December 9, 2006

• Healthy Babies, Turning point on Iraq Panel, Art in Aftermath of 9/11

  Saturday, December 09, 2006 We’re Not in Keds Anymore Robert Spencer for The New York Times Joel Meyerowitz at his studio in Provincetown, Mass. December 10, 2006 Possessed We’re Not in Keds Anymore By DAVID COLMAN OVER the centuries, doctors, holy men, philosophers, psychologists have argued about where to locate the sanctum sanctorum of human consciousness. Is it in the heart, the head, the liver, the stomach … points farther south? Despite the best efforts of the pharmaceutical industry, it is still anyone’s game. One might imagine, for example, a photographer restating the famous Descartes dictum to reflect a different view: “I see, therefore I am.” Certainly Joel Meyerowitz has relied on an eagle eye to create a celebrated array of work, from the raw and wrenching panoramas of the World Trade Center destruction (collected in a new book, “Aftermath,” from Phaidon) to lively New York streetscapes and atmospheric Cape Cod landscapes. But he has come to locate his own spirit farther south than even the viscera. “Going to get a new pair of Keds for the baseball season was something I really looked forward to when I was a kid,” Mr. Meyerowitz said. “I could see myself in them streaking down the base paths, covering the territory as if I had put on winged shoes. Especially after a long winter of heavy leather shoes, those new Keds were really liberating.” While Mr. Meyerowitz may wish that almost 50 years had not passed before rediscovering that his heart was really in his feet, he is thrilled to have had the fact brought home in style. In 1998, for his 60th birthday, his wife, Maggie Barrett, gave him a pair of shoes like no other. He had to travel down to E. Vogel, the 127-year-old custom cobbler in Lower Manhattan, to have his feet measured so the shoes could be made. “I don’t have a fetish about shoes,” he said. “I wear Birkenstocks all summer, to my wife’s great chagrin.” Which explains, perhaps, why he would never have paid Fogel’s price — about $1,000 for an initial pair, including a custom-made last for future pairs — and why his wife would. At any rate, he is very, very glad she did. “They are like a throwback to those winged Keds of youth,” he said. The style he chose even suggests that lightness: simply elegant black oxfords, the uppers made from one piece of French calfskin. They reminded him of Fred Astaire, he said. “I wore them out of the store, right onto Broadway. I found myself looking down at my feet every so often to see how they looked.” And they have been worn plenty since. “Whenever I go to a party where I know there’s going to be dancing, I always wear them,” he said. He also wears them when he makes appearances as a special cultural ambassador for the State Department, giving presentations of his work on 9/11 to foreign dignitaries. “Those shoes were always the ones I took,” he said. “You feel like you stand tall in the world because the shoes are appropriate. Anything that gives you comfort in a difficult situation is important.” And now he understands why transformative footwear figures in so many fairy tales and folk myths. “There’s some degree of fantasy that comes with shoes,” he said. “Something about running and flying and escaping that shoes are part of.” He is smitten enough that this month he returned the favor and bought his wife a pair of Vogel shoes for her 60th birthday. Insert sole-mate joke here.   Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

  A Turning Point for a Panel: 4 Harrowing Days in Iraq Gerald Herbert/Associated Press Few issues divided panel members, including from left, Leon E. Panetta, William J. Perry, Edwin Meese III, Charles S. Robb and Sandra Day O’Connor, far right. Christopher A. Kojm, an aide to co-chairman Lee H. Hamilton, second from right, helped draft the final report. December 8, 2006 A Turning Point for a Panel: 4 Harrowing Days in Iraq By PHILIP SHENON WASHINGTON, Dec. 7 — For some members of the Iraq Study Group, the turning point came during four days in Baghdad in September. They found the trip so harrowing, they said, that they wondered if they could afford to wait to speak out about the disaster in Iraq. Like other visitors, they arrived on a C-130 transport plane that performed a plunging corkscrew maneuver to avoid insurgent fire while landing at Baghdad’s airport. Then they were bundled into flak jackets and helmets and rushed onto attack helicopters for the five-minute flight to the Green Zone, the military-controlled neighborhood that is sealed off from the city. There, they were placed in fleet of armored Humvees, each with a medic seated in the back to offer first aid in the event of a rocket attack. The roar of the Humvees’ engines could not mask the sound of explosions from car bombs outside the Green Zone. The security measures had been routine for most of the American occupation, but they were still jarring to these first-time visitors to the war zone. “You understand this is real — this is a state of siege,” said Edward P. Djerejian, the former American ambassador to Israel and Syria who helped draft the Iraq Study Group’s report, released Wednesday, which called for an overhaul of American policy in Iraq. “The trip to Baghdad really solidified that perception for all of us.” Whatever their early differences over the American venture in Iraq, some of those serving on the 10-member bipartisan panel and its staff say the trip to Baghdad brought them to a common understanding of the catastrophic situation in Iraq and how much had gone wrong in American planning for the occupation. They said the situation in Baghdad was so bleak — and in many ways, so much worse than they expected — that the four Democrats and three Republicans on the trip debated releasing an interim report as soon as they returned home. They worried that a final report released after the November elections, as planned, would be too late to have any hope of salvaging the situation. One Democrat on the trip, Leon E. Panetta, White House chief of staff under the former president Bill Clinton, said the idea of an interim report was scrapped out of a concern that “if we put out something before the election, we’d be chewed up” in a political fight. But he said the group’s anxiety about waiting too long was justified — and bipartisan — and helped explain why surprisingly few issues divided the members when it came to writing a final report. Members of the study group said the most significant showdown between the panel’s Democrats and Republicans took place during final negotiations late last month and involved an explicit timetable for the withdrawal of American troops from Iraq. But they said that even that dispute never seriously threatened to derail the report, with the members so unified on most of the big issues. The Democratic case for a timetable for troop withdrawal was pressed most aggressively by William J. Perry, defense secretary in the Clinton administration, who said that almost all combat troops should be out of Iraq by the first quarter of 2008. Republicans felt the recommendation would box in President Bush, who has rejected calls for a deadline for withdrawal. Mr. Perry said in an interview Wednesday on National Public Radio that the issue was resolved in two hours of private talks between him and James A. Baker III, the study group’s Republican co-chairman and a former secretary of state. The compromise language replaced a recommendation that the United States “would” withdraw troops from Iraq under a timetable with a finding that the United States “could” withdraw the troops by early 2008. “I was willing to give up the language but not the substance,” Mr. Perry said. The study group was created by Congress at the urging of Representative Frank R. Wolf, a Virginia Republican active in foreign-policy issues who grew alarmed by what he saw in Iraq during a visit last year. He pressed Congressional leaders to approve $1 million for the project through the Washington-based United States Institute of Peace, which oversaw logistical and scholarly support for the project and helped recruit Mr. Baker and his Democratic co-chairman, Lee H. Hamilton, a former chairman of the House International Relations Committee. Mr. Baker and Mr. Hamilton selected the commission’s other members — four Republicans and four Democrats, all of them retired or close to it. The average age of the panel members: 74. “These were not people looking for their next big job,” said Daniel P. Serwer, the study group’s executive director and a vice president of the Institute of Peace. “They called this group bipartisan. But really, they were nonpartisan. You couldn’t tell who was a Democrat and who was a Republican. All of these people believed that if there were vital U.S. interests at stake, then there shouldn’t be any real problem in getting Democrats and Republicans to agree.” Mr. Djerejian, founding director of the James Baker Institute for Public Policy at Rice University in Houston, signed on at Mr. Baker’s request to help organize the inquiry. He said that Mr. Baker and Mr. Hamilton agreed early on that the study group’s final report had to be unanimous — or that there should be no report at all. Anything other than a unanimous report “would have been counterproductive, because that would just show that the debate over Iraq is unresolvable,” he said. He said he was struck by how quickly the study group agreed on what might have seemed a contentious recommendation: its call for the Bush administration to reverse course and engage in direct talks with Iran and Syria about the future of neighboring Iraq. “I think everybody in the group, from the right to the left, realized the merits of talking with your adversaries,” Mr. Djerejian said. He recalled how one of the Republicans on the panel, the former attorney general Edwin Meese III, pointed out to the study group that his close friend Ronald Reagan had negotiated arms deals with the Soviet Union even as he described it as an “evil empire.” The Institute of Peace joined with the Baker Institute and two other research agencies to set up panels of experts, including foreign policy and military analysts, to provide guidance to the study group. Eventually 44 experts were recruited to work for the panel; they produced dozens of research papers. The task of drafting the final report was largely left to Mr. Djerejian; John B. Williams, a colleague of Mr. Baker’s from his Houston law firm; and two longtime aides to Mr. Hamilton, Christopher A. Kojm and Benjamin J. Rhodes. Mr. Djerejian said the draft reports were heavily edited by the 10 members of the study group. Sandra Day O’Connor, a former Supreme Court justice, was an exacting editor and insisted that the report be written and organized so that it could be readily understood by people without foreign policy expertise. “She’d say, ‘We’re writing this for the American people, not for people like you,’ ” Mr. Djerejian said, chuckling. “We are all terrified of her. But she was right. Sometimes we policy wonks get lost in our own verbiage.” Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

  Healthy Babies Need Irony Elizabeth Lippman for The New York Times At the Web magazine’s office in SoHo are, from left, Ada Calhoun, editor in chief (with her son, Oliver); Rufus Griscom, a publisher (with his son, Declan); and Alisa Volkman, a publisher and Mr. Griscom’s wife. December 10, 2006 Healthy Babies Need Irony By PAMELA PAUL THAT Babble, a new online magazine for parents, should be introduced by the slinky literary sex site Nerve.com seems at once ludicrous and altogether logical. Sure, it stands to reason that after nine years of being sexually titillated and encouraged by the editors of Nerve, its readers have produced results. Yet in an era in which babies are overprotected and practically dipped in Purell, it’s hard to imagine people seeking insight into sleep training from a Web company that publishes personal essays by former teenage prostitutes. “From an editorial perspective, launching Babble is extremely natural and very exciting,” said Rufus Griscom, 39, founder of Nerve Media and a new father himself. “But clearly there’s an element of irony to it.” Babble.com, set to begin on Tuesday, aspires to appeal to educated, culturally engaged urban hipsters who are knee-deep in baby gear and seeking not just advice but the humor in it all. “We’ve found that there are a lot of taboos around parenting, as much as we felt there were around sex when we launched Nerve,” Mr. Griscom said. “There are a lot of things you can’t say, like, ‘We wanted a girl, but we got a boy.’ Or, ‘We’re pregnant with a third, but we don’t know if we want it.’ “ Babble, he says, will say it, and with wit and style. Or at least with irreverence. The site, which will be updated almost daily and feature interactive community-building features like video sharing and message boards, will attempt to cater to its prospective audience’s sensibility by mixing low-brow and high — archly observed commentaries on Kelly Ripa’s children or the latest wacky gadget for harried moms and literary satire with contributions by A-list writers, such as the novelist Walter Kirn and the screenwriter Erin Cressida Wilson. And the indie band Mates of State has been invited to chronicle the experience of taking the toddler daughter of its keyboardist and its drummer on tour. But if Babble is to succeed, the site must do more than overcome its association with its naughty sister. Store shelves and library archives are filled with current and departed parenting magazines, and today the Web is full of mommy and daddy blogs, message boards like UrbanBaby and social networking sites like Maya’s Mom and MothersClick. Some numbers are in Babble’s favor. Seventy-eight percent of women ages 30 to 44 are mothers, according to Census data from 2004. It’s clear that men — a big target readership of both Nerve and Babble — are more attentive to their children than previous generations. A study by the University of Maryland released in October, “Changing Rhythms of American Family Life,” found that married fathers spent 6.5 hours a week on child care in 2000, up from 2.6 hours in 1965. This is also a generation that sees raising children a bit differently from the way it is portrayed in most parenting magazines. Many have a knee-jerk skepticism toward mainstream corporate parenting culture and a determined reluctance to give up the vestiges of their own youths. “This is a new generation of parents who are interested in taking their existing lifestyle, sense of self and priorities into parenting, as opposed to checking them at the parenthood door,” said Julia Beck, founder of 40 Weeks, a consultancy serving the expectant- and new-parent market. “They’re looking for ways to infuse their personality and aesthetic into this new phase of life, and all this new lifestyle parenting media reflects that.” Ada Calhoun, 30, a mother to 3½-month-old Oliver and Babble’s editor in chief, intends to avoid the fear and didacticism she sees as endemic to the parenting magazine category. Rather than issue a dictum on whether to circumcise, for example, the site will post a range of opinions by a variety of experts, and a brief “Babble” take on the issue, encouraging readers to decide for themselves. Not everyone believes that what Babble is setting out to do is all that radical. “It’s not as if this is a new idea,” said Stephanie Wilkinson, a founder and an editor of Brain, Child, a magazine that reaches 36,000 readers, three-quarters of them paid subscribers. “The whole ironic absurdity of parenting, absence of dewy-eyed-sentimentalism thing is what the mother-lit movement — starting with Mothers Who Think on Salon and the ‘momoir’ genre — has been doing for the past 10 years.” Still, Ms. Wilkinson says, “If Babble can get men to read it in anything close to the numbers women do, that will be a real feat.” Greg Allen, 39, whose blog for new dads, DaddyTypes, attracts up to 300,000 visits a month, thinks the audience is there. “A lot of dads want to get involved in all aspects of raising their kids, but feel they’re ignored by the people who make baby products and by the parenting media,” he said. He will soon be a columnist for Babble. But magazines for dads have a tarnished pedigree. Three that started since 2001 — Dads, Offspring and Real Dad — closed after just a few issues. Mr. Griscom said that Babble is not aiming for elitism. “We do not intend for this to be a little literary magazine,” he said. “We intend for it to be wildly commercially successful.” To do so, Babble’s executives said, they need an audience of two million to three million readers a month. Mr. Griscom said that Nerve is profitable, with a projected profit margin of 20 percent on more than $3 million in revenue this year. But half its revenue stems from personal ads and subscriptions, neither to be offered on Babble. This leaves the magazine dependent on advertising, and a much smaller percentage of revenue is expected to come from licensing and publishing deals. According to Denise Fedewa, vice president and planning director for Leo Burnett USA, Babble has the right idea, at least in terms of the target reader. “It’s a very valuable psychographic in that the urban hipster lifestyle is something that a lot of people aspire to, even if they don’t technically live it,” she said. “These are the kind of consumers advertisers want to reach in order to get a trend started that will then filter out to a broader audience.” So far, smaller design brands have signed up as advertisers. Whether the big spenders like Target and Johnson & Johnson, companies that Babble is keen to reach, will advertise may depend on whether they are comfortable with the site’s affiliation with Nerve, say experts. Ms. Volkman, Mr. Griscom’s wife, insisted that “there will be no crossbreeding between Nerve and Babble,” with no visible Internet links between the sites. Alan Schanzer, managing partner at Mediaedge: cia, a media buying and planning agency, said it helps that the new magazine is confined to the Web. “In general, advertisers are a lot braver with the online space than with other media, so I think the majority will be open-minded,” he said. At least some parents seem tantalized by the possibility of a reading alternative. Deva Dalporto, a 32-year-old actress and children’s clothing designer in the San Francisco Bay area, said the traditional parenting publications are “a bit too kitchen-country-gingham” for her taste. “The smart, edgy magazine doesn’t exist for women, and it certainly doesn’t exist for parents,” she said. “It would be great to have a magazine with more wit and a sense of humor. After all, there’s so much that’s hilarious about this whole process, from childbirth to raising a child.” Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

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