September 24, 2005

  • Where's the Party? Scottsdale!




    Sandy Huffaker for The New York Times

    Scottsdale, Ariz., hot spots include, Club e4.


    September 23, 2005

    By MICHELLE HIGGINS



    WHEN Steve G. Bernath, 32, an engineer from San Jose, Calif., visited a friend in Scottsdale two years ago, he expected a sleepy community full of "golf fanatics and blue-haired women," he said. But a weekend of clubbing quickly changed his mind. "I was in awe actually as far as the night life," he said.


    And he was back last weekend with 14 pals for a friend's bachelor party. "It's hip," he said, beer in hand, surrounded by a gaggle of women in the pool at the year-old James Hotel. "It's happening. There's definitely a stepped-up night life."


    Hip? Happening? Scottsdale? Long associated with golf, grand dame resorts and retirees, this suburb of Phoenix is fast on its way to becoming a hipster hot spot. Nightclubs, chic hotels, trendy bars and restaurants that cater to a young, fashion-conscious crowd have been popping up.


    Party central is the James, a joint project of the New York restaurateur Stephen Hanson and Danny Errico, founder of the fashionable Equinox Fitness Clubs. Its J Bar, where Bond movies are projected on the wall, draws a steady flow of pretty people.


    But it just got some competition. In July, the nightclub e4 opened nearby. It features rooms and a patio designed around the four elements - earth, air, fire and water. On a recent Friday night, a throng of 20- and 30-somethings pulsated to house music next to a 20-foot waterfall inside e4's Liquid Room, while others smoked, sipped cocktails and watched flat-screen TV's outdoors on the Air Patio.


    A few blocks away, men with painstakingly tousled hair and tan women in spaghetti-strapped tops crowded into the bar at Stingray Sushi, a restaurant that hit the scene in December. Cocktails there have names like Godzilla and Lychee Circus, and a fish tank housing - yes - stingrays is built into the floor at the entrance.


    And at Sanctuary on Camelback Mountain, a resort and spa north of town, the only seating available at its restaurant, elements - yet another trendy lower-case e name - was at the Community Table. In the middle of the restaurant, it seats 14 and can't be reserved, intended as it is for diners who want to socialize over orange miso chicken or pecan dusted tilapia.


    In all, there are roughly 50 nightclubs, up from about 30 just a few years ago, and more than 600 restaurants, compared to 400 in 1994, according to the Scottsdale Convention & Visitors Bureau. Scottsdale has even started a New Year's Eve block party. Last year's attracted an estimated 8,000-plus partyers, the visitors bureau said. Not bad for a town better known for early-bird specials.


    "I think it's one of the best cities on the West Coast to go out partying," said Hugo Gamboa, 37, a nightclub and restaurant owner from San Francisco in town with Mr. Bernath for the bachelor party. "It's a mix between Las Vegas and L.A. You get that flavor."


    It wasn't always that way. Just five years ago, chain restaurants and Southwestern gift shops and galleries dominated downtown and there was little in the way of housing. Then the city came up with a new revitalization plan to spur investment in the area. Soon, new bars, restaurants and boutique hotels were opening - none more notable than the James, where each minimalist-chic room contains a flat-screen TV, martini set and intimacy kit.


    The James's blue and pink facade stands out in garish contrast to the brown and burnt-sienna hues of Scottsdale's adobe-style downtown. The hotel rooms are situated around its two pools - the Relaxation pool, set in a lush garden, and the Play pool, which with its bar has become so popular it warrants a doorman.


    Just inside the entranceway of the Play pool on a recent afternoon, music blasted, mist sprayed from a slatted overhang and men in surfer swimsuits and sunglasses congregated around a pool table, looking as if they were straight out of "Entourage." Couples lounged on wide white outdoor beds while singles floated and frolicked in the water. From the bar, patrons could watch guests pump iron at the glass-enclosed gym across the way or gaze at bikini-clad sunbathers.


    THE night life here is really cool," said Ilana Fisher, 25, a recent college graduate from Lansing, Mich., as she lounged poolside in a purple bikini in the dry Arizona heat. After visiting Scottsdale for the first time last October, Ms. Fisher decided to move to the area. In Michigan, she said, "there was a lack of anything social other than the movies."


    New projects under way are designed to court young people like Ms. Fisher soon. Construction is nearing completion on the first parts of the new Waterfront development - an 11-acre site along the northern banks of the Arizona Canal in downtown that will offer a mix of residential, retail and office space.


    The retro-chic Hotel Valley Ho, built in 1956, and once a playground for celebrities like Clark Gable, Humphrey Bogart and Natalie Wood, is getting a $70 million facelift. It is slated to reopen in December, with 194 rooms and a Trader Vic's restaurant. Not to be left out, Starwood Hotels & Resorts is planning to open a W Hotel in 2007.


    Many young residents welcome the change. "It used to be this dumpy looking kind of town," said Nikki Faigus, 34, a homemaker from Scottsdale sitting at a table of a dozen women in designer jeans and flashy tops. "Now it's more fashionable." The group was celebrating two birthdays with sushi and Asahi beer in the ultrasuede-covered booths at Stingray Sushi.


    "I think it's finally come into its own," added her friend Alicia Livingston, 36, an investment banker visiting from New York. "I think it's finally found its identity - fashionable but still down to earth."


    After dining on sushi and teriyaki chicken, the group headed over to e4 a little before 11 o'clock. There, a 100-person line was already starting to snake around the corner. No problem - the women talked their way into the V.I.P. entrance.


    Not everyone in conservative Scottsdale is entirely happy about the budding nightlife scene. The Love Bug, a three-year-old erotic boutique, sits among a mix of bars and interior design shops on Craftsman Court, a street that also includes the downtown Visitors Center. Earlier this year, the shop's owner, Wendy Cashaback, hung T-shirts splashed with obscenities in the window. Not long afterward, the Scottsdale police received complaints from residents and issued a formal request to take them down. Ms. Cashaback moved the offending garments inside, but noted that they were the best-selling items in the store, which stays open late on weekends to attract customers from nearby bars and clubs.


    And this is still hardly the Meatpacking District or South Beach. By day, no one's rollerblading through town in a bikini. Outside of downtown, golf resorts and senior living communities remain the norm. Indeed, the new clubs and restaurants are spread out in pockets - a cluster of nightclubs at the northern end of downtown, a row of bars on Craftsman Court near the Fifth Avenue shopping district, and the James in Old Town. Throughout downtown, restaurant chains and Southwestern-themed shops hawking cowboy boots, turquoise jewelry and jackalopes still dominate.


    After dark, on Main Street, old-timers wearing wrangler shirts and cowboy hats dance to country tunes at the Rusty Spur Saloon - a kitschy Western bar that used to be a bank. The bank vault serves as a liquor cabinet and beer cooler. And though there are no fish tanks, waterfalls or drinks with fanciful names, some hipsters prefer it to the trendy spots popping up around town.


    "There are not a lot of dive bars in Scottsdale," said Jason Miller, a 27-year-old financial adviser. "This is the coolest bar in town because it's real."


    •


    If You Go


    Downtown Scottsdale is roughly 20 minutes from the Phoenix airport. Most downtown hotspots are within walking distance of each other, as the entire district is only about two miles long and a mile wide. Still, nearly everyone drives, making parking an issue at peak hours.


    Stay at the James Hotel (7353 East Indian School Road, 480-308-1100) for prime people watching and V.I.P. access to its hot J Bar. Flashing a hotel room key will get you and a guest past any doorman. Current rates range from $229 for a standard room to $429 for a suite. In high season (January to April) those same rooms go for $279 to $509.


    For something more secluded but still chic, head north to the Sanctuary on Camelback Mountain (5700 East McDonald Drive, Paradise Valley; 480-948-2100) and check into one of its newly remodeled casitas with 42-inch flat-screen TV's and steel-blue sofas. Rates are $400 to $550.


    Both hotels offer trendy restaurants. There's also Stingray Sushi (4302 North Scottsdale Road, 480-941-4460), which offers both raw and cooked dishes and fancy cocktails.


    For dancing, the newest nightclub is e4 (4282 North Drinkwater Boulevard, 480-970-3325). Expect a line as early as 10:30 p.m. on weekends. BS West, which draws a gay crowd, is at the north end of Craftsman Court. Other clubs like Axis/Radius, Suede and Myst, all within blocks of one another south of Camelback Road and east of Scottsdale Road, also draw a young, energetic crowd.





  • Intimate Snapshots of the War Called Hell




    Nancy Crampton
    E. L. Doctorow.

    September 20, 2005
    Intimate Snapshots of the War Called Hell
    By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
    "War is hell," William Tecumseh Sherman famously observed.

    Sherman was in a position to know. An unforgiving advocate of "total war," he marched his Union Army through the heart of Georgia, torched Atlanta, then turned southeast to the sea, cutting a path of destruction hundreds of miles long. He reached Savannah by December 1864, presenting the city as a "Christmas gift" to President Lincoln, then headed north toward the Carolinas. In the course of his march through Dixie, his troops burned and pillaged and looted, destroying railroads, warehouses, factories, plantations and private homes - in an effort to destroy the Southern economy and break the will of the Confederacy.

    "War is cruelty," Sherman asserted. "There's no use trying to reform it. The crueler it is, the sooner it will be over."

    In his arresting new novel "The March," E. L. Doctorow mixes fact and fiction, real characters and made-up ones, to give the reader a bloody, tactile portrait of Sherman's infamous march and a visceral understanding of the horrors of war. Although the novel is less inventive, less innovative than his 1975 classic "Ragtime," it showcases the author's bravura storytelling talents and instinctive ability to empathize with his characters, while eschewing the self-conscious pyrotechnics and pretentious abstractions that have hobbled his recent books like "City of God."

    Some of the wide-angled views of war presented in "The March" will be familiar to fans of "Gone With the Wind": Southern families loading up carts with their most treasured possessions, as they flee the approaching Union Army; dozens upon dozens of dying and wounded soldiers awaiting treatment in hastily improvised field hospitals; flames devouring the cities of the South, as giddy soldiers and shell-shocked residents look on.

    "You could go for miles without seeing an end to the procession of troops and horses and wagons," Mr. Doctorow writes of Sherman's armies. "An eagle aloft in the April winds high over the landscape would only see something iridescently blue and side-winding that looked like the floodplain of a river."

    Such panoramic vistas, however, are the exception in this novel, which is dedicated to giving the reader a series of intimate snapshots of the war. By cutting back and forth between various characters' stories, Mr. Doctorow shows how that conflagration overturned people's lives, tearing up families, torpedoing communities and subjecting men, women and children to the cacophonous, centrifugal forces of history. He does not delve into the reasons for the war or the ravages of slavery, but instead focuses on the chaos and dislocations of battle: families losing their homes and livelihoods; soldiers on both sides losing their lives, their limbs, their sanity to the brutalities of combat.

    The two characters with whom Mr. Doctorow most clearly sympathizes are Pearl, a teenage former slave, who succeeds in transcending her past through a redemptive act of charity toward her former owners; and Stephen Walsh, an introspective Union soldier who falls in love with her. During the opening salvos of Sherman's march on Georgia, Pearl owes her survival to a series of lucky happenstances: she is adopted by a Yankee soldier, who disguises her as a drummer boy, and she later finds employment as a nurse's aide with a doctor who is operating a field surgery for the Union wounded. Walsh, who received $300 for enlisting in the Union Army, feels only a "grim despair" over what he sees as an "insane war"; his one hope is that he and Pearl will somehow survive the war and figure out a way to invent a new life together.

    Adding to the chorus of voices in "The March" are a motley assortment of Yankees and Rebels. There's Emily Thompson, a prim young Southern woman, who finds herself having an affair with a Union doctor named Wrede Sartorius, whom she likens to "some god trying to staunch the flow of human disaster." There's Arly, a canny con man, whose comic peregrinations will take an unexpectedly violent turn, and there are Arly's two reluctant sidekicks - Will, a hapless young deserter; and Calvin, a photographer's assistant, who is determined to document the war.

    The most venal aspects of the Union decimation of the South are personified by a lecherous Yankee officer named Kil Kilpatrick, who treats the war as a grand opportunity to loot and womanize, while the professionalism of the military is embodied by a Colonel Teack, who toasts Sherman's tactical brilliance, but secretly scorns the general's temperamental excesses.

    As for Mr. Doctorow's Sherman, he emerges as neither the evil madman, the "Nero of the 19th century" portrayed in Southern mythology, nor the military visionary hailed by some Northerners. Instead, he comes across as a mercurial, hard-charging general, by turns unforgiving and sentimental, savage and ruminative. "I have marched an army intact for four hundred miles," he boasts. "I have gutted Johnny Reb's railroads. I have burned his cities, his forges, his armories, his machine shops, his cotton gins. I have eaten out his crops, I have consumed his livestock and appropriated ten thousand of his horses and mules. He is left ravaged and destitute, and even if not another battle is fought his forces must wither and die of attrition."

    In actuality, the central character of this novel is not Sherman, but the Army he commands - and its inexorable march through Dixie. We see the Army in the opening days of the campaign as a motley group of men, led by sharply dressed drummer boys and walking "in a careless manner, chatting and laughing and looking anything but military." As the war progresses, however, the Army becomes a force of nature, a swollen tide of locusts devouring anything in its path, only to end, in the final days of the conflict, as a spent and hungry beast.

    "They were angry as only exhausted men can be," Mr. Doctorow writes. "The clothes on their backs were not to be dignified as rags, and their shoeless feet were bloodied and swollen. There were no drummer boys to keep the pace. There was no pace."

    It is Mr. Doctorow's achievement in these pages that in recounting Sherman's march, he manages to weld the personal and the mythic into a thrilling and poignant story. He not only conveys the consequences of that campaign for soldiers and civilians in harrowingly intimate detail, but also creates an Iliad-like portrait of war as a primeval human affliction - "not war as adventure, nor war for a solemn cause," but "war at its purest, a mindless mass rage severed from any cause, ideal, or moral principle," a "characterless entanglement of brainless forces" as God's answer "to the human presumption."

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  • 2005 LASKER MEDICAL RESEARCH AWARDS




    2005 LASKER MEDICAL RESEARCH AWARDS

    The recipients of the 2005 Lasker Awards in Basic and Clinical Research, and Public Service, are as follows:

    Basic Research: Earnest A. McCulloch and James E. Till for ingenious experiments that first identified a stem cell - the blood-forming stem cell - which set the stage for all current research of adult and embryonic stem cells.

    Clinical Research: Edwin M. Southern and Alec John Jeffreys for development of two powerful technologies - Southern hybridization and DNA fingerprinting - that together revolutionized human genetics and forensic diagnostics.

    Public Service: Nancy G. Brinker for creating one of the world's great foundations devoted to curing breast cancer and dramatically increasing public awareness about this devastating disease.

    September 18, 2005
    Five Pioneers Are Awarded Lasker Medical Prizes
    By LAWRENCE K. ALTMAN
    Correction Appended

    The 2005 Lasker Awards for medical research are going to scientists who discovered stem cells, invented genetic fingerprinting and developed a powerful technology that played a crucial role in mapping the human genome.

    And a nonscientist, Nancy Brinker, is the winner of the Lasker Public Service Award for creating the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation, which has helped transform a disease once rarely mentioned in polite conversation into an international issue.

    The awards, widely considered the United States' most prestigious medical prizes, are being announced today by the Albert and Mary Lasker Foundation. The two scientific awards each carry a $50,000 prize, split between the winners; the public service award has no monetary prize.

    Starting with $200, Ms. Brinker created the Komen foundation in 1982 to fulfill a promise to her sister, Susan Komen, who had died of breast cancer two years earlier, at age 36.

    Among other things, Ms. Brinker started the Komen Race for the Cure, a series of five-kilometer running and walking races around the country that have helped the foundation raise more than $750 million to support breast cancer research, education, screening and treatment.

    Ms. Brinker started and "nurtured the grass-roots breast cancer advocacy movement," the Lasker Foundation said. Now 58, Ms. Brinker is also a breast cancer survivor.

    Mary Lasker created the awards in 1946 as a birthday gift to her husband, Albert, in hopes of curing cancer in 10 years.

    The research award for stem cell work is going to Drs. Ernest A. McCulloch and James E. Till, emeritus professors at the University of Toronto and the Ontario Cancer Institute.

    Scientists had long theorized that the body contained cells that could renew themselves, mature and specialize in various ways. But no one had found them until Dr. McCulloch, now 79, and Dr. Till, 74, proved their existence in the blood-forming system.

    Their work started in the late 1950's, when scientists were trying to understand when and how radiation therapy stopped cancer and the military was seeking ways to treat personnel exposed to radiation from nuclear weapons.

    Working with mice, Dr. McCulloch and Dr. Till designed a system to measure the sensitivity of bone marrow cells to radiation. With rigorous experiments that relied on principles from microbiology, they showed that the spleen contained cells that divided into the three main types of blood cells - red, white and platelets.

    The findings led to a system for studying the factors that send the stem cells down different developmental paths, and helped transform the study of blood cells from an observational science to a more experimental one. Dr. McCulloch and Dr. Till found that molecules both within and outside a cell can determine its fate.

    Their work also helped scientists learn how and why bone marrow transplants replenish blood cells, thereby improving a procedure that can prolong the lives of people with leukemia and other blood-cell cancers.

    Sir Edwin Southern of the University of Oxford and Sir Alec J. Jeffreys of the University of Leicester in England received the Lasker Award for developing two powerful technologies, Southern blotting and DNA fingerprinting, that, the foundation said, "together revolutionized human genetics and forensic diagnostics."

    Working in Edinburgh in the 1970's, Dr. Southern, now 79, developed the technique now known by his name that allowed detection of a single gene in a complex genome and that eventually enabled the rapid sequencing of entire genomes.

    Suddenly, scientists had a new way to search for gene sequences of particular interest and to detect subtle DNA differences among individuals.

    Scientists used the technique, for example, to pinpoint mutations linked to inherited diseases. Detection of such mutations has led to tests for prenatal detection of diseases like sickle cell anemia and thalassemia.

    Southern blotting also led to the second breakthrough, genetic fingerprinting. The method provides a way to distinguish every person from every other person, except an identical twin.

    Genetic fingerprinting has changed the way law enforcement agencies have solved new and old crimes like murder and rape, and has absolved the innocent, settled paternity and immigration disputes, helped improve techniques for transplanting organs and tissues, led to tests to detect and better understand inherited diseases, and helped establish human origins and migrations.

    Dr. Jeffreys, now 55, was interested in uncovering genetic variation in different populations. He used the Southern blot technique to study certain DNA segments present in all humans. In 1984, he noticed in one Southern blot that the pattern of these segments varied from person to person, creating a unique genetic "fingerprint" of an individual.

    He also found that parents passed the patterns on to their offspring, with each child carrying half of each parent's fingerprint. Dr. Jeffreys's "predictions about the utility of the method not only have been borne out, but have been surpassed," the Lasker Foundation said.

    Although the discoveries were made decades ago, the awards are being given this year because newer research has shown their broad potential, said Dr. Joseph L. Goldstein, chairman of the Lasker jury. Dr. Goldstein, a Nobel laureate from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, said that because it can take years to appreciate a discovery's significance, awards are often given long after the discovery is made.

    Correction: Sept. 20, 2005, Tuesday:

    An article on Sunday about the 2005 Lasker Awards for medical research gave an incorrect age, supplied by the sponsors, for one winner, Sir Edwin Southern of Oxford. He is 67, not 79.

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  • From Artist to Muse and Back to Artist




    Jessica Brandi Lifland for The New York Times
    Allyson Hollingsworth, the artist who inspired Steve Martin's film "Shopgirl."


    September 18, 2005

    By MARGY ROCHLIN



    Berkeley, Calif.


    WHEN the film version of Steve Martin's best-selling novella, "Shopgirl," opens next month, audiences will see just how much of himself Mr. Martin put into the adaptation: he wrote the screenplay, produced the film and stars as Ray Porter, a wealthy older man who enters into a relationship with a shy, depressed clerk (Claire Danes) who spends her days selling gloves at an elegant Beverly Hills department store and her nights making art at her small dining table.


    But they will also see the work of the woman who inspired Mr. Martin's tale in the first place: the artist Allyson Hollingsworth, who created the photographs and drawings attributed to Ms. Danes's character, Mirabelle Buttersfield, and who also served as a consultant on the film. Ms. Hollingsworth previously worked as an art assistant on "Cheaper by the Dozen," another of Mr. Martin's movies, and jumped at this new opportunity, she said, when he offered it. And this time, her own artwork figured into the process: for example, Ms. Hollingsworth recreated one of her original pieces - a charcoal self-portrait of her nude body suspended in dark space - so it could be filmed for the movie as the work progressed.


    "To actually be able to be paid to create something while I'm creating it?" said Ms. Hollingsworth, 36, sitting on a chair in her tidy, 9-by-13-foot white-walled studio here, dressed in baggy beige trousers and a pink and white cowboy shirt. "Not that that is a huge motivation for an artist, because that doesn't happen very often, but to be able to sit there and draw all day? It was such a luxury. My whole life, I had day jobs and fit my art in between. This was absolutely phenomenal."


    At the time, Ms. Hollingsworth had yet to see "Shopgirl," which was directed by Anand Tucker, but she did catch the two-and-a-half-minute trailer on the Internet. There is a scene where Ms. Danes, wearing a thin cotton gown, sets the timer on her Nikon camera and makes a nighttime dash into a faintly lighted grove of spindly trees. Then a click, and the image is captured. "It got me really excited to see my process reproduced: the car headlights, the freezing of the white figure against the trees," Ms. Hollingsworth said.


    The result is like a giant replica of a series of Ms. Hollingsworth's ghostly, faux Victorian-era photographs featuring a sleepwalking bride, which appear in a show scheduled to open last night at the Michael Kohn Gallery in Los Angeles. "Oh, it was so cool," she said of the movie scene.


    This is her second one-person show, but the first time she is being featured as just an artist, not also an employee. From 1993 to 1996, she worked at what was then the Kohn-Turner gallery cataloging other people's art. One day, Mr. Martin, a serious art collector and a regular customer, came by.


    "As soon as he left, I looked at Allyson and said, 'He likes you,' and she got all red and embarrassed and said, 'No, he does not,' " Michael Kohn, the gallery's co-owner, recalled recently. "About an hour later there was a phone call, and it was Steve, and he asked to speak to her." When "Shopgirl" the book was published in 2001, it wasn't just the "To Allyson" dedication on the flyleaf that suggested who the book's inspiration had been. "It was the truck that she drove, the cats that lived in her apartment, the apartment that was at the back of the complex," Mr. Kohn said. "You didn't have to suspend any disbelief, because he was very truthful to the model."


    And what is Ms. Hollingsworth's own calculation of the fact-fiction ratio in the book? She replied in a manner that could have been lifted from actions of the self-conscious young woman in "Shopgirl." First she stammered, then her voice trailed off, then she just fell silent. The flat expression on her face never changed, but discomfort seemed to roil just beneath the surface of her pale skin. The longer she remained silent, the heavier the molecules in the air grew. Finally, she spoke: "I'm a really private person. Even with friends, I have a certain reserve."


    "I think it's from moving around so much when I was growing up," said Ms. Hollingsworth, who was born in Columbia, Mo., and as the daughter of a career Army officer attended 12 schools before graduating from high school.


    Still, she tried to push beyond her uneasiness and provide a better answer. "There are definitely movies like 'Erin Brockovich' or 'A Beautiful Mind,' based on a person's life from Point A to Point B," she said. "I would certainly say this wasn't a biography. There were things inspired by experiences that I had, but they've been so changed in the process of writing fiction." Ms. Hollingsworth's hesitancy extended to any and all queries placing Mr. Martin and herself in a single sentence - including something as simple as how long they were a couple. "I don't discuss my personal life," she said. (Mr. Martin declined to be interviewed.)


    Perhaps Ms. Hollingsworth would prefer that her art serve as the window into her soul. Having received her undergraduate degree in jewelry and metalsmithing at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, and a master's degree in art at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, she now lives in Oakland and works in various media - drawing, photography, sculpture, installations - many of them made to look as if they were made at the turn of the 20th century. Even her playful pieces have an underlying sense of longing and sadness.


    "For me, it's about ephemera - her work is a lot about elegy and the question of mortality, what's fragile," said Gregory Hinton, a Los Angeles-based novelist who owns a few of Ms. Hollingsworth's romantic creations, including a quilt made of glistening communion wafers linked together with tiny brass rings, a version of the nude floating in space from "Shopgirl," as well as an antique handkerchief with the word "once" embroidered in the middle. "It's like, 'Once, I loved you,' or 'Once I dreamed about this,' or 'Once I was here,' " said Mr. Hinton. "She works in the past - like a love affair that's gone."


    Recently, Ms. Hollingsworth reread "Shopgirl" and found it "moving," she said. "It's really amazing because the story that he wrote became a kind of universal theme. I think people can identify with love, loss and transforming."





  • High: Napa Valley on $1,000 a Day




    Peter DaSilva for The New York Times

    Everywhere in Napa, grapes frame the experience. Related feature: Low: Napa on $250 a Day


    September 18, 2005


    By PATRICIA LEIGH BROWN


    Correction Appended


    Before us lay a bonbon, ensconced on a half shell. We considered the bonbon, debated it, conceptually analyzed the bonbon. We were perplexed, our hard-worn sense of self and confidence plummeting as we tried in vain to decode the elusive yellow powder - clearly a curry of some sort - covering the bonbon.


    I was seated with five strangers at an octagonal Moroccan wood table inlaid with geodes and agates for the by-appointment-only Harvey Tasting at the Swanson Vineyards in Rutherford, Calif. We were swaddled in impossibly theatrical décor, surrounded by paintings of vintage peasants. At the table, besides the spiteful bonbon, were six varieties of wine, three types of cheese, a caviar dollop atop crème fraîche atop a potato chip, and four members of the famous Puck family, sans Wolfgang.


    "Does anyone experience a tannin?" inquired Shawn Q. Larue, the winery's salonnier and Perle Mesta. The salon is an ingenious attempt to distinguish Swanson, owned by the TV-dinner family, from tasting rooms for hoi polloi. (Wolfgang's 23- year-old nephew Lukas correctly identified tannin in the fortified Muscat.)


    But deconstructing the particle physics of the bonbon - a heady mix of pink peppercorns, Chinese star anise, clove and cumin over a ganache blended with a $55-a-bottle cabernet and syrah - taxed us to our very marrow. That's what happens when one is given $1,000 to spend over 24 hours in the monoculture of fabulousness that is Napa.


    Of course, surrealism comes with the terroir. My original fantasy had been to stay at the Auberge du Soleil, the lush Mediterranean cloister in Rutherford for haves in seersucker persimmon robes perched on a hill overlooking the valley - specifically, the elite "up valley" north of the city of Napa, where the road gets thin and beautiful and so do the people. But it soon was clear that the Auberge's lowest midweek rates - $550 for a room above the restaurant or $650 for the cheapest cottage - would stress even my Kate Spade pocketbook.


    A friend had told me about the Carneros Inn, a new resort in a less fashionable but up-and-coming part of the valley, straddling Napa and Sonoma. The appeal, besides the summer special of $355 - a sum that my husband, Roger, and I might spend once a year for our anniversary - was an intriguing spa menu that seemed very Napa.


    It was thematically divided into "the harvests" (orchard olive stone and honey dew exfoliation), "the cellars" (Bulgarian rose and grape seed), "the minerals" (largely gemstones - ho hum) and the one that sold me, "the farms." I was instantly captivated by the idea of a warm goat butter massage, which elicited visions of healing angelic goats imparting a chèvre for my soul that would soothe a multitude of woes.


    Apparently, I was not the only one with an agricultural fantasy. I checked into the inn amazed to discover a new style of architecture - 4-H Modernism: as if Ma and Pa Kettle had gone to architecture school and became New Urbanists. The rooms, which resembled chic sharecroppers' cabins outfitted with bottles of Domaine Carneros champagne, were winsome tin-roofed, board-and-batten cottages in haute cracker style, with old-fashioned front porches, rocking chairs and mailboxes for the morning newspaper.


    The inn - scaled like a subdivision and still under construction, which the reservations clerk neglected to mention - is managed by the PlumpJack Group, which was founded by Mayor Gavin Newsom of San Francisco, the newly single heartthrob who is now Bachelor No. 1. The 80-foot-long infinity pool was situated idyllically on a hilltop with the restaurant and spa, stretched languorously toward verdant canopies heavy with grapes on the cusp of harvest.


    Roger, who drove up separately to meet me for dinner, was already waiting on the porch of our private garden, outfitted with native plants and that pathetic accouterment of foggy Bay area summers, a heat lamp. Our bathroom, I was elated to find, had not only heated floors and a deep marble tub but also two showers: a glass-enclosed one with four gloriously aggressive nozzles, and - my longstanding fantasy - one outdoors, a folksy affair with corrugated metal walls and plank floors. Armed with Italian blood orange body wash, I luxuriated in princess-ness, the warm torrent pounding on tin as I soaked up the perfect Northern California sky, dreaming of barnyard animals.


    Anticipating 24 hours of gluttony, I decided it would be a good idea to get some exercise. So, passing the $800-a-day stretch-limo drivers loading up on caffeine at the Oakville Grocery, I had begun my odyssey at the crack of dawn speeding from my home in Oakland to Calistoga for Sip 'n' Cycle, a $115-a-person biking tour of wineries operated by Getaway Adventures.


    No sooner did I pull into the parking lot than Perry Mayfield, a former bike racer and Kitzbuhel ski instructor, spritzed my face with lavender aromatherapy. "Rejuvenation without caffeine!" he crowed, then proceeded to climb a tree.


    Our two wine jocks, Perry and Randy, took us on a Tour de Napa, shunning Highway 29 in favor of quiet, European-feeling back roads. Enshrined in a Plexiglas case at the Chateau Montelena, a widely respected vineyard, was the exalted bottle of 1973 chardonnay that won the famous 1976 Judgment of Paris, in which two California wines outscored the French ones, thus precipitating the cult of Napa.


    Feeling flush, I sprang for the exclusive $25 "estate tasting," including one from a $130-a-bottle '96 cabernet, which I brought from the somewhat sinister-feeling back room to share among my biking brethren. Later, across a dragon-green lake with swans and pagodas, we spied the balding head of Bo Barrett, Montelena's esteemed winemaker - a celebrity sighting akin to finding Angelina and Brad eloping in Fiji.


    At Zahtila Vineyards, situated on the Silverado Trail, where even the local landfill is Edenic, we learned that everyone in Napa is moving to Ashland, Ore. (50 acres for less than a million, it's said). The tasting room had a ceramic porcelain spit bucket, a somewhat disgusting ritual Napa objet that is essentially a spittoon for wine snobs. Under the woozy influence of the Montelena cabernet, I bought a 2002 Zahtila cabernet for $50, which was later fetched and delivered by the Getaway Adventures van.


    Sporting helmet hair, I visited St. Helena, arguably Napa's toniest town, which, like its Hamptons soul sisters, is wrestling with its popularity among the riffraff. In recent years, the town has apoplectically tried to block the building of a station for the Wine Train, a "down valley" dining experience on rails that some fear would overrun the town with T-shirted fudge shoppers. Old-fashioned places like Taylor's Refresher, a frozen-in-time drive-in with static-y loudspeakers, now commune with shops selling white chocolate koi (at $8 each a steal compared with a live koi that recently fetched $170,000 in Japan, a factoid you, too, would know if you read Auberge, the Auberge du Soleil's glossy magazine).


    At the campus store of Greystone, the West Coast outpost of the Culinary Institute of America, I lusted after a $499 set of six fluorescent Laguiole knives designed by the French architect Jean-Michel Wilmotte. But realizing I couldn't afford dinner or a massage if I bought them, I became absorbed in the collection of 1,800 corkscrews obsessively amassed by the late Brother Timothy, who oversaw the Christian Brothers winery, which formerly occupied the brooding Addams Family-esque building.


    The corkscrews, some no bigger than my pinky and vaguely inter-uterine-looking, were divided into bizarre subsets, like Cork Removers That Are Not Corkscrews (itself subdivided into Gas-Powered, Air-Powered and CO2 Powered). They were exhibited as if they were Thebian pre-Dynastic scarabs in the Egyptian wing of the Met - sacred amulets of the good life that is Napa.


    Heading back to the inn to meet Roger, I was locked in a death grip of traffic on Highway 29 behind a Volvo with a "Life is a Cabernet" license plate holder. Then, we circled back to the Auberge for a drink and an appetizer ($63 for a shrimp cocktail and two glasses of wine) on the Auberge's outdoor terrace, enveloped in pleasantness.


    The sunset bathed the mountains in blue shadows, and a half moon rose over a huge pyramid housing the Opus One winery. Like Scarlett O'Hara vowing never to go hungry again, I vowed that the next time the gods gave me $1,000 to spend in Napa, I would hole up at the Auberge, even if it meant subsisting on acorns.


    We barreled down Zinfandel Lane to Press, the restaurant jointly owned by Dean & DeLuca's Leslie Rudd that specializes in Napa wines, from 240 wineries. Our waitress, Anne, had a Moonie-like intensity, and the wine list turned out to be a better read than People magazine, with insider tidbits about vintners like Frank Farrell, who still practices law and "burns up the highway between Napa and San Francisco."


    Ordering wine was a memorable experience. "Would you prefer wine from the mountains or the valley floor?" Anne said patiently. "There is more fruit north of Spring Street Mountain Road and more evergreen on Mount Veeder." (We had a flash of a waitress in New York asking if we would prefer the boiled kosher frank from the Second Avenue Deli or the all-beef grilled one from the Nathan's Famous at Surf and Stillwell on Coney Island.)


    The chef's "sourcing" page read as if written by William Least Heat Moon. We wanted it all - the Berkshire Heritage Pork from Iowa, the watercress from Sausalito Springs. Roger was presented with a steak knife that looked like Daniel Boone's. My dish, Skeena River salmon, was not transcendent, but I was too transfixed by the next table to notice, where eight people were drinking six bottles of wine in 24 glasses.


    "That's Robert Foley, thank you!" said the all-knowing Anne, referring to the maker of a "very rustic full-bodied charbono."


    I won't go into detail about the impossibly decadent Scharffen Berger chocolate soufflé, topper of our $130 dinner, but to say, I regretted it. We went to bed in a stupor. "The floor is at 81 degrees," Roger muttered.


    The monochromatic décor of our cottage felt soothing the next morning. It was finally time to indulge in the spa, where a sign at the front desk said, "Please ask us for complimentary horse cookies."


    The warm goat butter smelled slightly of lavender. The therapist, Arnela Guastucci, put a warm towel under my neck and started to knead my back. I was struck by the sound of the butter, which made sucking, slightly gloppy noises beneath her palms.


    I was dimly aware of the rhythm of waves emanating from somewhere. Are the goats swimming? I wondered as I drifted off. Do they have life preservers? When it was over, I went to the rosemary-infused steam room, where my back melted into the tiles. I felt peaceful - basted actually.


    I had planned to go to a museum, but bagged it for a swim. I had the sensation of swimming to the grapevines, which loomed on green and russet hills. I thought about the seductive harvest of the senses that is California as I sat in a whirlpool hidden from view, hawks flying overhead, the flicker of Mylar ribbons, to ward off birds, shimmering in the distance. I sank into blissful, buttery oblivion, my soul bleating.


    Total spent: $999.85


    PATRICIA LEIGH BROWN reports for The New York Times from San Francisco.

    Correction: Sept. 18, 2005, Sunday:

    A line is omitted on Page 13 of the Travel section today at the end of an article about visiting the Napa Valley inexpensively. It should read, "Total spent: $262.49."





  •  







    Low: Napa Valley on $250 a Day




    September 18, 2005

    Low: Napa Valley on $250 a Day


    By CHRISTOPHER SOLOMON


    Napa does not smile on the visitor who's working with a Two-Buck Chuck budget.


    At the Napa Valley Redwood Inn, nearly $100 a night won't get you a room with a view of Napa's lion-colored hills and marching vines, much less a glimpse of redwoods. The "inn" is a clean, sage-colored motor lodge in the town of Napa, hard by Highway 29, the valley's main drag. My room opens onto the parking lot. It reminds me of Miles's in the movie "Sideways" and makes me melancholy in some undefined way.


    Not two hours in the valley and I've already blown more than half of my $250 two-day budget on rental car and lodging. Clearly, making a Napa trip feel extraordinary without testing credit limits is going to take some ingenuity.


    I've been told several times that newcomers to Napa and the winemaking process, like me, should kick off their visits with a tour of the Robert Mondavi's Mission-style winery near Oakville, so my buddy Tan and I had reserved a $20 tour and tasting. The affable guide, Channing, an art teacher and winemaker, talks to us of the need to stress grapes and prune back vines to coax maximum flavor from the grapes.


    Usually, we'd head to the vineyard for a closer look, but it's 95 degrees outside. The older members of our group look waxy. Channing herds us instead into the 58-degree winery. We visit the sepulcher-like barrel room (votive candles burning), then contemplate an intricate display of cork, and I wish for one of the more in-depth tours that talk about terroir and food pairing. The world brightens when Channing appears with four bottles of wine, including a moscato d'oro, an unctuous, peach-scented dessert wine, and pours samples.


    The tour conveniently ends at the gift shop where tour-takers get 15 percent off wine purchases. The ploy works. Rashly, I line up at the cashier with a bottle of $20 moscato, behind a man whose baseball cap reads, "Life Is a Cabernet."


    Though a big chunk of Napa's fun is visiting different wineries where it's easy to plunk down $5 to $10 for tastings, one of the valley's best deals isn't at a winery at all. The $15 Taste Napa Downtown card gets its holders 10-cent wine tastings at 10 different tasting rooms and retail stores in the town of Napa, as well as discounts on purchases. The card, which can be bought at any of the participating stores, also grants free admission to Copia, Napa's impressive museum of food and wine (which usually costs $12.50).


    That afternoon, we step up to the wine bar at Wineries of Napa Valley, next to the Napa Valley Conference and Visitors Bureau - the first of a few stops we'll make with the card - and plunge our noses deeply into stemware holding wines from five smaller wineries, like Bourassa and Goosecross. The man who's pouring introduces me to a white called viognier. ("The white for people who don't like whites," someone later describes it.) Tan tries a Dusinberre cabernet so thick he could eat it with a fork.


    When we're done we offer dollar bills. He waves us off. Nobody, apparently, bothers to collect those dimes. Amount left: $66.70.


    There's one more sample to try today - this time, a fleeting taste of the Good Life. In midsummer, my whole budget won't rent the bathroom of the least-opulent room at Auberge du Soleil in Rutherford, a Relais & Chateaux property of tinkling waters and soothing colors among oaks a few hundred feet above the valley floor. Anyone, however, can have a drink on the resort's deck.


    A valet parks our humble car. A soft-voiced attendant brings a plate of buttery olives. The bar menu has $80 Madeiras and a cigar page. I have a glass of wine, Tan has a $14 Meyer lemon drop cocktail - the price of admission to spend a restful hour looking out across rows of green vines as the sky drains from white-hot, to orange, to a cool blue that precedes the first stars.


    Before departing, I ask at the front desk if I can see more of the hotel.


    A polite, firm, "No."


    I don't have the money to go to Tra Vigne, the restaurant made famous by Michael Chiarello, the TV chef. So we head for the brick-oven pizzas of Pizzeria Tra Vigne, which Mr. Chiarello helped start several years ago. (He's no longer involved with either.) On the patio, we eat nicely charred pizza with prosciutto and arugula from the wood-fired oven, and head to the hotel.


    Luckily for the lonesome few presidents who remain my wallet, Napa dies after dark. Luckily, too, the hotel serves a modest Continental breakfast - since the next morning I want to try to squeeze in one last indulgence, and can't afford much else.


    In 1993, as a busboy/ski bum in Vail, Colo., I'd tried the Mondavi-de Rothschild collaboration Opus One. A genie couldn't have been a more beautiful thing to emerge from a bottle. That one taste showed me what wine could be. I've never had it since; the 2001 vintage now sells for about $160 a bottle. But what about a tasting?


    Discreet black lettering on a pale pedestal is all that announces the Opus One Winery in Oakville. Down a long drive bordered by Mission olive trees lies the winery - half sunk in the earth, rosy-stoned, pharaonic. Bees buzz in the lavender bushes. We park in a spot vacated by a limousine.


    A tasting at Opus One is a single five-ounce pour of the current Bordeaux-style vintage ... for $25. A sign says, no, you do not get to keep the Riedel glass. I swallow dryly, hand over a credit card and sneak an extra palate-clearing cracker when the attendant turns his back.


    Opus encourages visitors to wander with their investment. Tan and I head up to the shaded rooftop terrace. Somewhere, classical music plays. Overhead, two eagles turn in a slow circle, parenthesizing a patch of morning sky. The atmosphere is perfect for drinking expensive wine.


    And the wine? I swirl and smell a cup of berries. Tan tastes his: cherry liqueur, he says. Tastes again. Chocolate, he says. The wine isn't the altering experience I remember - how could it be, when in the cellar of memory everything ages to perfection? But after 17 months in French oak barrels, it's damn smooth. Amount left: 93 cents.


    Anticipating this moment, I had asked the front-desk clerk that morning about suggestions for a cash-strapped tourist. He'd produced several two-for-one tasting coupons. Now we sort through them.


    We take up the topic of Napa's costliness with the young woman behind the cork at Domaine Chandon in Yountville during our flight of sparkling wines ($6 each with a twofer coupon). She reaches beneath the bar and hands us still more cards - this time for free tastings. (Many of the cards are valid only during the week, however.)


    "Go to St. Supéry," she adds, like some Prohibition barmaid slipping us the password. "Tell Kent that Vickie sent you."


    The rest of the day we drift from less-known winery to winery, floating on a raft of free coupons handed to us by pretty women at places like Esquisse in St. Helena, where the two working are more than glad on a slow and sweltering Wednesday afternoon to have someone to talk with about life in Napa, and about the virtues of viognier. Then they send us on our way loaded with still more coupons.


    When we grow hungry, we graze the free samples at Dean & DeLuca in St. Helena until shame finally drives me, unsated, to the impressive if overpriced cheese case across the street at the V. Sattui Winery, where still more free wine-tasting awaits. A baguette, a small bit of Urgelia cheese and some olives ($7.42) push me a little deeper into the red, as V. Sattui requires a purchase to sit under the shade of a pear tree in its picnic area.


    And I'm ready to sit. In 24 hours, at least 28 wines have crossed these lips. My palate isn't exhausted; it's pickled. Which is good, because my wallet has hit bottom. It's ready to go on the wagon.


    Total spent: $262.49

  • 3 in 82nd Airborne Say Beating Iraqi Prisoners Was Routine




    September 24, 2005
    3 in 82nd Airborne Say Beating Iraqi Prisoners Was Routine
    By ERIC SCHMITT

    WASHINGTON, Sept. 23 - Three former members of the Army's 82nd Airborne Division say soldiers in their battalion in Iraq routinely beat and abused prisoners in 2003 and 2004 to help gather intelligence on the insurgency and to amuse themselves.

    The new allegations, the first involving members of the elite 82nd Airborne, are contained in a report by Human Rights Watch. The 30-page report does not identify the troops, but one is Capt. Ian Fishback, who has presented some of his allegations in letters this month to top aides of two senior Republicans on the Senate Armed Services Committee, John W. Warner of Virginia, the chairman, and John McCain of Arizona. Captain Fishback approached the Senators' offices only after he tried to report the allegations to his superiors for 17 months, the aides said. The aides also said they found the captain's accusations credible enough to warrant investigation.

    An Army spokesman, Paul Boyce, said Friday that Captain Fishback's allegations first came to the Army's attention earlier this month, and that the Army had opened a criminal investigation into the matter, focusing on the division's First Brigade, 504th Parachute Infantry. The Army has begun speaking with Captain Fishback, and is seeking the names of the two other soldiers.

    In separate statements to the human rights organization, Captain Fishback and two sergeants described systematic abuses of Iraqi prisoners, including beatings, exposure to extremes of hot and cold, stacking in human pyramids and sleep deprivation at Camp Mercury, a forward operating base near Falluja. Falluja was the site of the major uprising against the American-led occupation in April 2004. The report describes the soldiers' positions in the unit, but not their names.

    The abuses reportedly took place between September 2003 and April 2004, before and during the investigations into the notorious misconduct at the Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad. Senior Pentagon officials initially sought to characterize the scandal there as the work of a rogue group of military police soldiers on the prison's night shift. Since then, the Army has opened more than 400 inquiries into detainee abuse in Iraq and Afghanistan, and punished 230 enlisted soldiers and officers.

    The trial of a soldier charged in an investigation into Abu Ghraib, Pfc. Lynndie R. England, continued Friday in Fort Hood, Tex. [Page A16.]

    In the newest case, the human rights organization interviewed three soldiers: one sergeant who said he was a guard and acknowledged abusing some prisoners at the direction of military intelligence personnel; another sergeant who was an infantry squad leader who said he had witnessed some detainees' being beaten; and the captain who said he had seen several interrogations and received regular reports from noncommissioned officers on the ill treatment of detainees.

    In one incident, the Human Rights Watch report states, an off-duty cook broke a detainee's leg with a metal baseball bat. Detainees were also stacked, fully clothed, in human pyramids and forced to hold five-gallon water jugs with arms outstretched or do jumping jacks until they passed out, the report says. "We would give them blows to the head, chest, legs and stomach, and pull them down, kick dirt on them," one sergeant told Human Rights Watch researchers during one of four interviews in July and August. "This happened every day."

    The sergeant continued: "Some days we would just get bored, so we would have everyone sit in a corner and then make them get in a pyramid. This was before Abu Ghraib but just like it. We did it for amusement."

    He said he had acted under orders from military intelligence personnel to soften up detainees, whom the unit called persons under control, or PUC's, to make them more cooperative during formal interviews.

    "They wanted intel," said the sergeant, an infantry fire-team leader who served as a guard when no military police soldiers were available. "As long as no PUC's came up dead, it happened." He added, "We kept it to broken arms and legs."

    The soldiers told Human Rights Watch that while they were serving in Afghanistan, they learned the stress techniques from watching Central Intelligence Agency operatives interrogating prisoners.

    Captain Fishback, who has served combat tours in Afghanistan and Iraq, gave Human Rights Watch and Senate aides his long account only after his efforts to report the abuses to his superiors were rebuffed or ignored over 17 months, according to Senate aides and John Sifton, one of the Human Rights Watch researchers who conducted the interviews. Moreover, Captain Fishback has expressed frustration at his civilian and military leaders for not providing clear guidelines for the proper treatment of prisoners.

    In a Sept. 16 letter to the senators, Captain Fishback, wrote, "Despite my efforts, I have been unable to get clear, consistent answers from my leadership about what constitutes lawful and humane treatment of detainees. I am certain that this confusion contributed to a wide range of abuses including death threats, beatings, broken bones, murder, exposure to elements, extreme forced physical exertion, hostage-taking, stripping, sleep deprivation and degrading treatment."

    Reached by telephone Friday night, Captain Fishback, who is currently in Special Forces training at Fort Bragg, N.C., referred all questions to an Army spokesman, adding only that, "I have a duty as an officer to do this through certain channels, and I've attempted to do that."

    The two sergeants, both of whom served in Afghanistan and Iraq, gave statements to the human rights organization out of "regret" for what they had done themselves at the direction of military intelligence personnel or witnessed but did not report, Mr. Sifton said. They asked not to be identified, he said, out of fear they could be prosecuted for their actions. They did not contact Senate staff members, aides said.

    One of the sergeants has left the Army, while the other is no longer with the 82nd, Mr. Sifton said. Both declined to talk to reporters, he said.

    A spokeswoman for the 82nd Airborne, Maj. Amy Hannah, said the division's inspector general was working closely with Army officials in Washington to investigate the matter, including the captain's assertion that he tried to alert his chain of command months ago.

    John Ullyot, a spokesman for Senator Warner, said Captain Fishback had spoken by telephone with a senior committee aide in the last 10 days, and that his allegations were deemed credible enough that the aide recommended he report them to his new unit's inspector general.

    While they also witnessed some abuses at another forward base near the Iraqi border with Syria, the three said most of the misconduct they witnessed took place at Camp Mercury, where prisoners captured on the battlefield or in raids were held for up to 72 hours before being released or transferred to Abu Ghraib.

    Interrogators pressed guards to beat up prisoners, and one sergeant recalled watching a particular interrogator who was a former Special Forces soldier beating the detainee himself. "He would always say to us, 'You didn't see anything, right?' " the sergeant said. "And we would always say, 'No, sergeant.' "

    One of the sergeants told Human Rights Watch that he had seen a soldier break open a chemical light stick and beat the detainees with it. "That made them glow in the dark, which was real funny, but it burned their eyes, and their skin was irritated real bad," he said.

    A second sergeant, identified as an infantry squad leader and interviewed twice in August by Human Rights Watch, said, "As far as abuse goes, I saw hard hitting." He also said he had witnessed how guards would force the detainees "to physically exert themselves to the limit."

    Some soldiers beat prisoners to vent their frustrations, one sergeant said, recalling an instance when an off-duty cook showed up at the detention area and ordered a prisoner to grab a metal pole and bend over. "He told him to bend over and broke the guy's leg with a mini-Louisville Slugger that was a metal bat."

    Even after the Abu Ghraib scandal became public, one of the sergeants said, the abuses continued. "We still did it, but we were careful," he told the human rights group.

    Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company Home Privacy Policy Search Corrections XML Help Contact Us Work for Us Site Map Back to Top

  • Scorsese, PBS reveal another side of Bob Dylan By Glenn Abel




    Director Martin Scorsese (R) and singer Elvis Costello arrive at the premiere of 'No Direction Home: Bob Dylan' in New York September 19, 2005. (Albert Ferreira/Handout/Reuters)

    Scorsese, PBS reveal another side of Bob Dylan By Glenn Abel
    Fri Sep 23, 8:35 AM ET

    "Don't look back," the baseball sage Satchel Paige advised. "Something might be gaining on you." For Bob Dylan in the 1960s, the hellhounds in the rearview were the crush of celebrity and the weight of ridiculous expectations.

    Martin Scorsese's "No Direction Home: Bob Dylan" starts off in Ken Burns territory, using a rich and exquisite mix of vintage sounds and images to track Robert Zimmerman of Hibbing, Minn., as he moves to New York and becomes folk singer Bob Dylan.

    The documentary ends a half-decade later, with a speed-jacked-hollow-eyed Dylan rocking back and forth on a couch repetitively, as if he'd been dusted with autism. "Traitor!" they had yelled at him one too many nights. "I just want to go home," the shellshocked rock star moans.

    Dylan's long search for a place to be looms large in Scorsese's compelling two-part film, which airs Monday and Tuesday on PBS stations. "No Direction Home" also has been released as a double-DVD set.

    "I was born very far from where I'm supposed to be," Dylan says today, as the 3 1/2-hour documentary opens. "So maybe I'm on my way home."

    Dylan acts as his own witness throughout -- at ease, clear, sometimes funny and seemingly pleased to take control of his legend, much as he was last year on "60 Minutes."

    Other key interviewees include musicians Joan Baez, Pete Seeger, Maria Muldaur and Al Kooper, as well as one-time ladyfriend Suze Rotolo and the folk-music promoter Harold Leventhal. Dylan's mentor Dave Van Ronk and the beat poet Allen Ginsberg were interviewed before their deaths.

    The film's subtitle should be something like "Bob Dylan, 1960-65." The recorded output during the period stretches from the walkthrough debut album "Bob Dylan" (1962) to the titanic "Highway 61 Revisited" (1965).

    "I don't feel like I had a past," Dylan says, but the assembled evidence proves otherwise. Part 1 unspools much like a video companion to Dylan's vastly entertaining biography "Chronicles, Volume One," which covers his years on the Greenwich Village folk scene, the epicenter of American hip in the early 1960s.

    Dylan first came to New York on a quest to meet his idol Woody Guthrie, the iconic folksinger whose Huntington's disease landed him in a mental hospital. Dylan says no one reached him musically before Guthrie. "It was the sound (of other singers) that got to me," he recalls. "It wasn't who it was." Scorsese shows seldom-seen clips of performances by such artists of the day as Hank Williams, Gene Vincent, Odetta and Muddy Waters. (The 5.1 audio, irrespective of source material, is stunning throughout.)

    Guthrie "had a particular sound, and besides that he said something," Dylan recalls. "He was a radical -- (I thought) that's what I want to say. I want to say that."

    Dylan found a reason to believe in the craft of songwriting, and once he started, "I wrote 'em anywhere I was -- in a subway, a cafe. . . . I wrote the songs to perform the songs . . . in a language I hadn't heard before."

    A dubious Baez, the folkie madonna, came to see the phenom perform. "He was everything they said he was." The singers became lovers and collaborators. "I knew he was going to be a massive star, and I liked that," she says today, delightfully rough and ready in her maturity.

    The folk movement's old guard embraced Dylan, anointing him at the 1963 Newport Folk Festival. "Blowin' in the Wind" became an all-purpose anthem for the socially aware. Dylan was branded a protest singer, a label he rejected, most of the time. Of "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall," he told Studs Terkel's radio audience: "It's not an atomic rain. It's just a hard rain."

    Ginsberg recalled discovering Dylan in the hottest days of the Cold War. "I heard 'Hard Rain' and wept. . . . It seemed the torch had been passed (from the Beats) to a new generation." On the scariest night of the Cuban missile crisis, Dylan played the Gaslight coffeehouse and sang "Masters of War."

    Part 1 goes on to chronicle Dylan's rise to international stardom after signing with Columbia. The documentary's gentle rhythms turn propulsive as his early recordings annex the soundtrack. At first, industry wags dismissed Dylan as producer "John Hammond's folly," but most everyone got it, especially the college kids coming out of the 1950s looking for someone to follow.

    "It's almost enough to make you believe in Jung's notion of collective unconscious," Van Ronk said. "If there is an American collective unconscious, Bobby had somehow tapped into it."

    "No Direction Home" becomes a film by Martin Scorsese in its dark concluding act. Like the director's "Mean Streets" and "GoodFellas," it captures the paranoia and disintegration as the central character's life implodes.

    As Scorsese and his collaborators spin the tale, Dylan's torments come solely as punishment for artistic metamorphosis -- the treasonous act of going electric after finding fame as a dutiful folk singer. "No Direction Home" sidesteps Dylan's chaotic personal life and drug use.

    The artist faced a far-flung confederacy of dunces, Scorsese maintains: moronic reporters, abusive audiences, uncomprehending music lovers, petulant folkies, teenagers who shrieked, fawned and grabbed. No one seems to have any sense except for Dylan and his in-crowd.

    Dylan's songs play nonstop in that gorgeous audio, but there is little discussion, surprisingly, of the groundbreaking music he produced in the mid-'60s -- no recognition of the vast baby boom audience that heard the genius in his explorations and embraced them. No one testifies to the deep and immediate influence of "Highway 61 Revisited" on rock innovators up to and including John Lennon.

    Still, it's easy and satisfying to buy into Scorsese's view of Dylan as underdog. The slant and subjectivity give "No Direction Home" much of its drama and depth, especially in the final hour.

    Part 2 leans on footage from the films "Don't Look Back," about Dylan's 1965 tour of Britain, and "Festival," which captured the shootout at Newport. Included are famous scenes such as the "Mr. Jones" confrontation with a British reporter and the seminal cue-card video for "Subterranean Homesick Blues."

    (Those films' directors, D.A. Pennebaker and Murray Lerner, respectively, get third billing in "No Direction Home," after Scorsese and his gifted editor, David Tedeschi. Still photographer Barry Feinstein and interviewer Jeff Rosen, Dylan's manager, are other key contributors.)

    In the remarkable footage from Newport '65, Dylan jolts the folkies by enlisting Kooper and members of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band for a quick set of rock songs. The boos and catcalls compete with the amplified din. Dylan's freaked-out friend Seeger calls for an ax with which to cut the power cables, reports of which wound Dylan "like a dagger."

    "I had no idea why they were booing," Dylan says today with a straight face. "Whatever it was about it wasn't about anything they were hearing." Accounts of that night don't add up, but it was hardly an ambush by Dylan: The rock album "Bringing It All Back Home" had been out for four months.

    Booing Dylan became sport and populist performance art when he next toured, finishing the show with rock musicians. Sometimes Dylan would sass them back, playfully. Sometimes he would snarl. Of the backup band that became the Band, he says, "They were gallant knights for standing behind me."

    Pennebaker and his cameras were back in England on May 17, 1966, when the group played Manchester. "Judas!" a British fan screams at Dylan as he takes the stage. "I don't believe you," the musician says in the legendary exchange. "You're a liar."

    Dylan turns to his bandmates, commanding, "Play it f***ing loud!" They roar through "Like a Rolling Stone" like scorched-earth warriors. For Scorsese and his TV audience, the ride ends here, with Dylan taking a hard right at the crossroads.


    When you get to the end, you want to start all over again. That's the No. 1 reason to own Paramount's double-DVD set of "No Direction Home," which was released Tuesday.

    Coming from a project so awash in audio and video treasures, it seems odd that the only meaningful DVD extras are complete versions of Bob Dylan numbers trimmed for the documentary.

    That said, there are some great performances here -- for example, the eight-minute version of "Like a Rolling Stone" from the 1966 tour of Britain and the hypnotic "Mr. Tambourine Man" from a Newport workshop in 1964. (There are five others, some odd, all worthwhile.)

    A quartet of guest performances from singers interviewed for the documentary don't add much, except for Joan Baez's home-cooked "Love Is Just a Four-Letter Word."

    There also is an interesting "unused" 1965 promo for "Positively Fourth Street" -- unfinished is more like it -- and a clip of Dylan crafting a song in a hotel.

    The DVD's Dolby Digital 5.1 audio achieves reference quality. (Quality is sure to vary as individual PBS affiliates broadcast the documentary.) The 2003 remastering jobs on Dylan's early and midperiod recordings (for SACD hybrids) possibly came into play.

    Images are TV-friendly full-screen, with pleasing grays and medium contrasts. The video texture is amazingly consistent given the Babylon of sources.


    Spitfire Pictures, Gray Water Park Prods., Thirteen/WNET Network/PBS and Sikelia Prods., in co-production with Vulcan Prods., BBC and NHK

    Cast: Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Allen Ginsberg, Al Kooper, Maria Muldaur, Pete Seeger, Dave Van Ronk.

    Executive producers: Paul G. Allen, Jody Patton, Jeff Rosen, Nigel Sinclair, Susan Lacy, Anthony Wall; Co-producer: Margaret Bodde; Producers: Jeff Rosen, Susan Lacy, Nigel Sinclair, Anthony Wall, Martin Scorsese; Director: Martin Scorsese; Editor: David Tedeschi; Sound re-recordist: Dave Bihldorff; Sound re-recording mixer: Tom Fleischman; Music editor: Annette Kudrak; Supervising sound editor: Philip Stockton; Sound effects editor: Allan Zaleski.

  •  







    Art of the Internet: A Protest Song, Reloaded



    September 24, 2005
    Art of the Internet: A Protest Song, Reloaded
    By SARAH BOXER


    Some songs have all the luck. They lead double, even triple lives, meaning everything to everyone, and meaning it passionately.


    Last month, Green Day's "Wake Me Up When September Ends" was serving both as a protest song against the war in Iraq and as a patriotic ballad. It was (and still is) one of the most requested music videos on MTV. Now, thanks to the Internet, it is a song about the devastation that followed Katrina.


    The song's original music video, made by Samuel Bayer (who also filmed the video of Nirvana's classic "Smells Like Teen Spirit"), is full of pathos and sap. It shows a young couple in love, then quarreling and finally separated by war. As the young man fights in Iraq thinking about sunnier days, the young woman sits home waiting and fretting.


    Although the band intended the music video as an antiwar protest, Kelefa Sanneh, a pop music critic for The New York Times, pointed out that it also "works pretty well as a support-our-troops statement." One blogger recently posted the Green Day video with the tag "Great Recruitment Video." Maybe he was being facetious, maybe not.


    Today, it's the same old song with a different meaning. Two weeks ago, Karmagrrrl, a blogger also known as Zadi, paired the Green Day ballad with television news coverage of Katrina and posted it at her Web site, smashface.com/vlog. Her video fits the lyrics like a glove.


    Karmagrrrl's video begins with a view of green trees out the window of a bus. "Summer has come and passed, the innocent can never last," the song goes. "Wake me up when September ends." On the floor of the bus, you see a pair of red sneakers toeing the headline "HELP US" on a folded copy of The New York Post from Sept. 1. The picture in the newspaper shows a pair of feet in cardboard sandals.


    From that point on, "Wake Me Up" is set to images of Katrina seen on MSNBC, CNN and "The Oprah Winfrey Show." As the rain rages on MSNBC, the song swells: "Here comes the rain again, falling from the stars." A streetlight falls onto the wet street: "Drenched in my pain again, becoming who we are." Videotape of corpses carried on stretchers goes with this lyric: "As my memory rests, but never forgets what I lost." It's almost too perfect.


    In the video the song's lyrics seem weirdly prescient, even though parts of the song make no sense at all. "Like my father's come to pass,/ 20 years has gone so fast." What could that mean? Perhaps that touch of incoherence is the song's key to universality.


    And what about the instrumental interludes? They have been filled with excerpts from President Bush's remarks to hurricane victims hundreds of miles away. In what is either a remarkable stroke of luck, or the vlogger's artistry, the president's halting, I'm-in-this-with-you cadence exactly fits the folksy rhythm and earnest feel of the music.


    "I want the folks there on the Gulf Coast to know that the federal government is prepared to help you." It's as if the president were onstage with the band. "Right now the days seem awfully dark to those affected, but I'm confident that with time, you'll get your lives back in order."


    Is it possible that Karmagrrrl is empathizing with Mr. Bush? Is it possible that this is a romantic video about America in mourning? A few images undo that suggestion. At a certain point in the video, you don't just see families waving for help, infants crying in their mother's arms and children in makeshift carts. You see women shouting obscenities at the camera.


    Unlike the original Green Day video, which could be either pro-war or antiwar, this one sends a clear message. Yet what makes the Katrina video work is that it isn't totally obvious from the beginning.


    It glides to an end with a long panorama of homeless people sitting on curbs and waiting for help. The song goes, "Wake me up when September ends,/ Wake me up when September ends,/ Wake me up when September ends." Rather gratuitously, after the music has stopped, the president's mother, speaking from Houston, gets the last gaffe: "So many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, and this is working very well for them." And it's a wrap.


    By the way, Karmagrrrl is not alone. Around the same time she was joining Green Day's song to images of Katrina, two Houston rappers who collectively call themselves the Legendary K.O., Damien Randle and Micah Nickerson (who lives near the Houston Astrodome), made their own mash-up. They joined Kanye West's hit song "Gold Digger" with some of the ad-lib remarks that Mr. West made during an NBC telethon for hurricane relief, tossed in some more words, called it "George Bush Doesn't Like Black People" and posted it on the Internet.


    It's now a hit on the radio and the Internet, and can be downloaded from various Web sites, including the rappers' own, www.k-otix.com. Already someone on the Internet named Black Lantern has added video. And there's no guessing about the sentiment.




  • When the West Helps China Spy




    Yahoo Scandal

    When the West Helps China Spy

    By Nils Klawitter

    For years, American internet companies have been helping the powers-that-be in China to spy on their own people. Yahoo is even said to have exposed a journalist.

    The last time Gao Qinsheng saw her son, she hardly recognized him. She remembered Shi Tao, 37, as a large and powerful man. But all she saw now was "skin and bones." Gao told prison officials that her son needed a doctor.

    Instead he was transferred to a re-education camp about a week ago. The camp, officially dubbed a "machine factory," sits on a small island in Dongting Lake in the southern province of Hunan, where Shi Tao shares a cell with at least 30 prisoners. If things go poorly for Shi Tao, this could be his living arrangement for the next ten years.

    His crime? Shi Tao, a journalist with financial daily Dangdai Shang Bao, electronically forwarded an internal Communist Party directive concerning the 15th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre to a "foreign hostile element." The document contained little more than a general warning about the return of certain dissidents. But it was precisely this word -- dissident -- that was probably picked up by the state security apparatus' filter programs, focusing the attention of one of the country's 40,000 internet censors on Shi Tao.

    But because the journalist had taken the precaution of sending his e-mails from an anonymous address, the Chinese authorities had to turn to Yahoo for help. And the American internet company, through which Shi Tao had sent his e-mails, apparently had no qualms helping out the Chinese. According to the organization Reporters without Borders, Shi Tao could never have been arrested without the servile Americans. When he was sentenced in April, the People's Court expressly referred to information "provided" by Yahoo: the journalist's personal account and the exact transmission time of the incriminating message.

    The case became a PR disaster for Yahoo. Only after it was reported in various newspapers did company spokeswoman Mary Osako issue a terse statement to the effect that each individual Yahoo office must operate within the framework of local laws and "customs." Customs? Does that mean child labor? A little light torture? What exactly does the word "customs" mean to Yahoo?

    Osako also told SPIEGEL that the company, of course, abides by its own "privacy policy." But that policy is full of holes. As far back as 2002, Yahoo voluntarily signed a document ominously titled "Commitment to Self-Discipline for the Chinese Internet Industry."

    Until the Shi Tao case, this meant helping out with censorship as well as blocking access to certain internet sites to China's approximately 100 million internet users. Google has also complied with Chinese policy, and Microsoft's MSN was even willing to remove search terms like "democracy" and "human rights" from its portal. According to MSN's model of cultural relativism, this kind of language is simply "forbidden speech" in China.

    But, says Reporters without Borders, Yahoo's latest move has essentially relegated it to the role of "police informant." The US company, which had just acquired 40 percent of China's biggest e-commerce company, Alibaba.com, for $1 billion, had apparently taken this approach in an effort not to make waves in what it viewed as the prevailing political landscape.

    In taking this approach, though, American companies contradict the doctrine that opening up markets will encourage political liberalization.

    Journalist Ethan Gutmann has addressed this issue for years. Network provider Cisco, which has operated in China since the mid-1990s, is one of the usual suspects in Gutmann's articles. "We firmly believe," says company spokesman Ron Piovesan, "that the internet has made countries all over the world more open."

    But Chinese citizens haven't exactly been able to count on Cisco's help in this respect. Indeed, the company has done exactly the opposite, says Gutmann, reconfiguring its top-selling firewalls and routers to meet the Chinese government's censorship needs. In a study on the internet filtering system in China, the "OpenNet Initiative," a research pool of three North American universities, writes that Cisco products are especially well-suited to helping out the government's monitoring system.

    The devices cost about $20,000, and Gutmann says that Cisco already sold "several thousand" in 2002. Cisco spokesman Piovesan claims that the company merely sells network equipment "and is not involved in government censorship efforts." It's an excuse that sounds a bit like that of the weapons dealer who steadfastly denies having anything to do with war.

    In 2000, concerned politicians started to raise red flags about the role of technology transfer in censorship. To address these problems, they established the US-China Economic and Security Review. At one of the Commission's meetings, someone asked why trading in censorship-ready products isn't illegal. The response? "That's a good question." The issue was quickly forgotten, and nothing has changed since then.

    Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan

    © DER SPIEGEL 38/2005
    All Rights Reserved