Matt Connors
Untitled
2008
oil on canvas, wood frame
29 1/2 x 23 1/2 inches

Varda Caivano
Untitled
2003
oil on canvas
18 x 14 1/4 inches

at Karyn Lovegrove

By JOSHUA YAFFA
NY Times Published: January 2, 2009

My parents arrived in Berkeley in 1969, just as city cops were storming People’s Park. They took an evening photography course in a crumbling studio not far from the Bay Bridge. After each class, their teacher, a failed portrait photographer who had turned to Native American hallucinogens in an attempt to revive his work, would prepare a communal meal for the half-dozen students, using the same solvent-stained pots and pans that he had just used to mix photo-developing chemicals. Phenidone and potassium bromide were somehow acceptable foodstuffs, my parents reasoned, but brown soda, processed cheese and red dye No. 2, no way.

Such was the prejudice my sister had to overcome to get her first taste of Burger King. Jess was 5 in 1980, when she made an errant turn on her roller skates and had a run-in with a brick wall. The accident left her with a crumpled nose oozing blood and snot and what she realized was a perhaps once-in-a-lifetime chance for a hamburger.

At the hospital, the deal was struck. Jess wouldn’t freak out as the doctor threaded the dozen stitches, and in return, my mother would grant one fast-food burger of her choosing. My sister, having no real empirical knowledge of the matter, didn’t really know the difference between a vanilla milkshake and a packet of mayonnaise. She went with a Whopper.

I didn’t have it much easier. Although I lacked a massive facial injury to bolster my case, I staged a demonstration of my own at age 9. I had found my wedge issue, the inherent contradiction in my parents’ dueling child-rearing impulses — their proud insistence upon a child’s right to self-determination versus the desire to feed the family as if we were a stable of horses.

My father, a lawyer, intervened with a compromise. My sister and I would each be allowed to pick out a box of sugary cereal once a year on our birthdays. I usually went with Frosted Flakes. My sister went straight for the hard stuff, choosing noxiously sweet boxes of Cocoa Puffs or Cookie Crunch.

At school, other kids’ lunches amazed me, and I could only imagine what other sorts of exotic and deviant child-rearing my classmates were receiving at home. As poor 10-year-old Ryan Oliver took a swig from his can of Pepsi, I pictured his father, taking a drag on a menthol cigarette just before dropping in on a skateboard on the half-pipe in the family’s living room.

Bargains were struck in the lunchroom. Want a look at my worksheet from math class? Sure. Just make sure your mom throws an extra stash of Pringles in your lunch tomorrow. Sleep overs took on the kind of salivatory anticipation that most children reserve for Halloween. Other kids aimed straight for the Nintendo, or perhaps for the host’s action figures. I headed for the kitchen cabinet. After sucking down a few cans of Coke and burying my face in chocolate wrappers, I would streak through the house with the bleary-eyed zeal of an enraptured Pentecostal. “Perhaps we should call his folks,” I could hear my friend’s parents whispering, as I collapsed on the kitchen floor.

It turned out that even my father had ways to cope. When I became old enough to be trusted, sometime just before my bar mitzvah, my father let me in on his secret. Sent to pick up the groceries for the week, he would also buy an extra-large tub of cheese balls, which the two of us would devour in rapturous silence on the car ride home. As we pulled into the garage, my father would inspect his beard in the rearview mirror, careful to brush off any telltale orange powder. “Don’t tell your mother,” he said. As if I ever would.

True liberation came only when I went away to college. Walking into the dining hall carried the same tingle of anticipation as descending into a Bangkok opium den, where I knew I could engage in vice without fear of punishment but still with a thick patina of guilt. There, with half-glazed eyes, I spent afternoons dipping slices of greasy cafeteria pizza into cups of ranch dressing. Nights were for sneaking beer into the dorms and eating late-night cheese steaks with hot sauce and fries.

These days, my sister is famous for sitting at the table at large family gatherings and eating Cool Whip right out of the plastic container. She calls me to make sick moaning noises after she has eaten too much chocolate and tolerates the disapproving looks I make when she gives my nephew sips of Sprite.

For my part, I never got over the subconscious aversion I had for the soda fountain, and I atoned for the sin of eating processed lunch meat by following it with a piece of fresh fruit. I was always pushing against authority, until one day I realized I wasn’t anymore, when I found myself stuffing a half-pound of spinach into a bag at the farmers’ market.

By RICHARD S. CHANG
NY Times Published: January 2, 2009

IF Detroit sold a car that could withstand 30 years of hard driving and cost less than $7,000, its main industry would be in a better place than it is today.

But while a new-model car with such credentials does not exist, Tom Cucciniello may have found the next best thing.

Mr. Cucciniello, co-owner of a linen supply company here, is the proud proprietor of three beautiful old Mercedes-Benz diesels: a 1979 300D, a 1983 300SD and a 1985 300D. The cars have already logged an average of 170,000 miles apiece, and Mr. Cucciniello reckons that together they have a million more to go.

“People generally get around 350,000 in these cars,” he said recently, standing outside his house, though he is hoping for more than 400,000 from each of his.

Renowned for their durability, the big Mercedes diesels built from the mid-1970s to the mid-’80s were also notoriously slow and loud.

Mr. Cucciniello, who is 50, didn’t know about the drawbacks when he first test-drove a Mercedes diesel around 15 years ago. On the road, he spotted a car for sale and tailed it until the owner stopped and got out. Mr. Cucciniello approached the startled man for a test drive, which in turn startled Mr. Cucciniello right back.

“I put my foot on the gas, and it didn’t move,” he said, exaggerating the car’s acceleration only slightly. In 1975, Road & Track found that the 300D took 20.3 seconds to reach 60 miles an hour from a stop.

Mr. Cucciniello didn’t buy the car, which he said he regretted for years — so much so, in fact, that when he next saw a used one for sale in good condition (the 1985 car), this time parked on the side of the road, he bought it then and there.

And he bought another, and another.

“They’re a great value,” Mr. Cucciniello said. He estimated that he has spent around $6,600 altogether for the three cars, which he proudly insisted will last the rest of his life. His wife drives the 1985, while he switches between the 1979 and the 1983 every other month. In the summer, Mr. Cucciniello takes one to his summer home on Lake Champlain in Vermont: about 250 miles each way.

You could say that he has gotten used to the speed (or lack thereof). One recent afternoon, he encouraged a visitor to floor the accelerator on the 1979 model and laughed at the results (none).

As for the noise, “that’s not loud to me,” he said above a subdued but ever-present clatter, lifting a tight fist. “That’s strong. It’s like a tractor.”

Sitting inside the 1979 car, Mr. Cucciniello seemed chipper in a pink shirt, a brown vest and chinos. He displayed the exuberance of someone who has beaten the odds in Vegas. “Look at that interior!” he said with enthusiasm, and rightfully so.

The blue upholstery looked untouched. Mr. Cucciniello had the stuffing replaced in the seats, but everything else inside was original. The cabin could have been a museum exhibit, down to the analog stereo (and its chunky buttons), which pulled in an adult alternative station loud and clear.

“For $2,000, where are you going to find something like this?” he asked.

Mr. Cucciniello found the 1979 car through a combination of luck and persistence. Although he bought it some five years ago, his pursuit goes back around 10 years (even before he bought the ’85).

He saw it on the road, and true to his modus operandi, he followed the car until it stopped at a traffic light. He got out of his car and handed the owner, an elderly woman, his business card. She should call him, he said, if she ever wanted to sell the car.

She didn’t, but four years later Mr. Cucciniello got a call from her daughter, who didn’t think her mother should be driving anymore. It was a done deal.

He bought the 1983 300SD (which is longer than the standard 300D) in a similar fashion. After learning about the car through a hot tip from his “auto body guy,” he approached the owner, who was in his 90s, and asked if he wanted to sell.

The man played hardball.

“He wanted $9,000 for it,” Mr. Cucciniello said. “The Blue Book value was $2,300, so I offered him $2,300. He didn’t take it.”

A few months later, the man died, and his secretary called Mr. Cucciniello on behalf of the man’s children, who “basically gave the car away.”

That completed his eccentric car collection.

They are three diesels of varying degrees of torpor. The 1979 is powered by a 5-cylinder engine with less than 90 horsepower. The other models came with turbocharged 5-cylinders, which made them faster, but not by much. (They were rated at about 120 horsepower.)

“It’s fine,” Mr. Cucciniello said. “In my younger days, I was a reckless driver and racked up some tickets. I haven’t had a run-in with the police since I got these.”

His goal these days is more of a lasting satisfaction.

“I’m 50 years old, so I’m trying not to buy another car,” he said, but hinted that his days of stopping Mercedes diesel drivers on the road might not be over. Friends and relatives have caught the bug (his brother-in-law was the latest to buy one), and they’ll need an expert to steer them in the right direction.

by Kelefa Sanneh
The New Yorker January, 5, 2009

I’m trying to run a tight ship,” Will Oldham said when he came to the door. By which he meant “Don’t be late again.” It was a Friday afternoon in Louisville, Kentucky, and Oldham was in his working house, a cozy place that would be perfect for a small family, were it not for all the musical instruments and studio equipment. It’s tucked behind some trees on a dense residential street in the Highlands, an area known for its charming shops and rising property values. (He also has a sleeping house nearby, which is just about empty.) Oldham tends to hide his thoughts behind a faint, ambiguous smile, and hides his smile behind an unpruned beard, which can make him seem like a man out of time. This impression is underscored by his excellent posture—though that may merely be evidence of a childhood spent in the theatre, learning to be conscious of his body and how it moves. The front hall was full of CDs, books, and boxes of T-shirts, and Oldham was holding a small stack of light-blue envelopes, the same shade as the cover of his most recent album. On the front of one, he had written, “Mom . . . plus siblings.” There were concert tickets inside, and they had to be delivered soon, because the concert was twenty-four hours away. It was time to go.
He walked across the street to his car, a well-worn minivan. A bumper sticker said, “When you have overpowered an enemy, show him forgiveness out of gratitude for the ability to overpower him.” (The quote comes from Ali ibn Abu Talib, the central figure in Shia Islam; Oldham got hooked on Muslim bumper stickers after seeing some in a shop in Chicago.) Louisville is his home town: lots of people there know him, and lots more people know who he is. Oldham must be one of the country’s most celebrated singer-songwriters, and if it’s a relatively small number of people doing the celebrating—well, that just shows how hard they’ve been working. He hadn’t driven more than a few blocks before a man waved him over and asked if he had a spare ticket for the concert. He did.
Oldham has been releasing records for fifteen years, though almost never under his own name. His first recordings were credited to Palace Brothers, a name inspired by John Steinbeck’s “Cannery Row”—in which the characters’ makeshift home is known as the Palace Flophouse—and by close-harmony duos such as the Louvin Brothers, who helped expand the scope of early country music, and the Everly Brothers, whose hits from half a century ago underscored the link between country music and early rock and roll. Oldham was a student of music history, clearly, but he never sounded studious. He had an eerie, strangulated voice, half wild and half broken. And he sang vivid and peculiar songs, which sometimes sounded like old standards rewritten as fever dreams or, occasionally, as inscrutable dirty jokes.

These days, he calls himself Bonnie “Prince” Billy, and his music is a little bit easier to love and a lot harder to dismiss. He has settled into character as an uncanny troubadour, singing a sort of transfigured country music, and he has become, in his own subterranean way, a canonical figure. Johnny Cash covered him, Björk has championed him (she invited him to appear on the soundtrack of “Drawing Restraint 9”), and Madonna, he suspects, has quoted him (her song “Let It Will Be” seems to borrow from his “O Let It Be,” though he says, “I’m fully prepared to accept that it’s a coincidence”). One tribute came from the indie folksinger Jeffrey Lewis, whose song “Williamsburg Will Oldham Horror” affectionately portrays Oldham as both a hero and a brute; the joke is that most indie-rock listeners already think of him that way. And a recent, unenthusiastic review in the London Independent nonetheless concluded that Oldham was “the underground artist most likely to work his way into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.” Although he has never signed with a major label, and has never risen higher than No. 194 on Billboard’s album chart, his concerts sell out all over the world. If he remains a spectral figure, that is no coincidence. In an online tour diary from a few years ago, he wrote, “It is more rewarding to be complicit with scarcity than excess.”
He is known, too, as a recluse and an enigma—two words that journalists often use to describe people who don’t particularly enjoy talking to journalists. He is cagey in interviews; he hates photo shoots. But he rarely goes more than a few months without some kind of record release. And in the past few years he has swum closer to the surface. He has rerecorded some of his best-loved songs with deft Nashville professionals, prettifying—or, if you like, desecrating—his own beloved back catalogue of obscurities. He has starred in a Kanye West video, alongside the comedian Zach Galifianakis. He appeared in the independent films “Junebug,” “Old Joy,” and “Wendy and Lucy,” the new Michelle Williams film (he also wrote a melody for her to hum in it). And he played a police officer in “Trapped in the Closet,” the multipart comic opera by the R. & B. singer R. Kelly, who is one of Oldham’s favorites. It’s a small part, but he looks as if he’s having fun.
ldham’s mother, Joanne, was still living in the home where he grew up, a two-story house on a hill at the end of a leafy cul-de-sac. After delivering most of his envelopes, he went to see her, stopping at a liquor store on the way to buy some tonic water. Joanne is a soft-spoken but lively woman who seems nearly unshockable. She is an artist; she drew the image on the cover of her son’s most recent album, “Lie Down in the Light”—the one with the light-blue cover. (Her assignment: re-create “The Wrestlers,” by Gustave Courbet, but turn it into an image of Jacob wrestling the angel.) In the spirit of hospitality, she offered a warning: she said that her son wasn’t always easy to interview. The word she used was “ornery.”
“Ornery” also happens to be the title of a profile of the country-music singer Merle Haggard that was published in this magazine, in 1990. To Oldham, Haggard, like R. Kelly, is a living hero. (In this trinity the third member is Leonard Cohen.) He says that fond memories of that story, which was written by Bryan Di Salvatore, persuaded him to coöperate for this story, although not without trepidation. In Di Salvatore’s piece, Haggard is discovered in the kitchen of his tour bus, with his feet stretched out under a table, “naked except for a plaid flannel shirt and après-ski boots.” Oldham says, “That’s, like, an ideal for me. That’s such a great life.”
Oldham served drinks and talked about a recent European tour, during which he smuggled psychedelic mushrooms across a border (he hid them in his underwear) and stole a hairpin from a flamenco singer (he hid it in his beard).Soon, it was time for dinner, and after some back-and-forth Oldham and his mother decided on an upscale pub nearby. Oldham started up the minivan, which is equipped with a fearsome-looking sound system. To demonstrate its capabilities, he cranked up an old cabaret song.
“It’s Mabel Mercer, so it’s not really a test of the system,” he said.
“I remember Mabel Mercer,” Joanne said. “God.”
he concert hadn’t been Oldham’s idea; it had come from his friend Oscar Parsons, a singer and guitarist from western Virginia (on his MySpace page, he calls himself a “skinny ass billhilly”), who first befriended Oldham by offering him some homemade blueberry moonshine. Parsons wanted to know how much Oldham charged for a concert. Oldham said, “Fuck, anywhere from zero to twenty-five thousand dollars. It depends who asks.” They rented a P.A. system, and agreed that Oscar’s group—Thomas A. Minor and the Picket Line, with Oscar in the role of Thomas—would be the opening act and also Oldham’s backing band. They asked Oscar’s sister Jennifer, who lives in Los Angeles, to print the tickets on a letterpress. She made three hundred, and they quickly disappeared from Louisville shops, at ten dollars apiece.
By way of rehearsal, Oldham and the band had spent the week giving brief, unannounced performances at local bars. On Thursday night, he had called up Joe’s Palm Room, a venerable and predominantly African-American establishment, and asked, “Do y’all have music tonight?”
The answer was no.
“Do you want some?”
No.
“So if we came down there with some instruments and played some music, would you like that?”
No.
“For free?”
Eventually, the staff had consented to let Oldham and his band play, or, at any rate, consented not to stop them from playing. A few fans managed to track him down, but many of the people in the audience had no idea that they were watching one of Louisville’s most celebrated residents, and Oldham seemed proud to have won over a few skeptics. His favorite review came from a regular patron who had been moved to shout, “Sing that shit!”
ill Oldham was born in 1970, the second of three boys; Joanne was a full-time mother, and his father, Joe, who died in 2006, was a lawyer and an amateur photographer. By the early nineteen-eighties, Oldham was getting musical tips from his older brother, Ned, who was immersed in Louisville’s fertile punk-rock scene, and he soon developed his own adventurous listening habits—he struck up a correspondence with the noisemaker and poet Lydia Lunch, after meeting her at a Sonic Youth show during a trip to New York. (He also remembers sending a “fairly elaborate” package, including a collage, to Glenn Danzig, the former leader of the horror-punk band the Misfits; he says that Danzig, in turn, sent him a package that included a rare copy of “Cough/Cool,” the band’s 1977 début single.) Despite his strong and particular musical tastes, Oldham was taken with acting—or, more accurately, he was taken with the idea of getting into character. He studied at the Walden Theatre, appeared onstage at Louisville’s acclaimed Actors Theatre, and auditioned for a role in “Matewan,” John Sayles’s film about a coal strike in the nineteen-twenties. He got the part of Danny, a prophetic boy preacher, which meant two months away from high school, living with actors (including Chris Cooper and James Earl Jones), the crew, and a tutor in West Virginia, and earning twelve hundred and fifty dollars a week, plus a per diem. When he got back to Louisville, he couldn’t figure out what to do next; with some nudging from his parents, he finished high school and applied to Brown. He lasted one semester before dropping out; he moved to Los Angeles, then to New York, tried Brown again, and finally left for good.
All the while, he remained loosely connected to Louisville’s music scene. While he was shooting “Matewan,” some of his best friends formed a band called Slint; Oldham shot the cover photograph for Slint’s 1991 album, “Spiderland,” which was recognized, belatedly, as an indie-rock classic. But he never felt the itch to start his own band. “Singing seemed more real to me than acting—and therefore didn’t seem very interesting,” he says. He had an agent, for a time, and landed a few more roles (he played the father in “Everybody’s Baby,” a TV movie about Jessica McClure, the baby who fell down a well), but he came to realize that acting wasn’t very interesting to him, either: an awful lot of it appeared to consist of fussing over lights and line readings.
He was unmoored and, sometimes, mentally fragile. “I retreated into a purely imaginary world,” he says now, remembering the time he attempted to stop speaking, in the hope of discovering a more intuitive means of communication and a more sympathetic community. He eventually found both through music, though he started writing songs only because people around him told him to. He learned his first few guitar chords about the time he went to Brown, and began experimenting with words and melodies at the insistence of Ned and the guys from Slint. He remembers a slow-breaking revelation: “I thought, O.K., music can be a construction, like a movie or like a book. It’s not a person singing about their life—someone has actually learned a craft.” He made some recordings, including “Ohio River Boat Song,” which has become one of his signatures. (It’s a Kentuckified version of a Scottish folk standard, “Loch Tay Boat Song”; instead of singing “I look towards Ben Lawers,” in reference to a Scottish mountain, he sings, “I look towards Floyds Knobs,” in reference to some hills in southern Indiana, across the river from Louisville.) Because he didn’t have a better plan, he sent out four packages: to the New York indie-rock labels Matador and Homestead (no reply); the Los Angeles upstart Interscope (a polite no); and Drag City, a quirky young label based in Chicago.
Dan Koretzky, a co-founder of Drag City, agreed to release a two-song single and then Oldham’s 1993 début album, “There Is No-One What Will Take Care of You.” Except for a few years during which he tried putting out his own albums, Oldham has worked with Drag City ever since. The album, which included a version of a song by the mysterious nineteen-twenties gospel singer Washington Phillips, got Oldham some attention, and some gigs. (He and his bandmates were offered a thousand dollars a show to be an opening act on the 1994 Lollapalooza tour; they signed up, and, he says, saw their fee raised by two hundred and fifty dollars after the death of Kurt Cobain, whose band, Nirvana, had been scheduled as the headliner.) The songs were slow, as if Oldham’s Kentucky warble were pulling the recalcitrant instruments along, and the lyrics, which were full of references to death and sin, helped encourage all sorts of fantasies about Oldham. One reviewer wondered if the album had been recorded in a barn. Oldham says that he had set out to make a swaggering blockbuster, in the tradition of the Rolling Stones’ “Sticky Fingers.” (Suffice it to say that what he made was closer in spirit to “Moonlight Mile,” that album’s ruminative finale, than to its first song, “Brown Sugar.”) He claims to have been baffled by the response. “When people were saying, ‘This sounds Southern,’ ‘This sounds country,’ ‘This sounds Appalachian,’ I was just, like, ‘What the fuck? We made a rock record!’ ”
The idea that he is some sort of folk-art naïf, or an Ivy League dropout pretending to be some sort of folk-art naïf, long haunted and irritated him. And he spent much of the nineteen-nineties embracing and rejecting various pretenses. Oldham’s second album, “Days in the Wake,” from 1994, is a simple recording of him singing and strumming; “Viva Last Blues,” which he made with a full band and released in 1995, includes a half-heroic rock song called “Work Hard/Play Hard.” With each album, he tweaked his name: Palace Brothers became Palace, then Palace Songs, and finally Palace Music. “Arise Therefore,” a dark and tangled album from 1996, was released with no artist’s name at all, and “Joya,” which he made twice (he thought the original version sounded “unfocussed”), was simply credited to Will Oldham.
The idea, all along, was to erase the person making the music so that listeners would focus on the music itself. Of course, it didn’t work that way: with each new release came a barrage of questions about Oldham’s new name, and the evasions only added to his mystique. And so, one day in 1998, flying back from a tour of Australia, he created Bonnie “Prince” Billy, inspired equally by Bonnie Prince Charlie, the eighteenth-century pretender to the English throne, and Nat King Cole. “He’s going to sing songs that have verses, choruses, and bridges,” Oldham decided. “He’s, like, a Brill Building or Nashville songwriter.” Oldham had finally found a role that he loved. A casual listener might not have noticed the difference, but it’s not clear that Oldham has any casual listeners.
Oldham’s fans tend to be nearly as obsessed with his music as he is (a number of fan Web sites attempt to track his output, which now includes more than a hundred albums, singles, and collaborations), but he still likes the idea of being an old-fashioned artiste, humbly amusing the general public. And this new character was proof of his commitment. He says, “Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy can be more entertaining, ideally, than Palace Brothers were or Will Oldham was.” True to form, he signalled the start of this “entertaining” era with a bleak, subdued album called “I See a Darkness,” which had a skull on the cover. The album, which appeared in 1999, wasn’t necessarily more fun than Oldham’s previous ones but it was more direct. The title song has become one of his most popular; Johnny Cash sang it, on “American III: Solitary Man,” an album from 2000 produced by Rick Rubin, who has long been an Oldham fan. It’s a solemn song, but the homely lyrics tug against the prophetic tone of the title: “Well, I hope that someday, buddy, we have peace in our lives / Together or apart, alone or with our wives.” Part of the thrill was the feeling—however illusory—that, for once, you knew exactly what Oldham was talking about.
ickets for the concert carried a stern warning—“No Beer, Alcohol or Drugs”—and some legalese, which, it turned out, was adapted from Ticketmaster (“This ticket is a revocable license and may be taken up and admission refused for any reason”). No address was given, in order to discourage gate-crashers; ticket holders had to e-mail for directions, which led them to a small field in the southeastern exurbs of Louisville, past a “Do Not Enter” sign, and down a gravel road. The concert site was a clearing on a lake; the land belonged to the family of Brad Reinstedler, a banjo player in Oscar Parsons’s band, whose friends had named the field Funtown and elected him mayor. Weeks before the concert, on a Louisville music blog called Backseat Sandbar, one fan spread word of the lake and advised concertgoers to bring bathing suits. Reinstedler replied, “There will be no swimming due to some unfortunate circumstances.” He had purchased liability insurance for the concert, but not enough to insure swimmers.
Cars began arriving at around five in the afternoon; they were met by volunteers who checked for tickets and directed parking. One of them explained how he planned to enforce the no-alcohol policy: “If they got more beers than what I think they can handle, then I’m gon’ take a few of ’em.” This plan proved unnecessary: alcohol consumption was moderate, although some visitors talked reverently about a “waterfall” in the woods, which turned out to be a beer keg next to someone’s car. Gate-crashers were scarce. Oldham is, in his soft-spoken way, an intimidating presence, and it appeared that no one wanted to get on his bad side. “You print the rules and cross your fingers,” he said.
Even he had to admit that this was as pleasant a concert setting as could be imagined. The stage was a flatbed trailer set up in front of a log cabin; it was a breezy summer afternoon, and people brought folding chairs and beach blankets. His mother was there, with a collection of aunts and uncles. Parsons, shirtless in swimming trunks and as skinny as advertised, sang some charming, shambling mountain songs with his band, and then there was a fake marriage ceremony, in case the neighbors were watching—they had been told that the gathering was for a wedding, on the theory that this would make them less likely to call the police. Then Oldham took the stage, with Parsons and the band surrounding him. He was wearing a maroon tank top, orange-and-pink pants, blue Crocs, and a pink Boston Red Sox cap, with “cam” and “odia” scrawled on either side of the “B.”
Parsons began strumming, and Oldham leaned in to test the microphone. “Y-y-yeah,” he said. Then he clasped his hands behind his back and started singing “Easy Does It,” the first song from “Lie Down in the Light.” His singing has grown more precise over the years, and he sometimes closes one eye, pirate-like, or shakes his head, as if he were fighting to push his voice closer to the notes that he hears in his mind. Volunteers had distributed commemorative Bonnie “Prince” Billy kazoos to the first hundred or so people who showed up, and before a song called “Goat and Ram” (which begins by expounding upon the central creed of Islam: “There is no God but God / God in your body, which is mine”) he asked audience members to get out their kazoos and toot along, creating an E drone. Someone asked why there weren’t enough kazoos to go around. “We’ve actually got a complaint box up here,” he said, motioning toward his crotch. “It’s right here.” He thought for a moment. “But it’s already full.”
There was one unexpected cover: a version of “Little Boxes,” the sixties folk hit that served as the theme song of the Showtime series “Weeds,” one of Parsons’s favorites. And Oldham found ways to transform some of his own earlier songs: “Death to Everyone,” a dirge, became a high-spirited sing-along. During “A King at Night,” he smiled at band members who flubbed the occasional note, and some of the people on blankets joined him in the refrain: “This is how I start another day in my kingdom.” Bent forward, with one knee up, he looked a bit like a court jester. The sun was setting, so the Christmas lights that had been hung above the stage seemed to grow brighter with every song. He was accompanied all night by the thrum of cicadas, and the music was punctuated by an occasional splash from the lake.
Oldham has been singing a lot of duets recently, using the conventions of male-female singing—calls and responses, low declarations and high harmonies—to mimic the stylized love he sings about, which sounds more traditional than confessional. The clear-voiced singer Marty Slayton, who sometimes sings backup for George Strait, helped him nudge his old songs a little way toward the country mainstream on “Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy Sings Greatest Palace Music,” in 2004; the first time he heard her voice over his it was “almost an erotic experience,” he says. “The Letting Go,” from 2006, was dominated by the unexpected countermelodies of Dawn McCarthy, who leads her own group, Faun Fables, which is now signed to Drag City. (He got to know her by taking her on tour, along with a then unheralded singer and harpist named Joanna Newsom.) For his latest album, he found an unlikely duet partner in Ashley Webber, a relatively unknown Canadian singer whom he met on tour. Onstage, Cheyenne Mize, a dexterous fiddler, filled in for Webber. When he called out “O lady,” she called back “O boy!”
This most recent album, “Lie Down in the Light,” sounds generous, like an invitation. “It’s O.K. to accept good fortune,” Oldham says, by way of explaining the title. But the song of the same name, which he performed at Funtown, could just as easily describe the apocalypse:

When the sun welcomes us in
And the earth’s protective skin
Fails and peels back, face to chin
Then we start it all again

Why do you frown?
Why do you try?
Why don’t you lie down in the light?

Oldham’s voice goes up on those last three words, as if he really wanted to know. And, near the end of the song, Parsons, still shirtless, broke the eerie mood with a Jew’s-harp solo. Friends hooted their approval.
When the show was over, the crowd dispersed, helped along by an announcement that there was an after-party at a bar in town. (This was true, though perhaps misleading, since none of the performers had any plans to attend.) Parsons passed around some moonshine, and Oldham created a cocktail of his own by mashing some watermelon into a plastic cup of tequila. A young fan was sitting at his feet, rapt. She had come from California, and had brought him some marijuana-infused caramel—“weedamel,” she called it.
It was time to go swimming. Oldham was one of the first people in the lake, and others wanted to know if it was cold. He looked thoughtful. This was not a simple question. “I found it cold, but there are others who are not finding it cold,” he said. “My body temperature dropped right before I went in—the world became cold.” He conjectured that maybe the water felt cold to him only because he was anticipating the cold feeling of getting out of it. He got out and dried off. The group headed back to the cabin. People pawed through a table full of empty potato-chip bags, looking for a bottle that had something in it. It was past three, and some of the revellers were talking about lighting a bonfire. More people left. Some tents appeared in the field. Oldham retreated to his minivan, and by dawn he was gone.
e looked none the worse for wear-the next afternoon, sitting in his kitchen. Remembering his disappearance the previous night, Oldham said, “I figured I should sleep for, like, an hour and a half. For legal reasons.” He had agreed to talk about music, and so he did, although the idea makes him uneasy, not least because he knows the pitfalls. In the pre-Internet era, a generation of young bands internalized the financial priorities of the used-record stores that they relied on; it was as if they envied those valuable used records, ancient enough and obscure enough to be rediscovered—and priced accordingly. Long before 1997, when the Smithsonian reissued Harry Smith’s 1952 “Anthology of American Folk Music,” Oldham was fascinated by what Greil Marcus once called the “old, weird America.” But he also knows that, for many singers, a fixation on the antique and the quirky has been a handicap. “Old” is merely a word for something that was once new and survived; no amount of affectation will provide a shortcut. And “weird,” misapplied, can be even worse. Surely, Washington Phillips, with his modified zither (if that’s what it was) and his gutbucket sermons, never set out to be weird. And if Phillips nevertheless was weird—well, weird to whom?
Oldham has been careful to avoid getting sentimental about days gone by, and he goes out of his way to remind listeners that he doesn’t want to be heard as an alternative to the new, seemingly normal America. His repertoire of cover songs includes “Just to See You Smile,” which was a hit for Tim McGraw, and Mariah Carey’s defiant ballad “Can’t Take That Away (Mariah’s Theme).” At first, these could have been interpreted as inclusive and faintly condescending gestures, as if he were welcoming a few vulgar favorites into his rarefied world. But by now Oldham’s abiding interest in truly popular song is more appealing: an expression of impudence and aspiration. Why shouldn’t his sturdy but cryptic odes find their place among the blockbusters?
In discussions with Drag City, Oldham sometimes referred to “Lie Down in the Light” as “LIDL,” or “the little record,” partly because he knew that he wouldn’t be doing much to promote it. In March, he plans to release “the big record,” a deeply satisfying album called “Beware,” which conjures a mood of resolution, maybe even finality. (In the stately country song “I Don’t Belong to Anyone,” he amplifies the title of his 1993 début album: “I don’t belong to anyone, there’s no one who’ll take care of me / It’s kind of easy to have some fun when you don’t belong to anyone.”) He intends to promote the album with singles, a photo shoot, and a handful of interviews, if only to prove that record promotion doesn’t really work, at least not for him.
He is inspired, and challenged, by the example of Merle Haggard. “He’s writing and singing better than he ever has,” Oldham says. “And it’s just like, well, there’s no excuse, then. You can’t just say that it goes away, or that the music industry kills it, or whatever.” He also likes the idea of stopping, content in the knowledge that he has done what he came to do. But he knows that he has contemplated quitting before. “Sometimes,” he says, “we need to tell ourselves that we’re not going to do certain things, just in order to stay sane.”
As night fell, the conversation turned to the indie-rock industry that supports Oldham, and the indie-rock community that he keeps at arm’s length. These days, it is, to a large extent, a world sustained by bars (where the musicians circulate) and the Internet (where the music circulates), both of which Oldham dislikes. He’s always looking for ways to widen his circle: he’d love to get in the studio with R. Kelly, or spend a week watching Haggard work. And he resists the idea that, with his endless flow of obscurities and his maniacal fan base, he is one of the most blog-friendly musicians in the country. He asked, “At that show last night, what do you think, eighty per cent of the people read blogs? Fifty? Thirty? Ten? Ninety?” There were certainly plenty of cameras, and, sure enough, on Monday morning the indie-rock Web site Pitchfork posted six photographs and a brief write-up.
He went out to the minivan to retrieve something: a book of his lyrics, handprinted and bound by a woman in West Virginia. “There were supposed to be three hundred,” he said. “But a couple of pages got fucked up, so I think there are about two hundred and seventy-five or so. And I’ve just given them away, because I don’t know how to sell ’em—you know, I don’t want them to end up on eBay.” He proffered a copy, with an inscription inside: “K. GOOD LUCK. BPB.” But it was clear that he wasn’t feeling entirely optimistic about having agreed to a magazine profile. “My mother’s a huge fan, and I really liked that Merle piece, but definitely there’s already . . .” He trailed off. “I don’t know. I really hate press. And it’s . . . yeah.” ♦

nice new paintings by Matt Connors on andahalf

By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN
NY Times Published: December 31, 2008

BERLIN — A hole has appeared in the center of town here. The symbolism is impossible to miss.

Berlin’s plan is to erect a fake Baroque palace, a copy of the Hohenzollern Stadtschloss that once stood where that hole is, the site culminating the great avenue called Unter den Linden, at whose other end is the Brandenburg Gate. In December a little-known Italian architect, Franco Stella, won what passed for the building’s competition, which required a design faithfully reproducing three of the four original facades and much of the interior courtyard, leaving the fourth to the designer’s imagination.

Few serious architects bothered to apply.

The idea has been years in the making, but exactly what’s supposed to go inside this new Schloss still remains vague. At the moment the scheme calls for a museum of non-Western art, a library, restaurants and cafes. German officials, often inclined toward euphemism, have christened it the Humboldt Forum, after the philosopher and his naturalist brother. Carson Chan, who runs a gallery here, put it better. “A Schloss-shaped mall,” he said.

The saga of the Schloss, a cultural misadventure from the start, captures Berlin in a nutshell, as a city forever missing the point of itself. The original Stadtschloss, partly damaged during the war, was ripped down in 1950 by the Communist East Germans as a loathed emblem of Prussian militarism and imperial power. They replaced it in the mid-’70s with the Palace of the Republic, a bronzed glass-and-steel behemoth, the last remains of which were torn down, at eye-popping cost, during this past summer and fall. The palace housed the East German parliament but also a clutch of restaurants, theaters, art galleries and bowling alleys that provided East Berliners with a measure of escape from the drudgery of Communist life. Even some West Germans developed a little nostalgia for it, as the place before which news reporters in East Berlin were always posing.

When it was shuttered after the wall fell (asbestos was the official excuse), artists remade the abandoned space into a hot spot for new art shows and performances. The derelict palace epitomized hipster Berlin, a capital of second chances and opportunistic subcultures. Clubs in former Nazi bunkers, bars in Communist-era high rises, theaters in disused factories, art galleries in empty tenements — like the bygone Palace of the Republic they are what has attracted young people since the wall fell to a city that, historically, has kept failing to become the metropolis it aspired to be, and instead always became something more interesting.

It’s hard to find a thinking Berliner these days who actually likes the Schloss idea, the latest in a slew of historical reconstructions across Germany and Central Europe that includes the Alte Kommandantur, a former Baroque palace just next door to the Schloss, and also the Frauenkirche in Dresden and the Stadtschloss in Braunschweig, which has become a mall.

Some sites should be reconstructed. Supporters of the new Schloss tend to be West Germans angry at the former East Germany for tearing the old Schloss down, and also cautious Berliners fearful of what happened at places like Potsdamer Platz, not far from the Schlossplatz. Who can blame them? Potsdamer Platz today is a trash bin for big-name modern architects who did some of their worst work there.

They were following a lousy master plan. Having come of age during the post-modern 1980s, Berlin’s urban bureaucrats envision the city as a kind of “hand-me-down Paris,” as Niklas Maak, an architecture critic here, put it on a recent afternoon — a stage-set of an old capital, with phony, manufactured charm, erasing traces of the bad years of the 20th century, with all the dissonance that, to younger Berliners, is a civic virtue.

Willed forgetfulness is unforgivable here, of all places. The same cluelessness caused officials last year to mothball Tempelhof, an ingenious work of ’30s design, a functioning airport with a soaring, light-filled terminal in the very heart of town, a 15-minute taxi ride from the Brandenburg Gate, where Gary Cooper and Errol Flynn descended into a scrum of flashbulbs on the tarmac — now empty, made useless toward no clear end.

The outcome is uncertain at the Schloss too. Its projected cost is $800 million, but no one believes that figure won’t skyrocket. Having pushed the plan, the federal government is stuck with the tab, but, facing the same gloomy financial picture as everyone else, Germany may simply not have the money. A newspaper here this week reported that there may not be enough qualified stonecutters in the whole of Europe to do the job. Here’s hoping that’s true.

Did I mention that the original, 18th-century Stadtschloss, by Andreas Schlüter and Johann Friedrich Eosander von Göthe, was a hulking, unlovable pile? Even the emperors didn’t want to live there. Proponents of reconstruction argue a new Schloss would restore an urban complex that includes great buildings by Karl Friedrich Schinkel, Berlin’s most important Neoclassical architect. But this makes less than no sense, not least because Berlin decided during the 19th century to construct an appalling wedding cake of a cathedral next to, and all out of proportion with, Schinkel’s landmark Altes Museum, which is across the street from the Schloss.

Sorry, Humboldt Forum. Ingeborg Junge-Reyer, the Berlin senator in charge of urban development, told me the other morning, with a perfectly straight face, “It is decisive that it is called the Humboldt Forum, not the Schloss, because the name Humboldt symbolizes knowledge, openness to other cultures, and to culture, and that fits Germany.” Wilhelm von Humboldt, the great philosopher, educator and friend of Goethe and Schiller, and his brother Alexander von Humboldt, the naturalist, like Schinkel evoke the glory days of Berlin’s Enlightenment. Meanwhile a German official advocating the Schloss got in hot water recently by suggesting that the forum would include studios open to the public for artists from Africa, Asia and other exotic places, bringing to mind the old Hottentot and freak show displays. The official later insisted this wasn’t what he meant.

Speaking of which, competitors for the Schloss design almost totally ignored the issue of what a museum of non-Western cultures might look like within an imitation of an imperial palace. Quai Branly, the museum Jean Nouvel recently designed in Paris for this same purpose, is in many ways a calamity, but it at least began from the serious premise that devising such a building in a Western capital during the 21st century is a complex issue demanding careful consideration. Arising only as an afterthought, as something to put in the Schloss, the museum here entered almost not at all into the discussion. If the Schloss gets built, it’s a ticking bomb.

Mr. Stella, a student of Aldo Rossi, the Italian architect who championed historic renewal, seems giddy with victory and is full of talk now about public piazzas and civic continuity. You wouldn’t build a modern building in San Marco in Venice, he said over coffee the other day. Why should Berlin stick a modern building on this site?

“I don’t ask myself about political issues, whether the person who built the building was a king,” he added. “The Schloss was important for the German nation and because Berlin is disjointed, not homogeneous, it’s all the more important to recover its history. Memory is what distinguishes Europe from America.”

That’s ridiculous, but more to the point few Berliners are still alive who can remember the original Schloss. The Palace of the Republic, by contrast, though generally lamented as an eyesore, and, occupying only the eastern end of the Schlossplatz, badly oriented on the site, did belong to the living memory of many Berliners; and more than a few of them were heartbroken to see it erased. Post-1950s German architecture is undergoing reconsideration, deservedly so. It’s a mystery why thrifty Germans never considered simply inviting architects to reuse the frame while filling out the empty space that the old Schloss once occupied with a larger building. Good designers might have considered it a challenge.

Instead competitors for the Schloss had few options. They envisioned walls of Renaissance stonework and glass boxes slid into the ersatz facades like boxes of matches left partly open. Mr. Stella’s design had the distinction of being simple. The single facade left for him to design he imagined as a grid of square loggias, intended to evoke Schinkel’s Altes Museum, recalling Rossi too, and maybe a bit of fascist architecture.

It’s ultimately a monument to civic caution and historical ambivalence. The Schloss represents Berlin today, a capital of pipe dreams, and broke; fashionable but provincial, megalomaniacal yet insecure, a Petri dish for youth culture, stodgy and fearful, steeped in history but brand new. The city sprawls across lively neighborhoods riven by expanses of nowhere.

Add to that the big hole at the center, on which a pavilion for contemporary art, a kind of oversized trailer, is now temporarily parked on the western corner of the Schlossplatz, like a handkerchief covering a corpse.

thanks to Basil Katz

By CHARLES McGRATH
NY Times Published: December 30, 2008

On Thursday, J. D. Salinger turns 90. There probably won’t be a party, or if there is we’ll never know. For more than 50 years Mr. Salinger has lived in seclusion in the small town of Cornish, N.H. For a while it used to be a journalistic sport for newspapers and magazines to send reporters up to Cornish in hopes of a sighting, or at least a quotation from a garrulous local, but Mr. Salinger hasn’t been photographed in decades now and the neighbors have all clammed up. He’s been so secretive he makes Thomas Pynchon seem like a gadabout.

Mr. Salinger’s disappearing act has succeeded so well, in fact, that it may be hard for readers who aren’t middle-aged to appreciate what a sensation he once caused. With its very first sentence, his novel “The Catcher in the Rye,” which came out in 1951, introduced a brand-new voice in American writing, and it quickly became a cult book, a rite of passage for the brainy and disaffected. “Nine Stories,” published two years later, made Mr. Salinger a darling of the critics as well, for the way it dismantled the traditional architecture of the short story and replaced it with one in which a story could turn on a tiny shift of mood or tone.

In the 1960s, though, when he was at the peak of his fame, Mr. Salinger went silent. “Franny and Zooey,” a collection of two long stories about the fictional Glass family, came out in 1961; two more long stories about the Glasses, “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters” and “Seymour: An Introduction,” appeared together in book form in 1963. The last work of Mr. Salinger’s to appear in print was “Hapworth 16, 1924,” a short story that took up most of the June 19, 1965, issue of The New Yorker. In the ’70s he stopped giving interviews, and in the late ’80s he went all the way to the Supreme Court to block the British critic Ian Hamilton from quoting his letters in a biography.

So what has Mr. Salinger been doing for the last 40 years? The question obsesses Salingerologists, of whom there are still a great many, and there are all kinds of theories. He hasn’t written a word. Or he writes all the time and, like Gogol at the end of his life, burns the manuscripts. Or he has volumes and volumes just waiting to be published posthumously.

Joyce Maynard, who lived with Mr. Salinger in the early ’70s, wrote in a 1998 memoir that she had seen shelves of notebooks devoted to the Glass family and believed there were at least two new novels locked away in a safe.

“Hapworth,” which has never been published in book form, may be our only clue to what Mr. Salinger is thinking, and it’s unlike anything else he has written. The story used to be available only in samizdat — photocopies of photocopies passed along from hand to hand and becoming blurrier with each recopying — though it has become somewhat more accessible since the 2005 DVD edition of “The Complete New Yorker.” In 1997 Mr. Salinger agreed to let Orchises Press, a small publisher in Alexandria, Va., bring out a hardcover edition, but five years later he backed out of the deal.

Ever since, Salinger fans have been poring over the text, looking for hidden meaning. Did the author’s temporary willingness to reissue “Hapworth” indicate a throat-clearing, a warming up of the famously silent machinery? Or was it instead an act of closure, a final binding-up of the Glass family saga — one that, coming last but also at the chronological beginning, brings the whole enterprise full circle?

“Hapworth,” to summarize the unsummarizable, is a letter — or rather a transcription of a letter — 25,000 words, written in haste, by the 7-year old Seymour Glass, away at summer camp, to his parents, the long-suffering ex-vaudevillians Les and Bessie, and his siblings Walt, Waker and Boo Boo, back in New York.

Seymour, we learn, is already reading several languages and lusting after Mrs. Happy, the young wife of the camp owner. He condescends to his campmates and dispenses advice to the various members of the family: Les should be careful about his accent when singing, Boo Boo needs to practice her handwriting, Walt his manners, and so on.

The letter concludes with an extraordinary annotated list of books Seymour would like sent to him — a lifetime of reading for most people, but in his case merely the books he needs to get through the next six weeks: “Any unbigoted or bigoted books on God or merely religion, as written by persons whose last names begin with any letter after H; to stay on the safe side, please include H itself, though I think I have mostly exhausted it. … The complete works again of Count Leo Tolstoy. … Charles Dickens, either in blessed entirety or in any touching shape or form. My God, I salute you, Charles Dickens!” And so on, all the way through Proust — in French, naturally — Goethe, and Porter Smith’s “Chinese Materia Medica.”

“Hapworth,” in short, must be the longest, most pretentious (and least plausible) letter from camp ever written. But though it’s the work of a prodigy, it’s also, like all camp letters, a homesick cry for attention.

Its author is the same Seymour who, while on his honeymoon in Florida years later (but — it gets confusing — 17 years earlier in real time, in the 1948 short story “A Perfect Day for Bananafish”), will take an automatic pistol from the bottom of his suitcase and shoot himself through the temple as his bride lies napping in the twin bed next to him. And the same Seymour — the family saint, poet and mystic — whom we’ve heard about at such length in the later Glass stories.

Or is he the same? The Seymour of “Bananafish,” and “Raise High the Roof Beam,” is more a sweetly charming neurotic than the ethereal, otherworldly figure described in “Seymour: An Introduction,” who in turn seems not in the least like the superior, boastful little genius of “Hapworth.” The discrepancies among the various versions of Seymour is such that some critics have questioned the motives and reliability of Buddy, Seymour’s younger brother and the family scribe, who is our source for much of what we know (and also the transcriber of the “Hapworth” letter).

But that kind of tricky, Nabokovian reading feels forced in this case. Mr. Salinger seems less interested in keeping the details straight than in getting them right and offering some explanation, or justification perhaps, for that moment, still startling even after many rereadings, when Seymour blows his brains out. It’s as if Mr. Salinger realized, belatedly, that he had prematurely killed his best character and wanted to make it up to him.

And at some point, it seems fair to say, he fell in love with this project — not just with Seymour but with the whole clan. Who can blame him? The Glasses are one of the liveliest, funniest, most fully realized families in all of fiction. The trouble is that like a lot of families, they occasionally take themselves too seriously and presume to lecture the rest of the world. In the early ’60s, as a certain amount of sentimental and half-baked mysticism began to be spouted by some of the younger Glasses, the critics quickly turned on Mr. Salinger, and “Hapworth” was grumpily dismissed.

What makes “Hapworth” so fascinating, though, is that it’s the only work of Mr. Salinger’s in which the voice is not secure, as the young Seymour fidgets first with one tone and then with another — by turns earnest, anxious, playful and sarcastic. In effect he’s always revising himself. He worries about his spirituality and then skewers his fellow campers. He wants to be like Jesus, and he wants to sleep with Mrs. Happy. He yearns to be left alone, and is desperate to be noticed. He wants to be a saint, and even if he can’t quite admit it yet, he wants to be a great author. Intentionally or not, he seems like a projection of his creator.

In general what has dated most in Mr. Salinger’s writing is not the prose — much of the dialogue, in the stories especially and in the second half of “Franny and Zooey,” still seems brilliant and fresh — but the ideas. Mr. Salinger’s fixation on the difference between “phoniness,” as Holden Caulfield would put it, and authenticity now has a twilight, ’50s feeling about it. It’s no longer news, and probably never was.

This is the theme, though, that comes increasingly to dominate the Glass chronicles: the unsolvable problem of ego and self-consciousness, of how to lead a spiritual life in a vulgar, material society. The very thing that makes the Glasses, and Seymour especially, so appealing to Mr. Salinger — that they’re too sensitive and exceptional for this world — is also what came to make them irritating to so many readers.

Another way to pose the Glass problem is: How do you make art for an audience, or a critical establishment, too crass to understand it? This is the issue that caused Seymour to give up, presumably, and one is tempted to say it’s what soured Mr. Salinger on wanting to see anything else in print.

Sadly, though, Mr. Salinger’s spiritual side is his least convincing. His gift is less for profundity than for observation, for listening and for comedy. Except perhaps for Mark Twain, no other American writer has registered with such precision the humor — and the pathos — of false sophistication and the vital banality of big-city pretension.

For all his reclusiveness, moreover, Mr. Salinger has none of the sage’s self-effacement; his manner is a big and showy one, given to tours-de-force and to large emotional gestures. In spite of his best efforts to silence himself or become a seer, he remains an original and influential stylist — the kind of writer the mature Seymour (but not necessarily the precocious 7-year-old) would probably deplore

thanks to steven tsou

new Animal Collective found on Matt Connor’s blog

By BOB HERBERT
NY Times Published: December 29, 2008

Does anyone know where George W. Bush is?

You don’t hear much from him anymore. The last image most of us remember is of the president ducking a pair of size 10s that were hurled at him in Baghdad.

We’re still at war in Iraq and Afghanistan. Israel is thrashing the Palestinians in Gaza. And the U.S. economy is about as vibrant as the 0-16 Detroit Lions.

But hardly a peep have we heard from George, the 43rd.

When Mr. Bush officially takes his leave in three weeks (in reality, he checked out long ago), most Americans will be content to sigh good riddance. I disagree. I don’t think he should be allowed to slip quietly out of town. There should be a great hue and cry — a loud, collective angry howl, demonstrations with signs and bullhorns and fiery speeches — over the damage he’s done to this country.

This is the man who gave us the war in Iraq and Guantánamo and torture and rendition; who turned the Clinton economy and the budget surplus into fool’s gold; who dithered while New Orleans drowned; who trampled our civil liberties at home and ruined our reputation abroad; who let Dick Cheney run hog wild and thought Brownie was doing a heckuva job.

The Bush administration specialized in deceit. How else could you get the public (and a feckless Congress) to go along with an invasion of Iraq as an absolutely essential response to the Sept. 11 attacks, when Iraq had had nothing to do with the Sept. 11 attacks?

Exploiting the public’s understandable fears, Mr. Bush made it sound as if Iraq was about to nuke us: “We cannot wait,” he said, “for the final proof — the smoking gun that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.”

He then set the blaze that has continued to rage for nearly six years, consuming more than 4,000 American lives and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. (A car bomb over the weekend killed two dozen more Iraqis, many of them religious pilgrims.) The financial cost to the U.S. will eventually reach $3 trillion or more, according to the Nobel laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz.

A year into the war Mr. Bush was cracking jokes about it at the annual dinner of the Radio and Television Correspondents Association. He displayed a series of photos that showed him searching the Oval Office, peering behind curtains and looking under the furniture. A mock caption had Mr. Bush saying: “Those weapons of mass destruction have got to be somewhere.”

And then there’s the Bush economy, another disaster, a trapdoor through which middle-class Americans can plunge toward the bracing experiences normally reserved for the poor and the destitute.

Mr. Bush traveled the country in the early days of his presidency, promoting his tax cut plans as hugely beneficial to small-business people and families of modest means. This was more deceit. The tax cuts would go overwhelmingly to the very rich.

The president would give the wealthy and the powerful virtually everything they wanted. He would throw sand into the regulatory apparatus and help foster the most extreme income disparities since the years leading up to the Great Depression. Once again he was lighting a fire. This time the flames would engulf the economy and, as with Iraq, bring catastrophe.

If the U.S. were a product line, it would be seen now as deeply damaged goods, subject to recall.

There seemed to be no end to Mr. Bush’s talent for destruction. He tried to hand the piggy bank known as Social Security over to the marauders of the financial sector, but saner heads prevailed.

In New Orleans, the president failed to intervene swiftly and decisively to aid the tens of thousands of poor people who were very publicly suffering and, in many cases, dying. He then compounded this colossal failure of leadership by traveling to New Orleans and promising, in a dramatic, floodlit appearance, to spare no effort in rebuilding the flood-torn region and the wrecked lives of the victims.

He went further, vowing to confront the issue of poverty in America “with bold action.”

It was all nonsense, of course. He did nothing of the kind.

The catalog of his transgressions against the nation’s interests — sins of commission and omission — would keep Mr. Bush in a confessional for the rest of his life. Don’t hold your breath. He’s hardly the contrite sort.

He told ABC’s Charlie Gibson: “I don’t spend a lot of time really worrying about short-term history. I guess I don’t worry about long-term history, either, since I’m not going to be around to read it.”

The president chuckled, thinking — as he did when he made his jokes about the missing weapons of mass destruction — that there was something funny going on.

LA Times, Steve Lopez
December 28, 2008

They had every kind of trophy you could imagine at House of Trophies in Boyle Heights. Soccer, basketball, baseball, football, even fishing. They had trophies 6 inches tall and 6 feet tall, plaques and desk ornaments too, for retiring cops and transit workers and for great teachers.

But nothing for musicians.

I told a clerk I needed a trophy with something a little different on it, like maybe a string player.

It was an unusual request, I could tell, but he went to his computer and came back with a printed image of a conductor and a musical symbol.

“We could do something like this,” he said.

I decided to put my faith in House of Trophies and began making plans for the awards ceremony. The plan was to honor a friend I’m constantly asked about by readers and also to recognize two of my buddy’s pals.

Since I began writing about Nathaniel Anthony Ayers, a street musician I met almost four years ago in downtown Los Angeles, I’ve been asked to speak at mental health symposiums, skid row fundraisers, universities and high schools and all kinds of award banquets.

I usually walk away with a plaque and a bad case of guilt. All those groups really should be honoring Mr. Ayers, not me. He’s the one who’s had to muster the courage to face each day. He’s the one who has given a face to the anonymous thousands in the same fight. And he’s the one whose story, I hope, is helping de-stigmatize mental illness.

I usually pass along the awards I get to Mr. Ayers, but I thought he should have his very own, which is how I ended up at House of Trophies.

Mr. Ayers had been telling me for months that he wanted to celebrate Beethoven’s birthday on Dec. 16. I don’t know a lot of people who walk around with Beethoven’s date of birth in their heads, but nothing about Mr. Ayers is typical.

Ever since he stumbled upon the Beethoven statue in Pershing Square several years ago, he has conducted himself as if Ludwig were god of the universe and everything beyond.

Mr. Ayers had told me he’d like to perform at Beethoven’s birthday party with some of his friends from the Los Angeles Philharmonic. But as the date approached, he feared he wouldn’t be sharp enough to play with the pros. He said if he really worked at it, he’d be in good shape by Beethoven’s birthday next year. But he wondered if we could still have a party.

Among the few dozen guests were violinist Robert Gupta, pianist Joanne Pearce Martin and cellist Ben Hong, all friends of Mr. Ayers and all members of the L.A. Phil.

Also attending was Adam Crane, the former L.A. Phil publicist who made Mr. Ayers welcome at Disney Hall concerts and became one of his closest friends. Mr. Ayers has had a tough adjustment since Crane moved on to the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, occasionally strolling up to Disney Hall to see if Crane has decided to come back. Crane was coming to town anyway in December and adjusted his schedule to get here in time for Mr. Ayers’ Beethoven party.

As the party approached, I began worrying that the man of the hour might not attend. Mr. Ayers has had a painful, chronic stomach problem for which he was refusing treatment, no matter how bad the agony. Doctors and meds, he says, are not for him. Not yet, anyway, because he recalls too vividly the days of restraints, shock therapy and Thorazine. He is still tough to be around at times and a challenge for the staff at Lamp Community, which handles hard-core, chronic cases of mental illness.

A book I wrote about Mr. Ayers came out last year, and I had been nervous about how he would react to it and to a movie based on the book that will be out in April. He once told me he preferred experiencing life to seeing it reflected in a mirror. Developing insight into one’s own illness is difficult for many people. After reading the book, though, he thanked me. He said it wasn’t easy to read, but he felt that he needed to. As for the movie, he said he had no desire to see it, in part because the very thought of two-dimensional images on a screen is spooky to him.

So I was shocked when, at the last minute, he decided to see a screening for cast and crew. Many of his friends at Lamp play themselves in the movie because director Joe Wright insisted on not using actors. They were excited about seeing themselves on the screen, and Nathaniel wanted to be with them, rather than miss what in effect was his own party.

We sat together at the Arclight. I’d seen the movie, but still I was anxious, and so was Mr. Ayers. He kept his eyes closed through the entire film, but he experienced it — felt it, really — in his own way. He loved the music, grumbled at certain depictions, laughed at funny lines and joined in the shout-outs when his friends saw themselves up on the screen.

I was humbled by him, proud of him, worried for him. What he’s got doesn’t go away. Every day’s a challenge.

The first award at the Beethoven party was presented in absentia to Peter Snyder, an L.A. Phil cellist who retired last week after nearly 40 years with the orchestra.

Snyder has already moved up to the Central Coast and couldn’t make the party. He was the musician who volunteered to give lessons to Mr. Ayers in a vacant skid row apartment three years ago, hoping it would make Mr. Ayers comfortable enough to move in off the streets of skid row.

Those lessons were the key, I think, even though Mr. Ayers resisted moving indoors, saying that he couldn’t leave Beethoven alone on the streets of downtown L.A. Crane got him past that by going to the Disney Hall gift shop and getting a bust of Beethoven to place in the apartment. Mr. Ayers has lived in that apartment ever since.

At the Beethoven party, held in a basement music room at the L.A. Times, Crane’s plaque was inscribed “Mensch of the Century.”

Mr. Ayers was not just the man of the hour but the life of the party. He warmed nicely to the crowd, had a smile on his face most of the evening and was in his glory when Gupta and Martin offered a rousing rendition of the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto.

He also did pretty well in his own performance despite the lack of any rehearsal, playing cello to Martin’s piano on the Bloch Prayer and a bit of the Schubert Arpeggione Sonata.

Standing tall on the piano throughout the performance was Mr. Ayers’ new trophy, a gaudy 2-foot-tall beauty with metallic red and the best fake gold available. It was inscribed:

“Disciples of Beethoven Award

“For a half century of devotion to music. For a talent that knows no bounds. And for a story of courage and perseverance that speaks to thousands.”

(After this column was written on Friday, Mr. Ayers’ stomach pain became so intense that he agreed to go to the hospital, and he took his violin with him. He was diagnosed with gastritis and was discharged Saturday morning, but not before serenading staff and patients.)

By TERI KARUSH ROGERS
NY Times Published: December 26, 2008

IN a city awash in creature comforts for those who can still afford them, a few remain unattainable at any price. Some New Yorkers who yearn for the comfort of creatures — specifically, cats and dogs — find themselves stymied by their apartment buildings’ restrictions on pets.

But just as city dwellers are accustomed to settling when it comes to real estate, many aspiring cat and dog owners turn to other species to satisfy their yen for a cuddle, companionship or wish to convey childhood lessons in responsibility.

A partial list of things that slither, hop, glide, swim or scurry beyond the purview of co-op boards, landlords and occasionally, the law, includes chinchillas, parrots, bearded dragons, tortoises, pythons, fancy mice, monkeys and ferrets, along with a more pedestrian assortment of gerbils, guinea pigs and goldfish.

Many owners of these creatures swear that their offbeat choices have turned out to be nearly as satisfying as a dog or a cat.

Consider Pounce, the free-range rabbit sharing a two-bedroom apartment with Jennifer Edwards, Jim Gaherty and their sons, Dylan, 13, and Liam, 10.

Before Pounce arrived last April in their Upper West Side no-dogs-allowed co-op, the family had owned beta fish and gerbils.

“The big problem with any of those is cleaning the cages and tanks, and when there’s no payoff, it’s kind of a drag,” said Ms. Edwards, 44, a health care policy consultant whose allergy to cats ruled out a feline solution to the family’s desire for a more interactive pet.

“I had no interest in living with birds because they’re not my style — they’re in my airspace,” Ms. Edwards said. “It was hard to figure out a pet that would be acceptable to me and cuddly enough for the kids. I thought maybe turtles or some sort of reptiles — they’re not cuddly, but they don’t jump out of your hands.”

A rabbit didn’t enter their thoughts until the day Dylan happened upon a floppy-eared Holland lop at a pet store. As he wandered around the shop cradling the 12-week-old bunny, Ms. Edwards recalled, “people started telling us how trainable rabbits are — how they can be litter-box-trained and you can let them out of their cages.”

They took the rabbit home and within a month (during which Pounce litter-box-trained himself) they gave him virtually free rein over their two-bedroom apartment. (Pounce’s occasional misfires take the form of odorless hard pellets about the size of an M&M.)

“He’s a lot more petlike than I expected,” Ms. Edwards said. “Rabbits like company, and they’re smart.”

Pounce typically spends his days with Ms. Edwards in her dining-room-cum-home-office. The plump six-pound rabbit nibbles on timothy hay and the edges of low-lying folders.

When the boys are home, the rabbit may decide he needs some quiet time under the sofa. Or he may lounge attentively between Dylan and Liam while they play video games. Later at night, he snuggles up against the adults on the sofa for television.

To be sure, Pounce has his naughty side. Rabbits are notorious chewers, and Pounce is no exception. He has gnawed through electrical cords and the corners of doors and drawers (now sealed with clear packing tape to prevent further incursions). Pounce has also denuded more than one potted herb plant left on a seductively low-hanging shelf.

He also sheds enough to warrant Ms. Edwards’s use of the vacuum cleaner once or twice between her housekeeper’s biweekly visits, and the special recycled paper lining his litter box needs to be changed twice a week to prevent odor.

On the other hand, unlike the dog the family had initially wished for — and now could have, thanks to a recent change in building pet policy — Pounce doesn’t bark, need grooming or demand to be taken for walks.

Mr. Gaherty, 45, a geophysicist, wasn’t consulted on the decision to adopt Pounce. But he sounded affectionate toward the rabbit in a nonpublic, indeterminate-pronoun kind of way.

“I’m a dog person, and you can’t say it’s like a dog,” Mr. Gaherty said. “You can use food to make it responsive. Rabbit food smells better than cat food, litter boxes smell bad either way, and rabbits chew but cats scratch, which is probably worse.”

Like the Edwards-Gaherty family, would-be dog owners usually list interactivity high on their list of desired pet qualities, which is why many choose birds as a substitute.

“Birds are extremely intelligent,” said Linda Pesek, a veterinarian at the Center for Avian and Exotic Medicine on the Upper West Side. “They can recognize their owners, and they can interact.”

Tonia Misvaer couldn’t agree more. She and her husband wanted a dog, a pet prohibited by the lease on their rented apartment on the Upper West Side. They bought their first avian, a small parrot known as a lovebird, on impulse four and a half years ago.

“Yogi had a lot of personality,” said Ms. Misvaer, 33, a graphic designer. The couple trained the bird to go to the bathroom in its cage and gave it unfettered access to their 900-square-foot duplex.

“We were surprised that they make really interesting pets,” Ms. Misvaer said. “He had a chest of toys he played with on the floor, and he particularly liked to push things off bookshelves. We both liked him a lot, although he didn’t like my husband. He would poop in his shoes every once in awhile and drop things on his head.”

After Yogi died from a melamine-poisoned treat a year and a half ago, the couple bought two more birds.

“We wanted a little bit better of a parrot — one that could maybe talk and live longer,” she said. They settled on Swami, a Meyer’s parrot, and Odin, a Jardine’s parrot.

“They’re both quiet birds and fairly small,” Ms. Misvaer said. “A lot of times when people think of parrots they think of huge macaw parrots. But Swami is six inches and Odin is seven or eight inches tall. They don’t squawk or scream, so they’re good apartment birds.”

So far, the birds have learned a few words and can dog-whistle. (Swami can also wolf-whistle, which Ms. Misvaer discovered while riding with him on a crowded subway.)

The facet of avian husbandry that has surprised Ms. Misvaer most is how time-consuming it is.

“A dog will hang out and sit on your lap or take a nap,” she said, “but birds are constantly active. I mean, they’ll sleep a lot, but they demand a lot of attention. Odin has terrible separation anxiety. When I’m in the apartment he will run across the floor and look up at me until I pick him up and put him on my shoulder. Also, if you want a healthy parrot you really need to cook. We spend maybe 30 to 60 minutes a day preparing food —cutting up fresh fruit and vegetables and baking bird bread.”

It’s common for neophyte owners to assume that birds are low-maintenance creatures, said Stephen L. Zawistowski, an animal behaviorist and the executive vice president and science adviser for the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.

“They’re not a great pet if you’re out of the apartment all day,” Mr. Zawistowski said. “They need company more so than a cat. If you don’t interact with birds, they can develop behavior problems, and as a form of anxiety they will actually pick out their feathers.”

Mr. Zawistowski says many bird owners are also stunned by how loud birds can be. For apartment dwellers, he recommends finches, especially the hardier zebra and society varieties: “They tweet a lot, but they’re not superloud. They’re interesting and active. You don’t need a massive cage. And you can keep several of them, so you don’t have to worry about social questions.”

Parakeets are louder, more active and comical, he said, while “canaries have been an immensely popular bird in the city of New York since the mid-1800s.”

“But with apartments you have to be very careful of cleaning products and pesticides, and the Teflon frying pans release fumes on the stove that are toxic to birds,” he said, “so you have to keep them away from the kitchen and the cleaning products.”

There is also the matter of keeping pets away from the neighbors: Tales abound of escaped hamsters, among other things, that wind up in someone else’s apartment.

This is of special import in a no-pet building, as most buildings with restrictions on pets prohibit any sort of animal — not just cats or dogs — without the permission of the board, said Lisa Breier Urban, a real estate lawyer with Breier Deutschmeister Urban & Fromme in Manhattan.

“That’s not to say people don’t go to the pet store and buy whatever they want,” she said. “It’s much easier to harbor a pet in the building if it’s not a dog. Unless the animal is a nuisance, the buildings in general are not going to enforce the rules.”

Typically, the nuisance consists of a foul odor coming from an apartment with cats, but not always.

“We had a case where someone had two or three rabbits and they were not keeping the cages clean,” Ms. Urban said. “The neighbors complained about the smell, and the building required that the people get rid of the rabbits. And we had a case a couple of years ago where a rent-stabilized tenant had a lizard that ate crickets. The crickets were shipped in by mail, but somehow they got out all over the building and they had a huge cricket problem.”

Beyond the special challenges presented by their sometimes hopping diets, reptiles frequently require high temperatures and humidity levels to thrive.

Some owners, however, appreciate reptilian reserve.

Evan Cohen has lived with a five-foot-long iguana, Roxy, for the past 11 years in a studio apartment in Greenwich Village. The iguana is house-trained (each morning it relieves itself in a paper-towel-lined bathtub, which Mr. Cohen scrubs down with bleach afterward) and wanders freely through the 525-square-foot dwelling.

“I think that to him, this is his apartment, and he’s letting me live here,” said Mr. Cohen, 36, a former jack-of-all-trades who is now an undergraduate student at Columbia University. “I think he’d prefer it if I wasn’t living here. I admit he’s not a snuggly type of animal, but that never really bothered me — you can still pick up a 13-pound-lizard and hold him and pet him as much as he’ll tolerate.”

Alice and Morgan Dontanville were barred by their lease from getting a dog, but wanted something that was cuddly as well as quiet, clean and relatively low maintenance. Back in high school Mr. Dontanville had owned an intelligent and extroverted rat; this led them to consider something in the rodent family. They eventually settled on a chinchilla.

“Chinchillas have the advantages of the other rodents — they’re friendly and they respond to you — without the weird tail,” Ms. Dontanville said. “He looks like a cross between a small bunny and a giant mouse with a squirrel-esque tail. He has tiny little feet and legs and a big, pudgy, unbelievably silky body.”

The Dontanvilles bought their first chinchilla several months ago at a pet store. After a couple of weeks, it fell ill with an intestinal blockage and, $2,000 in vet bills later, had to be euthanized. After learning more about the proper care and feeding of chinchillas (don’t give them pet-store food, recommended Ms. Dontanville, or keep the temperature over 75 degrees), they bought their current chinchilla, a six-month-old male named Ajax, from a breeder in Brooklyn.

Ajax lives on Ms. Dontanville’s former craft table a few feet from the kitchen, inside a 32-inch-high black-wire cage made for rats. He is conveniently nocturnal, springing to life around 9 p.m. after the couple come home from work to their garden apartment in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. Several evenings a week they take Ajax out of his cage for a romp in the chinchilla-proof second bedroom. (Chinchillas will chew practically anything, including much that is harmful to them.)

“At first he was hiding a lot, but now he’s sitting on my lap a lot,” said Ms. Dontanville, adding that she and her husband had become surprisingly obsessed by Ajax. “He’s very affectionate and responsive but doesn’t really like to be held yet — you interact more than cuddle with him.”

Grooming consists of an excited wriggle in a metal container about the size of a shoebox, filled with a specially purchased ash-like dust. And while chinchillas can’t be completely house-trained, their arborio-rice-size droppings are easy to sweep up.

Much like dogs, Ms. Dontanville said, chinchillas care about and respond to attention from their owners. “You feel like you really matter, and he loves your attention the same way a dog really loves human attention,” she said. “It’s the appeal of a puppy without the daily walks and the pooper scooper.”