Hanoi Arrival

after my one day layover in singapore, arrived in hanoi yesterday afternoon at the sparkling new (and air conditioned!) terminal at Noi Bai International Airport. it was so surprising to step into what seemed like such a modern airport, after spending some time at the older and very basic concrete block styled terminal, only a year and half ago. then again, there seem to be a lot of new terminals and airports these days -- the new airports in athens and mykonos, chep lap kok in hong kong, terminal 1 & 4 at JFK. in singapore's changi international, it was such a nice surprise to discover free broadband internet hookups and mobile phone chargers scattered throughout the terminal! if only all airports were like that.

driving from the airport into the city, there seemed to be so many new and modern looking buildings looking completely out of place, scattered in between stretches of rice paddys and older concrete constructed block houses. arriving from singapore, the contrast in cities could not be stronger. in singapore, the city and streets are so ordered and manicured, and even downtown seemed deserted during the day. hanoi in contrast, has virtual hordes of people on bicycles, motorbikes, and cars and trucks and buses, all careening down small dusty streets blaring their horns as old women balancing loads of produce on bamboo poles stride into the middle of busy streets. there is definitely an authentic energy of life here. and it makes our more developed cities seem standing still by comparison.

the last time i was here, i stayed almost two months, including a significant time touring saigon and hanoi on motorbike. but arriving yesterday, i definitely felt overwhelmed with the crush and anarchy of distinctly vietnamese traffic. despite expecting it, being on the crowded streets almost felt claustrophobic. then again, maybe it was just a feeling of disorientation, arriving into the city from a different and unfamiliar direction.

last time i loved being here more than almost anywhere else, and i know i will again. it'll just take a few days to sink in and get comfortable and oriented again. including painfully slow internet connections! i've just been too spoiled with NYC broadband.

just still can't believe i'm actually here...

Cramming It All In at the Venice Biennale

Cramming It All In at the Venice Biennale
By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/26/arts/design/26VENI.html

VENICE — I usually skip the previews for the Venice Biennale, when the art world descends for two or three days on the public gardens and former shipyard where the show mostly takes place. Last time, about 14,000 people jammed the preview. The day after the show opened to the public there were 800 visitors wandering in a relative oasis of calm amid the honeysuckle and jasmine in the gardens.

Once the professionals push on, it is easier to see the art. But this year, having confused the show's opening dates, I found myself at the preview, cheerfully moaning along with everyone else about the crowds and the heat and the terrible art. We all seemed to be having a very good time sweating and complaining.

If this were happening in some ordinary place, the mobs would have stopped coming long ago. But this is Venice and the world's most august art festival, so the show goes on, fortunately, more than a century after the first biennale, long after the festival stopped being a bellwether of the best of what's new in art. I was amused to read a British critic fuming that this show failed because it wasn't a true survey of everything good today. A quaint thought. It is what it is, which is always useful.

There are gems to find, although the picking is especially tough this year, the 50th edition of the event. This is the largest, most sprawling and also by far the sloppiest, most uninspired, enervating and passionless biennale that I can recall. The curator, Francesco Bonami, has provided the usual nebulous title, pregnant with meaning but signifying nothing. This time it's "Dreams and Conflicts: The Dictatorship of the Viewer." It doesn't begin to account for the miasma that Mr. Bonami has allowed to be assembled.

I say "allowed" because Mr. Bonami doled out curatorial duties to diverse people to put together their own shows alongside his, which he has said reflected a desire to include many voices. Judging from the parts of the biennale he put together, which are better than most of the others, Mr. Bonami is perhaps more interested in painting and less attuned to the sort of political art that some of the other curators emphasize.

A result is to be found at the shipyard, or Arsenale, which is now a souk of inchoate exhibitions, eight of them stretching a mile or so, and noisily competing for attention. The works of good artists are badly shown: the artists should be furious at the curators, who are infuriating for including so much art that isn't good. Call it the dictatorship of the curator.

Maybe in another context the exhibition about Arab culture by Catherine David and another show organized by the artist Gabriel Orozco might have been instructive. Here they are swallowed up. At the end of the Arsenale, a show called "Utopia Station" is the coup de grace: a shantytown of plywood cubicles, annotated maps, buttons, books, posters, computer terminals, blaring videos and handbills, all of it socially attuned and well meaning, and utopian right down to its egalitarian refusal even to distinguish clearly the work of one artist from another.

One of the videos in "Utopia Station" won the biennale prize for artists under 35. It is by Oliver Payne and Nick Relph, from Britain. I had to return after the preview, when the crowds had left, to find it (or what I think was it): a grindingly upbeat music video of kids on skateboards, dancing in hallways, kissing in train stations, interrupted by backwoods hunters shooting deer, to the looping soundtrack of Terry Riley's "You're No Good." It wasn't all bad, I thought, after shedding a couple of pounds in the plywood sweatbox where it was screened.

All biennales are guaranteed to be chaotic because the festival consists of the main show or shows, Mr. Bonami's purview this time, and the dozens of national pavilions, each organized by its own country, the old ones spread through the public gardens and others, more than ever this year, scattered across the rest of Venice.

The prize for the best pavilion went to Luxembourg for a tastefully spare and sedate display by Su-Mei Tse, tucked away in an obscure spot more or less behind the Accademia bridge. The work consists of several rooms. One is soundproofed, another contains a ball of purple twine and two wicker chairs, another a video of street sweepers in the desert, the last a video of a cellist playing in the Alps. It is meditative, musical and vaguely poetic.

At the nearby Ukrainian pavilion another video, this one of hairless men grinding millstones, was just strange enough to keep me preoccupied for a few minutes. It is by an artist named Victor Sydorenko.

With hundreds of artists, the biennale is, by its nature, nearly impossible to canvas thoroughly unless you have many days and the patience of Job, which means that everyone can devise a different list of favorites and find something other people overlooked. I heard about a video from Armenia and an installation from Malaysia that I am ashamed to say I missed.

My own contribution to this parlor game is Tino Sehgal, a British-born 27-year-old from Berlin, whose work has no label to identify it. It is a brief, ghostly recording by an unidentified woman singing "this is propaganda, you know, you know" (from a pop song); the recording is triggered whenever someone passes by an unmarked spot in the room. I mention Mr. Sehgal not to be perverse but because he is, in fact, a clever provocateur and, by the way, a choreographer, not to mention that his discretion ought to be rewarded in a show like this.

I won't belabor the main pavilions. Representing Britain, Chris Ofili has a few good paintings and some poor drawings, of lovers, installed in a jewel-box environment, everything black, green and red, which aims to be like an African Vence Chapel but comes a little closer to a Vegas wedding chapel. Fred Wilson's pavilion for the United States, documenting blacks and Venice through history, is, as almost everyone seemed to say, a big disappointment, obvious and overwrought. We should do better next time. Michal Rovner's show with petrie dishes containing moving images of masses of people like teeming cells, next door in the Israeli pavilion, was rightly better received. And Olafur Eliasson's Danish pavilion, a kaleidoscopic fun house of architecture (with a room of yellow lights, harking back to a work by Bruce Nauman, which makes everyone in it look black-and-white), is at least a good diversion.

I also enjoyed Candida Höfer's photographs in the German pavilion. She deserves her moment in the sun. And the penny finally dropped for me with Jean-Marc Bustamante, who explores transparency and other brainy formal topics through various media in the French pavilion. Even more unexpectedly, in the Austrian pavilion I found the huge, eccentric sculptures of Bruno Gironcoli from the 70's a minor revelation.

As for the Australian pavilion, Patricia Piccinini's surreal sculptures, weird half-human creatures and a series of misshapen motorcycle helmets, a craftsmanly cross between Matthew Barney and Ron Mueck, caused me to linger there, partly because they are genuinely odd, partly because the building was air-conditioned.

Mr. Bonami's survey of painting at the biennale since 1964, installed at the Museo Correr, deserves honorable mention. It is a hodgepodge, thrown together, with many holes in it, but it includes art that's carefully made and rewards scrutiny. When was the last time you saw a show that put Renato Guttuso, Bridget Riley, John Currin, Frank Auerbach and Elizabeth Peyton together? It made painting in the 1970's look overlooked. Likewise, in what used to be the Italian pavilion in the public gardens, Mr. Bonami and Daniel Birnbaum have assembled eclectic works by Matthew Barney, Damien Hirst, Carol Rama, Robert Gober, Mr. Orozco, Jennifer Pastor, Ellen Gallagher and Helen Mirra. They all made my short list for this biennale.

I have a utopian idea: a small, tightly argued biennale by a brave curator who chooses a dozen, or even a few dozen favorite artists, as opposed to several hundred, the works installed coherently — forget filling every square foot of available space, appeasing dealers and collectors and covering one's behind politically. Imagine a contentious, digestible, aesthetically satisfying art exhibition to accompany the pavilions that the public might even want to see after the art professionals have gone.

I'm dreaming. It must be the heat.

Justices Back Affirmative Action by 5 to 4

Justices Back Affirmative Action by 5 to 4
By LINDA GREENHOUSE
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/24/politics/24AFFI.html

WASHINGTON, June 23 — The Supreme Court preserved affirmative action in university admissions today by a one-vote margin but with a forceful endorsement of the role of racial diversity on campus in achieving a more equal society.

"In order to cultivate a set of leaders with legitimacy in the eyes of the citizenry, it is necessary that the path to leadership be visibly open to talented and qualified individuals of every race and ethnicity," Justice Sandra Day O'Connor wrote in her 5-to-4 majority opinion upholding the University of Michigan's consideration of race for admission to its law school.

At the same time, by a vote of 6 to 3, and with Justice O'Connor in the majority as well, the court invalidated the same university's affirmative action program for admission to its undergraduate college. The difference was in the details: the undergraduate school uses a point system based in part on race.

As a result, the pair of decisions — the court's first in a generation to address race in university admissions — provided a blueprint for taking race into account without running afoul of the Constitution's guarantee of equal protection.

The law school engages in a "highly individualized, holistic review of each applicant's file" in which race counts as a factor but is not used in a "mechanical way," Justice O'Connor said. For that reason, she said, it was consistent with Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr.'s controlling opinion in the Bakke case in 1978, which permitted the use of race as one "plus factor."

The result of today's rulings was that Justice Powell's solitary view that there was a "compelling state interest" in racial diversity, a position that had appeared undermined by the court's subsequent equal protection rulings in other contexts and that some lower federal courts had boldly repudiated, has now been endorsed by five justices and placed on a stronger footing than ever before.

President Bush had asked the court to declare the universities' policies unconstitutional.

Although the four dissenters in the law school case did not directly confront the continued validity of the Bakke precedent, it was clear that both Justices Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia would have overturned it if they could. "Every time the government places citizens on racial registers and makes race relevant to the provision of burdens or benefits, it demeans us all," Justice Thomas said in a dissenting opinion that Justice Scalia also signed.

Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist wrote the principal dissenting opinion that spoke for all four, including Justice Anthony M. Kennedy. He took a more oblique approach that attacked the law school program not so much for its premise as for how it works in practice, dismissing it as "a carefully managed program designed to ensure proportionate representation of applicants from selected minority groups."

Justice Kennedy, writing separately, said that Justice Powell's opinion in the Bakke case "states the correct rule for resolving this case," but that the court had not applied the "meaningful strict scrutiny" under which the program should have been found unconstitutional.

Joining Justice O'Connor's majority opinion in Grutter v. Bollinger, No. 02-241, were Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who wrote a brief concurring opinion, and Justices John Paul Stevens, David H. Souter and Stephen G. Breyer.

By contrast with the law school, the admissions program for Michigan's College of Literature, Science, and the Arts awards 20 points on a scale of 150 for membership in an underrepresented minority group — blacks, Hispanics, and American Indians — with 100 points guaranteeing admission to the university's main undergraduate school. Fixed numbers of points are also awarded for other factors, including alumni connections, geography and athletics.

The inclusion of race on the scale, with the result that nearly all qualified minority applicants are admitted to the competitive program while many qualified white students are turned away, demonstrates the absence of the "individualized consideration" that the Bakke decision required, Chief Justice Rehnquist wrote. Justice O'Connor echoed that conclusion, describing the undergraduate program as a "nonindividualized, mechanical one."

Justice Breyer, concurring separately, did not sign the Rehnquist opinion. The dissenters were Justices Ginsburg and Souter, who said the majority opinion was incorrect on the merits, and Justice Stevens. He said the case should have been dismissed because the plaintiffs, two white students who had failed to win admission under an earlier version of the undergraduate admissions policy, lacked standing to challenge the current policy that the university adopted in 1998.

The rulings today came as an enormous relief to the civil rights community, as well as to public and private colleges and universities around the country, dozens of which had joined briefs supporting Michigan. Although the constitutional issue applied directly only to public institutions, federal law has given private colleges an equal stake in the outcome by forbidding racial discrimination by educational institutions that receive federal money.

President Bush issued a statement praising the court "for recognizing the value of diversity on our nation's campuses." He added, "Like the court, I look forward to the day when America will truly be a color-blind society."

The statement made no reference to the fact that the administration had asked the court to invalidate both Michigan programs as thinly disguised quota systems that violated the holding of the Bakke decision. Mr. Bush had personally announced in a televised address in January that his administration was siding against the university.

"A reader would never know that the administration's brief derided the law school's goal of having a critical mass of underrepresented students in each class," the liberal advocacy group People for the American Way said in a statement.

The administration's brief faulted the university for having failed to consider "race-neutral alternatives" before adopting its affirmative action plans. The only example the brief offered as an acceptable alternative was the plan now used in Texas, California and Florida, where admission is offered automatically to high school graduates above a particular class rank.

In her majority opinion today, Justice O'Connor was close to dismissive of the administration's analysis. She said the brief did not explain "how such plans could work for graduate and professional schools." She added: "Moreover, even assuming such plans are race-neutral, they may preclude the university from conducting the individualized assessments necessary to assemble a student body that is not just racially diverse, but diverse along all the qualities valued by the university."

The court's precedents, including the Bakke decision, made clear that any official consideration of race must survive a standard of judicial review known as strict scrutiny, meaning that the policy must serve a compelling state interest and be narrowly tailored to achieve that interest. Consequently, Michigan faced two analytical hurdles in defending its programs in lawsuits brought by three disappointed white applicants, Barbara Grutter in the law school case and Jennifer Gratz and Patrick Hamacher in the undergraduate case, Gratz v. Bollinger, No. 02-516. The university had to persuade the court that racial diversity was a compelling interest that was appropriately served by the challenged programs.

Justice O'Connor's opinion in the law school case embraced the diversity rationale. "Effective participation by members of all racial and ethnic groups in the civil life of our nation is essential if the dream of one nation, indivisible, is to be realized," she said. She added that law schools, in particular, served as gateways to economic and political leadership.

"Access to legal education (and thus the legal profession) must be inclusive of talented and qualified individuals of every race and ethnicity," she said, "so that all members of our heterogeneous society may participate in the educational institutions that provide the training and education necessary to succeed in America."

Her opinion cited a number of briefs from businesses, colleges and, with particular emphasis, two dozen retired senior military officers and former commandants of the service academies, who told the court that affirmative action was essential to maintaining an integrated officer corps.

The real debate came down to whether either program was narrowly tailored enough. With its 20-point formula, the undergraduate program had always appeared more vulnerable. The Federal District Court in Detroit had invalidated both programs. On appeal, the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, in Cincinnati, upheld the law school program but never issued an opinion after hearing arguments on the undergraduate program.

In concluding her opinion, Justice O'Connor noted that 25 years had passed since Bakke and said affirmative action should "no longer be necessary" 25 years from now. That led Curt A. Levey, director of legal and public affairs at the Center for Individual Rights, the law firm representing the plaintiffs, to observe that universities would start facing new lawsuits 20 years from now if they did not heed the court's advice.

"The court says affirmative action is not timeless, and it had better not be," Mr. Levey said in an interview.

Justices Back Law to Make Libraries Use Internet Filters

Justices Back Law to Make Libraries Use Internet Filters
By LINDA GREENHOUSE
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/24/politics/24INTE.html

WASHINGTON, June 23 — The Supreme Court today upheld a federal law that requires public libraries to install pornography filters on all computers providing Internet access, as a condition of continuing to receive federal subsidies and grants.

No single opinion spoke for the court in the 6-to-3 ruling. Writing for four justices, Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist said limitations on access to the Internet were, for library users, of no greater significance than limitations on access to books that librarians chose for whatever reason not to acquire. Justices Sandra Day O'Connor, Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia signed the opinion.

Two other members of the majority, Justices Anthony M. Kennedy and Stephen G. Breyer, wrote separately to express constitutional concerns about the statute, the Children's Internet Protection Act, and to suggest that it could be subject to a new First Amendment challenge if it proved unduly burdensome after it went into effect.

The law, enacted in 2001, has been blocked by a lower court ruling and has never taken effect. Both justices said there were not sufficient reasons to strike down the law on its face.

The law has been opposed by many librarians, and the American Library Association was one of the groups that brought the First Amendment challenge. Now that the statute will go into effect, librarians are highly likely to find that they have considerable discretion in administering it day to day, for adults as well as children.

The statute authorizes, but does not require, librarians to unblock Internet sites at the request of adult users. At the same time, it provides no procedures or standards for those decisions, leaving it up to individual library systems to decide whether to require users to give reasons for wanting access to a site or even whether to require them to identify themselves. Nor does the law specify what filter system to use, leaving it up to libraries to acquire filters on the open market. As a result of all these factors, there could be considerable variety in applying the law.

All nine justices agreed that restricting children's access to pornographic material did not in itself pose a constitutional problem. Nor was there any dispute that available filters are blunt instruments that, by the use of key words, inevitably block more material than the statute contemplates.

The question was the extent to which this "overblocking" infringes the First Amendment rights of adult library users. Sexually explicit material that comes under the general heading of pornography has First Amendment protection, although obscenity and child pornography do not.

Almost since the birth of the Internet as a mass communications tool, Congress has been trying to shield children from sexually explicit material that it makes available. The earlier efforts, aimed at the operators of Web sites, foundered because of the problem of restricting too much access by adults.

Several elements of the Children's Internet Protection Act served to make it different and constitutionally defensible, in the majority view. One was that the law operates as a condition on receiving federal money rather than a criminal prohibition.

"Congress has wide latitude to attach conditions to the receipt of federal assistance in order to further its policy objectives," Chief Justice Rehnquist said.

Libraries receive $200 million a year under two federal programs, one that provides Internet access at a discount and the other that gives grants for setting up and linking to electronic networks. Although libraries are free to reject the money and ignore the Children's Internet Protection Act, budgetary constraints make that quite unlikely.

Instead, Christopher Wolf, a lawyer who represented one group of challengers, predicted that the law might lead to a proliferation of the "cybercafes" that are popular in other countries but are less common here, places where people can pay modest fees for unrestricted Internet access. He said the law turned "librarians into censors."

The three dissenting justices, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, David H. Souter and John Paul Stevens, disputed the premises of Chief Justice Rehnquist's opinion.

"An abridgment of speech by means of a threatened denial of benefits can be just as pernicious as an abridgment by means of a threatened penalty," Justice Stevens said.

Justice Souter said the proper analogy to blocking the Internet was was not a failure to stock a particular book.

"It is either to buying a book and then keeping it from adults lacking an acceptable `purpose' or to buying an encyclopedia and then cutting out pages with anything thought to be unsuitable for all adults," he said.

He and Justice Ginsburg said public libraries would violate the First Amendment if they blocked the Internet on their own initiative.

In striking down the law last year, a special three-judge federal district court in Philadelphia framed the issue as one of free speech in a public forum, with libraries as surrogates for the First Amendment interests of their users.

A coalition of libraries, library users and Web sites brought the case, suing in Philadelphia, where federal judges had been receptive to a challenge to an earlier version of legislation intended to limit children's access to online pornography.

Internet access does not turn a library into a public forum, Chief Justice Rehnquist said, describing the Internet as an alternative tool for fulfilling libraries' traditional function of helping "research, learning and recreational pursuits."

The opinion, United States v. American Library Association, No. 02-361, appeared to take a narrower view of a "public forum" than the court has used in recent cases.

The issue is significant as a matter of First Amendment doctrine, because the government can curtail speech in a public forum only for compelling reasons.

When the case was argued in March, Solicitor General Theodore B. Olson told the court that librarians would quickly unblock filters without requiring explanations or otherwise violating users' privacy. Even if that were not the case, Chief Justice Rehnquist said today, "the Constitution does not guarantee the right to acquire information at a public library without any risk of embarrassment."

Rain Dates, Lots of Them With Gray Skies Above

Rain Dates, Lots of Them With Gray Skies Above
By ANDREA ELLIOTT
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/20/nyregion/20RAIN.html

Like his fellow New Yorkers, Brian Stites woke yesterday to more of the same: rain.

The sun had escaped New York's skies once again. So Mr. Stites, a painter from Hell's Kitchen, settled for a 10-minute visit with the next closest thing — a tanning salon.

"By this point in the summer I'm used to having a nice tan," said Mr. Stites, 26. "This is getting to be ridiculous."

The city's relentless rain has canceled Little League games, covered weddings with tents, filled pharmacies with requests for cold medicine, cooped up children in arcades and left cabdrivers cruising empty, slickened streets at nightfall.

The mood is dim. Not since May 1989 has New York been held as captive by downpours and their accompanying gray mistresses, that chilling, Londonesque fog. It has rained on 27 of the last 50 days in New York, double the typical amount this time of year. The state's dams are overflowing.

Weekend escapes now come with a weary promise of damp afternoons playing cards. Attendance at New York City's beaches has plummeted 82 percent, to 330,000 from 1.8 million at this time last year. The deadbeat sun has turned the city inward, filling the Barnes & Noble on Broadway near Lincoln Center with would-be parkgoers tricked by false meteorological promises.

"There's nobody at the beach," said Adrian Benepe, the city's parks commissioner. "There's nobody out sunning on Sheep Meadow at Central Park. There's nobody out eating ice cream. Saturday is the first day of summer, and it feels like we've barely gotten through spring."

Day after day, rain pounds the concrete, steams the air and is interrupted only so briefly by cameo appearances of sunshine. More than eight inches of rain have hit New York City this month, said Todd J. Miner, a meteorologist at Pennsylvania State University. "That's getting close to the wettest June of record," he said.

For New Yorkers, the rain is a cruel encore to a harsh winter. Beneath the damp canopy, reactions include ridicule, disgust and plain disbelief.

"It's so depressing, and it feels oppressive," said Damien Gonsalves, a resident of East Hampton Village on Long Island in his 20's. "You wait all year for the warm, sunny season, and it doesn't come. It's much harder for me to get out of bed these days."

To differing degrees, New Yorkers may be suffering from a weather-driven bad mood, said Dr. Norman E. Rosenthal of Rockville, Md., who coined the term seasonal affective disorder, or SAD. Among its symptoms are sadness, anxiety and a tendency to overeat and oversleep.

"People depend on the spring for a resurgence of vitality," Dr. Rosenthal said. "It's no coincidence that spring cleaning occurs in the spring."

The rain has thinned the income of some businesses and padded the pockets of others. Pizza deliveries are up, but roof repair work is — counter to intuition — down. That is because roofs need to be dry for workers to climb up there, said Bill Gunn, the project manager at Five Boro Roofing in the Bronx.

Mr. Gunn normally sends 10 to 12 roof crews out on jobs daily, but is down nowadays to sometimes one job a day. "We have work, but we can't do it," he said. "You send guys out to work, and they come back because it's raining. It's killing us."

Umbrella vendors are also — surprisingly — suffering.

Along Seventh Avenue, Dan Murray, a street vendor, sold "I Love NY" T-shirts, while rows of black umbrellas hung as motionless as stalactites. New Yorkers buy umbrellas only when they are caught unaware, he explained. "Everybody expects rain every day," he said. "That's why it's been slow. It's been hurting business all over."

Horse-riding lessons at the Kensington Stables in Prospect Park, Brooklyn, have nearly ground to a halt. "There are the diehards who ride in the rain," said K. C. Campbell, an instructor at the stable. "I have only two lessons willing to do that."

The Rye Golf Club in Westchester has lost $35,000 in green's fees and golf cart rentals alone, not to mention golf lessons, which are down about 60 percent, and memberships at the pool, which is all but empty.

"Take a wrong step in the rough and you can sink up to your ankle in mud," said Rich Santucci, the club's assistant golf pro. "That's why we can't let the carts out. People usually walk but now even a lot of walkers are not showing up."

But business could not be better or busier for Steve Frost, president of Stamford Tent and Party Rental in Stamford, Conn.

The company has saved galas and weddings at the last minute by padding soppy grounds with artificial covering. Rescue missions also include the added use of heat lamps and tents for things like cocktail tables. "Last year they sat on a shelf," he said. "This year we can't keep them on a shelf. Sales are up."

But the challenge for JoAnn Gregoli, a wedding planner, has been much more trying.

Brides are not easily consoled by the maxim that rain brings luck to their weddings. More mundane things like dye-bleeding shoes and flattened hair take precedence.

"A lot of people worry about their hair," said Ms. Gregoli, owner of Elegant Occasions in New York.

Ms. Gregoli has found herself hunting for the best hotel lobbies in town to replace picturesque Central Park for wedding photos, and ordering stacks of golf umbrellas. The rain has caused many to miss rehearsal dinners because of plane delays — but no wedding cancellations so far.

"It's all crisis management the whole time," she said. "People are panicked. It's just killing the photographs for these people. They can deal with the rain, but they want great shots."

With all its gloom, the rain also comes with perks.

"As much as New Yorkers are now probably sick of it, what all this rain means is that our reservoirs are overflowing," said Christopher Ward, the city's commissioner of environmental protection. "Over 100 percent capacity is great news. Unfortunately, New Yorkers have paid the price with frequently lost weekends of no picnicking or baseball."

McDonald's Asks Meat Industry to Cut Use of Antibiotics

McDonald's Asks Meat Industry to Cut Use of Antibiotics
By DAVID BARBOZA with SHERRI DAY
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/20/business/20MEAT.html

CHICAGO, June 19 — Responding to public health concerns about the overuse of antibiotics in farm animals, the McDonald's Corporation said today that it would ask its meat suppliers around the world to reduce their dependence on antibiotics.

McDonald's said it expected its suppliers to phase out the use of some antibiotics that promote growth in healthy animals and to significantly reduce the use of other antibiotics that typically protect animals against disease. The company's decision was reported in The Washington Post today.

McDonald's said it was making the change because of growing evidence that the use of antibiotics in farm animals was creating antibiotic resistance in animals and in the bacteria that cause diseases in humans.

"It's a public health concern," said Bob Langert, the senior director of social responsibility at McDonald's, which is based in Oak Brook, Ill. "So we're putting the word out that we want to buy less antibiotics in our meat."

Industry officials said the McDonald's decision would likely help alter the way animals are raised around the world because McDonald's is the world's largest restaurant chain and one of the world's biggest purchasers of meat. Last year, the company bought about 2.5 billion pounds of beef, poultry and pork. The European Union has already begun to phase out the use of growth-promoting antibiotics.

Other major restaurants and food companies are expected to follow the lead of McDonald's and force suppliers to cut back antibiotic use.

Antibiotics are widely used in the production of poultry, beef and pork, usually to fight off and control disease, but also to foster quicker or more efficient growth in some animals, particularly chickens.

Meat producers often add growth hormones and growth-promoting antibiotics to animal feed to create faster-growing animals. The McDonald's decision only affects the growth-promoting antibiotics.

The Food and Drug Administration, which regulates the use of antibiotics in farm animals, deems them safe and effective. But today, an F.D.A. official praised McDonald's for responding to concerns that the overuse of antibiotics around the world could allow germs that infect humans to eventually become resistant to treatment.

"McDonald's ought to be commended," said Dr. Linda Tollefson, deputy director of the Center for Veterinary Medicine at the F.D.A. "The thinking is that less use of antibiotics is better in humans and animals."

Some of the biggest meat suppliers for McDonald's, like Tyson Foods and Cargill, also applauded the move today and said they would work to comply with the new standards. But other industry officials said there was not yet enough evidence to justify a rejection of antibiotics.

"This is not a decision motivated by science but by market research," said Dan Murphy, a spokesman for the American Meat Institute, which represents some of the nation's big meat suppliers. "But we support them because perception is often reality."

The Animal Health Institute, which represents the makers of drugs for animals, also said the decision was not based on sound science.

"While we respect McDonald's right to do this, where we decide to put our confidence is in a science-based decision-making process," said Ron Phillips, a spokesman for the institute, which is based in Washington. "McDonald's has come to a marketing decision."

The announcement by McDonald's is just the latest in a series of moves by big food and agriculture companies to respond to consumer and public health concerns about the way the nation's food is produced.

Environmental groups and animal rights activists have complained for years about the growth of factory farms, where animals are housed in crowded conditions, and big packing plants.

They have also complained about the development of genetically altered crops, which are increasingly common on America's farmlands, and the increasing farm dependence on antibiotics that help animals survive in crowded conditions or help them reach slaughter-weight faster.

Now, some of the biggest food and agriculture companies are responding by pressuring their suppliers to use a softer touch.

A year ago, several big poultry producing companies began quietly reducing the antibiotics they fed to healthy chickens to promote growth. Two years ago, McDonald's also asked its suppliers to phase out the use of a class of antibiotics that was closely related to Cipro (the drug best known as a treatment for anthrax in humans) because it could increase resistance to the human drug.

And in recent years, three of the nation's biggest fast-food outlets, McDonald's, Burger King and KFC, have hired animal welfare specialists and instituted new standards on the humane treatment of animals.

In making its announcement today, McDonald's said it had worked with animal welfare specialists and Environmental Defense, an advocacy group often at odds with the food and agriculture industries, to rethink the use of antibiotics.

In a statement, Rebecca Goldburg, an expert on antibiotic resistance at Environmental Defense, praised the decision by McDonald's and criticized the use of growth-promoting antibiotics.

"These antibiotics are often used to compensate for the crowded stressful conditions that are found on many large animal-production facilities," she said.

Not all antibiotics are to be phased out, only growth-promoting antibiotics that are also used in human medicine. For other antibiotics, McDonald's is simply encouraging and giving preference to suppliers that reduce their use of the drugs.

Antibiotic use in the United States is in decline, according to the Animal Health Institute, which said 21.8 million pounds of antibiotics were sold in 2001, down from 23.7 million pounds in 2000. But there are very few reliable statistics on who uses them and what kinds are being used.

The government does not monitor antibiotic use and the companies are often reluctant to publish details or label their products.

Mr. Murphy of the American Meat Institute said that growth-promoting antibiotics are most widely used in poultry, but they are also used heavily in the production of hogs. They are not widely used for cattle, he said.

Tyson, the world's largest beef and poultry producer, says it does not use growth-promoting antibiotics in its poultry products. Its beef products come from ranchers, so much less is known about antibiotic use in beef, the company said.

Cargill, another meat giant, declined today to say whether or not it uses growth-promoting antibiotics.

But Dr. Tollefson, at the F.D.A., said that in the United States "most animals are produced using growth-promoters."

Robert A. Doughty, a spokesman for Burger King, the nation's second-largest fast-food chain, said it had already been "looking at this issue, and we'd had some discussions with our suppliers."

Bob Bertini, a spokesman for Wendy's, said it was "considering additional steps to reduce the use of antibiotics by our livestock and poultry supplier network."

2 Major Wall Street Firms Say Profits Fell Despite Rally

2 Major Wall Street Firms Say Profits Fell Despite Rally
By LANDON THOMAS Jr.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/19/business/19WALL.html

Morgan Stanley reported a 25 percent decline in earnings yesterday and demonstrated how vulnerable the big investment banks can be when they depend on an unpredictable trading environment to drive profitability.

The disappointing results from Morgan Stanley and Bear Stearns, which also reported a profit decline yesterday, show that the big Wall Street firms have yet to cash in on the recent stock market revival. Instead, firms continue to focus on the easier if not riskier game of relying on bond-trading profits in a low interest rate environment.

While Morgan Stanley's bond trading results were stronger than a year ago, they were weaker than what analysts had expected. The bank also took a $287 million charge against earnings because of continuing problems in its aircraft leasing business. In all, earnings fell 25 percent from a year earlier.

Investors pushed down Morgan Stanley's stock nearly 6 percent, or $2.78, to $46.89.

Bear Stearns said its profits declined 20 percent in the second quarter. But excluding a one-time gain from a public offering a year earlier, they rose 38 percent.

The company attributed the strong performance in its core business to robust gains in its fixed-income division. Net revenues in the division increased 48 percent in the latest quarter from a year ago.

The stock of Bear Stearns fell 3 percent yesterday, or $2.47, to $80.01. Since the beginning of the year the stock has gained 35 percent, compared with 17 percent for Morgan Stanley and 26 percent for Merrill Lynch.

Morgan Stanley has traditionally been viewed as conservative among the Wall Street investment banks because of its broad mix of businesses, including credit cards and asset management. But problems at its aircraft unit have made it look riskier to investors.

Stephen S. Crawford, Morgan Stanley's chief financial officer, said yesterday that the firm would stick with the aircraft business for the near future. "We were looking to get out of the business, but because of dislocations in the business, that is not the case now," he acknowledged in a conference call.

The firm's bond sales and trading division had a strong performance, with revenues rising 48 percent from a year earlier.

Though the figures for trading revenue were impressive on the surface, revenue actually fell from the first quarter of this year when the bank recorded some extraordinary results from commodities-related trades. When market volatility — which tends to benefit traders — decreased this quarter, so did the bank's trading profits, underscoring the problem with a dependence on trading.

Fixed-income sales and trading revenue fell 21 percent from the first quarter of this year; equity trading revenue declined 9 percent.

"Their trading numbers were below what the Street was expecting," said Richard K. Strauss, a securities analyst at Deutsche Bank. "And compared to other firms, they won't look as good. Morgan Stanley really needs the I.P.O. and mergers-and-acquisition business to come back, and that's not happening yet."

Morgan Stanley also provided some early signs that the recent stock market revival has begun to attract retail investors. The bank reported a 7 percent sequential increase in its brokerage assets during the second quarter, the first quarterly growth since late 2000. Still, the bank's larger business related to equities continued to lag.

Morgan Stanley's advisory business, which includes mergers and acquisitions, was down 44 percent for the second quarter, and revenues from stock underwriting declined 5 percent from what was a weak quarter last year.

The aircraft leasing charge was a result of a misguided attempt by Morgan Stanley to enter the aircraft leasing business in 2000. The business consists of 180 planes and is now valued at $4.8 billion on the firm's balance sheet. The global slump in the airline industry has forced the firm to start writing down the value of these assets.

Morgan Stanley has acknowledged in regulatory filings that the leasing business was overvalued by as much as 20 percent, and analysts estimate that the eventual write-down, before yesterday's charge, could be as much as $900 million.

In his conference call, Mr. Crawford also said that Morgan Stanley had reduced its head count by 1,000 this year and that he expected staffing to remain level through the end of the year.

For the quarter, Morgan Stanley's earnings were $599 million, or 56 cents a share. Bear Stearns second-quarter earnings were $280 million, or $2.27 a share.

Included in Morgan Stanley's expenses was an $80 million charge to cover possible legal claims related to its granting of shares in initial public offerings to corporate clients. By setting aside such a specific reserve, Morgan Stanley is taking an aggressive stance against future penalties arising from litigation.

Morgan Stanley and 54 other financial institutions are defendants in a suit filed by individual investors who contend that the banks fraudulently manipulated initial public offerings. The suit is aiming for class-action status.

In February, Judge Shira A. Scheindlin of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York turned back a request from the banks to dismiss the case. And in March, lawyers for the plaintiffs petitioned Judge Scheindlin to increase the number of companies covered in the suit to 900 from 300.

Very Richest's Share of Income Grew Even Bigger, Data Show

Very Richest's Share of Income Grew Even Bigger, Data Show
By DAVID CAY JOHNSTON
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/26/business/26TAX.html

The 400 wealthiest taxpayers accounted for more than 1 percent of all the income in the United States in the year 2000, more than double their share just eight years earlier, according to new data from the Internal Revenue Service. But their tax burden plummeted over the period.

The data, in a report that the I.R.S. released last night, shows that the average income of the 400 wealthiest taxpayers was almost $174 million in 2000. That was nearly quadruple the $46.8 million average in 1992. The minimum income to qualify for the list was $86.8 million in 2000, more than triple the minimum income of $24.4 million of the 400 wealthiest taxpayers in 1992.

While the sharp growth in incomes over that period coincided with the stock market bubble, other factors appear to account for much of the increase. A cut in capital gains tax rates in 1997 to 20 percent from 28 percent encouraged long-term holders of assets, like privately owned businesses, to sell them, and big increases in executive compensation thrust corporate chiefs into the ranks of the nation's aristocracy.

This year's tax cut reduced the capital gains rate further, to 15 percent.

The data from 2000 is the latest available from the I.R.S., but various government reports indicate that salaries, dividends and other forms of income have continued to rise since then, even as the stock market has fallen.

The top 400 reported 1.1 percent of all income earned in 2000, up from 0.5 percent in 1992. Their taxes grew at a much slower rate, from 1 percent of all taxes in 1992 to 1.6 percent in 2000, when their tax bills averaged $38.6 million each.

Those numbers can be read to show that the wealthiest, as a group, carried a disproportionate share of the overall tax burden — 1.6 percent of all taxes, versus just 1.1 percent of all income — evidence that all sides in the tax debate will be able to find ammunition in the data.

In 2000, the top 400 on average paid 22.3 percent of their income in federal income tax, down from 26.4 percent in 1992 and a peak of 29.9 percent in 1995. Two factors explain most of this decline, according to the I.R.S.: reduced tax rates on long-term capital gains and bigger gifts to charity.

Had President Bush's latest tax cuts been in effect in 2000, the average tax bill for the top 400 would have been about $30.4 million — a savings of $8.3 million, or more than a fifth, according to an analysis of the I.R.S. data by The New York Times. That would have resulted in an average tax rate of 17.5 percent.

The rate actually paid by the top 400 in 2000 was about the same as that paid by a single person making $123,000 or a married couple with two children earning $226,000, according to Citizens for Tax Justice, a labor-backed group whose calculations are respected by a broad spectrum of tax experts.

The group favors higher taxes on the wealthy, and its director, Robert S. McIntyre, said yesterday that the I.R.S. data bolsters that viewpoint. "Regardless of which party these 400 are in, these are the guys Bush wants to help, even though they have so much money they don't know what to do with it," he said. "How Bush feels about the half of the population that doesn't have much money is he got them a tax cut worth an average of $19 each."

William W. Beach, a tax expert at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative organization that favors lowering taxes for all Americans, said that the top 400 taxpayers made "the significant contribution" to government revenue — about one in every $64 of individual income tax paid. Cutting taxes, he said, will prompt the wealthy to invest more in the economy's growth.

Detailed information about high-income Americans has become increasingly important in setting tax policy, because the government relies on the top 1.3 million households for 37.4 percent of individual federal income tax revenue. The half of Americans who earned less than $27,682 in 2000, paid less than 4 percent of income taxes.

All of the I.R.S. data is based on adjusted gross income, the figure reported on the last line on the front page of individual income tax returns. Interest earned on municipal bonds, which are exempt from tax, is not included.

Over the nine years of tax returns that were examined for the new report, only a handful of taxpayers showed up in the top 400 every year, according to I.R.S. officials. In all, about 2,200 taxpayers made the cut even once. There were a few incomes of more than $1 billion a year in the group, but none as high as $10 billion.

The names of the wealthiest taxpayers are not disclosed in the report, which was prepared at the urging of Joel Slemrod, a University of Michigan business school professor who serves on an I.R.S. advisory panel and is a leading authority on taxation of high-income Americans.

The figures do not include the incomes of the many wealthy Americans who use shelters to reduce their reported incomes below the level of the top 400.

In 1999 and 2000, for example, William T. Esrey — then the chief executive of Sprint, the telecommunications company — earned more than $150 million in stock option profits, lofting him onto many lists of the best-paid corporate managers.

That income might have put Mr. Esrey in the I.R.S.'s top 400 taxpayers. But, as later came to light, Mr. Esrey bought a tax shelter from Ernst & Young, the accounting firm, designed to let him delay reporting the profits for tax purposes until the year 2030. Sprint's board forced Mr. Esrey to resign in March after he acknowledged that the shelter was the subject of an I.R.S. audit.

Over the nine years reviewed in the new report, the incomes of the top 400 taxpayers increased at 15 times the rate of the bottom 90 percent of Americans; their average income rose 17 percent, to $27,000, from 1992 to 2000.

Long-term capital gains accounted for 64 percent of the income of the top 400 in 2000, nearly double the level in 1992. Wages contributed 16.7 percent to the incomes of the top 400 in 2000, down from 26.2 percent in 1992, and dividends made up 2.8 percent.

A second report that the I.R.S. will make public today shows that the number of Americans with high incomes who pay no taxes anywhere in the world has reached a record. In 2000, there were 2,022 Americans with incomes of more than $200,000 who paid no income tax anywhere in the world, up from just 37 in 1977, when the report was first issued.

Men's Survival Secret: Bending Y Chromosome

Men's Survival Secret: Bending Y Chromosome
By NICHOLAS WADE
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/19/science/19GENE.html

Biologists have made a fundamental discovery about how the human Y chromosome, a genetic package inherited by men, protects itself against evolutionary decay.

As part of the work, the scientists have tallied the exact number of genes on the Y chromosome, finding more than they had expected. That and other research has led the researchers to assess the genetic differences between men and women as being considerably greater than thought.

Although most men are unaware of the peril, the Y chromosome has been shedding genes furiously over the course of evolutionary time, and it is now a fraction the size of its partner, the X chromosome. Sex in humans is determined by the fact that men have an X and a Y chromosome in each of their body's cells. Women have a pair of X's.

The decay of the Y stems from the fact that it is forbidden to enjoy the principal advantage of sex, which is, of course, for each member of a pair of chromosomes to swap matching pieces of DNA with its partner.

The swapping procedure, known to biologists as recombination, occurs between the chromosomes inherited from the mother's and the father's side as a first step to produce the eggs or sperm. Not only does that swapping create novel combinations of genes, making each individual different, but it also enables bad genes — those damaged by mutation or DNA changes — to be replaced by their good counterparts on the other chromosome.

Nature has barred the Y chromosome from recombining with the X, except at its very tips, because otherwise the male-determining gene, carried on the Y chromosome, would sneak into the X, making everyone male.

The cost of this abstinence, however, is that most of the Y's genes have been rendered useless by mutation and physically shed. The X and the Y chromosomes were once as similar as the 22 other pairs of human chromosomes, and each carried about 1,000 genes. Now the Y carries fewer than 100. What prevents it losing even those?

A team of researchers led by Dr. David C. Page, a biologist at the Whitehead Institute in Cambridge, Mass., has made a startling discovery. Denied the benefits of recombining with the X, the Y recombines with itself.

The Y chromosome is made of a single DNA molecule that is 51 million units of DNA in length. Within the chromosome, Dr. Page and his colleagues report in Nature today, lie eight vast palindromes, regions that carry identical sequences of DNA units that run in opposite directions like the letters in the sentence "Madam, I'm Adam."

By making a hairpin bend in the middle of a palindrome, the two arms can be brought together, aligning two long stretches of almost identical DNA sequence. That is the same step that precedes recombination between the maternal and paternal members of each ordinary chromosome pair, which also have almost identical sequences.

In the case of the Y, the alignment of the palindromic sequences leads to gene conversion. A mutated gene on one arm of the palindrome can be converted to the undamaged sequence preserved on the other arm.

This narcissistic process of salvation by palindrome seems to be what has saved men from extinction so far. It serves at least to counterbalance the decay caused by the lack of recombination. But Dr. Page and others say it is too soon to say which force is now uppermost.

"This is a pretty striking result," said Dr. William Rice, an expert on the evolution of the sex chromosomes at the University of California at Santa Barbara.

The mechanism, Dr. Rice said, is novel in human biology. It will take more study, he added, to see whether it can reverse Muller's Ratchet, the name that geneticists give to the grim process of irreversible genetic decay that affects asexual organisms and nonrecombining genome parts like the Y chromosome.

"This changes our view of the Y as being an X chromosome wannabe," said Dr. Evan Eichler, an expert on chromosome structure at Case Western Reserve.

The X chromosome, too, is denied the benefits of recombination when paired with the Y. But an X chromosome spends two-thirds of its time in a woman, where it can recombine with another X, dodging the Muller's Ratchet that has so eroded the Y.

The palindromes that make gene conversion possible sometimes foster another result, large deletions of DNA, including the genes that they carry. Those losses are a major cause of male infertility, Dr. Page has found.

Dr. Page's discovery is a fruit of a collaboration with the genome sequencing center at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. Under its previous director, Dr. Robert H. Waterston, and his successor, Dr. Richard K. Wilson, the center decoded the precise DNA sequence in the Y chromosome, a two-year effort.

Dr. Huntington Willard, a genome expert at Duke, said the sequencing effort was "nearly heroic."

"Most people," Dr. Willard said, "would have thrown their hands in the air and said this is too much like heavy lifting."

Although most of the human genome was decoded using DNA from several people, the Y had to be decoded from one man, because the natural variation between two men would have swamped the very small differences in the arms of the Y's palindromic DNA.

The donor of this Y chromosome is anonymous and designated by a sample number. But it is known that he was recruited locally by the Roswell Park Cancer Institute in Buffalo. So it can only be said that the person who revealed the secret of male survival is a Buffalo man known to science as Mr. RPCI-11.

In the course of a long study of the Y chromosome, Dr. Page's team has now tallied that it contains 78 genes, some concerned with male fertility and sperm production and others with general biological functions. The fertility genes are almost all sited in the palindromic regions of DNA. Dr. Page theorizes that the other genes are on their way out or that the damage from failure to recombine may drop off after just a handful of genes is left.

The finding of 78 active genes on the Y contradicts an earlier impression of the chromosome as being a genetic wasteland apart from its male-determining gene. But if the Y is not a wasteland, important consequences ensue for the differences between men and women.

As often noted, the genomes of humans and chimpanzees are 98.5 percent identical, when each of their three billion DNA units are compared. But what of men and women, who have different chromosomes?

Until now, biologists have said that makes no difference, because there are almost no genes on the Y, and in women one of the two X chromosomes is inactivated, so that both men and women have one working X chromosome.

But researchers have recently found that several hundred genes on the X escape inactivation. Taking those genes into account along with the new tally of Y genes gives this result: Men and women differ by 1 to 2 percent of their genomes, Dr. Page said, which is the same as the difference between a man and a male chimpanzee or between a woman and a female chimpanzee.

Almost all male-female differences, whether in cognition, behavior, anatomy or susceptibility to disease, have usually been attributed to the sex hormones. But given the genomic differences that are now apparent, that premise has to be re-examined, in Dr. Page's view.

"We all recite the mantra that we are 99 percent identical and take political comfort in it," Dr. Page said. "But the reality is that the genetic difference between males and females absolutely dwarfs all other differences in the human genome."

Dr. Rice commented that he would have to think through this argument, noting that many genes - up to 15 percent in some animals - are more active in one sex than the other. These differences in gene activity might dwarf the genomic differences described by Dr. Page, he said.

Another difference that has emerged between men and women concerns their ribosomes, the numerous small engines in the cell that build its working parts from the instructions in the genes. A general purpose gene on the Y makes a ribosome component. Its counterpart gene on the X makes a slightly different protein.

That means that every ribosome in a man's body is slightly different from those in a woman's. Though the difference is pervasive, Dr. Page said, it was not known what significance it may have, if any.

One thing his study had made him sure of was the complexity with which nature accomplishes its ends.

"It's a great irony that though the Y has been called a sex chromosome," Dr. Page said, "the bulk of it is asexual. Nothing is as it appears."

Spacecraft Give 'Deeper' Picture of the Origin of Galaxies

Spacecraft Give 'Deeper' Picture of the Origin of Galaxies
By DENNIS OVERBYE
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/20/science/20GALA.html

Astronomers unveiled the first results yesterday from what they said was the most searching look yet into the origin of galaxies and how they grew.

Staring at two patches of sky, one in the north and one in the south, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and Chandra X-ray Observatory assembled a snapshot of cosmic history, the astronomers said, that reaches back to less than a billion years after the Big Bang in which the universe was born.

A billion years corresponds to about 8 percent of the age of the universe, said Dr. Mauro Giavalisco, an astronomer at the space telescope who was a leader of the survey known as the Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey, or Goods. That, Dr. Giavalisco said, is "the period when galaxies and humans evolved the quickest."

Dr. Niel Brandt, an X-ray astronomer at Pennsylvania State University, said, "We are seeing galaxy children."

Augmented by ground-based observatories and the soon-to-be launched Space Infrared Telescope Facility, which will perform its own sweep of the same patches of sky, Goods is a successor to earlier surveys in which the Hubble stared at a pair of tiny patches of sky, recording galaxies far back in time. The new survey is wider, encompassing an area of sky equal to about half of a full moon — an area 33 times as large as that covered by the earlier "deep field" effort — and containing some 50,000 galaxies. Moreover, because the Hubble's new Advanced Camera for Surveys has a greater sensitivity in the infrared part of the electromagnetic spectrum, it can see deeper into time. (Galaxies far, far away and thus back in time have their light shifted to longer infrared wavelengths.)

Among the surprises, Dr. Giavalisco said, is that the universe was copiously producing stars as early as a billion years of age. Some earlier surveys had suggested that star formation had started out slowly and then peaked until the universe was three billion to six billion years old.

According to the Goods results, however, star formation started out at a high rate and stayed that way until about seven billion years ago. Then the rate fell precipitously, perhaps because all the primordial hydrogen, the gas of which stars are made, had been used up or heated up too far to condense.

In the dark realm of black holes, meanwhile, evolution was following a different course.

Dr. Brandt described the X-ray half of the survey as "a black hole core sample" of the universe. The goal, he said, was to study the evolution of black holes — millions or billions times the mass of the Sun — thought to lurk in the centers of most galaxies belching X-rays as they swallow stray gas and stars.

"The Chandra data are very cool," said Dr. Michael Turner, a cosmologist at the University of Chicago, "because essentially every image you see is a supermassive black hole. Where else are black holes so easy to see?"

Out of the 540 black hole candidates that Chandra counted, however, only a handful seem to date from the first billion years, even though galaxies were already numerous then, Dr. Brandt said. Black holes do not seem to "turn on" until a billion years later.

The data could resolve a chicken-and-egg question about which come first, galaxies or the black holes inside them. "Our data suggest that the galaxies come first and then supermassive black holes grow inside them," Dr. Brandt said.

What happens next, he said, depends on the mass of the black hole, with more massive ones growing and becoming active more quickly and generally lodging in more luminous galaxies or quasars. The "heyday" of the quasars, home of super-mighty black holes, happened when the universe was two billion to four billion years old, Dr. Brandt said, but the numbers of more moderate mass black holes, as registered by their X-ray activity, peaked when the universe was about 10 billion years old.

About seven of the black holes in the new survey have no optical counterparts, Dr. Brandt said. They could be in galaxies even more distant in time, in the so-called ages when the universe was only half a billion years old and still swaddled in gas that blocked all light, or they could be closer but swaddled in thick dust.

"They are very exciting, no matter what they are," Dr. Brandt said.

A Famed Resort Where Tourists Fear to Tread

A Famed Resort Where Tourists Fear to Tread
By SETH MYDANS
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/20/international/asia/20THAI.html

PATTAYA, Thailand, June 14 — It is as if the terrorist attack had already occurred. Beaches and bars are nearly empty. Tour ferries float at anchor in the distance. Even the elephants are idle, with few customers to ride them.

Thailand's most famous beach resort is a study in suspended animation, devastated by a slowdown in tourism caused by fears of terrorism and SARS infection.

This week, things got even worse as Thailand found itself in the bull's-eye of the latest terrorist threats.

In the country's Muslim south, the police arrested three men they said were members of a terrorist cell that was planning to attack embassies and entertainment spots.

At the same time, on a visit to Washington, Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra declared that Thailand was an ally in the worldwide campaign against terror, something he had strenuously avoided saying in the past.

Until now, the national policy has boiled down to the plea voiced today by a restaurant manager here: "Why us? We're friendly."

As soon as the arrests were announced, Australia, 88of whose people died in the terrorist bombing in Bali last October, issued a warning to its citizens to stay away from beach resorts in Thailand.

Here in Pattaya, speculation has focused on a popular nightclub and a central shopping plaza as potential targets even though, with so few customers, they would seem to be poor targets.

"I try to stay away from the plaza," said Munir Hasan, a salesman at one of the dozens of tailor shops that make it seem as though people come to Pattaya to get suits made as much as to go to the beach. "It's on people's minds," he said as he sat on the stoop of his empty shop.

One waitress told of the day a man with what seemed Middle Eastern looks had entered her nightclub, used the bathroom, then walked out again.

"We didn't know what to do," she said. "We were all afraid to go back there and look."

No figures were available to illustrate the slowdown in Pattaya, but these days it looks more like a stage set of a beach resort with a famous red-light district than the real thing.

At the empty bars, the lights flash, the music pulses and the pretty women wiggle in the doorways calling out: "Welcome! Welcome!"

On the beach, rows of striped canvas lounge chairs stand nearly empty under their forests of parasols. Young men wait by stacks of black inner tubes, ready to rent them out.

The surf laps quietly at the sand. Almost no one is out there splashing.

It has been like this for months, people here say. "Everybody is scared," said a travel agent here. "The Thais don't visit China and the Chinese don't visit Thailand."

Last year 10.8 million tourists came to Thailand and spent $7.7 billion, 6 percent of the country's gross domestic profit, said Somkid Jatusripitak, the deputy prime minister for economic affairs and tourism, in a speech this week.

Tourism has permeated almost all walks of life and has become part of Thailand's image of itself. "The land of smiles wears a smile as always," Mr. Somkid said bravely.

A receptionist at a nearly empty seaside hotel here said he was sure that everything was safe.

"We have video cameras everywhere," he said. "We can check everything. And in the garage we have a video camera. Every car that comes in, we have a record. And in the lobby also, and also outside the entrance."

Boonlua Chatree, who covers the police beat for the local weekly, Pattaya Mail, said the police were paying special attention to Middle Easterners, many of whom congregate in a small area known as Little Saudi.

He said prejudice against Middle Easterners is quite strong here among both residents and visitors.

On what is called Walking Street, in the heart of the city's entertainment district, one open-fronted bar has posted a sign that reads: "No Arab people to sit down here. We do not want Arab people consuming alcohol or molesting women. We respect your belief in Islam."

Caméra Vérité; A Peek Through Blue-Collar Lenses

Caméra Vérité; A Peek Through Blue-Collar Lenses
By ANTHONY DePALMA (NYT) 1270 words
Late Edition - Final , Section B , Page 1 , Column 1
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/18/nyregion/18PHOT.html

LEAD PARAGRAPH - In the vast convoy of vehicles that rumble through New York every day, Zu Rong Li's delivery truck is indistinguishable from the rest until he pulls to a curb and leaves the engine running and the driver's seat empty while he takes a photograph.

Mr. Li stops his truck where others rarely stop, to shoot pictures of things others rarely see: beneath a bridge he saw a long row of columns that he considered an image of continuity and friendship; he stopped by the old Brooklyn Army Terminal one day to photograph a single railroad tanker car that suggested the history of power and war; and the American flag reflecting on a shiny wall made him stop because it seemed such a glorious symbol of freedom.

[this was a nice article, but came back too late before the article was taken offline.]

For Lonely Travelers, TV Is Companion Away

For Lonely Travelers, TV Is Companion Away
By SUSAN STELLIN
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/17/business/17TUBE.html

There is a dirty little secret harbored by many business travelers, and it has nothing to do with abusing their expense accounts or with romantic interludes on the road.

It is about how much television they watch while holed up alone in their hotel room: apparently, way too much. Some even say they feel powerless to turn it off.

''It's like eating candy -- it's comforting and it makes you feel terrible afterwards, but you can't stop yourself,'' said Kim Robinson, an editor at a New York publishing company who travels for work about once a month. Though she rarely watches television at home in Brooklyn, in a hotel the first thing in the morning she turns it on. And at night, she will watch -- well, just about anything.

''One-hour TV dramas that I can flip in and out of, 'Dateline' episodes about someone being kidnapped in some small town somewhere, 'Antiques Road Show,' '' she said, rattling off a typical hotel-induced lineup. ''I always think I'll watch a movie, but I end up flipping and flipping. It's almost like you can't get comfortable in the bed and you can't get comfortable with anything that's on.''

Though their motivations and channel surfing habits differ to some degree, business travelers with a TV habit -- and their ranks are strong -- all marvel at their inability to resist the lure.

''I walk in and I find the remote -- I mean, I'm still holding my bags and I turn the TV on,'' said Ed Roche, a bond analyst with Moody's Investors Service in New York. He admits he will sometimes leave the television on until 3 a.m., listing CNN, A&E biographies and 'Law and Order' reruns as some of his favorites. ''Usually at home, I watch one episode and I'm done; in a hotel I can watch them back to back,'' he said. Which makes no sense, he confesses; he now has an infant child at home who keeps him up at night, and the smart thing to do would be to turn in early to catch up on his sleep.

A professor at a Midwestern university, who requested anonymity so a coming tenure review is not jeopardized, said he did not have a television at home precisely because he is such a self-described TV addict, but when he travels to conferences he is capable of watching all night long. '' 'Animal Planet,' bad movies, maybe three movies in a row,'' he said. ''After the first one, I look at my watch and say, 'You've got to turn off the TV.' Then I'll surf around and see what the next movie is. Pretty soon I'm interested in it, even if it's garbage.''

So why is it that even people who can control their couch potato tendencies at home turn into zombies on the road?

''TV takes you away from how you feel at any given moment,'' said Robert Kubey, associate professor of journalism and media studies at Rutgers University. ''It isn't a huge escape, but it distracts us from ourselves.''

For business travelers, Dr. Kubey said, what television typically distracts them from is being alone. ''It feels like you're being social with people,'' he said, admitting that when he travels for work, his virtual social circle tends to include the characters on 'Seinfeld.' ''I can see an episode I've seen three or four times and laugh and enjoy it,'' he said. ''We're creatures of habit -- you feel more like you're back home now even though you're traveling.''

The comfort of television turns into a problem, he said, when people cannot get past the barrier that keeps them from pressing the off button. ''There's a momentary feeling of emptiness when you turn the thing off,'' he said, adding that his strategy to get over that letdown is to say, ''I think we can handle those first few moments of feeling out of sorts.''

Another factor contributing to road warriors' TV habits may be the changing nature of business travel. Joe Brancatelli, a business travel writer who publishes the Web site joesentme.com, said: ''There's this fantasy that business travelers fly into a town, entertain lavishly and fly out the next day. That's not business travel anymore.''

These days, he said, business travelers are expected to keep up with what is going on back in the office, which means answering e-mail and returning phone calls from their hotel rooms, regardless of the hour. ''It's not like you can do anything other than work, so you're going to flip on the TV in the background,'' Mr. Brancatelli said.

And when employees stuck in a hotel room finally do turn off their laptops, they want to reward themselves -- whether that means watching the basketball playoffs or HBO. Mr. Brancatelli said he had gotten calls from business travelers asking, ''Do you know if they have HBO in this hotel? Because I'm not going if I can't watch 'The Sopranos.' ''

Indeed, hotels may be catching on to that desire. Roger Swadish, area vice president for operations of the Hilton Hotel Corporation, which installed 42-inch plasma-screen televisions in every room of the recently reopened Millenium Hilton Hotel in Lower Manhattan, said the television in a hotel room ''is as important as a bed these days.''

According to Mr. Swadish, Hilton's research indicates 98 percent of guests walk into a room and turn on the TV set, while 30 to 35 percent use pay-per-view in their rooms. Although Hilton does not have figures to prove it, Mr. Swadish said, the company believes that the business traveler uses pay-per-view more than the tourist does.

Which brings up a topic that, at least on the record, business travelers are not so forthcoming about: how many are watching soft-core pornographic movies on the road?

Though, not surprisingly, he demurred on that subject, Scott Gilman, director of business development for a software company in Boston, said the potential for raised eyebrows over his hotel bill keeps him from ordering even benign pay-per-view movies very often.

''It basically says 'movie' on the bill, even if I'm watching 'Treasure Island' by Disney,'' Mr. Gilman said, so although he sometimes watches a pay-per-view movie he missed in the theater, ''That's always on the back of my mind, so I don't do it a lot.''

He mostly travels to New York City on business and said his TV watching depended partly on whether the décor gives him a lift and makes him feel good. ''If the room is nice, I tend to not watch as much TV -- it motivates me to go out,'' he said.

On the opposite end of the spectrum is David Silva, a lawyer in New York, who says that after years of traveling for work, the allure of sightseeing on business trips has worn off, and thus his TV viewing in hotels has increased. Also, with two children at home needing homework help or competing for the remote, he said, ''I often end up watching television on the road because that's really my only opportunity to watch it.'' Even so, he admitted, ''You find yourself getting caught up in shows that you would never watch.''

For instance?

''I found myself in England one night watching people playing poker for over an hour,'' he said. ''Really, there was nothing else on.''

Six Degrees of Sexual Frustration

Six Degrees of Sexual Frustration
by William O'Shea
June 4 - 10, 2003
http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0323/oshea.php

"I've always had a tourist fantasy," says Rex, a singer in a New York City electroclash band. He recently had the opportunity to live out his fetish through Friendster.com, an online community for making friends and finding dates.

"He was no one I knew, a tourist who was in town for a few days," the vocalist continues. "I was flattered and weirdly curious." The traveler invited Rex (as he would like to be called) out on a date. "Under 99 percent of these circumstances I would have stayed away, but I happened to think he was cute. We got together for coffee. We met again later that night for a date and hooked up. It was really hot—a hot rendezvous."

Just as Napster exploded in popularity a few years ago, Friendster is now making its own climb to Internet stardom. By May, just three months after its beta release, the site had grown to over 300,000 users.

In practice, Friendster is far different from its file-sharing cousin. It is completely Web-based, with no peer-to-peer application to download, and the "sharing" is purely metaphorical. But it is expanding for the same reason Napster did—members have an interest in making it more popular, because that means there's more to trade. While similar new services like Ryze.org and LinkedIn.com help people swap business contacts, Friendster is one of the few places that help you swap your friends.

Friendster works on the same principle as the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon game, where you find connections between movie stars. People who join post profiles of themselves including photos, interests, favorite books, TV shows, and movies. Browse someone's profile—anyone within three degrees of separation is fair game—and you also see thumbnail pictures of their friends. If one looks interesting, you can click it for a full profile. With another click you can send a message, though the site safeguards your e-mail address to thwart unwanted come-ons.

Not strictly a dating service, Friendster has built its success on its casual feel. There are no cupids or hearts on the site, nothing to indicate it's anything but a tool for connecting with friends. But although you could use it to meet a fellow Scrabble aficionado or an ultimate Frisbee partner, the site ends up being largely about dating. "For every one user of online dating services, there are probably 10 people who would use Friendster because they're more comfortable with the approach," says company founder Jonathan Abrams. "Friendster is less creepy. It's a little more like real life."

Harris Danow, a development assistant at Miramax, has used online personals services but prefers Friendster. "It isn't threatening, like dating sites. It's called Friendster, not 'Fuckster' or 'Makeoutster,' " he says. "It's like the kiddie pool of online dating." Harris has been contacted by several women through his online profile and went out with one. "I didn't think of it as a place for making dates, but women started contacting me. On Friendster people can check out your credentials, meaning that someone can ask your friend, 'What's the deal with this person?' It keeps you on your best behavior. You couldn't get away with meeting someone on Friendster, sleeping with her, and never calling her back. There's a net behind you."

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Friendster is beginning to impact real-life socializing in intriguing ways. "It's interesting that now, when I go out to social gatherings, it seems as if just about everyone is on Friendster," says James Meetze, a publisher from Oakland, California. "The other night I was at an art opening when a girl approached me and said, 'I've seen you on the Internet.' I made the connection that she had recently sent me a message on Friendster about liking to eat kittens. I said, 'Oh, right, you're the kitten eater, please stay away from my kittens.' "

The site is emerging as a means to check out would-be mates. Lauryn Siegel, an unemployed production office manager in New York, spends much of her newfound free time browsing the service. "Friendster is the new Googling. It lets you find out more about a person, to put them in context."

This narrowing of social groups has created its share of awkward online moments. Lauryn found an old flame in her circle of friends, one she didn't want to rekindle. "I didn't think I would ever lay eyes on this person again. Maybe it's not so surprising. We're both from Northern California, both into music. . . . Everyone accepts that it's a small world, but Friendster makes it a lot more apparent."

Rex, the Friendster user with the tourist fantasy, also hints that there was something unsavory about his experience. "It was a successful one-night stand," he says, but the hookup came with an element of limbo and a touch of Velcro. "He's not in New York, but we are still in touch because of the way we met. We're Friendsters now."

The lack of anonymity can be uncomfortable, but it fuels the site. Once people join, they can invite friends, who can then invite still other friends. Jonathan Ringen, an assistant editor at Metropolis, is a new member. "I signed on to Friendster and after some quick browsing discovered that everybody I know is on this thing," he says. "I'm shocked that it took me this long to get an invitation!" Jonathan had unwittingly fallen victim to a new phenomenon—the virtual snub.

Despite Friendster's apparent popularity, CEO Abrams insists that making money is not his priority—at least not yet. He runs the five-person operation on a teenager's night-out budget. "We're trying to be really frugal. We're working out of our living rooms and apartments. I decided I wasn't really keen on raising money and getting a fancy office and spending tons of money." After the site graduates from its beta stage, he intends to keep membership free but begin charging for certain services like sending messages to Friendsters through the site.

What the network has going for it, says Friendster dater Harris, is that it is "insanely addictive." You can spend hours clicking around, cruising pictures and profiles. "I look at it every day, multiple times a day, like checking my e-mail," he says. In some circles, it seems to have replaced e-mail as a more convenient form of communication. The publisher James notes, "For a lot of us, [Friendster] is how we keep in touch. It's easier than e-mail" because you don't have to remember people's addresses—just click their pictures.

Perhaps the ultimate marker of success is that Friendster has already spawned two parody sites: Enemyster and Fiendster.

Users are also posting phony profiles of celebrities like Johnny Knoxville and Axl Rose. Ezekiel Lee, a/k/a Johnny Knoxville, explains, "I had been on Friendster for a couple of months and was getting kind of bored with it. It felt like I had hit a ceiling as far as how many new people I was meeting." So he decided to create a fake personality. "I have gotten more than one girl who actually thinks that I am the real Knoxville to send me naked photos of herself. I couldn't believe it. Here are these seemingly normal women who are sending me, some random guy, nude photos. Pretty ridiculous if you ask me."

Spring Street, a Stroll for All Seasons

Spring Street, a Stroll for All Seasons
By RICHARD LOURIE
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/20/arts/20SPRI.html

I grew oblivious to Spring Street. It was bound to happen. It's the street I take to leave my neighborhood at the west end of Canal Street, it's the street I take to get home. Over time it became no more than a stretch of cement between me and where I was going. But this year, after a winter like a recession that wouldn't quit, I decided to stretch my legs and walk the length of the street to where it dead-ends at the Bowery.

The first thing I discovered was that Spring Street was eminently strollable — long enough to be invigorating but not so long as to be wearying. The pace is naturally leisurely because there is so much variety at ground level with nary a dull block en route. Its contrasts are startling. At one end there's the bar-restaurant Ear Inn, in a building dating from 1817; at the other the new rice-pudding-only Rice to Riches, whose design style is 22nd-century Jetsons futurismo — from "Gangs of New York" to "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" all on a single street.

As I walked, I also saw that cross streets make cross sections. Spring Street bisects three neighborhoods — a still nameless stretch between West Street and the Avenue of the Americas followed by SoHo and an area north of Little Italy often called NoLIta. All three are examples of artists' districts discovered and then commercialized, but all three are in very different stages of the process, SoHo being the most advanced.

Glanced into from its perimeters, the little anonymous enclave between the Hudson and Hudson — the river and the street — can seem forbidding, industrial, bleak: sanitation trucks and three blocks' worth of U.P.S. vans are not the props of many fantasies. But that first impression would be doubly wrong. The neighborhood is unusually chummy and has some of the oldest buildings in the city, dating from the early 1800's. Behind the bar, the Ear Inn displays the detritus of decades past — whiskey jugs and long clay Dutch pipes, entire vanished generations, outlasted by their trash.

An art zone in the 70's and 80's when Roy Lichtenstein and Larry Rivers had studios nearby, this area was spared SoHo's commercialized fate because no galleries opened there. Geographically, it was far enough off the beaten track that it didn't even have a name — not really SoHo, West Village or TriBeCa. The artists called it Limbo. Known as the Upper West Side in the early 19th century when New York was young and small and all downtown, it was later referred to as the Lower West Side. Current attempts like NoCa (North of Canal) or Hudson Square haven't stuck. Udi Behr, a local kibitzer of genius, has suggested UPStown. Who knows? It might fly.

This neighborhood may not have a name but it has a definite character and flavor. Still populated by painters and writers, along with designers, video people and the sort of young Hollywood actors who prefer lofts to bungalows, the neighborhood is marked by wit and offhand eccentricity. Around the corner on Greenwich Street is a window where poetry and agitprop appear, like one sign that has President Bush saying: "Why should I care what the majority of the American people think? They didn't even vote for me."

Next door, at 488 Greenwich, is a rare-cookbook store whose proprietor, Joanne Hendricks, displays in her window offerings like "Sandwich Manual for Professionals." (Add lunchmeat B to bread slice A . . .) A few steps farther toward Spring is Castillo, a little theater that specializes in ethnic and political drama, which will be moving to Theater Row (543 West 42nd Street) in the fall. The southwest corner of Spring and Greenwich is Iberian: Pinxtos, a restaurant gem of authenticity and artistry, is Basque; Pão, Portugese, manages to be cozy and sexy all at once, and Kaña, which serves tapas, has the late-night crackle of Spain.

The north side of the street has gone a little ritzy of late. A new restaurant named Spring Street specializes in truffles; Giorgione, whose part owner is Giorgio DeLuca of Dean & Deluca, guaranteeing exquisite freshness of produce, is already threatening to become the Elaine's of downtown.

Other than the high-end furniture store Wyeth, this part of town is essentially shopless. But there are clubs, bars and lounges like Noca, Sway and the scruffy, semilegendary Don Hill's. What will probably doom this neighborhood to development and overdevelopment is not celebrity like SoHo's but something much simpler: riv vu.

Hip Clubs and Fire Museum

The two blocks of Spring between Hudson and the gates of SoHo at the Avenue of the Americas seem to belong to no part of the city, have no quality of neighborhood, are just pure downtown. At night a few clubs set out their bouncers and velvet ropes to herd their clientele — young, overdressed, braving obstacles of weather and indignity in the firm belief that something at the other end will make it all worthwhile.

Yet that block also has the New York City Fire Museum at No. 278, which first attracts the eye with its etched glass image of firefighters in profile and a video display of 9/11. For the country and the world the twin towers have become symbolic, iconic. Their meaning downtown is more down to earth. Sept. 11 was not only an attack on the country and city but on the neighborhood as well. The towers are what's missing when you cross Hudson and look south for oncoming cars.

What is best about the Fire Museum is the Americana — in one case, a stuffed dog, the heroic companion of firemen who could not bear to part with him, a street mutt all heart. Just as wonderful is the red and gold beauty of the old fire engines, their ornate brass gleaming. A hand-drawn hose reel from the Long Island City Fire Department from 1875 is strikingly elegant.

Before 1865 all fire departments were volunteer and they vied with each other in dash and bravery, in baseball, parades and, aesthetically, in a range of objects used in parades and ceremonies; some, like the presentation shields, are particularly handsome. A red, slender horse-drawn fire sleigh of the 19th century reminds us of days when Lower Manhattan was mostly meadow and springs did indeed gush from the ground — whence Spring Street derives its name.

The area's history is colorful and rowdy. George Washington was headquartered there; later it was chockablock with saloons and fishmongers, free black oystermen and home to the Boodle Gang — infamous for garroting. During the Depression the west end of Spring Street was a Hooverville — a shantytown for the homeless and jobless. There was once an El on Greenwich Street constructed with fanfare and now gone without a trace.

SoHo: The Next Generation

Eccentricity and experimentation may be long gone from SoHo itself, but it lives on at its western border at the Avenue of the Americas. A complex of theaters, an art gallery and a café, all existing under the general name Here Arts Center, preserve a bit of the flavor of those bygone days when art was more adventure than career. ACE Gallery on Hudson Street has the same feel of authenticity, but it operates on a larger, more professional scale.

SoHo is in very bad odor with the culturati. Those who still live there try to slip unseen out of their front door as if leaving assignations. The galleries have fled like startled pigeons, mostly to Chelsea, some to 57th Street. The fabled Spring Street Bookstore near West Broadway has now become a clothing emporium. It may still be possible to write a novel in SoHo, but not to buy one.

Though SoHo has become a district of fashion, furniture and fine dining, traces of its previous incarnations can still be spotted. Vesuvio Playground, at Thompson Street, named for an old renowned Italian bakery on Prince Street one block north, is a little more than half an acre surrounded by chain link, with netless basketball hoops and hard wooden benches painted a deep municipal green. Old-timers from the neighborhood might reminisce here over a slice from Ben's Pizza at No. 177 about what the place was like even before the artists came and went.

And most of the restaurants in this section intersected by Sullivan and Thompson Streets are Italian — Fiamma, L'Ulivo, Mezzegiorno — ready to spill out onto the sidewalk at the slightest provocation of a warm breeze. Prince Street boasts the classic cafes Borgia and Tina, but Spring Street does have an establishment that is decidedly offbeat, Mix, half cafe, half shoe store. There's a touch of old SoHo cheekiness in that combo.

Charles Darwin would probably be as surprised to find himself on the British 10-pound note as to learn that Evolution is a store at 120 Spring that sells everything from saber-tooth tiger skulls (reproductions) to freeze-dried mice (real). For some reason, creationism has yet to inspire any boutiques. In any case, Evolution, the store, is a reminder that the ferocious change that marks New York is a law of nature.

In a way SoHo's evolution was fitting. It wasn't high-tech or medical offices that opened after the artists left but restaurants, furniture stores, clothing shops and establishments devoted to makeup — Mary Boone replaced by Helena Rubenstein, Castelli by Armani. There's a certain continuity there as well, the beauty of art giving way to the beauty of adornment, the distance between triptych and lipstick shorter than suspected.

World of Artsy Commerce

Even in the blocks between West Broadway and Broadway there are some glimmers of the old SoHo, though some may postdate SoHo's demise. The open-air clothing and jewelry market at the corner of Wooster Street has that been-around-forever feel. Flint Butera, an artist who sells his work on the street, has been dodging the cops, critics in blue, for 13 years. And there are some nice contrasts. The classic bistro Balthazar — vast, mirrored, celebratory — is across the street from the Open Center, a "spiritual supermarket" where people are more concerned with past lives than today's dinner.

"You know what NoLIta stands for?" asked a woman with whom I'd struck up a conversation on Spring Street east of Broadway.

"Sure," I said, "North of Little Italy."

"Wrong," she said. "No Low-Income Tenants Allowed."

Wistful, bitter, the joke was simultaneously nostalgic and prophetic. Would the neighborhood simply be a rerun of SoHo, high rents squeezing out the creative spirits who gave the place its personality in the first place? But that may not be the right template at all. NoLIta was always a place of artsy commerce, of the "`sensibility store" that showcased its owner's taste and skill while also being a venue for vending its products. New additions to the neighborhood like the glowing futurist Rice to Riches and Café Lebowitz, with its Mitteleuropean décor and cuisine, are both examples of high design in the service of attracting customers.

It is a quarter of the young, judging by the clientele packing bars like Sweet and Vicious at No. 5 or easygoing eateries like Bread at No. 20; for the younger generations the conflict between art and commerce was never so pronounced as it was for preceding ones.

The real clue to the future may be found in Spring Street's second etched-glass figure, that of Bruce Lee in the window of the storehouse of SSUR, whose outlet is at 219A Mulberry. The end of Spring Street north of Little Italy might yet be absorbed into an expanding Chinatown. The present will become another stratum of the past. Future historians will puzzle over the early 21st century when people could buy cigarettes in drugstores but couldn't smoke them in bars.

singapore

arrived in singapore early this morning via frankfurt for a one day layover on my way to hanoi. with all the cheap fares to asia this summer, it was too tempting not to come over. i told myself that i could still proceed with my work, and have a vacation at the same time. but we'll have to see how much work i actually get done.

after a week of trying to secure the right flights, everything came together almost too quickly. got my visa this friday, and a ticket saturday, for a sunday flight! hardly had enough time to tell anyone i was leaving, not to speak of getting myself ready. my plan is to spend a few weeks in hanoi, then go diving in koh tao, and a few more days in singapore on the way back.

my first impression of singapore is like a mix of hawaii, san francisco, and hong kong. relatively, a relaxed tropical environment, in a spread out urban area (lots of people drive here), with a mind for business. yet walking around this morning, the city seemed deserted around the "downtown" areas of robinson and bridge roads. virtually no tourists, and many businesses opening at 11am still closed. around noon, people seemed to come out of their air conditioned offices for lunch. but definitely not the desperate freneticness of HK.

got to meet up with an old NYC friend for lunch, and later dinner, together with another ex-HK friend. she used to work across the street from me while i was at DLJ, and later came over to work for DLJ too. afterwards, she had moved to HK, where she put me up for several weeks while i was travelling in asia on my last trip two years ago. can't believe its been that long.

tomorrow, on to vietnam...