The Rains

The Rains
by Philip Levine (b. 1928)

The river rises
and the rains keep coming.
My Papa says
it can't flood for
the water can run
away as fast as
it comes down. I believe
him because he's Papa
and because I'm afraid
of water I know I can't stop.
All day in school I
see the windows darken,
and hearing the steady drum
of rain, I wonder
if it will ever stop
and how can I get home.

It did not flood.
I cannot now remember
how I got home.
I recall only that the house
was dark and cold, and I went
from room to room calling
out the names
of all those I lived with
and no one answered. For a time
I thought the waters had swept
them out to sea
and this was all I had. At last
I heard the door opening
downstairs and my brother
stamping his wet boots
on the mat.

Now when the autumn comes
I go alone
into the high mountains
or sometimes with my wife,
and we walk in silence
down the trails
of pine needles
and hear the winds
humming through the branches
the long dirge of the world.
Below us is the world
we cannot see, have come
not to see, soured
with years of never
giving enough, darkened
with oils and fire, the world
we could have come
to call home.

One day the rain
will find us far
from anything, crossing
the great meadows
the sun had hidden in.
Hand in hand, we
will go forward toward nothing
while our clothes darken
and our faces stream
with the sweet waters
of heaven. Your eyes,
suddenly deep and dark in that light,
will overflow with joy
or sadness, with all
you have no names for.
This is who you are.
That other life below
was what you dreamed
and I am the man beside you.

Sharon Laments 'Occupation' and Israeli Settlers Shudder

[as Tom Friedman commented last night on Charlie Rose, this is a significant development if not a crucial turning point.]

Sharon Laments 'Occupation' and Israeli Settlers Shudder
By JAMES BENNET
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/01/international/middleeast/01MIDE.html

ITAMAR SETTLEMENT, West Bank, May 30 — The newspaper headline that caught the rabbi's eye was a pun on Shalom Ahshav, the Hebrew name of one of Israel's most dovish groups, Peace Now.

"Sharon Ahshav," it read, under a picture of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.

"It's astonishing," Rabbi Avichai Ronzki murmured, scooping up the newspaper.

It has been, for Israel's settlers, a most unsettling week. First the Israeli government endorsed the idea of eventually creating a Palestinian state, giving qualified backing to an American-backed peace plan. Then Mr. Sharon criticized what he called Israel's "occupation" in the territories of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, captured in the 1967 war.

This is a right-wing Israeli government, and Mr. Sharon is a visionary and engineer of the settlement movement, which since the war has moved more than 200,000 Israelis into the West Bank and Gaza. Yet in a conflict in which every word can be inspected for political freight, in which names for everything from the city streets to the violence itself are contested, Mr. Sharon has adopted a term — "occupation" — that is central to the lexicon of Israeli doves and Palestinians.

For settlers, it was almost as though President Bush had described Texas as American-occupied territory.

"They are talking about giving up the land," said Rabbi Ronzki, who is a brigadier general in the Israeli reserves and a founder of this Israeli redoubt in the West Bank, a village of red-roofed cottages, armed men and laughing schoolchildren in the windswept hills above the Palestinian city of Nablus. In terms of educating the Israeli public, Rabbi Ronzki said, "the damage is huge."

Yet Rabbi Ronzki, 51, is a patient man in a patient movement. He is the father of six children, all of whom, he believes, will live as adults in Itamar, as his two married daughters already do. Settlers have long believed that trailers, water towers and other "facts on the ground" matter more than words; the fact remains that Mr. Sharon has yet to act to restrain settlement.

But that is not the same as saying that words do not matter. Rabbi Ronzki worried that Mr. Sharon had shaken an ideological foundation of his dominant Likud Party.

"The flag of the Likud was always ownership of the land of Israel — both sides of the Jordan River," he said, referring to settlers' motivating dream of holding all of the Jewish biblical domain.

Mr. Sharon is not talking these days about dreams, but about hard economic and diplomatic realities. His words are reverberating through Israeli society as settlers, politicians and analysts try to gauge their consequences.

It is a discussion that goes beyond a narrower debate, which is also raging, over whether Mr. Sharon is playing a deep game, preparing his old allies to surrender their homes, or using words rather than substantive concessions to ease American pressure for progress on the peace plan.

"The intentions are less important here than the dynamic that is being unleashed," said Yaron Ezrahi, a dovish political scientist at Hebrew University. He called Mr. Sharon's remarks "enormously significant," because so much of the Israeli debate had been "a conflict of language, of languages, of words." If this government fell, he argued, a left-wing leadership would have new political immunity to aggressively pursue the peace plan and act against settlement.

Settlers and others who favor a "greater Israel" prefer to speak of the land as having been "liberated" in the 1967 war, smudging any boundary between it and land taken in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war that accompanied Israel's founding.

But last Monday, a day after his government reluctantly backed the peace plan, Mr. Sharon told angry legislators from Likud: "You may not like the word, but what's happening is occupation. Holding 3.5 million Palestinians under occupation is a bad thing for Israel, for the Palestinians and for the Israeli economy."

A careful man, he used the word occupation — in Hebrew, kibush — at least four times.

They definitely did not like the word. Mr. Sharon was attacked as undermining his own government's effort to label the territories as "disputed," rather than "occupied." The next day, he said his mission was not to parrot everything he said in the past. But he also said that what he had meant was that the Palestinians were occupied, but that the territory was not — a formula that appeared to satisfy no one.

"Whether he wanted to or not, Sharon broke a huge taboo, and no murky clarification can get him out of it," the columnist Amnon Dankner wrote today in the Israeli daily Maariv. "He used the terminology of the left, and thus also adopted the basic outlook of the left, which has been arguing for many years that we are occupiers in the territories, that occupation is a bad idea and in fact mortally harmful to Israel."

Shaul Goldstein, a settler leader from the relatively moderate Gush Etzion settlement bloc, a community south of Jerusalem, said by telephone: "I was very, very surprised by the prime minister, and angry. I don't feel like one who occupies area. It's our area, our homeland."

Yet Mr. Goldstein is also taking part in an effort by settler leaders to draw up their own version of a partition plan that would give some autonomy to Palestinians. Settlers are divided over the plan, but it is a recognition that times may be changing.

At 75, Mr. Sharon appears once more to have positioned himself in the political center. An opinion poll published today by Maariv reported that 62 percent of Israelis supported "ending the Israeli occupation of the territories." Opposed were 32 percent, and 6 percent were undecided. The poll, of 593 people, had a margin of error of plus or minus 4 percentage points.

Supported by the government, settlers have tightened their grip on the West Bank during Mr. Sharon's tenure, with new roads and fences as well as outposts. They include Jewish immigrants from all over the world, but their strength is reinforced now by younger settlers born into the West Bank and the movement.

"They were born here, they grew up here, and their conviction of holding to the land is absolute," Rabbi Ronzki said last November.

From the right, Mr. Sharon has been booed this week and greeted by furious protesters who call his support for the peace plan treason. Settler leaders have been meeting late into the night debating what to do.

Rabbi Ronzki is among those who reject the peace plan. But he served as a captain of paratroopers under General Sharon in the Sinai desert in 1973, and he admires him as a man of vision and great cunning. He hopes that his old general is simply playing along with the Americans, believing that the Palestinians will never act decisively to stop terrorism and that he will be released from any obligations under the peace plan.

Mr. Sharon has often spoken of "painful concessions" for peace, but he has not specified what settlements he might remove. The new peace plan calls for Israel to dismantle immediately settlement outposts built since Mr. Sharon took office more than two years ago, and to freeze settlement growth. He is resisting these steps.

Mr. Sharon emphasizes his roots as a pragmatic Zionist, rather than as a devoutly religious one like Rabbi Ronzki, and it may be that he glimpses a chance to achieve an agreement on his terms. His allies say he envisions retaining as many settlements as possible while permitting a Palestinian state in less than half the West Bank, with Israel in control of its borders and airspace. But to Palestinians, settlements are a provocation and a barrier to a viable state. Mahmoud Abbas, the new Palestinian prime minister, says that in a final deal, Israel must remove all settlements and depart the West Bank entirely.

Rabbi Ronzki seemed wounded by Mr. Sharon's reference to Israel's economic crisis as a reason to divide the land. The settlement movement, he said, had far higher values than money, adding that the suffering of Jews today was nothing compared with what they experienced in the past.

During the 1973 war, Rabbi Ronzki lost more than 20 friends, an experience that he said had turned him to religion and deep study of the Bible. In 1980, he and his wife, Ronit, moved to this hilltop with half a dozen other families to found Itamar.

Like most settlers, he recalls the early days as halcyon, a time of "excellent relationships with our Arab neighbors."

"We shopped in Nablus for everything we needed," he said last fall. It was his dream, he said today, that the two peoples would live harmoniously together again someday.

Although another Palestinian uprising preceded the 1993 Oslo agreement, Rabbi Ronzki, like most settlers, blames Oslo and the subsequent return of Yasir Arafat for the current enmity. The problem, he says, is the governing Palestinian Authority and its leadership.

Now about 100 families live here, and a ribbon of asphalt stretches east along a ridge to join Itamar to newer outposts. Israeli soldiers stand guard against infiltration by gunmen, but children still do not lock their bicycles.

The beauty of the landscape is recorded on the rabbi's walls, in the oil paintings of anemone-starred valleys by Mrs. Ronzki, an artist. Today, the view was lunar, as a dust storm washed white the scrub grass and limestone ribbing of the hills, blurring the nearby Palestinian towns.

Rabbi Ronzki now has a long white beard and close-cropped, iron-gray hair, and he runs a yeshiva here. A year ago, three of the yeshiva students were killed by a Palestinian gunman who attacked at night. Less than a month later, a mother, three of her children and another Itamar resident were killed in a second attack. The next day some settlers went on a rampage; they drove to the nearby Palestinian town of Burin and shot a 22-year-old stonecutter dead.

As settlers tend to do, the rabbi took the long view, recalling how previous peace plans came to nothing. It was possible Mr. Sharon was going through some sort of transformation, Rabbi Ronzki said. But he dismissed the notion that the Palestinian leadership was changing. For that reason, he said, the new plan would also fail, and Jewish life in Itamar would continue.

"In the end, we know nothing will be achieved or changed," he said, as he parted today with a visitor. With an M-16 rifle over his shoulders, he was preparing to go out and do his reserve duty, continuing the struggle in the West Bank.

esthet.org

what a pleasant surprise this morning to find some of my images mentioned on lil's fabulous journal on photography and all things aesthetic -- esthet.org. thanks, lil!

it just reminds me how much more real work i need to get done. and how un-ready i still feel, even after a year of effort... :-(

life *is* art

"The white man is killed by culture. We segregate art from life. But life is art."
-- Henri Cartier-Bresson

The Man of the Moment
By Malcolm Jones NEWSWEEK
http://www.msnbc.com/news/917865.asp

June 2 issue — When Henri Cartier-Bresson saw me pull out my notebook, he asked in mock horror, “Are you from the police?” I said no, I would make a very poor policeman, and he smiled. Mindful of his distaste for interviews, I went on, “I know you don’t like questions—” but he cut me off. “Why not? There are no answers.” I started to see why journalists who have wangled interviews with the 94-year-old grandmaster of photography have come to regret it.

WE WERE SITTING in the Paris apartment he shares with his wife, the photographer Martine Franck. It was a rainy Easter Sunday, the day he’d picked for the interview because he is “an anarchist”—a word he uses to suggest his impudent disregard for propriety. We sat by the floor-to-ceiling windows that overlook the Tuileries, the Louvre and the Seine. Monet and Cezanne used to sketch this view from the apartment below. Cartier-Bresson sketches it now. But he does not photograph it. For the last 30 years, he has only rarely touched a camera, preferring instead to capture the world with a pencil and a sketch pad.

Yes, it’s as if Michael Jordan had decided to stay in baseball. This is the man who virtually invented street photography in the early ’30s and then went on to set the standard in photojournalism. He shot the communist takeover of China and the fall of British India. He took Gandhi’s portrait hardly an hour before he was assassinated. Once Cartier-Bresson photographed something or someone, you might as well have retired them as subjects: best picture of a man jumping over a puddle, best portrait of Sartre, best image of a picnic. Just don’t expect Cartier-Bresson to agree. “I’m not a photographer,” he insists. “I’m not interested in photography. With photography, you don’t grasp anything. It’s just intuition. To be a draftsman is very different.” Sure enough, he has no photographs on his walls, only drawings and paintings, by other artists.

Clearly Cartier-Bresson wants to put his past behind him and, just as clearly, the rest of the world isn’t cooperating. A huge retrospective of his work—more than 600 photographs, as well as selections from his documentary films and his drawings—just opened at Paris’s Bibliotheque Nationale. A definitive catalog, published in English as “Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Man, the Image and the World,” accompanies the show. Concurrently, the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson has also opened in Paris. Besides housing his archives, it will serve as exhibition space for other photographers and offer financial support to visual artists. When I mentioned all this, Cartier-Bresson first feigned deafness, then indifference. Finally, his wife reminded him that the Fondation opening was only a week away, and he looked up in unfeigned alarm. “Do I have to wear a tie?”

These days the globe-trotting photojournalist, who nearly died of blackwater fever in Africa and escaped from Nazi POW camps three times, usually sticks close to home. “We travel,” said Franck, “but mostly to attend exhibitions of Henri’s work.” Still, considering his age, Cartier-Bresson’s physical infirmities are negligible. He wears reading glasses, hearing aids in both ears, and he gets around with a cane, or rather what’s called a shooting stick: the curved metal handle splits in two to form a seat. These were invented for gentlemen hunters, like those in “The Rules of the Game,” the 1939 Jean Renoir film on which Cartier-Bresson worked as assistant director. “I can sit on this,” he says, “and draw for half an hour before I get tired.”

He may have lost the lithe grace so obvious in photographs of him at work as a younger man. But there is nothing slow about his mind. He answers questions quickly and succinctly—when he chooses to answer at all. He grows visibly bored and ill-tempered when the subject of his career as a photographer comes up. Only once, when he caught me leafing through the catalog to the current retrospective, did he voluntarily discuss a picture. Of the 1951 photograph of women on the stairs in an Italian town, a piece of fiendishly complicated geometry, he said, “I saw it and I only had a second. So I gambled.” This could be the story behind any of a hundred Cartier-Bresson shots, with their utterly unique balance of compositional genius, bottomless curiosity —about people and a jack rabbit’s reflexes when it comes to pulling the trigger.

In 1952, Cartier-Bresson wrote a now famous essay, “The Decisive Moment,” in which he specified the time for the click of the shutter not as the climax of the action but as the instant when, pictorially speaking, everything comes together. As an after-the-fact description of his own work, it makes perfect sense. As advice for anyone else, it’s pretty much useless. So when Cartier-Bresson insisted to me that “anyone with a camera is a photographer,” his wife broke out in exasperation: “Henri, you know that’s not true!” He grinned, happy to have her call his bluff. “I know, but I can say what I want.” Perhaps, I suggested, he was someone who thinks that because he can do something, that anybody can. He shrugged. “Maybe,” he said. “I don’t think about those things anymore.”

Near the end of my visit, he asked his wife to bring over an ebony carving, about a foot tall, of a female figure. “When I was dying of blackwater fever, a woman gave me this,” he said. “She had the power.” Feeling increasingly like the American rube in a Henry James novel, I press him. Is it magic? Do you think this saved your life? “We don’t talk about this,” he said gently. “There are things you don’t mention.” He took the statue back and stroked it. “The white man is killed by culture,” he said, as if to himself. “We segregate art from life. But life is art.” He thrust the statue at me again. “Look at the beauty, the way it takes the light.”

For him there is no discontinuity between life and art, between the young art student who in the 1920s abandoned painting for photography and the aging photographer who set aside his camera and picked up a pencil and a sketch pad. And what would he do, I asked, if he were unable any longer to draw? “You draw mentally then,” he said, without missing a beat. “You can’t kill in somebody what is essential.”

Mockup Wing Is Torn by Foam in Shuttle Test

Mockup Wing Is Torn by Foam in Shuttle Test
By JOHN SCHWARTZ with MATTHEW L. WALD
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/30/national/30SHUT.html

HOUSTON, May 29 — A piece of insulating foam shot at a mocked-up shuttle wing opened a long slit in its leading edge, which may help to explain what caused the loss of the space shuttle Columbia, investigators said today.

In the experiment, which was conducted for the independent board investigating the shuttle disaster, researchers shot a 1.67-pound chunk of foam from a gas cannon at a full-size model of the wing's leading edge at about 530 miles per hour. They were trying to recreate the circumstances at the Columbia's launching, when a piece of insulating foam from the external tank slammed into the shuttle wing at similar speed.

The impact produced a 22-inch-long gap, ranging in width from the thickness of a dime to a quarter inch, a spokesman for the Columbia Accident Investigation Board said this evening.

The test was not as realistic as possible; the target was made of fiberglass, not the material used in shuttles, reinforced carbon-carbon. Carbon-carbon, or R.C.C., is in short supply but will be used in a later test, said the spokesman, Lt. Col. Tyrone Woodyard of the Air Force. Fiberglass can withstand more forceful strikes without shattering, materials experts say. But investigators were excited by the test.

"If I was a gambling man, I'd bet it'll severely damage or perhaps even shatter a more brittle material such as the R.C.C.," said one of the commission's investigators. Another investigator said, however, that the main value would be to calibrate the testing mechanism, getting the speed right and the angle of impact, in this case 20 degrees, without using up scarce carbon-carbon samples.

In some ways, a narrow gap would be a more promising result than a shattered panel. Investigators note that before breaking up on Feb. 1, the Columbia entered the atmosphere far west of the California coast, but held together until it was over Central Texas, a sign that the breach in the wing must have been small and that the damage progressed relatively slowly.

That is why an expert outside the investigation suggested that today's experiment had solved the mystery. "That's the answer," said Paul A. Czysz, a professor emeritus at Parks College of Engineering and Aviation at St. Louis University, when told of the test results. A slit the size of one created in the test would let in a stream of gas three times as hot as a blowtorch."My God, that's like a barn door at those temperatures," he said.

Investigators have already concluded that a hole in the shuttle's left wing let in the superheated gases that destroyed the wing, and they knew that a piece of foam struck the wing on launching. But they would not have been able to link the two convincingly without experimental evidence, and some of them had been worried that the experiments might not produce any wing damage.

Adm. Harold W. Gehman Jr., who heads the investigation board, has repeatedly tried to lower expectations about the experimental results. He has said the board's recommendations will not be be based on absolute proof that the foam caused the hole.

Colonel Woodyard said the tests, which were conducted by the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, created a gap between a leading-edge panel and a part that fits between panels, called a T-seal for its shape. The impact appears to have shoved the seal sideways, exposing the inner structure of the wing behind it.

Professor Czysz suggested that the leading edge panels and seals shifted from the impact because the wing would not have been designed to resist a blow that exerted sideways pressure. "That just goes to show you that the thing you least expect to happen, will," he said.

A NASA engineer working with the investigators said the results were impressive but could not be conclusive until the tests were performed again using reinforced carbon-carbon. "All of the analysis and investigating and theorizing in the world just goes right down the tubes as soon as you have experimental information," he said. "The hardware doesn't lie."

In Uptown Galleries and Museums, Heat and Light Aplenty

In Uptown Galleries and Museums, Heat and Light Aplenty
By HOLLAND COTTER
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/30/arts/design/30COTT.html

JUST before and after World War II, 57th Street in Manhattan was the Gold Coast of modern art. Bright lights, big pictures, names like Pollock, de Kooning and Kline, not to mention indoor smoking.

When the action started moving downtown in the 1960's, the Midtown luster dimmed a bit. But it never went out, and today the area has a mellow, steady glow. Its prewar galleries look shapely and civilized next to Chelsea barns. Some of the city's best noncommercial spaces are in the area. So are some of this spring's more interesting shows.

Organizing a tour by medium or style doesn't do the trick. There's too much and too little of everything. So how about a theme? Light. Basically, light is what art is made of. Color is light rays bent a certain way. Sculpture is shaped by light. Photography? Light plus chemicals. Film: projected light. That's the physical part. Then there are ideas. Some of us, sometimes, find art to be illuminating: it fires the emotions, throws history into relief, brightens the day.

Art-and-light talk can get out of hand. Unless you are careful, you find yourself veering toward the Sublime, or some such place, and there the population changes. Suddenly spirits, space cadets and visionaries are walking around like so many turned-on light bulbs. Well, Pollock was one of those, so that's not so bad. So was Kline, which is better. And it turns out there are more where they came from on 57th Street and its environs this spring, as you'll see.

"Josef Albers: Homage to Color" at PaceWildenstein is a cool thing: a perfectly unecstatic demonstration of how luminous color can be. Albers (1888-1976) was a well-known abstract painter and maker of stained glass. He was also a born pedagogue, who combined the analytical acuity of a biochemist and the devotional patience of a priest.

Paintings like the 30 at PaceWildenstein were elements in a long-term research project to determine, through art, all the possible implications of a single word: vision.

In one sense, there isn't much to the work: color, a few geometric forms, that's it. And you can watch him work. With color, he starts simply. He paints a square of yellow on a canvas. Then he adds a touch of, say, red to the original yellow and lays a square of a new orangey-yellow on the earlier one, nested-box style. Then he adds green or something and gets a funny brown, which goes on top of the other two.

So now you have brown on orange on yellow. Or beeswax on egg yolk on forsythia. Or circumspection on passion on innocence. And by the time you've come this far, the stacked-up planes of color are moving slightly, like the bellows of a harmonium.

I suspect this is the kind of experience Albers wanted to put us through with his color studies, and it was one that he, the good teacher, took himself through first, adjusting colors, monitoring their temperatures and temperaments, taking notes. Some people find such exercises dry and mechanical. I can see why, but they don't strike me that way, nor do they look that way in the show.

Albers got the idea for color series from seeing vibrantly painted house facades in Mexico. And the installation at PaceWildenstein actually suggests a room with walls pierced by deep-set windows or empty niches for holding lamps. In Albers's world, though, the empty niches are lamps, glowing with color. Call it Lutheran Zen.
Amy Myers

Albers was, of course, the product of a high Modernist utopian time, which is unrecoverable now, and just as well. But his merging of art, science and spiritual discipline has produced contemporary heirs. Among them is Amy Myers, who makes an impressive New York solo debut at Danese with a show titled "String Series: The Handheld Universe."

Ms. Myers's work in no way resembles Albers's. His small paintings are geometric and emptied out; her large drawings are organic, diagrammatic, packed with detail. But her art, like his, is both system-based and personal. Albers's foundation was optics; Ms. Myers's is physics, and its laws of endless change and recombination. She learned those laws at home, as a child, from her father, a particle physicist whose experiments she observed.

What she has come up with for herself is an art that is both hard labor and serious play. The single, big, complicated structure in each of her drawings is made of countless small draftsmanly parts, meticulously arranged. The symmetry is breathtaking, as are the spark-shooting forms that result. They suggest many concrete things — spaceships, ectoplasmic apparitions, sexual organs, mandalas — but remain emanations of the personal physics that generated them.

Sharon Ellis

The quartet of paintings titled "The Four Elements," by Sharon Ellis, at Artemis Greenberg Van Doren also feel driven, but in a less tension-inducing way. They are landscapes, so the language is concrete and familiar. Some of her influences are easy to see, from Romantics like Caspar David Friedrich to American Modernists like Charles Burchfield and Agnes Pelton. Finally, her technique is so obviously virtuousic that it holds no surprises. It's like sugar coating.

Ms. Ellis means these paintings to be expressive and exciting, though, and at least one of them, "Fire," is. On the surface it is an autumn scene, but with a wired, hallucinatory verve. The sky is burning; the trees are calcified from heat. Something apocalyptic is going on, a fire-and-brimstone "Fantasia."

"Air" has strange trees, too, but they are set against a rainbowish sky, with giant gold spores zooming around like rockets. It's a pleasing picture, but too pretty, like a Claritin ad. This is a risk Ms. Ellis's paintings run. She prefers not to have her art described as psychedelic, but the trippier they are, the better.

This was true of Burchfield and Pelton, too. The gallery has a painting by each. We don't often see much Pelton, but she's really good, and her organic abstraction here is gorgeously hallucinogenic, the real unearthly thing.

Mariko Mori

The Japanese artist Mariko Mori has produced her own unearthly realness for more than a decade, with work that blends science fiction, fashion and esoteric Buddhism. Of late, she has been designing interactive spiritual hardware. At the Brooklyn Museum of Art, she installed a meditation booth that channeled solar light. Now a long-planned and more ambitious piece titled "Wave U.F.O." has landed, courtesy of the Public Art Fund, in the atrium of the former I.B.M. building on Madison Avenue between 56th and 57th Streets.

Shaped like a huge drop of pearlescent fluid, it accommodates three electrode-wired participants at a time, who are treated to a son-et-lumière projection of their brain waves, followed by an eye-rinsing aurora borealis of Ms. Mori's devising. The work is high-tech, fun while it lasts, and must have cost someone a fortune to produce. Sounds like art to me.

`Early Buddhist Sculpture'

Those craving more by Ms. Mori can head to SoHo, where she has a sculpture of touch-response aliens — they light up when hugged — at Deitch Projects (18 Wooster Street, through June 14). Others may prefer to move on to the Fuller Building for a celestial show of early Buddhist Indian sculpture at Carlton Rochell.

The star is a life-size figure of a standing Buddha, now headless, dating to the second century A.D. Heroically sensual in his clinging robe, he was cut from a red sandstone that still seems warm with the Indian sun.

Next to him is a bust of a bodhisattva who has lightning bolts for hair, and nearby is a fabulous carving of Sarasvati, the Hindu goddess of music and wisdom, surrounded by animal-headed attendants. In the West, you have to go to heaven to meet your Maker. In India, the gods spend long weekends on earth.
`Heaven and Hell'

One floor below, Barbara Mathes has a group show worth a peek. Its title is "Heaven and Hell," and as usual in this Miltonian face-off, the Devil makes a strong impression, particularly in a pair of uncharacteristically interesting sculptures by Stephan Baklenhol. As to heaven, there is Thomas Ruff's photograph of a star-filled sky and Thomas Struth's "Paradise 16, Yakushima, Japan," a view of sunlight falling on a mist-filled mountain valley and turning a river to gold.

`The New World's Old World'

Light falling on landscape is the visual crux of "The New World's Old World: Photographic Views of Ancient America" at AXA Gallery, a documentary show that is also a sustained meditation on the shadow play of science, art and politics.

Organized by May Castleberry, the show includes epically cinematic pictures of the American West by Timothy O'Sullivan and Carleton Watkins, men who must have lived in a state of nonstop awe. Less often seen are images taken in Central and South America by Europeans like Claude Joseph Désiré Charnay, Osbert Salvin and Augustus Le Plongeon.

Le Plongeon, it seems, was fixated on the theory that the Maya were the civilization from which all others sprang. To prove it, he climbed mountains, slashed through jungles, dug up ruins and took pictures like mad. His contemporaries dismissed him as a crackpot, but you can see what kept him going. The pre-Columbian remains he encountered are like the spacecraft of a superhuman race.

In addition to being an archaeological tool, photography in the Americas was used to create national identity, and as an art medium. In the 1940's, the great Peruvian photographer Martín Chambi presented Machu Picchu as a visionary monument to the past, his country's and his own. In 1930's snapshots of Mexican ruins by Albers and in aerial shots of Peru by George Johnson, the New World becomes a geometric design for modernist delectation.

More recently, artists like Leandro Katz have focused on the politics of picture-making. Others have gone a transcendentalist route, as Edward Ranney does in his photographs of the mysterious "Nazca lines," manmade linear patterns of raised earth that crisscross Peru. No one knows what they mean, but some people like the theory that they were designed as directional charts for intergalactic travelers cruising Earth in search of a future home.

`Homeland'

Prospective settlers might think twice after visiting "Homeland," a group exhibition about current American politics at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. The curators — Craig Buckley, Tanya Leighton, Sara Reisman, Emily Rothschild and Nat Trotman — are fellows in this year's Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program. They are clearly able to look at art and think about life at the same time, by no means a common talent in the art world. And they have come up with a shrewdly entertaining show.

The inclusion of work from the 1980's and 90's by Hachivi Edgar Heap of Birds and Hans Haacke acknowledges a history of activist Conceptualism, but much else is new. Security is a matter of interest. The group Institute for Applied Autonomy has a Web project in the show, begun in 2001, that maps out paths through Manhattan that avoid surveillance cameras. Arnold Mesches includes an excerpt from his "F.B.I. File Series" (2000-2001), an autobiographical documentary record of decades of government harassment. The full series appeared at P.S. 1 last year. It should be in a museum. It is the equivalent of history painting.

Olav Westphalen's "Statue" (2003), with a standing-tall figure of a man in a business suit, looks like a commemorative sculpture. Only if you walk around the piece do you see that the man is wearing handcuffs; in fact, he represents an unlucky Enron executive. Someday "Statue" may find an official site.

A performance piece by Michael Rakowitz titled "Minaret" has already been seen in several sites, officially or not. To execute the work, the artist goes to the roofs of various public buildings equipped with a megaphone and an alarm clock shaped like a mosque. The alarm itself is a recording of the call to prayer chanted five times a day from minarets across the Islamic world. Using the megaphone, Mr. Rakowitz amplifies the alarm, sending its ardent message out over American cities. For most people, the voice is just one more piece of the aural mix; to others it is a political or spiritual wake-up call; to still others, it is the sound of home, wherever or whatever home may be.

Dario Robleto

"Dario Robleto: Say Goodbye to Substance," at the Whitney Museum of American Art at Altria, is also about America and is also political, sort of. It deals in inquiry rather than in opinion, questions rather than answers. It approaches cultural history as a kind of high school science fair project, but one of such staggering speculative ingenuity and moral precocity that any teacher might think it is a joke, which it partly is. Me? I'd give it a blue ribbon and a Nobel Prize, and send Mr. Robleto — who is 31, lives in San Antonio, Tex., and is making his New York solo debut — to Washington to live in the White House, run the Pentagon, be First Lady, whatever he wanted to do.

Organized by Shamim M. Momin, director of this Whitney branch, the show is built round a 10-part sculpture titled "Popular Hymns Will Sustain Us All (End It All)," which is an index of the artist's methods and means. Each section takes the form of a boxlike compartment holding minisculptures, which Mr. Robleto made mostly by hand from some of the following ingredients: plaster, spray paint, driftwood, homemade crystals, antibiotics, prehistoric whalebone dust, gunpowder and melted vinyl recordings of the Beatles, Black Sabbath and Tammy Wynette. The whole piece lights up and blinks a lot, as if it were about to lift off.

It's almost impossible to give a thumbnail sense of what's going on. Suffice it to say that utopian thinking, science, nature, pop culture and an American childhood are in the conceptual mix. They are all treated with an attitude of sunny despair, nicely distilled in "I Won't Let You Say Goodbye This Time" (2001-2003), a photographic work for which Mr. Robleto raised tomato plants rescued from a satellite capsule that was launched into orbit by one ill-fated space shuttle, the Challenger, and retrieved by another, the Columbia.

`Aftershock'

That Mr. Robleto painstakingly handmade his art would probably disqualify it for inclusion in "Aftershock: The Legacy of the Ready-Made in Postwar and Contemporary American Art," a neo-Dada survey at Dickinson Roundell, though his crypto-anarchic sensibility makes sense here. Marcel Duchamp, of course, presides. The ready-made was his baby: "I took it out of the earth, and onto the planet of aesthetics," he said, as quoted in a catalog by Francis M. Naumann, the art historian and art dealer, who organized the show.

Even after a long, reputation-snuffing stretch of postmodern sainthood, Duchamp remains a live wire, and the exhibition highlights a sampling of the American artists he inspired. There are a lot of them here, old and young, some represented by classic pieces that retain charisma even in a desperately overcrowded installation. It's great, for example, to see a 1958 pencil study by Jasper Johns for his sculpture "Flashlight," a scruffy 1961 Robert Rauschenberg assemblage and Bruce Nauman's snapshot of a rough-and-ready drill-bit sculpture.

The Dada-derived work of the 1980's went for polish over funk, and nothing here is more polished than Sherrie Levine's 1991 "Fountain (After Marcel Duchamp)," a urinal cast in high-gloss bronze. For some reason, Ms. Levine has come in for critical sniping. But in the 1980's she walked straight out to the end of the Duchampian limb and started sawing away with a cool aplomb that made everyone else seem clownish. Her Paula Cooper show last month looked good; so does "Fountain," beaming out of its corner like a refulgent mother ship.

`Puerto Rican Light'

Traveling light is the idea behind "Puerto Rican Light: Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla" at the Americas Society, a show that presents the work of two conceptual artist-collaborators who divide their time between Puerto Rico and New York. At first, the show seems barely there. The main gallery appears completely empty, except that its walls are bathed in changing red, green and yellow light. Certain artists have taught us to think of light as sculpture. Dan Flavin was one, and, sure enough, a 1965 Flavin piece, made of three vertical lighted tubes — red, pink, yellow — is installed in a smaller gallery. It is titled "Puerto Rican Light (to Jeanie Blake)."

Usually a Flavin piece just plugs in to the wall. This one, though, is powered by solar energy stored in batteries sitting in a shipping crate in the middle of the room. The energy, enough to keep the Flavin lighted for the duration of the show, was gathered in San Juan. So, it turns out, was the light in the larger gallery. Indeed, the rhythmic change of color is timed to correspond to a set of traffic lights on a San Juan street corner.

The show, organized by Sofía Hernández Chong Cuy, associate curator at the gallery, is rounded out by a panoramic photograph of a man standing on a shoreline and facing out toward a distant city — San Juan again, though it could easily be part of New Jersey seen from Manhattan — as a column of platinum sunlight falls across the water to his feet. The light appears substantial enough for him to walk across it to the distant town, or, in yet another play on the idea of transport in a magical show, into the clouds above.

Rafael Tufiño

Then, once you're touched by Caribbean light and a traveling mood, I recommend a visit to El Museo del Barrio in East Harlem, where "Painter of the People," a retrospective of work by the Puerto Rican artist Rafael Tufiño, is on view. Mr. Tufiño, 73, was actually born in Brooklyn and moved to Puerto Rico as a child. He has been back and forth countless times, and in the 1970's helped create the workshop called El Taller Boricua, still vital and located a few blocks east of El Museo.

With such links, it makes perfect sense that the survey — organized by Dr. Teresa Tío for the Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico in San Juan — should be in New York, where this artist's history began. His career covers six decades; the show documents much of it. From the outset Mr. Tufiño was a figurative artist, and Puerto Rico — its people, cities and landscapes — was his subject, in paintings, prints and posters that joined Fauvist colors and Expressionist forms.

Piece by piece, there is much to savor in the show. But sometimes an artist's career can be a radiant thing in itself, a source of shared energy, and this is true of Mr. Tufiño's. His cosmopolitan presence in Puerto Rico and New York has encouraged generations of artists prone to view themselves as confined to a backwater to feel part of a larger world, and to feel that the world they live in is larger than they know. Even the crop of very young Puerto Rico-based artists, who are just beginning to cause ripples internationally, owe him a debt of gratitude.

Their work is, of course, nothing like his. Even in the 1950's, his was a traditionalist version of Modernism, one that avoided the abstraction that still hung on as the progressive house style of 57th Street. Instead, he painted his life, more or less as he saw it. A tough, realist portrait of his mother from 1953 is well known, though my own favorites are his seductive architectural interiors. One is of a cool, dim theater, its curtains draped like sheets hung up to dry; another is of a San Juan bar as solemn as a church off hours. Best of all is a recent painting set in a dark room but looking out toward a sun-flooded balcony, and beyond that a wall with a fantastic floating patchwork of squares, bright yellow and red: the colors of Albers's homages, and of "Puerto Rican Light."

Prospecting for Gold Among the Photo Blogs

Prospecting for Gold Among the Photo Blogs
By SARAH BOXER
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/25/arts/design/25BOXE.html

Imagine Walker Evans and Nan Goldin rolled together on your computer screen. In the 1930's and 40's Evans secretly photographed anonymous people on the New York City subways. The result was a book titled "Many Are Called." In the 1980's Nan Goldin turned her camera on herself and her friends, spilling the intimate details of her life to complete strangers. She described the resulting book, "The Ballad of Sexual Dependency," as "a diary I let people read." Now thousands of people get onto the Internet everyday to post their photographs, hoping that total strangers will come look at them and comment. They are photo bloggers.

Photo blogs are the colorful offspring of blogs, or Web logs, written diaries posted and updated regularly on the Internet. For a half-dozen years people have been posting text blogs to rant and to ponder the events of the day and the dust beneath their feet. Then, sometime in 2000, people started posting photographs to go with the text. The photo blog was born. Now photo blogs often are posted with no text at all. And there are thousands of them.

These days you can get onto the Internet and see a pet bunny in Hokkaido, Japan, that balances pancakes and teacups on its head. You can gaze at what someone ate for breakfast in New York or Montana, follow a person through the streets of Chicago, see the bottom of a Brazilian swimming pool, travel to the center of an ice crystal.

Photo blogs are slower to download than text blogs, but quicker to read. Usually you can tell what a picture looks like before it has completely materialized on the screen: Is that a snapshot of someone's baby? Click to the next site. Is this a picture of someone's Thanksgiving table? Click.

Click enough and you will be rewarded. On www.slower.net, Eliot Shepard's site, you can find a glowing red portrait of Porky Pig in a fire hat and an abstract shot of a red, white and blue floor. Www.fotolog.net/alphabet is devoted to found alphabets, objects resembling letters; it shows a toilet roll and holder that looks like a Q. On www.hirmes.com/ice, the photographer travels to the center of spherical ice forms and sends back pictures that look like new galaxies.

I started my adventures in the land of the photo blogs at a Web site announcing the winners of an online contest: the 2003 Photobloggies, sponsored by www.photojunkie.org. The 14 winners in 14 categories had all posted photo diaries on a regular basis in 2002.

The prize for best pet photo blog went to www.textism.com/oliver, a site featuring the photographer's adorable pet Weimaraner in various poses and landscapes. Puppy porn. One pose carried this caption: "Quit looking at my penis." One of the losers was devoted to Oolong, the aforementioned balancing bunny from Japan. A bit of the Japanese text was translated into English: "Oolong is 7 years old and was born in an outdoor rabbit group in a park in Hokkaido." Oolong, it turned out, was suffering from abscesses. I hopped off the bunny trail.

The Photobloggie for the best photo essay — that is, a photo blog documenting a specific day, event or theme — went to www.jeff-phillips.com/baby. His pictures and text told the tale of a 33-year-old man, Mr. Phillips himself, thinking (with his camera) about having a child and wondering, "Could I resist the temptation to push on that weird soft spot on the top of his head?" He decided to borrow his sister's child for a day and find out.

Ominously, the first picture of Mr. Phillips's day shows the toddler from above, soft spot vulnerable. Another picture shows the child in a car's kiddy seat. A third shot shows a picture of the car's dashboard, windshield and, reflected in the rear-view mirror, a teeny image of the child as the car speeds down the highway. Who is this maniac with the camera? On his home page Mr. Phillips lists his influences (among them the photographers Jerry Uelsmann and Keith Carter), his equipment (an assortment of Holgas, Nikons and Minoltas) and his awards (a sixth-grade graduation certificate from 1977).

What distinguishes a photo blog like this from a Web site set up by someone who just wants to organize his personal travel photos, family albums and pet pictures?

Most bloggers are hobbyists when it comes to photography. Todd Gross, a blogger from Long Island City, Queens, who posts www.quarlo.com, a collection of quirky nondigital photographs of everything from hot dogs to manhole covers, said in an e-mail that he set up his blog because he simply got tired of filing his pictures away in a drawer.

David Gallagher, one of the earliest photo bloggers (he posted his first photo in November 2000), noted in an e-mail interview that before he started www.lightningfield.com, his digital photos were just moldering on the hard drive of his computer. Besides, he said, he had wanted to start a Web log but didn't have the time or energy to do it every day. "A photo Web log seemed like a good way to have a creative outlet and a good excuse to take a lot more photos."

It's also a way to get other people to look at your pictures. Mike Clarke, an American in Tokyo whose Web site, www.hunkabutta.com, is devoted to "A Stranger's Life in Pictures," said the advantages of photo blogs are the ease of posting, the global exposure, the criticism, the affordability and "the motivation to take pictures constantly." The downside? Photo blogs, he said, "can suck up a lot of time."

And not just the photo blogger's time. A good blog is hard to find. Some photo bloggers helpfully include a list of their other favorite bloggers. Thus, although there isn't exactly a unified group of bloggers out there, a community of sorts is forming. And it seems to be made up largely of people between the ages of 25 and 45 who have digital cameras and lots of time on their hands. In this world, Mr. Clarke said, "The people who have been around the longest have an advantage." Why? Not necessarily because they are best but "because their readership continues to grow as more and more people link to them."

When I poked around, a few names kept cropping up, and it turned out that many of them posted from New York City and had won a prize or two in the Photobloggies. Had I found myself in a blogger's cul-de-sac?

Yes. The problem was the keyword: photo blog. An article in the online journal Salon pointed me to a new site, www.fotolog.net, and to a new term, fotolog. When I Googled fotolog, I found a new cache of sites, posted from places as far-flung as Singapore, Lyon, France, and Cramerton, N.C.

Fotolog.net is a clearinghouse of more than 6,000 photo blogs run by Scott Heiferman, Adam Seifer and someone who simply calls himself Spike. These men will set up a site for you where you can post your photos and the addresses of other sites you like under "Friends/Favorites." But don't think you're getting a free online photo album.

This is not the sort of place where you go to "dump your photos" of babies, puppies and vacations so your family and friends can look and order prints, Mr. Seifer said. (For that there's ofoto.com, snapfish.com, shutterfly.com and others.) Nor is it simply software for you to create a photo blog on your own. (For that there are sites like www.blogger.com and www.livejournal.com)

Rather, fotolog.net is a culture of its own, a place where you record "the interesting ephemeral moments of life," Mr. Seifer said. It is a community of strangers, from Brazil to Iran, who gather every day to look at the minutiae of one another's lives — the meals that were eaten, the peace rallies attended, the subway rides taken — and to respond to it all. (Every individual blogger gets a guest book for people to weigh in.)

Among Mr. Seifer's favorites are: www.fotolog.net/moodywoodpecker from France, which had a photo of a sawed-off board titled "Castration Symbolique"; www.fotolog.net/meltoledo from Brazil, featuring a series of pictures taken of swimming pools; www.fotolog.net/dirtdirt, random photos sent from a cell phone in Brooklyn, and www.fotolog.net/lauratitian, posted in New York by Laura Holder.

On May 2, Ms. Holder, one of the earliest photo bloggers (she put up some spy-cam photos in October 2000), posted a picture of a full-to-bursting black plastic trash bag with a smaller pink bag emerging from it. Her caption read: "A new baby bag is born every six minutes." One person wrote to say that the photo was disturbing. Another said, "If it wasn't gross before the caption, it certainly is now." A third said: "Congratulations! I guess since it's pink, it's a girl. So, does that make her a bag lady?"

How does one get noticed among the thousands of bloggers? Mr. Seifer said: "Anybody can be famous." The new sites are highlighted. "So, if you're new and you're good, you'll quickly get an audience." And even if you're not good, there are ways to get attention. For instance, Mr. Seifer said, "you can visit anybody's log and post a comment with your link on it." Most likely that person will want to see the site of the person who wrote to him. Mr. Seifer called it "Web karma."

Mr. Seifer's own site, www.fotolog.net/cypher has a motto: "Get in My Belly: Cypher." There he posts pictures of his daily bread. Like Sophie Calle, who has photographed a number of her monochromatic meals (white meals, green meals, yellow meals), Mr. Seifer shoots and posts what he eats. Unlike her, he mixes his colors. A recent meal included broccoli, carrots, mashed potatoes and Gatorade. One person responded: "This looks very appetizing. Was it Parmesan cheese? My favorite!" Another asked: "Will you let us see your baby pictures?" Mr. Seifer likes the attention: "I have 10,000 people looking at my food every week," he said.

There is something touching but also appalling about so much global attention focused on such mundane stuff. More than one photo blogger has cited Walker Evans as the inspiration for photo blogging. But it seemed to me that they have just as much in common with Robert Frank, Allen Ginsberg and Ms. Goldin, photographers who have chronicled the intimate lives of their friends and families for total strangers to look at.

On the Internet, I clicked my way through site after site: here was an old picture of a someone's friend's grandmother as a young woman on the beach. There was a little white dog with a chew toy in its mouth. Here was a picture of a young woman at a baby shower with ribbons and bows on her head. And there was a picture of the curtains in a hotel room where one blogger was staying.

After a while all this intimacy got a little alienating. I needed some fresh air, air that hadn't been photographed and posted. I clicked my mouse three times and recited: there's no place like home, there's no place like home, there's no place like home.

Ex-Wife Is Accused of Marketing Photos She Stole

Ex-Wife Is Accused of Marketing Photos She Stole
By DANIEL J. WAKIN
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/30/nyregion/30PHOT.html

The former wife of O. Winston Link, a photographer famed for dreamy pictures of trains, spent five years in prison for stealing 1,400 of his prints. The photos were never found, and throughout her trial and even after her release a year and a half ago, she never uttered a public word about their whereabouts.

But a recent foray into the art market, the authorities said, has landed her back in jail.

The ex-wife, Conchita Link, 67, and the man she married after Mr. Link's death two years ago were arrested and charged yesterday with conspiring to sell 31 of the photographs through an antiques dealer in Millerton, Dutchess County, said the Westchester County district attorney, Jeanine F. Pirro.

The antiques dealer, who was not charged and who cooperated with investigators, put the photos up for sale on the eBay Internet site for an average minimum price of $5,000, Mrs. Pirro said, below the going rate of $6,000 to $12,000 for one of her former husband's images on the art market. The dealer did not know about the disappearance of the prints or about Ms. Link's conviction, she said.

"This is a fascinating example of how you never really get away with it even when you think you got away with it," Mrs. Pirro said. "I guess she thought the time was safe."

Investigators were led to the prints by Thomas H. Garver, Mr. Link's former agent. Mr. Garver said he regularly surfed eBay, waiting for the missing prints to pop up. On April 23, he said, he came across an extremely rare Link print and called the dealer, who confirmed that Ms. Link was the source. "It was this charming and most effective woman who came in the door and convinced him these prints should be listed," Mr. Garver said.

He said he alerted the district attorney's office, which arranged a sting operation in which an undercover officer posed as a buyer.

Mr. Link's lawyer, J. Edward Meyer, said he had long expected Ms. Link to try to fence the prints after her former husband's death on Jan. 27, 2001, at age 86. "She was going to do it," he said. "Greed wins out."

Ms. Link and her husband, Edward Hayes, 63, were held pending arraignment this evening, and did not have a lawyer as of yesterday afternoon.

Mr. Garver said investigators told him that Ms. Link said the prints had been given to her as gifts. In the past, Ms. Link never tried to explain the disappearance of the 1,400 prints except to say that Mr. Link had made up the story, said Darien J. Zoppo, the lawyer who represented her at the criminal trial.

Although the missing photos were prints, not negatives, they are considered valuable because they were made, signed and stamped by the photographer.

Mr. Link's midcentury photographs of steam engines and railroad towns evoke an era of small-town American innocence that contrasted starkly with the years of ugly legal battles with Ms. Link, who was convicted in 1996 of stealing the photographs, worth more than $1 million.

At the time of her sentencing, the photographer said, "In my 81 years, I have never met nor heard of anyone more evil than her."

The couple began their public fight in 1992 with a divorce and related civil action. They exchanged charges of physical and psychological abuse. Mr. Link said she had turned him into a virtual prisoner by forcing him to make prints in the basement. He eventually won a $5 million judgment against her for taking prints, photographs, antique coins and other valuables, Mr. Meyer said.

At the criminal trial that followed, gallery owners testified that she had tried to deceive them into thinking Mr. Link had Alzheimer's disease, so she could take control of his business affairs. At her sentencing, Ms. Link said she did not know where the 1,400 prints were. She maintained that position even when asked about them while in state prison, Mr. Meyer said.

"Winston's greatest focus at the end of his life was to recover what had been stolen from him by his wife," the lawyer said. "I just wish he was alive today to see this."

He said he hoped a bargain could be struck with her, for leniency in return for the other prints. Ms. Link faces four more years in state prison if convicted.

Ms. Link and Mr. Hayes, a consultant to gravel and asphalt companies, lived in Gettysburg, Pa., the district attorney said. Mr. Zoppo, her former lawyer, said she had relatives in Millerton.

Mr. Link chronicled the waning years of the steam train, from 1955 to 1960, taking painstakingly lighted black-and-white pictures of the Norfolk & Western Railway in the Shenandoah Valley and coal towns of the Allegheny Mountains. He returned to commercial photography after the railroad retired its last steam engine.

"His pictures are much more than railroads," said Robert Mann, owner of the Robert Mann Gallery in Manhattan, which exhibited Mr. Link's work. "They're about a whole generation, a whole period of American life in the 50's."

"If in fact it means all the stolen Winston Link photos have been discovered, it's going to be a great day in photography," he said.

The 31 prints that were recovered were emblematic of Mr. Link's work. They included the image titled "Hotshot Eastbound, Iaeger, West Virginia," Mr. Meyer said. The 1956 photograph shows cars at a drive-in in front of a movie screen showing an airplane, as a locomotive steams by in the background. "It's pretty much the quintessential Winston Link," Mr. Mann said.

In Vienna, 'Matrix' Meets 'Sound of Music'

In Vienna, 'Matrix' Meets 'Sound of Music'
By ALASTAIR GORDON
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/29/garden/29VIEN.html

VIENNA -- SHORTLY after Jürgen Bauer and Beatrix Roidinger moved into their house, two police officers on their midnight rounds walked onto the property, mistaking it for a construction site. They walked all the way into the master bedroom before realizing their error. "Who are you?" one of them asked the startled residents. "We live here," Mr. Bauer replied from beneath the bedcovers.

Two years later, it is still a house that seems to demand closer inspection. With its sci-fi dormers and long, low profile inspired by ship construction and 60's movies, it has also been mistaken for a cafe, a housing project or a weather station.

Perched on a hillside in the northwest part of Vienna, it conspicuously breaks with convention while still managing to fit within the picturesque neighborhood of steeply pitched roofs and pocket-size gardens.

Ms. Roidinger, 38, and Mr. Bauer, 46, began producing techno rock in 1993, and they started their own recording company five years later. Now fugitives from the club scene, they have made a new life for themselves and their two children in this outer district near the Vienna Woods.

"We wanted a house that would give us the freedom to stay close to our children but also go on with our careers and continue being creative," Ms. Roidinger said, pointing out the spire of the 700-year-old Cathedral of St. Stephan while her 2-year-old son Camillo patrolled the front yard and his 5-year-old brother, Lino, played quietly in his bedroom.

"My horror vision was to end up settling in a little house and die," she said. "People have children and feel like they have to act like their parents or grandparents, but I don't feel at all like that. I feel like I am 25 and will always remain that age."

The hills around Vienna are alive with the sound of concrete mixers as a wave of Viennese like Mr. Bauer and Ms. Roidinger migrate from the city center to start families and escape apartment life. As a result, the outlying districts have become testing grounds for inventive new architecture.

"The image of architects is that they are very expensive and very arty, but that isn't always true," said Volker Dienst, a curator and architecture writer. "In Vienna we have a high density of young architects who would rather make buildings than make theory. They are willing to take on smaller residential projects, often for friends, without earning much money."

Most of the new houses are built on modest-size lots in the districts that lie outside the Gürtel, the road that encircles Vienna's nine central districts. Within a few miles of Mr. Bauer's and Ms. Roidlinger's house is a steel pavilion with interchangeable panels of glass and plywood known as the Teahouse. Built in 2000 at a cost of about $139,000 on a steep site overlooking a vineyard, it was designed by Georg Marterer and Thomas Moosmann for a professional tea taster.

"We wanted to create a sense of the patient sensibility of the professional tea taster," Mr. Marterer said. "It was a difficult site, so we made a house that one or two men could put together by hand."

In the town of Mödling, just south of Vienna, a couple in their mid-30's hired a firm called the Unit to design a minimal white cube with a reddish-orange curtain that billows across the garden facade like a giant matador's cape. "They studied books on architecture and told us that they wanted something wide and pure and clean," said Peter Reindl, a partner in the Unit. The curtain was used to bring in color and to soften the stark white geometries of the house, which cost about $435,000 at its completion late last year. "It creates a wonderful warm light," Mr. Reindl said.

What these projects have in common is a sense of experimental design for real life. "Young Viennese couples are well educated and have modern tastes in fashion and architecture," Mr. Reindl said. "They don't want to live in an average house. They want something special and timeless."

Not surprisingly, some new residences have been greeted with resistance. Some neighbors tried to stop the Teahouse from being built, according to Mr. Marterer, by complaining to their local council that it was too modern. And when a futuristic glass tube designed by Georg Driendl was built in a nearby part of town, one longtime resident declared that the area had gone "kaput." But most neighbors have been surprisingly tolerant of the newcomers.

Some of these outlying neighborhoods were filled with small summer homes built after World War II for low-income workers. In the past few years, zoning restrictions have been eased, allowing some innovation and gentrification.

After holding an informal competition among three firms, Ms. Roidinger and Mr. Bauer chose a firm called Querkraft, whose four principals look and act like members of a brainy rock band.

"We liked their work, but we also liked their energy," Ms. Roidinger said. "We didn't want architects who would be annoyed by our own creativity."

The firm's name can be translated as "the art of lateral thinking." As Peter Sapp, one of the four principals, explained, "If some problem comes along, we try to think about it in a different way — laterally. We look behind the questions."

The house, the second one by Querkraft, is definitely different. Part cave, part spaceship, it has open interiors with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the Vienna skyline to the south.

The construction, which cost about $315,000 at the time, was basic: a rectilinear shell of cast concrete burrows into the hillside like a bunker. The back of the shell acts as a retaining wall, while steel columns support the front. A floating concrete staircase ascends to a small work area, known as "the cockpit," flanked by two boxy dormers, or "pods," coated with polyurethane. "They are like two TV sets looking down on Vienna," said Michael Zinner, one of the other architects.

The house was set back on the 1,345-square-meter plot (about a third of an acre) to leave as much garden area in the front as possible for the children to play in. A ground-level terrace stretches the length of the house and is sheltered by clear plastic roofing supported by steel outriggers. A clump of unruly bamboo pushes against the underside of the canopy. "I think we must cut a hole to let it grow," Ms. Roidinger said.

At first impression, the house appears raw and unresolved, but the design is disarmingly direct. "We are interested in building atmospheres for living, not architectural monuments," Mr. Sapp said. While the house grows out of 20th-century modernism, it makes no heroic gestures. The exposed structure, the open deck and the bulging dormers make it feel like a piece of clothing turned inside out to reveal rough seams and stitching.

Cutting-edge modern elements have been softened and childproofed with padding and rounded edges. Carpeting covers every surface in the dormer. Nylon netting, the kind used for hockey goals, is stretched on either side of the open staircase and around the perimeter of the roof deck as a safety measure for the children.

From the outset, the couple and their architects agreed on a 1960's action aesthetic inspired by James Bond movies and John Lautner houses. "I told the architects that it must look like Kubrick or `Barbarella,' " Ms. Roidinger said. "It must look like Starship Enterprise."

The retro styling was combined with eco-conscious materials like steinwolle, an insulation that is used as an alternative to fiberglass. The back wall of the living area has been sprayed with an ocher-colored coating made from clay and sand that enhances the cavelike atmosphere while helping to absorb excess humidity. And the carpeting in the upstairs rooms is made from sheep's wool affixed to the floor and walls with a natural rubber from South America.

This area is designated as a special "kleingarten," or "little garden," zone where houses are restricted to 50 square meters (about 540 square feet) of floor space or less. But by building partly underground, the architects and owners managed to build 250 square meters, or about 2,700 square feet.

Under the law, they could have added two more floors, but they chose to lower the profile of the house as much as possible, to preserve their neighbors' views.

Unlike its more traditional neighbors, the house has no clear point of entry or logical succession of rooms.

"We have a flexible concept of space," Ms. Roidinger said. Since she and her family moved in two years ago, they continue to modify and experiment. "We change rooms whenever we feel like it." A downstairs bathroom, for example, has a prime position looking out on the panoramic views.

Shortly after the family moved in, four curious passers-by walked onto the property and peered into the bathroom. "They just stood there staring," Ms. Roidinger said.

The garden is still being landscaped, and a pool is partly built. The family will soon change the wood on the terrace to match the interior floors, blurring the line between inside and out. "We are learning how to live half inside, half outside, and learning how to integrate our life with the garden," Ms. Roidinger said.

There is hardly any distinction between private and family spaces, and boundaries between work and living areas are are not always clear. A narrow breezeway separates the family quarters from an office wing, allowing an easy flow between the two.

In the Vienna suburbs, inventive architecture is more than an idea to be admired in books. It is increasingly a way of life — not always perfect, but charged with a sense of adventure.

"Living here is a process of discovery after years of living in the city," Ms. Roidinger said. "When I am wired from work and can't sleep, I visualize entering the house and garden. It makes me calm, and I am able to fall asleep."

A Wet, Nonalcoholic Addiction

A Wet, Nonalcoholic Addiction
By JOANNE KAUFMAN
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/30/arts/30POOL.html

It's 8:28 a.m., the precise moment when four lanes merge into three to accommodate the heavily attended water exercise class at the 92nd Street Y. Grudgingly, the lap swimmers begin to collect in the narrow slice of pool left to them: my friend Suzanne, a fitness instructor, immediately recognizable by her wide looping turns; Laura, who stops every few minutes for a briefing on the late-breaking gossip from the locker room; the middle-aged man with the wildly hooking stroke and don't-tailgate-me kick, who for no apparent reason has been dubbed the dentist; the admirably focused Jan in hand paddles and flippers, who streaks past all contenders between consultations with the lifeguard about the finer points of the butterfly. And me, Lycra bathing cap worn almost past usefulness, Lycra bathing suit worn almost past decorum, determined (after 25 years it seems high time) to knock out a mile in less than 38 minutes.

When I run into people I haven't seen in years their first question, always in a tone of lightly amused tolerance, is whether I'm still swimming, an abiding passion during my college years in Ann Arbor, Mich., and one easy to satisfy in a sports-proud town. I'm certain these old friends expect me to say no, no, that I've put away childish things forever, that swimming is far too complicated a transaction in Manhattan, that the pools are too scarce, too inaccessible.

For the record, I haven't missed a day in the water in years. I swam on my wedding day: the vows should have read "for wetter or worse." I swam the days my children were born and each time was back in a pool four days later. These people underestimate me. They underestimate my town.

The chief pleasure — to my mind the only pleasure — of flying into Los Angeles or Palm Beach is the view from a few thousand feet up of those squares and rectangles of varying glorious shades of blue. So full of water, so full of promise. Give or take a few inconsequential rooftop pools, Manhattan keeps its aquatic treasures hidden, but I know where most of them are.

The first thing I did when I moved to New York after college on a balmy mid-September weekend in the late 1970's was to buy a bed; the second was to take out a pool membership at the 92nd Street Y. The order of business would have been reversed except that religious observances shutter the venerable health club from late Friday afternoon until Sunday morning over a vast chunk of the calendar and, of course, over the High Holy Days, Succoth, Passover, Shavouth and other lengthy celebrations.

The Y has its creed (Conservative Judaism); I have mine (fundamentalist freestyle). And as with so many mixed marriages, this has caused a certain amount of conflict through the years. It has also necessitated my maintaining concurrent memberships at several swimming establishments around town, and depending on the kindness of strangers for visiting privileges at others.

When, for example, my daughter Karen was in second grade and a classmate had a pool party at the Trinity School, the birthday girl's mother and the lifeguard invited me to do laps in the far lane well away from a spirited game of Red Rover, Red Rover. I was, unapologetically, the last one out, definitely the rotten egg. Last summer Karen went to gymnastic camp at Chelsea Piers; the fee included a handful of guest passes to the health club and a pool that had commanding views of the Hudson (if decidedly flimsy kickboards).

That I may have done the Manhattan equivalent of the Westchester swimmer in John Cheever's well-known short story "The Swimmer" is coincidence, not intention.

I have friends with enviably exacting standards when it comes to swimming in the city. A fellow writer who lives on the Upper West Side, close to the admirable if expensive pool at the Reebok Club at Columbus Avenue and 67th Street and the spanking new pool at the Jewish Community Center, will have absolutely nothing to do with either of them, nor any other facility where the water temperature falls below 80 and the rules of the road involve circle swimming — up one lane, down another. She seeks a pool where she can lay claim to her own space.

I do not like to think of myself as a shallow person, but the truth is I'm a sucker for proximity. Years ago, during an utterly pointless relationship with a pianist who lived in the West 50's, and ever eager for a short commute to my swim, I joined the pool one building away from my beau's at the Henry Hudson Hotel, whose renovation a few years ago carelessly did not include a swimming hole.

In those days you signed in on a blackboard to reserve a lane, all yours for half an hour, except for the cheaters, who fudged their start times. The membership lasted longer than the musician.

When I married and moved to the Upper West Side, I joined the 63rd Street Y pool (tiles donated by the Spanish government) while keeping my 92nd Street Y membership because I had an office (my former apartment) on the Upper East Side. When I took a two-day-a-week job at a magazine in the Time-Life Building, I added to my holdings by joining the Athletic and Swim Club pool, handily situated on the concourse level of Rockefeller Center.

But proximity's charm has its limits. When, before my move here, I visited my college roommate, a resident of 12th Street just off Fifth Avenue and a member of the New York Health and Racquet Club, she took me for a swim at the 13th Street branch. The pool, which was approximately the size of a quilt square, would not have provided a workout to an aerobically inclined ant. Then and there, despite its other charms (and ignorant of the pool at New York University, which has some community memberships), I crossed Greenwich Village off my nascent list of Possible Places to Live in Manhattan.

Almost daily, I am caught in a struggle between solidarity and self-interest. If I share with a fellow water rat the little-known information that the 92nd Street Y pool is open until 8 on Sunday night and on Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year's Day, or that Asphalt Green has long-course swimming — true Olympic length — during the holiday season, I have done a noble thing, no question. But to leak such news is to guarantee a flood of hard splashers sufficient to cast the Stairmaster in a whole new rosy glow. Generally, and uncharacteristically, mum's the word.

Perhaps to make this impersonal city more manageable, New Yorkers create their own discrete geography: here the street where they had their first dim sum, their second job, their third love affair. For my part, I've carved neighborhoods out of swimming experiences. The 20's and 30's on the far West Side, heretofore an almost unknown quantity, became familiar, comfortable territory after that week of morning swims at Chelsea Piers last summer. (Am I the only one who knows about the H&H Bagel outpost just off 11th Avenue in the 40's?)

But more than anything, pools are a reflection of my Manhattan past: the unsatisfactory boyfriend of the early 80's and West 50's; the early years of my marriage when my husband and I rode the bus together down Central Park West, me out first at the 63rd Street Y; my pregnancies of the early and mid-90's, stroked away in Midtown.

My dermatologist, a fellow swimmer, tells me of a pool he frequents at Lenox Hill Hospital, unknown — the door is unmarked, the doctor tells me — to all but the medical and aquatic cognoscenti. Now I can think of nothing else when I walk near 77th and Park.

I am in a similar haze on the northwest corner of Fifth Avenue and 54th Street, precisely where the vents of the University Club pool send out wafts of chlorine to passers-by. Reflexively, I finger the suit, cap and goggles I keep in my purse at all times.

The Athletic and Swim Club, I need no reminding, is just a few blocks away.

Together

last evening went to see a special showing of Chen Kaige's new film, Together. the film was pretty in parts, but i felt a little manipulated with its almost forced storyline and sentimentality. that being said, it was still a pretty film, despite one woman a few rows back who sobbed through the last third of the film. (actually, she was not alone, as probably more than a dozen people were sniffling right up through the end.)

nevertheless, the music was the real attraction in the film and did what the script couldn't in holding the film together. in addition, the father in the film was more than excellent in his portrayal, and i also liked the alltogether feisty but tender character of the young girl who becomes the young boy's friend. unfortunately for me though, Temptress Moon still remains one of the most beautiful and my most favorite of Chen's films.

Afterwards, there was a reception at Carnegie Hall where Chuanyun Li, one of the violinists featured in the film, played a short recital. the food (and drinks) were surprisingly delicious. but my real treat and surprise was getting to meet an old violin hero of mine -- Annie Akiko Meyers, whose recording of the Strauss and Franck violin sonatas i used to listen to repeatedly.

Cartier-Bresson's Instinct for Decisive Moments

Cartier-Bresson's Instinct for Decisive Moments
By ALAN RIDING
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/27/arts/design/27BRES.html

PARIS, May 26 — Henri Cartier-Bresson has always shunned the limelight, preferring his remarkable photographic record of the mid-20th century to speak for him. He has never liked giving interviews, agreeing at most to "a conversation." He long resisted being photographed, believing it stripped him of the anonymity essential to his work. In the mid-1970's he even abandoned photography as a profession to devote himself to his first love, drawing.

But now, just months short of his 95th birthday, the master of the "decisive moment," as he once described his art, is himself the reluctant object of celebration. Coinciding with a major retrospective of his work at the French National Library here, Mr. Cartier-Bresson, his wife, the photographer Martine Franck, and their daughter, Mélanie Cartier-Bresson, have created the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation, the first private foundation dedicated to photography in France.

Mr. Cartier-Bresson's bright blue eyes and mischievous smile confirm his good health, although he is now hard of hearing, uses a cane and complains of memory loss. What has not changed is his lack of interest in discussing photography. Over lunch recently, he enthusiastically recalled characters he met in Mexico in the 1930's, but on matters of art he was brief. "All that matters is knowing how to draw properly," he said.

Still, he worked with Robert Delpire, who organized the show at the new National Library, in selecting some 350 images. They range from his earliest work done in France, Spain and Mexico in the 1930's, through his postwar travels in India, China and Indonesia up to the afterthought of a bucolic Provençal landscape shot in 1999. The exhibition also includes a score of his drawings and the odd painting.

Yet it is at the foundation, housed in a renovated 19th-century building at 2 Impasse Lebouis in the Montparnasse district of Paris, that Mr. Cartier-Bresson has presented a different side to his art — the photographers whom he most admires and who have influenced him. For the foundation's opening show, "Henri Cartier-Bresson's Choice," he has picked 93 images by 85 fellow photographers.

Along with images by Robert Capa, George Rodger and David Seymour, with whom Mr. Cartier-Bresson founded the Magnum photo agency in 1947, there are works by leading 20th-century photographers, from Brassaï to Sebastião Salgado. Also on display is Martin Munkacsi's "Black Boys on the Shore of Lake Tanganyika," the 1931 photograph that first inspired Mr. Cartier-Bresson to become a photographer.

With the gift of Mr. Cartier-Bresson's personal collection of his photographs to the nonprofit foundation, his heirs can avoid donating a good many of them to the government in place of estate tax. "See what happened to André Breton," Ms. Franck said, referring to the recent auction of the Surrealist leader's art and book collection. "We wanted to avoid dispersal of Henri's work."

While the foundation will deal with the mechanics of Mr. Cartier-Bresson's legacy, it is through the images on display at the National Library through July 27 that he will best be remembered. The show looks at the man as well as his work. It opens with childhood snapshots in a prosperous Parisian home, school photographs and a 1926 portrait of him as an 18-year-old doing military service. By then, he was already interested in painting. During a yearlong stay in the Ivory Coast in 1931, he took up photography. His work was characterized by his ability to capture the "decisive moment," whether it is a man and his shadow stepping into a flooded street ("Behind the Gare St.-Lazare"), a beefy family picnicking beside a river ("On the banks of the Marne"), a heavily built man in a hat walking among children playing in Madrid, or a couple entwined in love-making in Mexico.

"Shooting a picture is recognizing an event," he later explained, "and at the very instant and within a fraction of a second rigorously organizing the forms you see to express and give meaning to that event. It is a matter of putting your brain, your eye and your heart in the same line of sight. It is a way of life."

In the late 1930's Mr. Cartier-Bresson worked in cinema, as an assistant on Jean Renoir's "Day in the Country" and "The Rules of the Game" and making two documentaries about the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War. When World War II broke out he joined the French Army, but was captured in 1940 and held in a German labor camp until he escaped, at the third attempt, in February 1943.

Back in Paris he joined the underground, helping prisoners and escapees, and also resumed his photography, which included memorable portraits of the painters Pierre Bonnard and Henri Matisse. In August 1944 he recorded the liberation of Paris, and the following year he directed a documentary about returning prisoners of war. He traveled to New York in 1946 to work on what had been planned initially as a posthumous exhibition of his work at the Museum of Modern Art.

Only after the creation of Magnum in 1947, however, did Mr. Cartier-Bresson move closer to photojournalism. In Asia he did not cover events as such — although he happened to be present when Gandhi was assassinated in 1948 — but rather the human impact of great social movements. He was in China for six months before and after the Communist victory over the Kuomintang. In Indonesia, where he met his first wife, Ratna Mohini, he followed the country's troubled steps toward independence in 1949.

The exhibition at the National Library includes many of his portraits of writers and artists, from Sartre to Picasso. But he took the most portraits of his friend Alberto Giacometti, whose sculpture "The Man Who Walks" is in this show, as if it were intended to personify the tall slim photographer himself in pursuit of an image.

But Mr. Cartier-Bresson is probably more honored for his insights into ordinary people, whether in Harlem, Texas or the Soviet Union, where in 1954 he was one of the few Western photographers allowed to work.

No less than the photographs chosen for the foundation's show, those at the National Library remind one of Mr. Cartier-Bresson's attachment to people. He also photographed landscapes and crowd scenes, yet the "decisive moments" are those that capture human instants — girls in Bali preparing to dance, a prisoner thrusting a fist and leg out of his cell door, children peeping over the Berlin Wall, old priests awaiting midnight Mass in Italy.

Then in 1975, Mr. Cartier-Bresson decided to put down his Leica — although not to put it away, because he still occasionally takes portraits — and turn his energy to drawing. "Photography is a sketchbook," he explained in an interview with The New York Times in 1994. "Drawing is meditation. Today everyone talks about photography. I spent 50 years taking pictures, but how many that I did can you look at for more than three seconds? Maybe 50? 100? It's about all."

From the sidewalk, then, he switched his workplace to the Louvre, where he spent long hours copying works by Géricault, Dürer and Goya. He hired models for nude drawing and he peered at himself for self-portraits. The view from his apartment overlooking the Tuileries Gardens was also sketched.

Yet in his home, there is no evidence of either the photographer or the artist. The walls are decorated with paintings and drawings but nothing by Mr. Cartier-Bresson, as if he were embarrassed by his fame. Certainly, after the agitation of the openings of the foundation and the retrospective, he seems happy to be back with his pencil and sketchbook. "The rest doesn't matter," he said. "I have forgotten it already."

Sadly, There Goes the Neighborhood

Sadly, There Goes the Neighborhood
By ERIK ECKHOLM
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/26/international/asia/26BEIJ.html

BEIJING, May 25 — No historic buildings will be lost when they level the neighborhood of Nanyingfang to build more luxury offices, apartments and malls.

This enclave near the city center is home to thousands of poor but proud people who have lived there for generations. In October, developers will level the neighborhood, a ramshackle tangle of single-story brick dwellings that have been rebuilt over the centuries on what began as an imperial army camp near the Temple of the Sun.

It features no architectural gems, but what Nanyingfang does have is a deeply rooted community that will soon be demolished, another step in the "urban renewal" that has altered the Beijing landscape.

The residents know that change is unstoppable, and few will miss the communal toilets. But they are worried about their compensation and where they will find new homes — almost certainly, for most, in a colorless high-rise on the city's outskirts.

Even more, they fear for the social texture of their lives.

"This is the old style of living, where everyone has to live side by side so you're always running into your neighbors," said Pang Hongsheng, a 54-year-old man who grew up in Nanyingfang as his parents did before. "In those new apartment blocks, if you live on the first floor, you wouldn't even think of visiting someone on the sixth floor."

"Nobody here wants to leave because relationships with their friends and family will become a lot weaker, and people will be more isolated," Mr. Pang said.

This anachronistic neighborhood purrs with the petty pleasures and pains of traditional Beijing life. Children jump rope and play hide-and-seek in the maze of lanes that are wide enough for carts but not for cars.

Middle-aged men, some in pajamas, spend the day sipping beer and playing cards. Elderly women sit outside their doors, brandishing fly swatters as they chat with neighbors and watch who comes and goes.

Many families keep small dogs and even dare to let them frolic outside in the daytime — an illegal act under Beijing's pet controls, which on more modern streets would result in the pet's swift confiscation.

None of the residents here has caught SARS, and few display the dread that has led many other Beijing people to cower at home in recent weeks, and compounds to bar all visitors.

But the looming transition is impossible to forget because every building has been spray-painted with the giant character "chai," or "demolish," by agents of the Chaoyang district government. The district has created a corporation that will develop this prime real estate.

To residents, the corporation is offering compensation tied to the size of existing homes. A few have accepted, and their homes are already bulldozed or boarded up, but most are asking for more money.

"They are offering $20,000, and we're holding out for $30,000," Mr. Pang said. "What they are offering isn't even enough to buy a decent apartment in the suburbs."

Mr. Pang and other residents can be forgiven if they bargain for the last penny and perhaps even exaggerate the financial strains. Unemployed since his factory job dried up several years ago, he receives a poverty allowance from the city of $34 a month and makes a few extra dollars fixing bicycles.

His wife runs a small beauty salon in front of the room the couple shares with their 6-year-old daughter, but her business barely buys food for the table, they said.

Still, the couple scrimps each month to pay $36 for dance lessons at a nearby academy for their daughter; she seems to have real talent, the doting parents said, and they want to nourish it, but wonder how she can continue once they move.

Everyone in the community has similar concerns.

"What will happen to the old people, and what will we do with our kids?" said Kang Yuliang, a neighbor with a young daughter who drifted into Mr. Pang's house. "A lot of the suburban areas don't have good schools yet."

The neighborhood has a surplus of elderly people, some with strong family connections and others who get by on their own in a community that guarantees human contact.

Some of the old people, like the penniless man who mumbles incessantly as he gleans unburned nuggets of coal from discarded ashes, or the white-haired woman who was outside cleaning fish the other day, have a shell-shocked look.

Others, hardened by decades of upheavals, put on a show of mock defiance.

"We like it here and we're not leaving — period!" said Mrs. Zhang, a widow in her 70's who would not give her full name. She was in the alley commiserating with a neighbor, a fly swatter in one hand and a cigarette in the other.

"You can't do anything to help us anyway," she growled at an inquiring foreigner, "so why should we talk to you?"

This Year, Everybody's Doing Everest

This Year, Everybody's Doing Everest
By JAMES BROOKE
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/27/international/asia/27EVER.html

KATMANDU, Nepal, May 26 — It's getting a little crowded at the top of the world.

In the last week, climbers rushing to scale Mount Everest before the 50th anniversary of the first ascent on Thursday have set a rash of records, including oldest (70), youngest (15), fastest (12 hours 45 minutes), again the fastest (10 hours 56 minutes) and the most frequent (13 times).

Three people stood on the peak today, including Sibusiso Vilane, a climber born in Swaziland, who became the first black person to accomplish the feat. It was the third attempt by Mr. Vilane, 32, in recent weeks.

As many as 500 climbers are jostling to reach the summit by Thursday, largely using the southeast ridge that took Sir Edmund Hillary and a Sherpa, Tenzing Norgay, to the top on May 29, 1953. Today, along the ridge, climbers have the advantage of about 60 aluminum ladders to cross a treacherous ice fall and thousands of yards of fixed ropes.

Climbers are also laying trophies at the feet of Sir Edmund, the 83-year-old New Zealander who is in Katmandu this week for what may be his last visit to his beloved Nepal. Mr. Norgay died in 1986.

The records for the most and the fastest ascents fell today to two Nepalese Sherpas. Climbing through the night, Appa, 43, reached the summit at 3:41 a.m., his 13th ascent since 1990. He was part of a nine-member expedition that followed the southeast route pioneered by Sir Edmund half a century ago. Mr. Appa was part of an American expedition that was there primarily to pick up decades-old trash left by climbers.

Perhaps most impressive, Lhakpa Gela, 36, cut almost two hours off an Everest speed-climbing record that was set just three days ago, reaching the summit from the base camp in 10 hours 56 minutes 46 seconds. Normally, climbers take about a week to get from base camp at 17,550 feet to the summit.

The climb today was so unexpected that The Himalayan Times, a daily newspaper, had a front-page photo of another Sherpa climber, Pembe Dorjie, wrapped in victory garlands and grinning happily under the headline, "Fastest climber says he can do it faster." He had climbed the mountain on Friday in just under 13 hours, a speed record that lasted only the weekend.

On Thursday, Ming Kipa, a fresh-faced 15-year-old Sherpa girl, became the youngest person to climb the 29,035-foot mountain. Eluding Nepal's ban on children under 16 attempting Everest, she climbed with her older brother and sister from the northern, Tibetan side.

The Sherpa ascents, displaying enormous stamina, were a salute to Sir Edmund, a straightforward beekeeper, who turned down an invitation to celebrate in London with Queen Elizabeth II to be here with friends in Nepal.

Over the last half-century, Sir Edmund has devoted much of his time to raising money for schools and clinics for the Sherpas, a mountaineering people who are the backbone of any high-altitude expedition in the Himalayas. On Tuesday, he is to be the centerpiece of a parade that will wind through streets of this city, the capital of a country that is often described as the top of the world.

While the festivities take place here, often grim tests of endurance occur on the beautiful if dangerous mountain that straddles the border of Nepal and Tibet. As a reminder of the potential dangers, The Himalayan Times today carried a front-page photograph of Sherpas dragging a sled with the body of Kami, a Sherpa who had died in a fall. Other articles related how a British military expedition abandoned their climb to rescue a British climber with a broken leg and how three French climbers were injured and evacuated by a Royal Nepal Army helicopter.

A record 65 expeditions are expected at Mount Everest this season. Since the 1953 ascent, more than 1,200 people from 63 countries have reached the summit. At the end of last year's season, the largest number of climbers, 258, came from Nepal, followed by 160 from the United States. About 175 climbers have died trying, with as many as 120 bodies interred on the mountain.

Sir Edmund has argued in interviews here that Nepal should "give the mountain a rest," limiting climbs to four or five expeditions a year.

With the Outdoor Life Network, an American cable channel, planning to broadcast live from the summit on Thursday, many climbers say the commercialism, crowds and litter are spoiling the Himalayan high-country experience.

"When I heard there were 760 people and 900 tents on the south side of Everest, I just felt lucky that I climbed Everest when I did," Veikka Gustafsson, a 35-year-old Finn, said in an interview here today. Mr. Gustafsson made four attempts on Everest, reaching the summit twice, once in 1993 with oxygen tanks and once in 1997 without tanks.

Celebrating over dinner his group's ascent of Kanchenjunga, the world's third highest mountain at 28,339 feet, he said, "At our base camp, there were nine tents."

But across the dinner table, Premnuru, the expedition's 43-year-old Sherpa cook, dug into a banana split with his daughter and offered a different view, saying, "More expeditions means more jobs for Sherpas, for Nepalis."

To climb Everest, a visitor can pay as much as $65,000. In a two-month climbing season, a skilled Sherpa can earn $2,000, about eight times the average per capita income in Nepal. For each group of seven climbers, Nepal charges $70,000 in royalty fees.

"Over the last two years, Nepal has opened 131 peaks to spread the climbing around," said Lisa Choegyal, an adventure tourism promoter here. "It is not Nepal's fault if everyone wants to climb Everest."

Stephanopoulos Slow to Win Sunday Viewers

Stephanopoulos Slow to Win Sunday Viewers
By JIM RUTENBERG
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/26/business/media/26STEP.html

George Stephanopoulos last week completed his first regular season as the sole host of ABC's public affairs program "This Week," and the early returns on the Sunday morning popularity contest are not particularly encouraging for the network.

For the first time since 1987, ABC finished in third place for the season among the Sunday morning news programs, as "This Week With George Stephanopoulos" trailed both "Face the Nation" with Bob Schieffer on CBS and the first-place "Meet the Press" with Tim Russert on NBC. And although the ratings of all three programs declined compared with the previous season, ABC's drop was the steepest.

ABC's third-place finish had its competitors crowing, some not so privately, that Mr. Stephanopoulos might not be ABC News's great Sunday hope. But executives at ABC News said last week that they were not worried about the sluggish performance of "This Week." Reiterating their commitment to Mr. Stephanopoulos, they pointed out that Mr. Russert needed some six years to take his program from third place to first after he became the host of "Meet the Press" in 1991.

"I think, over all, good programs have been good programs before they've become good programs in the ratings," Jon Banner, the executive producer of "This Week," said. One year ago, when ABC News announced it was replacing the program's two main anchors, Sam Donaldson and Cokie Roberts, with Mr. Stephanopoulos, competitors and some Washington officials questioned whether his high-profile role in the first Clinton administration would make his impartiality suspect and hurt his ratings.

And some television industry executives questioned whether Mr. Stephanopoulos's six years in the news business gave him enough stature to carry one of the major political programs.

For the most part, Mr. Stephanopoulos's performance has quieted the critics. But it has not attracted new viewers. In fact, the audience for "This Week" fell 16 percent this season, to an average of 2.75 million people, from 3.27 million people during the 2001-2 television season. "Face the Nation's" audience fell to 2.9 million from 3.1 million, a 6 percent decline. And "Meet the Press" lost 1 percent of its audience, dropping to 4.71 million from 4.74 million people.

Increased viewership in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks played a role in the ratings declines this season. But Mr. Banner said the scheduling of "This Week" was adversely affected by ABC's new acquisition of National Basketball Association games, previously carried by NBC. In the past 20 weeks, for example, 11 programs were rescheduled or pre-empted in as many as 118 markets. "I'm confident that without sports impacting the program," Mr. Banner said, " `This Week' would be a solid No. 2."

But executives at CBS and NBC said that was more of an excuse than an explanation. "Face the Nation" was itself rescheduled in various markets by National Football League games and college basketball. And "Meet the Press" had to contend with disruptions because of N.B.A. games from the early 1990's through the last television season.

Steve Friedman, former executive producer of "Today" on NBC and "The Early Show" on CBS, said Mr. Stephanopoulos did not deserve the blame for the ratings dip. He said he believed ABC had alienated its audience by making too many changes to the program over the past couple of years — changing its set and format a couple of years ago, then trading Ms. Roberts and Mr. Donaldson for Mr. Stephanopoulos.

"These are very habitual shows, shows that are very slow to change," Mr. Friedman said.

Mr. Schieffer, for one, said he definitely believed he had benefited by resisting changes to his program. "I think `no surprises' is a very good strategy for a television broadcast," he said.

As for "This Week," Mr. Schieffer said, "Somebody else asked me, `Do you think they're going about it wrong?' I said, `If I thought so I wouldn't tell them.' "

Mr. Russert would not offer a competitive analysis, saying only, "The more I do it, the more I'm convinced there is no substitute for preparation and discipline."

Executives at ABC are hopeful for the future, saying that Mr. Stephanopoulos had gained momentum from positive reviews for his role as moderator of the first Democratic presidential debate earlier this month.

They certainly do not seem unhappy with Mr. Banner, the program's executive producer, whom they are considering as a potential successor to the executive producer of "World News Tonight," Paul Slavin. Mr. Slavin has been named to a new job as a network senior vice president. (Under one plan being considered seriously, "This Week" would then come under the control of Tom Bettag, an executive producer for "Nightline," who would then presumably oversee a merged operation with "Nightline."

For his part, Mr. Stephanopoulos said, "My job is to be smart enough to master the things I can control with strong interviews and solid bookings, and wise enough to accept the things I can't control."

"Either way," he added, "I'm just thrilled to have the chance to go out there every Sunday."

Lulu's mother

Lulu's mother
by Annie Wang, SCMP PRD
Wednesday, May 28, 2003
http://totallyhk.scmp.com/thkarts/anniewang/ZZZ4NORF4GD.html

LULU'S MOTHER wants her daughter to give her a daily update on her boyfriends. If Lulu has a date, she wants to know everything in detail so she can comment. Her mother's opinions have often nagged Lulu. If she doesn't have a date, her mother will sigh and say things such as: ''Why are you so unattractive? Something must be wrong with your character. You are too strong.'' This hurts Lulu.

As her mother continually whines about her being so picky in choosing a husband, or her ending up an old maid, Lulu can only joke lightly: ''Mum, the later I get married, the better my man will be.''

Lulu's mother married at 25, an age that was considered late. She wants Lulu to get married so that both of them can have emotional and financial security. Yet when Lulu falls for someone, her mother says she's being stupid. ''Other girls all use their brains,'' Lulu's mother says. ''Only a stupid girl like you will give her heart and her body so quickly. When I was young, I never let boys get me so easily.''

When Lulu doesn't like some man she has met, her mother will say things such as: ''You're already 30-something. You'd be undesirable in my time. You're lucky to have some man who would like to go out with you.''

Lulu is distressed by her mother's interference in her love life, but she manages to contain her anger. She never explodes until this event.

One day, Lulu's mother is especially unhappy when Lulu makes negative comments about a man named Ching, whom her mother likes.

Lulu's mother thinks Ching will make a good son-in-law because, apart from having a good job, he is polite and honest. Plus, Ching's affection for Lulu is obvious. So when Ching calls later that day when Lulu is out, her mother picks up the phone and chats with him.

Ching asks for Lulu's e-mail address. Her mother says she doesn't have one and perhaps Ching could set one up for her. After Ching gets an e-mail account for Lulu, he calls. Once again, it's Lulu's mother who picks up the phone. Ching asks her to pass on the instructions to Lulu about how to send e-mails. Her mother doesn't forward the information to Lulu.

Instead, she pretends to be Lulu and sends affectionate e-mails to Ching.

Lulu's mother, a fast learner, even picks up things such as chatting via MSN Messenger, as well as sending text messages from Lulu's cell phone.

Ching is overjoyed by the warm and emotional e-mails he receives from Lulu. Three months later, on Lulu's birthday, he proposes by sending her a diamond ring. He e-mails Lulu that he will tell her mother that he is going to marry her.

After she reads the e-mail, Lulu's mother realises she has to tell Lulu about the correspondence between her and Ching, and that she continued it for her daughter's welfare. But Lulu gets very angry when she hears what her mother has done.

''I'm going out tonight!'' Lulu yells. ''After writing to him for so long, you must know how to deal with him. You don't really need me.'' Lulu leaves angrily. Ching comes with bags of gifts at 6pm.

Not seeing Lulu, he is confused. Lulu's mother has made up a story that it's Lulu's friend who has been writing on Lulu's behalf, not Lulu. Her friend thought the correspondence would create a chance for Ching and Lulu to get to know each other better, but found out later that Lulu was too stubborn to change, the mother says.

After hearing the story, Ching is not as hurt as Lulu's mother expected. Instead, he says to her: ''Auntie, help me find her friend. She has written to me with such beautiful words. She seems to understand me so well that I'd rather date her than Lulu!''

Boom Times in the City's Housing Courts

Boom Times in the City's Housing Courts
By DAVID W. CHEN
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/27/nyregion/27HOUS.html

Since its inception 30 years ago, New York City's housing court has sometimes resembled a chaotic netherworld worthy of Dickens. There some of the city's poorest tenants, or the most litigious, quarrel eternally with their landlords in courtrooms so wretched that even judges have described them as black holes of Calcutta.

But the daily combatants are a much more mixed lot these days. On any given day now, one might find Josie Gomez, a former dental-office manager who was making $52,000 a year plus bonuses before the office closed a few months ago. Unable to find a job, Ms. Gomez, a 29-year-old Queens resident, finds herself a couple of months behind in her $865-a-month rent and facing eviction.

One might also bump into a former Bloomingdale's executive who once made $175,000 a year. She lost her job two years ago, bled through her retirement savings and ended up in Manhattan's housing court in October because she was three months behind on her $1,580-a-month rent. Eventually, she found a $26,000-a-year job and an apartment that was $500 cheaper.

"You definitely see more working- and middle-class people coming through housing court," said Judge Fern A. Fisher, who was first appointed a housing court judge in 1989 and is now administrative judge of the Civil Court, which oversees housing court. "You see more nonpayments, you see more small owners, and you can expect that we all will be under the gun for the next few years."

The changing face of housing court, then, is but one more graphic, often terribly sad reflection of the city's stumbling economy. Simple job loss statistics or budget deficit projections can seem antiseptically quantitative, but housing court provides intimate accounts of how individual worlds are becoming unglued, apartment by apartment, month by month.

And no one — not judges, tenants, landlords or housing groups — believes that the situation will improve anytime soon. Middle class litigants are a further burden on a system already drowning in actions and petitions, eviction notices and stays. Discouraging signposts for the future abound, as well: thousands of municipal layoffs, the highest rent increases on regulated apartments in 14 years, soaring property taxes, dwindling emergency resources. Moreover, tenants' groups say, because the law now permits apartments with monthly rents of $2,000 to be taken off rent regulation (allowing landlords to charge whatever the market will bear), landlords of rent-regulated apartments have been aggressively trying to get tenants out and make upgrades that would allow them to charge the higher rent. And because the supply of regulated and cheaper housing has evaporated, the number of middle class litigants is proportionally greater than in previous slumps, said Judith Goldiner, a staff lawyer at the Legal Aid Society.

Andrew Scherer, executive director of Legal Services of New York City, said, "It's as bad as it's ever been, and it's likely to get worse."

The overall number of cases in housing court in the first four months of 2003 was 6 percent higher than in the comparable period last year. While evictions have declined slightly in recent years, the most current data are good only through 2001, or before the full effect of the downturn was felt.

Still, last year Legal Services of New York City, which has traditionally assisted the most indigent residents, helped 69 people in five affluent ZIP codes, including the Upper East Side's fabled 10021, that had a total of zero cases in 2000. Those five ZIP codes — all among the top nine in the city — had median household incomes of at least $75,000, or double the citywide figure.

Eviction Intervention Services, on the Upper East Side, receives 90 calls a day, overwhelmingly because of lost jobs or economic woes, it says, up from 40 calls two years ago. In addition, while the group has traditionally helped families who make less than $20,000 a year, it has recently helped people who have made up to $180,000 a year, said Karen Ingenthron, the group's executive director.

The Bridge Fund of New York City, a nonprofit program that provides financial assistance to low- and moderate-income families in housing court, says it now helps some families who pay more than $1,100 a month in rent; a few years ago, $900 would have been the maximum level. Maria Toledo, the fund's director, says many applicants "typically don't access social services" and are from the airline, restaurant, hotel and investment fields.

Ernest J. Cavallo, the supervising housing court judge in Manhattan, says he now sees up to 40 cases a month involving people who are in arrears on rents of more than $2,000 a month. Two years ago, he never saw such cases.

"I always look at the addresses, and what I see is that I had just as many East Side and Greenwich Village and Midtown apartments as I had other places," he said. "We are seeing people working on Wall Street who got laid off, people with businesses whose businesses have collapsed."

To new litigants, housing court, with its unruly atmosphere of lawyers and tenants negotiating in hallways or yelling into cellphones, can be overwhelming. While about 90 percent of the landlords have lawyers, perhaps only 15 percent of the tenants do, Judge Fisher estimated. The hearings before some of the most overworked judges in the system are usually brief, so litigants often have but a few minutes to recount their emotional slide into debt.

Housing court is also more accustomed to handling poor tenants receiving public assistance, not unemployed middle class defendants who are delinquent on rent payments or co-op maintenance fees.

"People say, `My rent is $1,100,' " Ms. Ingenthron said. " `I'm not a drug addict. I don't have H.I.V. I'm not an alcoholic. I just don't have a job.' "

Because of the stigma associated with housing court, few litigants interviewed in recent visits to Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens housing courts would discuss their stories, but those who did said they wanted to remind people that all New Yorkers are vulnerable to economic changes, regardless of whether their rent is $300 or $3,000.

One middle class professional in Manhattan, for instance, said she had operated a publishing business in her two-bedroom, $2,000-a-month apartment on the Upper East Side for 12 years. Two years ago, just before the 9/11 terror attacks, business began to tail off, she said.

"It is embarrassing and it is humiliating," said the publisher, whose previous experience with courtrooms had been limited to jury duty. She said she was determined to pay the back rent.

"The judges are very nice, and they try to help you get yourself together," she said. "I just better not get SARS or even a mild case of the flu."

In Brooklyn, one litigant, Kara Rubinfeld, said she and her boyfriend, an ironworker, found themselves in a bind after she lost her job in a bakery and then gave birth to their son, Thoreau, who is now 13 months. They had been making $65,000 a year, but now find themselves about $5,000 in the red on their $1,200-a-month two-bedroom near Fort Greene.

"I've never been in this situation before, and I don't want to be again," she said, adding that their case included concerns about lead paint.

No doubt, numerous small landlords, unable to collect from chronically late or troublesome tenants, are reeling, too, because of rising fuel costs, insurance rates, property taxes and other factors, said Frank Ricci, director of government affairs, and Mitch Posilkin, general counsel, of the Rent Stabilization Association.

More co-op shareholders have fallen behind their monthly maintenance fees as well. In Queens, the number of people in arrears on maintenance fees has climbed by perhaps 50 percent in five years, said Nicholas Bais, a legal aide to Judge Pam Jackman Brown.

The demand for help may be greater than ever, but the resources remain constrained. While the court has largely escaped the budget ax, Judge Fisher said, the workload is greater: civil filings involving insurance cases, student loans and credit card debt are expected to double from only three years ago.

The City-Wide Task Force on Housing Court, a tenants' group, is fighting for its survival because of the budget cuts. Legal Aid and Legal Services, both pressed for funds, must turn away far more people than they can help.

Still, there is only so much that an emergency pinch of one or two months' rent can do, if the jobs are not there. Take the story of one female executive, in her mid-50's, who once earned up to $100,000 a year in engineering management.

In 2001, she was looking for a job. But after Sept. 11, she was told she had a rare liver disease, and quickly fell behind on her $1,100 Mitchell-Lama apartment on the Upper East Side. She ended up in housing court.

"I was surprised, because there were a lot of people who are not welfare beats, but who are professionals," she said. "And I was thinking to myself: `Here I am, going from managing jobs worth millions of dollars to fighting these goons? What am I doing here?' "

At the last minute she received help from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. But that help expired recently, and now the woman, still unemployed, faces eviction again.

On the Seventh Day, a New Retail Option

On the Seventh Day, a New Retail Option
By LYDIA POLGREEN
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/26/nyregion/26LIQU.html

It was a simple transaction. Freddie Tabon hopped off his 10-speed bicycle, walked into Palace Discount Liquors and asked the man behind the Plexiglas for a drink.

"I'll take a pint of Wild Irish Red," Mr. Tabon said.

Ian Walters, who has owned the shop at the corner of West 131st Street and Adam Clayton Powell Boulevard for about six years, smiled and said, "$1.75 please." He then slipped the slim bottle, sheathed in a brown paper bag, through the plastic tunnel that protects him from would-be robbers.

Mr. Tabon, counting coins in his palm, smiled back.

"Liquor on a Sunday," he said, shaking his head. "I like that."

For the first time since Prohibition, liquor stores in New York were allowed to open for business on a Sunday. For generations, states across the nation banned the sale of liquor on Sundays with so-called Blue Laws, stubborn reminders of a time when demon drink was considered a scourge, the chief cause of society's ills. Even as the temperance movement passed into the history books the laws remained, and they might have remained in place still if hard-pressed state governments did not believe that allowing people to buy liquor on Sunday would send money pouring into state coffers.

And so shortly before noon yesterday, when many God-fearing New Yorkers were occupying church pews, Mr. Walters rolled up the steel gates to his liquor store.

"A lot of my customers were surprised," Mr. Walters said, speaking in something slightly less than a shout in order to be heard through the bullet-resistant barrier. "Some of the churchgoing ones are not too happy about me being open. But I think we will do more business on Sunday."

Whatever business there was on his corner, Mr. Walters had it all to himself. No other liquor stores nearby chose to open up yesterday.

Liquor store owners have typically been lukewarm to the proposition of opening on Sundays — they might do more business, but many package stores are operated by families with no outside employees. Opening seven days a week would deprive such business owners of a day off in many cases. New York will require that liquor stores close for at least one day a week. Across wide swaths of New York City, it seemed Sunday might remain the day off of choice. Metal grates stayed shut, neon signs stayed dark and a lot of New Yorkers stayed thirsty.

Jeremy Charles and Claudio Felix were not looking for liquor, but when asked if they were surprised that the liquor store behind them on the Avenue of the Americas in Greenwich Village was closed despite the new rule, they were shocked.

"We are working on a Sunday to make money," Mr. Charles, 26, said as they took a brief break from the landscaping job they were doing. "I figure the liquor store owners could make some money, too. I worked all week. I could use a drink."

An entirely unscientific survey of liquor stores in Greenwich Village found that not a single one had chosen to open its door yesterday. Astor Wines and Spirits in the East Village was closed, as were the Village Vintner at West 10th Street and B. & S. Zeeman's on University Place. In the birthplace of American bohemia, tradition seemingly held sway.

"I'm surprised they are not even trying it," said Larry Reiff, who works at an advertising agency and lives on the Upper West Side, as he was passing Zeeman's yesterday. "Maybe they decided to wait because it's a holiday weekend."

If Mr. Reiff really needed a bottle of wine, he should have stayed closer to home. West Side Wine, a shop on Columbus Avenue near 83rd Street, was open for business.

"We decided to give it a shot and see how it goes," said Raymond Batista, the shop's manager.

Mr. Batista said it appeared that giving up his only day off was worthwhile. At noon he set out a chalkboard easel announcing to passers-by that the shop, for the first time in its history, was open on a Sunday. His first customer arrived at 12:15, he said, a woman who bought a liter each of Johnny Walker scotch and Campari. By early afternoon several dozen customers had been in.

Jeff Wright popped into the store shortly before 2 p.m. to pick up a bottle of merlot. He was unaware of the historic nature of his purchase.

"I'm from Utah, where we know all about restrictions on liquor," said Mr. Wright, a venture capitalist who lives in Salt Lake City.

After a few minutes of banter about California chardonnay, Mr. Wright shook Mr. Batista's hand.

"Congratulations on your first Sunday," Mr. Wright said.

Another customer, Erika Christiansen, came in with a classic New York dilemma. She had six people coming to dinner at her apartment at 66th Street and Amsterdam Avenue but only three bottles of wine on hand. Would that be enough wine? Having seen on television that liquor stores would be open for the first time on a Sunday, Ms. Christiansen, an art director at People.com, set out to bolster her supply.

"I passed a couple of stores on Broadway but they were all closed," Ms. Christiansen said, clutching the neck of a bottle of cabernet sauvignon. "I am glad I found this one."

Of course, not everyone was enthusiastic about Sunday liquor sales. Deacon Willie L. Robinson of the Church of God on West 145th Street in Harlem was unequivocal.

"I am 100 percent against it," said Mr. Robinson, elegant and relaxed after church in his olive green suit and tie. "In our church we don't drink and we don't smoke any day of the week. But even for everyone else, there are six days of the week for those things. At least keep the sabbath holy."

Just down the street at St. Paul Community Church, Frank A. Kirkland Jr. said it was a sad day when money trumped morality.

"There is one day of rest; that is Sunday," Mr. Kirkland said. "You can't just forget that, to make a little money. That just isn't right."

Such talk does not bother Mr. Walters, who dealt with a steady stream of takers, some cheerful, some hostile, some sober, some drunk. A man with a scraggly beard and a filthy baseball cap stumbled in early in the afternoon, reeking of drink.

"A liquor store open on Sunday," he mumbled, a cigarette dangling from his lips as he fingered bills from his pocket. He asked for a pint of Smirnoff vodka and handed over seven one-dollar bills to pay for it.

As he counted the bills, Mr. Walters said people who think there should be no liquor sales on Sunday are entitled to their opinion.

"But I am not a churchgoing person," he added. "I am just a businessman."

The Message? Your Children Sure Get It

The Message? Your Children Sure Get It
By SUSAN WARNER
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/25/nyregion/25NJ.html

AS the end of the school year approaches, teenagers and their parents across the length and breadth of the state know that summer - at least for those not going away to camp with a laptop - will bring one thing:

Bluuup! Instant messaging.

An entire summer of exchanges like this:

"howdy"

" 'sup?" (what's up?)

"nm" (not much)

"u?" (and you?)

"jc" (just chilling)

"g2g" (got to go)

"bb" (bye-bye)

This is instant messaging, otherwise known as I.M., a potent combination of technology, hormones and teenage and pre-teenage defiance - punctuated by smiley faces and frowns. And it has become a social force.

"Indeed, it is a huge monster that's been invited into the household that gobbles up the time and the life-force of young people," said James Katz, a communications professor at Rutgers University. "It becomes as important as breathing. I see the same behaviors on the part of young people as addicts undergoing withdrawal if they don't get access to I.M."

The phenomenon of instant messaging, which has been building for years, is nationwide. Though AOL, the nation's largest provider of the service, does not break down its 195 million regular users by location, New Jersey is prime territory. After all, according to the American Electronics Association, the state ranks 13th in household computer penetration and 5th in high-speed broadband Internet connections.

"New Jersey would have to be in the top percent of I.M. usage," Professor Katz said. "Moreover, N.J. schools have been very successful in encouraging computer use - even in kindergarten. Keyboarding is a part of the New Jersey culture of young people."

The sprawling suburban geography of New Jersey also fuels instant messaging as a way for teenagers and pre-teenagers who are isolated on one-acre zoned development tracts to interact, if only virtually.

"In a state that could be called the play-date capital of the world - where there are no sidewalks - children lose their control over their ability to interact spontaneously if the adults aren't organizing things," said Maurice J. Elias, a professor of psychology at Rutgers and co-author of "Raising Emotionally Intelligent Teenagers."

For many, instant messaging is a harmless form of chitchat, today's version of the Princess phone that was once used to replay the day's events, no matter how mundane, to the consternation of parents. For shy, awkward teens - which is just about all of them - instant messaging can be a way to communicate with confidence.

But to hear the police and school officials tell it, instant messaging can also have undesirable consequences. School administrators say, for instance, that though instant messaging is screened out at schools, its hour-upon-hour use at home generates cliquish, hurtful attacks on children that disrupt social harmony at school.

'A Huge Trend'

"This is a huge trend," said John Hrevnack, principal of the Old York School in Branchburg, where half of the 500 third- and fourth-graders say they use instant messaging. "What happens on line, even if it is at home, can spill over into the schools."

What's more, law enforcement officials estimate that 100 cases a month involve terroristic threats to schools or school-age youths over the Internet - much of it instant messaging - said Richard Brown, deputy sergeant in the high-technology crime unit of the State Police.

Parry Aftab, a Bergen County lawyer who specializes in cyberspace and who founded WiredKids, an online child-safety organization, says that 14 to 20 percent of all teenagers in New Jersey have at one time agreed to meet someone they met on line.

"Almost every case that I'm aware of in the U.S. where sexual predators are communicating with kids for an off-line meeting they have used instant messaging," Ms. Aftab said. "The reason is because it's instant. They don't have to wait and worry parents will read it later on."

Responding to those concerns, Derick Mains, a spokesman for AOL - the largest provider of the service with about 2 billion messages bouncing back and forth each day - said his company recommended that parents monitor its use."

Setting expectations, guidelines and a parent's personal involvement - including moving the computer to the kitchen or family room - are the best safeguards," Mr. Mains said.

Erica Hersh, 14, of South Orange, has been using instant messaging since she was 11. She spends about two hours a day on line, usually in the evening after she and her friends are home from after-school activities and finished with homework.

"It's gotten more and more popular," Erica said. "Everybody has it."

In her case, she said she had 180 people on her buddy list. "What's good about it is you can talk to more than one person at once, and it lets you talk to people you don't know well enough to call," she said. E-mail, she explained, falls between the phone and instant messaging in communications formality.

A user can talk to more than one person at a time while instant messaging and can message while doing other things. Miss Hersh sometimes does homework, talks on the phone and listens to music while her instant messaging screen is up. "I like to multitask," she said.

Her mother, Lori Hersh, was so taken with the power that instant messaging had over her daughter that she made the phenomenon the subject of her master's thesis in speech pathology at Kean University.

Today, Ms. Hersh said, teenagers are multiliterate, communicating through traditional language as well as CD-ROM's, video games and digital cameras. "They are using all of this," she said. "It is normal for them. It's not just reading and writing anymore."

In fact, instant messaging has become an unofficial dialect, and devising misspelled versions of words lacking as many vowels as possible has become a literary form.

To determine if I.M.-speak is seeping into real life, Ms. Hersh surveyed 22 students in New Jersey ages 13 to 14; she found no difference in the grammatical skills of youths who used the Internet less than 2 hours a week and those who used it more than 10. But that could change, she warned, as children begin to use I.M. lingo before they are fully grounded in formal language.

To Robert Kubey, director of the center for media studies at Rutgers, it is precisely the casual and immediate nature of instant messaging that is a strong attraction to youths, allowing them to see who is on line before approaching them.

"Your buddy list has told you that they're also on line, so they're in the neighborhood," Professor Kubey said. "They're walking by and you're on the street corner and you're just saying, 'Hi.' "

Many Parents Are Clueless

And then there is the parental angst, and cluelessness, about instant messaging that makes it all the more important as a foundation for building teenage identity, he said. Teenagers delight, for example, in slipping the code "pos" into messages written right before the eyes of a snoopy parent unaware that it stands for "parent over shoulder."

"The more your parents don't like it, the more cool it is," Professor Kubey said.

Instant messaging is also harder for parents to monitor than earlier forms of teenage communication, he said. Mothers and fathers would certainly notice a one-hour phone call from New Jersey to California but might be unable to detect an instant messaging cross-country conversation of 3 hours, or 30 hours.

Professor Elias, of Rutgers, also says that endless hours of instant messaging can become an audiovisual form of avoidance, similar to drugs or alcohol.

"If you are I.M.-ing with seven people for hours, you really can't think about how lousy your home life might be or how disappointed you are in your parents or how you don't want to go to summer school," he said.

More important, instant messaging is changing the nature of human communication. "Children now are becoming, in some cases, hesitant to engage in the give-and-take of everyday life," he said, "because it's easier and cleaner to just instant message."

That detachment, along with instant messaging's technological reach, is ramping up traditional teenage tribal warfare to a level of savagery that makes the slam-books of the 1950's and 60's look quaint.

Pam Friedman, a technology instructor at the Old York School, who has three teenage children, says elementary school children use the service for idle, usually harmless, chat, while high school students avail themslves of it largely to make plans, coordinate school projects or perhaps engage in more thoughtful conversations.

The problem, Mrs. Friedman said, comes in the middle years, when instant messaging is often used as a blunt instrument for social terror. "It can get really nasty and vicious," she said.

As an example, she offered her 11-year-old niece, Liat Zabludovsky, of Springfield, who quarreled with another girl - over what she does not remember - and tried to make up by instant messaging.

"She said she didn't care because she was mad at me, and so we got into a bigger fight," Liat said. "It wasn't very helpful that we would talk on line because it would just get worse. When you're talking on line you can't see any reaction so you might say the wrong thing."

Her mother, Linda Kiesel-Zabludovsky, put it like this: "If you're on the playground and you say to a kid, 'You're fat and ugly,' two weeks later you can all forget about it. But these kids save their I.M.'s. They not only save them, they cut and paste them and print them. It stays forever. If you say something mean, you can't take it back."

Despite the pitfalls, Ms. Kiesel-Zabludovsky said she found instant messaging a useful way to communicate with her older daughter during her first year at college. The impersonal typing sapped their conversations of emotion.

"No one could say, 'Don't give me that attitude,' " she said. "So it has its good points along with its bad."

As for the bad points, Ms. Aftab, the lawyer in Bergen County, explained how a niece of hers was set up as the victim of an I.M. "notify" war. In this type of attack, an instant messager coaxes a victim into using bad language or otherwise violating unwritten codes of conduct. The attacker then notifies the victim's I.M. provider - be it AOL or Yahoo - which quickly revokes the victim's on-line privileges.

Her niece was eventually cleared after her father - using special software to retrace the conversation - showed that she had been set up.

Beyond the psychological injury, Ms. Aftab said she had bigger worries about instant messaging. Not wanting to miss a beat, she said, teenagers often leave a cellphone number on their I.M. away message, giving predators another foot in the door.

"They send a cute picture of a 14-year-old boy," Ms. Aftab said. "It's just that it's not them. Or maybe it was them a long, long time ago."

Ms. Aftab added that on-line predators frequently mention they have a connection to the teenage idol Justin Timberlake, in the same way they use the promise of a puppy to lure younger children.

Victims of sexual predators among users of instant messaging fall into two camps, she said. One is typically a lonely girl who is flattered by the attention and agrees to meet someone she thinks is a cute 14-year-old boy. When he turns out to be 25 or 45, the girl is disappointed but still connects, Ms. Aftab said. The other is a superachiever who agrees to meet as an adventure.

Why Allow It?

With all that to worry about, why would any parent let a child engage in instant messaging? The first argument most children make is that they need to discuss homework projects to improve their grades.

"They know that academic achievement is a bone for which the parent will jump very high," Professor Katz said.

Then there is the enduring power of peer pressure that transcends generations. "One of the most painful things for a parent is to see their child rejected," he said, "and to think there's this whole happy world that they're not letting their kids engage in."

Finally, many parents, exhausted by a long day at work and a grueling commute, are only too happy to have their child home and within earshot but otherwise engaged, he said. Not that parents are powerless.

"The computer is something that you can control as a parent just like the television," Professor Elias said. "There's no divine right to watch television, and there is no divine right to use the computer as much as a child wants to. Parents have to decide on a proper balance."

Mr. Hrevnack, the principal in Branchburg, said some problems that teenagers are having with instant messaging may decline because children in younger grades are now getting more formal education about the problems of a form of technology that their older brothers and sisters were left to discover on their own.

"They've all ended up with spammed porn," Ms. Aftab said. "They've seen the bullying games and most of the time they're good at abusing others. What we need to do is recognize that kids are going to use it, and for the most part they just need some education. It comes down to parenting, not technology."

Steal this barcode

Steal this barcode
Re-Code.com offers a do-it-yourself product repricing service. Wal-Mart is not amused.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Katharine Mieszkowski
April 10, 2003 | Is it social commentary, or shoplifting?
http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2003/04/10/barcode/index.html

The Web site Re-Code.com parodies the design and chipper lingo of Priceline.com's "name your own price" shopping site. It invites shoppers to "recode your own price," by making their own barcodes using the site's barcode generator. The theory: There's just a 10-digit number standing between you and a better deal on anything that you want in a store, and this site will help you crack the code.

The site's creators call it satire. Wal-Mart's legal counsel calls it an incitement to theft and fraud.

Re-Code.com lets shoppers share barcode numbers from products they've purchased or search for codes entered by other visitors to make their own. So far, the site claims that it has collected about 150 codes. Barcode swapping, say the site's creators, is a way of subverting a chain's own inventory management system to really name your own price: "Apply the cheaper item's barcode to the more expensive item," the site instructs, then go to the checkout where: "Cashiers usually don't notice but machines never do."

Re-Code.com is a project of the Carbon Defense League, an artist and activist collective affiliated with the "tactical media network" Hactivist.com.

"Nathan Hactivist," the nom de guerre of one of the collective's operatives, who is based in upstate New York, says "We think of ourselves as a friend of Priceline.com, making good on their promises of naming your own price. We're carrying out their goal to its logical extreme." He sees the site as a commentary on the absurdity of a company, like Priceline, marketing itself as "giving the power to the consumer," and as a tool for making a political statement about the perceived differences between brand-name and generic products, organic-labeled and non-organic foods.

But just days after opening for non-business on the Web, Re-Code.com has run afoul, not of Priceline's legal council, but of Wal-Mart's, the retailing megalith and the U.S.'s largest private employer. Despite the legal disclaimers at the bottom of Re-Code's home page pledging that the site is not intended to be used for illegal ends, Wal-Mart wants it shut down.

On April 2, Janet F. Satterthwaite, a Washington trademark attorney representing Wal-Mart Stores Inc., sent a letter to Domains by Proxy, a service that the Carbon Defense League used to register the Re-Code.com domain name anonymously, demanding that the site be shut down within 48 hours. It accuses Re-Code.com of "encouraging and facilitating theft and fraud against Wal-Mart," noting that "Wal-Mart barcodes are specifically made available on this Web site."

Domains by Proxy responded on April 10 by "canceling our privacy service for that domain," says Justin Scholz, the company's spam and abuse administrator. But the site is still up, since Domains by Proxy does not control its hosting or domain name registration, just the anonymity of that registration. Wal-Mart's lawyer refused to comment on the matter, but the collective behind Re-Code has gone on the offensive.

They posted the text of the letter on their home page, and added a more elaborate disclaimer, which visitors must pass through to visit the site: "If you understand that Re-Code.com is a site of satire then you may enter. We are not liable for any misuse of the contents of this site."

Below the disclaimer appears a handy list of "tactical shopping options using Re-Code.com" with Wal-Mart products. It suggests barcode swaps as a way of commenting on the war in Iraq: "Option 3: If we are to believe the mainstream news, casualties are very few in the current war. Why not suggest that our military begin strategic Nerf strikes by replacing Winchester Light Target Load Ammunition (UPC ID 2089200442) with Nerf Ballistic Balls (UPC ID 7628161348). Ain't no war like a Nerf war."

"We thought we'd target Wal-Mart specifically, since they chose to target us," says Nathan Hactivist. He says the Carbon Defense League has sought legal advice from lawyers affiliated with RTMark, a kind of counter-culture artists' front organization that helped etoy.com fight the dot-com eToys.com in a protracted trademark battle (which etoy.com eventually won). And right now, they don't believe that Wal-Mart has a case: Are 10-digit barcode numbers intellectual property? And where's the proof that anyone has stolen anything from Wal-Mart stores with the help of the site?

"In my mind, this is similar to 'The Anarchist's Cookbook,'" Nathan Hactivist says. "If the argument is that we're facilitating theft, then they should be going after the people who invented the barcode, which is the thing that's making it easier to steal. All we're doing is creating a database of the barcodes that already exist on the products that we purchase."

Wallpaper Tries to Make the Exclusive Accessible

A Chic Style Magazine Now Tries to Make the Exclusive Accessible
By DAVID CARR
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/26/business/media/26WALL.html

Cults tend to fade when their leaders disappear, and magazines that are inextricably connected to an individual's singular vision are no exception.

Tyler Brûlé created Wallpaper to be a glossy guide to chic urban living for a jet-setting elite. Its austere visuals and odes to consumption were apt accessories for the frothy 1990's. But after clashing with his bosses at Time Inc., Mr. Brûlé has departed, along with the profligate era the magazine celebrated.

Time Inc. is betting that the redesigned, more accessible Wallpaper that is now arriving on newsstands in Europe and the United States will prosper. But the public mood is darker and more practical than it was just a few years ago. And Time Inc.'s aptitude for publishing middlebrow magazines with circulations in the millions — from People to Sports Illustrated — would not seem to be the best credential for rebuilding Wallpaper's temple of design and attitude, which attracted not much more than 130,000 paying adherents.

Wallpaper, which is based in London, was started in 1996 by Mr. Brûlé, a Canadian journalist who worked for British television. The magazine was the print manifestation of Mr. Brûlé as a hunter of cool. He taught readers how to find a toilet as expensive as a car, a chic clothing store in the alleys of Baghdad and an Eames chair with the back cut out to flatter the silhouette.

Never just a shelter, travel or fashion magazine, Wallpaper combined elements of each to produce a glossy, alternative universe where everything, including the models who populated the rooms portrayed in the pictures, was rendered for ornamental effect. Imagine "The Matrix" with better furnishings.

"Wallpaper is a magazine that reaches the forecasters of style and design," said Melissa Pordy, an independent media consultant and a former media buyer for advertising agencies. "Certain magazines, whether they be general interest or popular culture-oriented, have tried to emulate parts of their look because it has had a unique ability to deliver an influential audience."

Norman Pearlstine, Time Inc.'s editor in chief, was quite taken by the punishingly cool magazine. He convinced the company to depart from its typical strategy of large-circulation magazines and buy the low-circulation, expensively produced Wallpaper for $1.63 million in 1997. Mr. Brûlé, however, was able to run his business without much interference, starting a brand consultancy and developing other magazine projects.

But as the new millennium arrived, the ardor between Mr. Brûlé and Time Inc. cooled. "The magazine that Tyler came up with was fresh and new and opened my eyes to things I had not seen before," Mr. Pearlstine said. "But like any title, it was beginning to repeat itself."

In addition, Time Inc. had placed Wallpaper under the direction of IPC Media, the British magazine company it purchased in 2001 for $1.6 billion. Mr. Brûlé's entrepreneurial, and allegedly spendthrift, ways — he was known to charter jets when he missed a flight, one company executive said — were a difficult fit with his corporate overseers, and he departed to run his branding company last summer. Mr. Brûlé could not be reached for comment.

Wallpaper's June issue is the first completely produced by Jeremy Langmead, the editor in chief, who arrived from the style section of The Sunday Times of London, and Tony Chambers, the creative director, a designer wooed away from the British version of GQ.

The redesigned magazine is suitably gorgeous, an object that will look good on the coffee table, as long as it is a mirrored cocktail table by Jonathan Adler. But the magazine — which had losses of under $1 million on revenues of about $20 million in each of the last two years, according to company executives — is seeking to enhance the connection between the publication and some of the mortals who might buy it. It is a delicate task: accessibility is not always a good thing for a franchise built on exclusivity.

New advertiser-friendly sections have been introduced, including one called Property, which covers real estate with a global lilt, and a new beauty and grooming section that ensures readers can be as fashionable as the environments they inhabit. The article about taking a trip to Venice deviates from the typical Wallpaper treatment by including a handy guide to bars, restaurants, shops and museums. The June issue also has more emphasis on things American, which is part of an effort to increase the magazine's tiny base of about 40,000 readers here.

But the latest issue of Wallpaper is a long way from Real Simple, another lifestyle magazine, which has found more than one million paying readers with a less racy approach. Wallpaper still reeks of artifice. The photographer Helmut Newton contributes a travelogue, replete with exotic locales and many nude women. And in an article titled "Set for Seduction," readers can visit the shooting location for a pornographic film (decorated with a $6,300 beach chair) and get some helpful hints on the best "furniture for fornication." "Our art is about combining an ambience of intimacy with the practicality of wipe-free surfaces," reads the accompanying cheeky text.

Mr. Langmead, Wallpaper's editor in chief, said: "I don't think that the ownership shows in the magazine itself. I find it somewhat comforting that even though we are producing a niche magazine, there is a huge corporation behind it."

Mr. Pearlstine points out that in recent years, Time Inc. has grown to include 135 magazines, including many small-circulation magazines and other nontraditional publications like Transworld Skateboarding. He said that these smaller magazines have thrived in part because they are attached to the largest magazine company in the world.

"When you have broad consumer titles with large circulation, you make a judgment about what is going to be palatable to the broad audience," Mr. Pearlstine said. "When you have niche titles, you want to serve them with provocative content."

Wallpaper, Mr. Pearlstine said, also gives IPC entree to advertisers it would otherwise have trouble reaching while serving as an incubator of both talent and ideas. But in the six years that Wallpaper has been part of Time Inc., Wallpaper has contributed little in the way of new blood for the company or warmer relationships with advertisers. Mr. Pearlstine said he believed the redesign would integrate the magazine into the company and maybe, perhaps, produce "a not insignificant amount of revenue."

In mapping out a Brûlé-less future, Time Inc. confronts a challenge similar to when Condé Nast Publications bought Wired after the founder, Louis Rossetto, was ousted from the magazine.

"I think that Louis leaving was a capstone on the inevitable process of growing up for the magazine," said John Battelle, a professor at the University of California-Berkeley and a former top editor of Wired who went on to start The Industry Standard. After Wired became a Condé Nast magazine, Mr. Battelle said, another kind of leader was required to faithfully integrate the magazine's mission into a corporate culture.

In spite of its abundance of idiosyncrasies, Wallpaper confronts other obstacles in the battle for primacy over the smart set. Surface, Nest and Dwell all utilize modernist conceits on a variety of subject matter.

"There are a number of small-circulation, big-buzz magazines that are in this category that reach a very influential audience," said Polly Perkins, business development director at AdMedia Partners, an investment banking firm, and a founding publisher of Elle Decor. "But Wallpaper is the only one that is not an entrepreneurial entity and is owned by a large publishing company."

Dwell, a design and architecture magazine first published in 2000, takes a pragmatic approach to modern living that is the functional opposite of Wallpaper.

"It is one thing to be edgy and brilliant, but you can be so exclusive so as to be esoteric to a lot of readers," Michela O'Connor Abrams, Dwell's publisher and president, said, adding that an edition of Wallpaper featured a travel pillow rendered in mink that was infused with aromatherapy.

Mike Soutar, editorial director of IPC Media, acknowledged that Wallpaper had to develop an identity beyond being the magazine that Mr. Brûlé used to edit.

"I think we are in the midst of proving that at the moment," he said. Mr. Brûlé, he added, "did what founders do. He sold up and moved on. The test of any magazine brand is that it is bigger than any one person's dream and we're confident we can demonstrate that."

Tempering Rage by Drawing Comics

Tempering Rage by Drawing Comics
By TARA BAHRAMPOUR
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/21/books/21SATR.html

In the early 1990's, as an art student at Tehran University, Marjane Satrapi took an anatomical drawing course. Students were provided with a female model draped in a chador; their sketches of black, formless figures must have been instructive in cultivating an appreciation of the absurd, at least.

When the class finally insisted on a male model — clothed, but at least in possession of visible limbs — an Islamic morals policeman showed up. "He said, `Miss, why are you looking at this guy?' " Ms. Satrapi recalled. "I said, `Should I look at the door and draw him?' And he said yes."

Ms. Satrapi, in a black blazer and miniskirt, recalled the incident last week over cappuccino at a Midtown sidewalk cafe, ignoring a smattering of rain so she could smoke another Winston Light. For her American book tour, she left her home in Paris to visit New York, where smoking has been banned in most indoor public spaces; the rule has only made her want to smoke more, she said.

That puff of rebellion will smell familiar to fans of "Persepolis," Ms. Satrapi's memoir in comic form, published in an American edition last month by Pantheon. Her story has sold more than 120,000 copies in France and has been translated from French into six languages; it recently won the Fernando Buesa Blanco Peace Prize in Spain. The American edition combines the first two volumes of this four-part series, which uses woodcutlike drawings with touches of classical Persian art to set Ms. Satrapi's childhood against the backdrop of Iran's 1979 Islamic revolution and its eight-year war with Iraq.

The great-great-granddaughter of a Qajar king of Iran, Ms. Satrapi, 33, grew up in a family of leftist intellectuals in Tehran. Though her family was descended from royalty, its position had been displaced by the family of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi. Her parents gleefully joined the protests that toppled that monarchy, then watched in despair as their fellow revolutionaries were executed or exiled by the theocracy that followed.

From the ages of 9 to 14, Ms. Satrapi lived in an increasingly surreal world in which women were attacked by thugs for resisting the chador, and boys were sent to war armed only with gold-painted "keys to heaven." Outspoken and spirited, she chafed under fundamentalist rule; after she struck her principal for trying to confiscate her jewelry, her worried parents sent her to high school in Austria. She returned to Iran for college, then moved to France, where fellow artists encouraged her to turn her story into a comic book.

The postrevolution crackdowns and war are painful memories for Ms. Satrapi.

Her beloved uncle was executed by the Islamic regime, an acquaintance was raped before facing the firing squad, and a neighbor's family was killed by an Iraqi Scud missile.

When she spoke of these events, her eyes filled with angry tears. But by illustrating her stories, she said, she found a way to tell them without letting rage take over.

"I cannot take the idea of a man cut into pieces and just write it," she explained. "It would not be anything but cynical. That's why I drew it. People are not ready to read a book about all the misery of the third world, and I don't blame them."

But judging from her book's reception in Europe, people seem ready for a comic book about it, especially one told from a matter-of-fact child's perspective. In "Persepolis," tales of torture and war are offset by lighter scenes, like the 13-year-old Marjane trying to convince the morals police that her Michael Jackson button is really a button of Malcolm X, "the leader of black Muslims in America." ("Back then Michael Jackson was still black," the Marjane-narrator explains.)

In some ways "Persepolis" is very Western, especially in the loving but unsparing openness with which she describes the foibles of her family and her native country. Iranians are adept at using humor to counter despair, she says. Characters in her book make relentless fun of the authorities and risk their lives to attend dance parties, declaring, "Without parties, we might as well just bury ourselves now."

Most of her mockery is reserved for self-important Islamists, but no one is spared. Fortunately her parents, still in Iran, were amused at the portrayal of their younger selves as overzealous revolutionaries. Fifteen years ago, she said, she would have been too worried for their safety to show them making bootleg wine in the bathtub or smuggling Iron Maiden posters into the country.

The Iranian government will probably not allow "Persepolis" to be sold there, Ms. Satrapi said, but she might translate it into Farsi and put it on the Web, which is widely used by young Iranians.

The book's American edition will probably get more exposure among Iranians than any previous edition. Besides reaching the hundreds of thousands of Iranians in the United States, many of whom fled the revolution, the book will probably also be spirited into Iran in suitcases and passed among young people, who tend to speak some English and crave anything subversive.

That is Ms. Satrapi's hope: to reach the relatively sheltered young Iranians born too late to remember the hardest days. "The period between '80 and '84 is a little taboo in Iran," she said. "People don't like to talk about it. That's why I think this book is important. I would have died of sadness if all these people had been forgotten."

In the West, she said, she hopes the book will challenge myths about Iran that have plagued her since her Austrian schoolmates associated her with the "beards and chadors" she had escaped.

Even now, she said, Westerners, especially Americans, cling to myths about Iran. In France, when she tells people that women in Iran drive cars and hold government posts, or that two-thirds of university students are female, "people are very happy that the doubt that they had about something was confirmed," she said. But in the United States, "it's a shock," she said. "I give them a completely different picture than they thought they would have."

With her thick, dark hair, animated expressions and prominent beauty mark, Ms. Satrapi looks disarmingly similar to her cartoon self. (In France she has even been recognized on the street.) In an autobiographical strip that ran recently in an Italian newspaper, Ms. Satrapi drew herself with horns, declaring, "I am the Axis of Evil."

She is deeply political and patriotic. She quickly turns radio interviews about her book into passionate political forums. "Democracy is not a color that you paint the wall with and say, `Now you're democratic,' " she told one interviewer, adding that it had taken postrevolutionary Iran a quarter-century to get to a point where democracy could work. "I think we will have something good if they" — outside powers — "don't interrupt us."

On principle Ms. Satrapi has put off getting a French passport, preferring to make her trip here as an Iranian, even though procuring an American visa has become difficult for Iranians. Upon arrival at Kennedy International Airport last Wednesday, she said, she was fingerprinted, photographed and interrogated by an immigration official who questioned why she called her home country "EE-rahn" instead of the Americanized "EYE-ran," and insisted that Ms. Satrapi pronounce it the American way.

Mark Thorn, a spokesman for the United States Bureau of Customs and Border Protection, would not discuss Ms. Satrapi's experience, but said that the process of questioning, fingerprinting and photographing visitors from Iran and many other countries, like Saudi Arabia and Iraq, was mandated by Congress after the Sept. 11 attacks. "We're living in a post-9/11 environment," Mr. Thorn said. "This is legislation passed by Congress and it's the law." People who refuse to comply can be denied entry to the United States, he said. (Among them were two celebrated Iranian filmmakers who were not allowed in when they refused to be fingerprinted.)

The scene at the airport reminded Ms. Satrapi of Iran, where biting one's tongue is sometimes the only way to avoid bigger trouble. "For one and a half hours I just had to swallow, swallow, swallow," she said, until she finally got her passport stamped. Once outside the terminal, she said, she fainted from the stress. Her worried limousine driver rushed her into the car, offered her water and told her to smoke as many cigarettes as she needed, despite the car's "no smoking" signs.

"This man, an American, he was so careful, so nice," she said. "I told him, `The way I was received here was not so good, but I'm so happy you're a gentleman.' Then I really was happy to be here." She smiled. "If you take away the government, you have the people. And that's the way it should be."

Philosophers Draw on the Film 'Matrix'

Philosophers Draw on the Film 'Matrix'
EDWARD ROTHSTEIN
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/24/arts/24MATR.html

Hundreds of millions of dollars ago, in a galaxy far, far away, a hacker named Neo reached into his bookcase and pulled out a leatherbound volume with the title "Simulacra and Simulation" — a collection of essays by the French postmodernist philosopher Jean Baudrillard. But when Neo opened it to the chapter "On Nihilism," it turned out to be just a simulacrum of a book, hollowed out to hold computer disks.

It resembled, then, the rest of the real world in the 1999 film "The Matrix" — the first of a trilogy directed and written by Larry and Andy Wachowski. That world, with its office buildings and restaurants and teeming populace, was, like its book, a hollowed-out illusion, a virtual universe filled with computer code, a simulacrum of ordinary life, which Neo, a master hacker, is gradually taught to see for what it is: the Matrix.

Neo is inducted into the horrifying truth: that human beings are unknowingly being force-fed this virtual fantasy while their bodies are held captive in gelatinous pods by bug-eyed machines. And as Neo learns to perceive how hidden code shapes the apparently real world surrounding him, so too did fans begin to examine the coded allusions lying within the film itself. Mr. Baudrillard was only the beginning. When asked how many hidden messages there were in "The Matrix," the Wachowski Brothers once teased, "More than you'll ever know."

Now that its sequel, "Matrix Reloaded," is out, the interpretive industry is also gearing up. After the first film, Christian allegorists leaped at the bait the authors left: characters named Neo and Trinity, allusions to Jesus and resurrection, a city named Zion. The Buddhist character of Neo's "awakening" to reality's veil of illusion was discussed. And academic interest grew because the film self-consciously tapped current fascination with pop culture and critical theory. Recent anthologies have included " `The Matrix' and Philosophy," edited by William Irwin (Open Court), "Taking the Red Pill," edited by Glenn Yeffeth (Benbella Books), and "Exploring the Matrix," edited by Karen Haber (St. Martin's Press). Even the Warner Brothers "Matrix" Web site contains a growing collection of papers by academic philosophers: (whatisthematrix.warnerbros.com/rl_cmp/new_phil_main.html).

Descartes, of course, is a recurring presence in these anthologies, since, like Neo, he attempted to discover what man can be certain about, even if, as he put it, a "malicious demon of the utmost power and cunning has employed all his energies in order to deceive me." Plato is invoked as well, particularly his allegory of the cave, in which prisoners are convinced that shadows on the cave's walls are the sole reality until they are freed by philosophical inquiry and led upward into the sunlight.

The problem is that in the movie, the cave is the reality — the rebels hide out from demonic machines in the sewers of this post-apocalyptic world — while those who dwell in the illusions of the Matrix bask in sunlight. One character, Cypher, explicitly prefers the world of the programmed Matrix, with its sensual pleasures, compared with the reality of darkness, warfare and struggle. So some philosophical essays ask, is there a reason the choice of the real world is more ethical?

But there is another twist to the Wachowskis' fable. The Matrix is not arbitrary; it is the world of contemporary America. It is our world. And the rebels, in discovering its illusory quality, the film suggests, are discovering the truth about our world: that it deserves to be overturned. "The Matrix" is a political allegory.

This is why Mr. Baudrillard's book "Simulacra and Simulation" is so closely associated with the film (some cast members were asked to read the book, which Morpheus, the rebel leader, also quotes). In these essays, mostly written in the 1970's, Mr. Baudrillard suggests that because of technology and the rise of modern capitalism, everything has become a simulacrum; as in the Matrix, nothing real remains. Disneyland is one of his examples: an imaginary world that invokes something "real," though that "real" world is just as imaginary. In fact, Mr. Baudrillard argues, Los Angeles and California are as fantastical as Disneyland.

There is a distaste for contemporary American culture in many of Mr. Baudrillard's analyses, and a distaste too for American power and its images. This is also shared by the rebels of "The Matrix," who reflect a kind of hacker ideology, seeking to "free" information from its "system" of control, to overturn the Matrix and its tyranny of images.

But this has a disturbing side. In the essay "On Nihilism" Mr. Baudrillard announces that in the face of "hegemonic" power, there is but one response: terrorism. He writes, "I am a terrorist and nihilist in theory as others are with their weapons." Similarly, in "The Matrix," Morpheus tells Neo he must regard all inhabitants of that virtual world as enemies that may be killed; anyway, most people are "not ready" for the truth. Morpheus is even wanted by the Matrix's ruthless agents for "acts of terrorism." While we are meant to cheer him on, neither Mr. Baudrillard nor the Wachowskis nor the philosophical essayists explore the ethical limits of these all-too-familiar convictions.

Now, though, in "Matrix Reloaded," something else takes place. At the risk of spoiling some plot twists, it is worth pointing out that, despite the film's flaws and misjudgments, it seems intent on questioning many ideas from the first film.

Some things stay the same. Neo and the rebels must head off a full-scale attempt by the machines to destroy the underground city, Zion, so the basic revolutionary posture remains intact. In some ways the film becomes even more extreme in its objections to American life (at one point, as a character speaks of the "grotesqueries" of human nature, background images of Hitler and George W. Bush appear).

But other things change. What exactly is Neo supposed to do? In the first film Morpheus hailed Neo as the One, the Savior of the real world. This belief in the real may be one reason Mr. Baudrillard has never found identification with "The Matrix" congenial, suggesting it has "stemmed mostly from misunderstandings" of his own work. But in the sequel he seems a nearer presence. Boundaries and premises break down. Morpheus's prophetic claims begin to seem strident. Neo can't even trust what he is told by the Oracle, a woman who foresees the future but who may also be manipulating Neo with her prophecies.

In fact we eventually learn through cryptic pronouncements of the Architect of the Matrix — its software writer, its God — that Neo is actually living in the sixth version of the Matrix. In each, a savior figure has arisen. And in each earlier case, the savior has not been able to free humanity at all. Instead, the result has been a large-scale loss of life, until the Matrix begins again, with an apparent upgrade — a new web of earthly illusions — allowing no recollections of the disastrous past. By the end, Neo has reason to wonder whether any revolutions accomplish what they claim, whether he is free to make a choice at all and whether even the real world is what it seems.

So the third movie, scheduled for November release, faces its own choice. It could end up moving even closer to the nihilism of Mr. Baudrillard and its ultimately sordid message. But faced with what Mr. Baudrillard has called "the desert of the real," it could also find some other path, as yet undreamed of in its philosophy, that may bring hackers, humans and machines together.

A Yak Attack on Beef and Bison

A Yak Attack on Beef and Bison
By MELISSA CLARK
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/21/dining/21YAKS.html

QUESTA, N.M. -- AS the sun sets on the Sangre de Cristo Mountains here in north central New Mexico, the dun-colored topsoil turns as red as blood itself. Long black shadows creep down the slopes in varying shapes: low and gnarly from thorny sagebrush, tall and majestic from oak and pinyon trees, and squat, shaggy and handlebar-horned from roaming yaks.

Yes, yaks. These woolly animals, originally from the Himalayas, have been turning up on ranches in the western United States and Canada. And although their numbers are still minuscule compared with those of bison and cattle (North America counts about 2,000 yaks, 350,000 bison and over 100 million head of cattle), ranchers are increasingly betting that, like such low-fat red meats as venison and bison, yak burgers, stews and sirloins will soon be on menus all over the continent.

That may be a long shot, but the quality of the meat makes it a possibility. Yak is as lean as venison or bison (about 5 percent fat, compared to about 15 percent for beef), and, to some, tastes juicier, sweeter and more delicate. Certainly the people of Tibet and Nepal think so. There, yaks have been an integral part of the culture for 5,000 years, used not only as pack animals and for milk but also as a source of meat. Originally brought to the Western Hemisphere for zoos a century ago, yaks have been bred commercially here for only about 15 years. North America now has more than 30 yak ranches.

Tom Worrell, who grazes 125 yaks on his 3,300-acre Latir Ranch here, estimates that he is the third-largest yak rancher in North America. Mr. Worrell, an entrepreneur who also owns Dharma Properties, which builds environmentally friendly resorts, is a solidly built man with blue eyes, a leathery tan and eyebrows as dark and bushy as a yak hide. He delights in the merits of his hairy, humpbacked beasts.

"They only eat about a third of what a cow eats and can forage for food without damaging the environment," he said. "They have small hooves and are nimble, so they can move over rough mountainous terrain. They don't need much attention. Unlike cows, you don't have to get up in the middle of the night and calve them. They are pretty disease-resistant, so they don't need any hormones or antibiotics. And unlike bison, they are docile and easy to maintain."

Since yaks thrive in forbidding, rocky landscapes at elevations up to 14,000 feet, they can easily forage in places that most cattle could never even reach. Ranchers generally leave them alone to search out grasses, weeds and wildflowers. In winter, the yaks are in their element, cavorting in the snow without the need for shelter and eating ice instead of drinking water.

"Yaks are what you'd call free-range animals," Mr. Worrell said. While they are never put on feedlots, some ranchers — though not Mr. Worrell — add grain to their diet a few weeks before slaughter to whiten their fat. Meat from exclusively grass-fed animals has a yellow tint from the carotene in the grasses.

"It's just for looks — American consumers aren't used to yellowish fat," said Bob Hasse, president of the International Yak Association and the owner of Desert End Yaks in Montrose, Colo.

The grain fed to yaks has no hormones or antibiotics, because it's not necessary. Much of the meat, Mr. Hasse pointed out, would satisfy the Agriculture Department's definition of organic, though no rancher but Mr. Worrell has filed the paperwork required to label it organic. All yak meat sold today is inspected by the department.

Mr. Worrell's yaks are raised by the ranch manager, Chuck Kuchta. With his worn Levi's, 10-gallon hat and bowlegged gait, Mr. Kuchta is the very picture of the cowboy he once was. But don't call him a cowboy. And definitely not "yakboy."

"We like to say Chuck's a recovering cowboy," Mr. Worrell said. "You've got to be careful about what you call him. For a while we were saying yakeroo, but I think Chuck prefers yakalero."

Mr. Kuchta is among a small group who have made the switch from cattle to yak, some going by way of bison, or American buffalo. But why should yak succeed where other exotic meats like ostrich and emu have failed? And the bison market is suffering from a huge oversupply after a decade of speculation (despite Ted Turner's best intentions). At the height of the bison bubble, the animals were selling for as much as $3,000. Now the price is less than a tenth of that. Yaks, which are about two-thirds the size of bison, are selling for an average of $2,500.

"The bottom fell out of the bison market because ranching bison doesn't make sense economically," Mr. Hasse said. "You need more capital to start out with. You have to put in a lot of sturdy fencing, and bison are much harder and more expensive to handle and feed than yaks. People wanted to raise bison because they have good eye appeal. They look good on the plains, and there's a romance to having this native animal on your land. But they just aren't feasible."

That is because at their core, bison are wild, ornery creatures that don't take to fences or, for that matter, to people who try to lock them up. As a result, a ranch needs more hands to manage the same number of bison as yaks or cattle. "You can never turn your back on bison," Mr. Hasse warned. "They're too aggressive."

Mr. Kuchta, who also raised bison in his post-cattle days, agreed that yaks require much lower maintenance. Domesticated yaks, he said, are so tame they are often considered family pets in Tibet. "You even hear stories about them sleeping inside the huts of their owners," he said. "I wouldn't try this with a buffalo."

Yaks are efficient eaters, needing less food pound for pound than either bison or cattle. To gain one pound, yaks need only 6 pounds of forage, as against 8 pounds for cattle and 12 for bison.

But even if yaks are more environmentally friendly than cattle and easier to handle than bison, finding a market for their meat has been is a challenge.

"Most people don't know what a yak is — that it's a Himalayan bovine related to a cow," said Jerry McRoberts, who has been raising yaks for 15 years at the McRoberts Game Farm in the Nebraska panhandle near Sidney. "But if you get them to try it, they love it."

There is indeed a lot to love about yak meat. Although it is low in fat, it is very succulent, with a deep crimson color and a mild, rather than gamy, flavor.

"It's sweeter than even farmed venison and more tender than buffalo," said Joseph Wrede, the chef and owner of Joseph's Table, a restaurant in Taos, N.M., that is in the process of moving elsewhere in town. He serves cubed yak meat in a savory stew with aromatic vegetables, and "yakballs" in a heady red-wine sauce, atop pappardelle pasta or simmered in a chili. "We sell a lot of it," he said. "The people who are brave enough to try it really get into yak."

About a dozen restaurants in the United States regularly offer yak. They include De la Tierra at the Sundy House in Delray Beach, Fla., where Johnny Vinczencz coats yak tenderloin in a mustard crust, and the Cosmopolitan in Telluride, Colo., where Chad Scothorn serves yak steaks as a special, using the same kinds of sauces he would with beef.

De La Tierra, which is owed by Dharma Properties, gets its yak from Mr. Worrell's ranch. Mr. Scothorn buys his from Mr. Hasse, who also sells the meat retail, as does Mr. McRoberts. In the western United States, yak meat occasionally shows up in supermarkets and health food stores, where, at about two and a half times the price of beef and one and a half times that of bison, it remains a tough sell.

"A lot of people are turned off by the word," Mr. McRoberts said. "They think yak? Yuck."

"We wanted to change the name to woolly Himalayan beef," he added, "but I don't think the U.S.D.A. will ever approve it. Someone suggested we send it to David Letterman and have them come up with 10 alternate names for a yak. Who knows, it just might help."