Wednesday, December 07, 2005
 |
A Violin Doctor
Ed Alcock for The New York Times
“You are like a doctor doing a verification of the health of the instrument, to see if all is in place.”
- ÉTIENNE VATELOT
December 3, 2005
A Violin Doctor in Sync With the Strings
By JOHN TAGLIABUE
PARIS
IT was the 1980′s and the virtuoso violinist Yehudi Menuhin was performing at the Salle Pleyel in Paris. “He played an encore, and I’m sitting in the orchestra and I said to my wife, ‘Something happened to his violin,’ said Étienne Vatelot, one of the world’s great violin restorers, warming to the story.
After the concert Mr. Vatelot asked Mr. Menuhinwhy the sound was different during the concert and the encore. “He laughed and explained that he had two Stradivari with him in the dressing room,” Mr. Vatelot said. “He used one for the concert, but when he came out for the encore he accidentally picked up the second.”
As Mr. Vatelot spoke, he cradled with a trembling hand the top of an 18th-century violin that appeared to have been stepped on by a high-heel shoe. “I come in every day,” he said, a smile curling his lip, “but I can no longer do certain things that require a steady hand.”
So four younger violin restorers sat around him tapping, sawing and shaving in a mad jumble of rusted tools, varnish pots and, of course, stringed instruments whose bodies lay about like tortoise shells.
Certainly a steady hand was one of the attributes, along with a passion for musical instruments, that helped Mr. Vatelot, 80, become one of the leading luthiers, as makers, restorers and dealers of stringed instruments are called. But what keeps him in the business is above all a keen ear for the qualities of a violin and a physician’s diagnostic skill for analyzing what may be wrong with it. For more than half a century, virtuoso violinists and cellists from around the world have brought their instruments to him to be fixed, tuned and generally brought back to life. Along the way, he has helped revive a craft in France that nearly disappeared in the decades after World War II.
Mr. Vatelot was born in Mirecourt, known as “the city of violins,” the son of a violin maker and the great-great-grandson of a guitar maker. “There were 1,000 violin makers in a city of 6,000,” he said.
In 1909 his father, Marcel Vatelot, moved to Paris to open a workshop in the central Rue Portalis, in the rooms still used by Mr. Vatelot. Marcel Vatelot gained entry into Parisian musical circles through his wife, Jehane, the daughter of a noted cellist of the time, André Hekking. Their circle included the composer Maurice Ravel. Later, Marcel Vatelot sent his son to Mirecourt and to New York, where he worked with Rembert Wurlitzer, who ran the foremost violin restoration shop in America, to learn the craft.
While Marcel Vatelot was respected, he was not nearly as gifted as his son, who soon eclipsed him. It was just after 1950 that the great soloists began to beat a path to Mr. Vatelot’s door. “I had particularly at heart the search for the why of a tone, and the modifying of a tone,” he said. “This permitted me to have a clientele of great soloists, Pablo Casals, Yehudi Menuhin, Isaac Stern.”
BUT business was slow in those years. “Classical music was not fashionable, the business was reduced to some old amateurs,” Mr. Vatelot said, seated in his office surrounded by violins and photos of great soloists who entrusted their instruments to him and became his friends: the cellists Mstislav Rostropovich and Yo-Yo Ma, the violinists Isaac Stern, David Oistrakh and Ivry Gitlis.
So with the filmmaker Claude Santelli, who produced a moving documentary on violin restoration, and with the cooperation of soloists like Mr. Menuhin and the violinist Arthur Grumiaux, Mr. Vatelot labored on a project to establish a school for young luthiers in Mirecourt. “At the start I was at pains to find five apprentices,” he said, a twinkle in his lively eyes. “Now, there are 200,” he said, lumping together current students and graduates.
As prices for violins soared in the decades after the war the business became lucrative, but Mr. Vatelot poured much of what he made back into his craft. In 1975 he founded the Marcel Vatelot Foundation to give scholarships to apprentice violin makers from disadvantaged families. But his greatest gift remains his passion for music and ability to diagnose what ails any stringed instrument, but particularly a violin, and to prescribe treatment. “If someone comes in with a Stradivarior a Guarneri, he comes in and checks it out,” said the conductor David Stern, whose father, Isaac, was a regular client and close friend of Mr. Vatelot’s.
Isaac Stern normally took his violins to the New York violin maker René Morel, but at least once a year he would visit Mr. Vatelot in Paris. On one occasion, when Mr. Vatelot coaxed him to say what he thought was wrong with his instrument (he played aGuarneri), Mr. Stern replied, “Étienne, you know better than I do!”
He believes there is a tonality that fits the violinist’s personality, so he tries when possible to hear the violinist in concert. (In fact, he still maintains his lifetime practice of attending violin concerts virtually every night of the week.) Failing that, he will have the violinist play in his workshop and, on occasion, will play the instrument himself.
“I may find the instrument is whistling a bit, or is not quite in form,” he said. “It can be due to several things. First of all the humidity, if the instrument is too dry, or too humid. In Indonesia, for example, there is very high humidity. Secondly, if the tone is bad you do various tests.”
He may order the violin cleaned or, if there is damage to the wood, repaired; the finger board, usually made of soft ebony wood, may be uneven and in need of being sanded down. He may adjust the tension of the strings, the angle of the bridge, the tiny wood piece that supports the strings. He may adjust by fractions of an inch the sound post, the slender wedge of wood inside the violin that the French call l’âme, or the soul, of the violin, for its crucial role in creating the tone.
MR. VATELOT has often compared his activity to that of a physician, diagnosing an illness and prescribing the remedy. “You are like a doctor doing a verification of the health of the instrument, to see if all is in place,” he said. “In general, a soloist is like other people: he doesn’t want to change doctors. He chooses a violin maker and keeps his confidence in him.”
Which may explain why, when friends celebrated Mr. Vatelot’s birthday in November with a concert at the Salle Gaveau in Paris, the guests included the virtuoso violin soloists Salvatore Accardo and Anne-Sophie Mutter, in addition to the conductor and pianist Daniel Barenboim.
Mr. Vatelot has handed over the day-to-day running of the shop to Jean-Jacques Rampal, the son of the virtuoso flutist Jean-Pierre Rampal, who was a close friend of Mr. Vatelot’s. The younger Mr. Rampal said that with the exception of Mr. Rostropovich, Mr. Vatelot’s musical generation is almost gone. “It’s sad for him,” Mr. Rampal said. “It was his faithful universe.”
For the time being, Mr. Vatelot says, he will continue coming to the workshop every day. Pointing to an overstuffed armchair in his office, he said: “In 1959 my father handed over his workshop to me. Every afternoon he would sit in that armchair and he would say, ‘I want to die gazing at the restoration of violins.’ “
|
|
|
Dire Wounds, a New Face, a Glimpse in a Mirror
Roland Quadrini/Reuters
Jean-Michel Dubernard, right, and Bernard Devauchelle explained how they performed the first partial face transplant today in Lyon, France.
December 3, 2005
Dire Wounds, a New Face, a Glimpse in a Mirror
By CRAIG S. SMITH
LYON, France, Dec. 2 – The world’s first person to wear a new face awoke Monday, 24 hours after her operation in the northern city of Amiens, and looked in the mirror.
The swollen nose, lips and chin she saw there were not her own – those had been ripped from her head by her pet Labrador in May – but for the 38-year-old woman, whose face had become a raw, lipless grimace, they were close enough. She took a pen and paper and wrote for the doctors, “Merci.”
On Friday, those doctors defended their rush to give the woman a partial face transplant just months after her disfigurement, despite the enormous risks of death and psychological difficulties. They dismissed objections that they were bent on glory at the expense of the patient, whose identity is being withheld at her request.
“We are doctors,” said Jean-Michel Dubernard, who led the transplant team and who helped carry out the first hand transplant in Lyon seven years ago. “We had a patient with a very severe disfigurement that would have been extremely difficult, if not impossible, to repair with classic surgery.”
In a news conference at Édouard-Herriot Hospital in Lyon, where the patient was transferred for monitoring of immunosuppressive therapy that will continue throughout her life, the doctors explained how the woman’s gruesome wounds almost immediately made her a candidate for the world’s first face transplant. They heatedly denied local news reports that quoted her estranged teenage daughter as saying she was suicidal, raising questions about whether she was psychologically stable enough for the operation.
Dr. Dubernard has faced such accusations before. Clint Hallam, the man he selected for the world’s first hand transplant, refused to keep up with the lifelong drug regimen required to suppress immune responses, along with regular exercises to train the new hand. After three years he had the hand removed.
According to Dr. Dubernard, the woman had quarreled with her daughter one evening in May at her home in the northern city of Valenciennes, and the daughter had left to spend the night at her grandmother’s.
The woman was agitated, he said, and took a sleeping pill. At some point during the night, he said, she arose and stumbled through the house, encountering the dog.
Local news reports have suggested that the woman, who is divorced, fell unconscious and that the dog chewed and clawed her face in an attempt to revive her. But Dr. Dubernard said the dog had been adopted from the local pound and was known to be aggressive. The dog has since been destroyed.
Shortly after the woman’s injury, Dr. Bernard Devauchelle, head of face and jaw surgery at Amiens University Hospital, decided that the woman was a candidate for a partial face transplant and sent an urgent request for help in locating a donor to the French Biomedicine Agency, which oversees the allocation of organs for transplant in France. The window for a successful transplant was narrow, the doctors said, because the wound was developing scar tissue.
Dr. Benoît Lengelé, a Belgian surgeon who assisted in the transplant, said the woman would have required at least three or four traditional plastic surgery operations to rebuild her face with skin flaps from other parts of her body, but the results would never have been aesthetically or functionally satisfactory.
Meanwhile, the woman’s injury had made it difficult for her to talk or even drink and eat, because food and liquid spilled easily from her mouth. The doctors said her ability to open her jaw was also progressively diminishing as her wounded tissue stiffened. In July, Dr. Devauchelle consulted with Dr. Dubernard, who visited the woman in early August.
“The moment she removed her mask, which she always wore, I had no more hesitation,” Dr. Dubernard said Friday.
No information was given about the donor, a brain-dead woman whose anonymity is protected by law. She was located on Saturday at a hospital in the northern city of Lille, 85 miles from Amiens.
Brain-dead patients in France are presumed to be organ donors unless they have made explicit provisions to the contrary, and approval by next of kin is not normally required. But given the delicacy of the case, the donor’s family was consulted about the possible harvesting of part of the donor’s face during the initial interviews that are undertaken to ensure that the deceased had not given instructions preventing organ donations.
A special team of psychologists worked with the family on Saturday afternoon as the doctors involved were notified that a potential donor had been found. By midnight Saturday, Dr. Devauchelle, who led the surgical team, was in Lille to begin harvesting the face while another team of surgeons in snowy Amiens began removing scar tissue from the patient in preparation for the transplant.
Harvesting of the face was complicated by the convergence of several teams to remove other organs from the donor, but the operation was complete by 5 a.m. Sunday. Before the donor’s funeral, a separate team of doctors reconstructed her face with a silicone prosthesis made from a cast taken before the dissection.
“The restoration was remarkable,” Carine Camby, the director of the French Biomedicine Agency, said of the prosthesis. Dr. Devauchelle rushed to Amiens with the patch of face, chilled in a saline solution to 39 degrees Fahrenheit, and began the transplant, starting with microsurgery to connect the blood vessels feeding the face. Dr. Devauchelle said blood circulation to the transplanted portion was restored at 9 a.m. Sunday, four hours after it had been severed from the donor.
The operation continued into Sunday afternoon as a team of eight surgeons connected muscle and nerves “as fine as the fibers hanging from a string bean,” Dr. Dubernard said. Finally they sewed up the skin and mucous membranes of the mouth, working 15 hours in all. As they were cleaning the woman’s face and preparing bandages, silence fell over the operating room.
“The result was beyond our expectation,” said Dr. Lengelé, part of the surgical team. “It was marvelous.”
A nurse asked if they might applaud, and when one of the doctors nodded, the nurses began to clap.
By Friday morning, the woman was eating and drinking and speaking clearly, the doctors said. Though she does not yet have muscular control or feeling in the transplanted portion of her face, she is able to open and stretch her mouth with the facial muscles that had remained intact.
The doctors said it would be months before they knew how much, if any, feeling or motor control she would have in the graft, though they said the swelling had already begun to recede and her appearance was relatively normal.
“There is only a thin scar running around the transplanted area,” said Dr. Lengelé, adding that the patient had already showed signs of psychologically accepting the transplant, saying Thursday, “This is my face.”
The doctors stressed that the appearance was determined as much by the underlying bone structure as by the features of the skin, but added that the donor’s skin color, texture and thickness presented a “stunning” match to the recipient’s. If the transplant is ultimately successful, they said, the woman will look neither exactly as she did before nor like her donor.
“It will be a new face,” Dr. Devauchelle said.
A patch of tissue taken from the donor’s forearm and transplanted under the woman’s arm will allow doctors to monitor the body’s response to the graft without having to take scarring biopsies from her face. The doctors said the woman had already passed the period when thrombosis, or blood clots, presented the greatest risk to her life, but that the most critical time for a possible rejection of the graft would come in the next week.
Dr. Dubernard said he had already injected stem cells from the donor’s bone marrow into the patient in an attempt to enhance her body’s tolerance of the transplanted tissue. After reviewing successful hand transplants, he theorized that cells produced by the marrow of the donor’s hands were the critical element in the operation’s success. He added that another “infusion” of the donor’s bone marrow stem cells would be given to the patient on the 11th day after the transplant. The transplant did not include bone.
As with all transplants, the doctors said, there was about a 33 percent risk of death, a 33 percent risk that the body will reject the graft and only a 33 percent chance that the transplant will prove successful. Surgical teams in other countries, including the United States, are closely watching the outcome before proceeding with face transplants they are planning.
“We think of all the people who have been disfigured to whom we could give new hope,” Dr. Dubernard said.
Lawrence K. Altman contributed reporting from New York for this article.
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company Home Privacy Policy Search Corrections XML Help Contact Us Work for Us Site Map Back to Top
|
|
|
Blast in Falluja Kills 10 Marines; 11 Are Wounded
December 3, 2005
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Dec. 2 – A year after marines led an American assault force in recapturing Falluja, 10 marines conducting a foot patrol on the edge of the city were killed at dusk Thursday by a bomb fashioned from several large artillery shells.
Eleven other marines were wounded in the blast, the worst in a drumbeat of insurgent attacks on American troops in and around Falluja that never ceased after the Nov. 2004 offensive there that cost 60 American marines and soldiers their lives.
Details of the Falluja bombing were sparse, with the Marine Corps’ command officially holding to a policy of releasing few facts about the circumstances of combat deaths in their statement on Friday.
But an American official in Falluja said Friday that the attack that killed the 10 marines occurred at or near an abandoned factory on a peninsula that juts into the Euphrates River on the city’s western edge, an area that was the target of the first Marine attack in the eight-day offensive last November that reduced much of Falluja to rubble.
The official, who asked that he not be identified because he was not authorized to speak about the attack, said the Marine unit that suffered the casualties had only recently been moved to the area.
The high casualty toll in the Falluja bomb attack brought to 205 the total number of American combat deaths in the western desert province of Anbar in the last nine months, since a major rotation of Marine units there that handed much of the fighting to the Second Marine Division, according to figures supplied by the Marines.
Marine combat deaths in the province, west of Baghdad, heartland of the Sunni Arab insurgency, have been proportionally the highest of any American units in Iraq. According to the Iraqi Coalition Casualty Count, a nonprofit organization that tracks American military deaths on its Web site, 2,127 American servicemen and women have died, including the 10 marines, since the invasion 32 months ago.
The worst American losses in Anbar this year, before Thursday’s bombing, involved a Marine helicopter that crashed in poor visibility, killing 31 marines at Rutba, near the Jordanian border, in January; and a roadside bombing that killed 14 marines in an amphibious troop carrier near the western town of Haditha in August.
With the death toll in the Falluja attack, the number of announced American military deaths across Iraq in the 72 hours ending at midnight Friday rose to 18, including two marines killed by small-arms fire on Wednesday who belonged to the same unit struck by the bomb attack on Thursday, Regimental Combat Team Eight of the Second Marine Division, based at Camp Pendleton, Calif.
In their statement on the Falluja bombing, the Marines said 7 of the 11 wounded men had returned to duty.
A White House spokesman, Scott McClellan, said President Bush had been informed of the Falluja attack on Thursday and briefed again on the incident on Friday. “We are saddened by the loss of lives, whether it is one soldier who loses his or her life, or 10 or 11,” Mr. McClellan said.
“Our hearts and prayers go out to their families, their loved ones,” he said. “We are forever grateful for their service and sacrifice.”
Other new deaths announced Friday included a soldier serving alongside Marine units in Ramadi, 50 miles west of Falluja, who was killed by rocket fire on Thursday, and three soldiers who died in a vehicle accident on Friday near the American air base at Balad, north of Baghdad.
The only other area of Iraq where the Americans have suffered casualties on a similar scale, proportionally, has been in and around Baghdad, 25 miles east of Falluja. The American force that controls security in the capital region, known as Task Force Baghdad, with a somewhat larger force than the American military presence in Anbar, has had more than 225 service members killed since February. Many of those deaths have been from troops serving with the Third Infantry Division, the largest component of the Baghdad garrison.
The peninsula where the bombing occurred Thursday lies at the western end of the steel trestle bridge where insurgents hung charred bodies taken from an attack in the center of Falluja in March 2004 that killed four American security guards, an incident that prompted a first, aborted American military attempt to recapture the city from insurgents who had made it their principal bastion in Iraq.
The second offensive, eight months later, was the most relentless American attack against the insurgents. It ended with American forces in control of the largely devastated city, but with many of its 300,000 residents having fled.
American commanders said their forces had killed 1,200 insurgents in that offensive, while taking more than 500 American casualties. But insurgent groups said later that many of their fighters had left the city for Ramadi, Mosul and other insurgent strongholds before the American assault.
Under a pledge to rebuild the city and compensate those who lost their homes, the Americans have spent about $100 million. But insurgents who never left under the American bombardment, or who infiltrated back through the tight cordon that American and Iraqi troops have thrown around the city, have kept up a steady stream of attacks, including suicide bombings, roadside explosions and assassinations of Iraqi government officials and others who have drawn the insurgents’ wrath.
Earlier this week, a leading cleric in Falluja, Hamza Abbas al-Issawi, 70, considered the city’s grand imam, who had urged Sunni Arabs to defy the insurgents and vote in the Dec. 15 elections for a full four-year national government, was shot and killed. He had received insurgent death threats in recent months.
Tensions appeared to be rising ahead of the election, when American and Iraqi officials are hoping for a repeat of the October constitutional referendum, when 170,000 votes were cast in Falluja, the strongest turnout of any Sunni Arab area in Iraq. Iraqi election officials calculated that 80 percent of the votes were against the constitution, but celebrated the fact that the city had chosen to take part in the political process.
In Falluja’s mosques, angry residents have vowed in recent days to avenge the clerics’ killings by hunting down Islamic extremists loyal to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, America’s most-wanted man in Iraq. The anger spread on Friday to fiery condemnations at the main weekly prayers at two of Baghdad’s most militant Sunni Arab mosques.
At the Mother of All Battles Mosque in the west of the city, the preacher, Sheik Ali Abu Hassan, called the killers “murderers” and said believers should respond by voting in large numbers. At the Abu Hanifa Mosque in the eastern Adhamiya district, a stronghold of support for Iraq’s ousted ruler, Saddam Hussein, the preacher, Sheik Ahmad al-Samarrai, said, “The election is both legitimate and necessary, and your duty to vote is heavier than a mountain.”
In another threat of violence by the insurgents, a new videotape broadcast by Al Jazeera satellite television on Friday evening threatened to kill four Western Christian peace activists kidnapped in Baghdad last Saturday, one of them an American, unless all insurgent prisoners held in American and Iraqi detention centers are released.
Al Jazeera said a statement accompanying the tape, from a group calling itself the Swords of Righteousness Brigade, gave the two governments until Dec. 8 to meet the demand. The American hostage, Tom Fox, 54, from Clearbrook, Va., was abducted with two Canadians and a Briton, all men.
In the new tape, the four men appeared frightened, and two, Mr. Fox and Norman Kember, 74, from London, were shown speaking to the camera, without sound, according to a Reuters report. Al Jazeera, quoting from the kidnappers’ statement, said they were appealing for American and British troops to be withdrawn from Iraq.
Reuters said that a separate sequence showed the two Canadians, James Loney, 41, of Toronto, and Harmeet Singh Sooden, 32, eating what appeared to be Middle Eastern sweets.
The United States, Britain and Canada have reaffirmed policies of not negotiating with hostage takers.
|
|
|
The Right Price for Digital Music
The Right Price for Digital Music
Why 99 cents per song is too much, and too little.
By Adam L. Penenberg
Posted Monday, Dec. 5, 2005, at 5:46 PM ET
In the early 1900s, jazz musicians refused to record phonograph records because they feared rivals would cop their best licks. We can laugh at their shortsightedness, but it’s reminiscent of today’s music industry, which is so afraid of piracy it still hasn’t figured out how to incorporate digital downloads into a sustainable business model. Each year record companies ship about 800 million compact discs—nearly 10 billion songs. That sounds like a lot until you compare it to the 13 billion songs that were available (according to download tracker BigChampagne) for free on peer-to-peer networks in 2004.
The one bright spot for the industry has been Apple’s iTunes store, which has sold 600 million songs since 2003, accounting for 80 percent of legal downloads in the United States. Piracy is clearly here to stay, but as iTunes has shown, the record companies’ best strategy is to provide an easy-to-use service that offers music downloads at a fair price. But what price is “fair”? Apple says it is 99 cents a song. Of this, Apple gets a sliver—4 cents—while the music publishers snag 8 cents and the record companies pocket most of the rest. Even though record companies earn more per track from downloads than CD sales, industry execs have been pushing for more. One option is a tiered pricing model, with the most popular tunes selling for as much as $3. After all, the music honchos reason, people pay up to $3 for cell-phone ring tones, mere snippets of songs.
Steve Jobs, who has been willing to take a few pennies per download so long as he sells bushels of iPods, calls tiered pricing “greedy.” That view is shared by millions of consumers who believe the record companies have been gouging them for years. From the buyer’s perspective, however, Apple’s 99-cents-for-everything model isn’t perfect. Isn’t 99 cents too much to pay for music that appeals to just a few people?
What we need is a system that will continue to pack the corporate coffers yet be fair to music lovers. The solution: a real-time commodities market that combines aspects of Apple’s iTunes, Nasdaq, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, Priceline, and eBay.
Here’s how it would work: Songs would be priced strictly on demand. The more people who download the latest Eminem single, the higher the price will go. The same is true in reverse—the fewer people who buy a song, the lower the price goes. Music prices would oscillate like stocks on Nasdaq, with the current cost pegged to up-to-the-second changes in the number of downloads. In essence, this is a pure free-market solution—the market alone would determine price.
Since millions of tunes sit on servers waiting to be downloaded, the vast majority of them quite obscure, sellers would benefit because it would create increased demand for music that would otherwise sit unpurchased. If a single climbed to $5, consumers couldn’t complain that it costs too much, since they would be the ones driving up the price. And enthusiasts of low-selling genres would rejoice, since songs with limited appeal—John Coltrane Quartet pieces from the early 1960s, for example—would be priced far below 99 cents.
The technology for such a real-time music market already exists. The stock exchanges keep track of hundreds of millions of transactions every day and calculate each stock to the quarter-penny in real-time. Banks are able to do the same with hundreds of millions of ATM withdrawals. A music market would actually be much simpler. When a trader on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange buys soybean futures, he has to take into account weather, crop yields, supplies in other parts of the world, and the overall economy. On the Digital Music Exchange, there is only one input: demand.
The interface could look something like Apple’s iTunes, where users search for songs they want. One important addition would be a ticker that calculates the number of times a track has been downloaded. Click on the icon to see how much it costs right now. Click again and you freeze the price—we’ll give you something like 90 seconds to make up your mind—and make the purchase. If you buy a track for $1, that doesn’t necessarily mean the price goes up for the next person. Just like on the stock market, it might take a lot of transactions to move the market. Another potential feature, stolen from Priceline: If you tell the system how much you’re willing to pay for the new 50 Cent single—say, less than 50 cents—it could send you an e-mail alert when the market is willing to meet your price.
This is all really just a corollary to Chris Anderson’s Long Tail theory. In the material world, stores sell goods that generate a satisfactory return on the space they eat up. According to Anderson, the editor in chief of Wired, your run-of-the-mill record store has to sell at least two copies of a CD per year to compensate for the half-inch of space it takes up on the shelf. But in the digital realm, there is no shelf space. Infinite amounts of product are available. Instead of a hit-driven culture, we experience what a friend of mine calls “an embarrassment of niches.” A record company doesn’t have to depend on one album to rack up sales of 5 million. They can make the same money selling 500 copies of 10,000 different titles, or, for that matter, 5 copies of 1 million titles.
Of course, there are modest fixed costs associated with this pricing model: bandwidth, servers, office space, electricity, and the salaries of people who maintain the business. That means there would have to be a price floor, perhaps 25 cents a song. But each obscure indie rock or klezmer song that gets sold for a quarter is almost pure profit, and the bargain-basement price would induce people to download even more tunes.
The big wild card here is the impact of illegal file sharing. David Blackburn, a doctoral student at Harvard, has argued that peer-to-peer systems increase demand for less popular recordings but dampen sales of hits. If that’s the case, charging extra for top sellers might just push legal downloaders back into the outlaw world of peer-to-peer file trading. If that happens, perhaps the record companies will start offering free digital downloads of top-100 hits (with ads embedded inside, of course), while charging whatever the market will bear for the rest. A Digital Music Exchange may not be a perfect solution, but who would you prefer to set the price of music: consumers or record executives?
Adam L. Penenberg is an assistant professor at New York University and assistant director of the business and economic reporting program in the school’s department of journalism. You can e-mail him at penenberg@yahoo.com.
|
|
|
Today’s Papers
Show and Trial
By Eric Umansky
Posted Wednesday, Dec. 7, 2005, at 3:25 AM ET
The Wall Street Journal‘s world-wide newsbox and New York Times lead with a double suicide attack at Baghdad police academy that killed about 30 people. The Los Angeles Times leads with Saddam’s trial, where one woman recalled her torture after having been tossed in Abu Ghraib at 16 years old. “They forced me to take off my clothes,” she said. “They lifted my legs up and beat me with cables.” The LAT notes that, for a second day, a prosecution witness seemed to be on shaky ground. Her testimony “veered seamlessly from her own experiences to stories apparently picked up from relatives or friends. Her account was long on dramatic flourishes and short on detail.” The Washington Post‘s top nonlocal coverage also goes with Saddam’s trial but focuses on the former dictator’s habit of playing to the crowd. “America wants to execute Saddam Hussein,” said Saddam Hussein. “It is not the first time.” USA Today leads with the Energy Department projecting that home heating bills will be up about 25 percent from last year.
The first police-academy bomber—who was inside the heavily guarded grounds—hit as police were gathering for roll call. The Post says cops then went running for the protection of blast walls, where another bomber was waiting and exploded.
The NYT says the attacks “showed that the insurgents have infiltrated the deepest levels of the Iraqi forces.” At the least, they got through a heckuva lot of security. “At each checkpoint, there is a thorough search,” said one police trainer who was wounded. “Every man has to raise up his shirt to show there are no explosive belts, and it’s the same for women.”
In other Iraq news, Arab TV stations received footage of what appears to be another American hostage, a 40-year-old security contractor. Meanwhile, 11 Iraqi (Sunni?) men were found handcuffed and shot in the head west of Baghdad.
The WP and NYT front a federal jury acquitting a Florida professor of conspiring to aid Palestinian terror groups. The case was the first terrorism prosecution to rely on material based on loosened subpoena rules from the Patriot Act. The Post plays up the Patriot angle: “FLA. PROFESSOR IS ACQUITTED IN CASE SEEN AS PATRIOT ACT TEST.” The paper says in the first paragraph that the decision deals the U.S. “a setback in its efforts to use secretly gathered intelligence” for terrorism cases. Except maybe not so much. According to one juror, the verdicts were based on the facts in the case itself. “I didn’t see the evidence,” he said. How exactly is that a comment one way or the other on the Patriot Act? (Of course, it may end up being a “setback” to the law if the coverage consistently portrays the verdict as such.)
A day after seriously subpar coverage of Secretary of State Rice’s (disingenuous) defense of the U.S.’s treatment of al-Qaida suspects—coverage bemoaned in yesterday’s TP—the NYT comes back with strong second-day play. Right up at the top, the Times notes that Rice was “pelted with questions about covert prisons and a mistaken, secret arrest. … she declined to answer most of them.” More important, the NYT reverses its credulous reading of Rice’s insistence that the U.S. does “not condone torture” and that the U.S. is following American law to a T. As today’s Times notes:
The American definition of torture is in some cases at variance with international conventions, and the administration has maintained in recent years that American law does not apply to prisoners held abroad.
The NYT fronts the Supreme Court’s skeptical hearing yesterday of a challenge to a law that withholds federal money from universities that don’t allow military recruiters in. Many law schools have kept recruiters out, arguing they don’t want to be complicit in the military’s anti-gay policies. The Supremes were not sympathetic. “It seems to me quite a simple matter for the law schools to have a disclaimer on all of their e-mails and advertisements that say the law school does not approve, and in fact, disapproves of the policies of some of the employers who you will meet,” said Justice Kennedy. “That’s the end of it.”
Knocking Heds …
The NYT: “AMID PARTY STRUGGLES, HOUSE REPUBLICANS SAY THEY WON’T MOVE TO FILL DELAY POST”
The WP: “LIKELIHOOD OF BATTLE INCREASING OVER DELAY’S FUTURE AS LEADER”
Customer-service segment! TP occasionally uses newspaper jargon—”reefering,” for example, is not a synonym for “hotboxing.” Here’s a Slate glossary of TP terms. It is a bit Clinton-era. So, we’re about to update it. If there is any other TP jargon that leaves you wondering, let us know. Eric Umansky (www.ericumansky.com) writes “Today’s Papers” for Slate. He can be reached at todayspapers@slate.com.
|
|
|
In Debate Over Safety, No Neutral Corner
Kevork Djansezian/Associated Press
Dr. Margaret Goodman quit as chief ringside doctor in Nevada over concerns about efforts to protect boxers.
December 3, 2005
In Debate Over Safety, No Neutral Corner
By GEOFFREY GRAY
In the last decade, Dr. Margaret Goodman, a neurologist in Las Vegas, has developed a reputation as one of the most aggressive ringside doctors in the country. Boxing promoters have criticized her for stopping fights too soon, while fellow regulators have praised her efforts to make an inherently violent sport safer.
But for tonight’s middleweight championship rematch between Jermain Taylor and Bernard Hopkins, Goodman will not make her customary check-ups between rounds. If she monitors the fight at all, it will be from home, on television.
After two deaths and two career-ending injuries to boxers in Nevada this year, Goodman resigned as the state’s chief ringside doctor. She made the decision after months of infighting among colleagues at the Nevada State Athletic Commissionand ringside doctors over adopting more stringent safety measures, she said. She remained as chairman of the commission’s Medical Advisory Board, which periodically reviews boxers’ medical issues.
“If our job is to give these boxers the best medical care we can, we need to be doing a much better job,” Goodman said in a recent telephone interview. “How many deaths does it take for us to start taking this stuff seriously?”
Marc Ratner, executive director of the boxing commission, called Goodman “one of the best ringside doctors in the world,” but he declined to comment on her resignation.
The commission, based in Las Vegas, regulates the biggest and most lucrative boxing matches in the country. And while the commission has developed a reputation as a leading regulatory agency, requiring boxers to submit to a battery of medical tests, the deaths and injuries have prompted officials to review their procedures.
In Las Vegas bouts last spring, Leopoldo Gonzalez, a 22-year-old bantamweight from Tijuana, Mexico, sustained a career-ending subdural hematoma, as did William Abelyan, a 27-year-old featherweight from Armenia.
But the deaths of Martin Sanchez, a 26-year-old featherweight from Mexico City, after a bout on July 1, and Leavander Johnson,a 35-year-old lightweight, after losing a title fight on Sept. 17, were the real catalysts to action.
The commission’s internal review of Sanchez’s death concluded that all regulations had been followed. Yet Sanchez’s medical records, on file with the commission and obtained by The New York Times, contained several red flags.
His boxing application, filled out at the weigh-in in Nevada before the fight, stated his height as 5 feet 9 inches. The mandatory form for a physical examination, conducted by Dr. Ramon Cruz in Tijuana two days before the fight, listed it as 6-1.
Several questions about Sanchez’s history were left blank on the form: How many knockouts had he suffered? What was the date of the last knockout? What was the longest duration of unconsciousness?
And Sanchez never signed the forms for his physical and eye exams.
“It’s nonacceptable,” Dr. Michael Schwartz, president of the American Association of Professional Ringside Physicians, said in a recent telephone interview. “If the fighter isn’t signing the forms, how do you know he’s taking the test?”
Cruz did not return calls.
Jeff Grmoja, the director of Guilty Boxing, which promoted Sanchez’s match and submitted his medical records, declined to comment.
Sanchez had never boxed in the United States, as was the case with three of the six boxers who died in Nevada in the past decade. Although some states do not accept medical records from doctors in Mexico, Ratner said in a telephone interview that it would be unfair to disqualify all of their tests.
In Sanchez’s case, Ratner said, the most important signature on the medical form was the doctor’s. He added that Sanchez appeared to be “as healthy as could be,” despite trying to lose several pounds shortly before the match.
Relatives of Sanchez in Mexico City said in telephone interviews through an interpreter that he never had health problems. Martin Sanchez Sr., the boxer’s father, said the family was seeking to sue the state of Nevada.
After Johnson died in September, Ratner said, the boxing commission formed a five-member panel to investigate the recent deaths in the hopes of proposing reforms. The panel, the Advisory Committee on Boxer Health and Safety, is expected to release its findings next spring.
The safety committee is led by Sig Rogich, the Republican consultant and fund-raiser who is a former chairman of the boxing commission. Boxing regulators have criticized the safety panel because every member has links to the boxing commissioners in Nevada or has political ties to the state’s Republican governor, Kenny Guinn, who appoints the commissioners.
Tim Lueckenhoff, president of the Association of Boxing Commissions, a consortium of the nation’s boxing regulators, said in a telephone interview that the makeup of the safety committee did little to address boxer safety.
“What this panel means is that Nevada could care less about their boxers,” Lueckenhoff said. “It just seems like one of these feel-good things where you come out with a report, make a little splash in the newspapers, then everybody goes back to business as usual.”
Raymond Avansino Jr., the chairman of the commission, said in a telephone interview that members of the safety panel were familiar with boxing’s nuances and were qualified to hear from independent experts and propose reforms.
Last month, Guinn came under additional criticism by boxing regulators for replacing Dr. Edwin Homansky, a longtime companion of Goodman’s who has also worked as a ringside doctor in Nevada for more than two decades, with Theodore Day, a businessman in Reno.
“The governor just felt like he wanted a change, someone with a fresh perspective,” said Steve George, a spokesman for Guinn.
Day said his close relationship with Guinn was the motivating factor behind his appointment. According to campaign records, he contributed $9,750 to Guinn’s 2002 campaign, while Homansky gave $1,500 and Goodman $1,000.
“Boxing has a major financial impact on the state, and I’m a major financial man in the state,” said Day, chairman of Dacole Company, an investment firm.
Day said a background in business is more important for a boxing commissioner than a background in medicine.
“If I need some help from doctors and the safety people, I can find those people, but it’s a lot harder to find a qualified businessman,” he said.
If doctors, trainers or boxers have concerns about the way the state regulates matches or ideas about how officials can limit injuries, Avansino said, the safety panel will address them and propose reforms.
“We’re taking a wide-open look at everything we do here,” Avansino said.
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company Home Privacy Policy Search Corrections XML Help Contact Us Work for Us Site Map Back to Top
|
|
|
Austin-Healey 100
Frank Schott for The New York Times
October 9, 2005
Auto Biography
By BRIAN FARNHAM
When it was first introduced to the world at the London Motor Show in 1952, the Austin-Healey 100 caused a rock-star-like commotion. A mean two-seat roadster with a folding windscreen, carved “tumblehome” sides and a grille as finely slotted as a whale’s baleen, the 100 took its name from the fact that the little “four banger” engine could do 100 miles per hour. Then, as now, people who didn’t know a camshaft from a carburetor took one look at its jazzy Italian-influenced design and felt a sense of longing.
That’s especially true for the glass artist Dale Chihuly. He got his first 100 under terrible circumstances – he inherited a 1956 model from his brother, who died in a Navy-Air Force training accident. Youth being youth, Chihuly sold the car a few years later, when he was 19, and an Alfa Romeo Giulietta turned his head. Other automotive love affairs would follow, none as passionate as the one he began with Aston Martin: at one point he owned 28 of them. But he is now down to this 1954 Austin-Healey 100M.
He spent $15,000 on the car and another $30,000 to return it to its Eisenhower-era perfection. The “M” means his 100 is the more rare LeMans edition: 110 horsepower and a beautiful louvered hood with leather straps. He drives it only a couple of times a year because, as he admits, “I’m much more involved with the aesthetic than I am with the mechanical part of it.”
The relationship between man and sports car will always be complicated. A serious car accident in 1976 left Chihuly blind in his left eye, but that still didn’t douse his automotive obsession. The 100M’s perfect design makes it feel paradoxically frozen in time even while it’s racing down the highway. “I just love a beautiful car,” Chihuly says. “I can’t explain it.”[?][?][?]Brian Farnham
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company Home Privacy Policy Search Corrections XML Help Contact Us Work for Us Site Map Back to Top |
|
