These are the photographs taken in class on Thursday.
Friday, October 8, 2010
Wednesday, October 6, 2010
News and Events
Cold-Case Trial: Two Opposites on Same Side, Facing Down a Killer
Last year Michael Connelly took his readers on a slow boat to China. He wrote “Nine Dragons,” a disappointingly flat and gimmicky story featuring his long-suffering Los Angeles police detective, Harry Bosch. Harry’s usual stomping ground is the depraved underbelly of Los Angeles, but “Nine Dragons” sent him on a touristy detour to Hong Kong. It also used one of the detective novel’s cheapest tricks, the kidnapping of someone near and dear to the hero (in this case his schoolgirl daughter) to generate suspense.
Fortunately Mr. Connelly has returned to solid ground. He has written “The Reversal,” which has a “the” title that makes it sound safely like one of John Grisham’s courthouse generics (Mr. Grisham’s next one, due later this month, is titled “The Confession”) and the setting that Mr. Connelly knows best. “The Reversal” also brings back Mickey Haller, the relatively new Connelly character who emerged as a leading man in “The Lincoln Lawyer.” He even showed up in “Nine Dragons,” which seemed to incorporate everything but the Connelly kitchen sink.
Taking no chances this time Mr. Connelly creates major roles in “The Reversal” for both the contentious Mickey and his moodier half brother, Harry. However venerable and well-loved Harry may be, it’s become clear that Mickey’s brazenness brings these books a new brio. So Mr. Connelly gives Mickey the larger role and makes him the story’s narrator. He has dreamed up a criminal case in which both can be involved. And then, once the story’s larger framework is in place, he executes the subtle sleight of hand that makes each of his books so much more than the sum of its parts.
The first few pages of “The Reversal” will convince no one that this book ought to be read on its literary merits. They explain how Mickey, ordinarily a wily defense lawyer (“me, Mickey Haller, defender of the damned”) and a happily outlandish one, is roped into serving as a prosecutor for a change.
The case is 24 years old. The defendant, Jason Jessup, was convicted for killing a 12-year-old girl. He went to prison, but now he is being retried on the basis of new DNA evidence, thanks to the Genetic Justice Project, which has turned the Jessup case into a cause célèbre and Jessup into a lowlife celebrity. The new trial has become so fraught that the district attorney wants to bring in an outsider to keep his own rival, the California attorney general, away from the proceedings. Enter Mickey.
“That case is a duck without wings,” Mickey complains, sounding like no human being this side of a movie screen. “The only thing left to do is shoot it and eat it.” In much the same spirit he throws back talk at the D.A. (“I’m an independent contractor, remember? You treat me otherwise and you’re going to be holding his hot potato without an oven mitt.”) No matter: Mickey is soon hooked. He’d like to prevail against Jessup, a gloating lout who stands to become rich and famous if exonerated. But what the man, whose slogan was once “Any case, Anytime, Anywhere,” likes even better is calling himself “Mickey Haller for the People.”
Now Mr. Connelly works Harry into the mix. Mickey needs an investigator. And, as this author’s longtime devotees know, Harry Bosch is simply the best. The story also draws on Maggie McPherson, a k a Maggie McFierce, the deputy D.A. who is Mickey’s ex-wife, and Rachel Walling, the F.B.I. profiler who has been a very close personal friend of Harry’s. This criminal investigation threatens to turn into a double date.
But the serious strengths of “The Reversal” become apparent after the principals are in place. Mr. Connelly likes to explicate the workings of the judicial process, especially for the benefit of people “who venture naïvely into the justice system” and “leave the courthouse wondering what just happened.” He can illustrate the basics of criminal investigation better than most. And he makes suspenseful use of simple but diabolical complications for the prosecution. In the case of “The Reversal” it is essential that the jury never learn, despite runaway press coverage, that Jessup has stood trial for the same crime before.
All stylistic posturing vanishes when this book gets down to basics, creating a classic detective-story puzzle around the facts of the girl’s disappearance. Her home was near a church. A swimming pool was being constructed in the backyard. So the victim and her sisters were doing something they didn’t normally do by playing in front of the house. The front lawn was obscured by a six-foot-high hedge. One of the victim’s sisters thinks that the abductor was a garbage man, but there were no garbage collections on Sundays. The three main suspects were tow-truck operators who looked for churchgoers’ illegally parked cars. The police were so desperate to find the girl alive that they rushed their investigation, zeroed in on this threesome and then singled out Jessup too recklessly.
Harry expertly tracks down leads in this long-neglected case, while Mickey prepares for the chess maneuvers of the trial. And when all of the characters begin working together, sparks really fly. Suffice it to say that there is a moment in the courtroom when Mickey outmaneuvers the defense so well that Harry glares at Jessup and feigns a throat cutting, just to indicate which side he thinks is winning. But Mr. Connelly doesn’t really write about winners and losers. He writes true-to-life fiction about true crime. What makes his crime stories ring most true is that they’re never really over.
Shedding Some Light on ‘Darkness’
A lot of motives might have been at play in “The Promise: The Making of ‘Darkness on the Edge of Town’ ”: nostalgia, vanity, a desire for documentation or benediction. One thing that’s undoubtedly on display, though, is bravery.
For much of the documentary, making its debut Thursday night on HBO, the director, Thom Zimny, cuts between a contemporary interview with Bruce Springsteen and footage shot more than 30 years ago of the young Bruce, an intense and beautiful creature who looks like the Robert De Niro of “Mean Streets,” but friendlier.
Mr. Springsteen, now 61, is aging remarkably well, but still — how many of us, at that age, would want to spend an hour and a half being compared with our 28-year-old selves?
Those scenes of Mr. Springsteen and the E Street Band in the studio during the year they worked on “Darkness on the Edge of Town,” their fourth album, were shot in grainy black and white by Barry Rebo, a future cinematographer and producer. Along with old color home movies of the Springsteen family, they give “The Promise” a surface resemblance to Bruce Weber’s great musical documentary “Let’s Get Lost,” about the trumpeter Chet Baker.
“The Promise,” however, is much smaller in scope. It’s a standard making-of documentary, proceeding chronologically through the tribulations and triumphs on the road to the 1978 release of “Darkness,” three years after “Born to Run” — an agonizingly long gap at a time when new songs on the radio were the only way to reach a mass audience.
What elevates the film are its subjects, both the artist and the album, which established a style and a set of themes that would define Mr. Springsteen’s subsequent career. Punk, which was developing at the same time, may get all the credit for revolutionizing popular music, but Mr. Springsteen’s determination to move away from the highly engineered and sterile perfectionism of 1970s rock made “Darkness” just as innovative in its own way.
Springsteen fans — a particularly knowledgeable and devoted audience — will be mesmerized by Mr. Rebo’s footage, which, according to HBO, has never been shown publicly. Those of us who remember where we were when we first heard the album can indulge our nostalgia while taking in the evidence of Mr. Springsteen’s stubborn yet calm determination to find exactly the sound he was seeking.
Happiest of all will be the Springsteen completists, rewarded by nuggets like his singing of “Candy’s Baby” (an earlier version of “Candy’s Room”); an alternate verse of “Something in the Night” or the never-released “What’s the Matter Little Darling”; or songs that went to other artists, like “Because the Night” (Patti Smith) and “Talk to Me” (Southside Johnny).
In the background of one shot Mr. Zimny identifies the fan Obie Dziedzic, who advised his hero to record the version of “Racing in the Street” that included a verse about a girl he met — thereby helping preserve some of Mr. Springsteen’s most romantic lyrics. (“Tonight my baby and me we’re gonna ride to the sea/and wash these sins off our hands.”)
In addition to the interview with the latter-day Mr. Springsteen “The Promise” includes reminiscences by most of the core members of the E Street Band and the producers Jon Landau and Jimmy Iovine. Mr. Springsteen is as intelligent and articulate a commentator as always, but he doesn’t have much to say that sounds new. On the themes that underpin “Darkness,” like sin or “deep despair, resilience, determination,” you’d rather just hear him sing.
More enlightening is Chuck Plotkin, who was brought in to help Mr. Iovine mix the album and who describes how Mr. Springsteen communicated the sounds and effects he wanted to achieve through visual, cinematic images. More amusing is Steven Van Zandt, the guitarist and latter-day “Sopranos” star, who still gets testy on the subject of the 70 new songs he had to learn before Mr. Springsteen chose the 10 that would make it onto the album. (“The Promise” was one of the rejects, after the band had spent three months rehearsing and recording it; it would show up 21 years later on “18 Tracks.”)
“The Promise” (the film) fits on the shelf with other friendly documentaries released in the past few years about great rock songwriters of the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s, like Bob Dylan, Neil Young and Tom Petty. It doesn’t approach the complexity or panache of Martin Scorsese’s movie about Mr. Dylan or Jonathan Demme’s films about Mr. Young, but in its modest way it’s a fitting tribute to an album meant to be lean, angry and unadorned.
Last year Michael Connelly took his readers on a slow boat to China. He wrote “Nine Dragons,” a disappointingly flat and gimmicky story featuring his long-suffering Los Angeles police detective, Harry Bosch. Harry’s usual stomping ground is the depraved underbelly of Los Angeles, but “Nine Dragons” sent him on a touristy detour to Hong Kong. It also used one of the detective novel’s cheapest tricks, the kidnapping of someone near and dear to the hero (in this case his schoolgirl daughter) to generate suspense.
Fortunately Mr. Connelly has returned to solid ground. He has written “The Reversal,” which has a “the” title that makes it sound safely like one of John Grisham’s courthouse generics (Mr. Grisham’s next one, due later this month, is titled “The Confession”) and the setting that Mr. Connelly knows best. “The Reversal” also brings back Mickey Haller, the relatively new Connelly character who emerged as a leading man in “The Lincoln Lawyer.” He even showed up in “Nine Dragons,” which seemed to incorporate everything but the Connelly kitchen sink.
Taking no chances this time Mr. Connelly creates major roles in “The Reversal” for both the contentious Mickey and his moodier half brother, Harry. However venerable and well-loved Harry may be, it’s become clear that Mickey’s brazenness brings these books a new brio. So Mr. Connelly gives Mickey the larger role and makes him the story’s narrator. He has dreamed up a criminal case in which both can be involved. And then, once the story’s larger framework is in place, he executes the subtle sleight of hand that makes each of his books so much more than the sum of its parts.
The first few pages of “The Reversal” will convince no one that this book ought to be read on its literary merits. They explain how Mickey, ordinarily a wily defense lawyer (“me, Mickey Haller, defender of the damned”) and a happily outlandish one, is roped into serving as a prosecutor for a change.
The case is 24 years old. The defendant, Jason Jessup, was convicted for killing a 12-year-old girl. He went to prison, but now he is being retried on the basis of new DNA evidence, thanks to the Genetic Justice Project, which has turned the Jessup case into a cause célèbre and Jessup into a lowlife celebrity. The new trial has become so fraught that the district attorney wants to bring in an outsider to keep his own rival, the California attorney general, away from the proceedings. Enter Mickey.
“That case is a duck without wings,” Mickey complains, sounding like no human being this side of a movie screen. “The only thing left to do is shoot it and eat it.” In much the same spirit he throws back talk at the D.A. (“I’m an independent contractor, remember? You treat me otherwise and you’re going to be holding his hot potato without an oven mitt.”) No matter: Mickey is soon hooked. He’d like to prevail against Jessup, a gloating lout who stands to become rich and famous if exonerated. But what the man, whose slogan was once “Any case, Anytime, Anywhere,” likes even better is calling himself “Mickey Haller for the People.”
Now Mr. Connelly works Harry into the mix. Mickey needs an investigator. And, as this author’s longtime devotees know, Harry Bosch is simply the best. The story also draws on Maggie McPherson, a k a Maggie McFierce, the deputy D.A. who is Mickey’s ex-wife, and Rachel Walling, the F.B.I. profiler who has been a very close personal friend of Harry’s. This criminal investigation threatens to turn into a double date.
But the serious strengths of “The Reversal” become apparent after the principals are in place. Mr. Connelly likes to explicate the workings of the judicial process, especially for the benefit of people “who venture naïvely into the justice system” and “leave the courthouse wondering what just happened.” He can illustrate the basics of criminal investigation better than most. And he makes suspenseful use of simple but diabolical complications for the prosecution. In the case of “The Reversal” it is essential that the jury never learn, despite runaway press coverage, that Jessup has stood trial for the same crime before.
All stylistic posturing vanishes when this book gets down to basics, creating a classic detective-story puzzle around the facts of the girl’s disappearance. Her home was near a church. A swimming pool was being constructed in the backyard. So the victim and her sisters were doing something they didn’t normally do by playing in front of the house. The front lawn was obscured by a six-foot-high hedge. One of the victim’s sisters thinks that the abductor was a garbage man, but there were no garbage collections on Sundays. The three main suspects were tow-truck operators who looked for churchgoers’ illegally parked cars. The police were so desperate to find the girl alive that they rushed their investigation, zeroed in on this threesome and then singled out Jessup too recklessly.
Harry expertly tracks down leads in this long-neglected case, while Mickey prepares for the chess maneuvers of the trial. And when all of the characters begin working together, sparks really fly. Suffice it to say that there is a moment in the courtroom when Mickey outmaneuvers the defense so well that Harry glares at Jessup and feigns a throat cutting, just to indicate which side he thinks is winning. But Mr. Connelly doesn’t really write about winners and losers. He writes true-to-life fiction about true crime. What makes his crime stories ring most true is that they’re never really over.
Shedding Some Light on ‘Darkness’
A lot of motives might have been at play in “The Promise: The Making of ‘Darkness on the Edge of Town’ ”: nostalgia, vanity, a desire for documentation or benediction. One thing that’s undoubtedly on display, though, is bravery.
For much of the documentary, making its debut Thursday night on HBO, the director, Thom Zimny, cuts between a contemporary interview with Bruce Springsteen and footage shot more than 30 years ago of the young Bruce, an intense and beautiful creature who looks like the Robert De Niro of “Mean Streets,” but friendlier.
Mr. Springsteen, now 61, is aging remarkably well, but still — how many of us, at that age, would want to spend an hour and a half being compared with our 28-year-old selves?
Those scenes of Mr. Springsteen and the E Street Band in the studio during the year they worked on “Darkness on the Edge of Town,” their fourth album, were shot in grainy black and white by Barry Rebo, a future cinematographer and producer. Along with old color home movies of the Springsteen family, they give “The Promise” a surface resemblance to Bruce Weber’s great musical documentary “Let’s Get Lost,” about the trumpeter Chet Baker.
“The Promise,” however, is much smaller in scope. It’s a standard making-of documentary, proceeding chronologically through the tribulations and triumphs on the road to the 1978 release of “Darkness,” three years after “Born to Run” — an agonizingly long gap at a time when new songs on the radio were the only way to reach a mass audience.
What elevates the film are its subjects, both the artist and the album, which established a style and a set of themes that would define Mr. Springsteen’s subsequent career. Punk, which was developing at the same time, may get all the credit for revolutionizing popular music, but Mr. Springsteen’s determination to move away from the highly engineered and sterile perfectionism of 1970s rock made “Darkness” just as innovative in its own way.
Springsteen fans — a particularly knowledgeable and devoted audience — will be mesmerized by Mr. Rebo’s footage, which, according to HBO, has never been shown publicly. Those of us who remember where we were when we first heard the album can indulge our nostalgia while taking in the evidence of Mr. Springsteen’s stubborn yet calm determination to find exactly the sound he was seeking.
Happiest of all will be the Springsteen completists, rewarded by nuggets like his singing of “Candy’s Baby” (an earlier version of “Candy’s Room”); an alternate verse of “Something in the Night” or the never-released “What’s the Matter Little Darling”; or songs that went to other artists, like “Because the Night” (Patti Smith) and “Talk to Me” (Southside Johnny).
In the background of one shot Mr. Zimny identifies the fan Obie Dziedzic, who advised his hero to record the version of “Racing in the Street” that included a verse about a girl he met — thereby helping preserve some of Mr. Springsteen’s most romantic lyrics. (“Tonight my baby and me we’re gonna ride to the sea/and wash these sins off our hands.”)
In addition to the interview with the latter-day Mr. Springsteen “The Promise” includes reminiscences by most of the core members of the E Street Band and the producers Jon Landau and Jimmy Iovine. Mr. Springsteen is as intelligent and articulate a commentator as always, but he doesn’t have much to say that sounds new. On the themes that underpin “Darkness,” like sin or “deep despair, resilience, determination,” you’d rather just hear him sing.
More enlightening is Chuck Plotkin, who was brought in to help Mr. Iovine mix the album and who describes how Mr. Springsteen communicated the sounds and effects he wanted to achieve through visual, cinematic images. More amusing is Steven Van Zandt, the guitarist and latter-day “Sopranos” star, who still gets testy on the subject of the 70 new songs he had to learn before Mr. Springsteen chose the 10 that would make it onto the album. (“The Promise” was one of the rejects, after the band had spent three months rehearsing and recording it; it would show up 21 years later on “18 Tracks.”)
“The Promise” (the film) fits on the shelf with other friendly documentaries released in the past few years about great rock songwriters of the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s, like Bob Dylan, Neil Young and Tom Petty. It doesn’t approach the complexity or panache of Martin Scorsese’s movie about Mr. Dylan or Jonathan Demme’s films about Mr. Young, but in its modest way it’s a fitting tribute to an album meant to be lean, angry and unadorned.
Tuesday, October 5, 2010
Visions of Light
I have seen over ten or more of the movies shown on "Visions of Light" on AMC. Whenever the network honors an actors/actresses career whether for their anniversary in the business, birthday, or death, the commmentator always talk about how the directors placed the actors in different lighting's to enhanced the characters in the movie or a particular place to film. In the black and white films, you can almost always figure out who is the main character. In the book "Hub", the character of the housekeeper is an African American woman. Hub character did sexual assault the housekeeper. The movie industry change the characters around to fit in the time. The book "Grapes of Wrath", the characters in the movie are close to the identity of the characters of the book. "Visions of Light" has excellent information, and gave great pointers on taking challenging images,which makes a good source for research to keep close by.
Light painting photographers
German duo Cenci Goepel and Jens Warnecke create stark imagery that brings a ghostly quality to the beauty of nature, turning striking natural settings into backdrops for glowing organic forms made of moving light. Their subtle use of light painting in deserts, canyons, forests and snow-covered fjords makes the illuminated forms seem to blend in with their backgrounds in a way that brings to mind alien landscapes on some far away planet.
Patrick Rochon creates stunning images by moving light through various media and capturing the movement with photography and video. Patrick’s light painting is unique even among a field of very innovative artists, using lasers to illuminate his subjects in ways that create an eerie, otherwordly feel in the finished portraits. Patrick has also taken light painting to a whole new level by building costumes of lights and performing light painting on a giant screen to create a unique visual experience.
Michael Bosanko is a photographer who’s taken on light painting in a series called “We Come in Peace”, in which figures made of light seem to interact with their surroundings in a way that’s comical, fun and highly engaging. The series features giant spiders crawling down a highway, “alien” rocks gathering around a central “spaceship”, a light figure skateboarding on a ramp and another hitchhiking on the side of a road.
Mike Stobbs
Monday, October 4, 2010
News/Events
The Paris That Awoke to Atget’s Lens
Atget returned again and again, especially in his later years, to the Parc de St.-Cloud, seen in an image from March 1926 and recently.
In a city that maintains a strong reverence for its past, many of the scenes photographed by Eugène Atget still exist — untouched.
Books of The Times
Newark 1944, When Polio Disrupted the Playground
Philip Roth’s latest protagonist is not one of his self-conscious writer-heroes, like Nathan Zuckerman or Peter Tarnopol, who spend their lives turning sentences around and contemplating the equation between life and art. No, he’s a simple Newark gym teacher who in the summer of 1944 is supervising the neighborhood playground, watching the boys play ball and the girls jump rope. In Mr. Roth’s new novel, “Nemesis,” it’s the summer when a polio epidemic sweeps through the city, spreading anxiety and suspicion.
Times Topic: Philip RothLike his 2008 book, “Indignation,” “Nemesis” is a modest undertaking: a small-scale portrait of an era and of an earnest young man who finds the unstoppable engine of history steamrolling over his life. In this case, Bucky Cantor, 23, is one of the neighborhood’s few young men who aren’t off fighting the war; although he wanted to enlist along with his two best friends, he was rejected by all the services because of his terrible eyesight. The sense of duty instilled in him by his grandfather has made him feel guilty about not being able to serve his country. He feels “ashamed to be seen in civilian clothes, ashamed when he watched the newsreels of the war at the movies.”
Still, as Mr. Roth’s narrator recalls, Bucky is venerated by the neighborhood boys as “the most exemplary and revered authority we knew, a young man of convictions, easygoing, kind, fair-minded, thoughtful, stable, gentle, vigorous, muscular — a comrade and leader both.” The boys admire Bucky’s athletic skills, and they look up to him as a role model — especially after he faces down a gang of menacing teenagers.
Bucky resembles Marcus, the hero of “Indignation,” in that he’s the very paradigm of niceness. He is not torn, as so many Roth heroes famously are, between responsibility and transgression, tradition and rebellion. He doesn’t even have a sense of humor — doesn’t engage in irony or sarcasm, and rarely speaks in jest. Whereas “Portnoy’s Complaint” was an outrageously comic tale about the throwing off of duty, “Nemesis” is a pleasantly told parable about the embrace of conscience — and what its suffocating, life-denying consequences can be.
That Bucky is such a one-dimensional character makes for a pallid, predictable story line in which the random workings of fate and the fate of temperament — rather than genuine free choice — are the narrative drivers. It’s all a bit by the numbers, though Mr. Roth executes Bucky’s story with professionalism and lots of granular period detail.
As he did in “The Plot Against America” (2004) — a novel with much bigger ambitions and a sweeping historical canvas — Mr. Roth conjures up World War II-era Newark and a Jewish neighborhood, where the routines of daily life are suddenly ruptured by fear. This time it’s not anti-Semitism that’s arrived, but polio, which has abruptly stricken two boys from the playground: Herbie Steinmark, a “chubby, clumsy, amiable eighth grader who, because of his athletic ineptness, was usually assigned to play right field and bat last,” and Alan Michaels, another eighth grader, who “was among the two or three best athletes” and “the boy who’d grown closest to Mr. Cantor.”
At the time, no one understands how polio spreads, and as more and more children succumb to the disease, panic and paranoia proliferate. Neighbors of the families with sick children call for quarantines; a local hot dog joint is shunned; and a mentally disabled man named Horace is accused of being a carrier.
Bucky tries to be a calm, stoic parental figure for the children, but he is shaken by an outburst from a hysterical mother with two sick boys. She accuses Bucky of letting them “run around like animals” on the baseball field, of letting them drink from the public fountain, of failing to look after the children’s welfare.
Bucky’s girlfriend, Marcia, wants him to quit his job and join her as a counselor at a camp in the Poconos, far from the contagion. At first he resists her, arguing that he has a responsibility to stay in Newark, but as more of his young charges fall sick, he tumbles into a full-blown existential crisis. In wondering how God could allow such innocent kids to suffer, he begins to wonder how God could have let his mother die in childbirth, how God could be so heartless and cruel.
Racked with doubt and anger and fear for his own health, Bucky impulsively changes his mind and accepts the camp job. He tells his boss in Newark that he is resigning and is soon in the bucolic Poconos with his beloved Marcia. For a few days, everything is idyllic: Bucky bonds with his new charges and exults in the lovely country air — so pure, so cool, so uncontaminated. And then everything changes: one of the boys in Bucky’s cabin falls ill and is rushed to the hospital. The epidemic has arrived at the camp, and Bucky thinks, “Who brought polio here if not me?”
Given Bucky’s personality and history, it’s not hard for the reader to figure out what happens next, even if Mr. Roth makes the aftermath a lot more melodramatic than you might expect. It’s not unmoving, exactly, but all a little synthetic — less like a vintage Roth narrative than like a very well-executed O. Henry story, complete with a deliberately ironic plot twist and a sentimental outcome.
Atget returned again and again, especially in his later years, to the Parc de St.-Cloud, seen in an image from March 1926 and recently.
In a city that maintains a strong reverence for its past, many of the scenes photographed by Eugène Atget still exist — untouched.
Books of The Times
Newark 1944, When Polio Disrupted the Playground
Philip Roth’s latest protagonist is not one of his self-conscious writer-heroes, like Nathan Zuckerman or Peter Tarnopol, who spend their lives turning sentences around and contemplating the equation between life and art. No, he’s a simple Newark gym teacher who in the summer of 1944 is supervising the neighborhood playground, watching the boys play ball and the girls jump rope. In Mr. Roth’s new novel, “Nemesis,” it’s the summer when a polio epidemic sweeps through the city, spreading anxiety and suspicion.
Times Topic: Philip RothLike his 2008 book, “Indignation,” “Nemesis” is a modest undertaking: a small-scale portrait of an era and of an earnest young man who finds the unstoppable engine of history steamrolling over his life. In this case, Bucky Cantor, 23, is one of the neighborhood’s few young men who aren’t off fighting the war; although he wanted to enlist along with his two best friends, he was rejected by all the services because of his terrible eyesight. The sense of duty instilled in him by his grandfather has made him feel guilty about not being able to serve his country. He feels “ashamed to be seen in civilian clothes, ashamed when he watched the newsreels of the war at the movies.”
Still, as Mr. Roth’s narrator recalls, Bucky is venerated by the neighborhood boys as “the most exemplary and revered authority we knew, a young man of convictions, easygoing, kind, fair-minded, thoughtful, stable, gentle, vigorous, muscular — a comrade and leader both.” The boys admire Bucky’s athletic skills, and they look up to him as a role model — especially after he faces down a gang of menacing teenagers.
Bucky resembles Marcus, the hero of “Indignation,” in that he’s the very paradigm of niceness. He is not torn, as so many Roth heroes famously are, between responsibility and transgression, tradition and rebellion. He doesn’t even have a sense of humor — doesn’t engage in irony or sarcasm, and rarely speaks in jest. Whereas “Portnoy’s Complaint” was an outrageously comic tale about the throwing off of duty, “Nemesis” is a pleasantly told parable about the embrace of conscience — and what its suffocating, life-denying consequences can be.
That Bucky is such a one-dimensional character makes for a pallid, predictable story line in which the random workings of fate and the fate of temperament — rather than genuine free choice — are the narrative drivers. It’s all a bit by the numbers, though Mr. Roth executes Bucky’s story with professionalism and lots of granular period detail.
As he did in “The Plot Against America” (2004) — a novel with much bigger ambitions and a sweeping historical canvas — Mr. Roth conjures up World War II-era Newark and a Jewish neighborhood, where the routines of daily life are suddenly ruptured by fear. This time it’s not anti-Semitism that’s arrived, but polio, which has abruptly stricken two boys from the playground: Herbie Steinmark, a “chubby, clumsy, amiable eighth grader who, because of his athletic ineptness, was usually assigned to play right field and bat last,” and Alan Michaels, another eighth grader, who “was among the two or three best athletes” and “the boy who’d grown closest to Mr. Cantor.”
At the time, no one understands how polio spreads, and as more and more children succumb to the disease, panic and paranoia proliferate. Neighbors of the families with sick children call for quarantines; a local hot dog joint is shunned; and a mentally disabled man named Horace is accused of being a carrier.
Bucky tries to be a calm, stoic parental figure for the children, but he is shaken by an outburst from a hysterical mother with two sick boys. She accuses Bucky of letting them “run around like animals” on the baseball field, of letting them drink from the public fountain, of failing to look after the children’s welfare.
Bucky’s girlfriend, Marcia, wants him to quit his job and join her as a counselor at a camp in the Poconos, far from the contagion. At first he resists her, arguing that he has a responsibility to stay in Newark, but as more of his young charges fall sick, he tumbles into a full-blown existential crisis. In wondering how God could allow such innocent kids to suffer, he begins to wonder how God could have let his mother die in childbirth, how God could be so heartless and cruel.
Racked with doubt and anger and fear for his own health, Bucky impulsively changes his mind and accepts the camp job. He tells his boss in Newark that he is resigning and is soon in the bucolic Poconos with his beloved Marcia. For a few days, everything is idyllic: Bucky bonds with his new charges and exults in the lovely country air — so pure, so cool, so uncontaminated. And then everything changes: one of the boys in Bucky’s cabin falls ill and is rushed to the hospital. The epidemic has arrived at the camp, and Bucky thinks, “Who brought polio here if not me?”
Given Bucky’s personality and history, it’s not hard for the reader to figure out what happens next, even if Mr. Roth makes the aftermath a lot more melodramatic than you might expect. It’s not unmoving, exactly, but all a little synthetic — less like a vintage Roth narrative than like a very well-executed O. Henry story, complete with a deliberately ironic plot twist and a sentimental outcome.
Saturday, October 2, 2010
News/Events
Balancing Act Remains for Jeter and the Yankees
When the season ends, the Yankees will initiate a delicate last tango with Derek Jeter, one of the most venerable Yankees this side of Lou Gehrig.
Ben Solomon for The New York Times
The 10-year $189 million contract that Derek Jeter signed in 2001 is about to expire.
Keep up with the latest news on The Times's baseball blog.
Jeter has lived one of the most charmed lives of any superstar athlete in North America, maybe the world. The franchise and the shortstop are near the end of a spectacular 16-year relationship. The 10-year $189 million contract that Jeter signed in 2001 is about to expire.
Now what?
The Yankees’ front office is paid a lot money to make difficult, unpopular decisions when necessary — Bernie Williams, Johnny Damon, Joe Torre.
But this is a different dance. Jeter, the captain since 2003, closed the old Yankee Stadium with a moving speech and welcomed fans to the new one.
What are the Yankees willing to give an aging shortstop who is completing the worst statistical season of his career? Jeter’s .268 batting average is the lowest in a full season since he made his debut in 1995.
If Jeter were 28, you could argue that his subpar season is an anomaly. At age 36, it’s fair to speculate that this season is the beginning of a downward spiral.
Some say that it would not be prudent for the Yankees to give Jeter more than a three-year contract — if that. Others have suggested that Jeter might take the honorable way out and accept a two-year deal worth, say, $20 million a year.
Don’t hold your breath. That would be tantamount to a concession from Jeter that he has lost a step and bat speed.
Jeter may ask for four years and $20 million a year. If he does, the Yankees should give it to him. If he insists on five, why not? Why quibble over a year or two?
His new contract is not about batting average and production. This last dance is about what Jeter means to the Yankee brand and the deep feeling between player and team.
The franchise and the player are locked in an embrace that neither wants to break. Each side wants its pound of flesh but neither can appear too greedy or too harsh in the way it negotiates.
The stoic Jeter must not come off as greedy or unreasonable. The Yankees must publicly keep talks with Jeter sweet and cordial.
“Baseball will show its true colors; the Yankees will show their true colors by how they conduct these negotiations,” said Ken Burns, the filmmaker who recently released “The Tenth Inning,” his and Lynn Novick’s four-hour follow-up to the 18 ½-hour documentary series “Baseball.” Burns is a Red Sox fan but loves Jeter.
“If they focus entirely on his statistics and the subpar year that he’s had, they will have done a disservice to themselves and their organization and to baseball in general,” Burns said. “At this stage Derek Jeter deserves a kind of contract for life.”
The Yankees and Jeter have been good for each other. Jeter has been blessed to spend his entire career in a great organization that consistently surrounds him with outstanding players at every position.
He has made the most of a great situation. He hit better than .300 in four of his first five seasons. He was the foundation of a team that won five World Series. He is the first major leaguer to be the most valuable player in the All-Star Game and the World Series in the same season. He is approaching 3,000 hits.
The Yankees have already paid Jeter for his production. What they are paying for now are intangibles. Jeter’s greatest intangible is that he doesn’t get in trouble, or if he does, he keeps it under wraps. This may be the most significant achievement for a superstar athlete who plays in an age of instant omnipresent media. No other superstar athlete in New York has done better.
On Wednesday, during a celebration of Manager Cito Gaston’s home final game in Toronto, Jeter, leading off, tipped his cap toward Gaston in a classy show of respect.
“The accepted symbol of what is good about baseball is Jeter,” Burns said. “There is a part of every Red Sox fan who has to acknowledge that as much as you hate the Yankees there is something great at the core of Derek Jeter.”
Years from now, Jeter’s plaque will be in Monument Park, and young fans will look at his statistics. Numbers speak for themselves; intangibles seldom do. The intangibles are not lost on players whom Jeter played with and against, or on the organization he has not embarrassed or on the sport he did not let down.
This promises to be a fascinating last tango.
CNN Fires Rick Sanchez for Remarks in Interview
Rick Sanchez, a daytime anchor at CNN, was fired on Friday, a day after telling a radio interviewer that Jon Stewart was a bigot and that “everybody that runs CNN is a lot like Stewart.”
Post a Comment on Media Decoder The latter comment was made shortly after Mr. Stewart’s faith, Judaism, was invoked.
CNN said in a statement Friday evening, “Rick Sanchez is no longer with the company. We thank Rick for his years of service and we wish him well.”
Mr. Sanchez’s comments came Thursday during a contentious conversation with the comedian Pete Dominick on satellite radio. By Friday afternoon, a recording of the conversation had circulated widely on the Internet.
In the conversation Mr. Sanchez, who is Cuban-American, repeatedly suggested that he had experienced subtle forms of discrimination in his television career.
He said that “a lot of elite Northeast establishment liberals” viewed him as someone “who belongs in the second tier and not the top tier.”
Among those establishment figures, he said, was Mr. Stewart, the host of “The Daily Show” on Comedy Central and a friend of Mr. Dominick’s.
At first, Mr. Sanchez called Mr. Stewart a “bigot,” but later took the word back, calling the comedian “prejudicial” instead.
Prejudicial “against who?” Mr. Dominick asked.
Mr. Sanchez said, “Against anybody who doesn’t agree to his point of view, which is very much a white liberal establishment point of view.”
One of the co-hosts of the radio show brought up the fact that Mr. Stewart was a Jew, saying to Mr. Sanchez that he was a minority “as much as you are.”
Mr. Sanchez answered sarcastically, “Yeah. Yeah. Very powerless people.” He let out a high-pitched laugh.
“Everybody that runs CNN is a lot like Stewart,” Mr. Sanchez said. “And a lot of people who run all the other networks are a lot like Stewart. And to imply that somehow they — the people in this country who are Jewish — are an oppressed minority? Yeah.”
Mr. Stewart has made jokes about Mr. Sanchez more than 20 times in the last five years, according to a search of the show’s Web site. Or as Mr. Sanchez put it, “You watch yourself on his show every day and all they ever do is call you stupid.”
Mr. Stewart was far from the only person known to mock Mr. Sanchez, who was once tasered on camera for a segment. He was a polarizing figure within CNN, but under the channel’s former president, Jonathan Klein, he was rewarded with more air time, most recently a two-hour block in the afternoons. Mr. Klein was fired last week.
On Wednesday, Mr. Sanchez ended two months as an interim prime-time anchor. He appeared on the radio show as part of tour to promote his book “Conventional Idiocy.” Attempts to reach Mr. Sanchez were unsuccessful.
When the season ends, the Yankees will initiate a delicate last tango with Derek Jeter, one of the most venerable Yankees this side of Lou Gehrig.
Ben Solomon for The New York Times
The 10-year $189 million contract that Derek Jeter signed in 2001 is about to expire.
Keep up with the latest news on The Times's baseball blog.
Jeter has lived one of the most charmed lives of any superstar athlete in North America, maybe the world. The franchise and the shortstop are near the end of a spectacular 16-year relationship. The 10-year $189 million contract that Jeter signed in 2001 is about to expire.
Now what?
The Yankees’ front office is paid a lot money to make difficult, unpopular decisions when necessary — Bernie Williams, Johnny Damon, Joe Torre.
But this is a different dance. Jeter, the captain since 2003, closed the old Yankee Stadium with a moving speech and welcomed fans to the new one.
What are the Yankees willing to give an aging shortstop who is completing the worst statistical season of his career? Jeter’s .268 batting average is the lowest in a full season since he made his debut in 1995.
If Jeter were 28, you could argue that his subpar season is an anomaly. At age 36, it’s fair to speculate that this season is the beginning of a downward spiral.
Some say that it would not be prudent for the Yankees to give Jeter more than a three-year contract — if that. Others have suggested that Jeter might take the honorable way out and accept a two-year deal worth, say, $20 million a year.
Don’t hold your breath. That would be tantamount to a concession from Jeter that he has lost a step and bat speed.
Jeter may ask for four years and $20 million a year. If he does, the Yankees should give it to him. If he insists on five, why not? Why quibble over a year or two?
His new contract is not about batting average and production. This last dance is about what Jeter means to the Yankee brand and the deep feeling between player and team.
The franchise and the player are locked in an embrace that neither wants to break. Each side wants its pound of flesh but neither can appear too greedy or too harsh in the way it negotiates.
The stoic Jeter must not come off as greedy or unreasonable. The Yankees must publicly keep talks with Jeter sweet and cordial.
“Baseball will show its true colors; the Yankees will show their true colors by how they conduct these negotiations,” said Ken Burns, the filmmaker who recently released “The Tenth Inning,” his and Lynn Novick’s four-hour follow-up to the 18 ½-hour documentary series “Baseball.” Burns is a Red Sox fan but loves Jeter.
“If they focus entirely on his statistics and the subpar year that he’s had, they will have done a disservice to themselves and their organization and to baseball in general,” Burns said. “At this stage Derek Jeter deserves a kind of contract for life.”
The Yankees and Jeter have been good for each other. Jeter has been blessed to spend his entire career in a great organization that consistently surrounds him with outstanding players at every position.
He has made the most of a great situation. He hit better than .300 in four of his first five seasons. He was the foundation of a team that won five World Series. He is the first major leaguer to be the most valuable player in the All-Star Game and the World Series in the same season. He is approaching 3,000 hits.
The Yankees have already paid Jeter for his production. What they are paying for now are intangibles. Jeter’s greatest intangible is that he doesn’t get in trouble, or if he does, he keeps it under wraps. This may be the most significant achievement for a superstar athlete who plays in an age of instant omnipresent media. No other superstar athlete in New York has done better.
On Wednesday, during a celebration of Manager Cito Gaston’s home final game in Toronto, Jeter, leading off, tipped his cap toward Gaston in a classy show of respect.
“The accepted symbol of what is good about baseball is Jeter,” Burns said. “There is a part of every Red Sox fan who has to acknowledge that as much as you hate the Yankees there is something great at the core of Derek Jeter.”
Years from now, Jeter’s plaque will be in Monument Park, and young fans will look at his statistics. Numbers speak for themselves; intangibles seldom do. The intangibles are not lost on players whom Jeter played with and against, or on the organization he has not embarrassed or on the sport he did not let down.
This promises to be a fascinating last tango.
CNN Fires Rick Sanchez for Remarks in Interview
Rick Sanchez, a daytime anchor at CNN, was fired on Friday, a day after telling a radio interviewer that Jon Stewart was a bigot and that “everybody that runs CNN is a lot like Stewart.”
Post a Comment on Media Decoder The latter comment was made shortly after Mr. Stewart’s faith, Judaism, was invoked.
CNN said in a statement Friday evening, “Rick Sanchez is no longer with the company. We thank Rick for his years of service and we wish him well.”
Mr. Sanchez’s comments came Thursday during a contentious conversation with the comedian Pete Dominick on satellite radio. By Friday afternoon, a recording of the conversation had circulated widely on the Internet.
In the conversation Mr. Sanchez, who is Cuban-American, repeatedly suggested that he had experienced subtle forms of discrimination in his television career.
He said that “a lot of elite Northeast establishment liberals” viewed him as someone “who belongs in the second tier and not the top tier.”
Among those establishment figures, he said, was Mr. Stewart, the host of “The Daily Show” on Comedy Central and a friend of Mr. Dominick’s.
At first, Mr. Sanchez called Mr. Stewart a “bigot,” but later took the word back, calling the comedian “prejudicial” instead.
Prejudicial “against who?” Mr. Dominick asked.
Mr. Sanchez said, “Against anybody who doesn’t agree to his point of view, which is very much a white liberal establishment point of view.”
One of the co-hosts of the radio show brought up the fact that Mr. Stewart was a Jew, saying to Mr. Sanchez that he was a minority “as much as you are.”
Mr. Sanchez answered sarcastically, “Yeah. Yeah. Very powerless people.” He let out a high-pitched laugh.
“Everybody that runs CNN is a lot like Stewart,” Mr. Sanchez said. “And a lot of people who run all the other networks are a lot like Stewart. And to imply that somehow they — the people in this country who are Jewish — are an oppressed minority? Yeah.”
Mr. Stewart has made jokes about Mr. Sanchez more than 20 times in the last five years, according to a search of the show’s Web site. Or as Mr. Sanchez put it, “You watch yourself on his show every day and all they ever do is call you stupid.”
Mr. Stewart was far from the only person known to mock Mr. Sanchez, who was once tasered on camera for a segment. He was a polarizing figure within CNN, but under the channel’s former president, Jonathan Klein, he was rewarded with more air time, most recently a two-hour block in the afternoons. Mr. Klein was fired last week.
On Wednesday, Mr. Sanchez ended two months as an interim prime-time anchor. He appeared on the radio show as part of tour to promote his book “Conventional Idiocy.” Attempts to reach Mr. Sanchez were unsuccessful.
Art 21
Laurie Simmons, photographer and filmmaker
Laurie Simmons uses miniature figures in domestic places are very unique. The scenes she uses for her dolls and ventriloquist dummies are placed in a real world without approaching people. She used her solitude lifestyle to make the puppets relate to every ones' lifestyle. The movie, Music of Regrets", a romance between puppets that was brought to life. It seems strange to me, however, watching a short trailer of the movie you can see how much of herself that was placed in the characters of each puppets.
Yinka Shonibare MBE I really like the multi-layer fabric association with Africa's tradition. The headless figures hands was position to the body as if you were hearing the conversation;some of his work poses photographs and videos of himself recreating a character of famous British painters or stories. Shonibare’s work explores issues of race and class through the use of painting, sculpture, photography, film and performance. He, also, explores the interrelationship between Africa and Europe with their economic and political histories. He is a painter,photography, filmmaker, artist, and a member of the BritishMember of the “Most Excellent Order of the British Empire”.
Jeff Koons, Fantasy world imaginary world; support few paintings a year-studio of works, his wood sculpture exhibition at the Chateau de Versailles was excellent. The flowers arrangement at the Chateau de Versailles was placed in mathematical arrangement. He, also, had made a porcelain of Michael Jackson and Bubbles.
Florion Maier-Aichen photographer, a landscape photographer making images for post cards from Europe to United States are great collectors items.
Kara Walker storyteller, African American artist tells of complexion's story of fictions and facts that explores race, gender, sexuality, violence and identity in her work. She is best known for her room-size tableaux of black cut-paper silhouettes. Walker's silhouette images work to bridge unfinished folklore in the Antebellum South, raising identity and gender issues for African American women.
Trenton Doyle Hancock, African American artist, also a storyteller about himself,community, and family. He has produced this imaginary worlds called Mounds, half-animal, half-plant creatures, which are preyed upon by evil beings called vegans. Hancock makes prints, drawings, and collages that tell stories of a fantastical nature.
Do-Oh Suh storyteller,is a Korean sculptor and installation artist,and ex-military. He worked on metal tags using an old typewriter to print each person name constructing it into a custom metal robe. Suh's work draws attention to the ways viewers occupy and inhabit public space. Do Ho Suh constructs site-specific installations that question the boundaries of identity. His work explores the relation between individuality, collectivity, and anonymity
Mary Heilmann artist writing art works hand in hand promote emotions in color. Heilmann expresses her work by writing short piece about the work, which helps the viewer understand the meaning of the art.
Laurie Simmons uses miniature figures in domestic places are very unique. The scenes she uses for her dolls and ventriloquist dummies are placed in a real world without approaching people. She used her solitude lifestyle to make the puppets relate to every ones' lifestyle. The movie, Music of Regrets", a romance between puppets that was brought to life. It seems strange to me, however, watching a short trailer of the movie you can see how much of herself that was placed in the characters of each puppets.
Yinka Shonibare MBE I really like the multi-layer fabric association with Africa's tradition. The headless figures hands was position to the body as if you were hearing the conversation;some of his work poses photographs and videos of himself recreating a character of famous British painters or stories. Shonibare’s work explores issues of race and class through the use of painting, sculpture, photography, film and performance. He, also, explores the interrelationship between Africa and Europe with their economic and political histories. He is a painter,photography, filmmaker, artist, and a member of the BritishMember of the “Most Excellent Order of the British Empire”.
Jeff Koons, Fantasy world imaginary world; support few paintings a year-studio of works, his wood sculpture exhibition at the Chateau de Versailles was excellent. The flowers arrangement at the Chateau de Versailles was placed in mathematical arrangement. He, also, had made a porcelain of Michael Jackson and Bubbles.
Florion Maier-Aichen photographer, a landscape photographer making images for post cards from Europe to United States are great collectors items.
Kara Walker storyteller, African American artist tells of complexion's story of fictions and facts that explores race, gender, sexuality, violence and identity in her work. She is best known for her room-size tableaux of black cut-paper silhouettes. Walker's silhouette images work to bridge unfinished folklore in the Antebellum South, raising identity and gender issues for African American women.
Trenton Doyle Hancock, African American artist, also a storyteller about himself,community, and family. He has produced this imaginary worlds called Mounds, half-animal, half-plant creatures, which are preyed upon by evil beings called vegans. Hancock makes prints, drawings, and collages that tell stories of a fantastical nature.
Do-Oh Suh storyteller,is a Korean sculptor and installation artist,and ex-military. He worked on metal tags using an old typewriter to print each person name constructing it into a custom metal robe. Suh's work draws attention to the ways viewers occupy and inhabit public space. Do Ho Suh constructs site-specific installations that question the boundaries of identity. His work explores the relation between individuality, collectivity, and anonymity
Mary Heilmann artist writing art works hand in hand promote emotions in color. Heilmann expresses her work by writing short piece about the work, which helps the viewer understand the meaning of the art.
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