around St. Peter's appeared to be Italian and tourists in town anyway, a fair number of Poles were on hand, and groups from Spain, France and other European countries were already arriving. The Polish Foreign Ministry estimated that as many as two million Poles would travel to Rome.
"To most Catholics, it's like traveling to the funeral of your father," said John Mortensen, 30, an American theology teacher living in Austria who flew to Rome with his wife and two children on the first flight he could get. "You make the biggest effort to do it."
The Vatican itself was not counting how many people actually saw the body, but Italian officials said as many as 18,000 people churned through the basilica each hour. Some waited up to 10 hours to enter for a fleeting glimpse of the body.
"It might have been only 15 or 20 seconds with the pope," said Nicole Mayfield, 20, of Steubenville, Ohio, who is studying in Austria and traveled 14 hours by bus with 250 fellow students. "It was definitely worth the entire trip, just to be able to do that."
John Paul died Saturday night. The viewing will end Thursday night or early Friday.
The city has set aside several buildings, stadiums and fields - including the park that was once the ancient Circus Maximus - to accommodate pilgrims. The state railroad has added 43 trains each day to the St. Peter's station from around Italy.
Officials were also bracing for the funeral's aftermath, when huge numbers of people would try to go home. "If everyone tries to leave from St. Peter's station, it will be the end of the world," said Luigi Irdi, a spokesman for the railroad.
Reporting for this article was contributed by Laurie Goodstein and Jason Horowitz, and Elisabeth Rosenthal and Elisabetta Povoledo of The International Herald Tribune.
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Tuesday, April 05, 2005
Jonathan Safran Foer April 3, 2005 'Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close': Everything Is Included By WALTER KIRN EXTREMELY LOUD AND INCREDIBLY CLOSE By Jonathan Safran Foer. Illustrated. 326 pp. Houghton Mifflin Company. $24.95. Its title is ''Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close,'' but it will also be known, inevitably, perhaps primarily, and surely intentionally, as that new Sept. 11 novel whose last pages include a little flip-book of video stills arranged in reverse order to create a fleeting, blurry movie of an actual human being careering upward through the sky toward the top of the fiery doomed tower from which (softheaded moralists will note, to the bafflement of hardened aesthetes) the flesh-and-blood person on the film was - in undoctored, forward-rushing fact - jumping or falling to his death. Does a novel with such a high-concept visual kicker (and sensational book-club conversation starter) even need a title at all? Does it even need text? Besides containing a wealth of other photographs and attention-grabbing graphic elements, Jonathan Safran Foer's second novel (his first was ''Everything Is Illuminated'') positively teems with text - most, but not all, of which takes the form of prose. There's a distinction, of course, and Foer is just the sort of brainy, playful young writer, his critical faculties honed by the academy and his multimedia sensibilities shaped by the Internet and heaven knows what else, for whom this arcane distinction is second nature and a perfect excuse for fun and games. To Foer and his peers (who can't really be called experimental, since their signature high jinks, distortions and addenda first came to market many decades back and now represent a popular mode that's no more controversial than pre-ripped bluejeans), a novel is an object composed of pages tattooable with an infinite variety of nonsentence-like signs and signifiers. As Foer's new book demonstrates, some pages can even be left blank. Oskar Schell is the 9-year-old New Yorker whose motormouth drives Foer's story. He's a cross between J. D. Salinger's precocious, morbid, psychiatry-proof child philosophers and all those daunting city kids from children's books whose restless high spirits and social confidence get them into funny predicaments while their preoccupied but loving parents conduct their mysterious offstage grown-up business - business that they'll come home from just in time to save their offspring from real trouble. Which is pretty much how things go in Foer's novel. A conscious homage to the Gotham wise-child genre, the book features several beloved stock characters, down to the nice doorman and other service folk who help their upper-middle-class young wards get around the urban jungle safely. Foer chose this quaint template for an ingenious reason: it evokes, at a primal cultural level, the benevolent, innocent New York that was vaporized, even as a fantasy, when the towers were toppled. Not all the victims, Foer knows, were real, live people. Eloise and Stuart Little died, too. So did Oskar's father, Thomas, we learn, though not before he left a series of telephone messages that haunt his cerebral, hyperverbal son (who feels his grief as if ''in heavy boots'' and compulsively soothes himself by dreaming up whimsical inventions like an electronic sign for ambulances that flashes news of their occupants' conditions) and also impel his booklong quest to locate the lock that fits a key he finds while snooping in the murdered father's closet. This scavenger hunt recalls the plots of countless children's books as well as the puzzles that Oskar's wonderful father, a retail jeweler and armchair intellectual brimming with erudite fun facts, invented to educate his gifted boy about science, art and history. The last of the father's ''Reconnaissance Expeditions'' was ominously different, though. Oskar was steered to Central Park to dig for a nameless treasure, and given no clues. ''Unless,'' Oskar wonders, ''nothing was a clue.'' This paradoxical would-be koan is a clue for the reader: profundities ahead, possibly a lot of them, and all of them dropping with the same ''plop.'' And so it begins, and doesn't ever stop - a rain of truisms, aphorisms, nuggets of wisdom and deep thoughts tossed off by Oskar and the other characters as if they were trying to corner a market in ironic existentialist greeting cards. ''It's better to lose than never to have had.'' ''You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness.'' ''Everything that's born has to die, which means our lives are like skyscrapers. The smoke rises at different speeds, but they're all on fire, and we're all trapped.'' Kids, we're told, will say the darnedest things, but kids like Oskar - authorial surrogates with their darling whimsicalities and cute ''have you ever noticed?'' observations and disarming ''what if?'' descriptions of talking anuses, underground skyscrapers and a body paint that changes color with its wearers' moods - drive adults to the bar for a stiff drink. In theory, there's nothing wrong with a narrator like this, especially when he's a cunning combination of other narrators from the kind of books that his author wants to conjure with, but there are neurological limits to some readers' ability to tolerate a wee one who says whatever springs to mind at roughly the same speed it springs to mind and keeps circling to the clue of cluelessness and other riddling Oriental insights. ''I spread the map out on the dining room table, and I held down the corners with cans of V8. The dots from where I'd found things looked like the stars in the universe. I connected them, like an astrologer, and if you squinted your eyes like a Chinese person, it kind of looked like the word 'fragile.' Fragile. What was fragile? Was Central Park fragile? Was nature fragile? Were the things I found fragile? A thumbtack isn't fragile. Is a bent spoon fragile? I erased, and connected the dots in a different way, to make 'door.' Fragile? Door? Then I thought of porte, which is French for door, obviously. I erased and connected the dots to make 'porte.' I had the revelation that I could connect the dots to make 'cyborg,' and 'platypus,' and 'boobs,' and even 'Oskar,' if you were extremely Chinese. I could connect them to make almost anything I wanted, which meant I wasn't getting closer to anything.'' This hyperactive impersonation of Holden Caulfield, who dreamed of catching suicidal children as he trod the same sidewalks that Oskar does and tried to shake off a funk that also traced back to a family tragedy, connects with the photographs of the terrorist victim in a nifty, Rubik's cube sort of way that gives a chilly intellectual thrill but doesn't penetrate the bosom. This accords with what appears to be the novel's quite difficult grand ambition: to take on the most explosive subject available while showing no passion, giving no offense, adopting no point of view and venturing no sentiment more hazardous than that history is sad and brutal and wouldn't it be nicer if it weren't. The novel's two supporting stories - told in the form of long letters to posterity from Oskar's German immigrant grandparents, and pivoting on the firebombing of Dresden, because Foer loves to play his aces in pairs - link up with each other just as neatly. Both letters are styled as high-art prose poems. The grandmother's letter is one long pregnant pause chopped up into a thousand or so full stops (''I didn't eat lunch. Seconds passed. The afternoon left. The evening came. I didn't eat dinner. Years were passing through the spaces between moments'') that make it sound like a Buddhist affidavit. The grandfather's letter is dense, oblique and manic, its web of minutiae and oracularities Velcroed together with zillions of hook-shaped commas (''I walked with my head bowed, my broad-brimmed cap pushed low, when you hide your face from the world, you can't see the world''). THE grandparents' stories converge with Oskar's lock-quest - in the course of whose shaggy-dog meanderings he befriends a quirky elderly shut-in, who, like the grandfather, is obsessed with language, and scribbles away as if to save his life - and the result is a blizzard of epiphanies that buries New York and brings traffic to a halt. The reader (he'll have his hand raised at this point and be bursting with mock-profound answers of his own) learns that ''sometimes you have to do something bad to do something good'' and, furthermore, that this ''extremely complicated'' yet ''incredibly simple'' life we lead makes it ''always necessary'' to tell one's loved ones that one loves them before they die in some very bad explosion like 9/11 or Dresden or Hiroshima (which is also thrown in). And as for the various quests we set out on in hopes of finding the locks that fit our keys or the questions that fit our answers, or whatever, little Oskar wakes up and realizes what matters most is the searching, not the finding, as Jonathan Livingston Seagull might have told him had he visited the docks. A full-page photo of starry infinite space is provided as a meditation aid. Once they've cracked open this overstuffed fortune cookie and pondered the symmetries, allusions and truths on the tightly coiled strip of paper, it will dawn on some readers that today's neo-experimental novels are not necessarily any better suited to get inside, or around, today's realities than your average Hardy Boys mystery. The avant-garde tool kit, developed way back when to disassemble established attitudes and cut through rusty sentiments, has now become the best means, it seems, for restoring them and propping them up. No traditional story could put forward the tritenesses that Foer reshuffles, folds, cuts into strips, seals in seven separate envelopes and then, astonishingly, makes whole, causing the audience to ooh and aah over notions that used to make it groan. One final example. What if, Oskar muses at the conclusion of this triumph of human cuteness over human suffering, time could somehow run backward as in a movie and dead people could hop up and not be dead? This is when the novel's ideal reader is meant to riffle through the flip-book, while Oskar riffles through it in the story, and let himself, for one Peter Pan-ish moment, imagine how incredible that would be. Sept. 11 would never have happened! Even cooler and weirder, the pages of this novel, starting with the last, would all turn blank (except for the pages that are blank on purpose to teach us that some extremes of pain and loss can be signified only by the text of no text)! And then, perhaps, if we wished upon a star, the miraculous undeconstructions would continue until all the Holden Caulfields who aren't Holden were back inside J. D. Salinger's manual typewriter and ''we would have been safe,'' just as Oskar wouldn't have said. Walter Kirn, whose most recent novel is ''Up in the Air,'' is a regular contributor to the Book Review. Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company | Home | Privacy Policy | Search | Corrections | RSS | Help | Back to Top
Luther Head, left, missed a desperation 3-point shot near the end of the game. He led the Illini with 21 points.
SPORTS OF THE TIMES
Matchup Not Simply One of Talent vs. Team
By WILLIAM C. RHODEN
St. Louis
ROY WILLIAMS's wait is finally over.
After 10 years as Dean Smith's assistant at North Carolina and 15 seasons as the head coach at Kansas, Williams won his first national championship last night when the Tar Heels defeated top-ranked Illinois, 75-70.
Somewhere between Vermont's victory over Syracuse and North Carolina's narrow victory over Villanova, the N.C.A.A. men's basketball tournament became a referendum on team versus talent. Last night's game was simply a contest between two great teams with equal talent and equal desire.
This was a masterly game of strategy by two outstanding coaches. Illinois's Bruce Weber, the coach of the year, had to manage for most of the second half without his best frontline player, James Augustine, who fouled out.
Williams spent most of the evening substituting an array of players to offset Illinois's perimeter play. But Williams's most significant move came with 5 minutes 34 seconds to play, when he took Rashad McCants out of the game with his team clinging to a 65-63 lead and Illinois surging.
McCants, North Carolina's most high-profile player - and in some respects, its most controversial - would pretty much spend the rest of the game as a spectator, watching as his teammates held off a ferocious Illinois comeback.
"It wasn't tough at all," McCants said. "I was going to do whatever it took to help the team win."
McCants returned to the court with 2:32 to play, just before Luther Head's 3-pointer for Illinois tied the score at 70-70. McCants attempted a shot, missed and left the game for good with 1:05 left and the Tar Heels leading, 72-20.
Before the tipoff, Williams was asked how he responded to those who characterized the game as a showdown between Illinois, the team, and his North Carolina squad, the talent.
Williams, of course, was irked. In his 17th season as a head coach, he led North Carolina to its first national championship game in 12 years, yet the news media say he is here because of his players' talent.
"Illinois is extremely talented," Williams said. "Yet the perception is, if we win: 'Aw, well, gosh, you're supposed to win. If you can't win with that group, you ain't never going to win.' "
He won with McCants on the bench because North Carolina had enough talent to compensate. But the Tar Heels were enough of a team to pull together, McCants accepting being benched in favor of Jackie Manuel.
"We had to make the best defensive substitution," McCants said as he watched his teammates cut down the nets. "Jackie is one of our best defenders."
So, how did he feel after dreaming of this moment, working for this moment, then sitting on the bench at the end?
"I feel relief," McCants said. "I'm satisfied."
The story line was that North Carolina wins with raw talent, which is associated with street ball, while dutiful Illinois wins with the smart passing and teamwork associated with the "white" ideal.
The story line continued: Weber is the brilliant strategist who forces his players to abandon their playground ways and play team ball; Williams rolls the balls out and lets his players sink or swim on the strength of their talent.
This was the latest twist on what I call loose-ball mentality, which regards talent as a scourge. That athletic talent is not compatible with high intellect is an age-old myth perpetuated by the news media.
What was so silly about the perception that Illinois had the team and North Carolina had the talent was that these players are essentially cut from the same cloth. The Final Four teams, including Michigan State and Louisville, all recruit the same players. And those players all take part in the same summer circuits.
Dee Brown of Illinois and McCants are friends. Each is capable of playing the same wide-open playground style. They tone down that style in an organized setting, in which coaches impose themselves and call plays. But when the pressure is high, as it was last night, every player goes for what he knows.
"With our team, Coach Williams wants us to be basketball players and just play like we're playing on the playground," McCants said before last night's game.
If North Carolina had lost to Wisconsin in the Syracuse Regional final, I was ready to bury McCants. I had heard that he was moody, had an attitude problem and had a chip on his shoulder - negative qualities long associated with black athletes. That's when I decided to look a bit closer.
McCants made several key plays, including a blocked shot to seal the victory over Wisconsin. But last night, in the biggest game of his career, McCants scored 14 first-half points and that was it.
When a player chooses a storied program like North Carolina, he has to take the heat. McCants has not done a good job handling it. He was asked to respond to criticism by past players, who have said that for the previous two seasons, the Tar Heels did not play like a Carolina team.
"I didn't know they thought that," McCants said. "I really don't think they think that. But we were confused with the way that we wanted to win. We really didn't see the bigger picture as far as getting away from the individual accolades and just going out there playing for each other, playing for North Carolina."
Throughout an outstanding N.C.A.A. tournament, there has been a lot of sermonizing about team versus talent. It's not that simple. In reality, the formula is team plus talent equals championship.
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April 3, 2005
WORD FOR WORD
He Said (1912), She Said (2005)
By THOMAS VINCIGUERRA
IF ever a novel depicted college life in all its rah-rah, fraternity-laden, raccoon-coated glory, it was "Stover at Yale." Written by Owen Johnson (Yale class of 1901) and published in 1912, the book follows John Humperdink "Dink" Stover's journey up Old Eli's social ladder - mixing with the right crowd, makes a name as a football hero, rebelling just enough to emerge as the biggest man on campus. In 1920, F. Scott Fitzgerald - a Princeton man himself - called it the "textbook" for his generation.
But move over, Stover: Last month, a freshly minted Yale graduate published a college novel for a new generation. "Chloe Does Yale" (Hyperion), by Natalie Krinsky, relates the misadventures of one Chloe Carrington, the undergraduate author of a sex column in The Yale Daily News.
Excerpts from the books suggest that priorities at George W. Bush's alma mater have shifted a bit in 93 years.
As soon as Stover arrives as a freshman, a sophomore, Hugh Le Baron, offers advice:
"Don't ticket yourself for drinking."
"I won't."
"Or get known for gambling - oh, I'm not preaching a moral lesson, only, what you do, do quietly."
"I understand."
"And another thing: no fooling around with women; that isn't done here."
In contrast, by Page 10 of "Chloe Does Yale," our heroine is fooling around with a vengeance:
Without a word, he leans in and kisses me. It's good. He's a goooood kisser. For just a moment I lose myself in it. Even my mind is giving a little sigh.
But the moment of enjoyment is fleeting and my mind begins racing again. The good kiss is lost and now he's doing something very odd with his tongue.
?
Stover, the bumbling neophyte, has little fashion sense, as his friend Dopey McNab tells him:
"Fancy wearing a colored shirt - and such a color! You're gotten up for a boating party - not for a formal lunch. You're unspeakable, Dink, unspeakable! Look at me. I'm a delight - black and white, immaculate, impressive and absolutely correct."
Chloe isn't hung up on sartorial niceties:
Exotic Erotic is also the best party at Yale. Its motto: The less you wear, the lower the fare. Being only slightly more modest than cheap, I shelled out the requisite $3 at the door. I could have avoided the fee by showing the freshman manning the entrance my left breast. ...
Once inside, it occurs to me, as it does every year, that being nearly naked in front of 4,000 other people who are nearly naked is quite an interesting, if not jarring, experience.
?
Stover ignores Le Baron's advice about women and falls for the beautiful Jean Story. He courts her through the proper channels:
The maid stood at the open door. There was nothing to do but to toil up the penal steps, heart in mouth.
"Is Miss Story in?" he said in a lugubrious voice. "Will you present her with this card?"
Chloe prefers the direct approach:
We met. I was unimpressed. We hooked up.
?
Despite Stover's gentlemanly overtures, Jean resists him:
"Oh, please!" she said, with a sudden weakness, again trying to release her fingers.
"I can't help it," he said, blurting out the words. "Jean, you know as well as I what it is. I love you." ...
She remained motionless a moment, gathering her strength against the shock.
"Please let go my hand," she said quietly.
Believe it or not, Chloe resists, too:
Hooking up with college guys is like playing a sordid game of cat and mouse. They are after the mouse, and you need to hold them off as best you can. I am fending Maxwell off like a warrior princess. Hand moves to the bikini bottoms. Whop! I smack it away. He tries the left hand - tricky. Whop! I got that one, too.
At one point, Stover frets that he's wasted his time by sucking up to well-connected classmates:
"Good Lord!" he said, almost aloud, "in one whole year what have I done? I haven't made one single friend, known what one real man was doing or thinking, done anything I wanted to do, talked out what I wanted to talk, read what I wanted to read or had time to make the friends I wanted to make. I've been nothing but material - varsity material - society material."
When Chloe frets, it's about not getting connected at all:
"I need to start some kind of program for myself. You're all leaving me in relationship dust!" I exclaim.
"You're not dusty," Crystal says comfortingly. "Maybe just a little ... rusty?"
"Rusty? What do you mean?"
"Last major relationship: Josh. Last major hookup: hello, honey, six months ago - Maxwell. Wake up and smell the Gold Cup. Girl, you gotta get yourself some action."
?
"Stover at Yale" ends with Dink as a junior, achieving his ambition of membership in the secretive social club Skull and Bones, with the entire student body congratulating him:
He heard them cheering, then he saw hundreds of faces, wild-eyed, rushing past him; he stumbled and suddenly his eyes were blurred with tears, and he knew how much he cared, after the long months of rebellion, to be no longer an outsider, but back among his own with the stamp of approval on his record.
"Chloe Does Yale" also ends with its title character as a junior. But she, alas, fails to attain her true educational goal:
I couldn't wait for college because everyone told me I would meet the man I was going to marry. I was going to fall in love.
It's been three years, and I'm still waiting.
Thomas Vinciguerra is an editor at The Week magazine.
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Howard Stern is moving to Sirius Satellite Radio next year
Satellite Radio Takes Off, Altering the Airwaves
By LORNE MANLY
Just a blink after the newly emergent titans of radio - Clear Channel Communications, Infinity Broadcasting and the like - were being accused of scrubbing diversity from radio and drowning listeners in wall-to-wall commercials, the new medium of satellite radio is fast emerging as an alternative. And broadcasters are fighting back.
The announcement on Friday by XM Satellite Radio - the bigger of the two satellite radio companies - that it added more than 540,000 subscribers from January through March pushed the industry's customer total past five million after fewer than three and a half years of operation. Analysts call that remarkable growth for companies charging more than $100 annually for a product that has been free for 80 years.
Total subscribers at XM and its competitor, Sirius Satellite Radio, will probably surpass eight million by the end of year, making satellite radio one of the fastest-growing technologies ever - faster, for example, than cellphones.
To keep that growth soaring, XM and Sirius are furiously signing up carmakers to offer satellite radio as a factory-installed option and are paying tens of millions of dollars for exclusive programming. On Sunday, XM began offering every locally broadcast regular-season and playoff Major League Baseball game to a national audience, having acquired the rights in a deal that could be worth up to $650 million over 11 years. And Howard Stern is getting $500 million over five years to leave Infinity and join Sirius next January. Each company offers 120 or more channels of music, news, sports and talk.
Though satellite radio is still an unprofitable blip in the radio universe, it is pushing commercial radio to change its sound. Broadcasters are cutting commercials, adding hundreds of songs to once-rigid playlists, introducing new formats and beefing up their Internet offerings. A long-awaited move to digital radio could give existing stations as many as five signals each, with which they could introduce their own subscription services - but with a local flavor that satellite is hard pressed to match.
"At the end of the day, people want to hear what's going on in their local market," said Joel Hollander, chairman and chief executive of Infinity Broadcasting, owned by Viacom and the country's second-largest broadcaster behind Clear Channel. "People are emotionally involved with local radio."
That emotional connection - to music, personalities, information - has always translated into strong feelings about radio. Twenty-seven years ago, in "Radio, Radio," the singer Elvis Costello ranted about the medium's programming choices, singing that "the radio is in the hands of such a lot of fools, tryin' to anesthetize the way that you feel."
But such criticism pales beside the complaining unleashed by Washington's deregulation of radio, beginning in 1996. The loosening of ownership restrictions set off a frenzy of acquisitions, transforming what was essentially a mom-and-pop business into an industry dominated by a handful of giant broadcasters.
To satisfy Wall Street, station owners cut costs by combining station operations in a given market and pumping up the number of advertisements per hour; meanwhile, programming formats became narrower and more uniform. All these moves nearly doubled the industry's revenue in five years, but they also gave satellite radio its opening.
"In many cases, radio almost killed the golden goose by getting it to lay too many eggs," said Sean Butson, an analyst with Legg Mason. "If you're going to have a third of an hour of commercials, you're going to turn a lot of people off, and they're going to look for an alternative." (Legg Mason owns stock in XM.)
Founded in the early 1990's, XM and Sirius endured tough financial times while waiting for the Federal Communications Commission to divide up the satellite bandwidth and while preparing to launch their satellites. XM finally began offering its subscription service in late 2001, Sirius in mid-2002.
Car owners - the companies' prime targets - have clamored for the service once they have been introduced to it.
Joseph O'Neal of Royal Palm Beach, Fla., is a self-proclaimed Elvishead who laments that his local stations do not play enough of the King. So Mr. O'Neal, a 44-year-old drywall contractor, is a zealous convert to Sirius, the home of Elvis Radio.
Mr. O'Neal installed the service in his truck in January. Between Elvis, blues and Sirius's six country music channels, he said, "I haven't listened to regular radio since -