September 16, 2005






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    George W. Bush

    September 16, 2005
    Amid the Ruins, a President Tries to Reconstruct His Image, Too
    By RICHARD W. STEVENSON

    WASHINGTON, Sept. 15 - George W. Bush, whose standing for the last four years has rested primarily on issues of war and peace, introduced himself to the nation on Thursday night in an unfamiliar and somewhat uncomfortable new role: domestic president.

    The violence of Hurricane Katrina and his faltering response to it have left to Mr. Bush the task not just of physically rebuilding a swath of the United States, but also of addressing issues like poverty and racial inequality that were exposed in such raw form by the storm.

    The challenge would be immense for any president, but is especially so for Mr. Bush. He is scrambling to assure a shaken, angry nation not only that is he up to the task but also that he understands how much it disturbed Americans to see their fellow citizens suffering and their government responding so ineffectually.

    So for nearly 30 minutes, he stood in a largely lifeless New Orleans and, to recast his presidency in response to one of the nation's most devastating disasters, sought to show that he understands the suffering. He spoke of housing and health care and job training. He reached with rhetorical confidence for the uplifting theme that out of tragedy can emerge a better society, and he groped for what he lost in the wind and water more than two weeks ago: his well-cultivated image as a strong leader.

    It was not the president's most stirring speech, but it conveyed a sense of command far more than his off-key efforts in the days immediately after the storm, when he often seemed more interested in bucking up government officials than in addressing the dire situation confronting hundreds of thousands of displaced and desperate people.

    But if the speech helped him clear his first hurdle by projecting the aura of a president at the controls, it probably did not, by itself, get him over a second: his need to erase or at least blur the image of a White House that was unresponsive to the plight of some of the country's most vulnerable citizens and failed to manage the government competently.

    Whether he can put a floor under his falling poll numbers, restore his political authority and move ahead with his agenda will determine not just the course of his second term but the strength of his party, which by virtue of having controlled both the White House and the Congress for more than five years has trouble credibly pinning the blame elsewhere.

    "He was giving a speech as if the nation were disheartened and worried and had lost its spirit, but that's not what people were thinking," said Mickey Edwards, a former Republican congressman from Oklahoma. "They were thinking, why did the government screw up?"

    To those storm victims in need of immediate help and to those who face the continued upheaval of their lives for weeks or months or longer, he offered an expansive government safety net of specific programs, from paying the costs of reuniting families to a commitment to moving everyone out of shelters into housing by mid-October. Doing so marked a distinct shift for a president whose perceived hostility or indifference to government's role in social welfare programs - manifested in budgets that have sought to cut such programs or curtail them - has long been a flash point in his relationship with poor and minority voters.

    But if this was big government, it was at least in part on Mr. Bush's ideological terms: federal reimbursement to allow displaced students to attend private and parochial schools, tax-free business zones, a call for charitable and religious groups to continue with relief work. Having no choice but to open the fiscal floodgates, he sought to reassure nervous conservatives that he would guard against fraud and waste.

    When it came to the issues hardest to address and most in need of sustained commitment, new ideas and risk-taking leadership - the gap between rich and poor, its causes and consequences, its racial components - he was less effective.

    "We have a duty to confront this poverty with bold action," he said.

    Yet he spoke of "deep, persistent poverty" as something the nation had seen on television rather than as a condition that many citizens had been living in for generations. He defined the problem as regional rather than national in scope, and offered only regional rather than national solutions.

    "The reconstruction, massive as it is, is really the easy part," said Bruce Reed, president of the Democratic Leadership Council, an organization of centrist Democrats. "Rebuilding confidence, especially among the poor and vulnerable, is going to be extraordinarily difficult."

    In dealing with the more concrete aspects of the job ahead, Mr. Bush slipped comfortably into the language that he has used as commander in chief to comfort and exhort the nation as it has waged war, hailing those Americans who have "served and sacrificed" and vowing that the government "will stay as long as it takes" to get the job done, an echo, almost word for word, of his formulation for how long the United States will remain in Iraq.

    The president forthrightly linked the failures in response to the storm to a vulnerability to a terrorist attack and said he wanted to know "all the facts" about what had gone wrong.

    Mr. Bush called for unity in tackling the problems. But with only a camera before him, and New Orleans silent around him, he could draw no strength or self-assurance from the cheers of a united nation, as he did when he addressed a joint session of Congress nine days after the Sept. 11 attacks. Not only did his own stagecraft leave him alone in the spotlight, but whatever good will flowed to him across the aisle in those moments after the terrorist attacks is long gone, a victim of a polarized political culture that he did not create but to which he has often contributed.

    For Mr. Bush, this was a moment for the country to turn away from what he and his aides have dismissively labeled "the blame game" toward a hopeful vision of a rebuilt Gulf Coast and a smarter government. But it is not yet clear that his performance will stanch the political wounds he has suffered or ensure that he can avoid being hobbled through his second term, not just by what he lost in the faltering response to Hurricane Katrina but by the rising death toll in Iraq, sky-high energy prices and worrisome deficits.



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September 15, 2005

  • Mikey Patrick Whelan




    Mikey Patrick Whelan, Fire and Sun Tae Kwan Do School. Las Vegas, Nevada. 2001

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    Olivia Frances Whelan, Februrary 5, 1995 U.C.S.D. Hospital, Hillcrest, San Diego, California



  • Las Vegas, Nevada 1996.
    Olivia Frances and "DA"


  • Moonlight Beach, Encinitas, California 1999

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    Michael Patrick, Olivia Frances and "DA"

  • GWYNETH PALTROW




    GWYNETH PALTROW and Daughter Apple

    September 15, 2005
    Acting by the Numbers: You Do the Math
    By COREY KILGANNON
    Acting by the Numbers:

    You Do the Math

    GWYNETH PALTROW was on the red carpet on Tuesday night at the Ziegfeld when her cellphone rang. She opened her purse and checked her phone but did not answer it. "Sorry, I want to make sure it's not the baby sitter," said Ms. Paltrow whose daughter, APPLE, turned 1 in May. "My paranoia."

    Ms. Paltrow was wearing a CHANEL for the premiere of "Proof," which opens tomorrow. She stars with ANTHONY HOPKINS in the film, based on DAVID AUBURN's Pulitzer Prize-winning play. Mr. Hopkins plays a tortured mathematician, and Ms. Paltrow his daughter.

    We asked what she was doing these days. She said she would like to brush up on her French: "My grammar is atrocious."

    At the after-party at the Boathouse in Central Park, the director, JOHN MADDEN, said he hoped that the film, which is about unraveling a complicated mathematical proof, would portray mathematics as sexy. Certainly, it got the actors fascinated.

    "I think, like me, they probably felt an attraction to the mysteriousness of numbers," Mr. Madden said. "Math is reputed to be such a dull, boring subject, but in the higher reaches of mathematics, it's a completely fascinating world, where real transcendence is possible."

    As for Mr. Hopkins, he seemed to be transcending that realm called fun. He brightened when we approached, but then regained his impatient look when we asked if the film made him think differently about problem solving.

    "I don't think like that," he said. "It's just a movie. I just do the movie and that's it." So, he didn't learn anything working on the film?

    "No," he said. "It's a job."

    Almost a Fashion Victim, Alas, the Poor Prada

    MARY J. BLIGE was at the LUCA LUCA show in the Fashion Week tents at Bryant Park, as were CARMEN ELECTRA, KELLY OSBORNE and PARIS HILTON.

    We spoke to the hip-hop mogul DAMON DASH, who said he began coming to Fashion Week a couple of years ago.

    "I'm not going to lie, I came to look at the girls, right," but added that he now comes for fashion tips.

    "I like to be around people who know more than me," Mr. Dash said, adding with a laugh, "which you know is not that many people."

    We saw AMY ASTLEY, editor in chief of Teen Vogue, at the BCBG MAX AZRIA show on Monday and she described having a large lighting fixture fall on her while at the DIANE VON FURSTENBERG show Sunday night.

    "It was like, boom, it landed on my shoulder," Ms. Astley said. "But some really lovely guys lifted it off. A PRADA sweater was destroyed, but I'm good. I'm fine."

    She said Ms. von Furstenberg apologized profusely.

    "Diane has been e-mailing me, sending notes, 'Can I replace your sweater?' "

    "Someone must have told her my clothes were ripped off."

    No Makeover for Kanye

    QUEEN LATIFAH told us she had an interesting way of devising her own line of makeup, the CoverGirl Queen Collection. "I would look at samples and say 'uh-uh, I don't like it, whatever it is, get it away,' " she said on Tuesday night at B.B. KING's Blues Club in Times Square. Queen Latifah, who recently finished shooting a movie called "Last Holiday" in New Orleans, said she was heartbroken about the hurricane devastation. "I gave $100,000 to the Red Cross," she said, "and I hosted the BET benefit that raised over $10 million."

    Also on the subject of KATRINA: At a concert at the HENRY FONDA Theater in Hollywood that MTV2 plans to broadcast on Sunday, KANYE WEST - standing behind his recent comment on live television that "GEORGE BUSH doesn't care about black people" - told the crowd: "It's been a crazy last couple of weeks, but they haven't done anything to me yet."

    Apparently ridiculing the president's visits to the New Orleans area, Mr. West said, "Oooooh, I'm going to go kiss some black people now."

    With Melena Z. Ryzik, Kari Haskell and Joe Brescia in New York and Jordana Lewis in Los Angeles



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  • No Middle Ground, to Riders' Delight




    Norman Y. Lono for The New York Times

    A prototype of New Jersey Transit's new two-level trains, unveiled yesterday in Newark. The trains will begin running in late 2006.

    September 15, 2005
    No Middle Ground, to Riders' Delight
    By PATRICK McGEEHAN

    NEWARK, Sept. 14 - New Jersey Transit officials offered commuters a glimpse of their train-riding future here on Wednesday and it was not drab, rigid or strictly horizontal. But what clearly was most appealing to all who beheld it was that it would eliminate the chance of spending more than an hour a day pressed between two strangers.

    "The middle seat is gone," cheered Maxine Marshall, who commutes from Plainfield, N.J., to work for a trust company in Jersey City.

    Well, it is not gone yet. The gleaming vehicle that had Ms. Marshall grinning was a prototype of New Jersey Transit's first bilevel passenger car, which will not be in service for at least a year. It was unveiled on Wednesday at a ceremony at Newark Penn Station.

    But in late 2006, the railroad plans to start running the first batch of 100 cars to ease crowding on its trains into and out of Pennsylvania Station in Manhattan. Those trains are rapidly approaching full capacity during the rush hours, and there is no room in the tunnel or at Penn Station for additional trains.

    The only solution is to squeeze more people onto each train, and the most comfortable way to do that is to add a second level, said Jack Lettiere, the state's commissioner of transportation and the chairman of New Jersey Transit. With two levels, the cars hold more passengers, even though there are only two seats on each side of the aisle. A typical 10-car train will have 1,375 seats, or about 225 more than on a comparable train today.

    "That dreaded middle seat is the bane of commuters' existence," said Mr. Lettiere, who was on hand for the unveiling. "It becomes a place where people pile things to keep others from sitting there. It's not what the customer wants."

    The railroad's officials said they had figured out what passengers wanted by asking them. A group of riders, including Ms. Marshall, visited Bombardier, the Canadian company that is building the cars, and shared their opinions about how the cars should look and feel.

    Aside from the two-by-two seating, Ms. Marshall said she particularly liked the "soothing" blue walls and seat covers and the "not too bright, not too dark" lighting. She said they were a significant improvement over the brown benches on some of the railroad's older trains.

    "You don't feel too closed in," she said, adding that she would most likely choose to sit on the lower level because she was unsure about her ability to walk down the stairs while the train was moving.

    The cars will have about 65 seats on each level. Each seat has about one inch more legroom than on the railroad's existing cars, said Richard R. Sarles, an assistant executive director who is overseeing the acquisition of the cars.

    The money to buy the first 100 cars, for about $1.9 million each, came from the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. John S. Wisniewski, a Democratic assemblyman from Parlin, N.J., who is the chairman of the transportation committee, described the Port Authority's chairman, Anthony R. Coscia, as "our rich uncle."

    But New Jersey Transit already has ordered 131 more of the bilevel cars, and the state will have to come up with its own money for those. Mr. Lettiere said that he was confident there would be enough federal funding to pay for the second batch of cars.

    The new cars will run on the railroad's main Northeast Corridor Line between Trenton and Manhattan and on its North Jersey Coast Line and Midtown Direct routes into Penn Station. At 14 feet, 6 inches high, they barely clear the tunnel under the Hudson River, which is owned by Amtrak. Amtrak and the Long Island Rail Road have already spent about $2 million clearing obstacles at Penn Station to make way for bilevel cars that come in from Long Island, an Amtrak official said.

    To make New Jersey Transit's new model fit, Bombardier had to shave the front and rear corners off the roof, giving the car the profile of a giant harmonica. But as Mr. Wisniewski said, the railroad's passengers will be more concerned about what is inside.

    "These are comfortable seats," he said. "The air-conditioning works really well in there. And there are no middle seats."

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  •  







    Reports Detail Elements That Turned Fires Into Catastrophes




    Timothy Ivy for The New York Times

    Firefighter Eugene Stolowski was injured in a jump from a burning building.



    De Maria for The New York Times
    Jeanette Meyran's husband, Lt. Curtis Meyran, was killed at a fire.


    September 15, 2005

    Reports Detail Elements That Turned Fires Into Catastrophes


    By KAREEM FAHIM


    As flames enveloped the Bronx apartment, whipping around the room where Lt. Curtis Meyran stood with his men on a cold, windy Sunday morning in January, the lieutenant seemed not to realize the level of danger. A voice on his radio asked if the flames had reached him; he answered that there had been a "slight extension" - meaning that the fire had grown, and gotten closer, but not by much.


    But that was wrong: the fire was all around and beneath him. The question was asked again. "Slight extension, slight extension," the lieutenant replied.


    Around the time of that radio transmission, flames - kicked up perhaps by wind - were breaking through from the floor below, jumping into a hallway and then to a fourth-floor bedroom where the men were.


    Lieutenant Meyran probably was not aware of this because an illegal partition blocked his view of the fire, as well as access to the fire escape. Flames gulped up the kitchen and raged on, eventually blowing out the front door of the apartment.


    Less than two minutes after that last radio transmission, with the fire visible and intense, Lieutenant Meyran used his handset again, this time, to yell for help. "Mayday, mayday, mayday."


    Minutes later, he and five other men jumped from the fourth floor to escape the flames. The lieutenant and Firefighter John G. Bellew died.


    These harrowing details and more emerged yesterday as the Fire Department released reports - as well as audiotapes - from investigations into two catastrophic fires on Jan. 23 that killed three firefighters. In the second fire, in Brooklyn, Firefighter Richard T. Sclafani died.


    The investigation into the fire in Morris Heights, where Lieutenant Meyran was killed, was undertaken by a panel of five fire chiefs. It cataloged failings - on the part of the Fire Department, firefighters and officers on the scene, and even the city's Department of Housing, Preservation and Development for failing to remedy the apartment's condition.


    The investigation found that the illegal wall had prevented firefighters on the fourth floor from seeing, and perhaps escaping, the fire; that the firefighters would have been better off with personal safety ropes; and that breakdowns in communication and discipline worsened matters.


    Calling the reports "comprehensive, candid and constructive," Fire Commissioner Nicholas Scoppetta said he would enforce their recommendations. He acknowledged that had conditions been different - with better weather, a steady stream of water on the fire and the use of personal safety ropes - the firefighters might have escaped unharmed. The department, which in 2000 stopped supplying all firefighters with personal safety ropes, will start giving all firefighters new rope systems in October, Mr. Scoppetta said. Relatives of the firefighters who died and those who were hurt bristled at any hint that the men who were killed or injured should shoulder any of the blame.


    A survivor of the fall, Firefighter Eugene Stolowski, left a rehabilitation center in West Orange, N.J., before the report's release. He said that he had not seen the report. "We were up there doing our job," he said. "It went bad."


    From the report, and the audiotapes, a picture emerges of that morning: About 8 a.m., firefighters entered a third-floor apartment on East 178th Street. "The wind and driving snow created near whiteout conditions," the report said. "The temperature was 17 degrees Fahrenheit, and there were northwest winds gusting in excess of 45 m.p.h."


    Within minutes, firefighters found that hydrants near the building were frozen. That problem was fixed with a relay system, but the relay created other obstacles. Fifteen minutes after the fire started, a hose began losing pressure, either because of a kink, misunderstandings by crew members using the relay equipment or the failure to clear air from a pump, the report found.


    The effects were terrifying, and the audiotapes reveal some of the confusion cited in the report. People listening to Lieutenant Meyran's calls for help did not know who was making the calls, the report found.


    The report by a separate panel on the Brooklyn fire found similar confusion regarding distress calls. The findings found that Firefighter Sclafani had been found without his facepiece, helmet and protective hood. But the report also faulted the department for inadequately training firefighters on how to provide a fallen member with an air supply.


    Jeanette Meyran recounted listening to the transmissions. "I was just waiting to hear his voice," she said of her husband in an interview at her home in Malverne, N.Y. "I just put my head down and listened."


    John Holl, Colin Moynihan and Ann Farmer contributed reporting for this article.





  • Wendy Whelan and David Michalek




    Giovanni Rufino for The New York Times

    Jock Soto, the bride's longtime dance partner, and Luis Fuentes, right, joined the couple at the reception.

    September 11, 2005
    Wendy Whelan and David Michalek
    By KATHRYN SHATTUCK

    AS a principal dancer of the New York City Ballet, Wendy Whelan long ago came to understand the importance of timing in a successful partnership.

    But she had a harder time with the rhythm of relationships offstage, her romances strained by the rigors of a performer's life. Then one August day 12 years ago, Ms. Whelan walked through the door of David Michalek, a photographer based in Los Angeles, and he placed her on a pedestal.

    It was just a prop he was using to photograph her for a magazine article, but she was surprised by the ease she felt when he lifted her. "It felt so effortless, so right," said Ms. Whelan, 38, also noting his "very energetic smile."

    Mr. Michalek, also 38, who had apprenticed with the fashion photographer Herb Ritts, knew his way around supermodels. "But I'd never seen a ballet dancer up close, and it was sort of shocking," he said. "She was so sweet, and so lovely."

    When Ms. Whelan traveled to California the next month for the company tour that Mr. Michalek was photographing, he took her for a drive, planted a kiss on her cheek and gave her his phone number in Los Angeles, where he owned a house filled with books.

    In November of that year, he came to New York, and a breakfast date ended up lasting four days. In December he returned for four more days, and the couple emerged from Ms. Whelan's home on New Year's Eve so distracted that they left candles burning all over the apartment.

    "Whenever I came to New York, I was more and more certain I only wanted to be with that person," Mr. Michalek recalled.

    And then Ms. Whelan, who had other romantic entanglements, vanished from his life.

    "I had some growing to do," she explained. "We were on opposite coasts and very involved in our separate careers. I was trying to think practically, and it didn't seem to me that a relationship with David at that point could be real."

    As Ms. Whelan's career took off in a big way, Mr. Michalek distracted himself with his own work, which shifted from commercial photography into fine art. Still, he recalled, "I thought of her constantly. I tried one or two relationships, but they went nowhere."

    Four years later, Ms. Whelan was a widely acclaimed dancer and now unattached. She called Mr. Michalek.

    He was wary, but proposed a hike in Joshua Tree National Park in California. Ms. Whelan showed up in high-heeled sandals. "We got up the mountain, but she broke a heel on the way down, and I carried her the rest of the way on piggy back," Mr. Michalek said. His wariness faded as they spoke about how their artistic paths had become more similar over the years they had spent apart.

    "David was a totally different person, as was I," Ms. Whelan said. "I was just turning 30 and felt like I had come into my own as a performer. He was more bicoastal in his career. He decided he wanted us to be together again, and I took a deep breath and said I was ready to try."

    Ms. Whelan said she returned to Manhattan filled with serenity and a confidence that was evident in her performances.

    Mr. Michalek began spending ever more time in New York, living in her apartment. "I always knew that New York would be a wonderful place if I needed to be here for any reason, and now I had one," he said.

    Mr. Michalek proposed last year in Venice, where Ms. Whelan was performing. The lag in timing, he said, had nothing to do with any lack of a desire, on his part, to spend his life with Ms. Whelan, adding that he had "felt married in spirit to her for years."

    Rather, it was the normally light-tripping Ms. Whelan who was dragging her feet. She said she never harbored the desire to marry until an injury last year kept her home for four months, where Mr. Michalek tended to her. The leave forced her to be "a wife in a weird way," she said. "I really enjoyed it, so I just knew I could be myself and not be a dancer with this person. I could look ahead into the future, and I was just so happy being me with him."

    At their wedding on Sept. 3, officiated by the Rev. Alfredo Balinong at Holy Trinity Roman Catholic Church on the Upper West Side, the bride glided down the aisle in an ivory silk Vera Wang gown, her ballerina's bun loose at the nape of her neck. The reception, at Industria Superstudio in Greenwich Village, included Ms. Whelan's teachers and City Ballet colleagues like Pauline Golbin, Tom Gold, Megan Fairchild and Nikolaj Hubbe. A few dancers tangoed between bites of a Spanish feast prepared by Jock Soto, Ms. Whelan's longtime dance partner, and his boyfriend, Luis Fuentes, a chef and sommelier.

    "Wendy and I were on the same level, and when we were on stage it was like meeting your soul mate," Mr. Soto said. "With David I finally see that same equality."

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