Christie’s
Mark Rothko’s “Untitled” (1964) will sell for $8 millin to $12 million at Christie’s
Month: April 2005
-
Sotheby’s
Willem de Kooning’s “Sail Cloth” is expected to bring $8 million to $12 million at Christie’s.
April 28, 2005
At the Auction Houses, Snapshots of a Market
By CAROL VOGEL
Collectors poring over this spring’s auction catalogs will readily spot the signs of today’s tastes and fashions. There are instantly recognizable images, like one of Warhol’s paintings of Elizabeth Taylor, one of Rothko’s moody abstract canvases and a recently discovered Brancusi sculpture from the artist’s “Bird in Space” series. Many hot current art stars are represented too, with works by Marlene Dumas, Maurizio Cattelan, Elizabeth Peyton, Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst.
A decade ago the big money was primarily to be found in Impressionist and modern art. But during the next two weeks of back-to-back evening auctions, newer art is expected to be where hungry buyers will gravitate. Fueled in large part by a passionate group of multimillionaire hedge-fund managers, with deep pockets and a taste for the 20th and 21st centuries, they relish the competition of bidding at auction and will often pay whatever it takes to bring home the best.
Seasoned sellers, recognizing that this is the fastest-growing area of the art market, are already smelling the profits. Among them: Irving Blum, a Los Angeles dealer; Anthony d’Offay, a London dealer; Jean-Christophe Castelli, the son of Leo Castelli, the legendary dealer who died in 1999; François Pinault, the luxury-goods magnate who is the owner of Christie’s; William S. Rubin, a former chief curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art; and the family of Robert B. Mayer, the Chicago collector who died in 1974.
“People see the high prices that were achieved last year and know this market is extremely hot,” said Tobias Meyer, director of Sotheby’s contemporary art department worldwide.
Little wonder, then, that this season’s postwar and contemporary-art catalogs are bulging. It’s not just the sheer number of works that adds to their heft but also the over-the-top presentation: countless fancy foldout displays and pages of sellers’ biographies.
The season begins with the more conservative Impressionist and modern art sales on Tuesday night. While Sotheby’s and Christie’s have each managed to find a few great works to sell, compared with a year ago when Sotheby’s broke the $100 million barrier selling Picasso’s “Boy With a Pipe (The Young Apprentice),” for $104.1 million, the catalogs seem thin.
“It’s much easier to come across money than it is great works of art,” said Christopher Eykyn, head of Christie’s Impressionist and modern art department in New York. His colleague in the department, Guy Bennett, who is responsible for running its Wednesday evening sale, added: “Finding iconic works has become increasingly difficult, since the best examples are either in museums or in private collections whose owners want to hang on to them. When they do surface they’re highly sought after.”
The highlights of the Christie’s and Sotheby’s sales are geared to more modern tastes. The most classic is a shimmering Cézanne landscape, “Large Trees Under the Jas de Bouffan,” circa 1885-87. The Maspro Art Museum in Nagoya, Japan, bought the painting at Sotheby’s in London in 1996 for $8 million. Christie’s now expects it will bring $12 million to $16 million. Just as rare is Picasso’s 1921 neo-classical “Head of a Woman.” A kind of sculptural goddess with downcast eyes and massive hands, it is thought to sell for around $13 million. Christie’s is also selling two important sculptures: Giacometti’s “Woman Leoni,” made in 1947 and the genesis for the artist’s depiction of standing women, is estimated to sell for $7 million to $10 million; and one of Brancusi’s “Bird in Space” series from 1922-23 that was unknown by historians until an expert at Christie’s discovered it in an attic in France under layers of dirt. Carved of gray-blue marble and sitting on a stone pedestal, it is considered especially rare and may bring $8 million to $12 million.
The strength of the Sotheby’s sale on May 3 also lies in modern works. “We were being more aggressive to get modern material because we knew that’s what buyers want,” said David Norman, co-chairman of Sotheby’s Impressionist and modern art department worldwide. From the collection of John A. Cook, a New York psychiatrist who died in 1996, and his wife, Margaret, who died last year, is one of Picasso’s “Women of Algiers” from the artist’s series of 15 canvases dedicated to North African women. Cook bought the 1955 work in 1962 and Sotheby’s expects it will bring $15 million to $20 million. Also rare is “Self-Portrait With Crystal Ball,” from 1936, by Max Beckmann. Estimated to sell for $10 million to $15 million, it is a hauntingly prescient portrait, painted only months before Beckmann fled Germany for the Netherlands on the eve of World War II.
Another haunting portrait is on the cover of Sotheby’s May 10 contemporary sale catalog. This one, by Chuck Close, is of the painter John Roy, whom the artist met when they were on the faculty at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst in 1964. “There are only two of these early photo-realist portraits by Chuck Close still in private hands,” Mr. Meyer said. “The rest are in museums.” What makes it particularly hypnotic, Mr. Meyer added, “is the way John is larger than life yet slightly averting the viewer’s gaze.” It is estimated to sell for $5 million to $7 million.
Nor do you see too many of Warhol’s 1960′s portraits. But Mr. Blum, the dealer, is parting with his 1963 “Liz,” one of a series of 13 paintings, this one against a deep-red background, that is priced at $9 million to $12 million at Sotheby’s.
Other Warhol celebrities are on the block this spring. Particularly timely is a 1984 silkscreen of Michael Jackson, at Phillips, de Pury & Company on May 12. Far less important than “Liz,” it is expected to sell for $250,000 to $350,000. Phillips, which has made its name by concentrating only on younger art, is also selling a selection of some of today’s trendiest artists. Among the highlights, Mr. Hirst’s “Out of Sight, Out of Mind,” two cow heads submerged in formaldehyde, which is expected to bring $700,000 to $900,000.
Christie’s sale of postwar and contemporary art on May 11 features a far more blue-chip selection of works. There is de Kooning’s 1949 “Sail Cloth,” one of the artist’s so-called action paintings, a term coined by the critic Harold Rosenberg to describe what would become known as Abstract Expressionism. This canvas, one of de Kooning’s abstract paintings, is estimated to sell for $8 million to $12 million. Christie’s is also selling a moody Rothko from 1964 consisting of three rectangles of rich wine tones that thought to fetch $8 million to $10 million.
Perhaps Christie’s biggest surprise is the inclusion of a late painting by Edward Hopper in its postwar and contemporary art sale. “Chair Car,” a 1965 image of a rail car’s interior, would normally be sold in an American paintings auction, but Christie’s officials believe it will bring more money being offered to the largest number of today’s richest collectors. “It takes it out of the provincial,” said Brett Gorvy, co-head of Christie’s postwar and contemporary art department. “People who wouldn’t look at American paintings catalogs can have a taste of Hopper.” Collectors like the actor Steve Martin and Barney Ebsworth of St. Louis are both big Hopper fans. “Several L.A. superstars have tried it in their homes,” Mr. Gorvy added. “It wouldn’t have otherwise attracted those kind of people.”
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company | Home | Privacy Policy | Search | Corrections | RSS | Help | Back to Top -
Ramona Rosales
Ken Ferree
QUESTIONS FOR KEN FERREE
Recasting PBS?
Interview by DEBORAH SOLOMON
As the chief executive of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, you’ve been said to represent the growing influence of conservative politics in public TV and radio.
Believe it or not, we don’t discuss politics here. We’re just trying to get money into the public broadcasting system in the most efficient and intelligent way we can.
But who can deny that politics has crept into the process? Your predecessor, Kathleen Cox, was axed just two weeks ago, supposedly because she had incurred the wrath of conservative groups. Recently, they were outraged by an episode of ”Postcards From Buster,” which was never shown, in which the animated bunny visits a friend who lives with a lesbian couple.
All I know is that on Friday afternoon the board chairman came in and asked if I would serve as interim president. I had no idea until the 11th hour that this was happening. I don’t know what led to what.
Do you worry that these sorts of incidents will alienate the old left-leaning PBS loyalists?
Well, maybe we can attract some new viewers.
You mean viewers who are more conservative?
Yeah! I would hope that in the long run we can attract new viewers, and we shouldn’t limit ourselves to a particular demographic. Does public television belong to the Democrats?
Of course, many liberals also gripe about PBS. Maybe the real problem is a lack of creativity.
We’re working on that right now. We have a new initiative we call ”American History and Civics.” There’s been a long decline in teenagers’ knowledge of civics. So we’re going to put our TV dollars into new programming that will not be TV-centric.
How can TV not be TV-centric?
It uses new media. Interactive media. Games.
You previously worked at the F.C.C., where you championed deregulation. Why did you want this job?
What I was doing at the F.C.C., in my mind, was preserving commercial broadcast services and helping them thrive. Now, in this job, I am trying to preserve free noncommercial television.
Isn’t the president trying to cut the budget of public broadcasting by about 15 percent?
In the president’s budget there were some changes that would result in a net cut to us of about $60 million. We need to be better at telling the story of public TV and radio on the Hill so that Congress will be less inclined to look at public broadcasting as an easy place to find extra dollars.
What PBS shows do you like?
I’m not much of a TV consumer. I like ”Masterpiece Theater” and some of the ”Frontline” shows. I like ”Antiques Roadshow” and ”Nova.” I don’t know. What’s your favorite show?
It would probably be the ”NewsHour With Jim Lehrer.”
Yes, Lehrer is good, but I don’t watch a lot of broadcast news. The problem for me is that I do the Internet news stuff all day long, so by the time I get to the Lehrer thing . . . it’s slow. I don’t always want to sit down and read Shakespeare, and Lehrer is akin to Shakespeare. Sometimes I really just want a People magazine, and often that is in the evening, after a hard day.
For the head of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, you don’t sound like much of a PBS viewer. Perhaps you prefer NPR, which your organization also finances?
No. I do not get a lot of public radio for one simple reason. I commute to work on my motorcycle, and there is no radio access.
Can’t you install a radio on a motorcycle and listen with headphones?
One probably can. But my bikes are real cruisers. They’re stripped down deliberately to look cool, and I don’t want all that electronic gear.
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company | Home | Privacy Policy | Search | Corrections | RSS | Help | Back to Top -
Christoph Niemann
April 24, 2005
Watching TV Makes You Smarter
By STEVEN JOHNSON
The Sleeper Curve
SCIENTIST A: Has he asked for anything special?
SCIENTIST B: Yes, this morning for breakfast . . . he requested something called ”wheat germ, organic honey and tiger’s milk.”
SCIENTIST A: Oh, yes. Those were the charmed substances that some years ago were felt to contain life-preserving properties.
SCIENTIST B: You mean there was no deep fat? No steak or cream pies or . . . hot fudge?
SCIENTIST A: Those were thought to be unhealthy.
— From Woody Allen’s ”Sleeper”
On Jan. 24, the Fox network showed an episode of its hit drama ”24,” the real-time thriller known for its cliffhanger tension and often- gruesome violence. Over the preceding weeks, a number of public controversies had erupted around ”24,” mostly focused on its portrait of Muslim terrorists and its penchant for torture scenes. The episode that was shown on the 24th only fanned the flames higher: in one scene, a terrorist enlists a hit man to kill his child for not fully supporting the jihadist cause; in another scene, the secretary of defense authorizes the torture of his son to uncover evidence of a terrorist plot.
But the explicit violence and the post-9/11 terrorist anxiety are not the only elements of ”24” that would have been unthinkable on prime-time network television 20 years ago. Alongside the notable change in content lies an equally notable change in form. During its 44 minutes — a real-time hour, minus 16 minutes for commercials — the episode connects the lives of 21 distinct characters, each with a clearly defined ”story arc,” as the Hollywood jargon has it: a defined personality with motivations and obstacles and specific relationships with other characters. Nine primary narrative threads wind their way through those 44 minutes, each drawing extensively upon events and information revealed in earlier episodes. Draw a map of all those intersecting plots and personalities, and you get structure that — where formal complexity is concerned — more closely resembles ”Middlemarch” than a hit TV drama of years past like ”Bonanza.”
For decades, we’ve worked under the assumption that mass culture follows a path declining steadily toward lowest-common-denominator standards, presumably because the ”masses” want dumb, simple pleasures and big media companies try to give the masses what they want. But as that ”24” episode suggests, the exact opposite is happening: the culture is getting more cognitively demanding, not less. To make sense of an episode of ”24,” you have to integrate far more information than you would have a few decades ago watching a comparable show. Beneath the violence and the ethnic stereotypes, another trend appears: to keep up with entertainment like ”24,” you have to pay attention, make inferences, track shifting social relationships. This is what I call the Sleeper Curve: the most debased forms of mass diversion — video games and violent television dramas and juvenile sitcoms — turn out to be nutritional after all.
I believe that the Sleeper Curve is the single most important new force altering the mental development of young people today, and I believe it is largely a force for good: enhancing our cognitive faculties, not dumbing them down. And yet you almost never hear this story in popular accounts of today’s media. Instead, you hear dire tales of addiction, violence, mindless escapism. It’s assumed that shows that promote smoking or gratuitous violence are bad for us, while those that thunder against teen pregnancy or intolerance have a positive role in society. Judged by that morality-play standard, the story of popular culture over the past 50 years — if not 500 — is a story of decline: the morals of the stories have grown darker and more ambiguous, and the antiheroes have multiplied.
The usual counterargument here is that what media have lost in moral clarity, they have gained in realism. The real world doesn’t come in nicely packaged public-service announcements, and we’re better off with entertainment like ”The Sopranos” that reflects our fallen state with all its ethical ambiguity. I happen to be sympathetic to that argument, but it’s not the one I want to make here. I think there is another way to assess the social virtue of pop culture, one that looks at media as a kind of cognitive workout, not as a series of life lessons. There may indeed be more ”negative messages” in the mediasphere today. But that’s not the only way to evaluate whether our television shows or video games are having a positive impact. Just as important — if not more important — is the kind of thinking you have to do to make sense of a cultural experience. That is where the Sleeper Curve becomes visible.
Televised Intelligence
Consider the cognitive demands that televised narratives place on their viewers. With many shows that we associate with ”quality” entertainment — ”The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” ”Murphy Brown,” ”Frasier” — the intelligence arrives fully formed in the words and actions of the characters on-screen. They say witty things to one another and avoid lapsing into tired sitcom cliches, and we smile along in our living rooms, enjoying the company of these smart people. But assuming we’re bright enough to understand the sentences they’re saying, there’s no intellectual labor involved in enjoying the show as a viewer. You no more challenge your mind by watching these intelligent shows than you challenge your body watching ”Monday Night Football.” The intellectual work is happening on-screen, not off.
But another kind of televised intelligence is on the rise. Think of the cognitive benefits conventionally ascribed to reading: attention, patience, retention, the parsing of narrative threads. Over the last half-century, programming on TV has increased the demands it places on precisely these mental faculties. This growing complexity involves three primary elements: multiple threading, flashing arrows and social networks.
According to television lore, the age of multiple threads began with the arrival in 1981 of ”Hill Street Blues,” the Steven Bochco police drama invariably praised for its ”gritty realism.” Watch an episode of ”Hill Street Blues” side by side with any major drama from the preceding decades — ”Starsky and Hutch,” for instance, or ”Dragnet” — and the structural transformation will jump out at you. The earlier shows follow one or two lead characters, adhere to a single dominant plot and reach a decisive conclusion at the end of the episode. Draw an outline of the narrative threads in almost every ”Dragnet” episode, and it will be a single line: from the initial crime scene, through the investigation, to the eventual cracking of the case. A typical ”Starsky and Hutch” episode offers only the slightest variation on this linear formula: the introduction of a comic subplot that usually appears only at the tail ends of the episode, creating a structure that looks like this graph. The vertical axis represents the number of individual threads, and the horizontal axis is time.
A ”Hill Street Blues” episode complicates the picture in a number of profound ways. The narrative weaves together a collection of distinct strands — sometimes as many as 10, though at least half of the threads involve only a few quick scenes scattered through the episode. The number of primary characters — and not just bit parts — swells significantly. And the episode has fuzzy borders: picking up one or two threads from previous episodes at the outset and leaving one or two threads open at the end. Charted graphically, an average episode looks like this.
Critics generally cite ”Hill Street Blues” as the beginning of ”serious drama” native in the television medium — differentiating the series from the single-episode dramatic programs from the 50′s, which were Broadway plays performed in front of a camera. But the ”Hill Street” innovations weren’t all that original; they’d long played a defining role in popular television, just not during the evening hours. The structure of a ”Hill Street” episode — and indeed of all the critically acclaimed dramas that followed, from ”thirtysomething” to ”Six Feet Under” — is the structure of a soap opera. ”Hill Street Blues” might have sparked a new golden age of television drama during its seven-year run, but it did so by using a few crucial tricks that ”Guiding Light” and ”General Hospital” mastered long before.
Bochco’s genius with ”Hill Street” was to marry complex narrative structure with complex subject matter. ‘Dallas” had already shown that the extended, interwoven threads of the soap-opera genre could survive the weeklong interruptions of a prime-time show, but the actual content of ”Dallas” was fluff. (The most probing issue it addressed was the question, now folkloric, of who shot J.R.) ”All in the Family” and ”Rhoda” showed that you could tackle complex social issues, but they did their tackling in the comfort of the sitcom living room. ”Hill Street” had richly drawn characters confronting difficult social issues and a narrative structure to match.
Since ”Hill Street” appeared, the multi-threaded drama has become the most widespread fictional genre on prime time: ”St. Elsewhere,” ”L.A. Law,” ”thirtysomething,” ”Twin Peaks,” ”N.Y.P.D. Blue,” ”E.R.,” ”The West Wing,” ”Alias,” ”Lost.” (The only prominent holdouts in drama are shows like ”Law and Order” that have essentially updated the venerable ”Dragnet” format and thus remained anchored to a single narrative line.) Since the early 80′s, however, there has been a noticeable increase in narrative complexity in these dramas. The most ambitious show on TV to date, ”The Sopranos,” routinely follows up to a dozen distinct threads over the course of an episode, with more than 20 recurring characters. An episode from late in the first season looks like this.
The total number of active threads equals the multiple plots of ”Hill Street,” but here each thread is more substantial. The show doesn’t offer a clear distinction between dominant and minor plots; each story line carries its weight in the mix. The episode also displays a chordal mode of storytelling entirely absent from ”Hill Street”: a single scene in ”The Sopranos” will often connect to three different threads at the same time, layering one plot atop another. And every single thread in this ”Sopranos” episode builds on events from previous episodes and continues on through the rest of the season and beyond.
Put those charts together, and you have a portrait of the Sleeper Curve rising over the past 30 years of popular television. In a sense, this is as much a map of cognitive changes in the popular mind as it is a map of on-screen developments, as if the media titans decided to condition our brains to follow ever-larger numbers of simultaneous threads. Before ”Hill Street,” the conventional wisdom among television execs was that audiences wouldn’t be comfortable following more than three plots in a single episode, and indeed, the ”Hill Street” pilot, which was shown in January 1981, brought complaints from viewers that the show was too complicated. Fast-forward two decades, and shows like ”The Sopranos” engage their audiences with narratives that make ”Hill Street” look like ”Three’s Company.” Audiences happily embrace that complexity because they’ve been trained by two decades of multi-threaded dramas.
Multi-threading is the most celebrated structural feature of the modern television drama, and it certainly deserves some of the honor that has been doled out to it. And yet multi-threading is only part of the story.
The Case for Confusion
Shortly after the arrival of the first-generation slasher movies — ”Halloween,” ”Friday the 13th” — Paramount released a mock-slasher flick called ”Student Bodies,” parodying the genre just as the ”Scream” series would do 15 years later. In one scene, the obligatory nubile teenage baby sitter hears a noise outside a suburban house; she opens the door to investigate, finds nothing and then goes back inside. As the door shuts behind her, the camera swoops in on the doorknob, and we see that she has left the door unlocked. The camera pulls back and then swoops down again for emphasis. And then a flashing arrow appears on the screen, with text that helpfully explains: ”Unlocked!”
That flashing arrow is parody, of course, but it’s merely an exaggerated version of a device popular stories use all the time. When a sci-fi script inserts into some advanced lab a nonscientist who keeps asking the science geeks to explain what they’re doing with that particle accelerator, that’s a flashing arrow that gives the audience precisely the information it needs in order to make sense of the ensuing plot. (”Whatever you do, don’t spill water on it, or you’ll set off a massive explosion!”) These hints serve as a kind of narrative hand-holding. Implicitly, they say to the audience, ”We realize you have no idea what a particle accelerator is, but here’s the deal: all you need to know is that it’s a big fancy thing that explodes when wet.” They focus the mind on relevant details: ”Don’t worry about whether the baby sitter is going to break up with her boyfriend. Worry about that guy lurking in the bushes.” They reduce the amount of analytic work you need to do to make sense of a story. All you have to do is follow the arrows.
By this standard, popular television has never been harder to follow. If narrative threads have experienced a population explosion over the past 20 years, flashing arrows have grown correspondingly scarce. Watching our pinnacle of early 80′s TV drama, ”Hill Street Blues,” we find there’s an informational wholeness to each scene that differs markedly from what you see on shows like ”The West Wing” or ”The Sopranos” or ”Alias” or ”E.R.”
”Hill Street” has ambiguities about future events: will a convicted killer be executed? Will Furillo marry Joyce Davenport? Will Renko find it in himself to bust a favorite singer for cocaine possession? But the present-tense of each scene explains itself to the viewer with little ambiguity. There’s an open question or a mystery driving each of these stories — how will it all turn out? — but there’s no mystery about the immediate activity on the screen. A contemporary drama like ”The West Wing,” on the other hand, constantly embeds mysteries into the present-tense events: you see characters performing actions or discussing events about which crucial information has been deliberately withheld. Anyone who has watched more than a handful of ”The West Wing” episodes closely will know the feeling: scene after scene refers to some clearly crucial but unexplained piece of information, and after the sixth reference, you’ll find yourself wishing you could rewind the tape to figure out what they’re talking about, assuming you’ve missed something. And then you realize that you’re supposed to be confused. The open question posed by these sequences is not ”How will this turn out in the end?” The question is ”What’s happening right now?”
The deliberate lack of hand-holding extends down to the microlevel of dialogue as well. Popular entertainment that addresses technical issues — whether they are the intricacies of passing legislation, or of performing a heart bypass, or of operating a particle accelerator — conventionally switches between two modes of information in dialogue: texture and substance. Texture is all the arcane verbiage provided to convince the viewer that they’re watching Actual Doctors at Work; substance is the material planted amid the background texture that the viewer needs make sense of the plot.
Conventionally, narratives demarcate the line between texture and substance by inserting cues that flag or translate the important data. There’s an unintentionally comical moment in the 2004 blockbuster ”The Day After Tomorrow” in which the beleaguered climatologist (played by Dennis Quaid) announces his theory about the imminent arrival of a new ice age to a gathering of government officials. In his speech, he warns that ”we have hit a critical desalinization point!” At this moment, the writer-director Roland Emmerich — a master of brazen arrow-flashing — has an official follow with the obliging remark: ”It would explain what’s driving this extreme weather.” They might as well have had a flashing ”Unlocked!” arrow on the screen.
The dialogue on shows like ”The West Wing” and ”E.R.,” on the other hand, doesn’t talk down to its audiences. It rushes by, the words accelerating in sync with the high-speed tracking shots that glide through the corridors and operating rooms. The characters talk faster in these shows, but the truly remarkable thing about the dialogue is not purely a matter of speed; it’s the willingness to immerse the audience in information that most viewers won’t understand. Here’s a typical scene from ”E.R.”:
[WEAVER AND WRIGHT push a gurney containing a 16-year-old girl. Her parents, JANNA AND FRANK MIKAMI, follow close behind. CARTER AND LUCY fall in.]
WEAVER: 16-year-old, unconscious, history of biliary atresia.
CARTER: Hepatic coma?
WEAVER: Looks like it.
MR. MIKAMI: She was doing fine until six months ago.
CARTER: What medication is she on?
MRS. MIKAMI: Ampicillin, tobramycin, vitamins a, d and k.
LUCY: Skin’s jaundiced.
WEAVER: Same with the sclera. Breath smells sweet.
CARTER: Fetor hepaticus?
WEAVER: Yep.
LUCY: What’s that?
WEAVER: Her liver’s shut down. Let’s dip a urine. [To CARTER] Guys, it’s getting a little crowded in here, why don’t you deal with the parents? Start lactulose, 30 cc’s per NG.
CARTER: We’re giving medicine to clean her blood.
WEAVER: Blood in the urine, two-plus.
CARTER: The liver failure is causing her blood not to clot.
MRS. MIKAMI: Oh, God. . . .
CARTER: Is she on the transplant list?
MR. MIKAMI: She’s been Status 2a for six months, but they haven’t been able to find her a match.
CARTER: Why? What’s her blood type?
MR. MIKAMI: AB.
[This hits CARTER like a lightning bolt. LUCY gets it, too. They share a look.]
There are flashing arrows here, of course — ”The liver failure is causing her blood not to clot” — but the ratio of medical jargon to layperson translation is remarkably high. From a purely narrative point of view, the decisive line arrives at the very end: ”AB.” The 16-year-old’s blood type connects her to an earlier plot line, involving a cerebral-hemorrhage victim who — after being dramatically revived in one of the opening scenes — ends up brain-dead. Far earlier, before the liver-failure scene above, Carter briefly discusses harvesting the hemorrhage victim’s organs for transplants, and another doctor makes a passing reference to his blood type being the rare AB (thus making him an unlikely donor). The twist here revolves around a statistically unlikely event happening at the E.R. — an otherwise perfect liver donor showing up just in time to donate his liver to a recipient with the same rare blood type. But the show reveals this twist with remarkable subtlety. To make sense of that last ”AB” line — and the look of disbelief on Carter’s and Lucy’s faces — you have to recall a passing remark uttered earlier regarding a character who belongs to a completely different thread. Shows like ”E.R.” may have more blood and guts than popular TV had a generation ago, but when it comes to storytelling, they possess a quality that can only be described as subtlety and discretion.
Even Bad TV Is Better
Skeptics might argue that I have stacked the deck here by focusing on relatively highbrow titles like ”The Sopranos” or ”The West Wing,” when in fact the most significant change in the last five years of narrative entertainment involves reality TV. Does the contemporary pop cultural landscape look quite as promising if the representative show is ”Joe Millionaire” instead of ”The West Wing”?
I think it does, but to answer that question properly, you have to avoid the tendency to sentimentalize the past. When people talk about the golden age of television in the early 70′s — invoking shows like ”The Mary Tyler Moore Show” and ”All in the Family” — they forget to mention how awful most television programming was during much of that decade. If you’re going to look at pop-culture trends, you have to compare apples to apples, or in this case, lemons to lemons. The relevant comparison is not between ”Joe Millionaire” and ”MASH”; it’s between ”Joe Millionaire” and ”The Newlywed Game,” or between ”Survivor” and ”The Love Boat.”
What you see when you make these head-to-head comparisons is that a rising tide of complexity has been lifting programming at the bottom of the quality spectrum and at the top. ”The Sopranos” is several times more demanding of its audiences than ”Hill Street” was, and ”Joe Millionaire” has made comparable advances over ”Battle of the Network Stars.” This is the ultimate test of the Sleeper Curve theory: even the junk has improved.
If early television took its cues from the stage, today’s reality programming is reliably structured like a video game: a series of competitive tests, growing more challenging over time. Many reality shows borrow a subtler device from gaming culture as well: the rules aren’t fully established at the outset. You learn as you play.
On a show like ”Survivor” or ”The Apprentice,” the participants — and the audience — know the general objective of the series, but each episode involves new challenges that haven’t been ordained in advance. The final round of the first season of ”The Apprentice,” for instance, threw a monkey wrench into the strategy that governed the play up to that point, when Trump announced that the two remaining apprentices would have to assemble and manage a team of subordinates who had already been fired in earlier episodes of the show. All of a sudden the overarching objective of the game — do anything to avoid being fired — presented a potential conflict to the remaining two contenders: the structure of the final round favored the survivor who had maintained the best relationships with his comrades. Suddenly, it wasn’t enough just to have clawed your way to the top; you had to have made friends while clawing. The original ”Joe Millionaire” went so far as to undermine the most fundamental convention of all — that the show’s creators don’t openly lie to the contestants about the prizes — by inducing a construction worker to pose as man of means while 20 women competed for his attention.
Reality programming borrowed another key ingredient from games: the intellectual labor of probing the system’s rules for weak spots and opportunities. As each show discloses its conventions, and each participant reveals his or her personality traits and background, the intrigue in watching comes from figuring out how the participants should best navigate the environment that has been created for them. The pleasure in these shows comes not from watching other people being humiliated on national television; it comes from depositing other people in a complex, high-pressure environment where no established strategies exist and watching them find their bearings. That’s why the water-cooler conversation about these shows invariably tracks in on the strategy displayed on the previous night’s episode: why did Kwame pick Omarosa in that final round? What devious strategy is Richard Hatch concocting now?
When we watch these shows, the part of our brain that monitors the emotional lives of the people around us — the part that tracks subtle shifts in intonation and gesture and facial expression — scrutinizes the action on the screen, looking for clues. We trust certain characters implicitly and vote others off the island in a heartbeat. Traditional narrative shows also trigger emotional connections to the characters, but those connections don’t have the same participatory effect, because traditional narratives aren’t explicitly about strategy. The phrase ”Monday-morning quarterbacking” describes the engaged feeling that spectators have in relation to games as opposed to stories. We absorb stories, but we second-guess games. Reality programming has brought that second-guessing to prime time, only the game in question revolves around social dexterity rather than the physical kind.
The Rewards of Smart Culture
The quickest way to appreciate the Sleeper Curve’s cognitive training is to sit down and watch a few hours of hit programming from the late 70′s on Nick at Nite or the SOAPnet channel or on DVD. The modern viewer who watches a show like ”Dallas” today will be bored by the content — not just because the show is less salacious than today’s soap operas (which it is by a small margin) but also because the show contains far less information in each scene, despite the fact that its soap-opera structure made it one of the most complicated narratives on television in its prime. With ”Dallas,” the modern viewer doesn’t have to think to make sense of what’s going on, and not having to think is boring. Many recent hit shows — ”24,” ”Survivor,” ”The Sopranos,” ”Alias,” ”Lost,” ”The Simpsons,” ”E.R.” — take the opposite approach, layering each scene with a thick network of affiliations. You have to focus to follow the plot, and in focusing you’re exercising the parts of your brain that map social networks, that fill in missing information, that connect multiple narrative threads.
Of course, the entertainment industry isn’t increasing the cognitive complexity of its products for charitable reasons. The Sleeper Curve exists because there’s money to be made by making culture smarter. The economics of television syndication and DVD sales mean that there’s a tremendous financial pressure to make programs that can be watched multiple times, revealing new nuances and shadings on the third viewing. Meanwhile, the Web has created a forum for annotation and commentary that allows more complicated shows to prosper, thanks to the fan sites where each episode of shows like ”Lost” or ”Alias” is dissected with an intensity usually reserved for Talmud scholars. Finally, interactive games have trained a new generation of media consumers to probe complex environments and to think on their feet, and that gamer audience has now come to expect the same challenges from their television shows. In the end, the Sleeper Curve tells us something about the human mind. It may be drawn toward the sensational where content is concerned — sex does sell, after all. But the mind also likes to be challenged; there’s real pleasure to be found in solving puzzles, detecting patterns or unpacking a complex narrative system.
In pointing out some of the ways that popular culture has improved our minds, I am not arguing that parents should stop paying attention to the way their children amuse themselves. What I am arguing for is a change in the criteria we use to determine what really is cognitive junk food and what is genuinely nourishing. Instead of a show’s violent or tawdry content, instead of wardrobe malfunctions or the F-word, the true test should be whether a given show engages or sedates the mind. Is it a single thread strung together with predictable punch lines every 30 seconds? Or does it map a complex social network? Is your on-screen character running around shooting everything in sight, or is she trying to solve problems and manage resources? If your kids want to watch reality TV, encourage them to watch ”Survivor” over ”Fear Factor.” If they want to watch a mystery show, encourage ”24” over ”Law and Order.” If they want to play a violent game, encourage Grand Theft Auto over Quake. Indeed, it might be just as helpful to have a rating system that used mental labor and not obscenity and violence as its classification scheme for the world of mass culture.
Kids and grown-ups each can learn from their increasingly shared obsessions. Too often we imagine the blurring of kid and grown-up cultures as a series of violations: the 9-year-olds who have to have nipple broaches explained to them thanks to Janet Jackson; the middle-aged guy who can’t wait to get home to his Xbox. But this demographic blur has a commendable side that we don’t acknowledge enough. The kids are forced to think like grown-ups: analyzing complex social networks, managing resources, tracking subtle narrative intertwinings, recognizing long-term patterns. The grown-ups, in turn, get to learn from the kids: decoding each new technological wave, parsing the interfaces and discovering the intellectual rewards of play. Parents should see this as an opportunity, not a crisis. Smart culture is no longer something you force your kids to ingest, like green vegetables. It’s something you share.
Steven Johnson is the author, most recently, of ”Mind Wide Open.” His book ”Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter,” from which this article is adapted, will be published next month.
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company | Home | Privacy Policy | Search | Corrections | RSS | Help | Back to Top -
Matthew Donaldson
The road to Taipe beach.
April 24, 2005
TRAVEL
Muito Chic
By ALEXANDRA MARSHALL
Gisele Bundchen and Leonardo DiCaprio are regulars there. When Naomi Campbell visits, she stays in a palatial beach house owned by Donata Meirelles, the buyer for Daslu, the São Paulo boutique that sells more Chanel than any place in the world (except at Chanel itself). The Brazilian interior design star Sig Bergamin has a house there, as do Swiss bankers with low profiles but high balance sheets. Waiting in an eternal passport control line at Guarulhos International Airport in São Paulo, I ran into Kai, one-fourth of the downtown New York design collective As Four, and the stylist Victoria Bartlett. Guess where they were headed? So what if reaching its white shores takes three flights, a short ferry and a bumpy hour in the back of a taxi? Trancoso, in the state of Bahia, just might be the chicest beach town you’ve never heard of.
That trend-obsessed Brazilians of the leisure class have suddenly piled on to Trancoso is not surprising. Until three years ago, when an asphalt road was built from Porto Seguro, the place was almost inaccessible. Less typical is Trancoso’s history. Though the Portuguese first landed on Brazil’s verdant shores in Porto Seguro, industry, agriculture and the slave trade pretty much bypassed the southernmost part of Bahia, and by the 19th century, Trancoso was forgotten. In 1973, when a handful of Brazilian hippies sought to get back to nature and escape a military dictatorship, no one would have thought to look for them there. There was a post office in a neighboring town, but mail usually took about a month. The quadrado — which boasts one of the country’s oldest churches — was in disrepair. There were no roads and no electricity and no currency was traded among the small Pataxo Indian and mixed-race population — just ”the forest and those beautiful beaches,” says Ricardo Salem, one of Trancoso’s first modern settlers. ”When I first climbed up the hill to the square, which was just an opening in the forest, I said, I want to live here.”
Salem and the others settled into a peaceful collective. They fished; they had children; they put on puppet shows. But with skill sets honed by law school and bumming around Amsterdam and India, the biribandos, as they were called, needed help from the natives to survive. ”By hiring the native people to help us build houses, we introduced money,” Salem recalls. ”Soon they started to offer to sell us land. The beach land was less valuable to them because they couldn’t farm it, so I bought two kilometers, about 300 meters deep, for the price of a Volkswagen Beetle.” Sounds like a sucker deal, but no one knew the value of that land then. Today, a 100-yard-wide plot on the same beach would cost anywhere from $800,000 to $1 million.
Still, the biribando spirit is in no danger of disappearing. The local dress code calls for nothing fancier than Havaiana sandals and a sarong. The aptly named Vegetal, another original settler, may have cut his hair — it was draining his energy, man — but he still adheres to an all-flora diet. During the high season of January and February, dreadlocked teenagers selling jewelry and fruit dot the beach by day, and by night there’s always a drum circle on the torch-lit quadrado, complete with capoeira dancers and the unmistakable smell of a certain burning herb. At the rustic new Mata N’ativa Pousada hotel, next to a listing for Reiki sessions and yoga classes, is a warning that the cost of removing henna tattoo stains from sheets will be added to your bill. Mata N’ativa’s owner, Daniel Victor Santos, is a shy, 30-year old Jesus look-alike in board shorts. He is happy to lead a kayak excursion on the water-lily-dotted Rio Trancoso, and he’ll throw in a delightful lecture on nature preservation free — though the calls of the bright Corrupiao and Xexeu birds almost drown him out.
”When I came here in 1997, it changed my life,” says André Zanonato, co-owner of the sleek hotel, Etnia Pousada. He and his partner, Corrado Tini, previously lived in Modena and worked in fashion and design but found that ”in Europe, everyone is stressed, afraid of terrorism. We came here to stay in nature and find balance in our lives.” (Etnia’s in-house art therapist probably helps.)
Zoning laws in Trancoso are keeping overdevelopment at bay — there’s that biribando ethic again — but rumors abound that a Txai resort hotel is in the not-so-distant future. And Club Med has already arrived. Perhaps this will prompt Brazilians to pack up and pioneer the next great vacation spot in a country that still has large chunks of terrain unexplored by the nonindigenous. Some have moved on already: Gloria Coelho, the São Paulo-based fashion designer, recommends Ponta do Corumbau, a beach rimmed by a coral reef four hours by car (or 20 minutes by private plane) from Porto Seguro. Trancoso residents don’t much care. ”The important thing about Trancoso isn’t that it’s chic, although it has become a fashion place,” Zanonato says. ”The important thing here is the nature. And the people who live here understand that.” If you don’t believe him, just ask Vegetal — that is, if you can find him.
Alexandra Marshall is a New York-based writer who often covers Brazilian fashion.
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company | Home | Privacy Policy | Search | Corrections | RSS | Help | Back to Top -
George Duncan
April 24, 2005
DIAGNOSIS
Abdominal Pain, Bloodshot Eyes, Pounding Headache
By LISA SANDERS, M.D.
1. Symptoms
The voice on the phone was hoarse with fatigue. ”Sharon, I’m really sick. It’s like I have the worst flu ever. My doctor’s out of town. Do you think I ought to go to the E.R.?” Sharon Inouye was immediately concerned. She knew her friend hadn’t been feeling well recently, but this Saturday afternoon she sounded awful. ”All right,” she instructed. ”Why don’t you go, and I’ll meet you there.” In many ways this was a routine phone call — a sick woman calling a friend for sympathy and advice — but in this case, the patient and the friend were doctors, and the hospital they were heading to was their workplace.
In the E.R., Inouye found her friend already on a gurney in the hallway. Her face was flushed, and her curly auburn hair was matted and dark with sweat. Her eyes, normally clear, were sunken, and the whites strikingly bloodshot. ”It all started about three days ago,” the patient began. She had felt tired and achy. No appetite. Last night, she had gone to her weekly soccer game thinking that running around might help, but once there, she spent the entire game on the sidelines. ”That’s when I knew I was sick. I always want to play — but I just couldn’t.” This morning her fever reached 104 despite as much ibuprofen as her stomach could manage. She had pain in her abdomen on the right and a headache that got worse with every movement.
When the emergency-room doctor came in, Inouye left and the patient began telling her story again, but she withheld one small detail. ”I told him about the fever and the belly pain, but I didn’t talk about the headache,” the patient told me later. ”I tried not to be a doctor — I know we’re bad patients — but I worried that if I told anyone how much my head hurt, they’d want to do a lumbar puncture, and I didn’t think it was necessary.” A lumbar puncture, an uncomfortable procedure otherwise known as a spinal tap, would show if the patient had meningitis, and she felt certain she didn’t. But leaving out that symptom may have made a difficult diagnosis even harder.
At 48, the patient was healthy and active. Her only visits to the hospital — ever — had been for a variety of broken bones and to deliver her two children. She generally took no medications.
2. Investigation
During the exam, the E.R. physician took note of her bloodshot eyes, rapid heart rate and tenderness on the right side of her abdomen over her liver. Routine blood work was normal except for some abnormalities in her liver-function tests. An ultrasound showed a normal liver, but just below it, her gallbladder was distended.
Medicine is filled with little rules of thumb that describe diseases or the patients who get them; they are the shortcuts doctors use in their complex calculations en route to a diagnosis. This patient and her symptoms evoked what we all learn in med school as the four F’s: female, fat, forty and fertile — the classic description of the typical patient with gallbladder disease. The patient wasn’t fat, but she fit the other criteria, and she had pain in the right place. Moreover, the mild liver damage and the swollen gallbladder were the only abnormalities the team had found. Given this, the E.R. doctor and, later, the medical team that admitted her thought that an infection in her gallbladder, cholecystitis, was the most likely cause of her symptoms.
Usually this illness occurs when a stone blocks a gallbladder duct. Since the ultrasound didn’t show a stone, a HIDA scan, which uses dye to look for a hidden obstruction, was ordered. It was normal. She had a CAT scan to look for infection; none was found. Now what?
Once you get started down a diagnostic pathway, it becomes more difficult to go back to the starting point and find a new direction, even when the chosen path peters out. So despite the unrevealing work-up, the patient was treated for a presumed abdominal infection.
Inouye was not sure she agreed with the medical team that her friend had cholecystitis. Though the patient had pain over the gallbladder and tests showing abnormal liver function, there was no evidence of obstruction, and her white-blood count — which should have been sky-high if there was a gallbladder infection — was normal. Her high fever and the striking conjunctivitis weren’t consistent with that diagnosis. And what about her persistent, painful headache? That just didn’t fit. But if it wasn’t her gallbladder, what was it?
Inouye, a gerontologist, realized that she would need help identifying other possibilities. She contacted the infectious-disease expert on call, Dr. Jeffrey Topal. She briefly described her friend’s situation. ”What kinds of infections should I be thinking about?” she asked. Topal began to list more than a dozen possibilities. The fever and muscle pain were suggestive of an influenzalike illness, and some types of flu cause mild liver abnormalities. But it wasn’t flu season. The Epstein-Barr virus, which causes mononucleosis, was possible, but she didn’t have the characteristic sore throat and swollen lymph nodes. The persistent headache suggested a viral meningitis; enterovirus was the most common cause. But that doesn’t often cause liver damage. Headache and conjunctivitis were common symptoms of leptospirosis — an unusual disease transmitted by farm and wild animals — but it, too, was a summertime illness, frequently picked up while swimming in contaminated water. Finally, adenovirus was a common cause of conjunctivitis, but it rarely affects the liver. Inouye thanked him, hung up and began reading up on the diseases he had named.
When she returned to the hospital the next day, Inouye peppered her friend with questions, trying to discover how she might have come into contact with any of the unusual pathogens she had been reading about. Her call to the specialist had reminded her that the secret to any infection is exposure. Had she been around anyone sick? Had she traveled anywhere recently? Any recent tick bites? Had she been swimming in fresh water? No, no, no and no.
Inouye was frustrated but undeterred. The fever, abdominal pain and abnormal liver tests were common symptoms of a variety of diseases. The unrelenting headache along with the conjunctivitis were more unusual. There are a number of pathogens that can cause conjunctivitis; a few can cause both conjunctivitis and headache. She could find none, other than leptospirosis, that caused these symptoms and abdominal symptoms. But everything she read said that leptospirosis was a rare disease, and the patient didn’t fit the typical profile. It was mostly a disease of farmers and veterinarians , not urban internists.
3. Resolution
Discouraged, she went to bed. As she lay in the dark mulling over all she had read, she suddenly had a moment of clarity. ”I realized that no matter how unlikely it seemed, it had to be leptospirosis,” she explained to me later. ”There had to be an exposure, because it was the only diagnosis that fit the whole picture.”
At 6 a.m. she called her friend. ”I think you could have leptospirosis,” she told her. ”Now we have to figure out how you got it.” Inouye pressed her for any fresh-water exposure in a farm or rural setting. The patient immediately recalled that the week before she had spent a day with her son in a glider competition at an upstate New York farm. It had been a rainy weekend, and the ground was soaked. She and her son had run through the puddles as they retrieved the glider after each flight. She had gotten drenched. ”I might as well have been swimming,” she remembered.
Inouye called the doctor charged with her friend’s care and laid out her diagnosis of leptospirosis. He was excited and relieved. The patient had presented a confusing picture, but this new diagnosis made sense. He sent off blood and urine to confirm the diagnosis and started the patient on doxycycline, the antibiotic of choice for leptospirosis.
More than a month later, the confirmation came, and by then the patient was back to normal. Reflecting on her illness and nearly missed diagnosis, she was philosophical: ”We’re taught that common things are common, and leptospirosis won’t fit when you use that paradigm. I was trying not to be a doctor, but even if I had tried to diagnose myself, I wouldn’t have come up with that. I’m glad Sharon did.”
If you have a solved case to share with Dr. Sanders, you can e-mail her at LSanders@pol.net. She is unable to respond to all e-mail messages.
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company | Home | Privacy Policy | Search | Corrections | RSS | Help | Back to Top -
Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times
“Just because we’re a real women’s magazine doesn’t mean we’re all about dumb and fluff.” Cynthia Leive
April 22, 2005
PUBLIC LIVES
A Magazine Editor Getting Used to Hearing ‘Congrats’
By ROBIN FINN
YES, there’s a telltale abdominal pouf beneath her billowy Miu Miu tunic – “That’s Miu Miu, not muumuu,” Cynthia Leive, editor in chief of Glamour magazine, says helpfully – that marks the spot where her newborn, Ike, recently resided. And she had to leave her brand new “Ellie,” the reproduction of an elephant-shaped Alexander Calder stabile that represents her National Magazine Award, back at Condé Nast while she’s on maternity leave at her bouquet-infested loft on Grand Street. Floral tributes sprout like weeds when one closes on a Brooklyn town house on a Monday, accepts a major industry award on Wednesday and then gives birth on Friday.
But those two trifles – a temporarily bigger belly, and separation anxiety from an award not won by Glamour since 1991 and captured last week at the expense of heavy-hitter finalists like Newsweek and Sports Illustrated – seem to constitute the extent of the post-partum downers endured by the energetic Ms. Leive, who is 38 and blissfully barefoot for a change of pace from her customary workday stilettos. At a decidedly non-statuesque 5-foot-2, she is, she says, “heel addicted.” So what? Show her a young woman who isn’t into shoes and she’ll show you a young woman (her audience is age 18 to 40) who isn’t among Glamour’s 12 million readers (2.3 million of whom are subscribers).
Manolo Blahniks and the occasional Guccis are her preferred platform. But there’s more to Ms. Leive and the readers, whom she calls “the stars of the magazine,” than fancy footwear.
“Heel height is not the meaning of life,” she says. Though it does flirt with Glamour’s pet theme: empowerment.
“Glamour has a message, and whether or not you like this word, it’s empowerment, and it’s on every page. Just because we’re a real women’s magazine doesn’t mean we’re all about dumb and fluff. Women are capable of getting excited about a sale at Barneys and having an intelligent discussion about national issues, so why can’t a magazine encompass that, too?”
After handing off Ike to her husband, Howard Bernstein, a producer of indie features including “Wet Hot American Summer,” Ms. Leive plunks on a bench beside her grandmother’s Knabe baby grand piano. She herself doesn’t play much, but the heirloom fits the space like a shiny black glove. Since last week, the loft’s soundtrack has been Jack Johnson (the of-the-moment crooner) and Elmo (favored by her toddler, Lucy) , on a continuous loop because no one’s had time to change it. Ike, who arrived two weeks early, has yet to indicate a musical preference.
Ms. Leive had just gotten home from serving as co-host for a party – for a Glamour associate editor, Erin Zammett, who wrote a series of articles about contracting a rare strain of leukemia – when she went into labor at warp speed. Her husband hailed a taxi, and leaving him home with Lucy, she took off, alone, for the hospital, panicky that she would give birth in the back of the cab.
Then her career woman persona took over: She reminded herself the episode would make a wonderful editor’s note for the magazine. She entered the delivery room still wearing $20,000 diamond earrings, borrowed from Fred Leighton for the magazine awards and the party. There’s an editor’s note in there somewhere.
JUST as she was not expecting Ike to arrive last week, she had not planned on Glamour’s winning the general excellence award for magazines with circulations above two million. Hubris is unattractive in an extremely pregnant woman wearing a stretchy black Derek Lam dress and gold Liz Lange coat. Besides, Glamour hadn’t even been a finalist since 1992.
“I’ve trained myself to have low expectations,” she admits. “This award is the toughest nut to crack, and a lot of people still regard women’s magazines as ‘less than.’ How were we going to beat Newsweek in a war year, or Sports Illustrated in a year when they’d done all that reporting on steroids? Those are publications you’re proud to lose to.” So why did Glamour prevail?
“We had women,” she says. “Our magazine reflected their lives perfectly. We were firing on all cylinders. There’s a your-face-here aspect to it, right to who we put on the cover.” Models and actresses deemed unrealistically thin or enhanced are rejected. Ms. Leive has a bias against cosmetic surgery and the trendy notion that surgical upgrades are another form of empowerment: “That’s not the kind of feminism we stand for. I’m working on a book about women and body image and how we got to this confusing place. I feel disgusted by the amount of pressure put on absolutely normal young women to have this kind of surgery.”
Ms. Leive grew up in McLean, Va., with two working parents; her father was a lawyer, her mother, who died of uterine cancer when Ms. Leive was 19, was a biochemist. Her editorial aspirations articulated themselves early: At age 8 she compiled a neighborhood newsletter, soliciting short stories and poems from peers. The catch was, she rejected most of their submissions and used her own.
She went to Swarthmore, where “women’s magazines were thought of, when they were thought of at all, as the enemy of feminism.” After summer internships at The Paris Review and The Saturday Review, she took what she assumed would be a one-year “airhead job” at Glamour. One year became 11. Ruth Whitney became her mentor. She was editor in chief of Self, Condé Nast’s fitness magazine, for two years, and in 2001 was asked to run Glamour.
“See,” she says, “I’ve been a control freak editor since I was 8.”
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company | Home | Privacy Policy | Search | Corrections | RSS | Help | Back to Top -
Robert Stolarik for The New York Times
Edward Hayes, left, the lawyer for Stephen Caracappa, and Bruce Cutler, who is representing Louis J. Eppolito, before Thursday’s arraignment in Brooklyn.
April 22, 2005
2 Retired Detectives Plead Not Guilty to Murdering for the Mafia
By ALAN FEUER
Two retired city detectives accused of betraying their badges to become paid Mafia killers were formally arraigned in Brooklyn yesterday, pleading not guilty to committing at least eight murders for the mob.
The arraignment of the two – Louis J. Eppolito and Stephen Caracappa – struck the opening note in what promises to be a spectacular trial, Kings County style. The charges in the case include, for example, the murder of a gangster on the shoulder of the Belt Parkway and the 1986 shooting of a diamond dealer whose skeleton, officials say, was discovered nearly six feet beneath the concrete floor of a Brooklyn garage this month.
Not since 1912 have there been such explosive criminal charges involving the New York Police Department, said Edward Hayes, Mr. Caracappa’s lawyer. It was then, he reminded the court, that a police lieutenant named Charles Becker was tried for the murder of a two-bit gambler and informant named Herman (Beansie) Rosenthal. (Lieutenant Becker was convicted and died in the electric chair on July 30, 1915.)
The defendants in this case, dressed in pastel federal smocks, appeared in Federal District Court in Brooklyn for the first time since their arrest at a Las Vegas trattoria on March 9. Mr. Caracappa, 63, looked drawn and gaunt, with his hair brushed back and eyeglasses perched on his nose. Mr. Eppolito, 56, was pale and jowly, his own hair pushed back above a pasty, heavy face.
Behind them, in the pews of the court, sat a gallery of police detectives, top Mafia prosecutors and well-known newspaper columnists, their presence testifying to the prominence of this particular case. So, too, did the defendants’ lawyers, Mr. Hayes and Bruce Cutler, who is perhaps most famous for having represented John J. Gotti, the Gambino family don who died in 2002. The two lawyers are friends of long standing.
Aside from the pleas, the hearing yesterday was occupied mostly by minor business. Mr. Hayes informed the court that Mr. Caracappa objected to being in solitary confinement 23 hours a day at the Metropolitan Detention Center and, that furthermore, he was cold. Judge Jack B. Weinstein ordered that both defendants be given warmer clothes.
Mr. Cutler, at one point, mentioned a series of secret tape recordings of his client made by a government informant. It has been widely reported that a wholesale clothier turned wholesale drug dealer named Burton Kaplan is cooperating with prosecutors and will serve as an important witness in the case.
Just how widely, in fact, disturbed Mr. Hayes so greatly that in court he denounced “agents of the executive branch” for leaking confidential information, like Mr. Kaplan’s name, to the press. He quickly added that he had nothing but respect for the two prosecutors on the case, Robert Henoch and Mitra Hormozi, suggesting that his quarrel lay with the investigators who had put the case together.
After the hearing, Mr. Eppolito’s daughter, Andrea, 28, told a crowd of reporters that she and her family would stand by her father and Mr. Caracappa throughout the trial.
“My father loved being a cop,” she said. “My dad made a vow to protect and serve the people of this city and he did it very, very well. Now it’s time for somebody to protect and serve him.”
That was Mr. Cutler’s cue. He told the reporters that “today is just the end of the beginning,” and that he fully expected an acquittal.
“We will try this case in the well,” he said in the old-time fashion, “and win it in the well.”
It is highly unlikely that there exist in New York City two trial lawyers who get more publicity than Mr. Hayes and Mr. Cutler. Both speak off the cuff, if not always to the point.
After chastising Mr. Cutler for monopolizing the microphones – a gentle joke – Mr. Hayes made a statement that managed to mix together references to a well-known Mafia killer, Representative Tom DeLay and Genghis Khan. He then appealed to the reporters to understand his client’s plight by understanding their own.
“The companies you work for mistreat you horribly,” he said, adding that he hoped the coverage of such a spectacular trial would at least earn them a raise.
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company | Home | Privacy Policy | Search | Corrections | RSS | Help | Back to Top
Recent Comments