milkriverarchive

REV: Rising/Falling Stars

2006-01-01T17:44:00.000-06:00

Maybe the Stars Have Gotten Small After All
By SHARON WAXMAN, LOS ANGELES, The New York Times, January 1, 2006

IT was months before the cameras were set to roll on one of 20th Century Fox's most ambitious projects for 2005, a $140 million historic epic about the Crusades by the director Ridley Scott. And still there was no one to play the leading role of Balian.

Mr. Scott had at first envisioned Russell Crowe, the scowling, muscled star of his "Gladiator" hit, to play the role of a blacksmith and reluctant Crusader in the Holy Land. But Mr. Crowe had other projects on his slate, and would not alter them to fit the director's timetable.

It took four more months of searching by casting agents and Mr. Scott to settle on Orlando Bloom, the long-haired, doe-eyed young British actor who was high on Hollywood's list of hot new stars in the making. Mr. Bloom, who had won a fan base of teenage girls with his performance in the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy, and who was fresh off the set of another historical epic, Warner Brothers' "Troy," was the favored choice of Fox executives.

But as it turned out, "Troy" did not catch fire with the audience (not even the teenage girls), or with critics. And Mr. Bloom's next major outing, in Mr. Scott's "Kingdom of Heaven," was a bust, taking in just $211 million in ticket sales around the world, hardly enough to justify its production and marketing costs.

Next came the lead in Cameron Crowe's comic romance, "Elizabethtown," which pancaked at the box office when Paramount released it in the fall, and exposed Mr. Bloom to a withering verdict by movie critics. Just a month later, moreover, the 28-year-old actor was sued by his former management company, the Firm, for breach of contract and failure to pay management fees, over the defection of his manager to another firm.

By the end of 2005, what just a year earlier had looked like the start of an upward climb toward Hollywood stardom began instead to read like a cautionary tale about the difficulty of minting movie superstars from the ranks of a 20-something generation.

Stardom came easier to the young only a decade or two ago. At 23, Tom Cruise grasped it with the release of "Top Gun" in 1986, and flaunted it two years later by turning a vehicle as slight as "Cocktail" into a major hit. Julia Roberts was a superstar at 22, after the success of "Pretty Woman" in 1990, and Leonardo DiCaprio was just 23 when "Titanic" turned him into an international screen presence in 1997.

All quickly rose into Hollywood's top salary tier - the ranks of the $20 million actor, or thereabouts - and achieved bankable status with nervous executives who were willing to make a costly film because these actors were in it.

That kind of glitter has remained out of reach for Mr. Bloom's generation, notwithstanding a new crop of talent in the likes of Jake Gyllenhaal, 25, who was featured in this past season's "Jarhead" and "Brokeback Mountain," or Heath Ledger, who co-starred in "Brokeback" and headlined in the just-released "Casanova."

YET none of them have proven their box-office clout with anything close to the certainty of their recent predecessors. And the calculus of the $20 million Hollywood equation has eluded them, as they have so far proved incapable of drawing the kinds of audiences that can justify the rising costs of producing and marketing movies. (One exception may be Daniel Radcliffe, the 16-year-old who recently signed on to star in the fifth "Harry Potter" film for a reported $14.4 million, but he has yet to test his drawing power outside that franchise.)

"The comfort level of hiring a star isn't what it used to be," said Jim Gianopulos, Fox's co-chairman. "I think people have recognized that there's a folly in allowing yourself to fall prey to the expectation that talent will always recover its value in the kinds of numbers we're playing with."

If new stars are born more rarely, it is partly because American audiences have been turning their backs on star-driven pictures. Of last year's top dozen box-office events, only three - "Hitch," with Will Smith; "Mr. & Mrs. Smith," with Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie; and "Wedding Crashers," with Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson - relied more on celebrities than computer wizardry to achieve their success. And several expensive movies with proven stars fell flat, among them "Bewitched" with Nicole Kidman and Will Ferrell, and "Cinderella Man" with Russell Crowe.

"There's a shrinking number of dramatic stars who can guarantee an opening-weekend audience," said Ron Meyer, president of Universal Studios and a former agent for A-list talent including Mr. Cruise and Tom Hanks. "They must be in the right vehicle at the right time."

So, what is the state of Hollywood stardom? Mr. Bloom's recent career experiences show that it is more difficult to achieve than it once was.

Agents and managers and a publicist for Mr. Bloom declined to discuss for the record his recent choices and the growing wariness toward stars on the part of audiences and film executives.

Mr. Bloom wrote in an e-mail message that he was focused on his craft, rather than on achieving stardom. (He declined to be interviewed further). "I am proud of my two films that came out this year, 'Kingdom of Heaven' and 'Elizabethtown,' " he wrote. "I learned so much from both Ridley Scott and Cameron Crowe, and view both experiences as the opportunities of a lifetime."

Still, court documents and interviews with colleagues provide a telling glimpse of a young actor in an era that has a new, more austere take on Hollywood stardom.

Born in Canterbury, England, in 1977, Mr. Bloom came to show business with an unconventional background. His father, Harry Bloom, was a famed political activist who fought for civil rights in South Africa and died when Orlando was 4. The boy was brought up, along with his older sister, by his mother, Sonia, and a family friend, Colin Stone. But when Orlando was a young teenager, his mother revealed that Mr. Stone was actually his biological father.

Suffering from dyslexia as a student, Mr. Bloom was drawn to the arts and poetry in school in the English county of Kent. At 16 he moved to London and joined the National Youth Theater, where he had a scholarship to train in a drama academy. He won a few television roles and had a small role in a 1997 movie about Oscar Wilde titled "Wilde."

Mr. Bloom went on to attend the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, where his first big break occurred during a student performance one night in 1998. The director Peter Jackson happened to be in the audience, and he came backstage to ask Mr. Bloom to audition for a set of movies he was preparing based on the J. R. R. Tolkien trilogy, "Lord of the Rings."

The fledgling actor's career quickly took hold as he gathered the accoutrements of Hollywood's star-making machinery. He was signed by International Creative Management in London, where he worked with Fiona McLoughlin, and in Beverly Hills, with Chris Andrews, both agents for young actors.

He made his Hollywood debut at 24 as the dashing Elvish archer Legolas Greenleaf in "The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring," in December 2001. Mr. Bloom became an instant teenage idol - in 2002 he was chosen one of Teen People's "25 Hottest Stars Under 25" - and his following grew through the two Tolkien sequels.

In time-honored fashion, Mr. Bloom's entourage grew as well. He hired a manager, Aleen Keshishian, whose management company, the Firm, had just acquired the apparatus and ambitions of the faltering Hollywood powerbroker Michael Ovitz. He also hired a publicist, Robin Baum, from the high-profile company PMK/HBH.

Led by its chairman, Jeff Kwatinetz, the Firm had eyes for creating big stars and was busy building up the careers of performers like Jennifer Lopez, Ice Cube and Cameron Diaz. Mr. Kwatinetz saw Mr. Bloom as a prime candidate to grow into a $20 million player, especially when Disney's "Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl," in which Mr. Bloom played a supporting role with Johnny Depp, became a surprise hit.

When the role of Paris in "Troy" came along, Mr. Kwatinetz clashed with Ms. Keshishian. He felt that the role presented too weak an image for an actor aspiring to the position of virile leading man. Ms. Keshishian felt differently. Mr. Bloom was slowly building a career, she believed, and a prominent part in a major international epic was a smart move.

Ms. Keshishian prevailed. But the dynamics of the star game were already changing. One star vehicle after another was coming up short at the box office - "Troy" with Brad Pitt," "The Terminal" with Tom Hanks, "The Manchurian Candidate" with Denzel Washington, "The Stepford Wives" with Nicole Kidman - and Hollywood was beginning to edge away from its commitment to high-cost talent.

This shift seemed at first to work in Mr. Bloom's favor. When Russell Crowe, a $20 million actor, bowed out of "Kingdom of Heaven," Mr. Bloom was briefly perceived as a bargain: an actor with a huge fan base among teenage girls, and one who would take a cut in his fee in exchange for the opportunity to have a leading role and work with Mr. Scott. He was paid just $2 million.

But when it opened in May, "Kingdom of Heaven" had disastrous ticket sales of just $47 million in the United States. While it did considerably better abroad, the film seemed to prove that Mr. Bloom was not ready to deliver a mass audience, at least not outside the framework of his earlier fantasy films.

The downward slide continued in another failed test of Mr. Bloom's drawing power, this time in a romantic comedy. Cameron Crowe, the acclaimed writer-director of "Jerry Maguire" and "Almost Famous," had run into casting troubles with "Elizabethtown," about a young, successful sneaker designer who undergoes an identity crisis when his father dies. Mr. Crowe originally cast the 25-year-old television star Ashton Kutcher in the lead. But as the director said in a recent interview, he "didn't feel the movie coming together" during two months of work on location in Kentucky. The two parted ways, and Mr. Crowe looked for a replacement.

He thought of Mr. Bloom, whom he had met three years before when Mr. Crowe wrote and directed a commercial for the Gap in which Mr. Bloom and Kate Beckinsale were chased down the street by fans.

"I needed the same thing from both those actors," said Mr. Crowe, referring to Mr. Kutcher and Mr. Bloom, explaining why he chose a dramatic actor for a comic role. "It was an interior, whimsical thing. It was Bud Cort in 'Harold and Maude.' Ultimately Orlando got me closer."

The studio resisted. Sherry Lansing, then chairwoman of Paramount, wanted Owen Wilson. But Cameron Crowe got his choice, and Mr. Bloom was paid $3 million, which his representatives described as another finnancial compromise made for the chance to work with the director.

Cost, it turned out, was the least of the problems with "Elizabethtown." The film was made for about $70 million, but has taken in just $50 million in ticket sales, making it a calamity for the filmmaker, the studio and, most of all, the star, who was perceived by more than a few critics as having gotten in over his head. (In The New York Times, A. O. Scott wrote, "Mr. Bloom distinguishes himself, in this performance as in most of his others, by his steadfast reluctance to explore his range as an actor.")

"You can't blame the actor," Mr. Crowe now says of the movie's failure. "It's not math. It's like catching lightning in a bottle."

And he said that he still believed in the possibility of Mr. Bloom's success: "Stars arrive on their own timetable."

That may be true; just a few years ago Mr. Ledger was written off after the double disasters of "The Four Feathers" and "A Knight's Tale." But that timetable is often of Hollywood's own making, as the inner machinery of the entertainment industry - the agents, managers, lawyers, publicists and movie executives - continually seek the stuff of which stardom is made, and on which their livelihoods depend.

As for Mr. Bloom, he is in the Caribbean, trying to recover his footing with roles in back-to-back sequels to "Pirates of the Caribbean," alongside Mr. Depp. At least in this case, Mr. Bloom has seen his salary rise nicely; he is being paid $11.9 million for the pair of movies.

But Hollywood is most likely already on the march, hunting for its next new naif. The other day Mr. Cameron Crowe heard from a screenwriter friend whose new script calls for a leading man of 25. "He called me and said, 'I'd love to pick your brain,' " Mr. Crowe recalled. "And I said, 'You better get an ax and start working the hard road, my friend. You've got a long journey ahead.' "

ENV: Losing Pikas

2005-12-31T18:06:00.000-06:00

American pika seen headed toward extinction

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- Human activity and climate change may be pushing the tiny American pika toward extinction in the mountains of western North America, according to research published Thursday.

The small rabbit-like mammals live in rock-strewn slopes but are gradually being pushed to higher elevations and are running out of places to live, archeologist Donald Grayson reports in the current issue of the Journal of Biogeography.

"Human influences have combined with factors such as climate change operating over longer time scales to produce the diminished distribution of pikas in the Great Basin today," Grayson said.

Seven of 25 historically described populations of pikas in the Great Basin -- the area between the Sierra Nevada and Rocky Mountains -- appear to have become extinct by the end of the 20th century, Grayson said.

Among the intrusions that appear to imperil the pikas are roads built close to their habitat and pressure from grazing livestock, Grayson said.

He examined 57 archeological sites dating as far back as 40,000 years, as well as unpublished studies by other researchers, finding that the tiny mammals have been pushed higher over the years.

"The Great Basin pika is totally isolated on separated mountain ranges and there is no way one of these populations can get to another," Grayson said in a statement. "They don't have much up-slope habitat left."

Pikas, which are very sensitive to high temperatures, are considered to be one of the best early warning systems for detecting global warming in the western United States, the journal reported.

ENV: King Kong and Island Evolution

2005-12-30T22:28:00.000-06:00

Fictional King Kong mirrors odd island facts

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa (Reuters) -- King Kong may be a far-fetched creation of Hollywood but scientists say the big ape has some basis in biological fact: animals on islands often evolve into gigantic versions of their mainland kin.

"There is a whole body of research on islands which suggests gigantism occurs on them but of course nothing on the scale of King Kong," said Sue Lieberman, an evolutionary biologist and director of the global species program for WWF International.

"There is evidence that this happens because of isolation and a lack of competition ... the further an island is from the mainland the more potential there is for the evolution of new species," she told Reuters by telephone from Rome.

"King Kong," which is reigning at the North American box office this holiday season, is a remake of the 1930s classic about a giant gorilla found on an uncharted island. (Full story)

Besides falling for the female lead, director Peter Jackson's ape battles predatory dinosaurs on an island that is also inhabited by titanic bats and bugs.

Evolutionary extravagance
Jackson's monsters may be a stretch, but it is a fiction which mirrors some strange facts about island life.

"Islands are havens and breeding grounds for the unique and anomalous. They are natural laboratories of extravagant evolutionary experimentation," writes David Quammen in his book 'The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinction'.

There are many examples of what biologists term "gigantism" on islands.

These include the Komodo dragons, the world's largest lizards which can be 10 feet long or more and weigh up to 500 pounds.

Found on a few small Indonesian islands, the Komodo -- a recorded man-eater -- is in many ways as chilling as anything from Jackson's fertile imagination.

Some of these quirks of evolution have occurred in a matter of decades -- an astonishing speed.

On remote Gough Island in the South Atlantic, "monster mice" are eating albatross chicks alive, threatening rare bird species on the world's most important seabird colony.

The house mice -- believed to have made their way to Gough decades ago on sealing and whaling ships -- have evolved to about three times their normal size.

Their remarkable growth seems to have been given a boost by a vast reservoir of fresh meat and protein in the form of the endangered Tristan albatross chicks on which they are feeding.

Madagascar
The huge Indian Ocean island of Madagascar -- the setting of another 2005 Hollywood blockbuster -- has also given rise to plenty of natural oddities.

These included massive elephant birds that stood over 9 feet 10 inches in height and lemurs that weighed 176 pounds and more.

Madagascar broke away from East Africa more than 100 million years ago, leaving it to evolve a rich ecosystem with 10,000 plant species, 316 reptiles and 109 bird species -- many of which are found nowhere else.

Moving in the opposite direction, island species have also displayed a marked tendency to shrink in size -- a process known as "dwarfism" -- though "Mini-Kong" would probably be a flop as a sequel.

This has been observed in island-dwelling hippos, elephant and deer, many of which have mutated into much smaller versions of their continental cousins.

Extinction
Seemingly the last of his kind, King Kong also reflects another phenomenon of islands -- their disturbingly high rate of extinction, especially when humans land on them.

Many island species have evolved in a predator-free environment -- producing things like flightlessness in birds -- which makes them easy prey for meat-eating intruders.

Such was the fate of Madagascar's elephant birds as well as the famed dodo of Mauritius.

According to the World Conservation Union, close to 800 species have become extinct since 1500, when accurate historical and scientific records began.

While the vast majority of extinctions since that time have occurred on islands, over the past 20 years continental extinctions have become as common.

Scientists say this is partly because continental habitats are being diced up by human activities -- a process that is creating what some biologists term "virtual islands."

King Kong's real-life relatives are marooned on one of these "islands" on East Africa's Virunga mountain range, home to the last of the world's roughly 700 mountain gorillas.

Conservationists say poaching, logging and disease will soon wipe out the last of the world's great apes unless new strategies are devised to save humankind's closest relatives.

From the Democratic Republic of Congo and Nigeria in Africa to the islands of Borneo and Sumatra in Asia, scientists fear populations of gorillas, chimpanzees and orangutans could disappear within a generation without urgent action.

REV: The Best Old DVD Releases of 2005

2005-12-29T21:12:00.000-06:00

Hailing the DVD Distributors: The Best Vault Raiders of 2005
By DAVE KEHR, The New York Times, December 30, 2005

There were 53,737 different DVD's available in the North American market as of Dec. 14, not counting imports and pornographic films, according to the Digital Entertainment Group, a trade association. That's a lot of titles - far more than a mere human could possibly keep up with (though I sometimes think most of them are piled in my kitchen).

By now, DVD's have become much more than a delivery system for recent Hollywood hits. There are vast numbers of how-to titles; countless videos intended to make your offspring smarter (while getting them hooked on franchised cartoon characters); rafts of music and sports videos; and vast, uncharted realms of old television shows and prematurely canceled new ones.

Together, these almost certainly account for a far greater share of the DVD market than movies. But movies are what the medium does best. Because DVD's demand better source material than did the relatively low-fi media of VHS tape and laser disc, movies are now coming out in versions far superior to anything that's been seen since their original theatrical releases; in a few cases, like the digitally realigned Technicolor restorations from Warner Brothers and other producers ("The Wizard of Oz," "The Band Wagon"), the films actually look better in some respects than they did when they were first made.

The range of available films has grown tremendously, too. Where the major studios once contented themselves with reissues of Oscar winners and a handful of chestnuts, the more enterprising now dig into their libraries for movies that haven't been seen in decades. Independent labels are bringing in not just established art-house classics but also obscure titles drawn from the secret history of Italian horror films, Cantonese martial-arts movies, German crime thrillers and Bollywood musicals. And the avant-garde is making inroads, though compilations devoted to individual artists like Stan Brakhage and George Kuchar as well as anthologies like Bruce Posner's amazing "Unseen Cinema - Early American Avant-Garde Film," a groundbreaking seven-disc set that attempts nothing less than a redefinition of the field.

It is, in short, an exciting, exhausting and expensive time to be a movie lover. Rather than offer a list of the 10 or 20 "best" DVD releases of 2005 - how do you compare a sleekly engineered release of a recent Hollywood blockbuster with an obscure Filipino action film wrenched from a moldering negative? - it seemed more useful to look at what individual distributors achieved in the last year. Many of these companies have developed distinct personalities, as easily recognizable - if not more so - than some of the filmmakers they distribute.

The Titans
At the top of the heap stand the twin titans of Warner Home Video and the Criterion Collection, companies with radically different missions but equally strong commitments to quality. Warner, of course, has the Warner Brothers film library to draw on, a collection that now includes, thanks to Ted Turner, a good part of MGM, the totality of RKO and a large number of independent productions. But if Warner has Bogart, Criterion has Bergman - Ingmar, that is, along with the rest of the European classics that were the core of the old Janus Films theatrical library.

For 2005, Warner's headline release was the three-disc "King Kong" set, a superb packaging of the 1933 classic (transferred from a vintage print discovered in Britain, with all the naughty bits that were cut for the American theatrical reissue still startlingly intact) along with the curious, self-parodying sequel "Son of Kong" and the quasi-remake of 1949, "Mighty Joe Young." These are all titles familiar from years of television exposure, yet the Warner's set made them look burstingly new - particularly "Joe Young," which seems to have been taken directly from the camera negative. It's a sign of Warner's attention to detail that the fire sequence in "Joe Young," in which the big ape rescues a bunch of kids from a flaming orphanage, has been transferred with its original red tinting, a dramatic effect that much enhances the scene's impact. (Similarly, the tropical sequence in "The Sea Hawk," included in Warner's "Errol Flynn Signature Collection," has been restored to its original sepia tone.) All this, plus commentaries from the legendary stop motion animator Ray Harryhausen and the contemporary special effects wizard Ken Ralston, a documentary on the film's producer and co-director Merian C. Cooper directed by the film scholar Kevin Brownlow and even the original Max Steiner overture combine to create the definitive version of a key film that continues to live in the global subconscious.

Warner also deserves high marks for the second volume of its "Film Noir Classic Collection," a five-title boxed set that found a way to valorize lesser-known films like Robert Wise's "Born to Kill" (1947), Max Nosseck's "Dillinger" (1945, with commentary by John Milius) and Richard Fleischer's "Narrow Margin" (1952, with commentary by William Friedkin). It is one thing to reissue "The Wizard of Oz" in an excellent new edition, as Warner also did this year, but something quite different to take on neglected films and return them to the public eye. This is not just preserving our film heritage, but actively expanding it.

"The Harold Lloyd Comedy Collection," which ended up at the Time-Warner subsidiary New Line Home Entertainment rather than the parent company, would be my pick for the best boxed set of the year - a seven-disc collection that, though eccentrically arranged, brought together a generous selection of Lloyd's silent classics, including "Safety Last" (1923) and "The Kid Brother" (1927), with three hours of bonus material that included a selection of Lloyd's 3-D photographs.

Probably my favorite DVD package this year was Criterion's "Boudu Saved From Drowning," which combined the latest French restoration of Jean Renoir's paean to paganism - embodied by the world's most repulsively lovable tramp, played by Michel Simon - with a wealth of inventive extras, including an interactive map of Paris that allowed viewers to follow Boudu's peristaltic path through the city (he is swallowed by the Seine on one side of the city and expelled by it on the other). And then there were "The Tales of Hoffmann" (1951) directed by Michael Powell; Akira Kurosawa's "Ran" (1985); Robert Bresson's indispensible "Pickpocket" (1959, on a disc that also included Babette Mangolte's fascinating documentary, "The Models of 'Pickpocket' "); "Ugetsu" (1953); "Le Samourai" (1967) by Jean-Pierre Melville; "The Flowers of St. Francis" (1950) by Roberto Rossellini; Michelangelo Antonioni's sublime "L'Eclisse" (1962); and Jules Dassin's 1950 "Night and the City" (1950). All this, and boxed sets for John Cassavetes (eight discs), Andrej Wajda's "war trilogy" and four overlooked Japanese swordplay films packaged as "Rebel Samurai." All wonderful stuff, and it never seems to stop coming.

Other Studio Treasures
The sleeping giant that is 20th Century Fox Home Video bestirred itself this year with the introduction of its "Fox Film Noir" series, 12 films so far (with more on the way in March) drawn from the studio vaults and presented in absolutely first-class transfers. The black-and-white of Otto Preminger's brilliant "Whirlpool" fairly pops from the screen, as does the color and CinemaScope of Sam Fuller's "House of Bamboo," a movie available for generations only in pan and scan television prints with badly faded color. Fox's "Studio Classics" series still seems to be lazily relying on Oscar-sanctioned but now nearly unwatchable titles like "The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit" and "Song of Bernadette," but things are picking up with livelier items like Robert Aldrich's "Hush ... Hush Sweet Charlotte" and Stanley Donen's "Two for the Road." Now, if only Fox could be convinced to examine its silent and pre-code holdings, a tremendous resource that includes some crucial titles by John Ford, F. W. Murnau, Howard Hawks, Frank Borzage, Allan Dwan and other canonical figures of the American cinema.

As the owner of the pre-1948 Paramount titles, as well as an almost completely unexplored library of its own, Universal Studios Home Entertainment has tremendous potential, though so far the company seems reluctant to go beyond its celebrated horror films. "The Bela Lugosi Collection" was a nice try, cramming no less than five Lugosi titles (including Edgar G. Ulmer's 1934 masterpiece, "The Black Cat") onto a single, double-sided disc, and their budget release of Preston Sturges's ultimate screwball comedy, "The Palm Beach Story," was probably the biggest bargain of the year (list price: $12.99). But while the company continues its quixotic quest to issue all of its Abbott and Costello and Ma and Pa Kettle programmers on DVD, it leases out classics like Ernst Lubitsch's "Trouble in Paradise" and Don Siegel's "The Killers" to Criterion, leaving its own studio heritage in the hands of others.

Paramount, having sold off its best titles to Universal in the early days of television, doesn't have much of a library remaining, though it has shown some resourcefulness in the last year, reviving little gems like Lewis Milestone's 1946 "The Strange Love of Martha Ivers," George Cukor's 1960 "Heller in Pink Tights" (the real first gay cowboy movie) and Blake Edwards's eternally reviled but quite interesting "Darling Lili" (1970). But it's Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, the current owner of the Columbia, United Artists and the later MGM library, that has been the consistent underperformer. With all the excellent material under its control, the company seems content to colorize its Three Stooges shorts and let it go at that, though some interesting discs, including a terrific drive-in double bill of Ray Milland's "Panic in Year Zero" and "The Last Man on Earth" by Ubaldo B. Ragona, have slipped out through MGM Home Video (current owners of the American International library). MGM is now a Sony subsidiary that, one hopes, will continue to be permitted to follow its own path.

Disney, of course, has long been the one company with a passionate commitment to its past, perhaps because its past is still producing gigantic licensing revenue. This year brought gorgeous digital restorations of "Bambi" (1942) and "Cinderella" (1950), tricked up with phony stereo soundtracks and (I suspect) colors brightened for television consumption, but still excellent editions with copious extras. The continuing "Disney Treasures" series, curated by Leonard Maltin, has just yielded a fine collection of "Disney Rarities" (including some of the silent "Alice in Cartoonland" films that began Disney's career), and there is bound to be much more to come from Disney's well-maintained vaults.

The Indies
And then, for the wild world of the indies - those publishers unaffiliated with major studios who have to make their own discoveries. Kino on Video continues to dominate the independent field, with a steady stream of surprises like Fritz Lang's ultra-rare "The House by the River" and the "Slapstick Symposium" series produced with France's Lobster Films. The two volumes in "The Charley Chase Collection" assembles some crucial early work by the comedy genius Leo McCarey ("The Awful Truth"), including the most formally perfect two-reeler I know, the 1926 "Mighty Like a Moose." And Kino's first venture with the Museum of Modern Art has resulted in "Edison: The Invention of the Movies," a four-disc set produced for video by Bret Wood and containing some 140 short films from the earliest years of the medium.

New Yorker Films - like Kino, the video spinoff of a long-established New York theatrical distributor - has radically upgraded its DVD output in recent months. "The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach," by Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, brings the rigorous work of these pioneering minimalist-materialists to the medium for the first time, in an edition that pays full respect to Mr. Straub's austere intentions. Milestone, a kitchen-table company that specializes in silent features and exotic travelogs, brought out two overlooked behemoths of the British silent cinema, E. A. Dupont's extravagant, Expressionistic melodrama "Piccadilly" (1929) and Maurice Elvy's working-class drama "Hindle Wakes" (1927), both startling discoveries that would otherwise have remained unknown in this country.

NoShame Video, an Italian-American company operating out of California, has carved out a niche for itself with its dual-pronged program of art-house revivals (including Bernardo Bertolucci's "Partner" and the anthology film "Boccaccio 70") and grind-house oddities (including Umberto Lenzi's genuinely disturbing "Almost Human"). Mondo Macabro, a British-based outfit, continues to amaze and astound with its pop discoveries from around the world, including "For Your Height Only," a secret agent spoof from the Philippines starring the two-and-a-half-foot-tall performer Weng Weng.

On a (much) more dignified note, First Run Features has been concentrating on documentaries and political films, bringing together the influential and entertaining first-person work of the documentarian Ross McElwee for a distinguished boxed set, and releasing selected titles from the East German studio DEFA, now owned by the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. "The DEFA Sci-Fi Collection" brings together three cold-war fantasies of space travel and Communist domination of the known universe, blending outrageous camp and Marxist ideology.

Tartan, another British company, has found its niche with its "Asia Extreme" series, which has introduced the work of the formally brilliant South Korean filmmaker Park Chanwook to American audiences ("Old Boy," "Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance," the forthcoming "Lady Vengeance") as well as several horror and suspense films from the busy Asian market, like Kim Jee-woon's subtle and insinuating "A Tale of Two Sisters."

One could go on, and one will - praising the Chicago-based Dark Sky Films for its discovery of Arnold Laven's striking "Without Warning!," a pioneering serial killer film, and Zeitgeist Films for its dedication to important contemporary auteurs like Guy Maddin ("Cowards Bend the Knee") and Jia Zhangke ("The World"), and the National Center for Jewish Film for releasing all four of Edgar Ulmer's Yiddish films in restored editions. But the DVD player is beckoning, and I think it is time for me to get back to the couch.

A Year's Feast for the Cinematic Epicure
Here is a listing of the DVD's discussed in this article, with their original suggested prices. Most are available at a discount from online retailers and the distributors' Web sites.

CRITERION COLLECTION
"Boudu Saved From Drowning," $29.95; "John Cassavetes: Five Films," eight discs, $124.95; "L'Eclisse," two discs, $39.95; "The Flowers of St. Francis," $29.95; "Night and the City," $39.95; "Pickpocket," $39.95; "Ran," $39.95; "Rebel Samurai: Sixties Swordplay Classics," four discs, $99.95; "Le Samourai," $29.95; "The Tales of Hoffmann," $39.95; "Ugetsu," two discs, $39.95; "Andrzej Wajda: Three War Films," three discs, $79.95. www.criterionco.com

DARK SKY FILMS
"Without Warning!," $14.98. www.darkskyfilms.com

DISNEY VIDEO
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ATH: Finding a Way to Surf?

2005-12-29T21:02:00.000-06:00

Surfers in Turmoil With the Loss of a Major Supplier
By PATRICIA LEIGH BROWN, The New York Times, December 30, 2005

SANTA CRUZ, Calif. - The thefts began shortly after the day surfers call Blank Monday, when the surfing community from San Diego to Santa Cruz and beyond felt caught in the undertow of what Grubby Clark had done.

Mr. Clark, a reclusive surf industrialist whose given name is Gordon, is responsible for producing foam cores, or blanks, for most of the nation's surf boards.

On Dec. 5, Mr. Clark abruptly went out of business.

The sheriff's office in Santa Cruz County cannot say for sure that it was the closing of Mr. Clark's company, Clark Foam, that led to a rash of surfboard thefts in the charming but tattered bungalow neighborhoods near The Hook, one of roughly 65 famous surf breaks that have drawn free spirits here since the late 1930's.

But Sgt. Fred Plagement, a spokesman for the sheriff's office, said that the thefts "followed the publicity regarding the unavailability of polyurethane blanks."

At roughly 1,000 blanks a day, Clark Foam had dominated the business of producing the buoyant foam innards of surfboards, some $175 million to $200 million worth a year.

All along the coast, board prices have gone up an average of $100, said Pete Johnson, the owner of Kane Garden Surfboards in San Diego.

Surfers and shapers have been hoarding their remaining blanks. "This is the last Mohican," said Michel Junod, one of Santa Cruz's most respected shapers, referring to his lone torpedo of white foam.

The thefts were an expression of the turmoil that has gripped many California surfing spots since Mr. Clark sent out a jarring, seven-page letter to his customers announcing that he was shutting down Clark Foam, his 44-year-old business, starting immediately.

"The Howard Hughes of the surfing world," in Mr. Junod's words, Mr. Clark said in his letter that his decision was based on many factors, including the cost of complying with state and federal regulations.

In 2003, Mr. Clark received a notice from the Environmental Protection Agency for, among other things, failing to safeguard workers against the accidental release of toluene diisocyanate, or TDI, a liquid catalyst and known carcinogen used in making polyurethane foam.

There was also the cost of workers' compensation, insuring machines of his own design and "a claim being made by the widow of an employee who died from cancer," he wrote.

"For owning and operating Clark Foam," the letter began, "I may be looking at very large fines, civil lawsuits, and even time in prison."

Both the E.P.A. and the Orange County Fire Authority, which monitors factories for hazardous materials, said, however, that Mr. Clark had recently been in compliance.

"We were kind of dumbfounded," said Capt. Stephen Miller of the fire authority.

Mr. Clark, a former chemist and engineer who is considered both a shrewd businessman and maverick pioneer, has not spoken publicly and his office in Laguna Niguel refused to comment. But reaction from the surfing community was swift.

"It was like a close out wave that nobody can ride," said Steve Coletta, 58, a Santa Cruz shaper, referring to an ominously unridable wave that sometimes roars up without warning after a storm.

As in other towns ruled by waves, Blank Monday was memorable here. On the verge of Christmas, "Not for Sale" signs sprang up at local surf shops.

At Fiberglass Hawaii, which sells materials for surfboards, 426 blanks were snapped up. "Pretty much the whole town showed up," said Barry Barrett, the general manager.

David Balding, a 35-year-old glazer and surfer, was asleep when thieves sneaked into his carport and stole five of his prized boards, including an 11-foot $1,400 Lance Carson, named for a revered shaper.

"Maybe they thought, 'Shoot, prices are going up, so I'm going to grab these,' " Mr. Balding said.

The rise of Mr. Clark, who earned his nickname as a young man for his devil-may-care attire - he is now 74 - paralleled and, in many ways, fostered, the growth of American surfing.

Before foam, surfboards were made from wood, including balsa, which was hard to get, limiting production, said Matt Warshaw, author of The Encyclopedia of Surfing.

In 1958, a year before the surfing movie "Gidget," Mr. Clark, a laminator, teamed up with Hobie Alter, who made surfboards and sailboats.

Ensconced in a secret foam-making plant in Laguna Canyon, they developed the first commercially successful polyurethane foam blank.

"It was like shaping a stick of butter," Mr. Alter once said.

With the use of foam, surfers numbering in the tens of thousands on the mainland boomed into millions.

In a world of colorful hell-raisers, Mr. Clark was known as a ripper, a term for fearless, hypercompetitive surfers.

Remarkably efficient at customizing blanks for small backyard shapers, he was both beloved and feared.

"He was smart, aggressive and had a good rapport with shapers," Mr. Junod said. "But one thing about surfers is, they want the easy way out. They just want to go surfing. So people would submit to his pressure."

As theories persist about what prompted Mr. Clark to call it quits, many say the company's demise, though difficult in the short-term, presents an opportunity to rethink the way surfboards are made.

"Surfers are supposed to be environmentally sensitive, but the boards are questionable," said Steve Pezman, publisher of The Surfer's Journal. "They're a part of the puzzle that doesn't really fit the ethic."

Pete Reich, a specialist with the E.P.A. in San Francisco and an avid surfer, said blank makers and glassers are exposed to toxic fumes, and the people who sand and shape surfboards contend with noxious particulates.

Of the possibility of new methods, Yvon Chouinard, a surfer and mountain climber, said, "My attitude is, It's about time."

Mr. Chouinard's company, Patagonia, has developed what Mr. Chouinard says is a less toxic process.

Many surfboards wind up in landfills after six or eight months, said Randy French of Surftech, a Santa Cruz company making boards out of epoxy composite and one of Mr. Clark's few major competitors.

He said that some of the current shortfall will be filled by suppliers in Australia, Brazil and South Africa.

Looking out over The Hook, Boyd Halverson, wearing a wet suit and barefoot on a cold rainy Saturday, braced himself for what he called an "ice cream headache" from frigid waves. Mr. Halverson, 27, who repairs damaged boards, said that the demise of Clark Foam would be good for his business.

Mr. Coletta, the shaper, who was sitting on a three-month inventory of blanks, regarded the situation the way he might a long, glassy right point break. "Before, no one found the need to experiment with new materials, to get the feel right," he said. "I'm really stoked."

REV: New York City Ballet

2005-12-29T20:42:00.000-06:00

Miranda Weese, Philip Neal, Kyra Nichols

L-R: Amar Ramasar, Adam Hendrickson, Ashley Bouder, Nikolaj Hübbe, Wendy Whelan, Philip Neal and Tom Gold

At City Ballet, Some Especially Catch the Eye
By JOHN ROCKWELL, The New York Times, December 30, 2005

IN his later years George Balanchine liked to stress choreography over those choreographed. It was the dance that was important, not the dancers. Of course, he still had his principals and his promising soloists and up-and-coming members of the corps de ballet; stardom, or at least the individuality of the dancers, could never be eradicated. Nor, deep down, did he wish it to be.

The New York City Ballet, 23 years into the post-Balanchine era, begins its winter repertory programs on Tuesday night, after the last paper snowflake from "The Nutcracker" has wafted from the flies. (Actually, strays will keep wafting for weeks, if past experience is any guide.) To herald the beginning of the real winter season, five dance critics of The New York Times have selected dancers (and in one case, a musician) whom they particularly look forward to seeing (or hearing) - not just principals, but everyone from promising young corps dancers on up.

A caveat: Balanchine's choreographic philosophy, plus the ever-present prospect of injuries, has led the City Ballet to be wary about advertising casts far in advance. Unlike American Ballet Theater (whose star-driven casting can also change at the last minute), when you decide to buy tickets for a City Ballet program, it's the program you're buying, not any particular dancer. You may know the kind of roles in which a given favorite specializes, and by now even some (always tentative) casting for early in the season. But that's it.

Ashley Bouder
Ashley Bouder is one of the most exciting dance artists to come along in recent years. Her repertory for the winter season is likely to include five classics by George Balanchine - "Symphony in C" (third movement), "Ballo della Regina," "Firebird," "Divertimento No. 15" and "Union Jack" - and the company director Peter Martins's "Octet." But "Firebird" is hers in a special way. She claimed the title role when she stepped into it on the ballet equivalent of a moment's notice in 2001 as a 17-year-old corps dancer. She was astonishing, and continues to be. She can probably dance just about any technical trick in the book, but her daring, her dazzling clarity and her musical phrasing shine through. And the Firebird is likely to be a role when the fleeting old-time glamour Ms. Bouder has been acquiring of late, reminiscent of ballerinas of the 1940's, can best be enjoyed. JENNIFER DUNNING

Tom Gold
Tom Gold is a charmer, and nowhere did he charm more than in the role of the manic, Buster Keaton-like hero running from hordes of voracious prospective brides in the second half of Susan Stroman's "Double Feature," seen last spring but not on the bill this winter. Here his acrobatic control, his humor and his ability to win sympathy in the most ridiculous of situations endeared him to all.

Mr. Gold is a demi-caractère dancer, which usually means the dancer is short (he is) and hence unsuited to danseur noble partnering of towering ballerinas on toe. His kind of dancer specializes in lively, often humorous roles that require as much acting as dancing, although the dancing can be athletically exciting as well. An example is the Jester in Balanchine's version of "Swan Lake," which opens a 12-performance run next Friday. He won't be in every cast, and other Jesters may be charming, too. But he is scheduled for the first performance, and feel lucky if he's in the one you see. Other ballets in which he's likely to appear this season include "Fancy Free" and "Fanfare."

Adam Hendrickson
As an actor-dancer, Adam Hendrickson is just about invincible: understated, enigmatic and full of eccentricity. From his jet-black eyebrows, which lend his handsome face a range of devilish expressions, to his dignified, graceful line, Mr. Hendrickson is unparalleled in City Ballet's canon of character parts, including Herr Drosselmeier in "The Nutcracker," Puck in "A Midsummer Night's Dream," Dr. Coppelius in "Coppélia" and the Jester in "Swan Lake," which he will reprise this season. He enriches each role with exacting nuance, and the effects never appear premeditated; the details are so ingrained that you see the character instead of the dancer.

In pure dancing parts, Mr. Hendrickson, with whiplash legs and a buoyant jump, provides a different kind of joy. Jerome Robbins's "N.Y. Export: Opus Jazz," also part of City Ballet's winter season, provides a perfect vantage point for Mr. Hendrickson's gutsy, all-out attack, in which he takes each step to teetering limits. He's the one wearing orange, and he's as exuberant as a firecracker. GIA KOURLAS

Nikolaj Hübbe
Nikolaj Hübbe is blessed with great powers of concentration. He can command attention at any moment and attract all eyes to him. There are times when such focus almost makes him glow onstage, one reason he has been able in past seasons to offer a distinctive portrayal of the young god in Balanchine's "Apollo": he radiates nobility.

He is also a strong, caring partner who resembles a gallant protector in the pas de deux in the third movement of Balanchine's "Brahms-Schoenberg Quartet." But his solo steps in that same movement are impetuous. His original training in the sprightly 19th-century Danish style has made the Danish-born Mr. Hübbe at home in quick, darting steps. And like many other Danish-trained dancers, he is capable of a great interpretative range.

Princely dignity can seem second nature to him. Yet he has also portrayed Riff, the leader of a street gang, in Robbins's "West Side Story Suite." Not only did the choreography make him look tough, but Robbins also required him to sing, which he did very well.

The versatile Mr. Hübbe is both a dancing deity and an artist whose human stage presence is a generous one.

Maria Kowroski
Tall, willowy and graceful, Maria Kowroski may be the most elegant of the current crop of City Ballet principals. She is known for her adagio passages, those statuesque showcases for grace and control. But she is lovely in her running leaps and airy turns, too. Her sweeping, sinuous arms have always seemed particularly captivating. She is as close to the ideal of the classical ballerina as anyone in the company.

She has been ill of late - nothing serious, the company says. But that means she won't be onstage for three or four weeks, so we'll miss the chance to see her Odette. But there will be other opportunities down the road, including, most likely, "Western Symphony," "Union Jack," "Brahms-Schoenberg Quartet" and "In the Night." ROCKWELL

Philip Neal
Look quickly when Philip Neal is dancing, and you may decide he is simply the consummate ballet partner. But though his every move is in resonant service to his ballerina, he is always quietly stylish in his own right in performing that blends today's requisite technical skills with vital individuality and freshness, whether he shares the stage or dances alone.

Mr. Neal stood out for his showmanship in the 1987 workshop performances of the City-Ballet-affiliated School of American Ballet. Over the years that exuberance has settled into a refined virtuosity that is best seen in Balanchine classics like "Symphony in C," in which he is likely to dance the dreamlike adagio this season. His simplicity and lyricism may be seen to their best advantage there. And it is hard to imagine that Mr. Neal will not continue to demand the most of himself in an art that seems to replenish him.

Kyra Nichols
Kyra Nichols is 47, and she no longer dances very much. But when she does, it is worth walking through a transit strike or braving extreme temperatures to see whatever she is performing.

Ms. Nichols is one of the last of the Balanchine-era ballerinas; she joined City Ballet, straight from the School of American Ballet, in 1974 and became a principal in 1979, just four years before Balanchine's death. Her 30th anniversary with the company last year was little remarked upon; Ms. Nichols simply went on doing what she has always done, which is dance with sublime and un-self-conscious purity and grace.

Ms. Nichols is tall and beautiful, with wide, curving shoulders, long legs and a regal carriage. In the earlier part of her career, she was known for her phenomenal technique and precision, and also for the nobility and force of her dancing. As if to compensate for an inevitable loss of technique, her other gifts now seem to be magnified onstage.

Her musicality and the clarity of her phrasing - the way she shapes movement in time and space - feel so spontaneous, so true to each work, that she becomes a utopian vision of the dance as the choreographer might have dreamed it.

City Ballet hasn't announced casting yet for its winter season, and Ms. Nichols chooses her ballets carefully now. Let's watch and hope for a few more glimpses of the enchanted worlds that she offers.

Amar Ramasar
Gifted dancers tend to grow up in public. That is true of Amar Ramasar, who has taken on a surprising range of roles for a corps dancer. He is never less than fully engaged in performance, and his joy in dancing is infectious, though it sometimes takes him over the top of his assignment. Mr. Ramasar is scheduled to perform featured parts this season in ballets including Robbins's "Fancy Free," "Fanfare" and "Concertino."

Some things to look forward to are the panache with which he unfailingly leads the Spanish Dance in "Swan Lake," a role that others often shrug off, and the quiet, gutsy eloquence of his dancing as a soloist in Christopher Wheeldon's haunting "After the Rain."

He has worked hard to hone his skills. Just a year ago he told a reporter that he hoped one day to dance the Cavalier in "The Nutcracker," which then seemed a wildly optimistic goal. But there Mr. Ramasar was this month, front and center in the role, and earning critical praise for his performance. The journey ahead should be interesting.

Miranda Weese
My favorite City Ballet seasons begin and end with Miranda Weese, whose inherent elegance is allayed by a mischievous, arch wit. Equipped with a startlingly sound technique - the sort that epitomizes the expression "turn on a dime" - Ms. Weese gives performances anchored by a razor-sharp musicality and a refreshing absence of self-conscious posturing. This season, she reprises Odette/Odile in "Swan Lake" (her mystical, creature-like Odette is enthralling) and will also appear in Balanchine's "Allegro Brillante," Mr. Martins's "Fearful Symmetries" and Mr. Wheeldon's new ballet, which will have its premiere on Jan. 24. (She was breathtaking in Mr. Wheeldon's "Shambards.")

Some find her dancing remote, perhaps because Ms. Weese doesn't oversell herself. She dances on her own terms, seemingly for her own pleasure and, most important, in the moment.

The joy to understanding Ms. Weese is to watch the way her undiluted, iridescent dancing begins on the inside and radiates out. She is a supremely natural dancer, and without her City Ballet would be lost: she dances as if Balanchine were alive.

Wendy Whelan
Wendy Whelan is the ballerina of geometry. Her long, lean arms and legs can trace straight lines and sharp angles in space with almost surgical precision. Moving at high speed, she proves capable of unusual stretches and balances, twisting herself into one shape after another. She can also make her dancing seem to explode like fireworks, as she does when she performs the Gypsy-inspired fourth movement of Balanchine's "Brahms-Schoenberg Quartet."

One of her recent roles has been a reminder that Edna St. Vincent Millay once declared in a sonnet, "Euclid alone has looked on Beauty bare." Just as mathematicians occasionally contemplate geometrical patterns with what can seem a mystical awe, so Ms. Whelan can invest her physical presence with an almost spiritual intensity. She does so superbly in Mr. Wheeldon's "After the Rain," in which she floats serenely from position to position, and when she is lifted by her partner she leans forward from his grasp as if she were a bird or an angel ready to soar. She thereby makes physical movements that demand extreme muscular control appear unearthly: flesh and spirit have been miraculously united. ANDERSON

Damian Woetzel
Damian Woetzel is a daredevil, a virtuoso who knows how to make the most complex combinations of steps look like fun. His dancing is often big and bold. Yet he is also capable of small, intricate shifts of weight, easy turns and carefree bouncy movements. Appropriately enough in a ballet that evokes Gypsy revelry, he can fill the finale of Balanchine's "Brahms-Schoenberg Quartet" with fiery passion, for Mr. Woetzel is more than a technician. He has considerable dramatic gifts.

In past seasons, he has been an eloquent interpreter of the title role of Balanchine's "Prodigal Son" and has been equally effective in such comic parts as Frantz, the romantically straying hero of Balanchine's version of "Coppélia." Indeed, he often turns frisky or roguish onstage. Mr. Wheeldon emphasized that aspect of his dancing personality by casting him in "An American in Paris." Here, he portrays a young man pursuing a "dream girl" through the streets of Paris with an irresistible jauntiness that makes it seem only logical that this fellow in search of an ideal would allow himself to be distracted by another, much more earthy and very jazzy, young woman.

Andrea Quinn
There are those (the critic Arlene Croce is one) who feel that the conductor plays as important a role in the overall impact of a ballet as the dancers.

The City Ballet's music director since 2001, Andrea Quinn has presided over a sharp upgrading of the sometimes disturbing sounds that used to emerge from the New York State Theater pit during City Ballet seasons. Part of that, Mr. Martins says, has to do with more reasonable, flexible union contracts. But a lot has to do, as he readily agrees, with her leadership and musicianship.

She is scheduled to conduct Tuesday's opening night and a new Martins ballet on Feb. 10 to a score (commissioned with the Juilliard School) by Christopher Rouse, and a host of other repertory as well. But hear her when you can. Most unfortunately, Ms. Quinn will be relinquishing her City Ballet post at the end of the spring season to return to her native England for family reasons.

The New York City Ballet's winter repertory begins Tuesday and continues through Feb. 26 at the New York State Theater, Lincoln Center, (212) 870-5570.

OBT: Danielle LeBlanc

2005-12-29T01:45:00.000-06:00

Murder suspect found dead
Arlington: Man wanted in girlfriend's slaying apparently shot himself
By HOLLY YAN / The Dallas Morning News / 12:00 AM CST on Saturday, December 24, 2005

Don Wayne Moody, an Arlington man suspected of killing his girlfriend and leaving her body at home with her 2-year-old daughter, apparently committed suicide Friday .

Mr. Moody's body was found in a Laredo hotel room the day after Arlington police issued a warrant for his arrest, department spokeswoman Christy Gilfour said. He is believed to have died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

Police believe Mr. Moody killed 22-year-old Zana Danielle Leblanc, with whom acquaintances said he had a troubled relationship.

"Danielle had also stated that her boyfriend threatened to kill her and himself if she ever tried to break up with him," according to an arrest warrant affidavit that included interviews with Ms. Leblanc's family and a co-worker. The co-worker said Ms. Leblanc was trying to break up with Mr. Moody but was afraid to because "he had hit her when she tried to break up with him in the past."

Relatives of Ms. Leblanc became concerned after not hearing from her for a few days and stopped by her apartment on Sigmond Drive on Tuesday. Ms. Leblanc had been strangled in her bedroom, but her toddler was in good health after getting into the refrigerator on her own.

It was unclear how long Ms. Leblanc had been dead. Ms. Gilfour said Mr. Moody checked into the Laredo hotel on Monday and was supposed to check out on Thursday.

Police seeking slain woman's boyfriend
Arlington: Warrant issued; co-worker, family describe abuse
By JEFF MOSIER / The Dallas Morning News / 12:00 AM CST on Friday, December 23, 2005

ARLINGTON – Police have issued an arrest warrant for the estranged boyfriend of an Arlington woman found strangled this week.

Detectives are trying to locate Don Wayne Moody, 26, who is wanted on suspicion of murder. The body of Zana Danielle Leblanc, 22, was discovered Tuesday afternoon on her bedroom floor after relatives dropped by to find out why she missed work and had not been in touch with them. Ms. Leblanc's 2-year-old daughter was also in the apartment, but the toddler was unharmed.

An arrest warrant affidavit describes Mr. Moody as an abusive boyfriend who often threatened Ms. Leblanc. "Danielle had also stated that her boyfriend threatened to kill her and himself if she ever tried to break up with him," according to police interviews with family and a co-worker.

According to a statement from a co-worker, Ms. Leblanc was trying to break up with Mr. Moody. Mr. Moody, who also goes by Don Wayne Franks, has a long criminal record that includes convictions for assault, possession of marijuana and cocaine and hindering prosecution.

Ms. Leblanc told her mother and stepfather that she was scared of Mr. Moody, according to the affidavit. Her parents also said that Ms. Leblanc once fled her home and stayed in a women's shelter.

A co-worker told police that Ms. Leblanc had recently moved to Arlington with Mr. Moody. According to driver's license records, Ms. Leblanc had previously listed her address as the home of Mr. Moody's parents in Mansfield.

Although they continued to live together, the relationship between Ms. Leblanc and Mr. Moody was unstable.

Ms. Leblanc told a co-worker at the Hooters restaurant where she worked that Mr. Moody was unemployed, refused to look for a job and frequently demanded money.

"Danielle had gotten tired of this and wanted him to go," according to the affidavit.

On some occasions, Mr. Moody became violent and attacked Ms. Leblanc, the co-worker said. She told police that Mr. Moody choked her, threw her against the headboard of her bed and pointed a shotgun at her face several times.

Ms. Leblanc told her co-worker that she planned to tell Mr. Moody he had to leave. According to the affidavit, she was afraid because "he had hit her when she tried to break up with him in the past."

COM: On Israeli Self-Determination

2005-12-28T14:44:00.000-06:00

Saving Israel From Itself
A secular future for the Jewish state
By Bernard Avishai. Posted on Wednesday, February 9, 2005. Originally from Harper's Magazine, January 2005.

In the winter of 2002, I moved to Jerusalem for the third time, to join my new wife, a professor at the Hebrew University, and teach at an Israeli business school. It was not the best of times to move to Israel, for the Al-Aqsa Intifada was at its most terrifying and the Sharon government was preparing its response in Operation Defensive Shield. When I met one old friend, she put her hand to the back of my head and started feeling around through my hair. “I’m looking for the hole,” she said. I had spent the better part of the 1970s living in Israel, and most of the 1980s visiting and writing about the country, so the new disturbances, and the little ironic gestures of solidarity, were not unfamiliar. But something had changed, certainly among my graying friends: a sadder-but-wiser air, a barely suppressed hunger to speak of big categories and formative years.

Recent events—Sharon’s plan for Gaza, Arafat’s death—have raised hopes for new diplomacy but do not alleviate the tension. People call the conflict the matzav, the “situation.” Listen to talk shows, go out to dinner, and what leaks into nearly every conversation is uncertainty about how to envision Israel going forward in its existing boundaries. I don’t just mean geographic boundaries. I mean legal, institutional, and cultural limits. Nearly everybody here will tell you that they see Israel as Jewish and democratic. Almost nobody can tell you what this means.

Not that Israelis aren’t hearing clear arguments. The most common, which is widely considered hard-headed, argues that the occupation has presented Israel with a “demographic” threat. Maintain the occupation, the argument goes, lose the “Jewish majority” between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean, and Israel must become either an apartheid state or a binational state—a “Jewish state” or a “democratic state”—not both. Less commonly asserted, and widely considered hard-hearted, is an argument about Israel irrespective of its occupation. A Jewish state cannot be democratic, this argument goes, because a state in which the world’s Jewish people and the Jewish religion have exclusive privileges is inherently discriminatory against non-Jewish citizens. Some kind of binationalism, if not inevitable, is more or less preferable. Both arguments are made by people in and around Israel, though only the former is made by people in and around the Israeli government.

So on the one hand are people whose preoccupation with “a Jewish majority” suggests an intuitive grasp of what it takes to preserve Jewish culture but whose grasp of building democracy is shallow and mechanical, who are painting by numbers—and (intentionally or not) laying the groundwork for ethnic cleansing. On the other hand are people who are more exacting about democracy but who’ve completely missed how radically, and for the better, historic Zionism has changed Jewish culture. The first group calls the second naive, the patsies of anti-Semites. The second group calls the first “racists” and “colonialists.” Little wonder people are disquieted and can’t explain why. It is becoming nearly impossible to say what has been right—and plainly wrong—about Israel since its founding and what needs to be done to save it.

Now, as before, the focus will be on occupied territory. But a quarter of Israel’s schoolchildren are Arabs. Were the West Bank and Gaza to disappear, and Israel did nothing to reform itself, it would face another intifada in a generation, this time from within. Israeli Jews know this in their guts, if not from their debate. Listen only to them, and the “situation” seems hopeless. Israel’s deficiencies as a “democratic state” were always most transparent to Arab Israelis. Paradoxically, it is only when I am speaking with them that I feel assured of the promise of a “Jewish state.” It will take at least a generation to fully realize this promise. That is the length of time it took all of us to create the disaster we will now have to unmake.

* * *

Arthur Koestler once wrote that becoming a Communist was an affair of the heart; in the summer of 1931, in Berlin, he fell in love with the Five Year Plan. In the summer of 1967, I fell in love with the Jewish National Fund—the old Zionist holding company, which formally owned the land on which most of Israel’s farming collectives had been built. I was eighteen, and had just finished my first year at McGill University. In what still seems to me an exhilarating rush of events, I arrived in Israel about a week after the end of the Six Day War and wound up volunteering to work on Kfar Yehoshua, the moshav (or cooperative farm) of an indomitable couple whose close neighbor had been killed early in the war. They were now working his widow’s dairy farm in addition to their own, so they needed an extra hand—a volunteer, they took pains to explain, since members of the moshav would not hire wage-laborers, certainly not Arabs, whom they refused “to exploit.”

They made it plain that Israel’s collectives enjoyed a certain authentic self-reliance. The old Hebrew motto of Labor Zionism was “kibbush avodah,” “the conquest of labor,” by which the real thing to be conquered was a Diaspora Jew’s civilized lethargy. And what had made it all possible was the Jewish National Fund, or Keren Kayemeth, whose green logo was still painted on the sign to Kfar Yehoshua. Members did not own their land, my friends explained; the land had been leased in perpetuity from the Keren Kayemeth, which had raised money abroad, penny by penny, then bought Arab estates in the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s, eventually distributing parcels to socialist halutzim, Zionism’s pioneers, their parents. As a child, I had myself slipped change into the Keren Kayemeth’s little blue tin collection boxes, for the fund kept on raising money for reforestation after the state was founded in 1948, after Israel could as easily expropriate land as have the Zionist fund buy it—and large tracts were expropriated after the 1948 war, effacing some 400 Arab villages. Anyway, we were now done with wars, and Kfar Yehoshua’s land remained the “inalienable property of the Jewish people,” that is, mine. I worked until I dropped. After about a month I was smitten: the warmth of welcome, the élan of revolution, the conviction that just war had brought lasting peace—that Israelis had won the former and Jews deserved the latter—the pleasingly triangular smell of cow’s milk, cow’s feed, and cow’s shit rising into Hebrew air.

This was not exactly love at first sight. My father had been a socialist-Zionist boy scout in Bialystok in the 1920s, and later a Zionist “leader” in immigrant Jewish Montreal. I had never really thought much about what his “Zionism” meant, except that it covered the bases for “modern” Jews. I understood, vaguely, that Zionism meant Jews could have fruit trees, fighter jets, a tan. More vivid was the prestige of the Hebrew language, which I had suspected since childhood contained a world worth knowing. When I was a pupil at Montreal’s Talmud Torah School, half my class’s day had been devoted to Hebrew studies, beginning in the second grade with readings from Breisheit, the Book of Genesis. Whereas the ABCs conjured scrubbed little boys watching girls play with kittens, the Alef Bet conjured families torn up by arbitrary fathers, jealous mothers, and rival brothers, all devoted to enigmatic things like “sacrifice” and “birthright,” or stirred by the promise of mysterious power. Hebrew stories seemed absolute, and talking about them seemed a kind of responsibility.

Zionism’s personal (or, if you were at McGill, “ideological”) requirement, that Jews should go and live in Israel, had always been finessed in my family. My father’s line, which I never quite bought, was that sending one’s money was “as Zionist” as sending oneself, though he often lamented that his “big mistake” was not joining his own pioneering group, which had founded Kibbutz Kfar Menachem in 1939. In May 1967, after my father told me that Israel was being “strangled” by Egypt’s blockade of the Straits of Tiran, he sat me down at the kitchen table and sketched a map on a napkin, explaining how Israel, whose reserves had been mobilized, would soon have to attack in Gaza. I became fixed on the vain fantasy I had had as a child—that were I to be lined up to board a cattle car, I would charge the guards in an ecstatic rage rather than get on the train. That is what “Israelis” did. In any case, I now had the body of a strong young man and told myself coldly that I could not just see it all end. I quit my job at Expo ’67 and determined to fly to Israel as soon as I could get there. My father finally went along, but to his relief (and mine), the war was over before I could leave.

* * *

Nothing prepared me for the atmosphere of the country when I arrived. It seemed that an entire people had done spontaneously what every human being should do deliberately—defend one’s life, touch one’s roots, spread progress, show magnanimity. The tokens of Israeli exceptionalism were everywhere. The radio played jingoistic songs, and no member of the Israeli government, however schlumpy, could appear in a newsreel without prompting the theater audience to burst into applause. Moshe Dayan visited West Bank villages and was greeted by “notables,” while Arab children pranced around him, a hand covering an eye in homage. Captured Russian trucks, looking like giant Ford pickups, appeared magically on the roads, and blond Swedish volunteers appeared magically in kibbutz dining rooms. Zionism had been proven right by, of all things, Zionism’s might.

I got to Jerusalem on June 28, driven in a lurching Citroën by a family friend, a paratrooper about my own age. We drove toward the Mandelbaum Gate, the old checkpoint in the divided city, just after noon, practicing how we might con the guard into letting us proceed to the Old City. But we found no checkpoint and no guard. We drove on, passing the shuttered Arab shops on Salah ad-Din Road, stopping the car a few times to stand silently at piles of rocks, topped by a rifle and a helmet, the makeshift memorials to friends who had been killed in the assault. Finally, somewhat bewildered, we flipped on the radio, only to discover that the Arab city had been annexed and the whole city declared united an hour before we got there. The government had decided to integrate all parts of Jerusalem by expanding Jewish neighborhoods in the Old City and in the eastern part, especially around Mt. Scopus, where the old Hadassah Hospital and Hebrew University had been before 1948. An expanse around the Wailing Wall, we soon discovered, had already been bulldozed. The radio played the new Zionist anthem, “Jerusalem of Gold,” and tears streamed down my friend’s cheeks.

Nobody thought twice about the families whose houses had just been razed. Hadn’t Jordan used the Old City’s Jewish gravestones to pave their roads? As for the 70,000 Jerusalem Arabs who might be encroached upon or pushed around, there was land enough for all in the new “Middle East.” Twenty-one countries for them, one for us. One undivided Jerusalem for us, Mayor Teddy Kollek’s liberalism for them.

Only one moment, several weeks later, gave me pause. On a visit with my cousins to the new campus of Tel Aviv University, I noticed huge posters with a puzzling map, which seemed exactly like the Arabic map of Palestine in which Israel has been effaced, only this was a Hebrew map of Israel on which the West Bank and Gaza were effaced. The posters, my cousins told me, were from a new organization, the Whole Land of Israel Movement, which opposed returning any part of the conquered West Bank, even for peace, since (as their statement read) “no government in Israel is entitled to give up this entirety, which represents the inherent and inalienable right of our people from the beginning of its history.” The clear implication of the statement was that the West Bank should now be settled by Jews.

Even then, this prospect struck me as oddly greedy and provocative, nothing like what my moshav friends’ parents had achieved. The times were completely different, after all. There was no Hitler, no proletarian internationalism, no British mandatory government enforcing property law but keeping Jewish refugees out. Zionists had settled some land by force in the 1940s. But Jews were desperate then. When Jean Valjean became a mayor, he didn’t continue stealing bread. My cousins, too, were skeptical. Israel was a Jewish state, they said, but it was “also democratic.” The land was ours but, less esoterically, it was also theirs. It didn’t matter which people wanted it more or longer. What mattered were boundaries that allowed each people, Jews and Arabs, to be more or less peacefully self-governing. When I asked others about the Whole Land of Israel Movement, I was reassured to find that few people took it seriously. Fewer still (myself included) noticed that this movement was merely proposing for the West Bank as a whole what the government, with almost universal acclaim, had already enacted in Jerusalem.

* * *

It is tempting to look back on those times with a certain wistfulness: young people, heady victories, reckless enemies, unavoidable hubris. Wistfulness goes well with what is probably the most common conception of Israel that educated people in the West have: that it was once a nicely social-democratic state that is being ruined by the blowback from its occupation—by its quickly multiplying and pietistic settlers, whom successive governments somewhat naively tolerated—that if only Israel could end most terrorist attacks, emancipate itself from the occupation, and replant most settlers back within the Green Line, the internationally recognized border prior to 1967, then Zionism could get back to being itself. This half-truth often is posed against the big lie—that Zionism was just a remnant of great-power “colonialism”—and so Jews have an understandable reflex to defend the moral prestige of historic Zionism and deflect criticism of its legacy. But even David Ben-Gurion, the country’s first prime minister, knew that Israeli democracy had serious problems before there was an occupation: specifically, that ultimately it would be folly to preserve the Zionist movement’s improvisations and institutions in a democratic state. Thinking back to 1967, certainly, it is obvious that the settlers’ ideas and stridency did not just grow out of thin air. Both emerged from a revolutionary Zionist logic and a powerful Zionist bureaucracy—right for their time, in the 1930s and ’40s, but terribly wrong once the state was firmly established, after 1967—a Zionism that automatically assured Jews privileges that other people, non-Jews subject to Israeli sovereignty, could not get.

I am not speaking here of the reasonable discrimination of a nation-state in favor of a dominant national culture: a day off for the Jewish Sabbath, support for the Hebrew University, the Star of David on the flag. I mean material discrimination by the state in favor of Jews as individuals. Settlements may seem part of a grand, premeditated national project, and were to some extent, especially around Jerusalem. But they were more often a spontaneous series of decisions by quasi-official Zionist offices to continue putting families formally defined as “Jewish” in and around where Arabs lived, or to support Jewish squatters, while excluding non-Jews from living there.

When I finally moved to Jerusalem in 1972, I was given a virtually interest-free mortgage to buy an apartment in Jerusalem’s French Hill, a new neighborhood that the state, in collaboration with Zionist philanthropic agencies, was putting up next to Mt. Scopus in Arab East Jerusalem. All I had had to do was prove myself a Jew by birth, which I had done, to an Israeli consul back in Canada. I did not think of this apartment complex as “a settlement.” I did not think it strange that I was moving into a neighborhood stringently segregated by the very Zionist laws, dreams, and management I had come to identify with liberation. The point is, settlements were made in territories beyond the Green Line so effortlessly after 1967 because the Zionist institutions that built them and the laws that drove them—The Jewish Agency, Zionist land banks and mortgage companies, the Law of Return, regulations supporting the Orthodox Rabbinate’s determination of what a Jew is—had all been going full throttle within the Green Line before 1967. To focus merely on West Bank settlers was always to beg the question.

After the Yom Kippur War, in the summer of 1974, when I began writing seriously about these matters, I reported on Henry Kissinger’s effort to mediate a disengagement agreement between Israel and Syria. I recall standing in a crowd in front of the prime minister’s office, surrounded by a few hundred West Bank settlers; their Gush Emunim (“Bloc of the Faithful”) movement was just getting started. Word had leaked out that Kissinger, then inside with Golda Meir’s government, was pressuring it to evacuate the captured Syrian town of Kuneitra. When he emerged, the settlers—a phalanx of knitted skullcaps—chanted, “Jew-boy, Jew-boy,” implying that one evacuation would lead to another, that the renunciation of one inch of promised land was something only a bare-headed court Jew like Kissinger could have entertained.

Mrs. Meir gave in to Kissinger on Kuneitra. She upbraided the settlers for their ugly behavior. And yet everybody knew her prejudices: that Jews had a right to live anywhere in Eretz (or Greater) Yisrael; that the Orthodox rabbis in her coalition, although not her type, were at least the genuine article; that Jerusalem was Israel’s “by historic right”; that pioneering settlement around Jerusalem, or on the Golan Heights, was heroic; that Western Jews who had never thought to settle in the Jewish state deserved an Israeli’s condescension. These prejudices reflected a basic cynicism about the fate of Jews in Western democracy, a cynicism that is even more widespread among Israeli Jews today, who decry the “anti-Semitism” of the press covering Israel. Meanwhile, the small band of Gush Emunim has grown to some 230,000 settlers today, not including those in Jerusalem. Army intelligence is rumored to have concluded that 10 percent of the settlers (not including their supporters in Israel proper) would violently resist being moved, and the army command warns against political decisions that would force Jews to shed the blood of other Jews.

* * *

Jaffa Gate, 1879.

Let us be clear: Israel is an open society. According to an Israel Democracy Institute poll, 81 percent of Jewish Israelis think “equality before the law” essential. And the judiciary is with them. The Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty, enacted in 1992, has something like the force of a Bill of Rights in Israel. Chief Justice Aharon Barak has applied the law broadly to protect civil liberties. Just recently, the court overturned the military censor’s effort to ban Mohammed Bakri’s 2002 film, Jenin, Jenin, which implicitly accused elite Israel Defense Force combat units (in the face of significant evidence to the contrary) of indifference to civilian casualties during Operation Defensive Shield. Israel publishes more scientific papers per capita than any other country, so silencing Israelis (including Arab Israelis) seems almost unimaginable. Israel is also a country, however, in which the institutional discrimination I spoke about has always been so routine as to be hardly noticed, especially among Jews. The most important continuing inequality is preferential residency on the land. Israeli Arabs, who are disproportionately engaged in farming, live mostly in separate towns having jurisdiction over 2.5 percent of the total land mass of pre-1967 Israel, augmenting their holdings with private land. This segregated pattern of settlement results from the fact that about 93 percent of pre-1967 Israel is public land administered by the Israel Lands Administration, which since its founding in 1960 has essentially taken over the mission of the prestate Jewish National Fund. Few outside observers have been able to penetrate the Lands Administration’s convoluted leasing arrangements with Jewish Agency mortgage companies, or with preferred contractors, or with large secretive holding companies such as Himanuta. Adding to the complexity, a 2001 Supreme Court ruling determined that old Jewish National Fund regulations, prohibiting sale of land to non-Jews, could not be used to keep an Arab couple from acquiring housing in the established village of Katzir. Yet nobody doubts that when any new housing developments are completed, only people with “Jewish nationality” need apply.

And what exactly is Jewish nationality? Now we are getting to the other side of the problem, the Zionist movement’s historic (and largely opportunistic) merging of rabbinic and state power. From its inception, Israel recognized two forms of personal status, ezrahut, most commonly understood as “citizenship,” and leom, which meant “nationality” or “peoplehood.” All citizens are entitled to equality in civil society, but people legally designated a part of the Jewish nation are entitled to immediate citizenship, and supplementary material benefits start from there. The courts came to rule that, insofar as the Law of Return applied, the child or grandchild of a Jew, or a convert by a recognized rabbinic authority, is a Jew. Under the pressure of the National Religious Party—to which Ben-Gurion pandered in order to maintain his own party’s hegemony in the early 1950s—other privileges were reserved for Jews as they are defined by Orthodox rabbinic courts. Moreover, a burgeoning, official rabbinical caste now supervises marriage, burial, and kashruth—critical for the restaurant, food-processing, and tourist industries. There is no civil marriage in the country, so no state official will marry a Jew to a non-Jew. Today, some 80,000 children in Jerusalem alone study in ultra-Orthodox yeshivas, which are state subsidized in numerous ways. The state directly supports an even larger Dati Leumi (“national religious”) school system. Arabs have their own system, segregated and underfunded.

One Arab Israeli friend, the novelist Sayed Kashua (author of the Hebrew novel Dancing Arabs), told me recently that his childhood friends are feeling hemmed in and enraged, their towns in commercial despair, many coming under the threat of youth gangs. “When these towns blow, Israeli Jews will no doubt say it is for political reasons. But if the government would give us two meters for development, we’d all be volunteering for the army. Every time there is a suicide bombing I think two things: thank God my daughter is not among the victims, and I hope there is an Arab Israeli among the victims, so they won’t blame my daughter.”

Terror has always warped debate about these matters, making talk of Arab rights seem a failure of Jewish nerve. Since the beginning of the latest intifada, there have been four suicide bombings just blocks from my Jerusalem home (and Kashua’s, for that matter). The cousins with whom I stayed in 1967 were killed when their TWA plane was blown out of the skies of Athens by a Palestinian terrorist bomb in 1974. No sane person could doubt that various barriers against terrorist cells are justified, or that preemptive attacks on terrorists may be defensible if innocent bystanders could be protected from harm. Moreover, terror has prompted an understandable desire for “separation,” manifested in the controversial security fence. It is in the context of separation that one hears expression of demographic fears. Israel has 6.8 million citizens, so the argument goes, of whom about 1.3 million are Arabs. Gaza and the West Bank have another 3.2 million Arabs. The Arab birthrate in Gaza is triple that of Israeli Jews; in Israel proper and the West Bank, it’s double. Now do the math. If you keep the territories you lose the “Jewish majority” sometime after 2010. Meanwhile poll after poll shows that 61 percent of Israelis support Sharon’s withdrawal from Gaza and 20 percent more support the security fence. The New Yorker’s Jeffrey Goldberg put the choices this way in a chilling article about Jewish settlers last spring:

Israel is faced with two options: keep the settlements, and risk either apartheid or binationalism; or separate cleanly from the Palestinians, by withdrawing settlements and raising a wall between the two sides.
What’s wrong with putting matters this way? Notice, first, that Arabs who are Israeli citizens are casually folded into the demographic projections. This is not just sloppiness; it betrays a curious slide into racial simplifications. If one assumes what is manifestly true, that Israel’s young Arab citizens have come into their own (albeit tensely) in Israel’s Hebrew culture, then equality of rights, not withdrawal behind a border or fence, is the only peace process that will mitigate fatal tensions between them and Israeli Jews. Even if terrorism could be crushed, even if the West Bank and Gaza could be taken completely out of the equation, Israel would still be left with hundreds of thousands of Arab citizens and a burgeoning number of young people. If a great proportion of them are not absorbed as equals into Israel’s civil society, the country will face within its 1967 borders virtually the same dynamic that it began to face in the occupied territories in the 1970s.

Clearly, “democracy” is being debased here to mean only some vague notion of national self-determination, like the sophomoric “ideology” I came to Israel with in 1972. For most, a democracy that enshrines “inalienable rights” seems an invitation to Arabs to swamp Jews, or it means a celebration of the bourgeois self, which sanctions moving to America. Old prejudices are at work here, too, casting Israel as a kind of work-in-progress for the world’s Jewish people, justifying its borders as provisional by, on the one hand, claiming the elastic, dream borders of ancient Eretz Yisrael and, on the other, recalling the horrific crimes of sixty years ago—crimes driven by anti-Semitic attitudes whose traces are still allegedly found in gentile countries. Who knows, so the argument goes, how many Jews Israel will eventually have to accommodate, or where the Palestinians will have to be placed to make Jews safe? Who knows how big Israel will have to be while the Zionist revolution continues? And until that revolution ends, why not continue to assure Jews special privileges: refuge, land, housing, investments—in a word, settlements?

Worse, there is an obvious way to safeguard a “Jewish majority” that hardly comes up in conversations, though the way most Israelis now grasp their history should give us pause. I mean ha’transfer, reducing by forced expulsion or economic pressure the numbers of Arabs living where Jews do. The fact is, it is impossible to get the “clean” separation Goldberg speaks of without extensive ethnic cleansing. And Israelis know this. A June 2002 poll by Tel Aviv University’s Jaffe Center for Strategic Studies revealed that 46 percent of Israelis entertain the idea of expelling Palestinians.

Benny Elon of the National Union argues openly that if Arabs are not willing to accept alternate citizenship they should be expelled. Efi Eitam, leader of the National Religious Party, proposes resettling Palestinians in the Sinai. In or out of Sharon’s coalition these parties now have 13 (out of 120) Knesset seats, and are gaining ground. Exclusion of Arabs from Israeli civil life is included in the platforms of the theocratic parties—Shas, Yahadut Ha’Torah—another 16 Knesset members. We have not even begun to explore attitudes in the dominant Likud, whose 40 Knesset members, and over 230,000 active members, anchor Ha’Machane Ha’Leumi, the “National Camp,” a coalition of Greater Israel advocates, ideological hardliners, Russian immigrants, and less well-educated Mizrahim, immigrants from Arab countries. Signs for the transfer of Arabs regularly paper the underpasses on highways between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. They read, NO ARABS, NO TERROR.

Sharon is withdrawing from Gaza anyway, pointing to the polls that show a national majority behind the move. But by the end of last August, 3,700 new housing units were under construction in the West Bank and Gaza. Jewish Jerusalem is at the heart of the new construction. Its young people increasingly betray the limited horizons of the settlers’ cult, rooted in Orthodox education. Ultra-Orthodox haredim (or “awestruck”) are now a third of the Jewish population, and the city has elected a haredi mayor, Uri Lupolianski, the father of twelve children.

While Sharon is being depicted by the zealots he once coddled as caving in to Palestinians, the route of his fence is already responsible for the migration of thousands of them. It is creating Palestinian enclaves separated from Jerusalem and from one another—enclaves surrounded by Jewish settlements that are linked by exclusive highways and bypass roads. It leaves hinterland towns separated from metropolitan centers, a rupture that denies any Palestinian business the prospect of viability. About two miles from my home is the neighborhood of Jabel Mukhaber. The fence is cutting it off from its sister village, Sheik Sa’ad, whose 2,000 residents are themselves cut off from the rest of the West Bank by steep cliffs. They are in danger of being “strangled.” One leader of Jabel Mukhaber told me that a third of those people—their own family members—have left, while the remaining villagers are living off the gifts of family abroad. Elsewhere in Jerusalem, the eastern suburb of Abu Dis (home to Al-Quds University) is cut off from the northern suburb of Hizma by Jewish settlements—which cuts both off from East Jerusalem’s businesses and hospitals. Yasir Barakat, one of the most established merchants in the Old City, tells me he knows “nobody whose educated children are not planning to leave Jerusalem if they can.”

Speak of this cruelty with Israelis and someone will counter with Yasir Arafat’s recalcitrance at Camp David during the summer of 2000. “We offered him 95 percent, and he came back with terror”—I must have heard the sentence a hundred times. This version of events is not unchallenged, but let us concede the retrospective logic: that today’s terror could justify, or even seem to justify, Israel’s continued occupation of the territories after 1974, when Jordan recognized the PLO’s hegemony there. Nevertheless, how could terror have justified Jewish settlement and its transformations? Why should democratic reasoning ever have been preempted by apocalyptic reasoning? What if, instead of settling the Palestinians’ land, Israeli officials had simply said they wanted for Palestinians what American officials said they wanted for the hated Germans in 1948: that the German state’s sovereignty derive from the consent of its governed, that it should have an integrated population and economy, the rule of law, conditions for the investment of advanced corporations, schools and universities that teach liberal values—and that an occupation army, reinforced by a Western coalition, would stay in place until it was safe to withdraw and not beyond? What if, at the same time, Israeli leaders had invested in Israel’s Arab citizens at a rate equal to Jews, and privatized state land and subjected its purchase to market forces? Would not Israelis and Palestinians be facing a very different reality today?

This is not the way Israelis are re-imagining their history. Instead, more and more young people I talk to are becoming resigned to a new master narrative, which sees the state’s founding in an exchange of populations, beginning with the Shoah and moving to attacks on all fronts by Arab states in 1948. In this flattened history, 750,000 Palestinian Arabs either fled or were driven from their homes, while the Arab states dispossessed and expelled some 800,000 Mizrahi Jewish refugees to Israel, especially during the 1956 Suez war. Israelis were not perfect, they say, but the pattern is unmistakable.

Dr. Uzi Arad, the former director of intelligence in the Mossad, has proposed that if a Palestinian state could be negotiated, Israel’s largest Arab towns in the “little triangle”—from Umm al-Fahm in the north to Kfar Kassem in the south—should be annexed by it. Not coincidentally, Arad is also the co-author of a new “Zionist Manifesto” for Israel, which would give “constitutional status” to Israel as a “Zionist-Jewish state,” a state of world Jewry; a state that would teach “the feeling of a right to the Promised Land, which is a central principle of Judaism.” The manifesto calls for “the preservation of democracy for all of its citizens.” It does not say if this is a central principle of Judaism.

* * *

This is where the demographic argument gets you. You put West Bank Palestinians behind a wall where economic life is virtually impossible, and you hive off another hundred thousand Arab Israelis and put them behind the wall too. Meanwhile, you expand your border to include new Jewish settlements and maintain existing political economic barriers for Arab Israelis, a barrier of institutional practice and law, a barrier of land and common ideology. You say Jews and Arabs must be separated because even if Israel’s Arab citizens will make the most of what liberties Israel gives them, they could not possibly want to be absorbed into Israel. And after all of this, you suppose yourself a democracy because you represent the general will of the “Jewish majority.” But is the choice really apartheid or binationalism?

People who put things this way, presumably to maintain Zionist momentum, have actually lost touch with what Zionism was mostly about at its inception, the power and grace of Hebrew culture. They underestimate the capacity of Israel’s cities to absorb new generations, including Arab citizens and foreign workers, to something both fully democratic and patently Jewish, yet in a way that does not presume to straighten the crooked timber—in short, to make Israel Jewish the way France is French. With the exception of the ultra-Orthodox, secluded in their spreading neighborhoods, nearly everybody in Israel (Arabs, too) is marinated in a popular Hebrew culture in which the international terms of science and business are incorporated, in which one shuttles from Hebrew fiction to subtitled Hollywood movies, or CNN, or the Lakers’ games, from Mizrahi music to sentimentalized Jewish holidays, or the beach. Go to a wedding or funeral in Tel Aviv, or an award ceremony in Haifa, and you’ll see that most feel homage when somebody reads, say, a poem by the late Yehuda Amichai, not when the rabbi chants perfunctorily from the traditional liturgy.

Israel’s Arabs remain close to the Arab world, and most will not likely assimilate as completely into Israel as, say, shtetl Jews have into New York City. But this does not mean they will not assimilate sufficiently into Hebrew culture to become responsible, even wonderfully iconoclastic, citizens. “One of the first novels I read,” Kashua told me, “was Saul Bellow’s Herzog in Hebrew translation. Then I bought all his books. I felt that Jews like Bellow understood me, understood what a democratic culture means when you’re a minority. Then I loved Primo Levi, then Zadie Smith. Arab literature, even the Koran, is full of stories of lost empire. The Arabs say, ‘We were once great and now have been brought low.’ The Jews say, ‘We were once slaves, but now we are free.’”

Kashua—who writes only in Hebrew—is unusual, but he is not an anomaly. Israel’s Declaration of Independence declares Israel “a Jewish state,” as the U.N. intended it to be, but also promises to ensure the “complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex. . . .” When he read the declaration aloud, Ben-Gurion unselfconsciously substituted the phrase “Hebrew people” (Am Ivri) for “Jewish people” when referring to the Zionist home. Perhaps the most original Zionist of them all, Ahad Ha’am, argued (after his distant hero, Herbert Spencer) for an organic view of Jewish community, wired together by the Hebrew language, struggling for existence, competing on progressive sophistication. He advocated enlightenment, self-reliance, newness. Living in Odessa in the 1880s, he argued for colonial settlements in Palestine, not because he wanted a state—not yet—but because he wanted a “Hebrew national atmosphere” that could provide a new and more congenial space in which Jews could work out in individual ways what it means to be Jewish—a place they could ask modern questions in Hebrew. He edited and mentored the generation that created the state’s DNA: A. D. Gordon, the founder of the kibbutz movement; Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, the creator of the modern Hebrew dictionary; Chaim Weizmann, the moderate leader of world Zionism during the Mandate; even, indirectly, Ben-Gurion.

It is Zionism’s singular tragedy that all of these figures are just street names today, while “Zionism” is applied to the people with caravans, Uzis, stylish forelocks, and visits from Pat Robertson. Once, Israel’s sympathizers took Zionism’s innovations for granted. Today, ironically, only Arab Israelis seem to grasp how radical Zionism was for Jews. About 70 percent say that the thing that makes you Israeli is the Hebrew language. Until the intifada began, a larger proportion of Arab Israelis than Jewish Israelis (over 63 percent) claimed “Israeli” for their primary national identity.

* * *

Which brings me, finally, to a curious petition, filed with Israel’s High Court of Justice last December. The petitioners are thirty-eight citizens of Israel, most of them Jews but a number of them Arabs: businesspeople, professors, entertainers, writers, jurists. Their petition enjoins the court to order the Ministry of Interior to inscribe them as “Israeli” in the Registry of Population. Given how much else is being contested in the country, one would think a petition to recognize Israelis as “Israeli” is frivolous. It is anything but that.

The petitioners are asking the state to recognize an inclusive, earned form of nationality, coterminous with and redundant to citizenship. They believe that fifty-five years after Israel’s founding—when two-thirds of its citizens have been born in the country, and half of those are third generation—the experience of Israel itself must be determinative of national identity. More important, they want to close the door on discrimination against individuals on religious or racial grounds.

“I have staked my life on the moral and cultural power of the Jewish people,” says Yoella Har-Shefi, a civil-rights attorney, who is leading the group, “but you can’t say, ‘Everybody is equal here, it’s just that a Jew is valued differently’—and if there is international or internal protest, well, that’s proof that ‘the whole world is against us.’ If Arab citizens can’t become ‘Israelis,’ the country will come apart. We are sitting on the edge of a volcano, because Israel is the only country on earth that does not recognize itself.”

The state’s attorney has so far responded to this petition predictably enough, arguing that it will divide the Jewish people—that it “undermines the very principles under which the State of Israel was created.” Barak’s court has not yet ruled definitively. But whatever the outcome, the petitioners are right to see that Israel’s real challenge in the coming generation is not only to get back into a peace process but to shore this up with a democratic revolution in civil rights; that is, to get Israeli Jews to “recognize” Israel. This Israel would not be a binational state; it would be a Hebrew republic, though what would be wrong, ultimately, with Israelis and Palestinians entering into some mutually convenient federal structure—or joining a larger one—to share jurisdictions that cannot be effectively exercised by either nation-state alone; to work on their roads, commercial links, water, labor standards, monetary policy, immigration, tourism, telecommunications policy, and more? The need for security cooperation around Jerusalem and its holy sites is obvious enough, and would probably require some international policing. I have yet to meet an Israeli businessperson who would not want Israel included in the European Community. Carl Hahn, the former chairman of Volkswagen, and an architect of European integration, told me recently that Israel would “certainly strengthen” the EU. But there is a caveat: “Israel must have peace with its neighbors and civil rights that conform to European law.”

Turkey, which has been Israel’s partner in so many economic and military ventures, is in advanced discussions with the EU. Why not an Israel subject to the EU’s collective security provisions, or formally joined to NATO, so that an attack on Israel would prompt a collective response? That Israel would still be a “Jewish state,” whose national literary and artistic masterpieces, created in Hebrew, would be open to the cultural and scientific currents of the developed world. But it would also be a country in which any citizen of the EU could choose to work, or start a business, and eventually go through a defined process of naturalization; that is, learn how to make the most of the Jewish nation’s civil society. And something very much like this process of naturalization would be the key to the advancement and integration of Israel’s Arab minority, who would be learning to be Israeli from primary school on, though individuals might well choose to live in the Palestinian state or to work in any country in Europe.

Israel would have to replace the Law of Return, but it could still have laws that prefer immigrants who are Diaspora Jews or victims of anti-Semitism. Greece has similar laws. At the same time, Israel would be a state in which, by law, the religious imaginations of citizens would be a matter of private conscience and voluntary assembly. It would be a state in which anyone could marry anyone, no religious institution would be supported by state funds, and all young citizens would be conscripted for some form of national service.

A pipe dream? Perhaps. The alternative, however, is a nightmare, and not only for Palestinians. According to recent polls, nearly half of Israel’s young people “do not feel connected” to the state, and a quarter of them do not see their future here. If the attitudes of my own business students are relevant, the brightest and most highly educated are as infatuated with America today as I was with Israel in 1967. There will be many interpretations of this poll, but one thing is clear: The absence of a coherent democratic vision cannot compete with the presence of a coherent, if outdated, Zionist vision. There will also be laments about how the Jewish state was supposed to be a “light unto the nations.” Perhaps Israel could just learn from the European nations for a while—not too much to ask, with its nemesis dead, its champion backtracking, its patron in too deep, and its once noble revolution in doubt.

About the Author
Bernard Avishai is the author of The Tragedy of Zionism: How Its Revolutionary Past Haunts Israeli Democracy. He teaches business and public policy at Duke University.

This is Saving Israel From Itself, a feature, originally from January 2005, published Wednesday, February 9, 2005. It is part of Features, which is part of Harpers.org.

REV: Mossad Ops Dispute Munich

2005-12-28T13:57:00.000-06:00

Israel's ex-spies question ‘Munich’ details
Former Mossad agents find aspects of Spielberg's film ‘absurd’
Reuters, Updated: 9:22 a.m. ET Dec. 28, 2005

JERUSALEM - A pocketful of receipts helped blow the lid off Israel’s most notorious intelligence bungle.

It was in 1973, after spies dispatched to Norway killed a waiter mistaken for the Palestinian mastermind of a raid on the previous year’s Munich Olympics where 11 Israeli athletes died.

The assassins might have got away, except that one of them was not a trained member of Israel’s spy agency Mossad but a Danish-born volunteer brought aboard for his language skills.

Hoping to recoup expenses, he had kept his receipts. Once detained by Norwegian police, he provided a paper trail that led to the capture and prosecution for murder of the rest of team.

So when director Steven Spielberg, in his new film on the post-Munich reprisals, showed a Mossad case officer ordering agents to hoard receipts while in deep cover abroad, eyebrows were raised among veterans of the intelligence service.

“It’s an absurd version of the modus operandi,” former field agent Gad Shimron said when asked about the thriller “Munich.”

“Agents are expected to account for their expenses, but not if it means incurring the risk of discovery. They can just as easily declare their expenses from memory when they return home, and it’s accepted on trust,” he told Reuters.

That is just one of a list of complaints made about “Munich” by those with direct knowledge of the Israeli reprisal campaign.

Spielberg’s version paints a grim picture of what befell five men sent by Israel to track and kill members of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) blamed for the Olympics raid.

The film is based on “Vengeance,” a 1984 book purporting to chronicle the confessions of an assassin who broke ranks in protest at Israel’s two-fisted tactics. It portrays a hit-team unleashed on Europe and the Middle East with little supervision, torn by self-doubt and on the run from Palestinian gunmen.

Spielberg was careful to add the disclaimer that the film was merely “inspired” by real events, but many Israelis say they are disappointed in the Hollywood director famed for his fastidiously researched Holocaust epic “Schindler’s List.”

“I think it is a tragedy that a person of the stature of Steven Spielberg, who has made such fantastic films, should have based this film on a book that is a falsehood,” said David Kimche, a senior Mossad official in the 1970s.

“Munich” shows the Olympic attack, followed by another established fact: Israel’s Prime Minister Golda Meir instructing Mossad to track down and kill the Palestinians held responsible.

In the film, Meir goes further, personally recruiting the hero, Avner, to lead the team. Shimron said this was unheard of.

“I know it’s tempting to see Golda as a sort of Zionist version of ‘M’ from the James Bond films, but she had nothing to do with Mossad personnel,” he said.

Spielberg shows a hit-team isolated in the field for months, and including a forger and bomb-maker so it can function alone.

But Mossad veterans say the reprisals, like all top-priority missions, were executed by a large number of agents, in stages.

First, case officers posted abroad were told to look out for Palestinians on the hit-list. Information came from a variety of sources, the most important being paid PLO informers; the Munich raid was carried out by Black September, a PLO splinter group.

Once the targets were found, specialized agents went through elaborate practice runs in Israel to prepare the assassinations.

“We would set up ’models’, by choosing areas in Israel that resembled the place where the person in question would be hit. Then we would drill to make sure the mission went without a hitch,” said a retired operative on condition of anonymity.

“The hit-teams were assembled and sent out on an ad hoc basis. Everything was in place for them, so they never spent more than a few days -- or, at most, weeks -- in the field. They were monitored and withdrawn as soon as each mission was over.”

The assassins in “Munich” are shown as occasionally inept, especially when it comes to planting novel booby-trap bombs.

But Shimron noted that by the 1970s Mossad had perfected this tactic. As for having a forger, Shimron doubted this would be considered for such short-term missions as no forger would be able to produce high-quality documents under such conditions.

Shimron was more damning of the all-male makeup of the team.

“It’s standard practice to include female agents in such operations,” he said. “Anyone who has been on a stakeout knows that having a lady on hand helps you avoid being spotted.”

'A country at war'
Much of the criticism from Israelis in the know focuses on the film’s depiction of the moral debates that burden the team.

A former Israeli special forces officer who took part in a Mossad assassination in the 1980s called this fanciful.

“Look, we all did mandatory military service, we all had combat experience, and we all accepted the necessity of hitting out at our enemies. Israel is a country at war,” he said.

“So you go, you do the job, and you hope you’ll be back in time to eat breakfast with your kids and take them to school.”

Shimron said Mossad provides in-house psychologists to help any agents who develop doubts about their work.

“Munich” also shows three assassins being killed. Other accounts do not mention this, although at the time the PLO did strike at Mossad case officers permanently stationed in Europe.

Michael Bar-Zohar, who wrote an authorized history of the operations, said two officers were shot in Madrid and Brussels.

“But as for Black September, it was wiped off the map for months,” he told Israel Radio.

Bar-Zohar noted Spielberg shows the hit-team hunting 11 Palestinians, and said this built an overly simplistic moral symmetry with the number of Israeli athletes killed in Munich.

Historians say the final Palestinian death toll may have reached as high as 18. In 1981, Black September mastermind Mohammed Daoud survived a shooting attack at a Warsaw hotel. In 1992, PLO official Atef Bseiso was shot dead in Paris.

Israel neither claimed nor denied responsibility for those operations, but Mossad veterans said that prior to 1993 there was no reason for the post-Munich reprisals to be called off.

That year, Israel and the Palestinians signed an interim peace deal in Oslo, near the site of the botched 1973 hit.

“We decided then that as long as they are not killing us, we would not kill them,” said the retired senior operative.

ENV: Chasing Woodpeckers

2005-12-27T18:09:00.000-06:00

Elusive woodpecker draws birders to Arkansas
Dozens of searchers plan to watch all winter for bird once thought extinct
The Associated Press, Updated: 1:27 p.m. ET Dec. 27, 2005

BRINKLEY, Ark. - Each morning, Sara Barker wakes before dawn, covers herself with camouflage and makes sure she has her compass before heading into the eastern Arkansas swamps. Her quest: the elusive ivory-billed woodpecker.

Dozens of birders have flocked to the wildlife refuges of the Arkansas Delta to follow up on a kayaker's 2004 sighting of a bird so rare it was thought to have become extinct. They hope to obtain a clear video or picture of the bird and then study its behavior.

Barker and fellow scientists from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology plan to comb thousands of acres this winter, while leafless trees allow good viewing, looking for a roost, a nesting hole or any other evidence of the woodpecker's existence. Their days stretch from before dawn to the "magic hour," just before dusk, when the birds are believed to be most active.

"We'll sit in a canoe, quietly, and we'll watch that hole until just after dark," Barker said. "Hoping, hoping that just maybe it's the ivory bill."

And what if, one day, it is?

"I'd probably fall out of the boat," Barker says with a laugh.

The searchers — equipped with Global Positioning System locators, binoculars, digital video cameras and cell phones — call the bird a flying needle in a haystack. This haystack covers 550,000 acres — about 75 percent of the size of Rhode Island.

Their quest was sparked Feb. 11, 2004, when one of the woodpeckers flew over amateur birder Gene Sparling while he was kayaking in the Cache River National Wildlife Refuge. It was confirmed in April as the first known sighting of the bird since 1944.

Now, dozens of searchers are sharing one house, while others promise to camp in the swamps for the entire winter. Cornell birder Nathan Banfield, 26, from Montgomery City, Mo., refuses to even go into nearby Little Rock to grab a beer.

"It would be nice to go out and stuff," he said. "But it nags on you if you're taking a weekend off knowing the bird could be there. If I could spend that extra time that maybe would give me that extra chance. You don't know when your three seconds are going to come."

Many of the birders hike or canoe through the bayous and swamps, scanning each tree for possible nesting sites. Each night, they download information from their GPS units to map out which areas have been scanned.

Others sit in blinds with digital video cameras — powered by motorcycle or car batteries so they can run all day.

"We've been trained, first thing you grab is your video camera," Barker said.

The people are supplemented by automatic video and audio recording equipment placed strategically in the swamps. A $4,000 camera strapped high on a tupelo tree can snap digital photos every 12 seconds with all the latest features — time lapse, motion detection, infrared, high-definition.

"These are just a tool to find where the ivory bill might be, its center of activity," said Jaime Hill, Cornell's technology surveillance scientist. "I think I've got the best job because when I take these down, I would see we've got an ivory bill and I'd be the first to know."

The audio units record sounds up to about 200 meters away in any direction. A computer program at Cornell labs in Ithaca, N.Y., will scan recordings for the bird's signature double-rap sound: "BAM-Bam!"

There's a chance that all this effort could be directed at the wrong place at the wrong times. Any ivory bills in Arkansas might not behave the same as the birds in the only study of the species, done in the 1930s by biologist James Tanner in Louisiana's Singer Tract.

"They may have adapted to using different types of habitats," Barker said.

Search crews have enlisted help from volunteer ornithologists and the public, including hunters and fishermen. At the fork of two gravel roads in the middle of the Cache refuge is a metal road sign. "Be on the Lookout!" it proclaims, along with a description of the bird.

"Now all we need is a little luck," said Ken Levenstein, a Cornell search crew leader. "We need one of those (birds) and these people to be in the same place."

COM: Dreaming of an Inclusive Christmas

2005-12-27T18:07:00.000-06:00

An All-American Christmas
Irving Berlin invented the separation of church and song with “White Christmas”
By Harold Meyerson, The American Prospect, 12.22.05

The white Christmases that Irving Berlin dreamed of weren't the earliest ones he used to know. He spent his first five Christmases in czarist Russia, and his only recollection of that time, at least the only one he'd acknowledge as an adult, was that of watching his neighbors burn his family's house to the ground in a good old-fashioned, Jew-hating pogrom.

So it's no surprise that when Berlin got around to writing his great Christmas song in 1941, nearly half a century after his family had fled the shtetl of Mohilev for New York's Lower East Side, it was flatly devoid of Christian imagery. It is, for all that, a religious song. It's just that Berlin's religion was America.

"White Christmas" is an achingly nostalgic ballad, evoking a rural America where treetops glisten and sleigh bells ring. This was Currier and Ives country, an idealized winter landscape created for an urban nation that was busily shipping its young men overseas to fight Hitler and Japan. Amid the unprecedented disruptions of the war, "White Christmas," with its implicit assertion that we can somehow get back to this innocent Eden, found a ready audience. Over the subsequent six decades, in a world that's only grown more unstable, Berlin's ode has never lost its power: Roughly 2,000 versions have been recorded since Bing Crosby's initial take.

The success of "White Christmas" paved the way for a whole new genre of Christmas songs. Two years after Berlin's ballad first appeared in Paramount's "Holiday Inn," MGM filmed "Meet Me in St. Louis," which had as its musical centerpiece the bittersweet "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" -- a song about loved ones trying to stay together "if the fates allow." (A film ahead of its time, "Meet Me in St. Louis" is about a family resisting corporate relocation.) Two years later came "The Christmas Song" ("Chestnuts roasting on an open fire"), and a year after that, "Let It Snow." By then the American Christmas song was about staying warm in winter, about staying connected to loved ones and traditions. It also practiced separation of church and song.

This was all rather new. Tin Pan Alley hadn't turned out many notable Christmas songs before "White Christmas." It hasn't turned out many since. But for a few years in the middle of the 20th century, it produced a series of songs that remain Christmas standards today.

Many of those Christmas songwriters, of course, were Jewish and the children of immigrants; their deepest drive was to demonstrate beyond all doubt that they were assimilated, cosmopolitan, American. Berlin's father had been a cantor, but Berlin himself, unlike the hero of "The Jazz Singer," wasn't torn between the Jewish piety of liturgical music and the American secularism of ragtime. When he left home at 14 to sing in the saloons of the Bowery, he never looked back. And the religious identity of the composer-lyricist of "White Christmas" and "Easter Parade" was as fuzzy as it was perfunctory. A Jew married to an Irish Catholic, Berlin raised his three daughters as nominal Protestants. Who better to write a non-Christian Christmas song? (Berlin's may have been an extreme case, but in the middle of the 20th century, Jewish assimilationism was so pervasive that it gave rise to the following crack: What's the difference between Reform Jews and Unitarians? Unitarians don't have Christmas trees.)

"White Christmas" was one of a dozen numbers that Berlin wrote for "Holiday Inn," each song commemorating a specific holiday. One hesitates to impute anything so vulgar as a message to a Crosby-Fred Astaire musical, but the message of this musical is that we are all Americans and these are our holidays. Easter belongs to all of us, even if it is about little more than strolling down Fifth Avenue. Christmas belongs to all of us. The religious content of those holidays was fine for Christian believers, but the composer of "God Bless America" preferred to celebrate a common national identity, complete with common holidays that had nonsectarian meanings.

Berlin kept Christmas in the public square and, more than anyone before or since, sent it out over the public airwaves. But it was an American, not a Christian, Christmas. And by the crass index of number of recordings sold, and the not-so-crass index of number of spirits touched, Berlin's nonsectarian holiday has been the predominant version of Christmas in this country for the past 60 years.

Now the Fox News demagogues want to impose a more sectarian Christmas on us, supplanting the distinctly American holiday we have celebrated lo these threescore years with a holiday that divides us along religious lines. Bill O'Reilly can blaspheme all he wants, but like millions of my countrymen, I take attacks on Irving Berlin's America personally. If O'Reilly doesn't like it here, why doesn't he go back to where he came from?

COM: Playing Hardball in Austria

2005-12-27T15:41:00.000-06:00

Schwarzenegger May Not Be Back to Hometown
Romance Between Arnold Schwarzenegger and Austrian Hometown May Be Over After Split on Execution
By GEORGE JAHN, The Associated Press, December 27, 2005

GRAZ, Austria - "I'll be back." That pledge from the Terminator traditionally has had special meaning in Arnold Schwarzenegger's hometown.

But now after the California governor refused to spare two convicted murderers in a row from their death sentences and showed no signs of relenting in another case up next month the romance is over between Schwarzenegger and Graz, Austria's second-largest city.

Acting on Schwarzenegger's orders two weeks after the Dec. 13 execution of former Crips gang leader Stanley Tookie Williams, city leaders Tuesday deleted all references to the bodybuilder-turned-governor on Web sites linked to Graz. Over the weekend, they also stripped his name from the city's soccer stadium.

And "Arnie," as he is known in the city of his youth, also sent back Graz' highest award its ring of honor as part of moves provoked by city council threats to rename the stadium because of his support for the death penalty.

He tried to soothe passions in a Dec. 19 letter, saying he still planned to visit. But that pledge is now more threat than promise for Austrians, who overwhelmingly consider the death penalty barbaric.

Sigi Binder of the environmentalist Green party in Graz says that in just two days more than 1,500 people signed her party's online petition to rename the stadium. The appeal was closed to further signatures when Schwarzenegger himself demanded that his name be dropped.

Thousands backed a separate similar petition, and hundreds of supporting phone calls came in from Germany and German-speaking parts of Switzerland, she added.

Her message to Schwarzenegger? "Mr. Governor, please push to have the death penalty abolished."

Other Arnie-bashers are less polite.

"Schwarzenegger has proven that he is truly the total dolt that he plays in his films," read a recent e-mail signed "Mario" on the Web site of the daily Kurier one of hundreds of impassioned readers' commentaries on the controversy, which has dominated Austrian headlines for the past two weeks.

But the dispute goes beyond Arnie. The tarnishing of Austria's idol in his home country is a renewed sign of a general European disenchantment with an America many here consider out of step with their ideals.

After his election as California's governor two years ago, Schwarzenegger held onto cult status in Austria even though most Europeans disagreed with his positions on the Iraq war and the death penalty.

Austrians focused instead on Schwarzenegger's successes since he left for America in 1968, first as Mr. Universe, then as "Conan the Barbarian" and the "Terminator" and finally his 2003 move into the governor's mansion in Sacramento.

One of Austria's most popular folk groups, Die Stoakogler, paid homage to him 13 years ago in a mixture of English and the dialect of Styria, his home province.

The song, which sold more than 2 million copies on vinyl and CD, begins with: "Steiermen san (are) very good, when they go to Hollywood."

A special stamp bearing his image and issued to commemorate his election sold out within days. But his decision last January to allow California's first execution in three years triggered protests in front of the U.S. Embassy in Vienna. Williams' execution less than a year later was the final straw for many Austrians.

For Schwarzenegger, the rationale was simple in ending the formal relationship with the city of his youth, about 120 miles south of Vienna.

"It is relatively likely that I will have to meet similarly difficult decisions as governor," he wrote Graz Mayor Siegfried Nagl, suggesting that cutting ties with the city was the best way to spare further controversy the next time he needed to make such a decision.

Next time is just weeks away. Lawyers for Clarence Ray Allen, 75, who suffers from multiple maladies, have asked the governor to block their client's Jan. 17 execution for ordering hits on three people while he was behind bars in 1980.

A refusal by Schwarzenegger to pardon him is sure to provoke a new protest across Austria and Europe.

Still, some continue to back their idol.

While emphasizing that he, too, is against the death penalty, Nagl told The Associated Press that "no one here has the right to sit in judgment" of Schwarzenegger.

Whenever he returns, "he is welcome to sit down with me for a bite of apple strudel," said Nagl, whose conservative People's Party is outnumbered in city council by the anti-Schwarzenegger opposition.

Kurt Marnul, a former "Mr. Austria" who put the first set of weights on the young Arnie's shoulders and still works out in a gym plastered with hundreds of pictures showing him with Schwarzenegger, accused Graz politicians of "stabbing Arnie in the back."

"More than 70 percent of Americans are for the death penalty," said Marnul, 75. "This issue is none of Austria's business."

REV: Cellphones and Movies

2005-12-27T15:38:00.000-06:00

Making Movies Quieter
Movie Theater Owners Consider Technology to Silence Cell Phone Chatter
By JONATHAN SILVERSTEIN, ABCNews.com

Dec. 27, 2005 — - One of the great things about cell phones is their ability to allow us to be in constant contact with friends, colleagues and loved ones. But it's also one of their drawbacks -- especially in movie theaters.

Cell phone gabbers who don't stop or don't hesitate to start when the lights go down in a crowded movie theater can be frustrating for moviegoers and for theater owners who often walk a tightrope between respecting the individual and pleasing the crowd.

"We don't want to be Draconian or mess up people's personal decisions about communications," said G. Kendrick Macdowell, general counsel for the National Association of Theatre Owners. "But we do want to try proactively to enforce better behavior so that all of our patrons can have a good moviegoing experience."

One idea that's been floated around is installing cell phone jammers to keep calls out or filters to make sure only the most important calls disrupt patrons.

But is such an elaborate scheme necessary? Or is it simply the responsibility of the theater owners to police the crowd for cell phone junkies?

It Costs More And the Audience Is Rude
When Christopher Steenbock goes to the movies these days, the 31-year-old New York City headhunter says he not only sees a marked difference in film quality and ticket prices, but in rude behavior as well.

"I'd say on average your multiplex theater typically attracts the worst sorts of crowds," he said. "You know, more cell phone users are in there either answering their phones or letting their phones ring throughout the performance."

Anyone who's paid for a movie ticket and had to endure the constant chatter of someone on their cell phone knows what Steenbock is talking about.

As annoying as he said the behavior is, he doesn't want to make matters worse, so he usually stays seated -- though maybe a little steamed.

"Usually I don't say anything," he said. "I think about throwing my soda or popcorn and lobbing it in that general direction, but typically I just sort of tolerate it."

But like a growing number of moviegoers, Steenbock thinks something has to be done about the rule breakers and he doesn't think it should be his responsibility to do it.

"At one point, theaters had ushers you might see perusing the aisles looking for underage kids in R-rated movies or something," he said. "I don't know if it's feasible, but in the past they used to have people that kind of intervened on the audience's behalf."

An increase in ushers to police movie theaters is one approach some in the industry are trying, according to Macdowell.

In fact, he said, people have suggested much more dramatic action.

"A lot of people think we ought to have bouncers -- big, burly guys who literally bodily drag people out who are rude," he said. "A lot of people feel very strong about that."

This dilemma may not require more employees but newer technology like cell phone jammers and filters to keep patrons' attention on the screen where it belongs.

Cell Phone Jamming a Safety Risk?
"Nearly everybody gets annoyed when someone's cell phone rings and somebody actually takes it and has a conversation," Macdowell said. "That's just ridiculous."

He said that a categorical cell phone jamming system was unlikely to be implemented, but that as the technology advanced, it was possible movie theaters could be outfitted with some kind of filter to keep all but the most important calls out.

"Technology that lets you filter through emergency calls or automatically send a message to a caller saying: 'Hi, I'm inside a movie theater. If it's an emergency, press 9,'" he explained. "Those are the kinds of things I think we would be looking at very closely, because some people feel very fondly about having that communication link with them."

But Joe Farren, director of public affairs for CTIA-The Wireless Association, said any technology that could threaten the ability for someone to make or receive an emergency call, was bad for the public.

"There are more than 220,000 calls made to 911 from wireless phones every day in America," Farren said. "To put irreversible technology in place that prevents those calls from being made in the tens of thousands of movie theaters across America makes no sense at all."

CTIA calls itself "the voice of the wireless industry." The nonprofit group represents "service providers, manufacturers, wireless data and Internet companies, and other contributors to the wireless universe," according to its Web site.

Farren said he and CTIA were not unsympathetic to the industry's dilemma, but, perhaps not surprisingly, were opposed to installing any technology that could keep someone from using his cell phone.

"We understand what they're trying to accomplish and we're not opposed to a policy where you turn off your phone and if it goes off you get kicked out," he said. "But don't take away the power of this incredible lifesaving tool."

Accommodating the Masses
Steenbock admitted that he had forgotten to turn off his cell phone on occasion, so he's somewhat understanding of the absentminded.

"I actually try to muffle the phone and turn it off," he said. "I know people screw up and accept that it's just part of the moviegoing experience."

But he doesn't see the need to have cell phone access at all inside a theater and has no problem with theater owners using jammers for that purpose.

"You know there was a time before cell phones," he pointed out. "So if you have a baby sitter or you have a loved one who is under medical care, you likely have a social network that can help out."

Macdowell said that while theater owners would continue to work on ways to limit rude behavior like cell phone chatter in theaters, there was a limit to what they could do.

"We have got to adopt an accommodating posture to the extent that it's practical," he explained. "We can't accommodate every idiosyncratic personality out there who wants to watch a movie in the particular way in which they want to watch a movie."

ATH: Snowboarding 1080s

2005-12-27T15:13:00.000-06:00

The 1080
Three Revolutions Have Equaled a Transformation in Snowboarding
By LEE JENKINS, The New York Times, December 27, 2005

BRECKENRIDGE, Colo. - Halfpipe snowboarding is the rare professional sport in which athletes perform to popular music and public-address announcers narrate moves as they are being made.

While competitors career down the ramp, a D.J. spins hip-hop beats and an excitable announcer shouts the names of every different trick - Crippler! Stale Fish! Melon Poke! The titles can sound as if they come from comic books.

But there is one trick that needs no goofy name or hyperactive introduction. When the announcer relays it, his voice tends to drop a decibel. Ten-eighty is all he needs to say. Everyone at a snowboarding competition seems to know what that means.

The 1080 is the most powerful move in snowboarding, a 1,080-degree spin that separates Olympic contenders from Olympic wannabes. Anybody who can make the requisite three revolutions in midair could wind up on the podium in Turin, Italy. Anybody who cannot is probably going to need some more lift.

"It's become the new standard," the pro snowboarder Mason Aguirre said. "If you want to get on that podium, it's mandatory."

Like many aspects of snowboarding, the 1080 did not exist five years ago. Those who could do the 900 - two and a half revolutions - were considered the most aerodynamic riders. But in this sport, with fashions changing from winter to winter, the degrees of difficulty are constantly being enhanced.

Now, there are riders doing reverse 1080's, doing back-to-back 1080's, grabbing their boards while they do 1080's. There are video games called 1080 Snowboarding and 1080 Avalanche. It is not uncommon to hear of a snowboarder winning an event on the strength of a 1080. With an estimated 25 percent of men's professional halfpipers incorporating the 1080 into their routines, it has become known around the pipe as the 10.

To execute a perfect 10, a snowboarder rises high off the lip of the ramp and starts to spin furiously in the air. Some keep their bodies vertical the entire time. Most go horizontal, looking like human corkscrews. At the end, a rider must regain his bearings and steady the board for a smooth landing. Even the best pros, overcome by a sudden dizzy spell, sometimes drop their gloves on the snow to balance themselves.

"Man, I hate that trick," said Shaun White, a favorite to make the Olympic halfpipe team. "There are times when you're just spinning and you totally lose track of where you are. You don't know where you're going to land. You only hope you're still in the pipe."

The 1080 cannot score many points for creativity. Because it takes so long to make three revolutions, little time is left for somersaults or back flips - the kind of flourishes that snowboarding so often celebrates. Many riders prefer more aesthetic tricks like McTwists or Cabs, but they feel 1,080 degrees of pressure to keep up with the latest trend.

At the first Olympic qualifier for the halfpipe, on Dec. 14 at Breckenridge, the top three finishers executed at least one successful 1080. First place went to White. Ross Powers, a 1080 pioneer, was second. Scott Lago, who last December could not do a 1080 and therefore might not have been able to compete for an Olympic berth, was third.

"I remember thinking last year that you had to do a 1080 to win," Lago said. "Everyone had to learn it, so I went to New Zealand over the summer, and I learned it."

Among the first riders to master the 1080 were Powers and Danny Kass, who perfected it before the 2002 Olympics. By no coincidence, Powers won the gold medal in the halfpipe in Salt Lake City and Kass won the silver. Doing the 1080 showed that they could catch more air than many of their competitors and torque their bodies with greater ease. "Now, everyone has stepped it up," Powers said.

The last time snowboarders were getting ready for an Olympics, some of them joked that they cared more about the X Games. They were still uncertain if the Olympic stage suited their untraditional style. But since Powers and Kass landed their 1080's, snowboarding has embraced the Olympics and vice versa. This winter, riders are pulling out their most death-defying tricks for qualifying events.

As commonplace as the 1080 has become in the men's draw, no professional women's rider is believed to have attempted it in competition. Hannah Teter, who won the first women's Olympic qualifier for the halfpipe, also at Breckenridge on Dec. 14, may be the best bet to give it a spin. She can already land the 900 with relative ease and is daring enough to try another revolution. "I'm thinking about it," she said.

Considering how quickly this sport evolves, she may have to hurry. Soon enough, the 1080 will probably be as passé as the 900, something to do before showing off the really big moves. Perhaps the 1260 is one Olympics away.

REV: Web Nerds Hit Big

2005-12-27T14:38:00.000-06:00

Nerds in the Hood, Stars on the Web
By DAVE ITZKOFF, The New York Times, December 27, 2005

For most aspiring rappers, the fastest route to having material circulated around the World Wide Web is to produce a work that is radical, cutting-edge and, in a word, cool. But now a pair of "Saturday Night Live" performers turned unexpected hip-hop icons are discovering that Internet stardom may be more easily achieved by being as nerdy as possible.

In "Lazy Sunday," a music video that had its debut on the Dec. 17 broadcast of "SNL," two cast members, Chris Parnell and Andy Samberg, adopt the brash personas of head-bopping, hand-waving rappers. But as they make their way around Manhattan's West Village, they rhyme with conviction about subjects that are anything but hard-core: they boast about eating cupcakes from the Magnolia Bakery, searching for travel directions on MapQuest and achieving their ultimate goal of attending a matinee of the fantasy movie "The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe."

It is their obliviousness to their total lack of menace - or maybe the ostentatious way they pay for convenience-store candy with $10 bills - that makes the video so funny, but it is the Internet that has made it a hit. Since it was originally broadcast on NBC, "Lazy Sunday" has been downloaded more than 1.2 million times from the video-sharing Web site YouTube.com; it has cracked the upper echelons of the video charts at NBC.com and the iTunes Music Store; and it has even inspired a line of T-shirts, available at Teetastic.com.

"I've been recognized more times since the Saturday it aired than since I started on the show," said Mr. Samberg, 27, a featured player in his first season on "SNL." "It definitely felt like something changed overnight."

But Mr. Samberg is already well aware of the Internet's power to transform relative unknowns into superstars. In 2000, when he and his childhood friends Akiva Schaffer and Jorma Taccone, both 28, who wrote "Lazy Sunday" with Mr. Samberg and Mr. Parnell, were still struggling comedy writers living together in Los Angeles, they created a Web site, the Lonely Island, to house their self-produced skits and video experiments.

"Honestly, almost every single one of the films was done at like 4 in the morning, kind of drunk," Mr. Taccone said. But the short movies they posted on thelonelyisland.com - everything from cartoons assembled from clips of old Nintendo video games to satirical rap videos performed in the styles of their favorite hip-hop artists - also gave the three a place to develop their comic voices without the pressure of having to deliver professionally polished work.

"The Internet allowed us to show people much faster, in a way that you don't embarrass yourself," Mr. Taccone said. "You don't have to hand someone a VHS. It's just on their computer."

These videos also provided the Lonely Island team with careers: through their Internet work, they landed an agent, pilot deals with Comedy Central and Fox, and writing jobs for the MTV Movie Awards. In 2005, they joined "SNL," Mr. Samberg as a performer and Mr. Taccone and Mr. Schaffer as writers.

At "SNL" they found a kind of kindred spirit in Mr. Parnell, who has used the program's "Weekend Update" segment to deliver highly inappropriate rap tributes to some of the show's comelier female guest hosts. "I don't think I ever heard from Britney Spears," said Mr. Parnell, 38, who has been with the show since 1998. "But Kirsten Dunst and Jennifer Garner seemed to really enjoy it, and thankfully not be creeped out by it."

On the evening of Dec. 12, the four wrote a song about "two guys rapping about very lame, sensitive stuff," as Mr. Samberg described it. They recorded it the following night in the office Mr. Samberg shares with Mr. Schaffer and Mr. Taccone at "SNL," using a laptop computer that Mr. Taccone bought on Craigslist.

Then, while their colleagues were rehearsing and rewriting that Saturday's show, the group spent the morning of Dec. 15 shooting their video with a borrowed camera, using the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater in Chelsea to stand in for a multiplex cinema and Mr. Taccone's girlfriend's sister to play a convenience-store clerk. Mr. Schaffer spent the next night - and morning - editing the video and working with technicians to bring it up to broadcast standards. Finally, at about 11 p.m. on Dec. 17, the four learned from Lorne Michaels, the executive producer of "SNL," that "Lazy Sunday" would be shown on that night's show.

By the next morning, the video had burrowed its way into the nation's cultural consciousness. "It brought a breath of fresh air to the show," Mr. Parnell said, adding that he received a congratulatory phone call soon after "Lazy Sunday" was shown from his co-star Maya Rudolph, who is on maternity leave, and her boyfriend, the filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson. "It's something the likes of which we haven't seen on 'SNL' anytime recently."

Mr. Schaffer and Mr. Taccone were also contacted by friends who heard the rap played on radio stations and in bars. And Mr. Samberg found himself in the delicate position of having to explain to his mother that the song's chorus is a play on words involving the name "Chronicles of Narnia" and the word chronic, a slang term for marijuana. "She's like, 'So is it actually about weed?' " Mr. Samberg said. "It makes you think it's going to be about weed, but then it's actually just about 'Narnia.' She's like, 'Oh, I think I get it.' "

While Mr. Parnell anticipates that the buzz surrounding "Lazy Sunday" will eventually die down, he said the video's success would continue to pay dividends for his young collaborators.

"It will have whatever life people are interested in it having, and then it'll pass out of being the thing of the moment," he said. "But it encourages Lorne and everybody involved with the show to trust them more, and to put their stuff out there."

Mr. Schaffer, who has written just two live sketches with Mr. Taccone that have survived the Darwinian "SNL" dress rehearsal process and made it onto the air, said he appreciated the attention "Lazy Sunday" has received. But he also said he expected no special treatment when the show's staff resumes work in January.

"The thing about 'SNL,' " Mr. Schaffer said, "is that all of this could happen, and we could still come in on Monday morning with zero ideas. No matter what, that's intimidating. We could use all the help we can get."

REV: American Ballet Theatre

2005-12-27T13:46:00.000-06:00

Ballet Theater's Director of Turnaround
By ROSLYN SULCAS, The New York Times, December 27, 2005

Rachel Moore's mother cried all the way to the airport when her 18-year-old daughter left her hometown of Davis, Calif., to join American Ballet Theater's junior company in New York. "My parents were both economists and very upset that I wasn't going to college," said Ms. Moore, who is now the executive director of Ballet Theater.

Her family can relax. Since her appointment in April 2004, this former dancer, now 41, has taken firm hold of an unwieldy, creaky organization that is also a great one, constantly beset by financial problems, yet somehow managing to produce the spectacular productions and dancers for which it is famous. Since Ms. Moore took over, Ballet Theater's endowment has risen from $8 million to $15 million; its City Center season this fall showed box office gains of 30 percent over the previous year; and for the first time in six years, an operating deficit has disappeared and a modest surplus is projected when audit results are released next week.

To put these achievements in perspective, it should be noted that when Ms. Moore was hired, she was Ballet Theater's fourth executive director in four years, following Elizabeth Harpel Kehler, Wallace Chapell and Louis G. Spisto. Unlike her predecessors, Ms. Moore had firsthand experience of the other side of the administrative-artistic divide that exists in every performing arts organization, having graduated from the junior company to the Ballet Theater corps in 1984 and danced there until she was sidelined by a foot injury four years later.

"I knew I was coming in to a place that had been very unsettled," said Ms. Moore, who has reddish gamine-cut hair and retains a dancer's ramrod-straight back. "But I understand the Ballet Theater context, what its traditions and needs are. And I never forgot what it's like to be a dancer. This can be a heartbreaking career."

Ms. Moore's Ballet Theater background was, in fact, a deciding factor for both the artistic director, Kevin McKenzie, and the chairman, Lewis Ranieri, who had stepped into the breach when Ms. Kehler left after less than a year on the job. "Rachel was in many ways at a disadvantage," Mr. Ranieri said. "She is young, and so she didn't have the kind of résumé that some of the other candidates had. But she had an inside grasp of things that they didn't. And I think she actually did much more homework. We were able to have extremely detailed conversations about the company, and so we had a very clear idea who we would be hiring."

Ms. Moore's résumé is, in fact, not at all shabby. After leaving Ballet Theater, she graduated from Brown University with honors in ethics and political philosophy, and then studied arts administration at Columbia. After working for an arts advocacy group in Washington, she moved to Boston with her husband, Robert Ryan, and held senior administrative positions at Ballet Theater of Boston and Project Step, a classical music school for minority students. Then she moved to the Boston Ballet as director of its Center for Dance Education, the largest professional ballet school in the United States, with 2,000 students and 75 employees. When the Ballet Theater position opened up, she decided to apply even though, she said, she thought she had little chance of actually getting the job. "My goal was simply not to embarrass myself," she said.

This mixture of ambition and realism appears characteristic of Ms. Moore, whose pragmatic focus on matters at hand runs side by side with a broader grasp of the company's needs. "When I arrived, it was clear that I would have to make changes," she said. "We restructured the senior staff - eliminating the chief operating officer position and dividing up those duties - and we made significant budget cuts by laying off staff for a week, not giving raises and changing touring plans. If I hadn't taken a tough stance, Ballet Theater might not have survived. But I understand the artistic issues, and I strongly believe that we must have a real identity and vision. I'm never going to quibble about the expense of rehearsal time or whether a particular ballet needs to be done."

All of this, Mr. McKenzie said, has made his life considerably easier. "The problem with trying to run a ballet company is that every artistic idea is a lousy business decision," he said. "But Rachel comes from within and knows the culture: we do big operatic ballets with big stars, and we also try to honor our origins as choreographic theater. It's an enormous juggling act, and when the fit is right between the executive and the artistic director, that takes a whole step out of the planning process. Now it's, 'Trust us,' as opposed to, 'Trust me.' "

However great Ms. Moore's insider grasp of affairs and rapport with Mr. McKenzie, she nonetheless still faces the problems that have vexed Ballet Theater's directors since the company's inception in 1940. The troupe has never had a permanent home, as New York City Ballet does at the State Theater, and it has always toured extensively, with the attendant costs of transporting large numbers of dancers and supporting staff - to say nothing of the costumes and scenery needed for its repertory of full-length classical ballets.

Ms. Moore's approach is to consider these circumstances as a spur to a bold vision. "We think of ourselves as a national company," she said, "and that's how American Ballet Theater can differentiate itself from every other ballet company, and find new forms of funding and new audiences. This means more than touring. It also means that we are working toward being the standard bearer of excellence in the art form - not just performing, but also fostering new works, raising the standard of dance training, and bringing dance to people from all walks of life. It's not just about doing 'Swan Lake' every year; it's about what impact we can have on the art form."

These are elevated goals, but Ms. Moore, who attends almost every performance by the company, is a convincing advocate.

"I plan to be in this job for a long time," Ms. Moore said.

Mr. Ranieri seems to agree. "She and her husband have just bought a house," he said. "I'm very pleased about that."

ATH: World Cup Watchees

2005-12-27T12:59:00.000-06:00

Beauty in the Beasts
By Malcolm Beith, Newsweek International

Wayne Rooney, Bastian Schweinsteiger, Lionel Messi: The brightest stars at next summer's World Cup may well be a trio of headstrong but divinely talented youngsters.

Dec. 26, 2005 - Jan 2, 2006 issue - It's difficult to spot a diamond in the rough. It's even harder to see the beauty in, say, a pig. But football—known as the beautiful game—has, on occasion, transformed what some might consider rather ordinary beasts into priceless gems. A short, stout and cocky Diego Maradona emerged from the Buenos Aires slums to become a god on the pitch, his ability to sweep defenders aside truly Biblical. Zinedine Zidane, born to Algerian immigrants in the rough banlieues of Marseille, led France to World Cup and European championship glory. Even megacelebrity David Beckham was once just a shy, mild-mannered kid from a working-class neighborhood in Essex.

Next summer's World Cup in Germany is guaranteed to usher forth a host of new heroes. And while the pretournament hype will likely focus on Brazil's exceptionally graceful Kaka and Portuguese pretty-boy Cristiano Ronaldo, it may well be a trio of hardworking, hard-nosed ugly ducklings who emerge as the swans: England's Wayne Rooney, Germany's Bastian Schweinsteiger and Argentina's Lionel Messi.

None older than 21, all three possess the same vigor as the young Maradona of the late ' 70s and early ' 80s who took our breath away, before cocaine and the temptations of fame took his. And when the legs of older teammates like Beckham, Michael Ballack and Juan Roman Riquelme grow weary during this summer's grueling, monthlong tournament, these youngsters will be expected to carry their teams.

They've already proved more than capable. In leading Argentina's youth side to this summer's world championship, 18-year-old Messi, a midfielder with a gift for the piercing pass, stepped into the shoes of his team's lagging strikers to emerge as the tournament's leading scorer. During Euro 2004, England's Michael Owen found himself cornered by defenders at every turn. Enter 18-year-old striker Rooney, who lifted the team—and an entire nation's hopes—onto his shoulders and into the quarterfinals with his fearless, darting runs into the box and crisp finishing touch. After he hobbled off with a broken foot, the England team lost its confidence and limped to a loss at the hands of Portugal.

And time and time again, the raw, explosive and uber-fit Schweinsteiger—a midfielder like Messi—has penetrated defenses when Bayern Munich teammate Ballack's game has been off. (He seems to think little of defense in general: when German defenders found themselves at Australia's mercy in June, he helped salvage a 4-3 win, and boldly declared, "If we give up seven goals, and shoot eight, then it doesn't really matter to me.") Expect the 21-year-old to do the same in 2006, when all the current media hype surrounding Ballack and striker Lukas Podolski translates into triple coverage and hacked shins for both of them.

Of course, with the exuberance of youth often comes a penchant for petulance. And at the World Cup, opposing players will do their best to provoke these headstrong youngsters. Schweinsteiger's weakness for cheeky fouls has already earned him several yellow cards. While Messi is generally regarded as calm and collected—at least in Argentina, where such terms are relative—he did receive a red card in his debut after trying to shake a defender who had attached himself to his shirt. He's also picked up several yellows at Barcelona, and if the ref isn't on Messi's side in Germany, he could find himself on the receiving end of a few more, at a much higher cost to his team. And Rooney's reputation for rage is already legendary. His frustration during England's appalling September loss to Northern Ireland earned him a yellow card, a one-match ban, howling headlines (wind him up, watch him go, read one) and a much-publicized locker-room spat with captain Beckham.

Still, if their elders respect anything, it's talent. The once petulant Beckham, now a footballing elder at 30, recognizes the upside to Rooney's volatility. "At the end of the day, in a way it is good that you see players react like that," said Beckham after the Northern Ireland match. "You know they have a lot of passion, and Wayne plays with a lot of passion." A wiser, more clearheaded 45-year-old Maradona has asked the Argentine football association to allow Messi—whom the international press has actually taken to comparing to El Diego—to wear his retired No. 10 shirt in Germany. And Schweinsteiger has garnered tremendous praise from German legend Franz Beckenbauer. He may have a name that literally means "pig mounter." But expect him and his fellow tyros to prove in Germany that beauty is indeed in the eye of the beholder.

REV: New at the Film Registry

2005-12-27T12:39:00.000-06:00

National Film Registry names 2005 picks
'Hoop Dreams' and 24 others join compilation of significant films

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The documentary "Hoop Dreams" and footage of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake are among the 25 movies picked this year for the National Film Registry, a compilation of significant films being preserved by the Library of Congress.

Fictional films chosen by Librarian of Congress James H. Billington range from Buster Keaton's last comedy, "The Cameraman," to the Christmas classic "Miracle on 34th Street" to the 1982 teen comedy "Fast Times at Ridgemont High."

The 2005 selections bring to 425 the total number of films being preserved by the Library of Congress or other institutions involved in the project. (See which films made the list)

"Sadly, our enthusiasm for watching films has proved far greater than our commitment to preserving them," Billington said.

Half the movies made before 1950, and 80 percent to 90 percent of those produced before 1920, have disappeared, he said. He added that more are lost each year, partly because of the recently discovered "vinegar syndrome" that attacks the safety film used to preserve most of them.

The most recent movie making the list is 1995's "Toy Story," the first full-length computer-animated feature.

The oldest film selected this year is a documentary from 1906 of the San Francisco earthquake and the fire that followed. The disaster, which destroyed much of the city, was one of the first recorded on film.

"Hoop Dreams," from 1994, follows the lives of two inner-city Chicago kids vying for college basketball scholarships, illustrating the limited opportunities for lower-class black families in America.

Another selection is a set of field recordings of music and services at the Commandment Keeper Church in Beaufort, South Carolina, in 1940. A team working under novelist Zora Neale Hurston recorded the songs and services of South Carolina's Gullah community. Recently rediscovered sound recordings are being reunited with the film.

Popular successes on the list include "The French Connection," an action-packed film in which Gene Hackman plays a cop tracking down international drug smugglers. The three-hour dramatization of Edna Ferber's novel "Giant" portrays life on the great Texas plains and stars Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson and James Dean.

Also on the list is "The Rocky Horror Picture Show," a still popular "midnight movie" that changed Hollywood's ideas about audience participation.

Then there's "Baby Face," in which Barbara Stanwyck plays a siren seducing her way up the social ladder. The 1933 film was initially banned for its sexual content before Warner Bros. released an expurgated version. An uncensored version was discovered last year.

"The films we choose are not necessarily the 'best' American films ever made or the most famous, but they are films that continue to have cultural, historical or aesthetic significance," Billington said.

Billington made his selections from more than 1,000 titles nominated by the public. He held lengthy discussions with the library's motion picture division staff and members of the National Film Preservation Board.

The registry was created by Congress in 1989.

LIT: A Story for Your Christmas

2005-12-25T15:25:00.000-06:00

He Loves New York, and It Loves Him Right Back
By MANNY FERNANDEZ, The New York Times, December 25, 2005

Among New York City's many powers is its capacity to tolerate and nurture those obsessed with it.

Yuki Endo was just 10 years old when the city first took hold of him. His life in New York might have been a lonely one after his mother moved him here from Japan in early 1996. He was born with a rare chromosome disorder that left him disabled and makes it hard for him to speak clearly.

But in the decade since, the city has nurtured Yuki in small, graceful ways and become his best friend. Through a quirky combination of luck and his own bottomless curiosity, he has formed a kind of extended family out of the firefighters, doormen, security guards, teachers, librarians and shopkeepers he meets on his daily explorations.

He is a landlocked Huckleberry Finn, restlessly caught up with the mystery and minutiae of New York, at least until 7 p.m., when his mother wants him home. He writes poetry about the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and memorizes train conductors' announcements. He entertains firefighters by singing to them in their firehouses, unaccompanied by music, because he likes to. His first home is an Upper East Side apartment; his second is the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He has spent so many afternoons inside the Met that the security guards call out his name when they see him. He tells them what subway lines to avoid because of weekend service changes, which he monitors religiously.

"I want to make sure they won't be late to the museum," explained Yuki, now 20.

It is easier during the holidays to see the city as children see it, not as a faulty municipality, not as a city of strangers, but as a snowy dream world where the uniformed ranks of firefighters, security guards and doormen all know your name. Yuki's New York is such a place.

"A good soul, passing through," one doorman, Tom Flynn, said of Yuki.

Mr. Flynn, 43, works at 1105 Park Avenue and has known Yuki for years, first meeting him as the firefighters and others did, when Yuki simply stopped by to introduce himself and say hello. Many of the workers Yuki has befriended think of him as an adopted little brother, and though some have a hard time understanding everything he says, they give him something they offer few others in the middle of their workdays: their time.

Mr. Flynn and other doormen on the Upper East Side have stood inside their lobbies looking over Yuki's schoolwork. Last Sunday, firefighters with Engine 22, Ladder 13 on East 85th Street invited him to their annual holiday party. One evening several years ago, three boys chased Yuki down a street. They wanted his money. He ran to an apartment-building security guard he knew and hid behind him. The burly guard turned to the boys giving chase and minced no words, telling them, "He's with me."

Unofficial Tour Guide

One recent morning, Yuki stood at a computer in a lush, darkened corner of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He typed in a long number: 62.233.14. It is the collection number for one of 19 objects in the museum's American Wing that makes up a glass and bronze Tiffany desk set, including a letter opener and other items.

Yuki memorized the number. He has lived on the Upper East Side, within walking distance of the museum, since arriving in New York. He went to the museum once when he was a seventh grader at Simon Baruch Middle School on East 21st Street. He liked it so much that he turned it into a personal after-school program for much of his adolescence, stopping by so often - sometimes two or three times a week, sometimes more - that he has become a kind of permanent visitor.

Yuki knows his way around the museum as well as any tour guide. He has no problem getting a security guard to sign a special pass allowing him to use a computer in a library usually reserved for researchers. Staff members let him into the museum free. "He's like family," one security guard said.

The guards wear blue jackets, ties and stern expressions, taking seriously their jobs to secure one of the world's largest art museums. Yet when Yuki steps around the corner of a hallway many of them will inevitably make the not-so-serious gesture of extending their right hand, palm out. Yuki throws them a quick high-five.

Spellbound by more than two million works of art, playfully adrift amid a collection that spans 5,000 years of world culture, he speed-walks among tourists in his blue-and-white Nike sneakers and backpack, holding one of the museum's walkie-talkie-style audio guides at his chest like a metal detector in a hunt for buried treasure. He does not horse around inside, walking quietly beneath the gaze of Rembrandts and Vermeers.

With every step, the world passes him by, framed, encased, rendered pristine. Over here is one of his favorite pieces of Iranian art. Over there is another favorite, Robert Blum's "Ameya," a painting of a Japanese street vendor that dates to the late 1800's. "It reminds me of my country," Yuki explained.

Yuki has black, unkempt hair and wears a necklace with a clip that holds keys, a Tokyo Disneyland pendant and his Velcro wallet. He stands about 5 feet, not much taller than some of the children he walks past in the museum.

Though 20 years old, he is more of a boy than a man. When he gets a Slurpee at 7-Eleven, he combines two flavors in one cup, because it seems like a fun thing to do. When he gets a microwave pizza pocket, he pours cheese sauce on top, because he can. He reads children's books and watches children's movies and writes his own fanciful short stories, including one about a remote-control toy fire truck that ran a red light at Third Avenue and caused an accident.

It is easier for Yuki to write his thoughts than to speak them. Yuki has trouble communicating with people, the words and sentences at times tumbling slowly from his lips and at other times leaping out all at once in an inarticulate jumble. Security guards, doormen and others have to listen carefully, with patience, to make sense of what he says.

Yuki has a genetic abnormality. In Yuki's case, a tiny part of Chromosome 18 is missing. Such abnormalities can lead to a variety of physical and mental disabilities, some more severe than others. Chromosome 18 deletions affect an estimated 1 in 40,000 births, said Jannine Cody, founder and president of the nonprofit Chromosome 18 Registry and Research Society.

"People don't even know these sorts of things exist," said Dr. Cody, an associate professor of pediatrics at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio. "Everyone knows about Down syndrome, but there's all these other chromosome abnormalities that are much more rare."

Yuki does not think of himself as disabled. His mother, Yoko Endo, said doctors in Japan told her Yuki would never learn English if she brought him to the United States. She is proud of him for proving them wrong. "I know he's not going to be completely like us, like height or mentality," said Ms. Endo, 44. "But to me, this is it, fortunately. He could be more bad, but this is it."

Ms. Endo lives with Yuki in a two-bedroom apartment on East 95th Street that they share with two friends. She is writing a book about her life in America and said she supports Yuki by working as a freelance Web designer. Over the years, she has expanded the boundaries of the area her son could explore, block by block, giving him unsupervised independence.

"You can't hold a child to grow up," she said, "so that's why I just let him go."

Many of those Yuki has met on his travels do not know the specifics of his condition. Yuki's attitude - blissfully refusing to acknowledge any difference between himself and others - becomes contagious. While a student at the High School for Environmental Studies on West 56th Street, he was known for getting teachers and students to sign petitions for various causes and for greeting people not with a handshake, but by gently touching his head to their shoulders in a kind of head-hug. Though he graduated in June, he goes back every Wednesday to help students recycle their garbage.

"He seems like he doesn't even notice his disability," said James Hansen, a wildlife conservation teacher. "He just plows right through that, like it's not even there."

At the graduation ceremony in a Lincoln Center concert hall, when Yuki's name was called he was greeted with loud applause and cheers. Fellow students gave him a standing ovation.

A Stickler for the Rules

On a cold December afternoon, Yuki sat on a Manhattan-bound A train. He was returning from a long trip to Queens. He had the urge to eat pancakes at a diner he had become interested in, the Rockaway Sunset Diner, not far from the boardwalk at Rockaway Beach. Taking a trip to the beach in snowy, chilly weather did not strike him as unusual. It was a big day for Yuki: new subway rules had taken effect that week.

Yuki is fascinated with the tiniest of the city's intricacies: the toll-free number (#3333) dialed at subway pay phones to hear automated service information and changes; the elevator at the Met that people often confuse for a gallery room when the doors are open because of its wood paneling and display case; the long-forgotten news that earlier this month southbound F trains were operating on the D line from West Fourth Street to Coney Island-Stillwell Avenue, an announcement of which Yuki carried in his backpack.

He often stands in subway cars carefully reading the public service messages displayed above the seats, singing the words out loud as if they were lyrics to a romantic ballad.

He also sings for neighborhood firefighters. At the Engine 22 firehouse on East 85th Street and Engine 44 on East 75th Street, he gives performances in the kitchen, belting out Frank Sinatra's "Summer Wind."

Engine 22 used to keep a copy of his report card on the refrigerator. "He's a good kid," said Lt. Dennis Stanford of Engine 44. "He's surprising, the things that he comes up with."

Yuki knows what he wants to do for a living: He wants to be a firefighter, bus driver, train conductor and tour guide. There is some uncertainty about his future in New York. Ms. Endo said she is considering leaving the country within a year or two. She said she would like to see her son go to college someday, but because of the possible move she said those plans would wait.

Yuki thinks of college as a far-off, out-of-reach place. Asked if he ever thought about going to college, he said, "Only in my dreams." Then he said that he had never been to summer camp and that he wanted to go there, too.

On the train, Yuki pulled out a brochure from the Metropolitan Transportation Authority detailing the new rules. He read the rules aloud for the benefit of his fellow riders, some of whom tried their best to ignore him. One new rule in particular he repeated over and over, stating in a conductor's tone that as of Dec. 5 it was a violation to place one's foot or bags on an empty seat. A woman seated across from him had her legs up on the empty seat next to her.

"Am I violating by having my feet up here?" she asked Yuki. Yuki said yes.

She did not take offense. Instead, she put her white sneakers back on the floor and started chatting with him. "They say in the future," the woman told Yuki, "our world is going to be somewhat Communist."

Yuki handed her the small white brochure he had been reading from and sat down next to her. Moments ago, they were strangers on a train, but no more. She confided in him her many theories about the state of the world. Yuki listened, and talked about the transportation authority. She asked him his name. Then she stood up as the train pulled into her stop.

As she stepped out the doors, she turned around and called out, as if to an old friend, "Bye-bye, Yuki."

ENV: An end to Japanese Whaling?

2005-12-24T22:23:00.000-06:00

Group Claims to Scuttle Japanese Whaling
Environmental Group Sending Boats After Japanese Whaling Fleet
Claims to Force a Temporary Halt
By MIKE CORDER, The Associated Press

SYDNEY, Australia - The captain of an environmentalist boat chasing Japanese whalers in the Antarctic claimed Sunday the Japanese had abandoned hunting for the day as they were chased by protesters through storm-tossed seas.

"I can assure you no whales are going to be killed today," Paul Watson, captain of the Sea Shepherd ship Farley Mowat, told The Associated Press by satellite phone.

Sea Shepherd and Greenpeace protest ships have been chasing Japan's whaling fleet for days, hampering their hunt for 850 minke whales and 10 fin whales as part of the country's scientific research program, which is permitted as research under the rules of the International Whaling Commission.

Opponents call the research program a disguise for commercial whaling.

Calls to the Japanese Fisheries Agency in Tokyo went unanswered Sunday.

Watson claimed the Japanese ship Nisshin Maru came close to ramming the Farley Mowat during their encounter. The environmentalists then towed a mooring line through the water and the Japanese ship backed off to ensure the rope did not get tangled in its propellor, Watson said.

Greenpeace spokeswoman Carolin Wenzel said the group believes no whales had been killed in the past day because of strong winds in the region.

ENV: Targeting Emerald Ash Borers

2005-12-24T22:21:00.000-06:00

Scientists Target Tree-Killing Beetle
Scientists Seek Genes, Critters to Fend Off Tree-Killing Beetle
By CARRIE SPENCER, The Associated Press

DELAWARE, Ohio - The wasps listen for sounds of their prey, then drill through bark to reach them. Either they paralyze the juvenile victim and glue eggs to its back, or pierce it to lay the eggs inside. When the eggs hatch, the wormy wasp young munch away at leisure.

For anyone who loves a day in a shady yard, a walk in the woods or the crack of a baseball bat, the gore is justified.

The target is the larvae of emerald ash borer, an Asian beetle that has been 100 percent fatal to North American ash trees since its arrival about 10 years ago, likely in a shipping pallet. The beetle, first noticed in 2002, has blanketed most of lower Michigan and appeared in Ohio, Indiana and southern Ontario.

Worried that the bug cannot be stopped, researchers are trying to figure out how to help the ash tree survive an infestation. Scientists are studying borer-killing wasps, insecticide use, crossbreeding and the possibility of breeding a tree that makes its own insecticide.

"What we need to do is contain this for as long as we can, to give research a chance to catch up," said Vic Mastro, director of the U.S. Agriculture Department lab that detects and finds ways to eliminate exotic pests. "Ultimately, it would be good to eliminate this pest, but we don't have the tools to do this right now."

The scientists have a role model. The Asian ash tree lives alongside the beetle, but scientists there haven't studied why, so researchers here are starting from scratch.

The ash is found throughout the eastern United States and along the West Coast. Many cities planted the trees which have rounded crowns and vibrant gold fall color along streets that were lined with elms before Dutch elm disease nearly wiped them out. Ash trees are also valued for wildlife food and their strong wood used for furniture and baseball bats.

The beetle larvae feed on the cell layers beneath the bark that the tree needs to transport water and nutrients, killing it within about four years.

The U.S. and Canadian governments are sticking with a strategy of cutting down swaths of trees to keep the beetle from spreading, but in the past year agreement has grown that the approach will at best slow the insect. It spreads about a half mile a year, but in laboratory conditions has been shown to fly six miles without stopping.

More and more researchers say that flying ability, plus the impossibility of stopping campers from moving infested firewood, mean the spread is likely to continue, devastating dense stands of ash in forests from the Dakotas to Maine. Already it has killed about 15 million of some 700 million ash trees in Michigan. Ohio has fared better, with some 250,000 trees cut and chipped to try to stop the spread from the largely agricultural northwest to 5 billion ash trees.

Unlike the elm, in which a few trees survived because of genetic resistance, there's no sign in ash trees of any resistance to ash borer, said Jennifer Koch, research biologist with the U.S. Forest Service lab in the central Ohio city of Delaware. "That doesn't mean it doesn't exist, but we haven't found it."

The speed of solutions being studied range from insecticides which work right now but are practical only for yard or golf course application to painstaking crossbreeding that could take decades to develop a resistant tree if it works at all.

Three species of stingless Asian wasps are in quarantine in government labs in Michigan and Massachusetts. Needed tests include how to rear them in the lab and whether they attack native species of ash borer that aren't a problem, said Juli Gould, a researcher in the lab Mastro runs on Cape Cod in Massachusetts.

The wasps can raise three to four generations a summer.

Even faster at reproducing are fungal infections and diseases, said Leah Bauer, a U.S. Forest Service researcher in East Lansing, Mich. Researchers hope to find some that attack ash borers in Asia.

At Purdue University, Rick Meilan is exploring ways for the trees to make their own pesticide.

Organic farmers often control pests with a bacterial toxin that can target a specific insect. Meilan has identified at least two toxins specific to emerald ash borer, which cause internal ulcers or paralyze their chewing parts.

The next step is getting the toxin-making gene into the tree, taking advantage of a natural bacteria that inserts genes in plant cells, then getting a few cells to grow into a tree.

The approach has been used before with corn and other plants but is met with resistance by environmental groups and a skeptical public that doesn't like mixing creatures that couldn't breed naturally.

"It's just DNA," Meilan said. "There are mechanisms by which genes move around in nature all the time."

An insecticide-making tree is at least two years away, and the government would have to write regulations for it, which likely would include some requirement that the tree be sterile, he said.

Here in Delaware, the Forest Service is taking a much slower but more traditional approach.

Chest-high seedlings as thick as a thumb give Koch hope that she succeeded in crossing Asian and American species of ash, but it will take genetic testing to make sure.

Even if the cross works, there's no guarantee that it's the tree's genes that make it resist the borer. If they do, it will take decades of more crossbreeding to get an essentially American tree with Asian resistance.

It's impossible to predict how natural controls such as the wasps will work until they're released in the environment, Gould said.

"This will be another tool in the toolbox to slow the spread of this thing," Gould said. "They need to throw everything they have at this pest."

On the Net:

http://www.emeraldashborer.info/Research.cfm

COM: Still shopping?

2005-12-24T21:54:00.000-06:00

There's still time to fill a stocking . . .

COM: Times' ID Editorial

2005-12-22T14:01:00.000-06:00

Editorial
Intelligent Design Derailed
The New York Times, December 22, 2005

By now, the Christian conservatives who once dominated the school board in Dover, Pa., ought to rue their recklessness in forcing biology classes to hear about "intelligent design" as an alternative to the theory of evolution. Not only were they voted off the school board by an exasperated public last November, but this week a federal district judge declared their handiwork unconstitutional and told the school district to abandon a policy of such "breathtaking inanity."

A new and wiser school board is planning to do just that by removing intelligent design from the science curriculum and perhaps placing it in an elective course on comparative religion. That would be a more appropriate venue to learn about what the judge deemed "a religious view, a mere relabeling of creationism and not a scientific theory."

The intelligent design movement holds that life forms are too complex to have been formed by natural processes and must have been fashioned by a higher intelligence, which is never officially identified but which most adherents believe to be God. By injecting intelligent design into the science curriculum, the judge ruled, the board was unconstitutionally endorsing a religious viewpoint that advances "a particular version of Christianity."

The decision will have come at an opportune time if it is able to deflect other misguided efforts by religious conservatives to undermine the teaching of evolution, a central organizing principle of modern biology. In Georgia, a federal appeals court shows signs of wanting to reverse a lower court that said it was unconstitutional to require textbooks to carry a sticker disparaging evolution as "a theory, not a fact." That's the line of argument used by the anti-evolution crowd. We can only hope that the judges in Atlanta find the reasoning of the Pennsylvania judge, who dealt with comparable issues, persuasive.

Meanwhile in Kansas, the State Board of Education has urged schools to criticize evolution. It has also changed the definition of science so it is not limited to natural explanations, opening the way for including intelligent design or other forms of creationism that cannot meet traditional definitions of science. All Kansans interested in a sound science curriculum should heed what happened in Dover and vote out the inane board members.

The judge in the Pennsylvania case, John Jones III, can hardly be accused of being a liberal activist out to overturn community values - even by those inclined to see conspiracies. He is a lifelong Republican, appointed to the bench by President Bush, and has been praised for his integrity and intellect. Indeed, as the judge pointed out, the real activists in this case were ill-informed school board members, aided by a public interest law firm that promotes Christian values, who combined to drive the board to adopt an imprudent and unconstitutional policy.

Judge Jones's decision was a striking repudiation of intelligent design, given that Dover's policy was minimally intrusive on classroom teaching. Administrators merely read a brief disclaimer at the beginning of a class asserting that evolution was a theory, not a fact; that there were gaps in the evidence for evolution; and that intelligent design provided an alternative explanation and could be further explored by consulting a book in the school library. Yet even that minimal statement amounted to an endorsement of religion, the judge concluded, because it caused students to doubt the theory of evolution without scientific justification and presented them with a religious alternative masquerading as a scientific theory.

The case was most notable for its searching inquiry into whether intelligent design could be considered science. The answer, after a six-week trial that included hours of expert testimony, was a resounding no.

The judge found that intelligent design violated the centuries-old ground rules of science by invoking supernatural causation and by making assertions that could not be tested or proved wrong. Moreover, intelligent design has not gained acceptance in the scientific community, has not been supported by peer-reviewed research, and has not generated a research and testing program of its own. The core argument for intelligent design - the supposedly irreducible complexity of key biological systems - has clear theological overtones. As long ago as the 13th century, St. Thomas Aquinas argued that because nature is complex, it must have a designer.

The religious thrust behind Dover's policy was unmistakable. The board members who pushed the policy through had repeatedly expressed religious reasons for opposing evolution, though they tried to dissemble during the trial. Judge Jones charged that the two ringleaders lied in depositions to hide the fact that they had raised money at a church to buy copies of an intelligent design textbook for the school library. He also found that board members were strikingly ignorant about intelligent design and that several individuals had lied time and again to hide their religious motivations for backing the concept. Their contention that they had a secular purpose - to improve science education and encourage critical thinking - was declared a sham.

No one believes that this thoroughgoing repudiation of intelligent design will end the incessant warfare over evolution. But any community that is worried about the ability of its students to compete in a global economy would be wise to keep supernatural explanations out of its science classes.

REV: Dance Via School

2005-12-21T00:53:00.000-06:00

Making Artists
Practice, Practice, Practice. Go to College? Maybe.
By ERIKA KINETZ, The New York Times, December 21, 2005

Mark Morris possesses five honorary doctorates. But he did not spend a day in college, rather training for a life in dance at what he likes to call "L'École of Hard Knocks." This, for him, consisted of heading to Europe after high school to practice folk dancing in Macedonia and Spanish dancing in Madrid. He also spent a fair amount of time cooking chickens and hanging out at weddings.

No surprise, then, that he dismisses what has become almost de rigueur for modern dancers: a college-level education. "Most of it in my opinion is just a big bag of wind," said Mr. Morris, whose Mark Morris Dance Group turned 25 this year. "Most college-level dance education should be pedagogy and criticism and history and theory and whatever and not be about performing dance."

Conservatory training fares little better in Mr. Morris's view. "I mostly think it ruins people," he said, though he did concede that Juilliard may be doing something right, given the fact that five of his dancers are graduates. "The .001 percent of people who graduate and become dance professionals, hurray for them," he said. "They are very lucky. I think most often it's in spite of school."

College-level dance programs are proliferating. Dance magazine's College Guide lists more than 500 such programs, up from 131 in 1966. But stable, paying jobs in the field are hard to find. And the utility of a college degree in dancing is a matter of endless debate.

Much of the training of modern dancers still takes place in independent dance studios, not colleges, universities or conservatories. Indeed, conservatories like the Juilliard School and the dance program at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts admit students only by audition, which means most people have some kind of training before they even apply. And if a number of dancers who did go to college say they were first exposed to modern dance in college, they add that they really learned to dance in childhood, from their first ballet, jazz or tap teachers.

So while college-age dancers, like college football players, face long odds of landing a spot in the pros, the picture is far murkier for the dancer than the running back: the football player at least knows that he has to go to college to have a shot at the N.F.L. "I thought you had to put all your eggs in that basket to make it happen," said Lauren Grant, who went to the Tisch School and joined the Morris company in 1998. "I know now that's not true." She credits N.Y.U. with helping her get her job with Mr. Morris, but she also says she wishes she had received a deeper academic education.

Not going to college at all gives young dancers a head start on what in many cases is a short career, and it remains the norm for professional ballet dancers. Modern dance is physically more permissive, but still mainly a young person's pursuit; those who rise through the ranks outside academia may be at a disadvantage when it comes to finding teaching jobs after they retire from the stage.

"In this climate, if you want to teach, you have to have a master's," said Maile Okamura, who joined the Morris company in 2001, after a career in ballet, and is one of just two of Mr. Morris's 17 dancers who lack a college degree. "I don't even have a bachelor's. I'm outside that system. I'm not sure how it's going to pan out."

Rima Faber, the program director of the nonprofit National Dance Education Organization, which promotes dance training, said the dance boom in colleges was partly due to the passage of the anti-sex-discrimination law Title IX in 1972 and the Equal Educational Opportunity Act of 1974. "Physical education went co-ed," she said. "And physical education for women started focusing on dance."

In the 1980's and 90's, most of these programs migrated out of the gym and into fine-arts departments. Even so, most are not designed to train professional performers. A star or two may emerge every few years, but many more alumni become teachers or scholars, or leave the field entirely. Some administrators say their programs have flourished simply because people love to dance.

The dance department at Juilliard, which has the luxury of admitting only the best of the best, estimates that in the last few years some 60 to 70 percent of students have found work as dancers after graduating. "We are sending a steady stream of young dance artists into the field, where they are being very well received," said Lawrence Rhodes, the director of Juilliard's dance division.

Tisch does not maintain employment statistics for its graduates, but Linda Tarnay, the chairwoman of the dance department, does acknowledge the awkwardness of preprofessional training for a profession with few paid jobs.

"We have grant-writing workshops," Ms. Tarnay said. "We have tax people come and talk to them about how to keep their taxes. But how to get a paying job? I can't say we do very well at that. I don't know what we could do."

There are no national statistics available, but the national service organization Dance/USA's surveys of two major metropolitan areas - Washington in 2003 and Chicago in 2002 - found that only 21 of the 286 companies in those two cities offered salaried positions. About half did not pay dancers at all.

Nonetheless, Ms. Tarnay said that applications to the Tisch dance program have been increasing; last year 450 people auditioned for 30 slots. "I think it's a miracle that anybody comes," she said. "I'm amazed every year that people still want to do this."

An added difficulty for educators trying to cram life skills into their curriculums is that dancers today must be more physically versatile than ever. Modern techniques have proliferated, and many choreographers now work on a project basis, so most dancers perform with different choreographers over the course of their careers.

"There aren't enough hours in the day to do all the kinds of disciplines and techniques and forms of dance," Mr. Rhodes of Juilliard said. "The variety of what is expected of students has expanded hugely."

Bradon McDonald, a 1997 Juilliard graduate now in the Morris company, said he was happy that his training focused on dance, rather than, say, grant writing or public relations. "I don't think training dancers in business is going to make the dance world blossom," he said. "I think training dancers in dancing is the only option."

Dance departments at liberal arts colleges take a different approach. Brown University, for example, has no dance major and does not even offer ballet classes; dance classes are offered through its well-regarded theater, speech and dance department. "Nobody is training anybody to be a professional in anything at Brown," said Julie Strandberg, the director of the university's dance program. "We're training people to be educated, well-rounded people."

Two of Mr. Morris's dancers attended Brown, but Ms. Strandberg said that few of the students who dance seriously there stay in the field. Some become performers or scholars; others become doctors or lawyers who later serve on the boards of dance companies.

Joe Bowie, who graduated from Brown with honors in English and American literature and joined the Morris company in 1994, is an exceptional case: he started dancing in college, on a dare, and soon dropped his pre-med ambitions. "I was smitten," he said.

While a late start like Mr. Bowie's is difficult for a man, it is near-impossible for a woman. Marjorie Folkman and June Omura, both members of the Morris company, graduated with honors from the dance program at Barnard College, which has an extensive roster of technique classes and is the only school at an Ivy League university with a dance major.

Having danced since childhood, Ms. Folkman decided to go to Barnard in part, she said, because she thought attending a conservatory would have been an intellectual sacrifice. But she spent her college years second-guessing herself.

"I wanted to transfer out," she said. "I kept thinking: I should be in a conservatory, because I'm not getting the training." Today, she says, she is grateful she stayed in college.

"We graduated knowing that if you can't find work, make up your own work," Ms. Folkman said, adding that she feels equipped to tackle a postdance career, whatever it may be. "I am capable of doing other things. I had to take physics. I had to read and discuss and debate and be in the world."

All that reading and discussion may even be good for dancing. "The more widely exposed to all ideas you are, the more interesting person and therefore dancer you are," Ms. Omura said, adding that she had given up on a dance career until she rediscovered modern dance at Barnard. "That sounds fanciful, but I really believe it's true."

Barnard does not have detailed employment information about its dance alumni. Mary Cochran, the chairwoman of the college's department of dance, said that recent dance majors had gone on to medical school, independent choreography and teaching. One is a Fulbright scholar; one dances for Neta Pulvermacher; and one just joined Philadanco, whose founder, Joan Myers Brown, was the subject of the graduate's senior thesis.

Ultimately, Mr. Morris says he does not care what kind of degrees, if any, his dancers have; he cares only that they can dance. His advice to aspiring dancers? "Dance," he said. "Read. Learn music. Look around. Participate in the world."

Which, to some, may sound very much like the ideals of a college education. Presented with this conundrum, Mr. Morris paused. "You need fabulous parents," he said. "I don't know what the answer is."

COM: The Alaska Drilling Decision

2005-12-21T00:39:00.000-06:00

Faith in humanity slowly being restored, part II.

Senate Blocks Military Bill Over Arctic Drilling
By CARL HULSE, The New York Times, December 21, 2005

WASHINGTON, Dec. 21 - The Senate voted today to block a Pentagon spending bill that would open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling, preventing Congressional Republicans and President Bush from achieving their long-sought goal of allowing exploration in the Alaskan wilderness.

In the second major legislative showdown of the day, drilling supporters fell four votes short of the 60 needed to cut off debate on the $453.3 billion spending bill as the Senate voted 56-to-44 to end a filibuster. Forty-one Democrats and one independent were joined by two Republicans in opposing the drilling plan.

Democrats argued that Senate Republicans, at the behest of Senator Ted Stevens, the Alaska Republican who has long championed the oil drilling, were twisting the rules of the Senate by adding the drilling initiative to a military bill. Senate leaders immediately began exploring ways to save the underlying Pentagon spending bill before Congress comes to a close in the next few days. As it stands now, temporary authorization for Pentagon spending expires on Dec. 31.

Earlier today, with Vice President Dick Cheney breaking a 50-50 tie, the Senate approved a $40 billion budget-cutting measure that Republicans hailed as evidence of their determination to control federal spending.

"Victory No. 1," Senator Bill Frist, the majority leader, declared after the budget measure was passed.

But Democrats won a procedural victory on the budget bill that forced it backed to the House of Representatives, delaying final approval and depriving House and Senate Republicans of a clear-cut win. The House has left the capital for the holidays and it is unclear when lawmakers could take up the minor changes.

The decisive vote by Mr. Cheney, who cut short an overseas trip to be on hand, was needed because five Republican senators joined all 44 Democrats and an independent in opposing the budget plan, which Democrats argued cut too deeply into social programs.

"This bill targets Americans with the greatest needs and the fewest resources," said Senator Harry Reid, the Nevada Democrat who is the Senate minority leader.

Republicans said the budget bill would save $39.7 billion over five years. As the oil debate began, Senator Robert Byrd, Democrat of West Virginia and a fierce defender of Senate rules, urged his colleagues to block the military spending bill, even though he is a longtime friend of Senator Ted Stevens, Republican of Alaska and the champion of the oil drilling plan.

"I love this man from Alaska, I do," he said after clutching a bound book of Senate rules. "But I love the Senate better."

Today's votes are part of a flurry of activity in the last few days before the Senate leaves for the holidays. Several senators have said that the votes on several major issues, like Arctic oil drilling and the spending cuts, would determine whether the Congressional session ends on a triumphal note for Republicans, or whether Democrats will celebrate blocking their efforts.

"It is make it or break it," Senator Mel Martinez of Florida said Tuesday as he left a closed lunch where Republicans, led by the majority leader, Senator Bill Frist of Tennessee, had laid out strategy for the next 24 hours.

The last few days at the Capitol have been chaotic, with an exhausting all-night session in the House that ended just before sunrise Monday and then, after adjournment there, two days of bitterness in the Senate over process as well as policy.

The two parties have done battle over the fate of the USA Patriot Act, the broad antiterrorism law. Charges and countercharges are flying over the Bush administration's secret domestic surveillance program. Democrats continue attacking the Republicans for making what the minority deems draconian cuts in social programs.

Veteran legislators say that preholiday theater is not unusual and that Congressional leaders often use the calendar to try to enact measures that would never pass otherwise.

"I have been here 27 years, including, I think, two of those years on Christmas Eve," said Senator John W. Warner, Republican of Virginia. "I actually observed fisticuffs between two of the most respected Republican senators ever to serve in this body on Christmas Eve."

As for Mr. Frist, he said he had no problem with working this close to the holiday.

"I used to be a surgeon," he said. "People got sick all the time on the 20th, the 21st."

One piece of legislation for which no votes are yet scheduled is the USA Patriot Act. Sixteen provisions of the law are set to expire at the end of the year, and an effort to extend them was blocked by a filibuster last week. Senate leaders traded accusations Tuesday over who would be held responsible if the provisions lapsed.

"The Patriot Act expires on Dec. 31, but the terrorist threat does not," Mr. Frist told reporters, echoing President Bush. "Those on the Senate floor who are filibustering the Patriot Act are killing the Patriot Act."

Democrats, who were joined by four Republicans in blocking the measure, say it is the majority that is at fault, for refusing to agree to a temporary extension while disputes over civil liberties safeguards are worked out.

Republican leaders also say they might have been able to finish earlier had they not lost considerable time in September dealing with Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath. But the approach of a holiday break is often an occasion for legislative action, as the time pressure builds and lawmakers relent on some fights.

Richard A. Baker, the Senate historian, recalled that in 1982, exasperated senators of both parties joined just two days before Christmas to shut off a filibuster by a handful of conservatives against an increase in the federal gasoline tax.

After the lopsided vote, Senator George J. Mitchell, Democrat of Maine, recalled for his colleagues Cromwell's exhortation to Parliament in 1653: "You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing; in the name of God, go."

Tags: Links, Blogs, Culture, Science, Politics, Environment, milkriverblog

LIT: Windhover/New Texas Conference

2005-12-19T21:12:00.000-06:00

The Writers’ Festival
University of Mary Hardin-Baylor
January 4-7, 2005

Wednesday, January 04, 2006
12:00 PM
Registration in Mabee Sub (Mabee Student Center)
1:00 PM
Readings in Brindley Auditorium (York Science Center)
Brady Peterson (poetry)
Alan Berecka (poetry)
Larry Thomas (poetry reading from Stark Beauty)
3:00 PM
Workshops (Mabee Student Center, 2nd Floor, Rooms 219 and 220)
Jill Patterson (Master Class--Prose, MSC 219)
Angela O'Donnell (Master Class--Poetry, MSC 220)
7:00 PM
Nixon Memorial Lecture in Brindley Auditorium (York Science Center)
Lyle Novinski

Thursday, January 05, 2006
8:30 AM
Readings in Brindley Auditorium (York Science Center)
Angela O'Donnell (poetry)
Anne McCrady (poetry, All We Can Hope For )
John Jenkinson (poetry, Rebekah Orders Lasagna)
10:00 AM
Workshops (Mabee 2nd Floor Rooms 219, 220, and 222)
Carol Rhodes, "Let's Get More Organized: How to Have More Time to Write"
John Jenkinson, "Publishing for Beginners"
Carlyn Luke Reding, "Looking into the Circle: Cracking the Writer's Block"
11:30 PM

Lunch on your own (usually people go to local restaurants together)
1:00 PM
Presentation in Brindley Auditorium (York Science Center)
Louis Gamino, Death of a Child in Art and Poetry
3:00 PM
Workshops (Mabee Student Center, 2nd Floor, Rooms 219 and 220)
Jill Patterson (Master Class--Prose, MSC 219)
Angela O'Donnell (Master Class--Poetry, MSC 220)
6:00 PM
Special Performance (A Work in Progress)
Neil Ellis Orts, "Inarticulations"
7:00 PM
Keynote Address in Brindley Auditorium (York Science Center)
Jill Patterson, non-fiction A Guilty Woman

Friday, January 06, 2006
8:30 AM
Readings in Brindley Auditorium (York Science Center)
Donna Walker Nixon (fiction, Sing to Me of Heaven)
Allen Powell (fiction, "A Naughty Night")
LaVerne Clark (fiction, Keepers of the Earth)
10:00 AM
Workshops (Mabee Student Center, 2nd Floor, Rooms 219 and 220)
Barbara Youngblood Carr, "Finding Your Poetic Voice and Believing in What You Do"
Deanna Jones, "Mothering as Poetry"
11:30 PM
Lunch on your own (usually people go to local restaurants together)
1:00 PM
Readings in Brindley Auditorium (York Science Center)
L.D. Clark (fiction, The Plains Beyond)
Carolyn Kennedy (creative non-fiction, "Family Circle")
2:00 PM
Readings in Brindley Auditorium (York Science Center)
Carlyn Luke Reding (poetry reading from Freeport Bottle Works)
Joe Christopher (poetry reading from Canto 3 of The O.K. Epic)
3:00 PM
Workshops (Mabee Student Center, 2nd Floor, Rooms 219 and 220)
Jill Patterson (Master Class--Prose, MSC 219)
Angela O'Donnell (Master Class--Poetry, MSC 220)
7:00 PM
Keynote Address in Brindley Auditorium (York Science Center)
Barbara Crooker, reading from Radiance and Impressionism

Saturday, January 07, 2006
8:30 AM
Readings in Brindley Auditorium (York Science Center)
Michael Lythgoe (poetry)
Audell Shelburne (poetry)
Open microphone, particularly for workshop participants to share their progress
10:30 AM
Workshops (Mabee Student Center, 2nd Floor, Rooms 219 and 220)
Carol Rhodes, "Manuscript Submissions. . . Playing by the Rules"
C. S. Ragsdale, "How to Research and Write the Historical True Story"
12:00 PM
Conference Ends

Tags: Links, Blogs, Culture, Science, Politics, Friends, Football, Environment, Soccer, Theatre, Film, Music, Dance, Literature

REV: The Evolving Movie Business II

2005-12-19T18:14:00.000-06:00

Before You Buy a Ticket, Why Not Buy the DVD?
By LAURA M. HOLSON, The New York Times, December 19, 2005

SAN FRANCISCO, Dec. 18 - At the Dubai International Film Festival last week, Morgan Freeman, the Oscar-winning actor and star of last year's "Million Dollar Baby," took on his most challenging role yet: movie entrepreneur.

Dubai was one of several stops on a Middle East tour for Mr. Freeman, who was meeting with local moviemakers, hoping to find independent films to distribute through his Internet venture, ClickStar. Mr. Freeman and Intel founded ClickStar this summer with an eye toward offering downloads of a movie at the same time as its theatrical release.

Mr. Freeman said in a phone interview Wednesday from Dubai that the industry practice of showing feature films in theaters first, then selling them later on DVD, was outdated. With new advances in digital filmmaking, he predicted, consumers will demand better access to movies.

"We want to give people what they want, when they want it," said Mr. Freeman. "We are following the wave."

Mr. Freeman is not the only entrepreneur riding the digital technology surf. In the last several months, a handful of new ventures have been formed to help filmmakers find their audience - online, on DVD and at the movie theater.

Among them is IndieFlix, based in Seattle, which was introduced by two independent filmmakers in October. For $9.95 a disc, the company will burn a feature or documentary film onto a DVD and ship it to a customer who has ordered it online. Another outfit, 2929 Entertainment, has teamed up with the Oscar-winning director Steven Soderbergh to offer the forthcoming movie "Bubble" simultaneously in theaters, on DVD and on cable television.

But how big is the market? Even those working on distributing movies in new ways cannot predict what will capture the public's interest. As many entrepreneurs did in the early days of the 1990's dot-com craze, they are experimenting with untested business models. Hollywood has a long-established way of promoting its movies, mainly through blockbuster releases. Until that changes, entrepreneurs will probably continue to find it challenging to get people to watch their films and to earn enough money to make their ventures profitable.

"The idea that a lot of things can get out without marketing clout is not there," said Bob Berney, a Hollywood veteran and president of Picturehouse, a theatrical distribution company. "I think there are complications for the next several years, as we are still in a theatrically driven mode."

Still, many in Hollywood smell opportunity, particularly since Steven P. Jobs, the chief executive of Apple and an industry outsider, announced he would offer some television shows and movies on the video iPod. "I've seen more movement in the last three months than the previous five years," said Todd Wagner, who along with his business partner, Mark Cuban, will release Mr. Soderbergh's "Bubble" in late January. "I think people are now saying they can't avoid this."

Smaller movies with limited appeal could have the most to gain from alternative distribution, either through movie downloads or bypassing studios altogether and selling DVD's directly to consumers. Such opportunities are enhanced in a digital world, which is not defined by international borders or movie-release patterns.

"There is a middle class of movies that have a niche audience," said Lori McCreary, Mr. Freeman's business partner. "If you put those audiences together throughout the world, it becomes a big audience."

Gian-Carlo Scandiuzzi, a co-founder of IndieFlix, said that 10 years ago, most independent filmmakers sought distribution deals with studios they hoped would market their films smartly. "That has changed," said Mr. Scandiuzzi. "Film studios are less likely to buy little-known movies, so the film's makers have to ask, 'How can I make money?' "

Mr. Scandiuzzi and his business partner, Scilla Andreen, started IndieFlix to give directors a place to sell smaller films that major studios would not choose to distribute. Directors submit their films to IndieFlix, which posts descriptions of them on a Web site. When customers pick a movie to buy, IndieFlix burns it onto a DVD and ships it to them. Each film's success depends largely on word of mouth.

Since mid-October, when IndieFlix opened for business, the service has sold about 100 copies of movies a day (about 60 are currently for sale on the site) and the average person buys two or three, Ms. Andreen said. By the end of the year, she said, IndieFlix hopes to offer about 160 films. But success may not be easy to measure: IndieFlix does not track filmmakers' budgets to see if movies make a profit.

"We're something of a petri dish, and want to see what comes of this venture," said Ms. Andreen.

Hollywood executives say that movies, particularly independent films, need smart marketing plans to break out of the clutter. At the Sundance Film Festival this year, 2,600 feature films were submitted for review, and only 120 were accepted.

Mr. Berney said that most filmmakers still needed a relationship with a studio to succeed. When he was involved in the release of "Happiness" in 1998, he said, "I did it out of my house with a telephone." But he conceded he would not have been able to do so if he had not had longstanding relationships in Hollywood. "I had a lot of connections to the film business," he said.

Peter Broderick, president of Paradigm Consulting, an independent film consultant based in Santa Monica, Calif., advises moviemakers on how to distribute their films in theaters and online. In 2003, he attended the Cannes Film Festival, where he helped sell "Faster," an independent documentary film about motorcycle racing narrated by Ewan McGregor. It had a limited release in theaters.

The makers of "Faster" had the right to sell the DVD themselves, and the film got its biggest boost on its Web site, Fastermovie.com. In particular, said Mr. Broderick, "They had a killer trailer."

Mr. Broderick said the film sold 5,000 DVD's the first two weeks it was for sale online, and an additional 8,000 DVD's in subsequent months. He estimated that by selling the DVD for about $23, the filmmakers earned about $16 to $18 per disc, compared with the $2 they would have made under a standard studio contract.

Later, when the filmmakers sold the DVD in retail stores, they added a bonus documentary and more footage. And as an incentive for fans who already owned the DVD, they offered a free T-shirt with the purchase of a second. Mr. Broderick said the film sold about 50,000 DVD's in retail stores and an additional 7,000 of the extended version on the Web site.

But most important, filmmakers get the names and e-mail addresses of fans, and can use that information to market their other movies, Mr. Broderick said. "The filmmakers have a sense of their audience that the studios don't," he said.

While most do-it-yourself distributors focus on online marketing or DVD sales, 2929 Entertainment works more broadly. The company has several entities: HDNet Films, which finances smaller-budget movies; Magnolia Pictures, a distributor; Landmark Theaters; and HDNet and HDNet Movies for cable broadcast.

Mr. Wagner, Mr. Cuban and Mr. Soderbergh plan to release "Bubble" simultaneously in their theaters, on DVD and on cable television. What the three men are proposing is a radical - and, to theater owners and existing distributors, not particularly welcome - model of how movies could be distributed one day. Theater owners complained several months ago when some media executives said the window between a movie's theatrical and DVD release would shrink. And video rental stores, which already fear going out of business if their renting customers become retail buyers, worry about an acceleration of that trend.

None of that is lost on Mr. Wagner, who conceded that a same-day multifaceted release of "Bubble" would not be possible if his group did not own both theaters and a cable channel. "It's not by coincidence," said Mr. Wagner. "I know if I went to another theater and said, 'Let's sell the movie at the same time on DVD and in the theater,' they would say 'no.'

"I don't think there is a right answer yet. We are experimenting. If we are just dead wrong, we are not going to do it anymore."

REV: An Asian Playing for Time

2005-12-18T23:25:00.000-06:00

Music
If Cambodia Can Learn to Sing Again
By PATRICIA COHEN, The New York Times, December 18, 2005

IT seems fitting that Arn Chorn-Pond should take on the inordinately ambitious goal of trying to rescue Cambodia's nearly extinct traditional music. After all, it was the music that rescued him.

His talent for playing the Khmer flute is the reason he survived the genocidal four-year reign of Pol Pot; the chief of the children's labor camp liked the way the 9-year-old Arn played the military and patriotic anthems that were based on familiar Khmer songs. Few were so lucky: among the estimated 1.7 million murdered by the Khmer Rouge were more than 90 percent of the country's artists and performers. For centuries, musicians had passed down their knowledge and skill orally, without recordings or transcriptions; now there are hardly any left. "We are on the brink of extinction," Mr. Chorn-Pond said. "This incredible culture has been reduced to the Killing Fields."

Mr. Chorn-Pond, 39, was stopping briefly in New York during a fall fund-raising tour. There was a few days' growth below his sharp cheekbones and soulful brown eyes. Sitting next to him in a small booth at a downtown diner was John Burt, a longtime friend and a partner in the effort to preserve Cambodia's thousand-year-old arts. "John is like my brother," Mr. Chorn-Pond said, throwing his arm around Mr. Burt's skinny frame. "He believes like I do."

For seven years now, the two have been working to record and teach Cambodia's arts, in part by finding performers and putting them to work as mentors for a new generation. So far they have tracked down 20 master musicians in 10 provinces, who are working with 300 students. A Cambodian Buena Vista Social Club.

Yet the men quickly realized that simply preserving the ancient arts wasn't enough, that without creating original work, the music would be like a pinned butterfly. They needed to provide new commissions, inspire new young artists. Mr. Burt recalled hearing that the ruins of Angkor Wat had become the largest single tourist destination in Asia. "Arn said it was fine that people were going to see these rocks," Mr. Burt explained, "but what about the living arts?"

So Mr. Burt, who is a producer as well as a philanthropist, came up with the idea of commissioning a new kind of opera that would shift the familiar focus from the Killing Fields and embody their project; it would integrate Cambodian and American, modern and traditional music, instruments and styles. He chose opera because it is one of the most popular forms of musical theater in Cambodia.

"We've never had a Cambodian-American opera," Mr. Chorn-Pond said. It is an example of "new musical forms growing out of the traditional."

It was also Mr. Burt's idea to base the story partly on Mr. Chorn-Pond's preservation efforts. In the opera, "Where Elephants Weep," Sam, a Cambodian refugee who escaped to America as a child, returns years later to salvage his country's ancient music (only to fall in love with a pop karaoke star).

Mr. Chorn-Pond's story, unhappily, differs in many important details from Sam's. Mr. Chorn-Pond did not escape the Khmer Rouge, who took over in 1975. Most of his family, which had run a musical theater for four generations, were murdered, including 9 of his 11 siblings. Sent to a labor camp with 700 others, Arn was one of five children picked to learn an instrument to play military songs. An old man with white hair taught him the khimm, a dulcimer, warning: "I'm not going to be here long. Learn well, this is your life." Arn never knew the man's name. After five days, he was taken to a mangrove field and killed.

When three of the five boys turned out to be insufficiently skilled, they, too, were taken to the mangroves.

Arn met another music teacher, Yoeun Mek, who taught him the flute, and the two helped each other stay alive. "I stole food for him," Mr. Chorn-Pond said, although the penalty for such a crime was death.

Arn's musical ability did not exempt him from the Khmer Rouge's other requirements: killing, observing daily executions, even witnessing occasional cannibalism. When the Vietnamese invaded in 1978, he was forced into the army. "Some refused to take the gun," he said, "but if they don't take it, they shoot them."

He eventually slipped away and made his way through the jungle to a refugee camp across the Thai border. Plucked from thousands of desperate children, Arn and a few others were adopted by the Rev. Peter Pond, a Congregationalist minister who worked at the camp. In a 1984 interview in The New York Times Magazine, when he was about 18, Arn told Gail Sheehy, "I am nobody before"; now, he said, "I am human."

For a few years after coming to the United States, he battled violent rages and suicidal feelings. Gradually those passed, but he was still haunted by terrible nightmares and guilt. He related a recurring dream to Sheehy: he is in a field holding a gun. On one side, the Khmer Rouge are beating an old woman; on the other, children are playing in a swimming ditch. He longs to join the children, but he knows that if he doesn't join the beatings, he himself will be punished.

Mr. Chorn-Pond has probably told some version of his experiences hundreds, if not thousands, of times during his 20 years of human rights work as a kind of perpetual expiation. He has raised money for Amnesty International, helped found Children of War to aid young survivors and started an anti-gang program in Lowell, Mass., and a community service program in Cambodia. His work has put him in contact with people like President Jimmy Carter, Bruce Springsteen, Peter Gabriel and, most important, Mr. Burt.

In 1996, Mr. Chorn-Pond returned to Cambodia to work on a theater project for Children of War and to locate Mr. Yoeun. They had not seen each other since the Vietnamese invaded. Now Mr. Chorn-Pond found him, drunk, on the streets of his own hometown, Battambang, cutting hair for money.

"He's a big guy, looks like gorilla," Mr. Chorn-Pond said, recalling the reunion. "He cried like a baby. His wife told me he never cried even when his mother died." When Mr. Yoeun met the Children of War group, he told them how Arn saved his life - the first time he revealed that part of his past to anyone. Later the two played together. That was when Mr. Chorn-Pond got the idea for the Master Performers Program. "Our project gave him a life," he said.

In 1998, Mr. Chorn-Pond and Mr. Burt, along with the nongovernmental organization World Education, helped found Cambodian Living Arts, which includes the master mentoring. The following year he took another trip to Phnom Penh. "I met a girl who reminded me of Lucy, Lucille Ball, you know, 'I Love Lucy'?" Mr. Chorn-Pond said. "She sells Chuckles, the candy, and wine on the street, but no one bought the wine, so she drank it herself."

The woman was Chek Mach, one of the country's most famous opera singers. "I had heard her on the radio as a child," Mr. Chorn-Pond said. "I was looking for her for many months." She, too, became a master, earning $80 a month teaching before she died in 2002.

As Mr. Chorn-Pond was walking or bicycling miles to remote villages looking for musicians, Mr. Burt was searching for someone who could make his idea for a Cambodian-American opera come to life. He found his librettist in 2000 at a performance of one of her plays at the Asia Society in New York. Catherine Filloux, a Canadian who once worked with Cambodian refugees, had written three plays about Cambodians and a libretto for a Chinese-American opera. (Her latest work, "Lemkin's House," about Raphael Lemkin, who coined the word "genocide," opens Off Broadway in February.)

Ms. Filloux began working on Mr. Burt's idea, but it took him two more years to find a composer. He met Him Sophy, who comes from a family of musicians and was visiting New York from the Royal University of Fine Arts in Cambodia on an artist exchange grant. Like Mr. Chorn-Pond, he was a child when the Khmer Rouge took over. Somehow he survived a labor camp and eventually returned to study at the Royal University. In 1985, he won a scholarship to study at the Moscow State Tchaikovsky Conservatory, and he stayed 13 years before returning home as one of only three professional, classically trained Cambodian musicians who could write music.

For three years, Mr. Him has been working on the score for "Where Elephants Weep," combining Western rock, classical music and rap with Cambodia's music. It is a meeting of two worlds - like the libretto, which tells a story of Romeo and Juliet (or Tom and Taev, in the Cambodian version), of East and West, of the ancient and contemporary.

IN July, Mr. Burt, who lives part-time in Vermont, brought Mr. Him to New York, and set him up in his own West Village apartment to finish the score, while Mr. Burt continued to look for backers.

One afternoon this summer, Mr. Him and Ms. Filloux were working in her cozy Upper West Side apartment.

"I can sing, but my voice is not a singer's," Mr. Him said apologetically, tapping his chest. He was sitting at a wooden table in front of a laptop and two small Sony speakers, the cord stretching across the tiny kitchen like a tripwire.

On his keyboard, Mr. Him sounded a tinny pling: a computerized approximation of the chapey, a two-string lute. Like the traveling musicians who used to play as they improvised poetry and social commentary, Mr. Him began to sing the prologue in a high, warbling voice. His left hand fluttered up and down at his stomach, as if he were playing:

"You must listen to my story.

I start in the year 63 ...

Halfway around the world, a man called 'King' has a dream

And musicians called the Beatles make the ladies scream."

Mr. Him stopped singing and explained with a satisfied smile, "I make the chapey player imitate the 'ladies scream.' "

After the prologue, the two went over the libretto line by line. As Ms. Filloux read, Mr. Him (who learned four languages before English) marked in his copy which syllable of each word should be stressed so that the music would match.

At one point, Ms. Filloux asked: "Can we go back to 'ancestors'? I worry about putting the emphasis on '-cestors.' "

He played it again.

"Our language is easy," he said with a laugh. "You don't need any stresses."

The complexities of the cross-cultural collaboration were also in evidence at a workshop this month in which the full opera was sung for the first time. Robert McQueen, the director, Scot Stafford, the music director, and Steven Lutvak, the musical adviser, painstakingly combed through the score, analyzing the lyrics, the concepts and the music. They suggested further Americanizing Sam's part, adding rock 'n' roll syncopation and some cursing. The musical changes were all right, but Mr. Him wasn't sure about the Cambodian audience's reaction to the swearwords. They spent 90 minutes working on four lines.

Later, Kay George Roberts, the conductor of the newly created New England Orchestra in Lowell, arrived. Home to Mr. Chorn-Pond half the year and to a large Cambodian population, Lowell seems a logical place for the American premiere (after the opera's scheduled opening in Phnom Penh next fall), and Mr. Burt was hoping that Ms. Roberts would agree to lead a performance of "Where Elephants Weep." She listened to the tenor and the soprano sing one of the songs, "No Mothers."

"These two different traditions have come together in an organic way," Ms. Roberts said later. As for performing it, she added, "I'm definitely interested."

Mr. Burt was at the session, but Mr. Chorn-Pond was not. He is back in Phnom Penh. With the opera on its way to completion and the masters program up and running, he has begun to close chapters of his past. A few years ago, he was able to find his mother and spend some time with her before she died of kidney failure. "She was a fireball, always talking," he said. She made everybody laugh, he added, even the doctors who treated her.

And four months ago, Mr. Chorn-Pond found Sokha, the only other boy of the original five chosen by the Khmer Rouge to be a musician who is still alive. "I've been searching for him for a long time," Mr. Chorn-Pond said. "Then, out of nowhere, I went to this mountain. He still worked for the Khmer Rouge for 50 cents a day, breaking rocks." (The Khmer Rouge control some disputed areas near the Thai border.)

"This guy is still a jungle boy," Mr. Chorn-Pond said. He took Sokha, seriously ailing from tuberculosis, and his wife and three children to live and work in his house, which is on a half-acre plot along the Mekong River.

During the trip to New York, Mr. Chorn-Pond talked about how much this home meant to him. "It's very difficult for me to put roots down," he said. He was turned toward Mr. Burt, his surrogate brother, looking imploringly at his face and holding his hand, seeming to forget that anyone else was at the table. "Hopefully, someday I can commit to somebody. I'm still scared."

Yet after talking about his large extended family, Cambodian and American, noting that he has lived longer than any male in his family and that, for the first time, he owns his own home, he pronounced: "At this moment, I'm a very happy man. This land, this house, I don't want anything more."

But actually, he does want something more: to explore his own art, to discover "who I would have been if it hadn't happened." He laughed, thinking of Cambodia's pop culture. "I want to be a karaoke star," he said. "I'm learning hip-hop, I'm learning break dancing, although I have problems with my body" - a result of repeated injuries during his youth.

Then, somewhat unexpectedly, he said, "I would like to be an artist instead of a human rights activist" - a sign, perhaps, that he might be ready to take a break from his self-imposed atonement.

During a recent cellphone conversation from Phnom Penh, he talked about how everyone can be redeemed, everyone can be forgiven. Did that mean he was finally able to forgive himself?

There was a long pause, and it was hard to tell if it was the bad connection or a hesitation. "Not totally," he replied. "It is very easy to get caught in your own wounds." But with his human rights work, he said: "There is a possibility I could do that. It is not easy, but I am doing it now."

So did he still have the dream, the one about the children playing on one side and the Khmer Rouge on the other?

"Yes," he said, but "I have it less now." He was explaining more, but the cell reception was poor and his voice kept fading out. In the dream, he said, he is still "caught in the middle."

"I know I will be shot if I turn away" from the Khmer Rouge, he added, but at least now a newfound confidence replaces the familiar terror. "I have no fear and no reluctance." He drops the gun and runs to the boys, to a lost youth, to innocence, to redemption.

REV: The Evolving Movie Business

2005-12-18T18:15:00.000-06:00

Pursuing the Scarcer Moviegoers
By SHARON WAXMAN, The New York Times, December 17, 2005

SANTA MONICA, Dec. 16 - With evidence increasing that the American moviegoing habit is in decline, theater owners are undertaking a concerted campaign to bring it back.

The National Association of Theater Owners, the primary trade group for exhibitors, is pushing to improve the theatrical experience by addressing complaints about on-screen advertisements, cellphones in theaters and other disruptions, while planning a public relations campaign to promote going out to the movies.

Some exhibitors are hiring more ushers to ride herd on inconsiderate patrons and are thinking about banning children after a certain hour, to cut down on crying babies in the theater, said John Fithian, president of the trade group.

"We have to attack rude behavior - fighting, bickering, talking too loud," Mr. Fithian said.

Some of the proposed solutions may not be so popular. The trade group plans to petition the Federal Communications Commission to permit the blocking of cellphones inside theaters, Mr. Fithian said. That would require changing an existing regulation, he added. But some theaters are already testing a no-cellphones policy, asking patrons to check their phones at the theater door.

A spokesman for a cellphone lobby said the group would object to any regulatory change. "We're opposed to the use of any blocking technology, because it interferes with people's ability to use a wireless device in an emergency situation," said Joseph Farren, a spokesman for CTIA-the Wireless Association, based in Washington.

Moviegoers' biggest complaint, however, is ticket prices. A recent online study found that price was the reason most often cited by those polled for staying away, far more than movie quality or rude behavior. The price of movie tickets has risen steadily over time, about 5 percent in the last two years. An adult ticket now typically costs $10 in major cities like New York and Los Angeles, though the average ticket price nationally is $6.34.

"It's gotten too expensive to go the theater," said Lauren Schneider, 49, who was strolling along the Santa Monica pedestrian mall on a brisk evening recently with her husband, Sascha. "You need a baby sitter. Tickets are $10, the popcorn is another $10. Before you're done it's a $50 night out."

When they think a movie is a must-see - like "King Kong" or "Good Night, and Good Luck" - they will go, said the couple. Otherwise, "if it's borderline, I'll wait to rent it on DVD," Mrs. Schneider said.

Mr. Fithian insisted that going to the movies is not too expensive, compared to other out-of-the-home leisure activities. "If consumers seriously analyzed their options, they'd realize that the cinema is the best value for a buck," he said.

The theater owners group plans to hire a public relations firm to promote that message, though Mr. Fithian acknowledged that his argument has so far fallen on deaf ears.

Among a dozen moviegoers interviewed at the Santa Monica AMC theater, almost all cited ticket prices as a major factor in deciding whether to attend a movie. Several said ads were a nuisance. Most cited the caliber of the movies as the biggest issue.

"There's a lack of quality stories," said Lisa Martin, 40, from Bakersfield, Calif., who was on her way to see "Syriana." "We feel like if we're going to spend this amount of money, we want to see something good."

None said ringing cellphones was a major problem, and some suggested that being denied access to their phones would discourage them from going to the theater. "I don't want an 18-year-old in charge of my cellphone," Mrs. Martin's husband, Clay, said, referring to the possibility that cellphones would be left at the door. "I have a $700 phone."

Asked about the proposals, Douglas Heller, executive director of the Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights, said that blocking phones might be a cure worse than the illness. "It doesn't sound like it's a plan that's been really thought out," he said. "There's a legitimate reaction against cellphone use in theaters, by moviegoers and theater owners. But I don't think the public is going to react very well to being handled in this way."

Even without new policies, theater owners say they are aggressively trying to respond to customer complaints and to maintain the comfort of seeing a movie in a big dark public space. Indeed, theater chains have invested in recent years in numerous amenities designed to upgrade the theatrical experience, with stadium seating, upscale restaurants in the lobby or state-of-the-art sound systems.

"We are trying to do a better job of policing our auditoriums, and making sure that if somebody is acting up in the theater, that they get one chance to shut off their cellphone or quit talking, and after that, they're asked to leave," said Aubrey Stone, president of the Georgia Theater Company, which owns theaters with 267 screens in Georgia, South Carolina and Virginia. "We don't want to ask people to leave, but they're ruining the experience for other patrons."

The measures are the first concerted response by movie exhibitors, the sector of the movie industry hit hardest this year. There has been a decline in the box office of more than 5 percent, and an even larger decline in movie attendance. The downturn has led some Hollywood studios to consider reducing, or even eliminating, the length of time between a theatrical release and that of the DVD, on the presumption that more people want to see movies in their homes.

Exhibitors vigorously oppose closing this gap, and their trade group has insisted that the current slump is merely a momentary dip in a cyclical business. The group contends that ticket sales are up over a 35-year period, though the industry's own figures show a decline in ticket sales for three years in a row, after a banner year in 2002.

Mr. Fithian and other executives said they had responded to the box-office slump by examining consumer research and listening more closely to patrons. They say that the three main complaints are movie advertisements, cellphones and other disturbances and the high price of going to the movies.

Theater owners will not eliminate on-screen advertisements, because doing so would drive ticket prices higher, Mr. Fithian said. But they are looking at ways to make the ads more entertaining and to mix them with information about the movies.

Screenvision, one of two companies that package on-screen advertising for exhibitors, has recently invested $50 million in a digital projection system to improve the viewing quality of the advertising. The other company, National CineMedia, is introducing 20-minute packages, which include, along with the ads, behind-the-scenes segments from movie sets like "King Kong."

"The biggest complaint we get from audiences is, 'We've seen it before on TV,' " said Kurt Hall, the chairman of National CineMedia. "We are taking that head on and going to try to achieve our goal by the end of the year, which is to have everything be original."

But Matthew Kearney, the chief executive of Screenvision, disputed the notion that advertising was a reason audiences might be staying home more. Ads "are not a deterrent" to going to the movies, he said. "Our current studies show that given the choice between ads or a blank screen, only 8 percent prefer a blank screen."

Still, he said, "we have to continue to try and improve what we're doing." He added, "If we don't, someone else will attract the audience to stay at home and watch TV, or play video games, or go to a restaurant."

Mr. Fithian said that consumers are complaining about the length and quality of ads. And he said advertising takes up too much time in the theater. How long is too long? "I don't know how long it should be," he said, "but it should be less than it is now."

OBT: Jack Anderson

2005-12-17T18:16:00.000-06:00

Jack Anderson, muckraking journalist, dies
Pulitzer Prize winner wrote syndicated column for more than a half-century
The Associated Press, Updated: 1:45 p.m. ET Dec. 17, 2005

WASHINGTON - Jack Anderson, the Pulitzer Prize-winning muckraking columnist who struck fear into the hearts of corrupt or secretive politicians, inspiring Nixon operatives to plot his murder, died Saturday. He was 83.

Anderson died at his home in Bethesda, Md., of complications from Parkinson's disease, said one of his daughters, Laurie Anderson-Bruch.

Anderson gave up his syndicated Washington Merry-Go-Round column at age 81 in July 2004, after Parkinson's disease left him too ill to continue. He had been hired by the column's founder, Drew Pearson, in 1947.

The column broke a string of big scandals, from Eisenhower assistant Sherman Adams taking a vicuna coat and other gifts from a wealthy industrialist in 1958 to the Reagan administration's secret arms-for-hostages deal with Iran in 1986.

It appeared in some 1,000 newspapers in its heyday.

Anderson took over the column after Pearson's death in 1969, working with a changing cast of co-authors and staff over the years.

A devout Mormon, Anderson looked upon journalism as a calling.

Considered one of the fathers of investigative reporting, Anderson was renowned for his tenacity, aggressive techniques and influence in the nation's capital.

"He was a bridge for the muckrakers of a century ago and the crop that came out of Watergate," said Mark Feldstein, Anderson's biographer and a journalism professor at George Washington University. "He held politicians to a level of accountability in an era where journalists were very deferential to those in power."

On Nixon’s ‘enemies list’
Anderson won a 1972 Pulitzer Prize for reporting that the Nixon administration secretly tilted toward Pakistan in its war with India.

He also published the secret transcripts of the Watergate grand jury.

Such scoops earned him a spot on President Nixon's "enemies list."

Watergate conspirator G. Gordon Liddy has described how he and other Nixon political operatives planned ways to silence Anderson permanently — such as slipping him LSD or staging a fatal car crash — but the White House nixed the idea.

Over the years, Anderson was threatened by the Mafia and investigated by numerous government agencies trying to trace the sources of his leaks.

In 1989, police investigated him for smuggling a gun into the U.S. Capitol to demonstrate security lapses.

Known for his toughness on the trail of a story, he was also praised for personal kindness.

Anderson's son Kevin said that when his father's reporting led to the arrest of some involved in the Watergate scandal, he aided their families financially.

"I don't like to hurt people, I really don't like it at all," Anderson said in 1972. "But in order to get a red light at the intersection, you sometimes have to have an accident."

Modest beginnings
Anderson began his newspaper career as a 12-year-old writing about scouting activity and community fairs in the outskirts of Salt Lake City, Utah.

His first investigative story exposed unlawful polygamy in his church.

He was as a civilian war correspondent during World War II and later, while in the Army, wrote for the military paper Stars and Stripes.

After he went to work with Pearson, the team took on communist-hunting Sen. Joseph McCarthy, exposed Connecticut Sen. Thomas Dodd's misuse of campaign money, and revealed the CIA's attempt to use the Mafia to kill Cuban leader Fidel Castro. Anderson also wrote more than a dozen books.

He was diagnosed with Parkinson's in 1986.

In a speech a decade later, he made light of the occasional, uncontrollable shaking the disease caused.

"The doctors tell me it's Parkinson's," he said. "I suspect that 52 years in Washington caused it."

He is survived by his wife, Olivia, and nine children

OBT: William Proxmire

2005-12-15T18:18:00.000-06:00

William Proxmire, Senator Who Abhored Waste, Dies
By RICHARD SEVERO, The New York Times, December 15, 2005

William Proxmire of Wisconsin, the longtime gadfly of the United States Senate who thrived on exposing frivolous federal spending and dispensed Golden Fleece Awards to spotlight what he considered bad uses of taxpayers' money, died today at a nursing home in Sykesville, Md. He was 90 and had remained a resident of the Washington metropolitan area after he announced in 1987 that he would not seek re-election, ending a colorful Senate career of 31 years.

Mr. Proxmire, who was also remembered for his championing of regimens of daily exercise (in his prime, he jogged nearly 10 miles a day) and spartan diet, learned he had Alzheimer's disease in 1995 and made it public three years later. A man who was proud of his keen intellect, it was a disease he feared and perhaps had a premonition about: in 1987 The Chicago Tribune reported that shortly before he retired, a full eight years before he received his diagnosis, he asked the Senate doctor what his odds were of living to the age of 80 without getting Alzheimer's disease, which is a degenerative disorder of the brain .The disease did not run in his family but he was worried about it. He said more than once that he did not want to be a senator if his intellect was for any reason diminished. He thought he could see the infirmities of old age on the horizon when he said he would not run again.

Mr. Proxmire, a Democrat, was first elected in 1957 to fill the unexpired term of the late Joseph R. McCarthy, the Republican who was censured for reckless attacks on those he accused of being communists or fellow travelers. McCarthy's successor could not have provided more of a contrast.

Senator Proxmire was fervid in his opposition to unnecessary spending. His Golden Fleece of the Month Award, in which he identified some "ridiculous" government outlay, became "as much a part of the Senate as quorum calls and filibusters," Senator Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia once observed.

A Golden Fleece was awarded, for example, to the National Science Foundation in 1975 for spending $84,000 to determine why people fell in love. Mr. Proxmire said that such study was better left to "poets and mystics, to Irving Berlin, to thousands of high school and college bull sessions, Dear Abby, Ann Landers ... "

Another Golden Fleece went to the National Institute for Mental Health, which spent $97,000 to study, among other things, the doings in a Peruvian brothel. The researchers said they had made repeated visits to the seraglio in the interests of accuracy, interviewing scarlet women "formally and informally.," They later infuriated some government officials by informing them they couldn't have a free copy of the book the taxpayers had paid for, that they'd have to buy it to find out what was seen and said.

The Federal Aviation Administration also felt Mr. Proxmire's wrath for spending $57,800 on a study of the physical measurements of 432 airline stewardesses, paying special attention to the "length of the buttocks" and how their knees were arranged when they were seated. Other Fleece recipients were the Law Enforcement Administration, for spending $27,000 to determine why prisoners wanted to get out of jail, and the Pentagon, for a $3,000 study that sought to determine if people in the military should carry umbrellas during rainshowers.

Over the years that the award was given, Senator Proxmire provided steady material for reporters and headline writers and made the nation laugh.

But he counted among his most significant accomplishments the government's 1986 approval of an international treaty outlawing genocide, for which he had delivered more than 3,000 speeches in the Senate over a 19-year period and which President Ronald Reagan finally signed into law in 1988. It took 40 years for the United States to join 97 other countries in a treaty outlawing genocide and it would not have done so were it not for Mr. Proxmire's tenacity. For two decades he would deliver a speech in favor of the treaty every morning the Senate was in session.

He also was credited with helping to block federal financing for the SST supersonic transport plane in 1970; in that battle, Mr. Proxmire bested the Nixon administration, Boeing, and his fellow Democratic senators Henry Jackson and Warren Magnuson, who desperately wanted the SST to create jobs in their home state of Washington.

He was tireless in pursuit of laws requiring lenders and credit card companies to disclose true lending rates and legislation enabling consumers to determine their credit ratings. He led forays against the practice by banks of "redlining" neighborhoods.

As chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, he pushed for repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, a landmark piece of New Deal legislation that, through strict regulation, sought to wipe out corrupt self-dealing in the financial system by separating banking from the brokerage business.

His penny-pinching was the bane of defense contractors, social scientists and fellow senators, whose raises and hefty campaign funds he opposed. Conservatives regarded him as a loose cannon at times; Norman C. Miller, writing in The Wall Street Journal in 1967, said Mr. Proxmire had led "fiery fights for hopeless causes." But not everything he did pleased the liberals, either; some of his fellow Democrats thought he was a self-centered grandstander. His reputation as a maverick was well earned.

In 1982, a convention of feminists booed him because he had voted against liberalizing abortion rights. Democrats were also upset when he voted to approve the conservative William H. Rehnquist as chief justice of the United States.

His Wisconsin constituents were not always pleased with him either, even though they kept voting for him. He just did not bring home the bacon the way other senators did. On one occasion, the people of LaFarge wanted some federal money to improve a lake. Congress was more than willing but Senator Proxmire shot it down, calling it a waste. The lake became a mud hole and someone in LaFarge put up a sign calling it "Lake Proxmire."

And the senator had a bittersweet relationship with New York. After he was named chairman of the powerful Senate Banking Committee in 1975, he worked assiduously to get Washington to approve a $2.3 federal loan guarantee to bail out New York City, which in 1977 seemed surely headed for bankruptcy.

Mr. Proxmire argued that the aspect of the nation's greatest city going belly up would have a ripple effect across the country and serve to introduce uncertainty into the municipal bond market, with the result that cities all over the United States would probably have to pay higher interest rates on the bonds they issued, no matter what their financial health. This, in turn, would result in higher taxes for ordinary Americans, something Mr. Proxmire opposed vigorously.

Having helped to save New York, Mr. Proxmire then publicly criticized it for its profligacy and excoriated the City Council for seeking a 50 percent pay raise. He also said that municipal workers made too much money and that their pensions and welfare benefits were too cushy. He added that the politicians presiding over such a mess seemed rather silly to continue free tuition at the City University. For such criticism The Daily News called him "Senator Scrooge" in a large headline. Mr. Proxmire minded that not a jot; he showed up at his staff's Christmas party that year wearing a "Senator Scrooge" name tag.

Edward William Proxmire was born Nov. 11, 1915, in Lake Forest, Ill., the son of Dr. Theodore Proxmire, a prominent physician and steadfast Republican, and his wife, the former Adele Flanigan. He had an older brother and a younger sister, both long ago deceased. When young Edward was about 6 years old, he saw a movie starring William S. Hart, the legendary cowboy of the silent screen. He was so taken with Mr. Hart's independent, loner kind of heroism that he insisted from that day on that he be called William, not Edward.

The family was well to do, and he was sent to the Hill School in Pottstown, Pa. There he was referred to as "the biggest grind" and "the biggest sponger." After his graduation in 1934, he went to Yale, where he became an English major.

He graduated with a bachelor's degree in 1938 and immediately enrolled at Harvard, where he became a teaching fellow and got a master's degree in business administration. He then went to New York, where he got an entry level job with J.P. Morgan. When the United States entered World War II, he enlisted in the Army as a private; assigned to counterintelligence work, he was discharged in 1946 as a first lieutenant. He returned to Harvard and in 1948 got a second master's degree - this one in public administration - and tried to figure what he wanted to do with his life.

In 1949, Mr. Proxmire became a reporter for The Capital Times in Madison, Wis. They fired me after I'd been there seven months, for labor activities and impertinence," he once said, conceding that his dismissal was merited.

He moved on and briefly worked for a union newspaper where he found it not difficult at all to characterize certain individuals as "no friend of labor." He also briefly had a weekly radio show called "Labor Sounds Off," which was sponsored by the American Federation of Labor.

In 1950, he ran for the Wisconsin State Assembly and won, defeating a six-term incumbent in the Democratic primary and trouncing his Republican opponent in the general election. Mr. Proxmire found that he loved campaigning - meeting people, pressing the flesh, hearing what they had to say and telling them what his own vision was.

He then decided he wanted to be Wisconsin's governor and ran three times unsuccessfully; twice against Walter J. Kohler, an incumbent Republican, and once against another Republican, Vernon Thompson. When he ran for the Senate seat left vacant by the death of Joe McCarthy, his opponent was Walter J. Kohler again. But this time, Mr. Proxmire won. The next year, when he ran for a full term, he easily defeated his Republican challenger, Ronald J. Steinle.

From the beginning of his service in Washington, found himself frequently at odds not just with Republicans but with members of his own party. He had early clashes with Lyndon B. Johnson, the Senate majority leader, because he thought Mr. Johnson was inclined to excessive compromise on civil rights legislation. He also did not like Mr. Johnson's support of the oil depletion allowance, which he regarded as a windfall for the petroleum industry.

Nor did Mr. Proxmire approve of President John F. Kennedy's nomination of John B. Connally as secretary of the Navy. The senator filibustered for 19 hours in an effort to prevent Mr. Kennedy's appointment of Lawrence J. O'Connor to the Federal Power Commission.

He always supported the notion of a strong military but after 1975, when he started issuing his Golden Fleece Awards, various nodes of the military establishment were frequent recipients of this honor.

For example, he gave a Fleece award to the Office of Naval Research and the National Science Foundation after he learned that they jointly spent around $500,000 to determine why rats, monkeys and people clenched their teeth when they got angry or upset. He gave another award to the Department of Defense for spending $100,000 to send brass to an Army-Navy game that was held on the West Coast.

But he also went after the National Endowment for the Humanities after it made a $2,500 grant to researchers in Virginia, who wanted to know why people were unruly and ill-mannered and why so many of them lied and cheated when they played tennis. He gave a Fleece to the Department of Agriculture, which spent $46,000 to calculate the precise time Americans spent cooking their breakfast eggs (it discouraged Agriculture from doing proposed studies on lunch and dinner).

In 1980, his "The Fleecing of America" was published by Houghton Mifflin and in it, Senator Proxmire conceded that some researchers thought he had been unfair and simplistic and needlessly hurtful. He acknowledged that academics, in particular, were needlessly stung when he highlighted certain research projects that were not easily understood. One scientist in Michigan who had been ridiculed by the senator for studying jaw-clenching monkeys sued him for libel in 1979 and there was an out-of-court settlement. In 1980, the senator reimbursed the Treasury for some of the money the Senate had paid out in its unsuccessful defense of the lawsuit.

Mr. Proxmire did not like it when a Cornell professor gave him the "Earth Is Flat Award." The professor noted that when Columbus left Spain, he had no firm evidence that North America existed. The professor suggested that had Senator Proxmire been working for King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, Europeans might still be wondering if there was a New World.

Mr. Proxmire also believed he would be cheating his constituents if he was not present in Washington attending to business so he set records in his time for Senate attendance and consecutive roll-call votes. His most-votes record, set when he cast his 12,134th vote on April 27, 1990, was broken by Senator Byrd.

His aversion to spending money extended to himself. Throughout his career, he wore inexpensive suits of the type worn by new employees who start work in the mailroom. They bore the label of "Robert Hall."

Mr. Proxmire also paid for his own plane rides when he went home to Wisconsin, which was often. He refused to spend any significant money to win re-election. 'I think fully two-thirds of the senators could get re-elected without spending a penny," he declared. He financed his own campaigns. Usually his campaign budget was well under $200 and some of that money went for postage to return money his constituents had donated to him.

His pronouncements did not stop him from being lobbied. Sometimes, the lobbyists would show up at his home in the Cleveland Park section of Northwest Washington and tried to jog with him as he ran the 4.9 miles to work at the Capitol every morning (after doing between 100 and 200 pushups). He jogged better than eight miles an hour and most lobbyists - victims of too many butterfat-and-martini luncheons - could not keep up with him.

Senator Proxmire was twice married. His first marriage to Elsie B. Rockefeller, a great-grandniece of John D. Rockefeller, ended in divorce in 1955. The following year he married Ellen Hodges Sawall, a former executive secretary of the Wisconsin Democratic Party. For years, even after he became ill, Mr. Proxmire was a great promoter of smiling. He was very conscious of the way he looked. He had a series of hair transplants, which the Washington press corps knew about and wrote about. He also had a face lift, which, it seems, almost nobody knew about. He even wrote a book explaining his outlook on exercise and life style called "You Can Do It: Senator Proxmire's Exercise, Diet and Relaxation Plan," which was published in 1973.

In retirement, he had a little office in the Library of Congress next to the La Follette Reading Room. He especially liked the location, since Robert La Follette had been Wisconsin's great progressive Senator and was one of Mr. Proxmire's heroes. He would jog there, too, just as he had to the Capitol. But there came a time when he began to fall. And he noticed that he could not remember anything he had read.

"I can't remember what I've read," he told a reporter. "Sometimes I can't remember where I am." But he added, "Regardless of what happens to you, get a smile on your face and keep it there."

ATH: Surf Extinctions

2005-12-11T21:14:00.000-06:00

Major bummer as surfboard supplier closes
Prices surge as industry grapples with sudden shutdown of foam maker
The Associated Press, Updated: 7:59 p.m. ET Dec. 11, 2005

SAN CLEMENTE, Calif. - For more than 40 years, everyone from casual weekend waveriders to top competitive surfers has shared one thing: Customized boards that began as nondescript foam blocks mass-produced by one Southern California company.

Clark Foam, an icon in California surf culture, enjoyed a virtual monopoly on the blocks that have been shaped and hand-painted by everyone from backyard do-it-yourselfers to design shops that churn out thousands of handcrafted boards each year.

That’s why the company’s sudden closure last week has the laid-back and thriving cottage industry fearing a wipeout.

Boards that cost between $300 and $800 have soared by as much as $200 at some smaller shops. Manufacturers are scrambling to secure the last supplies of the polyurethane foam blanks, customers are hoarding custom-made boards, and thousands of specialty board shapers, air brushers and workers who coat boards with fiberglass face unemployment almost overnight.

“Everybody’s figuring how they’re going to get on with their life,” said Chris Mauro, editor of Surfer Magazine, which broke the story on its Web site Tuesday. “There’s probably a shortage of 2,000 boards a week globally now. It’ll be months before things are back up to speed where any Joe Blow can get a blank — maybe even years.”

Clark Foam supplied the unshaped blanks for about 90 percent of all custom-made boards purchased worldwide — and those boards make up nearly three-quarters of the total international market, said Bjorn Deboer of Stewart Surfboards, a major custom-made retailer and designer in San Clemente. The rest of the $200 million U.S. market is comprised of machine-produced boards mostly churned out at factories in Asia and Eastern Europe.

A handful of small U.S. companies also produce foam, but Mauro said not in great enough quantities to fill the gap. Australian companies that make foam blanks turn out enough to meet Australian demand, but not much else, he said.

“Everyone’s scrambling to find new suppliers, foreign suppliers, anybody,” Mauro said.

Customers reacted by hoarding boards at stores up and down the coast — and some requested multiple boards.

Jefferson Wagner, owner of Zuma Jay Surfboards in Malibu, upped the price of his custom boards by $100 within a day of Clark Foam’s closure. He said people were calling with requests to buy 12 or 15 boards at a time.

“I’ve got every dealer in the book calling me, I’ve got customers running into the store buying them,” said Deboer, who said he sold a record of 14 boards in one day. “It’s a panic mode.”

Making a custom board is a painstaking process that holds special meaning for surfers. Foam blanks — which resemble rough surfboards — are first smoothed and shaved with sandpaper and handheld electric grinders and shavers. Painters then add intricate designs and color before the board is covered in fiberglass and polished.

At Stewart Surfboards, shaper Geoff Madsen worked Thursday on one of the last Clark Foam blank orders placed before the company’s sudden shutdown. The customer, a longtime surfer, has asked Madsen to shape the edges — or rails — of a 10-foot-3 longboard blank so it will move more slowly in the water like “old-school” boards.

A fine spray of white foam dust shot from the board like a miniature Fourth of July sparkler as Madsen used an electric shaver to peel away layers of its face. Thick slabs of foam fell away as he pushed the hand tool down the length of the board in smooth motions, leaving the unshaved portion sticking up like a half-mown lawn.

Across the hallway, airbrush artist Tom Cervantes trimmed the edges of a nine-foot board with black paint, then blew neon blue coloring on its front with an airgun.

Madsen, a 25-year veteran shaper, said he couldn’t understand why Clark Foam shut down so suddenly — especially because it had just started a new business in shaping tools and machinery.

In a letter to customers Monday explaining his closure, company founder Gordon “Grubby” Clark said he has increasingly been in trouble with state and local government because of his nonstandard production machinery — most of which he designed himself — and his use of toxic and polluting chemicals such as toulene di isocynate, or TDI.

He said he spent $500,000 in fire code fixes, another $400,000 defending himself against an employee’s lawsuit and faced buying a multimillion “scrubber” to comply with emissions law. He also battled with the Environmental Protection Agency over pollution issues at his Laguna Niguel-based company.

“They simply grind away until you either quit or they find methods of bringing serious charges or fines that force you to close,” he wrote.

Local and federal officials said Clark was in compliance with all laws and rejected the claim they were to blame for his demise.

Clark, who opened his company in 1961, revolutionized the surfboard in 1958 when he and surfing pioneer Hobie Alter poured resin over foam to create an all-foam board. The foam boards were durable, but had better flexibility than wooden boards that had previously been the hobby’s standard.

“He was kind of like the father figure and this came out of absolutely nowhere,” said Chas Wickwire, who custom makes about 500 boards a year out of his Westminster factory. “He took us all, put us in the back of a wagon and basically drove off the cliff.”

The most practical surfers said they would take better care of their existing boards, which can last up to 10 years with excellent care — but much less without it.

“I’m hanging onto my good one as long as I can to make it last,” said Mauro, also an avid surfer. “I’m taking my board out of my car every day now and storing it in a nice cool place and washing it off after every ride.”

REV: Dying Dreams, Waking Behemoths?

2005-12-11T18:43:00.000-06:00

DreamWorks Deal Played Like a Drama
By SHARON WAXMAN, The New York Times, December 12, 2005

LOS ANGELES, Dec. 11 - The phone rang at David Geffen's house on Friday, Dec. 2. It was Brad Grey, the chairman of Paramount Pictures.

"We really want to make a deal," said Mr. Grey. He was looking to break up another deal Mr. Geffen was on the verge of making to sell his studio, DreamWorks SKG - which Mr. Geffen had founded with Steven Spielberg and Jeffrey Katzenberg - to General Electric's NBC-Universal studio.

Mr. Geffen was skeptical. Paramount had expressed interest in buying DreamWorks three months earlier, but had failed to get the approval of the directors of Viacom, Paramount's parent company.

"We've been through this before," warned Mr. Geffen. "Unless you come to me with signed contracts that require only our signatures, forget it."

One week later, in a morning meeting at Mr. Spielberg's home in Pacific Palisades, high above the ocean, a bleary-eyed Mr. Grey produced those contracts for a $1.6 billion sale, which had been approved the night before by the Viacom board.

Thus did Mr. Grey pull off one of the more stunning coups in recent Hollywood history, snatching DreamWorks from the grasp of NBC-Universal, the studio that had been the first choice of Mr. Spielberg and Mr. Geffen.

The value of the two deals to the DreamWorks principal owners was similar, according to Mr. Geffen: Paramount paid them just $25 million more, though the studio had to pay more over all to cover other costs.

In acquiring DreamWorks, Paramount takes ownership of the 11-year-old studio's 60-film library, including movies like "American Beauty" and "Gladiator" (both Oscar winners for best picture) and "Saving Private Ryan." It gives Paramount access to the eight new films on DreamWorks' slate for 2006 (a ninth film is co-financed with Paramount) as well as the many films in its pipeline for 2007, helping Paramount round out its own schedule, which had been thin.

Paramount announced on Sunday that it was in advanced talks to sell the film library to unidentified investors.

In the end, the sealing of the DreamWorks deal came down to speed, and to Mr. Grey's driving ambition to transform the lackluster track record of Paramount, the studio he took over just one year ago.

In doing so, he took advantage of Mr. Geffen's annoyance with G.E., which had lowered its initial bid for DreamWorks, and then had taken weeks to finish negotiating what both sides described as minor details. Too late in the day on Friday came a last-ditch effort by Bob Wright, the chairman of NBC-Universal, to rescue the deal.

"Dealing with G.E. is unpleasant and difficult under any circumstances," said Mr. Geffen in an interview on Saturday. He said Universal apparently thought "we had no choice and were going to squeeze us and squeeze us. After a year of dealing with them, they still did not have a concluded finished contract ready to sign."

NBC-Universal had no comment. Senior executives on all sides of the deal described, on condition of not being named because of the delicate nature of the talks, the details of the agreement and events leading up to the last-minute agreement.

Some of those details also emerged on Sunday afternoon, as Mr. Grey took center stage in announcing the purchase.

"This for Paramount is a new beginning," Mr. Grey said in an interview on Sunday. "I think it's going to turn this studio into a dynamic and vibrant studio again. This studio is 100 years old, there have been extraordinary years. We happen to be in a cycle that needs a new architecture. This is going to go a long way in that strategy."

Paramount paid a total of $1.6 billion, which included more than $500 million in outstanding debt, $775 million to the DreamWorks principals and $225 million to repay additional loans that had been made to DreamWorks by Universal, Technicolor and HBO, according to a Paramount executive involved in the deal.

Paramount intends to seek a third-party equity investor to put up $800 million to $1 billion of the purchase price, which will include the $500 million debt, a fund used to finance movies. It has not yet determined who that will be.

The deal gives Paramount the right to distribute films made by DreamWorks Animation, the spinoff computer animation company run by Mr. Katzenberg, both domestically and internationally.

To guarantee the distribution deal with DreamWorks Animation, Paramount had to pay that company $75 million to match a deal that the animation company had already struck with Universal to distribute its films until 2012, according to two executives involved in the deal.

Additionally, Paramount had to repay a $75 million loan that Universal extended several years ago to DreamWorks when DreamWorks was running out of cash. Had Universal acquired DreamWorks, that loan would have remained on the books without being repaid immediately.

For Mr. Geffen, Mr. Spielberg and Mr. Katzenberg, two-third owners of DreamWorks, the deal is a rich one. Each is to receive about $172 million. Paul G. Allen, the Microsoft billionaire who was the principal investor in the studio and, with other investors, owned the other third of the company, will receive about $258 million.

Executives for NBC-Universal disputed DreamWorks' contention that the deal offered by Paramount was almost identical, saying their final offer was $1.15 billion. Some of the discrepancy may be explained by credit of more than $200 million that had been extended to DreamWorks by Universal.

Negotiations began with Universal more than a year ago, when Mr. Geffen sat down with one of his best friends, Ron Meyer, the president of Universal Studios. A sale to Universal made sense for both sides, and Hollywood insiders as well as Wall Street observers fully expected a deal.

Aside from the personal friendship, Universal had co-financed several movies with DreamWorks and had a lucrative deal to distribute DreamWorks DVD's and videocassettes worldwide, as well as live-action movies through an international distribution company that Universal owned with Paramount. The prospect of losing that revenue was a powerful inducement for Universal to buy DreamWorks.

Mr. Spielberg has longstanding personal ties to Universal, the studio that gave him his first break as a young director when he made the blockbuster hit "Jaws." "E. T. - the Extraterrestrial" and the "Jurassic Park" films followed, and all are major elements of the Universal Studios theme park. His production company, Amblin, is based on the Universal lot, where he has a contract to remain through 2010.

Indeed, Mr. Spielberg and Mr. Geffen both favored making a deal with Universal, Mr. Geffen said. "Steven's instructions were: If it is possible to make a deal with Universal, make a deal," said Mr. Geffen.

In July, DreamWorks and Universal agreed to a period of exclusive negotiations, and a tentative deal was struck for Universal to acquire DreamWorks for $1.5 billion, with about $900 million of that going to pay DreamWorks' principal executives and investors - $125 million more than the deal that was ultimately made.

But two months later, the talks suddenly broke off when Universal lowered its bid to $1.4 billion, after the poor performance of some DreamWorks films, principally the big-budget summer thriller "The Island," and the romantic comedy "Just Like Heaven."

Mr. Geffen said that NBC-Universal's chairman, Mr. Wright, had made a handshake deal for the $1.5 billion, and then reneged. A Universal executive agreed that a deal was in place, but said that during the due diligence period, the poor performance of DreamWorks movies changed the fundamental financial projections that made the deal possible.

Feelings were bruised, but at the time, Universal was the only suitor. Paramount had started to negotiate, but when Mr. Grey and Tom Freston, the co-president of Viacom, brought the proposal to the Viacom board, they were told the deal was too expensive and was poorly timed because Viacom was in the process of splitting into two companies, Viacom and CBS.

Rather than abandon the deal, Mr. Grey took a different message from that meeting - that the board would favor the deal if he could overcome the obstacle of price. When he learned that Universal had still not closed its bid by late November, he sounded out several private equity firms about the prospect of helping to finance the DreamWorks purchase. He secured interest from several firms, and went back to Mr. Geffen to see if a deal was still possible.

On Dec. 2, Mr. Geffen called Mr. Meyer and told him another bidder was in the game. During the next week, Mr. Meyer waited for a response from Jeffrey R. Immelt, the chairman and chief executive of G.E. None was forthcoming.

Last Thursday, the board of Viacom met in New York and approved the purchase of DreamWorks. Mr. Grey and Mr. Freston flew through the night on a private jet to bring the contracts to the DreamWorks principals.

All that remained was for Mr. Spielberg to become comfortable with the deal and his new patrons. That took place on Friday morning at his Pacific Palisades home, even as G.E. held its own board meeting on the East Coast - where they learned that they were about to lose the DreamWorks deal to Paramount.

But before signing the contracts with Mr. Grey and Mr. Freston, Mr. Geffen called his friend Mr. Meyer. He would still make the deal with Universal, he told Mr. Meyer, if G.E. would produce a check for $100 million as a good-faith deposit on the purchase.

That was not to be. "That was the end," Mr. Geffen recalled. "We knew they couldn't get it done in a day. They couldn't get anything done in a day."

But Mr. Wright still thought he could. Facing the imminent loss of DreamWorks, he persuaded the G.E. board on Friday to agree to the negotiated terms, and quickly called Mr. Meyer asking him to close the deal before Paramount could do so. Mr. Meyer made the calls. Too late: the ink on the contracts was already dry.

Lorne Manly contributed reporting from New York for this article.

Paramount agrees to buy DreamWorks SKG
Deal worth $1.6 billion in cash, assumed debt
BREAKING NEWS, The Associated Press, Updated: 3:00 p.m. ET Dec. 11, 2005

LOS ANGELES - Paramount Pictures said Sunday it had agreed to buy independent film studio DreamWorks SKG Inc. in a deal worth $1.6 billion in cash and debt.

The deal strengthens Paramount’s live action film business and gives the unit of Viacom Inc. access to DreamWorks’ library of 59 films, including Oscar winners “American Beauty” and “Gladiator.”

It also marks the end of an 11-year dream for Hollywood moguls Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen, who had ambitious goals for DreamWorks that included television, music, films and the Internet.

Brad Grey, Paramount’s chairman and CEO, said in a statement that enhancing Paramount’s pipeline of pictures is a “key strategic objective in restoring Paramount’s stature as a leader in filmed entertainment.”

The agreement does not include DreamWorks Animation SKG Inc., the most profitable part of the company. The animated unit went public last year. But Paramount does gain the right to distribute the studio’s lucrative animated films, including the “Shrek” franchise.

ATH: It's Bush . . . no, the good one

2005-12-10T21:57:00.000-06:00

While i think Vince Young is the best player in the country. There's no doubt Reggie Bush is an incredible running back. There were a lot of years when running backs were getting this award that never fulfilled any promise in the NFL. Since that time, quarterbacks have reined. So, expecially in that regard, i think that the first truly great running back to come along in some time is most deserving. Congrats to him.

Bush's Mad Dash Comes to Stop With the Heisman
By LEE JENKINS, The New York Times, December 11, 2005

Reggie Bush's broken-field run to the Heisman Trophy had a familiar feel.

There was the quick first step. The onrush of opponents. Then the cutback, the spin move and the finishing speed.

As usual, he left his pursuers breathlessly behind and the crowd chanting his first name. In New York last night, as he received the award at the Nokia Theater, the sound of "Reg-gie! Reg-gie!" had even more significance.

Bush, the University of Southern California's star tailback, separated himself from his competitors as if they were U.C.L.A. linemen. Texas quarterback Vince Young, already considered a favorite for next year's Heisman, finished a distant second in the balloting. U.S.C. quarterback Matt Leinart, who won last year's Heisman, finished third. Bush won every region of the country with relative ease and even picked up the first-place vote on the ballot cast by Leinart.

In the past four years, the Trojans have reached four Bowl Championship Series games and delivered three Heisman Trophy winners, proving they can be as successful at winning awards as they are at winning games. "I've been in college for three years," Bush said. "And this is the first time I've been invited to a fraternity."

Bush became the seventh Heisman Trophy winner from U.S.C. and the fourth Heisman-Trophy-winning running back from San Diego. The three finalists - Bush, Leinart and Young - will meet again at the Rose Bowl on Jan. 4, when the Trojans and the Longhorns will decide the B.C.S. national title in Pasadena, Calif. That Bush beat Young for this individual honor will only add to the hype.

"Right now, I feel like I let my guys down," Young said. "Right now, I feel like I let my family down. I feel like I let Houston and Austin down."

He added: "This will give me a little more edge, a little more ego."

As Young spoke, the pain evident in his voice, he sounded like the only person in the room who was surprised by the outcome. Asked about Young's disappointment, Bush's response included: "That's not my problem."

Young might have meant more to his team this season than any other player, and Leinart might have handled the most pressure, but nobody brought as much attention to college football as Bush.

He is a highlight-maker in a highlight world, the rare athlete in any sport who commands attention every time he is in action.

One year ago, when Leinart won the Heisman Trophy and Bush was a finalist, U.S.C.'s athletic director, Mike Garrett, told him: "You know you're going to be up there."

Bush replied: "I know."

In this era of trash talk and touchdown dances, his prediction might have sounded pompous. But it only illustrated the intensity with which he pursued the award. After U.S.C. beat California last month, Bush appeared downtrodden in the locker room because he had only 82 rushing yards. If the votes had been cast that day, Young probably would have been an easy winner.

But one week later, against an opponent from a non-B.C.S. conference, in a game that ended after 2 a.m. on the East Coast, Bush produced the signature performance of 2005. When fans woke up Sunday, Nov. 20, they realized what they had missed. Bush's 513 total yards against Fresno State included enough spin moves, jump stops and slipped tackles to jam the highlight shows.

While Young and Leinart relaxed in the green room last night, making goofy hand gestures for the television cameras, Bush sat quietly in his pinstriped three-piece suit, chomping on a piece of gum, looking like he was getting ready for a red-zone run. He went over his acceptance speech over and over in his mind. "He was in game mode," Leinart said.

To some, Bush's appearance at the Nokia Theater might have been the most mundane of his career. He did not hurdle the presenters or do one of his trademark flips when he picked up the trophy. He simply bowed his head and ambled to the stage, assuming a slower pace than many believed he was capable of.

Although Bush generally acts as stern as a stiff-arm, he wept openly when talking about his stepfather, LaMar Griffin, who helped raise him in San Diego. Bush's biological father, Reggie Bush Sr., lives about seven miles from the U.S.C. campus, but the two barely speak to each other. Bush has been referring to Griffin as his father since he was 2.

Bush did not address speculation that he would skip his senior season to enter the N.F.L. draft, but he did talk about the possibility of returning to New York soon. "I could definitely see myself playing here, playing for the New York Jets," Bush said.

The ceremony had extra electricity simply because Bush was in attendance. Over the past 10 years, Heisman winners have included Danny Wuerffel, Ron Dayne, Chris Weinke and Eric Crouch, all highly successful in college but somewhat forgettable. Bush did for the trophy presentation what he had done for college football - made it really worth watching.

More difficult than choosing the best player in the country was choosing his best play. The toughest task might have fallen to the ESPN producer who had to decide which of Bush's highlights to include in the montage and which to take out.

There was the punt return at Washington where he evaded eight tacklers; the touchdown run at Oregon where he made a semicircle to the end zone; the dash against Fresno State where he went from one sideline to the other; the push at Notre Dame where he shoved Leinart over the goal line.

Bush did not convince voters so much as he dazzled them. He averaged more than 8 yards a carry. He had 36 plays of 20 yards or more. But numbers did not do him justice.

He had to be seen.

REV: The Pinter Nobel Speech

2005-12-10T18:46:00.000-06:00

The Nobel Lecture: Art, Truth and Politics
By Harold Pinter, The Guardian UK, Wednesday 07 December 2005

This is the text of the lecture to be given by Harold Pinter when he receives the 2005 Nobel prize for literature on Saturday. Forbidden by doctors from going to Stockholm to receive the £720,000 prize, the ailing playwright and poet has delivered his speech by video

In 1958 I wrote the following:

'There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false.'

I believe that these assertions still make sense and do still apply to the exploration of reality through art. So as a writer I stand by them but as a citizen I cannot. As a citizen I must ask: What is true? What is false?

Truth in drama is forever elusive. You never quite find it but the search for it is compulsive. The search is clearly what drives the endeavour. The search is your task. More often than not you stumble upon the truth in the dark, colliding with it or just glimpsing an image or a shape which seems to correspond to the truth, often without realising that you have done so. But the real truth is that there never is any such thing as one truth to be found in dramatic art. There are many. These truths challenge each other, recoil from each other, reflect each other, ignore each other, tease each other, are blind to each other. Sometimes you feel you have the truth of a moment in your hand, then it slips through your fingers and is lost.

I have often been asked how my plays come about. I cannot say. Nor can I ever sum up my plays, except to say that this is what happened. That is what they said. That is what they did.

Most of the plays are engendered by a line, a word or an image. The given word is often shortly followed by the image. I shall give two examples of two lines which came right out of the blue into my head, followed by an image, followed by me.

The plays are The Homecoming and Old Times. The first line of The Homecoming is 'What have you done with the scissors?' The first line of Old Times is 'Dark.'

In each case I had no further information.

In the first case someone was obviously looking for a pair of scissors and was demanding their whereabouts of someone else he suspected had probably stolen them. But I somehow knew that the person addressed didn't give a damn about the scissors or about the questioner either, for that matter.

'Dark' I took to be a description of someone's hair, the hair of a woman, and was the answer to a question. In each case I found myself compelled to pursue the matter. This happened visually, a very slow fade, through shadow into light.

I always start a play by calling the characters A, B and C.

In the play that became The Homecoming I saw a man enter a stark room and ask his question of a younger man sitting on an ugly sofa reading a racing paper. I somehow suspected that A was a father and that B was his son, but I had no proof. This was however confirmed a short time later when B (later to become Lenny) says to A (later to become Max), 'Dad, do you mind if I change the subject? I want to ask you something. The dinner we had before, what was the name of it? What do you call it? Why don't you buy a dog? You're a dog cook. Honest. You think you're cooking for a lot of dogs.' So since B calls A 'Dad' it seemed to me reasonable to assume that they were father and son. A was also clearly the cook and his cooking did not seem to be held in high regard. Did this mean that there was no mother? I didn't know. But, as I told myself at the time, our beginnings never know our ends.

'Dark.' A large window. Evening sky. A man, A (later to become Deeley), and a woman, B (later to become Kate), sitting with drinks. 'Fat or thin?' the man asks. Who are they talking about? But I then see, standing at the window, a woman, C (later to become Anna), in another condition of light, her back to them, her hair dark.

It's a strange moment, the moment of creating characters who up to that moment have had no existence. What follows is fitful, uncertain, even hallucinatory, although sometimes it can be an unstoppable avalanche. The author's position is an odd one. In a sense he is not welcomed by the characters. The characters resist him, they are not easy to live with, they are impossible to define. You certainly can't dictate to them. To a certain extent you play a never-ending game with them, cat and mouse, blind man's buff, hide and seek. But finally you find that you have people of flesh and blood on your hands, people with will and an individual sensibility of their own, made out of component parts you are unable to change, manipulate or distort.

So language in art remains a highly ambiguous transaction, a quicksand, a trampoline, a frozen pool which might give way under you, the author, at any time.

But as I have said, the search for the truth can never stop. It cannot be adjourned, it cannot be postponed. It has to be faced, right there, on the spot.

Political theatre presents an entirely different set of problems. Sermonising has to be avoided at all cost. Objectivity is essential. The characters must be allowed to breathe their own air. The author cannot confine and constrict them to satisfy his own taste or disposition or prejudice. He must be prepared to approach them from a variety of angles, from a full and uninhibited range of perspectives, take them by surprise, perhaps, occasionally, but nevertheless give them the freedom to go which way they will. This does not always work. And political satire, of course, adheres to none of these precepts, in fact does precisely the opposite, which is its proper function.

In my play The Birthday Party I think I allow a whole range of options to operate in a dense forest of possibility before finally focussing on an act of subjugation.

Mountain Language pretends to no such range of operation. It remains brutal, short and ugly. But the soldiers in the play do get some fun out of it. One sometimes forgets that torturers become easily bored. They need a bit of a laugh to keep their spirits up. This has been confirmed of course by the events at Abu Ghraib in Baghdad. Mountain Language lasts only 20 minutes, but it could go on for hour after hour, on and on and on, the same pattern repeated over and over again, on and on, hour after hour.

Ashes to Ashes, on the other hand, seems to me to be taking place under water. A drowning woman, her hand reaching up through the waves, dropping down out of sight, reaching for others, but finding nobody there, either above or under the water, finding only shadows, reflections, floating; the woman a lost figure in a drowning landscape, a woman unable to escape the doom that seemed to belong only to others.

But as they died, she must die too.

Political language, as used by politicians, does not venture into any of this territory since the majority of politicians, on the evidence available to us, are interested not in truth but in power and in the maintenance of that power. To maintain that power it is essential that people remain in ignorance, that they live in ignorance of the truth, even the truth of their own lives. What surrounds us therefore is a vast tapestry of lies, upon which we feed.

As every single person here knows, the justification for the invasion of Iraq was that Saddam Hussein possessed a highly dangerous body of weapons of mass destruction, some of which could be fired in 45 minutes, bringing about appalling devastation. We were assured that was true. It was not true. We were told that Iraq had a relationship with Al Quaeda and shared responsibility for the atrocity in New York of September 11th 2001. We were assured that this was true. It was not true. We were told that Iraq threatened the security of the world. We were assured it was true. It was not true.

The truth is something entirely different. The truth is to do with how the United States understands its role in the world and how it chooses to embody it.

But before I come back to the present I would like to look at the recent past, by which I mean United States foreign policy since the end of the Second World War. I believe it is obligatory upon us to subject this period to at least some kind of even limited scrutiny, which is all that time will allow here.

Everyone knows what happened in the Soviet Union and throughout Eastern Europe during the post-war period: the systematic brutality, the widespread atrocities, the ruthless suppression of independent thought. All this has been fully documented and verified.

But my contention here is that the US crimes in the same period have only been superficially recorded, let alone documented, let alone acknowledged, let alone recognised as crimes at all. I believe this must be addressed and that the truth has considerable bearing on where the world stands now. Although constrained, to a certain extent, by the existence of the Soviet Union, the United States' actions throughout the world made it clear that it had concluded it had carte blanche to do what it liked.

Direct invasion of a sovereign state has never in fact been America's favoured method. In the main, it has preferred what it has described as 'low intensity conflict'. Low intensity conflict means that thousands of people die but slower than if you dropped a bomb on them in one fell swoop. It means that you infect the heart of the country, that you establish a malignant growth and watch the gangrene bloom. When the populace has been subdued - or beaten to death - the same thing - and your own friends, the military and the great corporations, sit comfortably in power, you go before the camera and say that democracy has prevailed. This was a commonplace in US foreign policy in the years to which I refer.

The tragedy of Nicaragua was a highly significant case. I choose to offer it here as a potent example of America's view of its role in the world, both then and now.

I was present at a meeting at the US embassy in London in the late 1980s.

The United States Congress was about to decide whether to give more money to the Contras in their campaign against the state of Nicaragua. I was a member of a delegation speaking on behalf of Nicaragua but the most important member of this delegation was a Father John Metcalf. The leader of the US body was Raymond Seitz (then number two to the ambassador, later ambassador himself). Father Metcalf said: 'Sir, I am in charge of a parish in the north of Nicaragua. My parishioners built a school, a health centre, a cultural centre. We have lived in peace. A few months ago a Contra force attacked the parish. They destroyed everything: the school, the health centre, the cultural centre. They raped nurses and teachers, slaughtered doctors, in the most brutal manner. They behaved like savages. Please demand that the US government withdraw its support from this shocking terrorist activity.'

Raymond Seitz had a very good reputation as a rational, responsible and highly sophisticated man. He was greatly respected in diplomatic circles. He listened, paused and then spoke with some gravity. 'Father,' he said, 'let me tell you something. In war, innocent people always suffer.' There was a frozen silence. We stared at him. He did not flinch.

Innocent people, indeed, always suffer.

Finally somebody said: 'But in this case "innocent people" were the victims of a gruesome atrocity subsidised by your government, one among many. If Congress allows the Contras more money further atrocities of this kind will take place. Is this not the case? Is your government not therefore guilty of supporting acts of murder and destruction upon the citizens of a sovereign state?'

Seitz was imperturbable. 'I don't agree that the facts as presented support your assertions,' he said.

As we were leaving the Embassy a US aide told me that he enjoyed my plays. I did not reply.

I should remind you that at the time President Reagan made the following statement: 'The Contras are the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers.'

The United States supported the brutal Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua for over 40 years. The Nicaraguan people, led by the Sandinistas, overthrew this regime in 1979, a breathtaking popular revolution.

The Sandinistas weren't perfect. They possessed their fair share of arrogance and their political philosophy contained a number of contradictory elements. But they were intelligent, rational and civilised. They set out to establish a stable, decent, pluralistic society. The death penalty was abolished. Hundreds of thousands of poverty-stricken peasants were brought back from the dead. Over 100,000 families were given title to land. Two thousand schools were built. A quite remarkable literacy campaign reduced illiteracy in the country to less than one seventh. Free education was established and a free health service. Infant mortality was reduced by a third. Polio was eradicated.

The United States denounced these achievements as Marxist/Leninist subversion. In the view of the US government, a dangerous example was being set. If Nicaragua was allowed to establish basic norms of social and economic justice, if it was allowed to raise the standards of health care and education and achieve social unity and national self respect, neighbouring countries would ask the same questions and do the same things. There was of course at the time fierce resistance to the status quo in El Salvador.

I spoke earlier about 'a tapestry of lies' which surrounds us. President Reagan commonly described Nicaragua as a 'totalitarian dungeon'. This was taken generally by the media, and certainly by the British government, as accurate and fair comment. But there was in fact no record of death squads under the Sandinista government. There was no record of torture. There was no record of systematic or official military brutality. No priests were ever murdered in Nicaragua. There were in fact three priests in the government, two Jesuits and a Maryknoll missionary. The totalitarian dungeons were actually next door, in El Salvador and Guatemala. The United States had brought down the democratically elected government of Guatemala in 1954 and it is estimated that over 200,000 people had been victims of successive military dictatorships.

Six of the most distinguished Jesuits in the world were viciously murdered at the Central American University in San Salvador in 1989 by a battalion of the Alcatl regiment trained at Fort Benning, Georgia, USA. That extremely brave man Archbishop Romero was assassinated while saying mass. It is estimated that 75,000 people died. Why were they killed? They were killed because they believed a better life was possible and should be achieved. That belief immediately qualified them as communists. They died because they dared to question the status quo, the endless plateau of poverty, disease, degradation and oppression, which had been their birthright.

The United States finally brought down the Sandinista government. It took some years and considerable resistance but relentless economic persecution and 30,000 dead finally undermined the spirit of the Nicaraguan people. They were exhausted and poverty stricken once again. The casinos moved back into the country. Free health and free education were over. Big business returned with a vengeance. 'Democracy' had prevailed.

But this 'policy' was by no means restricted to Central America. It was conducted throughout the world. It was never-ending. And it is as if it never happened.

The United States supported and in many cases engendered every right wing military dictatorship in the world after the end of the Second World War. I refer to Indonesia, Greece, Uruguay, Brazil, Paraguay, Haiti, Turkey, the Philippines, Guatemala, El Salvador, and, of course, Chile. The horror the United States inflicted upon Chile in 1973 can never be purged and can never be forgiven.

Hundreds of thousands of deaths took place throughout these countries. Did they take place? And are they in all cases attributable to US foreign policy? The answer is yes they did take place and they are attributable to American foreign policy. But you wouldn't know it.

It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn't happening. It didn't matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It's a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.

I put to you that the United States is without doubt the greatest show on the road. Brutal, indifferent, scornful and ruthless it may be but it is also very clever. As a salesman it is out on its own and its most saleable commodity is self love. It's a winner. Listen to all American presidents on television say the words, 'the American people', as in the sentence, 'I say to the American people it is time to pray and to defend the rights of the American people and I ask the American people to trust their president in the action he is about to take on behalf of the American people.'

It's a scintillating stratagem. Language is actually employed to keep thought at bay. The words 'the American people' provide a truly voluptuous cushion of reassurance. You don't need to think. Just lie back on the cushion. The cushion may be suffocating your intelligence and your critical faculties but it's very comfortable. This does not apply of course to the 40 million people living below the poverty line and the 2 million men and women imprisoned in the vast gulag of prisons, which extends across the US.

The United States no longer bothers about low intensity conflict. It no longer sees any point in being reticent or even devious. It puts its cards on the table without fear or favour. It quite simply doesn't give a damn about the United Nations, international law or critical dissent, which it regards as impotent and irrelevant. It also has its own bleating little lamb tagging behind it on a lead, the pathetic and supine Great Britain.

What has happened to our moral sensibility? Did we ever have any? What do these words mean? Do they refer to a term very rarely employed these days - conscience? A conscience to do not only with our own acts but to do with our shared responsibility in the acts of others? Is all this dead? Look at Guantanamo Bay. Hundreds of people detained without charge for over three years, with no legal representation or due process, technically detained forever. This totally illegitimate structure is maintained in defiance of the Geneva Convention. It is not only tolerated but hardly thought about by what's called the 'international community'. This criminal outrage is being committed by a country, which declares itself to be 'the leader of the free world'. Do we think about the inhabitants of Guantanamo Bay? What does the media say about them? They pop up occasionally - a small item on page six. They have been consigned to a no man's land from which indeed they may never return. At present many are on hunger strike, being force-fed, including British residents. No niceties in these force-feeding procedures. No sedative or anaesthetic. Just a tube stuck up your nose and into your throat. You vomit blood. This is torture. What has the British Foreign Secretary said about this? Nothing. What has the British Prime Minister said about this? Nothing. Why not? Because the United States has said: to criticise our conduct in Guantanamo Bay constitutes an unfriendly act. You're either with us or against us. So Blair shuts up.

The invasion of Iraq was a bandit act, an act of blatant state terrorism, demonstrating absolute contempt for the concept of international law. The invasion was an arbitrary military action inspired by a series of lies upon lies and gross manipulation of the media and therefore of the public; an act intended to consolidate American military and economic control of the Middle East masquerading - as a last resort - all other justifications having failed to justify themselves - as liberation. A formidable assertion of military force responsible for the death and mutilation of thousands and thousands of innocent people.

We have brought torture, cluster bombs, depleted uranium, innumerable acts of random murder, misery, degradation and death to the Iraqi people and call it 'bringing freedom and democracy to the Middle East'.

How many people do you have to kill before you qualify to be described as a mass murderer and a war criminal? One hundred thousand? More than enough, I would have thought. Therefore it is just that Bush and Blair be arraigned before the International Criminal Court of Justice. But Bush has been clever. He has not ratified the International Criminal Court of Justice. Therefore if any American soldier or for that matter politician finds himself in the dock Bush has warned that he will send in the marines. But Tony Blair has ratified the Court and is therefore available for prosecution. We can let the Court have his address if they're interested. It is Number 10, Downing Street, London.

Death in this context is irrelevant. Both Bush and Blair place death well away on the back burner. At least 100,000 Iraqis were killed by American bombs and missiles before the Iraq insurgency began. These people are of no moment. Their deaths don't exist. They are blank. They are not even recorded as being dead. 'We don't do body counts,' said the American general Tommy Franks.

Early in the invasion there was a photograph published on the front page of British newspapers of Tony Blair kissing the cheek of a little Iraqi boy. 'A grateful child,' said the caption. A few days later there was a story and photograph, on an inside page, of another four-year-old boy with no arms. His family had been blown up by a missile. He was the only survivor. 'When do I get my arms back?' he asked. The story was dropped. Well, Tony Blair wasn't holding him in his arms, nor the body of any other mutilated child, nor the body of any bloody corpse. Blood is dirty. It dirties your shirt and tie when you're making a sincere speech on television.

The 2,000 American dead are an embarrassment. They are transported to their graves in the dark. Funerals are unobtrusive, out of harm's way. The mutilated rot in their beds, some for the rest of their lives. So the dead and the mutilated both rot, in different kinds of graves.

Here is an extract from a poem by Pablo Neruda, 'I'm Explaining a Few Things':

And one morning all that was burning,
one morning the bonfires
leapt out of the earth
devouring human beings
and from then on fire,
gunpowder from then on,
and from then on blood.
Bandits with planes and Moors,
bandits with finger-rings and duchesses,
bandits with black friars spattering blessings
came through the sky to kill children
and the blood of children ran through the streets
without fuss, like children's blood.

Jackals that the jackals would despise
stones that the dry thistle would bite on and spit out,
vipers that the vipers would abominate.

Face to face with you I have seen the blood
of Spain tower like a tide
to drown you in one wave
of pride and knives.

Treacherous
generals:
see my dead house,
look at broken Spain:
from every house burning metal flows
instead of flowers
from every socket of Spain
Spain emerges
and from every dead child a rifle with eyes
and from every crime bullets are born
which will one day find
the bull's eye of your hearts.

And you will ask: why doesn't his poetry
speak of dreams and leaves
and the great volcanoes of his native land.

Come and see the blood in the streets.
Come and see
the blood in the streets.
Come and see the blood
in the streets! *

Let me make it quite clear that in quoting from Neruda's poem I am in no way comparing Republican Spain to Saddam Hussein's Iraq. I quote Neruda because nowhere in contemporary poetry have I read such a powerful visceral description of the bombing of civilians.

I have said earlier that the United States is now totally frank about putting its cards on the table. That is the case. Its official declared policy is now defined as 'full spectrum dominance'. That is not my term, it is theirs. 'Full spectrum dominance' means control of land, sea, air and space and all attendant resources.

The United States now occupies 702 military installations throughout the world in 132 countries, with the honourable exception of Sweden, of course. We don't quite know how they got there but they are there all right.

The United States possesses 8,000 active and operational nuclear warheads. Two thousand are on hair trigger alert, ready to be launched with 15 minutes warning. It is developing new systems of nuclear force, known as bunker busters. The British, ever cooperative, are intending to replace their own nuclear missile, Trident. Who, I wonder, are they aiming at? Osama bin Laden? You? Me? Joe Dokes? China? Paris? Who knows? What we do know is that this infantile insanity - the possession and threatened use of nuclear weapons - is at the heart of present American political philosophy. We must remind ourselves that the United States is on a permanent military footing and shows no sign of relaxing it.

Many thousands, if not millions, of people in the United States itself are demonstrably sickened, shamed and angered by their government's actions, but as things stand they are not a coherent political force - yet. But the anxiety, uncertainty and fear which we can see growing daily in the United States is unlikely to diminish.

I know that President Bush has many extremely competent speech writers but I would like to volunteer for the job myself. I propose the following short address which he can make on television to the nation. I see him grave, hair carefully combed, serious, winning, sincere, often beguiling, sometimes employing a wry smile, curiously attractive, a man's man.

'God is good. God is great. God is good. My God is good. Bin Laden's God is bad. His is a bad God. Saddam's God was bad, except he didn't have one. He was a barbarian. We are not barbarians. We don't chop people's heads off. We believe in freedom. So does God. I am not a barbarian. I am the democratically elected leader of a freedom-loving democracy. We are a compassionate society. We give compassionate electrocution and compassionate lethal injection. We are a great nation. I am not a dictator. He is. I am not a barbarian. He is. And he is. They all are. I possess moral authority. You see this fist? This is my moral authority. And don't you forget it.'

A writer's life is a highly vulnerable, almost naked activity. We don't have to weep about that. The writer makes his choice and is stuck with it. But it is true to say that you are open to all the winds, some of them icy indeed. You are out on your own, out on a limb. You find no shelter, no protection - unless you lie - in which case of course you have constructed your own protection and, it could be argued, become a politician.

I have referred to death quite a few times this evening. I shall now quote a poem of my own called 'Death'.

Where was the dead body found?
Who found the dead body?
Was the dead body dead when found?
How was the dead body found?

Who was the dead body?

Who was the father or daughter or brother
Or uncle or sister or mother or son
Of the dead and abandoned body?

Was the body dead when abandoned?
Was the body abandoned?
By whom had it been abandoned?

Was the dead body naked or dressed for a journey?

What made you declare the dead body dead?
Did you declare the dead body dead?
How well did you know the dead body?
How did you know the dead body was dead?

Did you wash the dead body
Did you close both its eyes
Did you bury the body
Did you leave it abandoned
Did you kiss the dead body

When we look into a mirror we think the image that confronts us is accurate. But move a millimetre and the image changes. We are actually looking at a never-ending range of reflections. But sometimes a writer has to smash the mirror - for it is on the other side of that mirror that the truth stares at us.

I believe that despite the enormous odds which exist, unflinching, unswerving, fierce intellectual determination, as citizens, to define the real truth of our lives and our societies is a crucial obligation which devolves upon us all. It is in fact mandatory.

If such a determination is not embodied in our political vision we have no hope of restoring what is so nearly lost to us - the dignity of man.

--------

*Extract from "I'm Explaining a Few Things" translated by Nathaniel Tarn, from Pablo Neruda: Selected Poems, published by Jonathan Cape, London 1970. Used by permission of The Random House Group Limited.

OBT: Richard Pryor

2005-12-10T00:50:00.000-06:00

Comedian Richard Pryor dies at 65
Saturday, December 10, 2005; Posted: 4:41 p.m. EST (21:41 GMT)

Comedian Richard Pryor died at Encino Hospital in Southern California on Saturday. He was 65. (CNN) -- Groundbreaking Comedian Richard Pryor died Saturday of a heart attack, his wife told CNN. He was 65.

Pryor, who had been ill with multiple sclerosis, died at Encino Hospital near Los Angeles, at 7:58 a.m. PT. Jennifer Lee Pryor tried to revive him before paramedics arrived and took him to the hospital, she said.

"He enjoyed life right up until the end," she said. "At the end there was a smile on his face."

Pryor, who was born in Peoria, Illinois, on December 1, 1940, was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1986.

"He was able to turn pain into comedy," his wife said. "He let the world see it, and that was his inspiration too.

"People said, 'If he can do it, I can do it.'

Comedian Richard Pryor dies at 65
Actor and comic known for caustic wit suffers apparent heart attack
The Associated Press, Updated: 4:43 p.m. ET Dec. 10, 2005

LOS ANGELES - Richard Pryor, the caustic yet perceptive actor-comedian who lived dangerously close to the edge both on stage and off, died Saturday. He was 65.

Pryor died shortly before 8 a.m. of a heart attack after being taken to a hospital from his home in the San Fernando Valley, said his business manager, Karen Finch. He had been ill for years with multiple sclerosis, a degenerative disease of the nervous system.

“We loved him and will miss you,” his ex-wife, Flynn Pryor, said from her Florida home.

Pryor was regarded early in his career as one of the most foul-mouthed comics in the business, but he gained a wide following for his expletive-filled but universal and frequently personal insights into modern life and race relations.

His audacious style influenced an array of stand-up artists, including Eddie Murphy, Arsenio Hall and Damon Wayans, as well as Robin Williams, David Letterman and others.

A series of hit comedies in the ’70s and ’80s, as well as filmed versions of his concert performances, helped make him Pryor one of the highest paid stars in Hollywood. He was one of the first black performers to have enough leverage to cut his own Hollywood deals. In 1983, he signed a $40 million, five-year contract with Columbia Pictures.

His films included “Stir Crazy,” “Silver Streak,” “Which Way Is Up?” and “Richard Pryor Live on the Sunset Strip.”

Throughout his career, Pryor focused on racial inequality, once joking as the host of the 1977 Academy Awards that Harry Belafonte and Sidney Poitier were the only black members of the Academy.

Pryor once marveled “that I live in racist America and I’m uneducated, yet a lot of people love me and like what I do, and I can make a living from it. You can’t do much better than that.”

Battled his demons
In 1980, he nearly lost his life when he suffered severe burns over 50 percent of his body while freebasing cocaine at his home. An admitted “junkie” at the time, Pryor spent six weeks recovering from the burns and much longer from drug and alcohol dependence.

He battled multiple sclerosis throughout the ’90s.

In his last movie, the 1991 bomb “Another You,” Pryor’s poor health was clearly evident. Pryor made a comeback attempt the following year, returning to standup comedy in clubs and on television while looking thin and frail, and with noticeable speech and movement difficulties.

In 1995, he played an embittered multiple sclerosis patient in an episode of the television series “Chicago Hope.” The role earned him an Emmy nomination as best guest actor in a drama series.

“To be diagnosed was the hardest thing because I didn’t know what they were talking about,” he said. “And the doctor said ‘Don’t worry, in three months you’ll know.’

“So I went about my business and then, one day, it jumped me. I couldn’t get up. ... Your muscles trick you; they did me.”

While Pryor’s material sounds modest when compared with some of today’s raunchier comedians, it was startling material when first introduced. He never apologized for it.

In his 1977 NBC television series “The Richard Pryor Show,” he threatened to cancel his contract with the network after NBC’s censors objected to a skit in which Pryor appeared naked save for a flesh-colored loincloth to suggest he was emasculated.

In his later years Pryor mellowed considerably, and his film roles looked more like easy paychecks than artistic endeavors. His robust work gave way to torpid efforts like “Harlem Nights,” “Brewster’s Millions” and “Hear No Evil, See No Evil.”

Pryor was married six times. He and Flynn Pryor had a son, Steven. Previous children included another son, Richard, and daughters Elizabeth, Rain and Renee.

Daughter Rain became an actress. In an interview in 2005, she told the Philadelphia Inquirer that her father always “put his life right out there for you to look at. I took that approach because I saw how well audiences respond to it. I try to make you laugh at life.”

Richard Pryor, Iconoclastic Comedian, Dies at 65
By MEL WATKINS, The New York Times, December 11, 2005

Richard Pryor, the iconoclastic standup comedian who transcended barriers of race and brought a biting, irreverent humor into America's living rooms, movie houses, clubs and concert halls, died Saturday. He was 65.

Mr. Pryor, who had been ill with multiple sclerosis, suffered a heart attack and died at a hospital in Los Angeles, his wife, Jennifer Lee Pryor, told CNN.

Mr. Pryor's health had been in decline for many years. Episodes of self-destructive, chaotic and violent behavior, often triggered by drug use, repeatedly threatened his career and jeopardized his life. "I couldn't escape the darkness," he acknowledged, but he was able to put his demons at the service of his art.

Mr. Pryor's brilliant comic imagination and creative use of the blunt cadences of street language were revelations to most Americans. He did not simply tell stories, he brought them to vivid life, revealing the entire range of black America's humor, from its folksy rural origins to its raunchier urban expressions.

At the height of his career, in the late 1970's, Mr. Pryor prowled the stage like a restless cat, dispensing what critics regarded as the most poignant and penetrating comedic view of African-American life ever afforded the American public. He was volatile yet vulnerable, crass but sensitive, streetwise and cocky but somehow still diffident and anxious. And he could unleash an astonishing array of dramatic and comic skills to win acceptance and approval for a kind of stark humor.

"Pryor started it all," the director and comedian Keenen Ivory Wayans said. "He made the blueprint for the progressive thinking of black comedians, unlocking that irreverent style."

For the actor Eddie Murphy, Richard Pryor was simply "better than anyone who ever picked up a microphone." The playwright Neil Simon called him "the most brilliant comic in America."

An Innovative Approach

Mr. Pryor's body language conveyed the ambivalence - at once belligerent and defensive - of the black male's provisional stance in society. His monologues evoked the passions and foibles of all segments of black society, including working-class, church-going people and prostitutes, pimps and hustlers.

He unleashed a galaxy of street characters who traditionally had been embarrassments to most middle-class blacks and mere stereotypes to most whites. And he presented them so truthfully and hilariously that he was able to transcend racial boundaries and capture a huge audience of admirers in virtually every ethnic, economic and cultural group in America. In 1998, he received the Kennedy Center's award for humor, the Mark Twain Prize.

Mr. Pryor's crossover appeal derived largely from his innovative approach to comedy - what Rolling Stone magazine called "a new type of realistic theater." It was essentially comedy without jokes - re-enactments of common human exchanges that not only mirrored the pretensions of the characters portrayed but also subtly revealed the minor triumphs that allowed them to endure and even prevail over the bleak realities of everyday living.

"Comedy," he said, "is when you are driving along and see a couple of dudes and one is in trouble with the others and he's trying to talk his way out of it. You say, 'Oh boy, they got him,' and you laugh. I cannot tell jokes. My comedy is not comedy as society has defined it."

In his autobiography, "Pryor Convictions," written in 1995 with Todd Gold, he allows Mudbone, the down-home raconteur who was perhaps Mr. Pryor's most unforgettable character and in many ways his alter ego, to comment, "the truth is gonna be funny, but it's gonna scare . . . folks."

In fact, Mr. Pryor's often harsh observations and explicit language did offend some audiences. But he insistently presented characters with little or no distortion. "A lie is profanity," he explained. "A lie is the worst thing in the world. Art is the ability to tell the truth, especially about oneself."

A Childhood of Characters

Richard Pryor, the only child of Leroy Pryor and Gertrude Thomas Pryor, was born in Peoria, Ill., on Dec. 1, 1940, and raised in a household where, as he wrote, "I lived among an assortment of relatives, neighbors, whores and winos - the people who inspired a lifetime of comedic material." His parents and grandmother ran a string of bars and bordellos that catered to a constant influx of transients who moved in and out of town, which was such an important stop on the black and white vaudeville circuits that it inspired the expression, "Will it play in Peoria?"

A frail child, he learned how to use his quick wit and belligerent humor to gain respect from street gangs and bigger, more aggressive peers. But the antic behavior that served him well in the streets did not translate to the classroom, and he was expelled from school in the eighth grade despite his obvious talent and intelligence. During the remainder of his teens, he worked as a truck driver, a laborer and a factory worker, then joined the Army, where he served in Germany until he was discharged after stabbing another serviceman during a fight.

He returned to Peoria, married, became the father of a son, Richard Jr., and, inspired by the television appearances of Redd Foxx and Dick Gregory, began performing in local nightclubs. In 1962, a variety act offered him a job as a master of ceremonies; leaving his wife and child behind, he began touring, appearing at small black nightclubs in East St. Louis, Cleveland, Chicago, Pittsburgh and Youngstown.

In 1963, after honing his craft on the "chitlin circuit," Mr. Pryor decided to take a crack at New York City. He felt ready to compete with the "big cats" and to try to emulate the success of Bill Cosby, the comedian he most admired. Soon, he was appearing at Greenwich Village clubs like Cafe Wha?, The Living Room, Papa Hud's and the Bitter End.

Mr. Pryor made his national television debut on Rudy Vallee's "On Broadway Tonight" in 1964. He had, in his own words, "entered the mainstream," presenting "white bread," nonoffensive humor that freely copied the styles of other comedians, particularly Mr. Cosby. He worked the Catskills resort hotels and opened for the singer Billy Eckstine at the Apollo Theater in Harlem. Big-time television appearances followed on "The Ed Sullivan Show" and Johnny Carson's "Tonight Show." Two years after his arrival in New York, he had a national reputation.

Despite his growing popularity, Mr. Pryor was frustrated. "I made a lot of money being Bill Cosby," he recalled, "but I was hiding my personality. I just wanted to be in show business so bad I didn't care how. It started bothering me - I was being a robot comic, repeating the same lines, getting the same laughs for the same jokes. The repetition was killing me."

In 1967, Mr. Pryor stormed off the stage of the Aladdin Hotel in Las Vegas, shouting, "What am I doing here? I'm not going to do this anymore!"

In his autobiography, he recalled: "There was a world of junkies and winos, pool hustlers and prostitutes, women and family screaming inside my head, trying to be heard. The longer I kept them bottled up, the harder they tried to escape. The pressure built till I went nuts."

Despite resistance from club owners, booking agents and advisers, he began listening to those voices, developing new material during the next few years served straight from the black experience, even embracing the street vernacular use of the word "nigger."

His first comedy album, "Richard Pryor" (1967) revealed his new direction with such routines as: "I always wanted to go to the movies and see a black hero. I figured maybe on television they'll have it - Look, up in the sky! It's a crow. It's a bat. No, it's Super Nigger. Able to leap tall buildings with a single bound; faster than a bowl of chitlins."

Becoming Himself

By 1970, he had gone underground to reassess his life and his comic approach.

When he returned to show business in Los Angeles, his comedy had changed radically. After seeing his revised act, Mr. Cosby said: "Richard Pryor took on a whole new persona, his own. Richard killed the Bill Cosby in his act, made people hate it. Then he worked on them, doing pure Pryor, and it was the most astonishing metamorphosis I have ever seen. He was magnificent."

Some of his new material appeared on his second album, "Craps (After Hours)" (1971), which was recorded at the Redd Foxx Club in Hollywood. He boldly engaged sensitive racial topics, mocking police harassment of blacks and exploring differences between white and black sexual attitudes.

Although "Craps" is considered one of Mr. Pryor's best comedy albums, initial sales were dismal. Even the black audience for whom it was intended largely ignored it.

Mr. Pryor persisted, however, developing his act and building a new following by returning to the small black clubs that he had abandoned with his initial success. He also appeared at better-known and challenging venues like the Apollo in Harlem and more cutting-edge comedy clubs downtown like The Improv.

The routines developed on those dates provided material for his next album, "That Nigger's Crazy" (1974), which surprised record-industry executives with its appeal to young whites as well as blacks. Despite its X-rating because of explicit language and sexual content, the record sold more than a half-million copies and won the Grammy Award for best comedy album of the year. It was followed by another X-rated album, " . . . Is It Something I Said" (1975), which also went gold and won another Grammy.

Appearances on television furthered Mr. Pryor's career. He was a popular host on "Saturday Night Live" in 1975, and two years later he agreed to do a series of television specials for NBC.

Mr. Pryor's impact was not limited to comedy performance on records and the stage. He wrote for Redd Foxx's popular television series "Sanford and Son" and for "The Flip Wilson Show"; he also collaborated with Lily Tomlin on her television specials, receiving an Emmy Award for best comedy writing for "Lily" in 1974.

After returning from a trip to Africa in 1979, Mr. Pryor told audiences he would never use the word "nigger" again as a performer. While abroad, he said, he saw black people running governments and businesses. And in a moment of epiphany, he said, he realized that he did not see anyone he could call by that name.

He appeared in 40 films during a career that began with "Busy Bodies" in 1969 and concluded with a role opposite his frequent co-star Gene Wilder in "Another You" in 1992.

His first starring role, in 1976, was as a race car driver in "Greased Lightning," and he costarred with Gene Wilder in "Silver Streak." Although he would dismiss "Silver Streak" as a "stupid film," audiences loved his performance and he became one of Hollywood's hottest box-office draws.

Comedy Sets a Standard

Mr. Pryor probably reached the pinnacle of his career in 1979 with his first concert film, "Richard Pryor, Live in Concert," a movie, filmed during an appearance in Long Beach, Calif., that more than a quarter of a century later remains the standard by which other movies of live comedy performances are judged.

The film, which was to inspire others to make their own comic performance movies, caught Mr. Pryor at peak form. He reflected often about his own tumultuous life, with monologues about a domestic quarrel in which he shot his wife's car, the death of his pet monkeys and a near-fatal heart attack, which ended with: "I woke up in the ambulance, right? And there was nothin' but white people starin' at me. I say . . . I done died and wound up in the wrong heaven. Now I gotta listen to Lawrence Welk the rest of my days."

In addition to his wife, Mr. Pryor is survived by six children: Richard Jr., Rain, Elizabeth, Steven, Kelsey and Franklin. He was married six times and divorced five times.

If he used his misadventures to earn fame and fortune, Mr. Pryor also frequently undercut his career and his life with his self-destructive behavior. In 1974, for example, he was sentenced to 10 days in jail, fined and put on probation after pleading guilty to a charge of willful failure to file an income tax return.

In 1978, a court fined him $500, placed him on probation again and ordered him to seek psychiatric care and make restitution after a New Year's Day incident in which he rammed his Mercedes into a car containing friends of his wife and then shot at it with a pistol.

In 1980, after a marathon drug binge, Mr. Pryor was critically burned in an explosion that the police said was caused by the ignition of ether being used in conjunction with cocaine. Fire Department paramedics found him walking in a daze more than a mile from his home outside Los Angeles with third-degree burns over the upper half of his body. He was hospitalized for almost two months while undergoing a series of skin grafts.

Recovering, Mr. Pryor remained a top-box office attraction during most of the 1980's. He appeared in numerous movies and released two more films of live comedy performances, but he continued to be bedeviled by drug and health problems.

In 1986, he was found to be suffering from multiple sclerosis, a disease that strikes at the central nervous system, and as the years passed he experienced its cruelest symptoms: vertigo, tremors, muscle weakness and chronic fatigue.

His performances in "See No Evil, Hear No Evil" (1989) and "Another You" (1992) with Gene Wilder revealed a frail, hesitant actor who struggled to deliver his lines. Still, in 1992, he was back at the Comedy Store in Los Angeles polishing material for a concert tour. He was no longer able to stand on stage and he delivered his monologue from an easy chair. But he was forced to cancel his tour early the next year.

"I realized that I had more heart than energy, more courage than strength," he said. "My mind was willing, but my feets couldn't carry me to the end zone."

OBT: Eugene McCarthy

2005-12-10T00:49:00.000-06:00

Former Sen. Eugene McCarthy dies

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Former Minnesota Sen. Eugene J. McCarthy, whose insurgent campaign toppled a sitting president in 1968 and forced the Democratic Party to take seriously his message against the Vietnam War, died Saturday. He was 89.

McCarthy died in his sleep at the retirement home in the Georgetown neighborhood where he had lived for the past few years, said his son, Michael.

Eugene McCarthy challenged President Lyndon B. Johnson for the 1968 Democratic nomination during growing debate over the Vietnam War. The challenge led to Johnson's withdrawal from the race.

The former college professor, who ran for president five times in all, was in some ways an atypical politician, a man with a witty, erudite speaking style who wrote poetry in his spare time and was the author of several books.

"He was thoughtful and he was principled and he was compassionate and he had a good sense of humor," his son said.

When Eugene McCarthy ran for president in 1992, he explained his decision to leave the seclusion of his home in rural Woodville, Virginia, for the campaign trail by quoting Plutarch, the ancient Greek historian: "They are wrong who think that politics is like an ocean voyage or military campaign, something to be done with some particular end in view."

McCarthy got less than 1 percent of the vote in 1992 in New Hampshire, the state where he helped change history 24 years earlier.

Helped by his legion of idealistic young volunteers known as "clean-for-Gene kids," McCarthy got 42 percent of the vote in the state's 1968 Democratic primary. That showing embarrassed Johnson into withdrawing from the race and throwing his support to his vice president, Hubert H. Humphrey.

Sen. Robert Kennedy of New York also decided to seek the nomination, but was assassinated in June 1968. McCarthy and his followers went to the party convention in Chicago, where fellow Minnesotan Humphrey won the nomination amid bitter strife both on the convention floor and in the streets.

Humphrey went on to narrowly lose the general election to Richard Nixon. The racial, social and political tensions within the Democratic Party in 1968 have continued to affect presidential politics ever since.

"It was a tragic year for the Democratic Party and for responsible politics, in a way," McCarthy said in a 1988 interview.

"There were already forces at work that might have torn the party apart anyway -- the growing women's movement, the growing demands for greater racial equality, an inability to incorporate all the demands of a new generation.

"But in 1968, the party became a kind of unrelated bloc of factions ... each refusing accommodation with another, each wanting control at the expense of all the others."

Eugene J. McCarthy, Senate Dove Who Jolted '68 Race, Dies at 89
By FRANCIS X. CLINES, The New York Times, December 11, 2005

Eugene J. McCarthy, the sardonic Senate dove who stunned the nation by upending President Lyndon B. Johnson's re-election drive amid the Vietnam War turmoil of 1968, died early yesterday. He was 89.

A courtly, sharp-witted presence in capital politics for half a century, Mr. McCarthy, a Minnesota Democrat, died in his sleep at an assisted-living home in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, where he had lived for the last several years.

His son, Michael B. McCarthy, said the cause was complications of Parkinson's disease.

Eugene McCarthy left his mark in a generation's skepticism toward war and the willfulness of political leaders.

"There is only one thing to do - take it to the country!" Senator McCarthy angrily declared in a Capitol corridor 15 months before the 1968 election, after hearing the Johnson administration make its case for the legality of the war.

Mr. McCarthy, a man of needling wit, triggered one of the most tumultuous years in American political history. With the war taking scores of thousands of American and Vietnamese lives, he rallied throngs against this "costly exercise in futility" and stoked a fiery national debate over the World War II model of an all-powerful presidency. He challenged Johnson in a primary, and the president, facing almost certain defeat, ended up withdrawing from the race.

Mr. McCarthy was a disarming presence on the stump as he mixed a wry tone and a hard, existential edge in challenging the White House, the Pentagon and the superpower swagger of modern politicians.

An acid-tongued campaigner, Mr. McCarthy was sometimes a puzzlement, veering from inspired speechifying to moody languishing. But he was the singular candidate of the Vietnam War protest, serving up politics and poetry, theology and baseball in a blend that entranced the "Clean for Gene" legions who flocked to his insurgent's call.

"We do not need presidents who are bigger than the country, but rather ones who speak for it and support it," he told them. His supporters were delighted by what they saw as his candor, yet some were troubled by the diffidence that marked his public persona.

"I'm kind of an accidental instrument, really," he said, "through which I hope that the judgment and the will of this nation can be expressed."

A Self-Styled Outcast

Typically, he only frustrated his followers when he allowed that he was at least "willing" to be president and, yes, might even be an "adequate" one. Questions arose about his passion on the campaign as he built a reputation as an unapologetic contrarian.

In his 1968 challenge and for decades thereafter, Mr. McCarthy played the self-outcast of the Democratic Party, even shunning Jimmy Carter to endorse Ronald Reagan, the Republican candidate for president in 1980. He was a chronic presidential campaigner, running in 1972, 1976 and 1988, 18 years gone from the Senate. He endorsed trade protectionism, the strategic defense initiative advocated by Reagan that was often referred to as Star Wars and, most passionately, the junking of the two-party establishment whose rules he came to despise.

"It's much easier for me to understand politicians who don't walk away from it," he said when, at age 71, he once more knew he could not win but ran anyway, hectoring the latest Beltway incumbents.

Mr. McCarthy stayed busy writing poetry and books about the decline of American politics, and kept his eye on Washington from his farmhouse in bucolic Rappahannock County, Va., 70 miles to the west, on 14 acres set amid the Blue Ridge Mountains.

"I think he has a rejection wish," Maurice Rosenblatt, a Washington lobbyist who was a longtime friend, once said of the senator's perplexing mix of quixotic impulse and lethal hesitancy. "He wants to reject others and be rejected by them."

But others, conceding his quirks, rated Mr. McCarthy the one stand-up, cant-free politician of their generation. "Besides his conscience, there is his civility," Joe Flaherty wrote in the antiwar heyday of The Village Voice.

Mr. McCarthy delighted in commenting obliquely on politics and himself by reciting poetry on the hustings. His more zealous volunteers yearned for clarion calls, not pentameter. But this was not the style of a man steeped in the Thomistic tangents of his training as a Roman Catholic college professor.

Standing a lean 6-foot-4, gray-haired and dryly smiling, the candidate McCarthy gave a memorable rendering of Yeats ("An Irish Airman Foresees His Death") in suggesting why he ran:

Nor law, nor duty bade me fight,

Nor public men, nor cheering crowds,

A lonely impulse of delight

Drove to this tumult in the clouds.

As a speaker, Mr. McCarthy was an original but hardly stem-winding presence. "Usually the cheers were greater when he came in than when he finished speaking," noted the poet Robert Lowell, who frequently traveled with the candidate.

Mr. McCarthy, once a semiprofessional baseball player, liked to burnish a kind of knuckleball oddness. In one of his own later poems, "Lament for an Aging Politician," he wrote:

I have left Act I, for involution

And Act II. There, mired in complexity

I cannot write Act III.

He identified simplistic partisanship as the ultimate enemy in the domestic strife over the Vietnam War. Invoking Whitman's call to human goodness - "Arouse! for you must justify me" - candidate McCarthy's basic message to Americans was Daniel Webster's dictum to never "give up to party what was meant for mankind."

A Soft-Spoken Campaigner

As crowds rallied to him, he promised no new deals or frontiers. Rather, he slowed his baritone for a plain definition of patriotism: "To serve one's country not in submission but to serve it in truth."

He showed more passion as contrarian than as dogged campaigner. At the 1960 Democratic National Convention, Senator McCarthy showed that speaker's fire so longed for by his later followers when he boldly nominated Adlai E. Stevenson, a twice-defeated presidential candidate, one more time despite - or because of - John F. Kennedy's lock on the nomination.

"Do not reject this man who made us all proud to be Democrats," rang Mr. McCarthy's electrifying loser's plea.

In Congress, Mr. McCarthy was an unabashed liberal unafraid to take on Senator Joseph R. McCarthy of Wisconsin and his alarmist warnings about the Communist menace. More often, as he restlessly paced the backs of committee rooms or brought a tome to read during hearings, Eugene McCarthy was viewed by peers as something of a ruminator and a curmudgeon.

Yet he was the one who dared to step forward and bell the White House cat when other Democrats would only complain. Grasping the unpopularity of the deepening war, he sought to make a party issue of it, announcing his primary candidacy against President Johnson, a fellow Democrat, in the hope of building pressure for a policy change.

"There comes a time when an honorable man simply has to raise the flag," declared the senator, a onetime novice monk whose political role model was Sir Thomas More, the English statesman martyred in resisting Henry VIII's seizure of church power.

Mocked by Johnson loyalists as a mere "footnote in history," Mr. McCarthy prevailed well enough in his time to observe, after driving Johnson into retreat, "I think we can say with Churchill, 'But what a footnote!' "

Senator McCarthy's challenge was intended to prod, more than destroy, the president. But in unnerving Johnson in office, he shook Senator Robert F. Kennedy of New York from his irresolution about challenging the president. The critical moment came in the New Hampshire primary of March 1968, when Mr. McCarthy beat the pundits' predictions and won 42 percent of the vote. Johnson, despite his incumbent's grip, could score only 49 percent.

Within days, Senator Kennedy entered the race, embittering McCarthy supporters, not to mention their champion. Two weeks later, Johnson pre-empted greater popular rejection and astonished the nation by suddenly announcing in a postscript to a televised speech that he would not seek re-election and would devote his energies to ending the war.

The Chicago Convention

The year's tumult continued. Kennedy was assassinated in June in California as he edged out the McCarthy forces in a key round of the antiwar competition. The Democrats staggered to their convention in Chicago, where civic mayhem erupted.

The party machine forced the nomination of Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey to face Richard M. Nixon, over the objections of war protesters, including draft-ripe college students. Many demonstrators were beaten in the streets by the Chicago police of Mayor Richard J. Daley, a party stalwart.

"I can still smell the tear gas in the Hilton Hotel," Mr. McCarthy said in an interview nearly 30 years later. "I said before the vote we were not going to win, and there was no point in having the student delegations in the streets thinking we could."

"The party hasn't recovered from Chicago; sort of its integrity was lost," he contended in his ninth decade, saying that modern issues of importance were being sidestepped as candidates ran to the drumbeat of the focus group for the office of "Governor of the United States."

Robert Kennedy's brother, Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, said in a statement yesterday: "Gene's name will forever be linked with our family. In spite of the rivalry with Bobby in the 1968 campaign, I admired Gene enormously for his courage in challenging a war America never should have fought. His life speaks volumes to us today, as we face a similar critical time for our country."

Mr. McCarthy viewed himself as the classic "messenger who brought the bad news" to the party, never to be forgiven. He withheld his endorsement of Humphrey until a week before the 1968 election, using the intervening time to demand antiwar concessions, but also, in a characteristic display of aloofness, to cover the World Series for Life magazine.

Baseball was his metaphor for politics and life. "We know Nixon's stuff," he said well before Nixon resigned in disgrace from the presidency. "He's got a slider. And he's thrown a spitter so many years he's got seniority rights on it."

Eugene Joseph McCarthy, of Irish-German descent, was born March 29, 1916, in Watkins, Minn., the son of Michael J. and Anna Baden McCarthy. He graduated from St. John's University in Collegeville, Minn., in 1935 and then earned a master's degree in economics and sociology at the University of Minnesota. He taught social science in Minnesota high schools for several years, then economics and education at St. John's and sociology at the College of St. Thomas in St. Paul.

The young McCarthy thought he might want to be a Benedictine monk, but he left the monastery after a nine-month novitiate trial. He later married a fellow teacher, Abigail Quigley. They had four children. Soon after the 1968 campaign, the McCarthys separated after 24 years of marriage. They never divorced.

In addition to Michael McCarthy, of Seattle, Mr. McCarthy is survived by two daughters, Ellen A. McCarthy of Bethesda, Md., and Margaret A. McCarthy of Takoma Park, Md.; and six grandchildren. He is also survived by a brother, Austin McCarthy of Wilmer, Minn.; and a sister, Marian Enright of Walnut Creek, Calif. A daughter, Mary A. McCarthy, died in 1990, Michael McCarthy said.

Public Figure, Private Man

Mr. McCarthy remained active until the last few months. In January, he published a 173-page paperback collection of essays and poems, "Parting Shots From My Brittle Bow: Reflections on American Politics and Life."

Stirred to politics by the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, Mr. McCarthy was elected to the House of Representatives in 1948 and served five terms before being elected to the Senate, where he served 12 years.

In the 1968 campaign, Mr. McCarthy was the sort of candidate who could accept with equanimity a critic's charge that he ran "against the powers of the presidency."

In manner, he was faulted for arrogance; in strategy, for not broadening his antiwar constituency with stronger ties to blacks and the working poor, as Robert Kennedy did. The McCarthy civil rights record was considered exemplary, yet when asked about the issue at a rally, he dismissively advised his questioner to look up his record.

"Record, hell! Tell us what you feel!" the citizen shot back at the candidate.

Although his image was warm and witty on television, Mr. McCarthy stepped back from playing the candidate who engaged by self-revelation. Abigail McCarthy, respected in her own career as a writer, once said, "The essential thing about Gene is that he's a private person, and in an all-confessional age, that's considered almost treachery."

The senator who defied his president and party was confessional in his reliance on Thomas More as "the first modern man, the first political man."

"He was forced to make a kind of individual and personal choice at a time when there was great upheaval," Mr. McCarthy noted with satisfaction as he tried to explain himself to a nation also in upheaval.

ENV: Fire Ant Relief

2005-12-08T21:08:00.000-06:00

One caution -- this is a press release, not a news article . . . passed on by Mike Quinn, thanks.

Off With Their Heads!
Bexar County Phorid Fly Release To Help with Fire Ant Control
Paul Schattenberg, Texas A&M University System Agricultural Program, Dec. 6, 2005

SAN ANTONIO – Heads will roll as the result of an upcoming phorid fly release in Bexar County. Fortunately, those heads will be attached to the bodies of thousands of red imported fire ants in the area.

While phorid flies have been established as a biological control for red imported fire ants in other Texas counties, their release here by Texas Cooperative Extension will be a first for Bexar County.

The release will be before year's end at Walker Ranch in northern San Antonio. Walker Ranch was chosen due to its existing fire ant mounds and the presence of sufficient trees to form a windbreak to protect the flies, as well as its water source.

Red imported fire ants are an invasive species accidentally introduced into the U.S. from South America around the 1930s, said Molly Keck, entomologist for Extension in Bexar County. Fire ants are now the dominant ant species in the eastern two-thirds of Texas. They are a concern because of their possible impact on human health, as well as on hatching reptiles, birds and other newborn animals.

In 2001, an economic impact study released by the Texas Imported Fire Ant Research and Management Plan showed Texans shell out more than $1.2 billion annually on fire ant damage and control. More than $700 million of that amount was for households.

Phorid flies were chosen as a biological control because they "parasitize" fire ants by depositing eggs which hatch into larvae that pupate inside the fire ant's head capsule, Keck said. Adult flies use chemical cues to locate fire ants and "dive-bomb" them, laying a torpedo-shaped egg in the ant's thorax. The maggot hatching from the egg then migrates to the ant's head.

"As the fly pupates, it releases enzymes which cause the head to fall off," she said. "The maggot continues to pupate in the decapitated head capsule, finally emerging as an adult fly." Currently, the main source of fire ant control is chemical.

"Many chemical controls are effective and work well against fire ants," Keck said. "But having an effective biological means of control is an important entomological and environmental objective. It provides us with another weapon in the arsenal to control fire ants."

Prior to a biological release, host specificity is established to eliminate any unintended economic or environmental consequences, Keck noted.

"The phorid fly species we'll be releasing is the Pseudacteon tricuspis," she said. "It is host-specific to red imported fire ants and has never been known to attack another organism."

The flies to be released are being provided by the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, said Dr. Bastiaan (Bart) Drees, professor of entomology at Texas A&M University in College Station.

"There have been similar successful releases throughout the southeastern U.S. and we feel confident this one will be equally worthwhile in supplementing red imported fire ant control efforts in Bexar County," he said.

Phorid flies will be shipped from the USDA rearing facility in Gainsville, Fla. Keck will receive hundreds of parasitized fire ant head capsules from which adult flies will emerge. As they emerge, they will be collected and released over a two-week period.

"The presence of adult flies next year will confirm the successful development and emergence of the first generation," Keck said. "After two months, all adults initially released will have died and new egg development would be complete."

Adult phorid flies must be released immediately after hatching because their life span is only a few days, she added.

Ten fire ant colonies will be opened and prepared and several will be monitored and the number of fire ant mounds at the release site will be recorded. The first study evaluation will take place two to three months after initial release.

Phorid fly activity and fire ant density will be evaluated during spring and fall, and the impact of the program will be monitored for several years.

"The main effect of the flies will be to disrupt fire ant foraging during the daytime and stress them so they have difficulty competing with other ant species," she said. "We hope that the introduction of this biological control will provide sustained repression of red imported fire ants in the county."

Similar biological control releases have resulted in a 10 percent to 30 percent reduction in the population of "target" species, Keck added.

Members of the integrative biology section of the University of Texas are currently planning a similar release within Bexar County in 2006. Keck and others involved in the Extension release are coordinating with them to ensure the integrity of their respective data. They will also share their results to get a better overall picture of phorid fly impact in the area.

REV: John Lennon

2005-12-08T14:30:00.000-06:00

i don't believe i've ever quite recovered from this . . .

there are some things that always stand out in your mind at times like these. for me it was the commiseration with, the genuine hurt in the face of a friend. i had gone birding with friends the day after, and Dave Dauphin said something to me along the lines of "nothing will ever be the same." we were mighty young then, but in tune. and what might have been dismissed by my elders of the time as mere misplaced grief, seems incredibly prescient now. it's why i give latitude to that generation that loves Kurt Cobain, and why i will do the same to the next generation that loses someone who "speaks" for them. as we all ponder the multiple tragedies of this week, Pearl Harbor, Lennon, it might do us the most good to look around at everyone we have lost who might have taught us something had we only listened. i know that heading into another Christmas at war makes me want to shout louder, point more fingers than i have, and hug my friends twice as hard twice as often.

Check out Eric's post at Altercation. The articles he cites are below the NYT.

Fans remember Lennon with flowers, memories
People gather in Central Park on anniversary of ex-Beatle's murder
The Associated Press, Updated: 1:42 p.m. ET Dec. 8, 2005

NEW YORK - John Lennon fans tried to imagine what might have been.

On the 25th anniversary of his murder, fans brought flowers, candles and their own bittersweet memories Thursday as they gathered in Central Park’s Strawberry Fields — and in the former Beatle’s hometown of Liverpool, England.

“With the country at war, his work and philosophy seem more poignant and more desperately needed than ever,” said Kim Polson, 50.

Polson, who said she fell in love with the Beatles when she saw them on television at age 8, was an early morning visitor to Strawberry Fields, the section of Central Park opposite the Dakota apartment building where Lennon was gunned down Dec. 8, 1980. Hundreds of fans, some of them born after Lennon’s death, gathered on a cold morning.

The scene Thursday was much the same in Liverpool, where scores of fans from around the world remembered him with white balloons, flowers and prayers. The balloons, carrying tributes to Lennon, were released into the sky.

“I just wrote ‘Merry Christmas John’ on my balloon,” said James Andrews, a 9-year-old from Bournemouth, England. “I love the Beatles, and especially John Lennon.”

In New York, locals mingled with tourists in Central Park. One woman sat with a scrapbook she had assembled over the years, while another man played Beatles’ music on an acoustic guitar. Visitors piled off tour buses to visit the vigil or walk past the Dakota. Among the floral offerings were a half-dozen white roses and a bough of holly.

Angie Mulbay, who was born four days after Lennon’s slaying, traveled to New York from Columbus, Ohio, with her 20-year-old sister, Ashley. They planned to spend most of the day in Strawberry Fields.

“John is very important to me, his music and his message,” Mulbay said. “We’re here to share the day and meet people with the same interest.”

On that night 25 years ago, Lennon — who had just turned 40 — was returning from a midtown recording studio with his wife, Yoko Ono. In an instant, Mark David Chapman, a fan carrying a copy of J.D. Salinger’s “The Catcher in the Rye,” opened fire. Police officers put the mortally wounded singer in the back of a squad car, but shortly after arriving a hospital, Lennon was dead.

‘It was just terrible’
In the documentary “One Night In December,” airing on the British Broadcasting Corp. to commemorate the anniversary, former Beatle Paul McCartney recalled getting the news that Lennon had been slain.

“It was early in the morning for us and I got a phone call from the manager who said, you know, ‘Are you sitting down?’

“He told me, and it was just terrible,” McCartney said. “It was a terrible shock because it was the end of an era of friendship for me.”

Tom Leighton, one of the organizers of an ad-hoc memorial committee, said people attend the vigil for different personal reasons, but “primarily it’s to pay our respects and share our grief collectively.”

Fans hold a moment of silence at 10:50 p.m. — the time Lennon was shot — and at 11:15 — the time he is believed to have died. Despite an appeal by Lennon fans, city officials planned to close the park at 1 a.m., as they have for several years.

Polson, who lives a block from the Dakota, recalled seeing Lennon in a coffee shop four months before he was killed. She stuck around to listen to him talk to a colleague.

“I came to the office two hours late that morning and my boss was furious, so I said, ‘Ask me why I’m late,”’ Polson said. “When I told him, he was no longer angry.”

“I’ll be late for work again today. John Lennon made me late again,” she said.

Chapman remains in New York’s Attica state prison, where his third request for parole was denied in October. He comes up for parole again next year.

John Lennon's strange sort of immortality, now 25 years long
Steven Winn, SFGate.com, Thursday, December 8, 2005

He was shot and killed, 25 years ago today, by a mad fan who thought he'd sold out and become a phony. On this Dec. 8, hundreds of biographies, broadsides, candlelight vigils, documentaries, reconsiderations and a Broadway musical later, John Lennon remains in the culture's magnified crosshairs. And still we can't quite get a fix on him.

Almost anyone of a certain age, now as then, has an opinion; a construct; a shadowy, imperfectly mapped place where Lennon lives and how his music -- even if we only experienced it as a backdrop, as I did -- helped place us in the world and simultaneously question that place. "Strawberry Fields Forever." "Imagine." "Beautiful Boy." "I Am the Walrus." "In My Life." "Mother." "Help!" The titles of the songs -- everyone has his own private playlist -- are enough. They summon things, take us back and remind us what we took forward and what we left behind. They stop time and expand it.

Popular music inevitably becomes the soundtrack of our youth. Lennon, of the Beatles era and beyond, was that and something more, an artist who seemed to both describe and drive experience, to anticipate as well as celebrate, whether it was puppy love, politics, drugs, marriage, dissatisfaction, parenthood, despair, contentment or the conundrum of celebrity he addressed. He was at once knowing and naive, incisive and baffled, contradictory, inspired, vain, generous, uncertain, fully flawed. He was, in other words, alive.

And then, suddenly, when we hadn't thought much about Lennon during his long retreat into househusbandry or whatever that was from 1975-'80, there it was: How displaced we felt, how unfinished, when he died. It's the wound that didn't ever heal, which is why we keep turning back to Lennon while he, endlessly discussed and ever elusive, seems to slip from our grasp.

Other popular musicians get summed up and sent off on a raft of tributes, biographies, box sets and celebratory star-vehicle films, where even the demons take on a kind of retrospective glow. "Ray" (Ray Charles) and "Walk the Line" (Johnny Cash) are the latest examples of the genre. Lennon has certainly had his share of attention and then some, before and after death. Make that the understatement of the day. But it's somehow fitting that he also got an odd, diffident musical about him in which he was played, in the show's San Francisco tryout earlier this year, by nine different actors of both genders and various races.

It didn't work. It felt both pompous and vague. The musical, with various revisions, bombed on Broadway. Blame it, as much has been blamed, on Yoko; she was the unseen hand holding all the cards. But you knew what the show's creators were driving at: Lennon was somehow bigger, or differently shaped, than the standard biopic or musical tribute measure.

One life wasn't enough to contain or explain him, which has fascinated, confused and angered people over the years. How could that adorable, influential, dominant Beatle wind up noodling away at performance art with Yoko? How could someone so patently talented write the mediocre songs on "Sometime in New York City?" What was he doing all those years up there in there in his Dakota enclave? How could a sorry nonentity like Mark David Chapman end it all?

Long before the great maw of entertainment journalism, cable television, image management and the Internet opened to its current, all-consuming dimensions, Lennon seemed to sense, warily and cannily, its appetite. He was, as many commentators and critics have said, both victim and master manipulator of his own image, whether he was being turned into a Teddie-cute Beatle by Brian Epstein, stage managing the bed-ins for peace with Yoko or meticulously recording his every thought, move and meal in his diaries.

Lennon laid the foundation for everything from Madonna's art of perpetual self-creation to Michael Jackson's public spectacle of self-destruction to Bono's purposeful political activism. Many of the aspects of today's celebrity culture -- its power to transfix, trivialize, degrade and do good -- stem from Lennon's singular career.

None of this would have surprised him. In his "last interview" with Playboy, which appears in the book "All We Are Saying," Lennon told David Sheff that by his mid-30s, "I had always considered myself an artist or musician or poet or whatever you want to call it and the so-called pain of the artist was always paid for by the freedom of the artist. And the idea of being a rock 'n' roll musician sort of suited my talents and mentality, and the freedom was great. But then I found I wasn't free. I'd got boxed in." If it was a trap, he understood how to live inside it, with all its limitations and liberations.

As Allan Kozinn wrote in the New York Times five years ago, at the 20th anniversary of the artist's death: "Lennon created and cultivated a public persona that was so well defined and copiously documented that it resists attempts to make him into either a saint or, as the revisionists have it, a dysfunctional layabout." Not that that has kept journalists, critics and meta-critics from sifting and resifting the evidence. There are books about every phase and aspect of Lennon's work and life, from his unhappy childhood to his complicated relationship with Paul McCartney, his droll drawings, his final days, even "The Mourning of John Lennon." And they're still coming. A fat new tome, Paul Spitz's recently published "The Beatles," argues that previous books about the Fab Four depend on a simplistic and reductive original narrative.

Anyone who remembers that Monday night in December of 1980, where they were and how they heard what had happened outside the Dakota in New York, has a stake in Lennon, a sense of broadly shared loss that intensifies the private connection many people felt to him and his music. You didn't need to be a rabid or even casual fan. You might have stopped listening to his music or thinking about him, but he was still a presence, an aura that radiated through the culture. He had changed some things, set others in motion, and meanwhile tried to live his life. And then, at age 40, he was gone.

Now, a quarter century later, a sense of persistence and sudden absence remains. We know him, through his music and the paradoxical, intently studied puzzle of his personal life, and we know him not. Lennon is everywhere and nowhere, a maker of infinitely adaptable anthems ("Imagine," "All You Need Is Love," "Give Peace a Chance,") that seem almost creatorless and a complex, faceted, self-scrutinizing artist who died too young.

Last week, and not because the 25th anniversary of his death was coming up, Lennon and the Beatles kept turning up. In the "Sing-It-Yourself 'Messiah' " at Davies Hall, conductor Bruce Lamott quoted a line from "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band": "You're such a lovely audience/We'd like to take you home with us." My colleague Mick LaSalle, in a review of Eminem's new CD, called the rapper "the closest thing to John Lennon since John Lennon." Billy Crystal, in his solo show "700 Sundays," invoked the black-and-white TV miracle of seeing the Beatles on "The Ed Sullivan Show."

We don't just remember Lennon now. We remember how we remember him, what we feel now about our own feelings when we first heard a song or saw him in concert -- that last time in Candlestick Park! -- or wondered what he was up to, what the next album might be and what it meant. No answers, then or now. Only the long tunnel of recollection, lit by a softly glowing light. Imagine that.

Lennon Lives Forever
Twenty-five years after his death, his music and message endure
MIKAL GILMORE, Rollingstone.com, Posted Dec 05, 2005 1:56 PM

It has been twenty-five years, and it can still stop your mind.

It had been a good night. John Lennon had just finished making music with his wife, Yoko Ono, that he regarded as some of the best music of his life, and his judgment wasn't off the mark. He had also learned, just a bit earlier, that his and Ono's album Double Fantasy -- the first collection with new music from Lennon in five years, following a mysterious sabbatical -- had gone gold that day. Now he and Ono were on their way back home from the studio to see their son, Sean, the five-year-old whom Lennon had devoted himself to more than to his career. Their car pulled up to the Manhattan apartment building where they lived, the Dakota, and Lennon got out. It was a balmy night, for December. He moved to the Dakota's entrance, then he heard a voice call his name.

Nothing made sense that night. John Lennon was murdered, shot five times in the back, in the presence of his wife. It was a murder of madness.

A future was gone -- Lennon wouldn't make music again, he wouldn't get to kiss his son -- but also, the past suddenly made no sense. A story that had started in hope had ended in blood. It was an awful payoff. Lennon had constructed the Beatles -- the group that in its time meant everything -- and then in his work after he left the band, he had strived for an honesty and an idealism that was unlike anything rock & roll had produced before. In doing so he threatened not just cultural conventions but also unforgiving powers, because he had an unusual command: He had made music that had moved the world. This violent ending ruined the epic.

Nobody ever pushed the possibilities of rock & roll like John Lennon, and nobody in the music's history has really mattered as much. This isn't to say that Lennon was the primary reason for the greatness of the Beatles, though the Beatles are, of course, unimaginable without him. Nor is it to say that after he left that group he necessarily made better albums than the other former Beatles -- though he made more interesting and consequential ones, and he took greater risks. And it isn't to say that he led a life of uprightness or sanctity, because -- and this is the important one -- he didn't. With songs like "Give Peace a Chance" and "Imagine," Lennon idealized optimism and compassion, but he realized those ideals in himself only fleetingly. He had a notorious, biting temper, he wasn't always fair to the people who loved and trusted him, and he sometimes lashed out viciously at an audience that simply believed in him.

What John Lennon did, above all else, was look after himself. He wanted love and validation, and he wanted those things on his own terms -- the only terms he cared about, and after he had become so legendary, the only ones he needed to accept. Fortunately for us all -- fortunately for history -- Lennon's terms involved high standards. He was prideful enough that he wanted to improve his art, both in and past the Beatles, and he succeeded in that ambition. He was also self-important enough to believe that he could wrestle with the times he lived in and make a difference -- and the difference he made was immense. Lennon was looking after himself when he made art and proclaimed hopes that would outlast his being. He was looking after himself when he made a family and nurtured and preserved it as his most meaningful legacy -- when he looked into his son Sean's face, and wanted to be worthy of the veneration he saw in that face. He did it when, after all his fuck-ups and all his years of silence, he believed enough in the purpose of what he had to say that he was willing to start over.

Maybe it's surprising or simply incidental that all this self-interest affected us in such wondrous and valuable ways. Or maybe it isn't incidental at all. The marvel of John Lennon's story is that all he really wanted was peace for his own interests -- he hated feeling hurt, and he felt it his whole life -- and in pursuing that end, he changed the times around him and the possibilities of the times that followed him. Deep-running hurt drove him. It's what made his story.

"You're born in pain," Lennon told Rolling Stone in 1970, after he had just left the Beatles, "and pain is what we're in most of the time. And I think that the bigger the pain, the more gods we need."

Lennon's pain reached back to his earliest memories -- and cut through his entire life. Without it, his most memorable and lasting artistic creation -- the Beatles -- would likely never have happened, or at least would not have accomplished what they finally accomplished.

Lennon was born in Liverpool, in northern England, on October 9th, 1940, during the days when Britain was the primary major democratic force willing to stand up against the advancement of fascism in Europe. Liverpool was one of England's leading port towns and a frequent target of Nazi bombing raids. On the night of Lennon's birth, air-raid sirens announced an impending attack, and the city shut out its lights. John Lennon was born that night into darkness. Though the city was hit hard and often, Liverpudlians were resilient people, with rough manners, harsh humor and a spirit of proud individualism. They needed those qualities, since much of southern England -- particularly London -- regarded the city as a plebeian backwater. "We were looked down upon by the Southerners as animals," he said in 1970. "We were hicksville."

Whereas the other young men who eventually joined Lennon to form the Beatles -- Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr -- grew up in housing projects and tougher parts of Liverpool, Lennon was raised in relative comfort, in his aunt Mimi's home in the cozy suburb of Mendips. But that benefit didn't shield the young boy from other deprivations. His father, Alfred, was a ship's steward and liked to drink; his mother, Julia, was impulsive and rebellious -- traits that Lennon inherited. Julia and Alfred married young, in a burst of passion in 1938, and John Winston Lennon was born two years later. Alfred, however, was often at sea, sometimes for a year or more, and in 1944, Julia became pregnant by another man. Alfred returned home in 1946, and when he couldn't put his family back together, he told the five-year-old John to choose between his father and mother. John at first chose his father, but when he saw the pain this was causing Julia, he relented, crying, begging his mother not to leave him. John would not see his father again until well into his fame in the Beatles; in 1970, when he severed his relationship with Alfred, Lennon still felt rage over the neglect from years before. "Have you any idea what I've been through because of you?" he screamed at his father. "Day after day in therapy, screaming for my daddy, sobbing for you to come home. What did you care, away at sea all those years?"

As it turned out, neither of Lennon's parents raised him. Julia's family was offended by her extramarital conduct, and Julia's sister Mimi took custody of the boy. Mimi was stern -- nothing like Julia. She tried to give Lennon a steady home and firm direction, though she was often unwilling to accommodate his youthful enthusiasms, and she withheld love unless he pleased her judgments.

Julia's influence, on the other hand, was immense. Whether she meant to or not, Julia provided her son a model of social defiance; she didn't feel bound by proper conventions and easy morals, and neither would John. She also encouraged his fervor for rock & roll.

In the mid-1950s, Lennon and much of English youth were in the grip of a passion for skiffle -- a rhythmic mix of the British music-hall tradition and American folk music, popularized in Lonnie Donegan's "Rock Island Line" -- when a harder beat emerged from America, led by artists like bluesmen Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf, R&B singers Ray Charles and James Brown, and fierce new stylists such as Gene Vincent, Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry. Lennon loved this music immediately -- he sought it out nightly on Radio Luxembourg, an early form of British pirate radio. But the class-conscious Mimi saw rock & roll as entertainment for commoners, and she wouldn't let Lennon learn to play it in her house. When John purchased a guitar anyway, Julia allowed him to have it sent to her home, where she taught him some chord patterns and rhythms, and gave him room to practice with friends.

Julia was killed in 1958 -- hit by a car driven by a drunken off-duty policeman -- and Lennon was left with the sense of an unfinished relationship that forever haunted his memories and longings. "I lost her twice," Lennon told David Sheff in a lengthy 1980 Playboy interview. "Once as a five-year-old when I was moved in with my auntie. And once again . . . when she actually, physically died . . . The underlying chip on my shoulder that I had as a youth got really big then. Being a teenager and a rock & roller and an art student and my mother being killed just when I was re-establishing a relationship with her . . . it was very traumatic for me."

The adventure of the Beatles was forged by John Lennon's temperament and needs. He formed the group to make his way through the world un-alone, in a partnership that might lessen his sense of anxiety and separation. Later, he would end the group for the same reasons.

As a teenager, at Quarry Bank High School and later at Liverpool College of Art, Lennon was seen as unusually bright, imaginative, creative -- and as a constant troublemaker. He wrote clever prose and drew skillful caricatures, but he had no patience for conventions of form and showed little respect to school authority for its own sake. Though Lennon struck some as a nasty character, he was also in serious pursuit of the securities and union that could be afforded by love and family. He found a romantic form of that quest in Cynthia Powell -- who married him in 1962 and bore him a son, Julian, the following year -- but Lennon's true effort at building a family came in the communion he formed with the Beatles. Indeed, the Beatles proved the great love story of the 1960s -- love was their main theme, first as a romantic ideal, then later as a social and political end -- but love wouldn't save their family.

The group debuted in 1962 with "Love Me Do" (a song by Paul McCartney) and first hit Number One on the British charts in 1963 with "Please Please Me" (a song by Lennon that was also a clever plea about oral sex). Within a year, the Beatles were the biggest event in British culture since the Second World War. A year later, after the group's breakthrough in America on The Ed Sullivan Show, the Beatles were simply the biggest thing in the world, short of nuclear fear. They represented a sea change -- in music, in culture, in democracy itself. They weren't always comfortable with having that effect. "People said the Beatles were the movement," Lennon later said, "but we were only part of the movement. We were influenced as much as we influenced." True, but the Beatles were a key part of that movement. They represented youthful hope, and they represented the new social power that rock & roll might achieve -- a power not only to upset but to transform. The world was changing -- or at least it felt that way -- and the Beatles served as emblems of that change.

As wonderful as all that may have seemed to the Beatles' audience, the group's internal reality was rather different. Lennon called life with the Beatles "a trap." In part, he meant the confinements and pressures that came with their fame and the fears -- such as the dread they felt traveling America in 1966, under constant death threats in the wake of Lennon's controversial statement that the Beatles were "more popular than Jesus now." Certainly, Lennon reveled in the money and fame, the hedonistic opportunities that spilled forth every place the Beatles turned, but he hated the touring. He resented making nice for private audiences with local privileged officials, and he felt the concerts offered no chance for musical growth. He also lamented that all these obligations kept him from time with his son Julian, though, according to Cynthia in her recent book, John, her former husband's emotional investment in his son was often strained even in the best of circumstances. The truth is, Lennon had inherited more of his mother's spirit than he understood. He lived intensely in the moment -- he threw himself into attachments with real ardor -- but when those moments and the infatuation had passed, he liked to move on. Quickly.

Lennon's first diversions came in the way of drug experiences -- a pursuit that he shared with the other Beatles, as their experiments with marijuana, then LSD, affected the growth of their music on Rubber Soul, Revolver and Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band -- followed by a devotion to Eastern mysticism and meditation. During a meditation seminar in Bangor, Wales, in August 1967, the group learned that its manager, Brian Epstein, had been found dead in his London apartment at age thirty-two, of a drug overdose. "I knew we were in trouble then," Lennon said in 1970. "I didn't really have any misconceptions about our ability to do anything other than play music. And I was scared. I thought, 'We've fuckin' had it.'"

But another event that would figure just as much into the Beatles' fate had already transpired. In November 1966, during the recording of Sgt. Pepper, Lennon visited London's Indica Gallery for a preview of an exhibition by Yoko Ono, a Japanese-born woman who had been a key player in New York's influential Fluxus avant-garde art movement in the early 1960s (she had helped conceive performance art). Her works were unlike anything Lennon had seen before. They were playful and intellectual at the same time, and all of them offered the viewers conundrums but also invited them to become a part of the art by addressing the conundrum. There was no such thing as a false answer to the riddles in Ono's art.

Lennon was puzzled, even annoyed by some of the challenges in Yoko Ono's art, but he got it, and he was captivated. Ono represented possibilities to him -- certainly romantically, but more important, the possibility of growth as an artist and the prospect of a new kind of partnership. In May 1968, Lennon sent Cynthia away on a vacation to Greece, and the night before her return, he invited Ono over to his country home in Weybridge. He and Ono talked for hours and made a remarkable experimental recording, Unfinished Music No. 1: Two Virgins. At dawn they made love. When Cynthia returned home that afternoon, she found the two sitting together in robes, drinking tea, and she was startled by their quiet intimacy. She later said, "I knew immediately [when] I saw them together that they were right for each other. I knew I'd lost him." For his part, Lennon knew there were other losses to come. "That's when I started freeing myself from the Beatles," he said. "And that's when everybody started getting a bit upset . . ."

Ono knew nothing about the rock & roll world and wasn't particularly impressed by the Beatles. Lennon's relationship with her was inspiring a new adventurism, and he felt that the Beatles would stifle that spirit. "What I did," he later admitted, "was use Yoko . . . It was like, 'Now I have the strength to leave, because I know there is another side to life.'"

Lennon began bringing Ono into the group's recording sessions during the making of The Beatles, popularly referred to as the White Album. Ono performed on a couple of Lennon's tracks and worked with him on "Revolution #9," and her participation was seen by some as a violation of the group's self-contained ethos. Lennon felt that the Beatles and others at Apple actively disliked Ono because she was a strong-willed woman and Japanese, and that they judged her "like a fucking jury." Ono said, "I sort of went to bed with this guy that I liked, and suddenly the next morning I see these three guys standing there with resentful eyes." The disparagement that Lennon perceived wounded and outraged him, and he continued to reflect on it even in his last days.

In 1969, during a business meeting around the time of Let It Be, McCartney was trying to persuade the group to return to live performances. This suggestion had been coming around for some time, and Lennon and Harrison hated it. With McCartney's hopes running so high, Lennon felt he had to come clean. "I wasn't going to tell you," he said, "but I'm breaking the group up." A shocked McCartney and Lennon's manager, Allen Klein, persuaded Lennon to hold off making any public announcements. The band still had to finish Let It Be, and there were two other albums to promote: Hey Jude and Abbey Road. Lennon agreed to the delay. On April 10th, 1970, close to the date the Beatles were set to release Let It Be, McCartney released his first solo album, McCartney, along with a press release announcing that he had quit the group and wouldn't miss it. Lennon was dismayed and furious. He had held off on his own announcement at McCartney's request, and now McCartney had gotten the jump on him.

In a famous, lengthy 1970 interview with Jann S. Wenner in this magazine, Lennon largely held McCartney's wiles to blame for the group's dissolution, but he also had plenty to say about the Beatles in general and the audience that claimed them. Among those statements: "We sold out. The music was dead before we even went on the theater tour of Britain . . . The Beatles' music died then, as musicians." "I didn't become something when the Beatles made it or when you heard about me -- I've been like this all me life. Genius is pain too. It's just pain." "Fuckin' big bastards, that's what the Beatles were. You have to be a bastard to make it, man. That's a fact, and the Beatles were the biggest bastards on earth." "One has to humiliate oneself to be what the Beatles were, and that's what I resent . . . About all we can do is do it like fuckin' circus animals. I resent being an artist in that respect, I resent performing for fucking idiots who won't know -- who don't know -- anything. 'Cause they can't feel -- I'm the one that's feeling, 'cause I'm the one that's expressing what they are trying to. They live vicariously through me and other artists."

It was difficult to read his words without feeling that Lennon was indicting not just the band but those who had placed a stake in the Beatles. No other major artist ever razed his own image so devastatingly.

However -- not surprisingly -- when Lennon applied his hurt and vitriol to his music, the result was transcendent. He had been active in Los Angeles in an experimental form of treatment, primal therapy, authored by psychologist Arthur Janov. The therapy's premise was that to heal oneself, you had to go into your deepest repressed pains in a cathartic way, and when you hit the center of that pain, you would erupt in a cry -- the primal scream -- and would know yourself better. It seemed tailor-made for Lennon. "I was the male who never cried, you know," he told Playboy in 1980. "I would never have gone if there hadn't been this promise of this scream, this liberating scream." Lennon brought some of that practice to bear on his first solo album, John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band, released in December 1970. The singer recruited Phil Spector to produce the record. Spector had formulated the orchestral-like Wall of Sound style for his famed recordings with the Crystals, the Ronettes, Ike and Tina Turner and the Righteous Brothers, and he had applied some of that sensibility to the Beatles' Let It Be and George Harrison's All Things Must Pass. Lennon, though, wanted an altogether different sound for his first album: minimalist instrumentation -- just guitar, bass, drums, piano and voice. The result was startling. Lennon sang about the most painful memories and undercurrents of his life -- the death of his mother, the failures of faith and fame, the betrayals in misplaced ideals -- in such a way that there was nothing to shield a listener from the resulting raw anger and anguish. He later said that he decided, for this album, to "shave off all imagery, pretensions of poetry, illusions of grandeur . . . Just say what it is, simple English, make it rhyme and put a backbeat on it and express yourself as simply [and] straightforwardly as possible."

The album's crowning moment was "God," a litany of all the systems of belief and mythology and history that Lennon was now turning his back on, until at song's end, in a mesmerizing and aching voice he pronounced, "I don't believe in Beatles/I just believe in me/Yoko and me/And that's reality." A short time later he told Jann S. Wenner, "I don't believe in the Beatles myth. I don't believe in the Beatles -- there's no other way of saying it, is there? I don't believe in them and whatever they were supposed to be in everybody's head, and including our own for a period." But Lennon was taking the measure of more than his former band. "God" caught the wonderful and terrible sense of a generation in its time -- romantic, shattered, reeling as hope dissolved all around it, and now left on its own. "The dream is over," he sang at the song's end, in the loveliest voice he ever summoned. "What can I say?/The dream is over/Yesterday/I was the dream weaver/But now I'm reborn/I was the Walrus/But now I'm John/And so, dear friends/You'll just have to carry on/The dream is over."

John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band would be the most powerful work of Lennon's career -- the only album by a former Beatle that can stand in its entirety alongside the best of the band's recordings. It didn't, however, sell as well as any of the Beatles' releases, nor as well as McCartney and Harrison's solo debuts. With his next album, Imagine, Lennon tried to present his concerns more accessibly. Spector produced again but this time brought his more familiar warm, lush style to the new songs. Lennon's lyrics still chased troubling themes -- his hatred of deceitful political leaders, jealous insecurities in his marriage, a bitter disdain for his former songwriting partner (he loved beating up on McCartney) -- but this time he wrapped them in a savvy pop sensibility. The album's title track, in particular, put forth some daring notions -- "Imagine there's no heaven . . . no hell . . . no countries . . . no religion . . . no possessions . . . imagine a brotherhood of man" -- and it did so in a beguiling and haunting way. The song was a prayer, the most radical prayer that ever played widely on radio. "'Imagine,' both the song and the album," Lennon said, "is the same thing as 'Working Class Hero' and 'Mother' and 'God' on the first disc. But the first record was too real for people, so nobody bought it . . . 'Imagine' was the same message but sugarcoated. . . . 'Imagine' is a big hit almost everywhere -- anti-religious, anti-nationalistic, anti-conventional, anti-capitalistic, but because it is sugarcoated it is accepted. Now I understand what you have to do: Put your political message across with a little honey."

Lennon's gambit worked. Imagine reached Number One on Billboard's album charts, and it produced an unorthodox anthem that has never been equaled in popular music. It was also the last great album Lennon would make until the last few weeks of his life.

In 1971, John Lennon and Yoko Ono moved to New York. Lennon felt vitalized by its art and music and politics, and he and Ono became friendly with some prominent radical activists, including Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman of the Yippies. Lennon had been politically concerned for some time, but in New York his politics grew more radical and outspoken. For years, starting before the end of the Beatles, Lennon and Ono had pursued a media-directed campaign for the cause of peace -- which at that time meant promoting an end to the war in Vietnam, though they were also advocating the larger philosophy of nonviolence that had guided India's Mahatma Gandhi and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. In March 1969, following their marriage in Gibraltar, Lennon and Ono flew to Amsterdam, where they staged a "bed-in" for peace. For seven days they sat in bed in their pajamas at the Amsterdam Hilton and gave hundreds of interviews, discussing their views that true peace begins as a personal pursuit and talking about intersections between activism, popular culture, ideology, and Eastern and Western religion. In May, they staged a similar "lie-in" for peace in Montreal, where they recorded the enduringly popular "Give Peace a Chance" in a hotel room with several friends and visitors. Lennon later said that he was trying to change his own heart as much as anybody else's. "It's the most violent people who go for love and peace," he told Playboy. "But I sincerely believe in love and peace. I'm a violent man who has learned not to be violent and regrets his violence."

After arriving in New York, the couple played some political benefits on the East Coast and appeared at demonstrations for social justice and against the war, though they still refused to take part in anything that might result in a battle. "We are not going to draw children into a situation to cause violence," Lennon once told Rubin and Hoffman. "So you can overthrow what? And replace it with what?" Lennon and Ono capped their political activity with a double album, Some Time in New York City, which addressed concerns like harsh drug laws, feminism, the Irish conflict and justice for black radical Angela Davis (a philosophy instructor tried and acquitted in a death-penalty case for the shooting death of a California judge). It was . . . well, it was a truly awful album -- the worst work of Lennon's career. The problem wasn't his political stances but instead how he expressed those concerns: The songs lacked any of the lyrical originality or effectiveness of Lennon's prior writing. He later said he was aiming for a journalistic style of immediacy, but other artists -- most notably Bob Dylan -- had done better with the same tack by humanizing their subjects, drawing portraits of people who embodied the pains of war and injustice. For the first and only time in his life, Lennon demeaned his material. There was nothing threatening or inspiring about Some Time in New York City. It worked only as a parody of itself.

Unfortunately, the U.S. government, under the administration of President Richard Nixon, saw Lennon's politics as a serious hazard. In 1972, a Senate internal-security subcommittee of the Judiciary Committee sent a memo to Sen. Strom Thurmond, noting Lennon's political activities. The letter suggested that Lennon intended to interfere with Nixon's renomination at the Republican Convention in San Diego. Thurmond then wrote Attorney General John Mitchell, hinting that Lennon should be deported. The Immigration and Naturalization Service informed Lennon he must leave the country within weeks, due to a guilty plea he had entered in a 1968 marijuana-possession case in England. Lennon fought the order and managed to win an extension, but he had to fight the matter for years. It wasn't until 1975, after Lennon had sued the federal government, that he finally prevailed and the government withdrew its case. Later, when the matter was all settled, and Nixon and much of his administration had been forced out of power over their criminal actions in the Watergate matter, Lennon told journalist Pete Hamill, in a Rolling Stone interview, that he didn't want to talk about the president's fall: "I'm even nervous about commenting on politics. They've got me that jumpy these days."

But Lennon faced other trouble during this period. In October 1973, he and Ono separated, after four years of marriage. Lennon claimed she threw him out. Ono said she was feeling lost as an artist. "What am I going to do?" she said. "My pride was being hurt all the time." Lennon moved to Los Angeles for a time, accompanied by his and Ono's secretary, May Pang, who became his lover. At first, Lennon asserted a delight at leading a single person's life. He caroused and drank heavily with Harry Nilsson (a favorite songwriter of Lennon's, who died of heart failure in 1994), the Who's drummer, Keith Moon (who died in 1978 of an overdose of medication he was taking to treat alcoholism), and Ringo Starr (whose alcohol addiction in those days sometimes resulted in blackouts). It became apparent that Lennon was miserable without Ono. He begged her -- often calling many times a day -- to take him back, but she said he wasn't ready. Lennon fell apart. He behaved horribly in public, and he smashed up a friend's house where he was staying. Nilsson later recalled Lennon crying while drunk at night, wondering what he had done wrong.

Lennon's depression and bravado ran alongside each other in his 1974 Walls and Bridges. The work was essentially an open plea to Ono -- indeed, parts of it, such as "Nobody Loves You (When You're Down and Out)" and "Bless You," were heartbreaking. Interestingly, the album yielded Lennon his first Number One single as a solo artist, the spry "Whatever Gets You Through the Night," which he recorded with Elton John. On Thanksgiving night that year, Lennon appeared at Elton's Madison Square Garden concert in New York, one of his rare appearances before a large audience, and it was a triumph. Ono attended the concert, and within a few weeks she allowed him to return to the Dakota. Almost a year later, on October 7th, 1975, Lennon finally won his deportation battle. A U.S. Court of Appeals Judge declared, "Lennon's four-year battle to remain in our country is a testimony to his faith in the American dream." Two days later, the forty-two-year-old Ono -- who had suffered three miscarriages before with Lennon -- gave birth to a son, Sean. The date was also Lennon's thirty-fifth birthday. That was when he decided to quit the world.

John Lennon's infant son transformed his life as nothing else ever had. His wife had offered him a deal: "I am carrying the baby nine months, and that is enough. You take care of it afterward." Lennon took his charge seriously. Just as his father and mother had, in effect, abandoned him, Lennon had also forsaken his first son, Julian, during his years with the Beatles, and only spoke with him sporadically since his divorce from Cynthia.

This time he was ready for parenthood. He turned his business over to Ono, who attended to managing their fortunes as if she were undertaking a new art form. Lennon, though, had little room in his days for art. He became Sean's primary nurturer, with the help of a domestic staff. He designed the boy's play routine, cultural education and diet, and when Lennon learned to bake loaves of bread, he viewed the accomplishment with the same sort of excitement that once greeted the release of the Beatles' albums. Lennon and Ono also became adherents of destiny systems like astrology and numerology, basing major decisions -- including business, travel and relationships -- on how the stars or the numbers looked. Elliott Mintz, a former ABC radio interviewer who became one of the couple's closest friends, saw much of their private life firsthand. While he kept his humor about it all, Mintz was also convinced that the family's belief systems and rituals helped transmogrify Lennon. He told Rolling Stone writer Chet Flippo in 1981, "We sometimes joked about the paradox of [Lennon] singing 'God' and 'I don't believe in I Ching and I don't believe in magic and I don't believe in Buddha and I don't believe in Krishna' -- but let me tell you, he believed in all of it." Lennon also studied feminist history and theory. "It's men who have come a long way from even contemplating the idea of equality," he told Playboy. "I am the one who has come a long way. I was the real pig. And it is a relief not to be a pig. The pressures of being a pig were enormous. They were killing me. All those years of trying to be tough and the heavy rocker and heavy womanizer and heavy drinker were killing me. And it is a relief not to have to do it."

Lennon said he didn't listen to much popular music during those years. He played Hank Williams and Bing Crosby records, watched a lot of TV (primarily The Tonight Show, with Johnny Carson) and did a lot of reading. He composed only sporadically in these years (though two of his rough demos, "Free As a Bird" and "Real Love," became the Beatles' final two singles, when McCartney, Harrison and Starr expanded on them for the Beatles Anthology project in 1996). One of the few musicians Lennon allowed himself contact with in this time was McCartney, who sometimes dropped by unannounced with a guitar, to Lennon's minor annoyance. When the Beatles' legal matters were settled in 1975, Lennon and McCartney were able to re-establish a cautious but respectful relationship. Each sometimes praised the other's solo work, and in one of his last interviews, Lennon paid McCartney his highest compliment. "Throughout my career I've selected to work with . . . only two people: Paul McCartney and Yoko Ono . . . That ain't bad picking." Overall, Lennon's feelings about the Beatles had turned warmer -- he knew they were unrivaled -- but he never once considered any of the many demands or invitations for a reunion of the group. "Why should the Beatles give more?" he said. "Didn't they give everything on God's earth for ten years? Didn't they give themselves? Didn't they give all?"

In the summer of 1980, Lennon abruptly decided that he and Ono would resume recording. Ono had sent him on a sailboat trip to Bermuda, but a three-day storm had made the captain and the boat's two deckhands sick. Lennon was forced to steer the ship for a night, keeping it on course as waves lashed at him. He sang sea chanteys and Beatles songs as he held the wheel tight. "I arrived in Bermuda," he said. "Once I got there, I was so centered after the experience at sea . . . all these songs came to me." He called Ono back in New York. It was time, he said, for them to make a new pop record together. In August, Lennon and Ono entered Manhattan's Hit Factory and produced a duo album, Double Fantasy, and Ono's single "Walking on Thin Ice" (a dark and brilliant piece of dance music). The new album was, in a sense, the most shocking music Lennon ever made. In the Beatles he had written and recorded some of the most daring pop of the 1960s, and he had taken numerous risks -- well beyond pop -- in his solo and experimental work. But Double Fantasy was a departure in unexpected ways that disturbed and disappointed some fans and critics. It was a collection of songs about marriage and family, about domestic affirmation, and it featured the most polished musicianship and professional production of any of his works. To some it sounded as if Lennon had made an easy peace, philosophically and aesthetically. But Double Fantasy ran deeper than that; it was, as Lennon and Ono saw it, a work about how modern capitalism aims to undermine the family. It was no less defiant, for them, than the music of the Clash or any of the other punk bands making brave music in that time. It was all music about a better world. "In one sense," critic Stephen Holden wrote, "Double Fantasy literally fulfills the dream of 'Imagine' by describing a real utopia." Or to put it in other terms, John Lennon was finally making good on an old claim: All you need is love.

In any event, Double Fantasy proved a hit. The night of December 8th, David Geffen -- the head of the label Lennon and Ono had signed with -- visited the couple at the recording studio to tell them the album had just gone gold. Lennon and Ono finished that night's work on "Walking on Thin Ice," which Lennon called the best song they had recorded in their re-emergence. He left the studio a happy man -- probably as happy as he'd ever been. He had wrested a satisfaction and purpose from life that had long eluded him: He had established a secure family, and he was making music he believed in. On that night, as he and his wife arrived back at the Dakota, Lennon carrying the tape of Ono's "Walking on Thin Ice," anxious to see their five-year-old son, he had found a balance. Then, as the singer walked to the entrance of his apartment building, a man stepped from the shadows. "Mr. Lennon," he said.

After his death, things changed around us. America entered the years of Ronald Reagan; Britain, the years of Margaret Thatcher. Modern history was reversing its hopes. Rock & roll, and later hip-hop, has still pushed against that reversal, but it has never pushed as hard as it did in the years of John Lennon. That isn't simply because Lennon was killed. Rather, it's because he lived. The Beatles set something loose in their time: a sense of generational transformation that moved quickly from the blissful to the artistic to the political, and for a few remarkable years, it seemed irrefutable. The story of our times since then has been the product of a determination to make sure that nothing like that could happen again. While "Imagine" can still be played on radio because its music sounds familiar and comforting, there's little -- if anything -- with that sort of nerve in today's mainstream pop. The free market of ideas just isn't that free right now. A pop star as popular as Lennon proclaiming similar ideals in our current environment would run the risk of being judged a heretic.

So we got something when we had John Lennon, and we lost something when his voice was killed. We lost somebody as fucked up as us, who worked his whole life to overcome himself, and, in doing so, his creativity would help us overcome the madness of our times -- at least for a while. Through it all, he told us to keep faith, to keep courage, to defy our hurt, our fear, to find love and hope and to fight for their meaning.

I remember that for about two years after Lennon's murder, I couldn't listen to "Imagine." That blighted message was just too heartbreaking. Instead, I was drawn to Lennon's brave performance of a song he hadn't written, Ben E. King's "Stand by Me," from Lennon's Rock 'n' Roll album. "If the sky that we look upon," Lennon sang, "should tumble and fall/And the mountain should crumble to the sea/I won't cry, I won't cry/No, I won't shed a tear/Just as long as you stand, stand by me."

The mountain crumbled, and we shed tears. We were on our own. We had been for a long time. The dream was over.

REV: Hamlet in Unlikely Places

2005-12-07T18:52:00.000-06:00

Teens create Hamlet 'in the Hood'

CHICAGO, Illinois (AP) -- Hamlet's father runs a club -- not a kingdom -- and the "sweet prince" drunkenly raps a version of his "To be or not to be" soliloquy in an urban teenage take on the Shakespearean play.

Brainstorming ideas for a project promoting nonviolence, the students chose a work in which almost all the main characters are dead by the time the curtain falls. But in their version, Hamlet openly discusses his troubles with his mother and friends, and his murderous uncle ends up in jail instead of dead at Hamlet's hands in a second, "rewind" ending.

"Hamlet in the Hood" is scheduled to be performed Thursday night at Alternatives, a nonprofit youth agency on Chicago's North Side.

Creator and co-writer Alan McDuffy said the play was not hard to update: Hamlet is a young man mourning his father's death, suffering girlfriend troubles and resenting the new man in his mother's life.

In this version, Hamlet's best friend Horatio becomes Jorge, his arguments with his girlfriend, Ophelia, take place over a cell phone and his father is whacked in the head with a golf club instead of poisoned in the ear. A competition between break dancers replaces the climactic sword duel.

"Shakespeare is timeless. He set the path for me, I just made it modern. It was already there, so I didn't have to do much," said McDuffy, 18, who drew inspiration from the anger he felt toward his mother's new boyfriend after his parents split up. In his case, though, the boyfriend became a friend.

During rehearsal less than a week before the show, the teenagers are a whirlwind of activity -- running their lines, practicing dramatic falls and cries after "fatal" stabbings, and dancing and spinning around the gym.

Dozens of students have contributed to the play since work began in April, said producer Angelita Moraga, a staff member at Alternatives.

Eight have speaking roles, portraying such roles as Hamlet's mother Gertrude (nicknamed Trudy) and her gossipy friend Pola, a take on the pompous Polonius from Shakespeare's play.

The students -- who attend several different Chicago high schools -- were trying to come up with a project to win a $5,000 grant from the Illinois Violence Prevention Authority when McDuffy suggested his take on "Hamlet."

The idea was an instant hit among the teens, and 16-year-old Bianca Taylor -- who plays Ophelia -- wrote the proposal. After getting the grant, the group dissected Shakespeare's original text and saw a production of "King Lear" before beginning to write.

Taylor said she thinks the relationship between Hamlet and Ophelia is especially realistic. At one point, suspecting that she's cheating on him, Hamlet insults her by saying, "I didn't love you. I loved your body, which is not much."

Taylor said the exchange reminds her of guys her age who are afraid to acknowledge their true feelings.

"I totally get that. They care much more about their image than they do their love life," she said.

So far, only one performance of "Hamlet in the Hood" is scheduled. But Alternatives plans to produce a how-to kit for other groups interested in producing a version of the play, and many of the teens are hopeful they'll perform it again.

"They plan for Broadway pretty much," Moraga said. "They have big plans for this. They have stars in their eyes."

REV: Pinter Rails

2005-12-07T18:50:00.000-06:00

Playwright Takes a Prize and a Jab at U.S.
By SARAH LYALL, The New York Times, December 8, 2005

LONDON, Dec. 7 - The playwright Harold Pinter turned his Nobel Prize acceptance speech on Wednesday into a furious howl of outrage against American foreign policy, saying that the United States had not only lied to justify waging war against Iraq but had also "supported and in many cases engendered every right-wing military dictatorship" in the last 50 years.

"The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them," Mr. Pinter said. "You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It's a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis."

Sitting in a wheelchair, his lap covered by a blanket, his voice hoarse but unwavering, Mr. Pinter, 75, delivered his speech via a video recording that was played on Wednesday at the Swedish Academy in Stockholm. Doctors told him several years ago that he had cancer of the esophagus and recently ordered him not to travel to Stockholm for the speech, his publisher said.

The playwright, known in recent years as much for his fiery anti-Americanism as for his spare prose style and haunting, elliptical plays like "The Caretaker" and "The Homecoming," was awarded the $1.3 million Nobel literature prize in October. In its citation, the Swedish Academy made little mention of his political views, saying only that he is known as a "fighter for human rights" whose stands are often "seen as controversial." It mostly focused on his work, saying that Mr. Pinter "uncovers the precipice under everyday prattle and forces entry into oppression's closed rooms."

The literature prize has in recent years often gone to writers with left-wing ideologies. These include the European writers José Saramago of Portugal, Günter Grass of Germany and Dario Fo of Italy.

When he won the award, Mr. Pinter said he did not know if the academy, whose deliberations and reasoning are kept secret, had taken his politics into account. He clearly welcomed the platform the award gave him to bring his views, long expressed in Britain, to a larger audience.

Dressed in black, bristling with controlled fury, Mr. Pinter began by explaining the almost unconscious process he uses to write his plays. They start with an image, a word, a phrase, he said; the characters soon become "people with will and an individual sensibility of their own, made out of component parts you are unable to change, manipulate or distort."

"So language in art remains a highly ambiguous transaction," he continued, "a quicksand, a trampoline, a frozen pool which might give way under you, the author, at any time."

But while drama represents "the search for truth," Mr. Pinter said, politics works against truth, surrounding citizens with "a vast tapestry of lies" spun by politicians eager to cling to power.

Mr. Pinter attacked American foreign policy since World War II, saying that while the crimes of the Soviet Union had been well documented, those of the United States had not. "I put to you that the United States is without doubt the greatest show on the road," he said. "Brutal, indifferent, scornful and ruthless it may be, but it is also very clever. As a salesman it is out on its own and its most saleable commodity is self-love."

He returned to the theme of language as an obscurer of reality, saying that American leaders use it to anesthetize the public. "It's a scintillating stratagem," Mr. Pinter said. "Language is actually employed to keep thought at bay. The words 'the American people' provide a truly voluptuous cushion of reassurance. You don't need to think. Just lie back on the cushion. The cushion may be suffocating your intelligence and your critical faculties but it's very comfortable."

Accusing the United States of torturing terrorist suspects in Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib, Mr. Pinter called the invasion of Iraq - for which he said Britain was also responsible - "a bandit act, an act of blatant state terrorism, demonstrating absolute contempt for the concept of international law." He called for Prime Minister Tony Blair to be tried before an international criminal court.

Mr. Pinter said it was the duty of the writer to hold an image up to scrutiny, and the duty of citizens "to define the real truth of our lives and our societies."

"If such a determination is not embodied in our political vision, we have no hope of restoring what is so nearly lost to us - the dignity of man," he said.