Male Gorillas

Male Gorillas
from Painted Bride Quarterly (2000)
by Ruth Stone.

At the doughnut shop
twenty-three silverbacks
are lined up at the bar,
sitting on the stools.
It's morning coffee and trash day.
The waitress has a heavy feeling face,
considerate with carmine lipstick.
She doesn't brown my fries.
I have to stand at the counter
and insist on my order.
I take my cup of coffee to a small
inoffensive table along the wall.
At the counter the male chorus line
is lined up tight.
I look at their almost identical butts;
their buddy hunched shoulders,
the curve of their ancient spines.
They are methodically browsing
in their own territory.
This data goes into that vast
confused library, the female mind.

Miscellany

so busy this week. two full days of preparation for a small claims court hearing on my suit against my photo lab, who i discovered (by carefully dissecting my statements) had not credited me for almost $3000 in payments i had made over the last six years!). work on video clips for a UK production company that works with the BBC. work on my photo editing. and preparation to leave for Oahu for a month and my brother's wedding! and still so much left to do.

unfortunately missing so many christmas parties by staying in and working. :-( but it'll be worth it once i'm on the beach in waikiki.

also just corrected my earlier post for ArtBaselMiami Day2 and added a few links:
http://www.paulwhkan.com/pqplus/archives/week_2002_12_01.html#000142

Justice Thomas Attacks Cross-Burning

An Intense Attack by Justice Thomas on Cross-Burning
By LINDA GREENHOUSE
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/12/politics/12SCOT.html

WASHINGTON, Dec. 11 — The question for the Supreme Court in an argument today was whether a state may make it a crime to burn a cross without at the same time trampling on the protection that the First Amendment gives to symbolic expression. The case, concerning a 50-year-old Virginia law, raised tricky questions of First Amendment doctrine, and it was not clear how the court was inclined to decide it — until Justice Clarence Thomas spoke.

A burning cross is indeed highly symbolic, Justice Thomas said, but only of something that deserves no constitutional protection: the "reign of terror" visited on black communities by the Ku Klux Klan for nearly 100 years before Virginia passed the law, which the Virginia Supreme Court declared unconstitutional a year ago.

A burning cross is "unlike any symbol in our society," Justice Thomas said.

"There's no other purpose to the cross, no communication, no particular message," he continued. "It was intended to cause fear and to terrorize a population."

During the brief minute or two that Justice Thomas spoke, about halfway through the hourlong argument session, the other justices gave him rapt attention. Afterward, the court's mood appeared to have changed. While the justices had earlier appeared somewhat doubtful of the Virginia statute's constitutionality, they now seemed quite convinced that they could uphold it as consistent with the First Amendment.

Justice Thomas addressed his comments to Michael R. Dreeben, a deputy federal solicitor general who was arguing in support of Virginia's defense of its statute. But he did not have questions for Mr. Dreeben, who in any event agreed with him in nearly all respects. The threat of violence inherent in a burning cross "is not protected by the First Amendment" but instead is "prohibited conduct," Mr. Dreeben had just finished arguing.

Rather, Justice Thomas appeared driven to make the basis for his own position unmistakably clear.

"My fear is you are actually understating the symbolism of and effect of the burning cross," he said, adding, "I think what you're attempting to do is fit this into our jurisprudence rather than stating more clearly what the cross was intended to accomplish."

It was a gripping made-for-television moment — except, of course, for the fact that television cameras are not permitted inside the courtroom. Justice Thomas speaks in a rich baritone that is all the more striking for being heard only rarely during the court's argument sessions. His intervention, consequently, was as unexpected as the passion with which he expressed his view.

He referred to an opinion he wrote in 1995, concurring with the majority that the City of Columbus, Ohio, had no basis for refusing permission to the Klan to place a cross among other Christmastime displays in a downtown park that served as an open forum for religious expression. In that opinion, Justice Thomas said he was joining the decision despite his belief that the Klan's cross was not a form of religious expression but rather "a symbol of white supremacy and a tool for the intimidation and harassment" of racial and religious minorities.

There was a suggestion in his remarks today that perhaps he now regretted his effort in that case to meld his own views into the court's jurisprudence and, after 11 years on the court, no longer felt obliged to try.

Afterward, Justice David H. Souter addressed Rodney A. Smolla, the lawyer for three men who were convicted under the cross-burning statute in two incidents. Mr. Smolla, a well-known First Amendment scholar at the University of Richmond, had just argued that the government could make it a crime to brandish a gun but not to burn a cross because a gun has physical properties that make it dangerous while the danger inherent in a burning cross comes from the ideas it symbolizes and not its physical properties.

That might have been a winning argument two centuries ago, Justice Souter said, "but how does your argument account for the fact that the cross has acquired potency at least akin to a gun?"

Justice Souter called a burning cross "a kind of Pavlovian symbol, so that the person who sees it responds not to its message but out of fear." He added that "other symbols don't make you scared," suggesting that a burning cross might be "a separate category."

Mr. Smolla recalled the court's decision upholding a First Amendment right to burn an American flag.

"You must concede," he said, that the cross itself "is one of the most powerful religious symbols in human history." As with burning the flag, the act of burning a cross involves "calling on that repository of meaning" to make a symbolic point, he said.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg objected that there was "a big difference" between the two acts.

"The flag is a symbol of the government," Justice Ginsburg said, and it is inherent in the constitutional system that "anyone can attack the government." But burning a cross means "attacking people, threatening life and limb," she said.

The Virginia law prohibits burning a cross "with the intent of intimidating any person or group of persons." Mr. Smolla said it would be effective as well as constitutional to make threats and intimidation a crime without singling out a particularly threatening symbol.

"A burning torch and a burning cross — what's the difference?" he asked, evidently intending to emphasize the expressive nature of cross-burning. But Justice Anthony M. Kennedy found a different answer. "One hundred years of history," he said.

Mr. Smolla made the best of the moment, saying, "Thank you, Justice Kennedy, and that 100 years of history is on the side of freedom of speech."

William H. Hurd, Virginia's state solicitor, argued on behalf of the statute in Virginia v. Black, No. 01-1107.

"We have not tried to suppress freedom of speech," Mr. Hurd said. "All we've tried to do is protect freedom from fear."

Self-Adjusted Glasses Could Be Boon to Africa

Self-Adjusted Glasses Could Be Boon to Africa
By NICHOLAS THOMPSON
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/10/health/10GLAS.html

AGOGO, Ghana — Agogo is a lovely town in central Ghana, surrounded by hills and lush forests. But many lifelong residents don't know that.

"I have patients here who have never been able to see the mountains," said Dr. Ababio-Danso, the lead ophthalmologist at Agogo's hospital. "You give them glasses, they look out in the distance, and they're amazed." He says he often sees patients who are unaware that they have a problem despite 20/200 vision, the threshold for legal blindness in the United States.

"Now an Oxford University physicist has developed a novel remedy and is trying it out in Ghana on the advice of the World Health Organization: eyeglasses that allow wearers to correct their own vision with no need for an optometrist."

Uncorrected poor vision is one of the most pressing problems in the developing world. The World Health Organization estimates that 180 million people — 90 percent of them in poorer countries — suffer serious visual impairments.

"I have met with farmers who can't tell maize from grass and fisherman who can't fix their nets," said Agnes Addo-Mensah, who runs an adult education program through Ghana's Ministry of Education.

The percentage of people in Ghana with vision problems roughly equals the percentage in the United States, according to John Randall, an American-trained optometrist who teaches at the University of Science and Technology in Kumasi. But in Ghana, as in other developing countries, poor vision is far more likely to be caused by poor nutrition or by illnesses like trachoma, a bacterial disease that slowly causes blindness.

In developed countries like the United States, it is relatively easy to find an eye doctor and good glasses. In Ghana, there are about 50 optometrists for a population of nearly 20 million, and the per capita income is less than a dollar a day. Getting glasses can take a week's travel and several months' wages.

Now an Oxford University physicist has developed a novel remedy and is trying it out in Ghana on the advice of the World Health Organization: eyeglasses that allow wearers to correct their own vision with no need for an optometrist.

The physicist, Dr. Joshua Silver, calls them adaptive glasses. Their lenses are filled with silicone oil and form a chamber bounded by polyester film. Turning a knob on a small frame-mounted pump changes the amount of oil in the lens, altering the curvature of the lenses and, therefore, the power of the glasses. Users adjust the oil levels on each side until they can see clearly, a process that takes about 30 seconds.

The glasses do not correct astigmatism, but they are effective against nearsightedness and farsightedness. Citing W.H.O. data, Dr. Silver estimates that all but about 15 percent of potential patients can be treated with his glasses.

The idea of fluid-filled lenses has existed since the 18th century, says Dr. Silver, but until now there has never been a model in wide use. "I started working on this idea for glasses in the mid-80's out of curiosity" he said. "Then I realized, if I could make something that could help a billion people, I ought to just go out and try to do it."

Dr. Silver, 56, has formed a company, Adaptive Eyecare, and says it will sell the glasses to Ghana at $10 a pair. The Ghanaian Health Ministry says it is interested in buying 400,000 pairs but does not have money in its budget to pay for them, so it is seeking funds from the World Bank.

Some doctors in Ghana are enthusiastic about the new glasses. "Imagine all the kids who will be able to see the blackboard with this," said Dr. Kweku Ghartey, who left Ghana in the 1960's out of fear of political persecution, eventually went to Harvard and became one of Boston's leading retinal surgeons before recently returning to his homeland.

But not everyone embraces the idea. "They will prevent some people from coming to the hospital, where we might discover more serious problems," said Dr. Samuel Asiedu, general secretary of the Ghana Optometrists Association. Dr. Ababio-Danso, the ophthalmologist in Agogo, also notes that many Ghanaians are unfamiliar with glasses and do not know how to care for them or clean them.

Nor is it clear how durable the glasses will be, or how long they will retain their prescriptive power, since the oils or the shape may deteriorate over time.

Still, many eye experts say it is hard to see how these glasses can be worse than the current alternatives, given that eye care now is virtually nonexistent. Many Ghanaians refuse to see doctors and dismiss poor eyesight as just one indicator of kookoo, a mysterious catchall sickness that supposedly causes disorders as diverse as cataract problems and impotence.

In Patriensa, for example, 15 miles from the Agogo hospital, few villagers wear glasses or have had their vision checked. Mary Agykpomaa — an indigenous healer at the bottom of a steep hill who claims to be able to cure AIDS with a potion concocted from local forest leaves, mud and boiling water — has a similar cure for bad eyesight.

"It's not the eye, but it's usually something in the head," she said recently, as a helper burned a snake in the background, and she rubbed her potion on an injured man's grotesquely swollen ankle. "And I can cure that."

The Next Africa? -- South & Central America

The Next Africa?
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/10/opinion/10KRIS.html

MONTE CHINGOLO, Argentina

While we're all focused on distant Iraq, our neighbor South America is quietly falling apart.

Maria Amelia Miranda stood yesterday in the Iapi shantytown here in Monte Chingolo, south of Buenos Aires, and cried. Three of her seven children — girls ages 8, 7 and 3 — have intestinal worms, up to a foot long, that she must periodically pull from their bottoms. But the worming medicine costs about $1.40 per child, and she can't afford to buy both the medicine and food for the children.

"Once I did buy a little medicine and gave each of my children a little bit," she said. "But it wasn't the full dose, and so it didn't do any good. So now my children are feeling itchy, and my 8-year-old is losing weight. If they have parasites, it doesn't matter what they eat."

So what should Mrs. Miranda buy — food or medicine? With her husband, a mechanic, getting by only with odd jobs, and bread almost doubling in price over the last year, she can't afford both. For now, she's using the money for food and hoping that the worms do not get worse.

Until now, the only part of the world to suffer a sustained drop in incomes has been Africa. But South America and Central America now risk becoming another Africa, in the sense of institutionalized Western neglect and indigenous despair, of tumbling living standards, of coups and civil war and failed states. If we allow this to happen, we Yanquis will pay the price — in terms of economics, drugs and immigration — for years to come.

Washington's policy toward South America is in disarray, and there has been too little urgency about reaching a new I.M.F. agreement with Argentina. The Treasury, under John Snow, must wake up to its international responsibilities to sustain economic order.

The economic historian Angus Maddison has calculated that in 1900, Argentina's per capita income was almost $2,800, behind the United States then but about the same as Canada and France and more than twice the figure for Japan.

Argentina has been one of the great failures of the last 100 years, for today its per capita income is about $2,500 — that's right, less than it was a century ago. The trajectory is evident in families like that of Eduardo Alberto William, who owes his surname to a great-grandfather who immigrated from England to give his descendants better prospects. It was a bad bet; Mr. William is one of Argentina's 125,000 garbage sorters, who collect recyclables, earning about $2 a day.

With an economy that is shrinking more than 10 percent this year, Argentina defaulted first on its commercial debts and last month on its World Bank debt as well, and even people who manage to get by often support the idea of defaulting.

"How can we pay?" asked Miriam Ganduglia, who was hoeing a vegetable garden. "We're starving."

Starving? She dressed well and had red-painted toenails and fingernails. But Argentinians are traumatized because they had thought they were living in the modern world — and now they find themselves eking out a living in the third world.

It is not just Argentina, for all of South America is in crisis. Uruguay, Paraguay and Bolivia are as badly off or worse. Brazil could follow Argentina into bankruptcy and default on its $260 billion foreign debt, rattling the entire global economy.

Farther to the north, Colombia is torn by civil war, and Venezuela is paralyzed by a political crisis that could also disintegrate into war. Almost everywhere, the "Washington Consensus" free-market policies of the 1990's are regarded as failed and discredited, partly because we did not fight corruption as aggressively as we should have, and in countries as diverse as Brazil, Venezuela, Peru and Ecuador, recent elections have gone to leftists or populists who tend to make Americans deeply nervous.

Iraq is of course enormously important, because we'll probably soon be at war there. But in today's world, as in chess, you can't afford to follow only a single part of the board. If we let Baghdad blind us to other crises and tragedies, if we allow Argentina to slip from the first world to the third world, and are not attuned to the distress of Mrs. Miranda and millions like her, then we — and the South Americans — will be checkmated.

From Radical Background, a Rhodes Scholar Emerges

From Radical Background, a Rhodes Scholar Emerges
By JODI WILGOREN
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/09/education/09SCHO.html

CHICAGO, Dec. 8 — As with the other triumphs of his young life, Chesa Boudin was unable to celebrate with his parents on Saturday afternoon when he was named a Rhodes scholar. He could not even share the good news.

As maximum-security inmates in the New York State prison system, Katherine Boudin and David Gilbert are barred from receiving telephone calls or e-mail messages. Though Mr. Boudin has rigged his dorm room at Yale University to override the block on collect calls, neither parent was able to connect with him today. They will read of their son's accomplishment in the newspaper, instead, and it may be days before they can congratulate him.

Mr. Boudin, 22, is used to it. His parents, members of the 1970's radical group the Weathermen, have been in prison since he was 14 months old, for roles in a 1981 Brink's robbery in Rockland County in which two police officers and a guard were killed.

They missed his Phi Beta Kappa award, high school graduation, Little League games.

"When I was younger, I was angry," Mr. Boudin, a tall, clean-cut young man said in an interview here Saturday evening, looking comfortable in the navy pinstriped suit he had worn for the Rhodes interview, though the tie was long gone.

"Now I'm not angry," he said, "I'm sad that my parents have to suffer what they have to suffer on a daily basis, that millions of other people have to suffer as well."

Raised by two other Weathermen leaders, Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, in Chicago's Hyde Park, he is one of 32 American winners of this year's Rhodes scholarships. It is a remarkable achievement for a boy with epilepsy and dyslexia who did not learn to read until third grade and spent much of his childhood in temper tantrums. His selection also reflects the changes in the nation's premier academic award in its 100th year: once an exclusive club of Ivy League athletes, the Rhodes in recent years has rewarded an array of students who have overcome striking challenges.

Among the other winners announced today are Kamyar Cyrus Habib, a Columbia University student from Kirkland, Wash., who is a black belt in karate, a downhill skier and a published photographer — as well as blind; Marianna Ofusu, who attends Howard University in Washington and is a Latin American dance champion; and Devi Shridhar of the University of Miami, who at 18 has mastered five languages, published a book on Indian myths and been admitted to medical school.

Thirteen of the winners are from Ivy League schools, four from Harvard, but the class also includes the first Rhodes scholar from the University of Central Florida, and students at state universities in Indiana, Kansas, Minnesota and Utah.

Established by the will of the British colonialist Cecil Rhodes in 1902, the scholarship offers a bachelor's, master's or doctoral degree at Oxford University, a value estimated at about $30,000 a year. Bill Clinton, Bill Bradley, Byron White and Dean Rusk are among the 2,982 Americans from 305 colleges and universities who have won the award.

Mr. Boudin is not the first child of convicts to be chosen; Adam Ake, the son of a gynecologist convicted of raping patients, was in the Rhodes class of 1997. But the political pedigrees of Mr. Boudin's parents, biological and adoptive, present a contrast with that of the British imperialist who established the prestigious scholarship in his will.

"Cecil Rhodes, I don't know what would he think if he were alive today; he'd probably be horrified," Ms. Dohrn, a professor at Northwestern law school, said, laughing, in her office, where snapshots of her children at play are interspersed with the memorabilia of a radical life.

Dennis Hutchinson, a law professor at the University of Chicago who headed the Midwest selection committee, said Mr. Boudin's family did not come up at the Friday night cocktail party or the 20-minute interview Saturday morning, as the winners were whittled from 98 finalists. Those finalists had been selected from 981 university nominees.

"That's one of the wonderful things about institutions, they adapt to the times," Professor Hutchinson, a Rhodes scholar in 1970, said. "This is a guy who talks not only with passion but with mature, thoughtful information about the things he cares about. Those are the sorts of qualities that separate good résumés from the people who are willing to fight the world's fight, as the will says."

Mr. Boudin, who has spoken widely about being the child of inmates and has led antiwar efforts at Yale, plans to study international development at Oxford, expanding on his experiences in Guatemala and Chile. Last week he won the Marshall scholarship, a similar award financing study in Britain, but he plans to accept the Rhodes instead. "As a child, I relished my personal freedom and tried to compensate for my parents' imprisonment," he wrote in his application. "Now, I see prisons around the world: urban misery in Bolivia, homelessness in Santiago and illiteracy in Guatemala."

Mr. Boudin's mother was denied parole in 2001. His father is serving 75 years. Each writes to him nearly every day. His adoptive parents were engulfed by controversy when Sept. 11 coincided with the publication of Mr. Ayers's memoir, "Fugitive Days," which celebrated attempted bombings on the Pentagon.

"We have a different name for the war we're fighting now — now we call it the war on terrorism, then they called it the war on communism," Mr. Boudin said. "My parents were all dedicated to fighting U.S. imperialism around the world. I'm dedicated to the same thing."

"I don't know that much about my parents' tactics; I'll talk about my tactics," he added. "The historical moment we find ourselves in determines what is most appropriate for social change."

Mr. Boudin said that with four loving parents, he was always surrounded by high expectations, unlike many other children of convicts. He sees his name — Swahili for "dancing feet," chosen because he was born breech — as a metaphor for his approach to life (though actual dancing is among his few weaknesses).

For a career, Mr. Boudin plans to focus on international problems because criminal justice is "too close to home." He plans to finish his own memoir this summer. "It's about growing up with parents in prison; it's about growing up in America," he said. "It's about two very different worlds, one of extreme privilege and opportunity, and the other of degradation and humiliation."

Mr. Boudin shunned questions about his parents' prospects for parole, and Mr. Ayers and Ms. Dohrn repeatedly tried to steer the conversation onto the next generation. A red-star revolutionary pin on his jacket, his Weatherman tattoo (and 17 others) hidden from sight, Mr. Ayers smiled as he watched his adopted son, fresh from his Rhodes interview, in the suit that Ms. Dohrn had helped pick.

"You know what I love about listening to Chesa?" Mr. Ayers said. "He confirms the natural cycle that your kids are always so much smarter and better than you."

The Incredible Shrinking Government, Bush Style

The Incredible Shrinking Government, Bush Style
By RICHARD W. STEVENSON
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/08/weekinreview/08STEV.html

UNLIKE Ronald Reagan, who insisted government is the problem not the solution, President Bush has never cast himself as an anti-Washington crusader. Indeed, national security concerns have forced him to put aside any ideological qualms he has about big government to support a striking expansion of federal powers and bureaucracy.

Yet over the past several months, Mr. Bush has picked a fight with the federal work force in a way that has revived concern among labor unions — and hope among conservatives — that he is intent on being a hard-nosed, confrontational chief operating officer for Washington Inc. even as he rallies the government and the nation behind him in his role as commander in chief.

His impetus may be more managerial than ideological. But if Mr. Bush prevails, he could end up doing more to overhaul the Civil Service and to advance the conservative small-government agenda than any of his predecessors, Mr. Reagan included.

After a long battle in Congress, Mr. Bush won the right to hire, fire and move the 170,000 workers who will staff the new Department of Homeland Security with more ease than Democrats and public employee unions wanted to give him.

He also laid out a plan to transfer as many as 850,000 government jobs — nearly half the federal civilian work force — to private companies as a way to save money and improve performance. Saying the country could not afford to grant a bigger raise in wartime, he set next year's pay increase for 1.8 million federal employees below the level sought by Congress, and then set off a storm by acknowledging that the administration had quietly re-established a bonus pool this year for more than 2,000 political appointees.

Ever since he was governor of Texas, Mr. Bush has been a master at blurring ideological lines while hewing by and large to conservative principles. To administration officials, there is no dissonance in his presiding over one of the largest expansions of government in decades while simultaneously seeking to rein in the bureaucracy.

"The president sees the federal government as an agent of positive change on behalf of a compassionate conservative agenda," said Ari Fleischer, the White House spokesman. "He thinks the government can do things well, and it's important that the government do them efficiently as it does them well."

But he has heads swiveling, or shaking, among experts on governance across the political spectrum. To conservatives who have watched with dismayed resignation as the demands of fighting terrorism have trumped their goal of reducing the size of the federal government, Mr. Bush's actions in the last few months were welcome, if minimal, reassurance.

"These are half measures," said Ronald D. Utt, a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative research group, "but it's about as far as he can go politically."

Some experts on the bureaucracy, Democrats among them, say Mr. Bush is right to push for more management flexibility within the civil service, which is under increasing pressure to attract better educated workers and redefine jobs for changing needs. But they also wonder whether management reform by a Republican president is cover for slashing domestic programs.

"Bush 43 is quite different from the Reagan administration," said John D. Donahue, a lecturer at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government who served as an assistant labor secretary in the Clinton administration. "Some of these guys in the Bush administration are not contemptuous of government in the way the Reagan people were, and are also deeply thoughtful about management. The question is going to be how the internal struggle plays out between the management reformers and the shrink-the-state contingent."

Labor leaders and analysts said Mr. Bush seems intent on a showdown with government-employee unions, the biggest source of growth in union membership in recent decades and a major supporter of Democrats.

"Not since the Patco strike in 1981 has any administration confronted federal labor unions as aggressively," said Joseph A. McCartin, a labor historian at Georgetown University, referring to President Reagan's decision to replace striking air traffic controllers. "It's clearly an exercise in trying to diminish the power of federal employee unions, and by doing so it has tremendous implications for the labor movement in general."

ELEMENTS of the administration's policy, especially the push to privatize many jobs, from mowing lawns to running laboratories, could also have broad implications for the economy.

Government employment has long been a stepping stone into the middle class for workers, especially blacks and women, who benefited greatly from efforts by the public sector to reduce discrimination in hiring.

Even today, black and female workers remain more reliant on government jobs than white workers. Robert I. Lerman, director of the labor and social policy center at the Urban Institute, a research group, said that among black men, federal, state and local government jobs currently account for 15 percent of employment, versus 11 percent for white males.

Critics of privatizing federal employment say it can lead to job losses, salary and benefit cuts and less job security, a trend that would expand if state and local governments follow Washington's lead. Even people who say privatization of government work can lead to savings for taxpayers and better government services warn against permitting the practice to reduce opportunities for women and minority groups.

Clearly sensitive to the perception that he is hostile to workers and their unions, Mr. Bush invited leaders of government employee unions to the White House for the signing of the bill creating the Department of Homeland Security. He has also taken pains in recent weeks to praise federal employees, especially for their role in keeping the nation safe from terrorists.

But the administration's critics accused Mr. Bush of saying one thing and doing another.

"Republican businessmen will tell you you can't expect to achieve widespread organizational change without the participation of the workers, and the unions if they are unionized," said Elaine Kamarck, who ran the Clinton administration's "reinventing government" program. "Everything the Bush administration has done in terms of managing the government, and in particular the way they went about the homeland security bill, is contrary to how Republican businessman who have managed through organizational change would tell you to do it."

Camera Is Graffiti's Unwelcome Audience

Camera Is Graffiti's Unwelcome Audience
By BONNIE ROTHMAN MORRIS
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/12/technology/circuits/12graf.html

WHAT flashes and shouts when it sees something moving, helping to stop crime? No, it is not some kind of high-tech police robot, but a much simpler invention: a modified film camera that is being used in Milwaukee, Los Angeles and other cities to deter graffiti vandalism.

The camera is a Vivitar 35-millimeter flash model that has been equipped with a motion detector and a digital voice recorder-player and housed in a rugged steel and clear plastic case. The system, which works on five C batteries, is mounted on a tree or pole overlooking an area where graffiti vandals might be tempted to do their work.

If the system detects motion in the area, it fires the camera and flash and issues "a pretty darn loud" warning, said Ken Anderson, president of Q-Star Technology, in Chatsworth, Calif., which makes the system. The warning, which can be recorded by the owner of the system, is usually something like: "Stop! This is a restricted area. We have just taken your photograph,'' and can be recorded and played back in any two languages.

Mr. Anderson, a former technology newsletter publisher who developed the camera system as a hobby, said it was meant as an alternative for governments and companies that spend a lot of money on removing graffiti.

Milwaukee, for example, which has more than 200 bridges that are targets of graffiti vandals, spent about a million dollars two years ago on removal. The money paid for crews who sandblasted graffiti or otherwise removed it from bridges and repainted them, said Paul Novotny, the bridge maintenance manager for the city.

Now the city uses about 20 of the modified cameras in eight locations to deter vandals. The cameras cost $3,000 each and are frequently moved from location to location, to keep "taggers," as the vandals are called, guessing.

"Every place we put them in at least pushes the kids away from the area that the camera is focused on,'' Mr. Novotny said. "They don't go under that bridge anymore." The film can be changed as needed - the system comes with a kind of remote control for determining, from the ground, how many exposures remain. But even if all the exposures are used up, the system will keep firing the camera and flash and activating the audio player as a deterrent.

The California Water Service Company's Westlake District recently installed a camera at a reservoir in Ventura County that is a favorite gathering place for teenagers, who would hang out at night with blankets, pizzas and beer on top of the concrete holding tank and paint to their hearts' content. No more.

"Since the camera has gone in, we haven't had a problem,'' said Elaine Marchessault, district manager at the water company. "Not one bottle, not one can, not one piece of trash and no graffiti."

So far, no one has been caught with spray can in hand, arrested and convicted. And no one has complained about being spied upon. Graffiti vandals, though, are finding ways to protest. Last month, in Lynwood, Calif., a city of 60,000 people and 26 anti-graffiti cameras, a tagger climbed to the top of a pole where a camera was mounted and spray-painted it, said Rudolph Brown, of the public works department in Lynwood. The camera did not catch the act: its batteries were dead.

Here's to Disco

Here's to Disco, It Never Could Say Goodbye
By BERNARD WEINRAUB
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/10/arts/music/10ARTS.html

SEATTLE, Dec. 4 — Rock musicians of the 1970's and their fans loathed disco music: they said the music was gimmicky, banal and predictable.

By 1979, when disco had become an industry generating $4 billion annually and there were an estimated 15,000 discothèques in the nation, a backlash was inevitable. It was symbolized by the reaction of thousands of rock fans who held an anti-disco rally at a baseball game at Comiskey Park in Chicago and set fire to an estimated 10,000 disco records.

"Mainstream rock 'n' roll music tells us disco was a waste, a low mark in American music history in the last 30 years," said Robert Santelli, director and chief executive of the Experience Music Project here, a multicolored and swooping museum designed by Frank Gehry that is devoted to rock.

Perhaps it was as inevitable as the backlash, but now playing at Mr. Santelli's museum is disco, the revisionist theory.

"Disco has not gotten true credit," said Mr. Santelli, 50, an author of several books on rock and the blues, who in the 70's listened to Bruce Springsteen in Jersey City. "There's a great value in understanding the history of disco because it teaches us what America was about in the 70's," he said.

The result is what is believed to be the first serious exhibition of the glittery phenomenon and its continuing impact on music from pop icons like Madonna and Michael Jackson, to teeny-bopper stars like Christina Aguilera and the band 'N Sync to the Latin pop of Ricky Martin, and even to the shores of hip-hop.

Called "Disco: A Decade of Saturday Nights," the exhibition, which runs until May 26, explores the pop phenomenon that began in the New York underground party scene of the early 1970's, influenced by black and gay urban culture. By the early 1980's disco had exhausted itself: disco clubs like the cocaine-drenched Studio 54 in New York were stamped by an exclusivity that left a sour aftertaste, and the music was so oversold that it attracted the most unlikely singers.

Yes, there was Donny Osmond. But the most improbable one was Ethel Merman bellowing "There's No Business Like Show Business" to a disco beat. (You can hear this recording, which she made for her 1979 disco album, at the exhibition.)

"Disco was about escapism, but it became inescapable," said Barry Walters, a senior music critic at Rolling Stone and one of the curators of the show. " In some ways it defeated its own purposes."

It was to many rock fans terrible music. Musicians and critics said that the form was a pointed contrast to the works of diverse performer-songwriters of the 60's and 70's like Jimi Hendrix, with his showmanship and virtuosic guitar playing, as well as Bob Dylan, Mr. Springsteen and others. Their works helped redefine popular music with songs rooted in the blues that were alternately poetic, confessional and political. By contrast disco was about dancing and, to some degree, about sexual liberation.

AIDS helped kill disco. Frank Crapanzano, 68, a onetime guidance counselor in the South Bronx who donated photographs, clothes and videotapes of the era to the museum show, returned to New York after the show opened on Nov. 23. "I wanted to call all my old friends about this wonderful show," said Mr. Crapanzano, a habitué of Studio 54 and other clubs who with his companion invented the campy "beanie boys" style with their crocheted hats. "There was no one to call. I didn't know anybody from the old days who was alive."

Mr. Santelli said that earlier this year, as the museum staff was exploring musical periods that had been ignored for possible shows, Eric Weisbard, senior program manager of the Experience Music Project's education department, received a phone call from a friend, Vince Aletti, a journalist and record company executive who wrote the first article about disco in Rolling Stone in September 1973. He was seeking a repository for his substantial collection of disco memorabilia (including an opening-night invitation to Studio 54) and records.

Mr. Weisbard, one of the show's creators, said he believed that disco probably began on Valentine's Day 1970, when a New York D.J., David Mancuso, opened his loft on lower Broadway for a party that was called "Love Saves the Day," or "LSD." Mr. Mancuso set up a sound system that played music continually for hours, without records being changed one at a time as was the custom, and he sold tickets. Soon dance clubs began proliferating, and not just in New York.

The basic gay influence on disco was always apparent (Mr. Weisbard said it was illegal until the 1960's in New York for men to dance together), but, he said, there was always a clear racial element. In the 1960's, he added, the counterculture listened to a blend of white and black music. By the 1970's, Mr. Weisbard said, this racial mix was becoming undone.

"Rock got white and whiter at the same time that disco was emerging," he said. Popular rock groups like Led Zeppelin and the Eagles were heard on FM radio. Disco emerged mostly on AM stations, which played black and Latino music.

"Most rock singers were white men, while the classic disco singer was a black diva," Mr. Weisbard added. "Things happened in opposition to each other. FM became classically rock, almost exclusively white. It was about as segregated a form of popular music as we've ever had. Disco was exactly the opposite case."

To the curators of the show the racial as well as sexual component of disco was an unspoken and inescapable issue that bothered some rock 'n' rollers. "Unlike rock music, whose ideal audience is teenage white male, disco brought together young and old, black and white, gay and straight," said Mr. Walters, the Rolling Stone critic. "It didn't follow any rules other than it had to be danceable. A lot of it was driven by sexual liberation, including the availability of the pill.

"Some people were threatened because it had a different sensibility," he added. "I'm not saying disco had a black sensibility or a gay sensibility or a female sensibility. But it didn't have a straight-white-male sensibility. And that bothered a lot of people."

Another curator at the show, Ann Powers, a former pop-music reviewer at The New York Times and now senior curator at the museum, said that the notion that discos were snobbish, allowing only trendy people or celebrities in, and that they had class overtones was wrong. "There's this false dichotomy: rock is the music of the people and disco is bourgeois," Ms. Powers said. "In fact rock was basically about star performers playing to an adoring audience. In disco the audience was as much the center of attention as anything, and all class barriers broke down. It welcomed everyone, from kids to elderly people who danced at senior-citizen centers."

"There was a conscious shaping of this idea that disco was antipopulist by the rock establishment, which is totally false," said Ms. Powers, who is married to Mr. Weisbard.

The exhibition involves candid photographs of the hothouse environment of the disco scene, memorabilia and film clips of early New York clubs like the Gallery and the Flamingo as well as the music of disco divas like Donna Summer, Gloria Gaynor and Patti LaBelle. John Travolta's white suit from "Saturday Night Fever," the classic 1977 film about a working-class Brooklyn youth who finds self-worth on the disco floor, is among the fashions on display. The film, with its soundtrack by the Bee Gees, embedded disco into the nation's culture.

Several veterans of the disco scene contributed memorabilia to the museum show. Nicky Siano, who put together the throbbing soundtrack for the exhibition and was a pioneer disc jockey in early New York clubs like the Gallery as well as Studio 54, said that hard-drug use at the start of the disco scene in the early 70's was not pervasive but grew at the decade's close. "By the end, people were pushing the envelope in everything they did," he said. "And it became about greed." (The owners of Studio 54, Steve Rubell, who died in 1989, and Ian Schrager, the hotel owner, served 13 months in prison after being indicted in 1979 on federal income tax charges involving more than $2.5 million skimmed from club receipts over three years.)

The exhibition itself is only yards away from the museum's permanent collection of Hendrix artifacts, guitars and memorabilia. The founder of the museum, Paul G. Allen, a co-founder of Microsoft, is an aficionado of the Seattle-born Hendrix, who died in September 1970 at age 27.

Disco's lingering effect is certainly no less than Hendrix's. "Disco is all over the popular music of the 1990's, and internationally it never went away," Ms. Powers said. She pointed to stars like Kylie Minogue, who is Australian; the Vengaboys from Spain; and the Swedish group Alcazar, whose hit last year was called "Crying at the Discothèque."

And at the start of hip-hop in the Bronx in the late 1970's, the early D.J.'s came out of disco. "Hip-hop basically evolved from disco," Ms. Powers said.

The music of Gloria Gaynor and Donna Summer is heard everywhere. "Talk about mainstream — have you ever gone dancing at a wedding or bar mitzvah where you didn't hear Gloria Gaynor sing `I Will Surive' ?" asked David Noh, who was a busboy at Studio 54 and contributed a jumpsuit he wore as a customer and other items to the museum show. "Disco music has never really stopped."

Bloomberg Outlines Plan to Increase Housing

Bloomberg Outlines Plan to Increase Housing
By CARLA BARANAUCKAS
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/10/nyregion/11HOUSIN.html

Saying that "affordable housing is fundamental to our long-term economic prosperity," Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York City outlined his strategy today for adding 65,000 housing units over the next five years.

Noting the substantial growth in Harlem's housing development, the mayor told the New York and National Housing Conference this afternoon that "today's challenge as we work on other parts of the city is to make scarce city dollars go further in an era when deep cuts to capital spending for housing are just unavoidable."

Making that challenge particularly daunting is the projected $3 billion deficit next year in the New York City budget.

The solution, Mr. Bloomberg said, "is doing the kind of strategic investment and groundwork that turns dreams into realities by using limited public funding to encourage private investment."

Mr. Bloomberg said his strategy would have two principal elements: encouraging private investment with creative use of public resources and changing regulations to cut the costs of land acquisition and building.

Between now and the fiscal year 2008, the city's Housing Development Corporation will double the amount of money available for affordable housing, compared with the amount spent over the last five years.

"We're going to put H.D.C.'s cash assets to work and borrow against the mortgages that H.D.C. holds," Mr. Bloomberg said, to generate of pool of $500 million. That money is expected to draw four times that amount in private investment.

In addition, Mr. Bloomberg said, the city would use the money for middle-income housing, as well as housing for the poor and low-income families.

The middle-class housing would be for families with incomes of $38,000 to $63,000 a year. "This includes teachers, police officers, firefighters, health care workers, the kind of people that make communities stronger," the mayor said.

In what Mr. Bloomberg called "a little financial magic of their own," the city's Department of Housing Preservation and Development will redirect $555 million in city and federal money toward development in specific neighborhoods.

Some of the money will be used to provide low-interest loans for the purchase and cleanup of former industrial sites that have been contaminated.

Mr. Bloomberg said he was also committed to working with the City Council on "removing barriers to development and reducing costs of construction."

"I've asked our city planning commission to move forward aggressively with rezoning plans in communities throughout the city, including East Harlem, Jamaica, Long Island City, Port Morris, Morrisania, Park Slope, Greenpoint and Williamsburg," Mr. Bloomberg said.

On Thursday, Mr. Bloomberg plans to speak about his vision for Lower Manhattan in an address to the Association for a New York.

New York Homeowners Paying a Record Share

New York Homeowners Paying a Record Share for Housing
By JANNY SCOTT
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/10/nyregion/10HOUS.html

The Bronx and Brooklyn emerged from the last decade with a dubious distinction: According to an analysis of recent census data, more homeowners in those two boroughs spend more of their income on housing than people anywhere else in the country.

The Bronx and Brooklyn jumped to the top of the list of United States counties ranked by the percentage of certain single-family homeowners spending at least 35 percent of their income on housing. Along with Hudson County, N.J., Miami-Dade County and Queens, they edged out a half-dozen California coastal counties that led the list in 1990.

The New Yorkers laying down such a large chunk of their income to live in the city are not lawyers and doctors in co-ops juggling maintenance and private school tuition; they are lower- and moderate-income people, many of them struggling to make mortgage payments on modest single-family houses in neighborhoods like Melrose in the Bronx, Canarsie in Brooklyn and Jamaica, Queens.

The census tracts with the highest percentages of homeowners spending at least 35 percent of their income on housing include wide swaths of brick row houses embroidered with white wrought-iron window guards and railings, and busy commercial districts where the rare single-family home, sheathed in pastel aluminum siding, huddles between apartment buildings and vacant lots.

"No, I don't think I'm getting my money's worth," said Natasha Guirand, a 30-year-old financial services worker and single mother who is spending 40 percent of her income on her newly bought house: a tiny, three-bedroom, semi-detached with a compact backyard on a tree-lined street near the border of Flatlands and Mill Basin, just a half-hour's trip from her office.

"But as my mom always says, `You pay for your convenience,' " she said.

Traditionally, lenders believed homeowners should spend no more than 28 percent of their income on mortgage payments to reduce the risk of delinquency and default. Though that rule of thumb has relaxed somewhat in recent years, spending more than 35 percent on mortgage payments, taxes and fuel is considered a heavy burden, especially for lower-income people.

The surge in the New York numbers came in a decade when home values soared and home ownership in the city rose but the median household income in every borough but Manhattan declined, according to the 2000 census. It also followed a successful push by the federal government to increase ownership among lower-income people who would not have qualified in the past.

Some experts wonder whether easier access to credit may have ended up overburdening some of the people it was intended to help. The foreclosure rate on government-insured loans has skyrocketed, especially in New York. And people who work in community organizations say they have seen a leap in the number of New Yorkers saddled with unmanageable housing costs.

"This is an issue that's on everybody's mind," said Michael H. Schill, a professor of law and urban planning at New York University. "A lot of people believe that home ownership is something that we should be promoting, while at the same time it can't be for everyone just because some people don't have the resources to both maintain their home and pay the debt service."

Howard Banker, a vice president for the Parodneck Foundation, which provides low- and no-interest loans to elderly homeowners, said, "If you combine the fact that people's income is static and the value of their homes has in some cases quadrupled, it permits them to borrow more money based on the value of their home, not necessarily on their ability to pay.

"If the percent of your income going for owner expenses is over 35 percent, it's a very difficult situation. Homeowner expenses have a tendency to increase. So insurance costs go up, taxes go up, the City of New York is proposing a substantial increase in the tax rate. It makes it ever more difficult to stay current on the mortgage."

Mary Sauri, a 48-year-old single foster parent living in Canarsie, is currently spending more than 60 percent of her income on the brick row house she bought in 1998. Having grown up in Sarasota, Fla., in an apartment without a bathtub, she had always dreamed of owning. She was able to get a $180,000 mortgage, she said, with a down payment of less than $10,000.

But Ms. Sauri decided a few months later to retire early from her job at Verizon. Though she found another job, in a telemarketing firm, she was laid off last February. She said that when she fell behind on her payments and tried to renegotiate her mortgage, she learned she was ineligible because of a $13,000 home equity loan that a contractor had helped her get for home repairs.

"I don't regret buying it," she said one morning recently, sitting in her diminutive, shoebox-shaped living room as her two dachshunds hectored the mailman. "I just should have been more informed."

Owner-occupied housing units make up slightly less than a third of all housing units in New York City. Census figures on the percentage of income spent for all owner-occupied units are not yet available; so far, the Census Bureau has released only those percentages for so-called "specified owner-occupied units" — single-family houses with no business attached.

That category constitutes a significant percentage of all owner-occupied housing in New York: 42.9 percent of the 912,133 owner-occupied units citywide; 39 percent of the owner-occupied units in the Bronx; 37.4 in Brooklyn; 55.8 in Queens; and 77.5 in Staten Island.

Andrew A. Beveridge, a professor of sociology at Queens College, found that the percentage of people in that group who were spending 35 percent or more of their income on housing jumped sharply during the 1990's. It went to 30.08 percent from 21.91 percent in the Bronx; to 28.6 from 20.8 in Brooklyn; and to 27.86 from 20.5 in Queens.

(The percentage of renters spending at least 35 percent of their income on rent was even higher: 36.22 percent in the Bronx; 36.24 in Brooklyn; and 32.73 in Queens. However, rents as a percentage of income in New York have been high for years; those percentages have barely risen since 1980, the census data show.)

What might explain the uptick is not yet clear.

Eric Kober, director of housing, economic and infrastructure planning for the New York City Department of City Planning, cautioned against reading too much into the housing-cost data. He and others theorize that there were widespread problems with the collection of accurate income data during the 2000 census, problems that were especially prevalent in immigrant neighborhoods.

"These results, which may appear to be unusual and interesting, may simply indicate problems with the data collection and not the measurement of things that are actually going on," Mr. Kober said.

Others said the apparent increase in homeowners who are spending more than 35 percent of their income on housing seemed consistent with what is known about the 1990's, a decade in which the official population count topped eight million for the first time, the demand for housing rose, neighborhoods revived and relatively little new low- and moderate-income housing was built.

For those reasons and others, the prices of single-family homes in the Bronx and Brooklyn rose on average by 57.5 and 61.7 percent respectively, according to Case Shiller Weiss, a firm that collects real estate data. In the New York metropolitan area, home prices escalated especially rapidly in the late 1990's, federal housing figures show.

Professor Schill of New York University and others pointed out that the federal government began pressing financial institutions more aggressively to lend money in low- and moderate-income neighborhoods in the mid-1990's. As it became easier to get a mortgage with a relatively small down payment, the ratios of payments to incomes rose, he and others said.

Also in the 1990's, there was an expansion of so-called subprime lending, often for refinancing — lending to people with less-than-perfect credit histories, usually at higher interest rates. And there was a proliferation of predatory lending by unscrupulous lenders taking advantage of home buyers by charging extremely high rates.

"I would suspect that part of this is that there has been a real push on home ownership," Jim Buckley, executive director of University Neighborhood Housing Program, a community loan fund in the Northwest Bronx, said of the census numbers. "That's all great, as far as I'm concerned. The big question is: Are people stretching themselves too far?"

Amid Holiday Glow, the Real Chill in the Air

Amid Holiday Glow, the Real Chill in the Air Is the Fear of a Transit Strike
By ROBERT D. McFADDEN
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/09/nyregion/09TRAN.html

Crowds coiled around department stores, sidewalk Santas rang bells, Christmas lights glittered on the tree at Rockefeller Center. But behind the holiday cheer yesterday lay the specter of a transit strike, a city without the subways and buses that carry seven million people a day in and out like tides.

To many New Yorkers, like Bernice Coffie, 28, a mother of two who rides the subway from the Bronx to work in a Harlem grocery store, the prospects of a strike were frightening. "There's no way I can take a cab," she said. "There's no way I can miss work. We haven't talked about it yet, but what would I do? How would we be able to get food? How would we be able to support our families?"

A transit strike is indeed a vision of human and economic chaos: of millions hiking or biking to and from work, of thousands of children missing school, of workplace absenteeism and people dying as emergency vehicles crawl in traffic-choked streets, of theaters and restaurants and retail businesses withering.

New Yorkers old enough to remember transit strikes of the past recall the scenes — Lilliputian hordes crossing East River bridges like invading armies in the mornings and retreating like refugees in the dusk; cars scrimmaging at every intersection; hotels jammed with suburbanites instead of tourists; commuters riding roller skates; subway train yards like branching fish bones, eerily silent.

It happened twice before in modern times — for 12 days in 1966 and for 11 days in 1980 — and it could happen again next weekend, with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and Local 100 of the Transport Workers Union, which represents 34,000 transit workers, at loggerheads over wages and other issues.

The union has demanded a 24 percent wage increase over three years; the transportation authority, facing a $2 billion deficit and the prospect of 25- or 50-cent fare increases, has called for a one-year wage freeze, with raises in the second and third years only if warranted by productivity increases. The transit workers now average $44,000 a year; the average was $18,520 in 1980, when the fare was 50 cents, and $6,250 in 1966, when a ride cost a quaint 15 cents.

The two sides were so far apart yesterday that they did not even agree on when the contract expires and a strike might begin. The union said the current three-year agreement would end at 12:01 a.m. next Monday; a strike then would hit with maximum impact at the start of the workweek, and at the height of the holiday shopping season. The authority says the contract ends at 12:01 a.m. Sunday; a strike then would give commuters and others a day's breather to map strategy.

There were no negotiations yesterday and none are scheduled until Wednesday, although committees might talk today. But there was plenty of talk about strike prospects by officials at City Hall, and in the streets and subways where ordinary New Yorkers began to contemplate life without public wheels.

Officials of the Mayor's Office of Emergency Management said that a comprehensive plan to cope with a strike was in preparation, with contributions by the city's police, fire, sanitation and transportation agencies and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.

The deputy commissioner for emergency management, Francis E. McCarton, would not give details. They were still being worked out in preparation for a City Hall announcement today by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and his top commissioners, according to the mayor's spokesman, Edward Skyler.

The mayor, who was briefed on the plan last week and requested some changes, met yesterday with Michael A. Cardozo, the city corporation counsel, to discuss legal strategies for heading off a strike and dealing with one if it were not averted, Mr. Skyler said.

The state's Taylor Law prohibits strikes by public employees, including the transit workers. It calls for imposing fines or imprisonment on union leaders, fines against striking unions, loss of the dues checkoff privileges on which unions rely for collecting money from members, and loss of two days' pay for every day a worker is on strike.

Mr. Bloomberg, visiting Staten Island to talk about park improvements, said the Taylor Law would be fully enforced. "We will be in court," he said. "We will exercise every single legal remedy that we have to make sure first to try to prevent a strike." If a strike occurs, he said, "there will be serious consequences."

The mayor also reiterated warnings that a strike could cripple the city, severely damaging businesses and the economy, generating layoffs and declines in tax revenues and imposing heavy new burdens on a deficit-ridden budget to pay for police overtime and extra ferries and buses. He also emphasized that a strike could imperil lives.

"No. 1, people will die because of the gridlock that you will invariably have," he said. "The second thing that will happen is that the economy of this city will be devastated. The estimates are a $100 million decline per day in economic activity. That is going to translate, if it lasts more than a day or two, into layoffs throughout the city."

In the 1966 strike, business losses exceeded $100 million a day, police overtime and uncollected sales taxes totaled $72 million, theaters and restaurants lost 40 percent of their income, and $3 million in transit revenues went by the boards. In 1980, business losses were $100 million a day, police overtime and uncollected taxes were $47 million; 60,000 workers were laid off, school attendance fell by one-third and the 50-cent fare went to 60 cents.

On the steps of City Hall yesterday, City Councilman Hiram Monserrate, a Queens Democrat, and eight Democratic Council colleagues called on Gov. George E. Pataki to intervene.

"The reality is a strike would be absolutely devastating," said Councilman Bill de Blasio, of Brooklyn.

But some council members, including Joel Rivera of the Bronx, voiced support for raises. "What they are asking for is a fair pay increase, which is long overdue," he said.

Councilman David I. Weprin, chairman of the Finance Committee, noted that the city was still recovering from last year's terrorist attacks and now facing property tax increases of 18.5 percent. "With a post-Sept. 11 mentality and increased property taxes, there are already people leaving New York," he said. "A strike would be a major disincentive. We could see people leaving the city in large numbers."

Random sidewalk and subway interviews yesterday confirmed the obvious — that a strike would be a heavy blow.

Larry Scholle, 55, a visitor from Cincinnati, whose daughter went on a $900 shopping spree in Chinatown, on Fifth Avenue and at Macy's, said the family had gotten about quite nicely with one-day subway passes. But he said they might not have come to town if a transit strike had been under way.

"We would have been paralyzed seriously without the subway," he said. "I definitely would have thought about canceling the trip."

Elissa Lopez, 23, who lives in the northern reaches of the Bronx and rides the subway an hour each way to attend Baruch College in Manhattan, said, "It would just be impossible for me to get to school."

Meredith Lubitz, 32, who described herself as happily unemployed, said she would ride out any strike in her East Village apartment. "Given the weather and the time of year, it's going to stink," she said. "I'm pretty much just going to be sitting around and watching TV."

Upscale Retailers Are Trying Downscale Tactics

Upscale Retailers Are Trying Downscale Tactics
By TERRY PRISTIN
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/10/nyregion/10SHOP.html

It was a pitch that used to come only from stores trying to unload cheap sofas and stereo equipment. But these days, even a customer trying on a $10,000 sapphire ring at Tiffany's flagship store on Fifth Avenue is likely to hear it: "No money down, zero interest for 90 days."

Tiffany is not alone in using this kind of inducement. This holiday season, shoppers can take home a $6,000 Tibetan rug from ABC Carpet and Home in the Flatiron district and not begin paying for it until January 2004. Or they can get interest-free financing — and not just from mass-market jewelers like Zale's, but also from chains like Fortunoff or from smaller stores like Michael Eigen on Madison Avenue.

In New York, especially, retailers have every reason to be jittery this season, and many are turning to strategies like extended credit to lure customers.

With the city still suffering the consequences of last year's terrorist attack and the loss of thousands of Wall Street jobs, consumer confidence remains considerably lower in New York than in the rest of the nation, according to the Siena College Research Institute in Loudonville, N.Y. Hanukkah, more significant in New York than elsewhere because of the city's large Jewish population, took place earlier than in most years, and foreign tourists have still not returned in large numbers.

Adding to retailers' problems is the fact that Thanksgiving — the traditional start of the Christmas season — was relatively late. "People are going to have less time to do their shopping," said Michael Gould, the chief executive of Bloomingdale's. "They're going to take care of their gift buying, but they may not have as much time to spend on buying for themselves."

Many merchants began cutting prices in mid-November. "In our 113-year history," said Mitchell B. Modell, chief executive of the New York-based chain Modell's Sporting Goods, "we have more things on sale than we ever had. We never took markdowns as early as we're taking them today."

Like others, Mr. Modell has also had to deal with effects of the recent strike by West Coast port operators. Soccer and hockey games from Asia arrived too late to be included in the company's advertising circulars, so "we're selling them almost at cost," he said.

The strike has also affected Mxyplyzyk, a novelty and housewares store in Greenwich Village. "We've had much later delivery of products," said Kevin Brynan, a co-owner.

Outside Saks Fifth Avenue one recent frigid afternoon, the hallmarks of holidays past were all in place: with a Salvation Army rendition of "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" wafting across the sidewalk, crowds were lining up to get a close look at ornately decorated windows depicting the ballet "Sleeping Beauty."

In the store, sales racks filled the floors and merchandise was being offered at 25 percent to 40 percent off. A black Armani suit that was originally priced at $2,025 was on sale for $1,214, and a sequined Isabella Fiore bag was reduced to $224 from $335. Even with the steep markdowns, one saleswoman confided, business was slow.

A few blocks away, Bergdorf Goodman had reduced prices on many items by 40 percent, but one customer, Geri Boxer, said she never bought gifts just because they were on sale. "You should buy things that people will like," she said. "If it costs a little more, so what?"

For younger people, especially, the steady stream of ominous news — the threat of war with Iraq, the United Airlines bankruptcy, widespread layoffs — is keeping confidence low, said Douglas Lonnstrom, the director of the Siena College Research Institute. "There's a generation of people," he said, "who until last year never saw tough times."

Dr. Lonnstrom said that consumer confidence in New York State was lagging behind the national average because the Northeast, except for New York City, never really bounced back from the 1991 recession.

Last month, consumer confidence across the nation rose 3.6 points to 84.2, but fell one point in New York State, to 72.3. In New York City, overall consumer confidence is at 71.1. (The state index is based on a November survey of 620 residents. Results are measured against a base line of 100 points that represents average consumer confidence in 1996.)

In addition to reducing prices, merchants are trying other ideas. Saks has beefed up its corporate gift program and its designer accessories department. Old Navy has lined hundreds of taxicab seats with fleece, and has promised to donate fleece and outerwear to the New York Cares annual coat drive for the homeless every time someone rides in a "Fleece Fleet" taxi.

Bergdorf Goodman is working to accommodate out-of-town customers who are not traveling to New York this season, said Ronald Frasch, the chief executive. "We've flown custom-suit sellers and tailors to San Francisco," he said. "If they're not coming to us," he said of West Coast customers, "hopefully we can go to them." In the store on weekends, two groups that normally perform in subway stations are giving concerts.

These days, said Arnold H. Aronson, the managing director for retail strategy at Kurt Salmon Associates, retailers know they need to give consumers an incentive to shop. Some, like Tiffany, have chosen easy-payment terms. With interest rates low, "that's the cheapest markdown you can give," Mr. Aronson said.

A Tiffany spokeswoman, who declined to be interviewed, said by e-mail that the extended credit program was introduced in the late 1980's. But several retail industry experts said they had not heard of it.

Luxury retailers who offer extended credit are seeking to expand their customer base beyond those who are considered recession-proof, said Scott Krugman, a spokesman for the National Retail Federation. "They are reaching out to consumers they might not have been able to have before," he said.

Ford and Goldman, So Cozy at the Top

Ford and Goldman, So Cozy at the Top
By LANDON THOMAS JR.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/08/business/yourmoney/08PALS.html

WHEN a Congressional committee in October revealed the many ties between Wall Street firms and their clients, one of its noteworthy findings concerned the Goldman Sachs Group. It had allocated shares from its 1999 initial public offering to William Clay Ford Jr., the chairman and chief executive of the Ford Motor Company. By the next day, the actual number leaked — 400,000 shares, by far the largest individual award, worth $52 million at its peak and $29.8 million now.

But no one apparently picked up on something even more interesting: John L. Thornton, a president and co-chief operating officer of Goldman, is an old prep-school pal of Mr. Ford's, someone with whom he shares several friends and even more interests. He also serves on Ford's board.

Their friendship made it easier for Mr. Ford to request a generous allocation of Goldman stock — equal in value to all of the common stock he owns in Ford Motor, which was founded by his great-grandfather (though he also owns 3.2 million Class B shares with enhanced voting rights). It has also strengthened a half-century-long tie between Ford Motor and Goldman, particularly since Mr. Ford took the executive reins of the family company a year ago.

With his company's stock near 10-year lows, its debt veering close to junk status and Wall Street questioning his ability to make a profit, an under-the-gun chief executive naturally turns to his banker for advice and counsel. If the banker is an old friend, well, so much the better.

On the surface, there may seem little that would raise eyebrows here: banks and brokerage firms often let their well-heeled private and corporate clients share in hot stock sales. Ford was clearly a client worth wooing: Goldman has collected $90 million in fees from the company since 1996. Helping its executives to buy some hard-to-get stock is the essence of old-style relationship banking.

But in today's unforgiving business environment, that kind of closeness can be a problem. Old school ties and collegial relationship banking are suddenly suspect.

Investors and regulators are focusing on conflicts of interest, and bankers with close personal and business ties to client companies may well be conflicted. They have obvious incentives to do deals that, while fine for the adviser, may not be in the best interests of the company and shareholders.

"You cannot be on the board of directors and also be doing investment banking work for the company," said Nell Minow, editor of the Corporate Library, an organization based in Portland, Me., that monitors board behavior. "I don't care if he steps out of the room or not. You can not be the umpire and the pitcher in the same game."

Mr. Thornton has recently given ground. In May, he resigned from Ford's audit committee. Two months later, Congress passed the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which required audit committee members to be independent and prohibited their companies from accepting advisory fees from a company if they serve on its board. Ford officials said Mr. Thornton's status as an independent director is under review, as is the status of other board members.

While Goldman is by no means Ford's exclusive adviser — it has missed out on some big deals like Ford's purchase of Volvo's carmaking business in 1999, and it is a bit player in Ford's huge debt financing business — it is usually there on the juicy, big-think transactions.

In April 2000, for example, it advised Ford on a complicated recapitalization plan. In January this year, it was the lead manager of a $5 billion convertible bond offering.

NOT all of its advice, and the transactions that followed, have been perfect. Goldman worked with Ford in 2001 when it stockpiled palladium as prices were soaring and in 1999 when it bought Kwik-Fit, a car service company in Europe, and again when it sold Kwik-Fit this year at a loss. The two incidents ended up costing Ford write-offs of $2.1 billion while earning Goldman millions in fees and commissions.

These transactions have focused attention on the relationship between Ford and Goldman — and, by extension, the friendship of Mr. Ford, 45, and Mr. Thornton, 48.

Both men graduated from Ivy League schools — Mr. Ford from Princeton and Mr. Thornton from Harvard — and both began their careers in Europe in the mid-1980's. The two men also married women who were graduates of the 1982 class at Princeton. Both men are directors at the Brookings Institution.

They come from similar wealthy, well-connected backgrounds. Mr. Thornton is the son of lawyers and was raised in the wealthy New York suburb of Bronxville; Mr. Ford, scion of the automobile dynasty, grew up in the exclusive Detroit suburb of Grosse Pointe, Mich. They are high-achieving baby boomers with a love for sports and public policy, and they have a common ear for 1970's rock 'n' roll.

Mr. Thornton and Mr. Ford declined to comment for this article, but people who know them well say they are good friends and share many acquaintances, although they do not socialize together. Undoubtedly, they have a closer compact than the ideal relationship between chief executive and director.

The relationship of these men and their employers is illustrated by the events of 15 days in January this year. Ranging from advising on sophisticated commodities trading strategies to underwriting multibillion-dollar equity offerings, the Goldman-Ford symbiosis came quite suddenly to light. In some cases, Ford lost billions of dollars. In others, it raised billions. Through it all, the relationship endured.

On Jan. 11, Mr. Ford, in one of his first defining moments as chief executive, announced that Ford Motor would cut 23,000 jobs, close plants and take a $5.45 billion charge against earnings for 2001. Included in the write-down was a $1 billion loss on a series of palladium trades with J. Aron, Goldman's commodities trading arm.

The loss came after Ford purchasing officials decided early in 2000 to stockpile palladium, a metal used in pollution-control devices. Ford hired J. Aron to execute its trades, bankers and commodities traders said. In a class-action lawsuit filed against Ford in Federal District Court in New York earlier this year, shareholders accused the automaker, urged on by J. Aron and other brokers, of buying forward contracts to purchase the metal even as those deals caused prices to skyrocket, to a peak of $1,100 an ounce in January 2001. When the Ford purchases stopped, prices collapsed. A Goldman spokesman denies that it urged Ford to keep buying palladium as the price rose.

Four days after owning up to this loss, Ford said it had retained Goldman to manage the sale of $1 billion worth of what Ford called "noncore assets," a service that would net the bank additional fees. And on Jan. 24, Ford completed the sale of $5 billion in convertible bonds, a deal that gave Goldman an additional $18.2 million in fees. (Three co-lead underwriters, Salomon Smith Barney, Morgan Stanley and J. P. Morgan, all earned the same amount.)

In hiring Goldman, Sachs to manage its divestiture strategy, Ford officials were on firmer ground. Goldman's advisory work is essential to its franchise and is, many analysts say, the best on the Street. Buying Kwik-Fit, a European chain of car service centers, in 1999 for $1.6 billion, was the idea of Ford's chief executive at the time, Jacques A. Nasser. Goldman advised on the mechanics of the purchase, though not the rationale behind it, people involved in the transaction say. Goldman also managed the sale of the company in August for only $500 million. While Ford lost more than $1 billion on Kwik-Fit, Goldman collected fees for both transactions.

Goldman's role in Ford's convertible bond sale is particularly illuminating.

For most of 2000 and all of 2001, the Ford executive team, which included Mr. Nasser and senior finance officials, had frozen Goldman out of many of Ford's capital market activities, Ford officials say. Senior Ford executives were upset at Goldman's refusal to extend the company a credit line in exchange for higher-margin advisory work. Mr. Nasser did not return several telephone calls seeking his side of the story.

IN the summer of 2001, though, Ford officials realized that the company's United States market share was eroding and that its profit margins were shrinking. By that fall, they concluded that the company had to raise extra cash in the capital markets, say bankers close to the matter. As early as February 2001, Goldman bankers had been discussing with Ford officials the viability of a convertible bond offering, but Ford executives felt at the time that there was no need for such a plan, one now says.

After Mr. Ford pushed out Mr. Nasser, Goldman dusted off the proposal and Ford executives presented it to the board in December. Mr. Thornton and Robert E. Rubin, the Citigroup vice chairman who also sits on the Ford board, discussed the merits of each proposal with other directors. In January, Ford executives recommended the Goldman plan, and the board signed off on it.

But in light of the corporate governance scandals that have rocked — and even sunk — some of the biggest corporations in America this year, the question remains: Should bankers like Mr. Thornton have been in a position to decide whether their firms got an $18 million payday?

Goldman and Ford spokesmen say that men of such stature understand their fiduciary duties as directors and would never pass on boardroom information to their banking colleagues. The Goldman spokesman went on to say that Mr. Thornton, for one, goes to extreme pains to not pass along privileged Ford information to Goldman bankers covering the account.

OTHERS, however, are skeptical. "The reality is that the seat on the board is considered a portal of entry through which the investment banker obtains business for its firm," said John C. Coffee Jr., a professor of securities law at Columbia University. "Even if there was a wall, look at the position of the lower-ranking corporate official who is supposed to make a recommendation as to whom to hire as your underwriter and chief financial adviser. He knows this guy is sitting on the board. He has to wonder: Do I want to take a position hostile to an important director by recommending Salomon Smith Barney over Goldman, Sachs when the two are sort of fungible?" (Salomon is owned by Citigroup.)

In this kind of situation, the occult calculus of office politics would be even more delicate if an underling happened to know that the banker and board member was also a prep-school classmate of the chairman and chief executive.

When Mr. Ford entered the Hotchkiss School, an exclusive boarding school in Lakeville, Conn., in 1971, following in the footsteps of his father and his uncle, Henry Ford II, Mr. Thornton was a senior and a big man on campus: ace tennis player, captain of the basketball team, editor of the school paper, an outstanding math student and a favorite of teachers and students alike.

Along with his roommates — including Ralph H. Booth II, a friend of Mr. Ford's from Grosse Pointe — Mr. Thornton was also a senior proctor, living on the same floor of Alumni Hall as Mr. Ford. Phelps Swift, another roommate of Mr. Thornton's, said that while Mr. Ford did not receive special treatment from other students, there was no doubt about his family background.

"We treated him pretty shabbily, like we treated everyone else," Mr. Swift said. "We used to raid him for those good pistachio nuts he used to have. Billy was a nice kid, though. He came in with the Ford name and we all knew who he was."

After graduating from Hotchkiss, Mr. Thornton earned a degree in American political history at Harvard, landing a summer internship in Senator Edward M. Kennedy's office where part of his job was to play tennis with the senator. He then did graduate work at Oxford, where he studied law, and at the Yale School of Organization and Management.

A summer internship at Goldman in 1979 led to an entry-level position in the firm's mergers-and-acquisitions department a year later. By 1985, Mr. Thornton had been posted to London, where he would make his mark by importing the shark-like, American-style takeover practices to the clubby British market.

Mr. Ford's career also took him to London in the mid-80's, after he had earned a master's degree in management from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. After a grounding in the family business in the United States, Mr. Ford was rotated to London in 1986 as head of commercial vehicle marketing for Ford Europe. "He wanted to carry on the family tradition for other generations," said Charles Caulkins, a childhood friend and Hotchkiss classmate of Mr. Ford's. "The family is a huge deal for him."

Mr. Ford and Mr. Thornton did not renew their friendship, however, until Mr. Ford was transferred to Ford's office in Zurich. The men became reacquainted over a breakfast meeting at which they discussed business. In 1988, at the age of 31, Mr. Ford was elected to the board of his family's company. That same year, Mr. Thornton, then 34, was made a partner at Goldman.

Unlike Mr. Ford, who mostly spent his early years as a director on the sidelines, Mr. Thornton closed out the 1980's riding the takeover boom in London. In many respects, that culminated with Ford's $2.5 billion hostile takeover of Jaguar in 1989. Like many era-ending deals, Ford's bid was richer than it should have been, analysts say now. In fiscal 2002, Jaguar lost $500 million.

Mr. Thornton was among the bankers who advised Ford on that deal, but people with a close knowledge of the matter say the impetus to buy Jaguar came from Ford itself. In any case, the fees were rich and the deal convinced Mr. Thornton's bosses that he was set to become the next standard-bearer for the bank's relationship with its huge client.

In March 1996, Mr. Thornton was appointed to the Ford board at the recommendation of the company's chief executive and chairman at the time, Alexander Trotman, becoming the first director who was also a senior Goldman partner since Sidney Weinberg in the 1950's.

(In 1956, Mr. Weinberg put together a plan that allowed Henry Ford II to take his company public — raising $650 million and retaining 40 percent of a new class of voting stock in the process. It was a brilliant piece of financial engineering, and cemented what has become arguably the most personal relationship between a Wall Street firm and a public company.)

As Mr. Thornton rose at Goldman, Mr. Ford was rising through the ranks at Ford. In 1994, he became chairman of the finance committee. Five years later, he was appointed chairman, and late last year he succeeded Mr. Nasser as chief executive — after plummeting profits had led him to engineer Mr. Nasser's firing.

Mr. Weinberg became one of Ford Motor's first outside directors and, as Lisa Endlich points out in her book "Goldman Sachs: The Culture of Success" (Knopf, 1999), a Ford family intimate. Mr. Weinberg was invited to private Ford family gatherings and, Ms. Endlich writes, Henry Ford II would later refer to him as his best friend. A legend within Goldman has it that when the elder Ford died in 1987, he had a framed picture of Mr. Weinberg in his bedroom.

TODAY, almost a half-century after they were forged, the links between Goldman and Ford remain strong.

Mr. Weinberg's grandson, John S. Weinberg, is a Goldman partner and directly handles the Ford account. (He and William Clay Ford Jr. both graduated from Princeton in 1979 with degrees in history.) Mr. Thornton continues the Weinberg tradition of serving on the Ford board.

The Ways of Daughters

The Ways of Daughters
from Painted Bride Quarterly (2000)
by Ruth Stone

My daughters are getting on.
They're in over their hips,
over their stretch marks.
Their debts are rising
and their faces are serious.

There are no great barns
or riding horses.
Only one of them has a washing machine.
Their old cars break
and are never fixed.

So what is this substance
that floods over them,
into which they wade
as if going out
to meet the Phoenicians?

And they have no nets
for those shifty looking sailors.
But when I look again,
my daughters are alone in their kitchens.
Each child sweats in its junior bed.

And my girls are painting their fingernails.
They are rubbing lotions
on their impatient hands. This year
they are staining their hands and feet with henna.
They lie in the sun with henna packs on their hair.

Ruth Stone – a Tough 87 Years

Poetry That Captures a Tough 87 Years
By DINITIA SMITH
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/10/arts/10POET.html

MIDDLEBURY, Vt. — Don't be fooled by Ruth Stone, the 87-year-old poet who recently won the National Book Award. She sits in her daughter Phoebe's house, alert and pretty, henna rinse in her hair and, even though she is going blind, with wide brown eyes fixed steadily on her questioner. She smiles, her voice is soft, her manner well bred. But she is not a sweet old lady.

There are words in Ms. Stone's poems that cannot be printed in this newspaper, even for art's sake. The words are not written for effect, they are there because of a brutal honesty. Indeed, Ms. Stone is sometimes called America's Akhmatova. Like that poet of Russia's post-revolutionary suffering, Ms. Stone doesn't go for Symbolist tricks. Like Akhmatova, she writes uncompromisingly about passion and unbearable loss; about living in poverty and on the margins of experience.

Forty years after the fact, Ms. Stone is still writing about the husband she adored, Walter Stone, who committed suicide in 1959 at 42, leaving her to raise three daughters by herself. "Tied a silk cord around his meat neck/and hung his meat body, loved though it was,/in order to insure absolute quiet,/on the back of a rented door in SoHo," she writes in a poem titled "The Electric Fan and the Dead Man (or the widow as a useful object toward the end of the century)," in her National Book Award-winning collection, "In the Next Galaxy" (Copper Canyon Press).

"Serial-killer of my days," she calls her husband in another poem, "March 15, 1998." And in "Reality" she writes about his autopsy: "As a fish, gutted for trade,/so my darling as a cadaver/was slit, his viscera removed;/pulled out by a gloved hand/as waste."

Despite her subject matter, Ms. Stone was ebullient. There had been nearly four days of partying after the awards ceremony in Manhattan, and she was suffering from a hangover. "I think I'm going to quit drinking wine," she giggled. When she won, she told the audience, "I think you gave it to me because I'm old."

"Someone thought I was the only funny thing in the show," she said later. "I didn't cry. I just didn't believe it."

But the award is not quite such a surprise. In 2000 she won the National Book Critics Circle Award for her collection "Ordinary Words" (Paris Press, 1999). And she has always been a "poet's poet."

"She has to a rare degree a quality of unsentimentality," said Sharon Olds, her friend and competitor for the National Book Award this year. "It's as if she hasn't heard that you're supposed to sugar it up."

Ms. Stone has had a tough life. She was born Ruth McDowell in Roanoke, Va., into a family of amateur poets and painters. Her father was a printer. "My mother recited Tennyson's `In Memoriam' aloud to herself when she was nursing me," she said. "She used to give me a penny to say poems to her."

When Ruth was 3 the family moved to Indianapolis. By 19, she was married to her first husband and had moved with him to Urbana, Ill., where they were students at the University of Illinois. They had a daughter, Marcia. At Urbana she met Mr. Stone, a graduate student and poet. She describes him in her poem "Spring Beauties": "Your long fingers, thin body,/and long bones of improbable genius;/ some scattered gene as Kafka must have had./Your deep voice, this passing dust of miracles."

In another poem, "Coffee and Sweet Rolls," published in her 1995 collection, "Simplicity" (Paris Press), she writes about their affair:

I remember the dingy hotels
where we lay reading Baudelaire,
your long elegant fingers, the nervous ritual
of your cigarette; you, a young poet working
in the steel mills; me, married
to a dull chemical engineer.

She divorced her husband and married Mr. Stone. She followed him to Harvard, where he was a graduate student, and eventually to Vassar, where he got a teaching job. She began publishing poems in Poetry magazine and The New Yorker, and won a Kenyon Review fellowship in poetry. With it she bought a farmhouse in Goshen, Vt.

Walter Stone seemed to have the world at his feet: poetry and short fiction published in The New Yorker, an advance for a novel. He and Ms. Stone seemed like a golden couple, both of them with collections scheduled to come out. They had two daughters, Phoebe and Abigail.

To this day, Ms. Stone says, she does not understand why he committed suicide. The family was in London, where Mr. Stone was on sabbatical. He suffered two head injuries, she said, one when he bumped his head on a low ceiling, the other when he hit it on the sharp point of a car door. That may have caused him to break down, she said.

He began telling her that he was having strange thoughts. "He said, `I think I'm losing my mind,' " she remembered.

"I couldn't save him," she added.

In a poem published after he died in his collection "Poems, 1955-1958," he wrote: "The Keats in me was never born./At twenty-five he had no tongue;/Entombed, unwilling to be torn/From the cool shroud in which he hung."

But then, he wrote, "At forty I began to shout/A desperate dissonance in air./ I tried to shake my poets out./Their eyes were dark; their tongues were bare."

Ms. Stone said of his suicide: "We were a happy family. It was like a rock fell out of the sky." There has never been anyone else, she said. "I lost the only man I ever wanted."

Immediately Ms. Stone and the girls returned to the United States. That year, 1959, she published her first book "In an Iridescent Time." She received a fellowship to the Radcliffe, now the Bunting, Institute, for advanced studies for women. Then Richard Wilbur got her a job as a photography editor at the Weekly Reader, a publication for children, in Middletown, Conn. But she kept breaking into tears.

"My psyche was just breaking down," she said. "I couldn't take it." She quit and took her three daughters back to Vermont.

To make ends meet, she became a "wandering poet," going from one teaching post to another, returning to Goshen in summers. In Goshen, at first, there was no running water, no central heating, but, Phoebe remembered, "we had five thousand books." There was no television, but the girls read and put on plays. Phoebe and Abigail both became writers. Ms. Stone's other daughter, Marcia Croll, is a psychologist.

"I used to sneak into the back study to write when they were little," Ms. Stone remembered. "I'd sit on the floor with my typewriter with my foot against the door to keep them out. I'd leave big spaces on the page so I could fill them in later because I didn't have time to do it then."

Phoebe remembered, "We would use her notebooks to draw." And then lose them. "I've lost lots of notebooks," Ms Stone said.

There was a 12-year hiatus between Ms. Stone's first book and her second, "Topography and Other Poems." After that, the books, eight in all, came at regular intervals, as did the awards, but not widespread recognition.

Finally, when Ms. Stone was 72, her life of wandering came to an end when she was awarded tenure at the State University of New York at Binghamton. Some of her more interesting poems come out of living in the snowbelt of upstate New York.

In "Visions From My Office Window" in her new book, she wrote, "Among the students between the buildings,/the colors of their clothes is a mirage of tulips./The lash of hot and cold upstate/New York mountain weather;/April splinters like an ice palace."

But not all her poems are bleak. In "Bits of Information" she describes a hummingbird: "While her minuscule fledglings, each slightly/larger and heavier than a bumblebee,/are rising out of the woven handbag of their nest,/this hummingbird is sipping jewelweed."

Three years ago Ms. Stone retired from Binghamton, though she still has graduate students. Since then, her eyesight has been deteriorating.

She still has her Goshen house. This winter she is living alternately with her three daughters, who have homes in the Middlebury area. She plans to get a small apartment in Middlebury during the bad weather, she said, and then to return to her farmhouse in Goshen.

Despite her poor eyesight, she has three books ready to publish, Ms. Stone said. Abigail helps her with her writing, typing her poetry on a computer and printing it in enlarged type so Ms. Stone can edit it — she still has some eyesight left.

In the title poem of the new collection, Ms. Stone writes that in the next galaxy, "Things will be different./No one will lose their sight,/their hearing, their gallbladder."

In the next galaxy, she continues, "certain planets will have true/blue skies and drinking water."

But do not be deceived by Ms. Stone's story. It is not a sad one. "I have had a life of enormous happiness," she said. "It is just beautiful. I think I've been fortunate. Though I lost Walter."

Art Basel Miami Day5

last day and raining off and on. but finally had a little time to see a little more of south beach. after a last walk through at the convention center, took a little walk down the beach and ocean drive. not as many people as there used to be. but maybe its a little early in the season...

Art Basel Miami Day4

Another beautiful day in Miami. in the morning, we visited the homes of a few private collectors. while visiting the home of Tom Healy and Fred Hochberg, i was mixed with feelings of inspiration and depression. it's hard to be confronted with perfection.

in the evening, we attended the showing of a taped interview with Karl Lagerfeld. the subject -- 'is fashion art?'. whatever. it was almost insulting to have to answer some of the questions posed in that context. sort of like 'boxers or briefs?'. so banal. (ok, i'll have to think up a better analogy later...) the art writer of the Times and her husband, next to whom one of our group was seated, were both outwardly laughing at the questions. and people were so rude. after 10 minutes of the interview, the chatter around was starting to drown out the taped interview. i was in the front and still had to lean forward and concentrate to hear clearly.

Last day now. and it is actually pouring. we've been so lucky to have great weather our whole time here. so let the rain come. wanted to go to the beach today, but i guess i'll just spend all of my remaining time trying to get through the last third of the convention center and the Scope exhibits here at our hotel, where one of my sister's best friends from college (Ethan Cohen) has an exhibit of chinese art.

and then the plane and back to the cold and snow of NYC...