Monday, May 26, 2008
Death of Sydney Pollack
May 26, 2008
Sydney Pollack, Film Director, Dies at 73
By MICHAEL CIEPLY
LOS ANGELES — Sydney Pollack, a Hollywood mainstay as director, producer and sometime actor whose star-laden movies like “The Way We Were,” “Tootsie” and “Out of Africa” were among the most successful of the 1970s and ’80s, died on Monday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 73.
The cause was cancer, said a representative of the family.
Mr. Pollack’s career defined an era in which big stars (Robert Redford, Barbra Streisand, Warren Beatty) and the filmmakers who knew how to wrangle them (Barry Levinson, Mike Nichols) retooled the Hollywood system. Savvy operators, they played studio against studio, staking their fortunes on pictures that served commerce without wholly abandoning art.
Hollywood honored Mr. Pollack in return. His movies received multiple Academy Award nominations, and as a director he won an Oscar for his work on the 1985 film “Out of Africa” as well as nominations for directing “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?” (1969) and “Tootsie” (1982).
Last fall, Warner Brothers released “Michael Clayton,” of which Mr. Pollack was a producer and a member of the cast. He delivered a trademark performance as an old-bull lawyer who demands dark deeds from a subordinate, played by George Clooney. (“This is news? This case has reeked from Day One,” snaps Mr. Pollack’s Marty Bach.) The picture received seven Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture, and a Best Actor nomination for Mr. Clooney.
Mr. Pollack became a prolific producer of independent films in the latter part of his career. With a partner, the filmmaker Anthony Minghella, he ran Mirage Enterprises, a production company whose films included Mr. Minghella’s “Cold Mountain” and the documentary “Sketches of Frank Gehry,” released last year, the last film directed by Mr. Pollack.
Apart from that film, Mr. Pollack never directed a movie without stars. His first feature, “The Slender Thread,” released by Paramount Pictures in 1965, starred Sidney Poitier and Anne Bancroft. In his next 19 films — every one a romance or drama but for the single comedy, “Tootsie” — Mr. Pollack worked with Burt Lancaster, Natalie Wood, Jane Fonda, Robert Mitchum, Al Pacino, Dustin Hoffman, Meryl Streep, Tom Cruise, Harrison Ford, Nicole Kidman, Ms. Streisand and others.
Sydney Irwin Pollack was born on July 1, 1934, in Lafayette, Ind., and reared in South Bend. By Mr. Pollack’s own account, in the biographical dictionary “World Film Directors,” his father, David, a pharmacist, and his mother, the former Rebecca Miller, were first-generation Russian-Americans who had met at Purdue University.
Mr. Pollack developed a love of drama at South Bend High School and, instead of going to college, went to New York and enrolled at the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theater. He studied there for two years under Sanford Meisner, who was in charge of its acting department, and remained for five more as Mr. Meisner’s assistant, teaching acting but also appearing onstage and in television.
Curly-haired and almost 6 feet 2 inches tall, Mr. Pollack had a notable role in a 1959 “Playhouse 90” telecast of “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” an adaptation of the Hemingway novel directed by John Frankenheimer. Earlier, Mr. Pollack had appeared on Broadway with Zero Mostel in “A Stone for Danny Fisher” and with Katharine Cornell and Tyrone Power in “The Dark Is Light Enough.” But he said later that he probably could not have built a career as a leading man.
Instead, Mr. Pollack took the advice of Burt Lancaster, whom he had met while working with Frankenheimer, and turned to directing. Lancaster steered him to the entertainment mogul Lew Wasserman, and through him Mr. Pollack landed a directing assignment on the television series “Shotgun Slade.”
After a faltering start, he hit his stride on episodes of “Ben Casey, “Naked City,” “The Fugitive” and other well-known shows. In 1966 he won an Emmy for directing an episode of “Bob Hope Presents the Chrysler Theater.”
From the time he made his first full-length feature, “The Slender Thread,” about a social work student coaxing a woman out of suicide on a telephone help line, Mr. Pollack had a hit-and-miss relationship with the critics. Writing in The New York Times, A. H. Weiler deplored that film’s “sudsy waves of bathos.” Mr. Pollack himself later pronounced it “dreadful.”
But from the beginning of his movie career, he was also perceived as belonging to a generation whose work broke with the immediate past. In 1965, Charles Champlin, writing in The Los Angeles Times, compared Mr. Pollack to the director Elliot Silverstein, whose western spoof, “Cat Ballou,” had been released earlier that year, and Stuart Rosenberg, soon to be famous for “Cool Hand Luke” (1967). Mr. Champlin cited all three as artists who had used television rather than B movies to learn their craft.
Self-critical and never quite at ease with Hollywood, Mr. Pollack voiced a constant yearning for creative prerogatives more common on the stage. Yet he dived into the fray. In 1970, “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?,” his bleak fable of love and death among marathon dancers in the Great Depression, based on a Horace McCoy novel, received nine Oscar nominations, including the one for directing. (Gig Young won the best supporting actor award for his performance.)
Two years later, Mr. Pollack made the mountain-man saga “Jeremiah Johnson,” one of three closely spaced pictures in which he directed Mr. Redford.
The second of those films, “The Way We Were,” about a pair of ill-fated lovers who meet up later in life, also starred Ms. Streisand and was an enormous hit despite critical hostility.
The next, “Three Days of the Condor,” another hit, about a bookish C.I.A. worker thrust into a mystery, did somewhat better with the critics. “Tense and involving,” said Roger Ebert in The Chicago Sun-Times.
With “Absence of Malice” in 1981, Mr. Pollack entered the realm of public debate. The film’s story of a newspaper reporter (Sally Field) who is fed a false story by federal officials trying to squeeze information from a businessman (Paul Newman) was widely viewed as a corrective to the adulation of investigative reporters that followed Alan J. Pakula’s hit movie “All the President’s Men,” with its portrayal of the Watergate scandal.
But only with “Tootsie,” in 1982, did Mr. Pollack become a fully realized Hollywood player.
By then he was represented by Michael S. Ovitz and the rapidly expanding Creative Artists Agency. So was his leading man, Dustin Hoffman.
As the film — a comedy about a struggling actor who disguises himself as a woman to get a coveted television part — was being shot for Columbia Pictures, Mr. Pollack and Mr. Hoffman became embroiled in a semi-public feud, with Mr. Ovitz running shuttle diplomacy between them.
Mr. Hoffman, who had initiated the project, argued for a more broadly comic approach. But Mr. Pollack — who played Mr. Hoffman’s agent in the film — was drawn to the seemingly doomed romance between the cross-dressing Hoffman character and the actress played by Jessica Lange.
If Mr. Pollack did not prevail on all points, he tipped the film in his own direction. Meanwhile, the movie came in behind schedule, over budget and surrounded by bad buzz.
Yet “Tootsie” was also a winner. It took in more than $177 million at the domestic box office and received 10 Oscar nominations, including best picture. (Ms. Lange took home the film’s only Oscar, for best supporting actress.)
Backed by Mr. Ovitz, Mr. Pollack expanded his reach in the wake of success. Over the next several years, he worked closely with both Tri-Star Pictures, where he was creative consultant, and Universal, where Mirage, his production company, set up shop in 1986.
Mr. Pollack reached perhaps his career pinnacle with “Out of Africa.” Released by Universal, the film, based on the memoirs of Isak Dinesen, paired Ms. Streep and Mr. Redford in a period drama that reworked one of the director’s favorite themes, that of star-crossed lovers. It captured Oscars for best picture and best director.
Still, Mr. Pollack remained uneasy about his cinematic skills. “I was never what I would call a great shooter or visual stylist,” he told an interviewer for American Cinematographer last year. And he developed a reputation for caution when it came to directing assignments. Time after time, he expressed interest in directing projects, only to back away. At one point he was to make “Rain Man,” a Dustin Hoffman picture ultimately directed by Mr. Levinson; at another, an adaptation of “The Night Manager” by John le Carré.
That wariness was undoubtedly fed by his experience with “Havana,” a 1990 film that was to be his last with Mr. Redford. It seemed to please no one, though Mr. Pollack defended it. “To tell you the truth, if I knew what was wrong, I’d have fixed it,” Mr. Pollack told The Los Angeles Times in 1993.
“The Firm,” with Tom Cruise, was a hit that year. But “Sabrina” (1995) and “Random Hearts” (1999), both with Harrison Ford, and “The Interpreter” (2005), with Nicole Kidman and Sean Penn, fell short, as Hollywood and its primary audience increasingly eschewed stars for fantasy and special effects.
Mr. Pollack never stopped acting; in a recent episode of “Entourage,” the HBO series about Hollywood, he played himself.
Among Mr. Pollack’s survivors are daughters, Rachel and Rebecca, and his wife, Claire Griswold, who was once among his acting students. The couple married in 1958, while Mr. Pollack was serving a two-year hitch in the Army. Their only son, Steven, died at age 34 in a 1993 plane crash in Santa Monica, Calif.
In his later years, Mr. Pollack appeared to relish his role as elder statesman. At various times he was executive director of the Actors Studio West, chairman of American Cinematheque and an advocate for artists’ rights.
He increasingly sounded wistful notes about the disappearance of the Hollywood he knew in his prime. “The middle ground is now gone,” Mr. Pollack said in a discussion with Shimon Peres in the fall 1998 issue of New Perspectives Quarterly. He added, with a nod to a fellow filmmaker: “It is not impossible to make mainstream films which are really good. Costa-Gavras once said that accidents can happen.”
May 27, 2008
Director and actor Sydney Pollack dies at 73
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 6:23 p.m. ET
Sydney Pollack found mainstream success with smart films for grown-ups -- a rarity today.
In thrillers, romances and comedies, his movies were intelligent and often dealt with social issues. They call such movies ''independent'' nowadays; Pollack could craft them into hits.
''The middle ground is now gone,'' he told New Perspectives Quarterly in 1998. ''It is not impossible to make mainstream films which are really good. Costa-Gavras once said that accidents can happen.''
Movies today tend to come as either blockbusters aimed at the younger demographics or smaller, stylized art-house works -- which typically fail to make money. Pollack did neither.
Pollack, diagnosed with cancer about nine months ago, died Monday afternoon, surrounded by family, at his home in Los Angeles, said publicist Leslee Dart. He was 73.
In a tireless career spanning nearly five decades, Pollack distinguished himself as a true professional: a director, a producer and an actor. His greatest successes as a director -- 1982's ''Tootsie'' and 1985's ''Out of Africa'' -- came years ago, but he showed no signs of slowing down.
He was executive producer of the new HBO film ''Recount'' about the 2000 presidential election, and he produced two high-profile films not yet in theaters: Kenneth Lonergan's ''Margaret'' and Stephen Daldry's ''The Reader.''
On Tuesday, Hollywood mourned the loss of the well-liked, prolific filmmaker. He had worked with seemingly every A-list star in the business, from Robert Mitchum to Al Pacino. But Pollack collaborated with Robert Redford more than any other -- seven films, including ''Out of Africa,'' 1973's ''The Way We Were,'' 1975's ''Three Days of the Condor'' and 1979's ''The Electric Horseman.''
''Sydney's and my relationship both professionally and personally covers 40 years,'' Redford said. ''It's too personal to express in a sound bite.''
Barbra Streisand, who starred alongside Redford in ''The Way We Were,'' said: ''He knew how to tell a love story. He was a great actor's director because he was a great actor.''
Tom Cruise, whom Pollack directed in 1993's ''The Firm'' and with whom Pollack memorably acted in Stanley Kubrick's ''Eyes Wide Shut'' (1999), said: ''Throughout the years, unpretentious and never condescending, he shared with me what he loved about family, storytelling, food, flying and a great bottle of vino. He was a Renaissance man and a great friend.''
''They Shoot Horses, Don't They?'' -- the 1969 film about Depression-era marathon dancers -- received nine Oscar nominations, including one for Pollack's direction. He was nominated again for best director for 1982's ''Tootsie,'' starring Dustin Hoffman as a cross-dressing actor and Pollack as the exasperated agent who tells him: ''I begged you to get some therapy.''
As director and producer, he won Academy Awards for the romantic epic ''Out of Africa,'' which captured seven Oscars in all.
Last fall, Pollack played law firm boss Marty Bach opposite George Clooney in ''Michael Clayton,'' which he also co-produced. It received seven Oscar nominations.
''Sydney made the world a little better, movies a little better and even dinner a little better,'' Clooney said. ''He'll be missed terribly.''
Clooney's admiration for Pollack is evident in the similar way he has traded on star power to make compelling, complex, realistic dramas with a political sensibility. But unlike, say, Clooney's ''Good Night, and Good Luck,'' Pollack's films did big business, no doubt largely aided by their considerable star wattage.
''Tootsie'' made $177 million. ''Absence of Malice,'' a 1981 film that today would be relegated to a studio's specialty division, more than tripled its $12 million budget. The film, starring Paul Newman and Sally Field, remains a remarkably relevant movie about the press 27 years after its release.
''Sydney was a very special person, but the thing that impressed me was that he was special enough so that he didn't have to think that he was,'' Newman said Tuesday.
Pollack moved gracefully between in front of the camera and behind it. He became an elite producer, helping bring to theaters well-crafted (but not snooty) films, among them 1995's ''Sense and Sensibility,'' 2002's ''The Quiet American'' and 2005's ''The Interpreter,'' which he also directed.
He teamed with the late Anthony Minghella on the production company Mirage Enterprises, and produced most of Minghella's films, including ''The Talented Mr. Ripley'' and ''Cold Mountain.'' The company also released Pollack's last film, the 2006 documentary ''Sketches of Frank Gehry.''
''He was elegant, a gentleman, smart and generous, a wonderful actor, a great cook -- a true connoisseur of life,'' said Nicole Kidman, who starred in ''The Interpreter. ''He guided me artistically and personally, not just as a director or producer but as a mentor and friend.''
The film was the first shot at U.N. headquarters; by then, Pollack was an unofficial ambassador of movies. He often appeared in documentaries about filmmakers; he participated in American Film Institute television specials; and he spoke artfully about classic cinema while hosting series such as Turner Classic Movies' ''The Essentials.''
Sidney Irwin Pollack was born in Lafayette, Ind., to first-generation Russian-Americans. In high school in South Bend, he fell in love with theater, a passion that prompted him to forgo college, move to New York and enroll in the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theater.
Studying under Sanford Meisner, Pollack spent several years cutting his teeth in various areas of theater, eventually becoming Meisner's assistant.
''We started together in New York and he always excelled at everything he set out to do, his friendships and his humanity as much as his talents,'' said Martin Landau, a longtime close friend and associate in the Actors Studio.
Though Pollack would make his name as a director and producer, his first love was acting. It wasn't until later in his career that the parts came easily: a notable role in ''The Sopranos,'' a role in Woody Allen's ''Husbands and Wives,'' appearances on TV shows ''Will & Grace,'' ''Frasier'' and ''Entourage.''
His last screen appearance was in ''Made of Honor,'' a romantic comedy still in theaters, where he played the oft-married father of star Patrick Dempsey's character.
''Since I don't pursue an acting career, I (now) have the luxury of getting more offers than when I was pursuing an acting career,'' Pollack told The Associated Press last year, laughing. ''It's the irony of life. When I was a young kid and wanted to be an actor, I couldn't get arrested.''
After appearing in a handful of Broadway productions in the 1950s, Burt Lancaster urged Pollack to try directing and introduced him to MCA Chairman Lew Wasserman. His first full-length feature was 1965's ''The Slender Thread,'' about a suicide help line.
The film was scored by Quincy Jones. ''Sydney Pollack's immense talents as a director were only surpassed by the compassion that he carried in his soul for his fellow man,'' Jones said Monday.
Pollack first met Redford when they acted in 1962's low-budget ''War Hunt,'' and would go on to play a major role in making Redford a star. ''It's easy working with Bob; I don't have to be diplomatic with him,'' Pollack once told the AP. ''I know what he can and cannot do; I know all the colors he has. I've always felt he was a character actor in the body of a leading man.''
Pollack said in 2005 that for ''Tootsie,'' Hoffman pushed him into playing the agent role, repeatedly sending him roses with a note reading, ''Please be my agent. Love, Dorothy.'' At that point, Pollack hadn't acted in a movie in 20 years -- since ''The War Hunt'' with Redford.
The love soon frayed as Pollack and Hoffman differed over whether the film should lean toward comedy or drama, and the tension spilled out publicly. But the result was a hit at the box office and received 10 Oscar nominations, with Jessica Lange winning for best supporting actress.
''Stars are like thoroughbreds,'' Pollack once told The New York Times. ''Yes, it's a little more dangerous with them. They are more temperamental. You have to be careful because you can be thrown. But when they do what they do best -- whatever it is that's made them a star -- it's really exciting.''
He added: ''If you have a career like mine, which is so identified with Hollywood, with big studios and stars, you wonder if maybe you shouldn't go off and do what the world thinks of as more personal films with lesser-known people. But I think I've fooled everybody. I've made personal films all along. I just made them in another form.''
Pollack is survived by his wife, Claire; two daughters, Rebecca and Rachel; his brother Bernie; and six grandchildren. Pollack's son, Steven, died in a plane crash in 1993.
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On the Net:
A YouTube collection of interviews with Pollack: http://www.mcnblogs.com/mcindie/archives/2008/05/sydney--pollack--1.ht ml
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Associated Press writers Raquel Maria Dillon in Los Angeles and Marcus Franklin in New York contributed to this report.
Monday, May 19, 2008
Geeks Crash a House of Fashion By DAVID CARR
May 19, 2008
The Media Equation
Geeks Crash a House of Fashion By DAVID CARR
Of all the dot-com publishing franchises, Wired seemed the most likely to end up as road kill on a superhighway it helped create.
The seminal artifact of the Web 1.0, it was bought by Condé Nast Publications in 1998 and then lost two-thirds of its ad sales during the bust from 2000 to 2002. Its newsstand sales dropped by over a third in the same period, and its Web site was no help because, well, it didn’t even own its site.
Chris Anderson, then of The Economist, was dropped into the crater in 2001 as editor in chief. A few months into his tenure, he and I sat in a booth in the Condé Nast cafeteria as he earnestly explained that Wired was not a confection of the digital age, but a magazine about the culture to come.
“This isn’t the domain of techies anymore. It has gone mainstream in a way that doesn’t diminish its power, but illustrates it,” he said.
Yeah, right, I remember thinking.
He was right. Magazines like The Industry Standard, Red Herring, Business 2.0, eCompany Now all went down the digital drain, but Wired rowed carefully and slowly away from its geek origins and survived. (Fast Company, another magazine I suggested was toast, is managing a similar feat on a smaller level.)
Wired had a very respectable 1,300 ad pages last year, and its ads are up slightly so far this year, an achievement in an era of secular and cyclical decline that is threatening all manner of old media. Newsstand sales are edging back to the boom years, and it didn’t hurt that along the way, Mr. Anderson penned a conceptual book, “The Long Tail,” that became the keystone for PowerPoints all over the land.
Perhaps most important, in 2006, the company reunited Wired.com and Wired magazine by buying the site from Lycos for $25 million, a fraction of its $83 million price back when Condé Nast bought the magazine in 1998. The traffic has tripled since the acquisition and the Wired brand, which once was perched on a very thin reed, is now a sturdy plank.
You might think that Condé Nast’s headquarters at 4 Times Square — where the September issue of Vogue is viewed as one of humankind’s crowning achievements — would be the last place to look for Web innovation. With its fat, luscious magazines and elevators full of thin, luscious people, it would seem to be the antithesis of the sneaker-wearing run-and-gun aesthetic of the Web.
After all, rather than run the risk of dulling the luster of the printed Vogue or Gourmet, the company produced Style.com and Epicurious.com, which took some content from the magazines, but kept the Web at arm’s length.
But there have been signs that the company is serious about constructing a digital business that is less beside the point. Soon after getting his hands on Wired.com, Steven Newhouse, chairman of Advance.net, the digital division of the parent company, moved to buy Reddit.com, a social news site along the lines of Digg, although smaller.
Last week, all the attention was focused on the $1.8 billion grab by CBS for eyeballs with the purchase of CNet. But during the same week, Condé Nast bought Ars Technica, a small but very influential Web tech site; Webmonkey, a site for Web developers that will be restarted today; and Hot Wired, a storied brand from early Internet days — which ran the first banner ad ever. The price was not disclosed, but the company probably spent another $25 million on the acquisition, according to executives there familiar with the deal.
Between the $50 million already invested, and another $50 million that may end up being spent on discreet, small acquisitions, Condé Nast has essentially re-geeked Wired. Much of the allure of the acquired sites is harvesting the bright young things who thought them up. But apart from all that the brain-collecting, executives at Condé Nast said that with the new properties at Wired Digital, the company will now have a male-skewing audience of about 19 million unique visitors, which will put them in the neighborhood of Forbes.com and the various Dow Jones Web sites.
Of course, every big media company is buying digital properties — in a landgrab either for audience or bragging rights. Condé Nast’s tack is different. It has a long history of financing impresarios and remaining patient, going back to Alexander Liberman, a Russian immigrant who arrived at the company in 1941 as a designer and became its protean editorial director. Tina Brown crossed an ocean to bring Vanity Fair back from the brink and then picked up The New Yorker and gave it a good tug. Anna Wintour, left to her own devices, turned Vogue into a behemoth, large enough to spin off Teen Vogue and Men’s Vogue, as well.
True to form, the captains of the Condé Nast Death Star have not meddled with kids from Reddit — it was founded by a couple of students at the University of Virginia — any more than they have told Ms. Wintour what cover models to put on Vogue.
“We did not buy these sites to dictate what they should be doing,” said Mr. Newhouse, sitting in a borrowed office in the huge headquarters built by his father, Donald Newhouse, and his uncle, S. I. Newhouse. “There is a debate among big media companies about whether you achieve scale in digital businesses through big acquisitions, and all the cost and overhead that goes with it, or whether you do what we are doing, which is to lay the groundwork for a strategy that allows for real growth over time.” (He didn’t mention CNet, but he didn’t have to.)
David Carey, the group president with oversight over Portfolio, Wired, the company’s golf magazines and the ad sales at Wired Digital, would like to see a digital division that helps the company, which has always leaned on fashion-oriented print publications, make money off of a business audience as well.
“We have a great editor in Chris at Wired and a great team at Wired.com that has created a nicely profitable franchise in print and digital,” he said last Thursday. “We think we can scale that on the digital side through acquisition and growth into something meaningful.”
Ken Fisher, one of the co-founders of Ars Technica, may be just a pen-protector expression of the Condé Nast way. After we discussed our common interest in fourth-century Coptic texts — O.K., he talked, I listened — he said that he had been approached by a number of parties interested in buying the site. After talking to people at Wired.com and Reddit, he and his partners decided that the Condé Nast way left them the best chance of developing what had been a hobby on steroids into a business.
“We didn’t have to take them on faith,” he said. “They have a track record of understanding what they acquire, which was alarmingly not the case with the other parties we talked to.”
E-mail: carr@nytimes.com.
The Media Equation
Geeks Crash a House of Fashion By DAVID CARR
Of all the dot-com publishing franchises, Wired seemed the most likely to end up as road kill on a superhighway it helped create.
The seminal artifact of the Web 1.0, it was bought by Condé Nast Publications in 1998 and then lost two-thirds of its ad sales during the bust from 2000 to 2002. Its newsstand sales dropped by over a third in the same period, and its Web site was no help because, well, it didn’t even own its site.
Chris Anderson, then of The Economist, was dropped into the crater in 2001 as editor in chief. A few months into his tenure, he and I sat in a booth in the Condé Nast cafeteria as he earnestly explained that Wired was not a confection of the digital age, but a magazine about the culture to come.
“This isn’t the domain of techies anymore. It has gone mainstream in a way that doesn’t diminish its power, but illustrates it,” he said.
Yeah, right, I remember thinking.
He was right. Magazines like The Industry Standard, Red Herring, Business 2.0, eCompany Now all went down the digital drain, but Wired rowed carefully and slowly away from its geek origins and survived. (Fast Company, another magazine I suggested was toast, is managing a similar feat on a smaller level.)
Wired had a very respectable 1,300 ad pages last year, and its ads are up slightly so far this year, an achievement in an era of secular and cyclical decline that is threatening all manner of old media. Newsstand sales are edging back to the boom years, and it didn’t hurt that along the way, Mr. Anderson penned a conceptual book, “The Long Tail,” that became the keystone for PowerPoints all over the land.
Perhaps most important, in 2006, the company reunited Wired.com and Wired magazine by buying the site from Lycos for $25 million, a fraction of its $83 million price back when Condé Nast bought the magazine in 1998. The traffic has tripled since the acquisition and the Wired brand, which once was perched on a very thin reed, is now a sturdy plank.
You might think that Condé Nast’s headquarters at 4 Times Square — where the September issue of Vogue is viewed as one of humankind’s crowning achievements — would be the last place to look for Web innovation. With its fat, luscious magazines and elevators full of thin, luscious people, it would seem to be the antithesis of the sneaker-wearing run-and-gun aesthetic of the Web.
After all, rather than run the risk of dulling the luster of the printed Vogue or Gourmet, the company produced Style.com and Epicurious.com, which took some content from the magazines, but kept the Web at arm’s length.
But there have been signs that the company is serious about constructing a digital business that is less beside the point. Soon after getting his hands on Wired.com, Steven Newhouse, chairman of Advance.net, the digital division of the parent company, moved to buy Reddit.com, a social news site along the lines of Digg, although smaller.
Last week, all the attention was focused on the $1.8 billion grab by CBS for eyeballs with the purchase of CNet. But during the same week, Condé Nast bought Ars Technica, a small but very influential Web tech site; Webmonkey, a site for Web developers that will be restarted today; and Hot Wired, a storied brand from early Internet days — which ran the first banner ad ever. The price was not disclosed, but the company probably spent another $25 million on the acquisition, according to executives there familiar with the deal.
Between the $50 million already invested, and another $50 million that may end up being spent on discreet, small acquisitions, Condé Nast has essentially re-geeked Wired. Much of the allure of the acquired sites is harvesting the bright young things who thought them up. But apart from all that the brain-collecting, executives at Condé Nast said that with the new properties at Wired Digital, the company will now have a male-skewing audience of about 19 million unique visitors, which will put them in the neighborhood of Forbes.com and the various Dow Jones Web sites.
Of course, every big media company is buying digital properties — in a landgrab either for audience or bragging rights. Condé Nast’s tack is different. It has a long history of financing impresarios and remaining patient, going back to Alexander Liberman, a Russian immigrant who arrived at the company in 1941 as a designer and became its protean editorial director. Tina Brown crossed an ocean to bring Vanity Fair back from the brink and then picked up The New Yorker and gave it a good tug. Anna Wintour, left to her own devices, turned Vogue into a behemoth, large enough to spin off Teen Vogue and Men’s Vogue, as well.
True to form, the captains of the Condé Nast Death Star have not meddled with kids from Reddit — it was founded by a couple of students at the University of Virginia — any more than they have told Ms. Wintour what cover models to put on Vogue.
“We did not buy these sites to dictate what they should be doing,” said Mr. Newhouse, sitting in a borrowed office in the huge headquarters built by his father, Donald Newhouse, and his uncle, S. I. Newhouse. “There is a debate among big media companies about whether you achieve scale in digital businesses through big acquisitions, and all the cost and overhead that goes with it, or whether you do what we are doing, which is to lay the groundwork for a strategy that allows for real growth over time.” (He didn’t mention CNet, but he didn’t have to.)
David Carey, the group president with oversight over Portfolio, Wired, the company’s golf magazines and the ad sales at Wired Digital, would like to see a digital division that helps the company, which has always leaned on fashion-oriented print publications, make money off of a business audience as well.
“We have a great editor in Chris at Wired and a great team at Wired.com that has created a nicely profitable franchise in print and digital,” he said last Thursday. “We think we can scale that on the digital side through acquisition and growth into something meaningful.”
Ken Fisher, one of the co-founders of Ars Technica, may be just a pen-protector expression of the Condé Nast way. After we discussed our common interest in fourth-century Coptic texts — O.K., he talked, I listened — he said that he had been approached by a number of parties interested in buying the site. After talking to people at Wired.com and Reddit, he and his partners decided that the Condé Nast way left them the best chance of developing what had been a hobby on steroids into a business.
“We didn’t have to take them on faith,” he said. “They have a track record of understanding what they acquire, which was alarmingly not the case with the other parties we talked to.”
E-mail: carr@nytimes.com.
Thursday, May 15, 2008
Repairing Computers
May 15, 2008
Basics
Taking Control of Repairing Your Computer
By ERIC A. TAUB
LEMONADE and computer keyboards do not mix. I learned that the hard way a few weeks ago, when my stepdaughter accidentally spilled some onto her iBook laptop. Over the phone, I told her how to remove the keyboard and blot up the mess.
But even after the lemonade dried, the iBook didn’t work properly. The spill had precipitated a virtual stroke: the laptop could no longer connect to the outside Internet world, its screen was dim, and when Stacey tried to type, evryling cme out lke tis.
A local repair shop said a new keyboard would cost $200 installed, and it would take two weeks.
Googling “iBook keyboard repair,” I found a Web site selling parts to help people fix their own computers. The next morning, I received a new keyboard, and 10 minutes later, I had it installed — at half the cost and with virtually no downtime.
While personal computers rival the brain’s neural complexity, you do not need to be a neurosurgeon to fix one. Many parts can be easily replaced at home for a fraction of what a professional would charge.
According to Paul Reynolds, the electronics editor for Consumer Reports, consumers should not bother fixing a PC when the cost equals about half the price of a new machine. And that number is easy to reach. Having a shop replace a laptop’s L.C.D. screen, for example, can easily run up to $600. Doing it yourself might cost $200, and a few hours of research and labor.
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From adding memory to replacing a motherboard, repair tasks often require little more than patience, organization and a couple of small screwdrivers. There is a downside to doing it yourself. If you guess wrong and replace a part that is not causing the problem, you will have wasted time and perhaps money. But many hardware problems are fairly easy to diagnose.
If you have no idea where to start, the Web has many sites and discussion boards where others with similar problems are eager to analyze, discuss and instruct you.
For example, had I contacted the Laptop Guy, an online repair company, I would have been told that once liquid hits a computer, you should not turn it on. “That’s like dropping a hair dryer in the sink,” said Todd Feit, the owner.
Most fix-it-yourself sites concentrate on laptop problems for an obvious reason: given that laptops are thrown around in airports and backpacks, they are much more likely to break. And fixing a laptop is more challenging than repairing a desktop. Not only are parts packed in more tightly, but each manufacturer has its own design.
You often have to look beyond the symptoms to identify the underlying causes of a problem, said Morris Rosenthal, a computer consultant who has a repair section on his Foner Books site.
One good strategy for any repair: take digital photographs of all the disassembly steps to try to ensure that you won’t have any stray pieces left after you put the laptop back together.
Keeping track of the screws is especially important. Use one that’s too small and parts will not hold. Use one that is too big and you could easily short out the new logic board that you just installed. One way to account for all the screws is to tape and label each one on a piece of paper on which you have outlined the computer’s shape.
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Some items are very easy to replace. Manufacturers have long allowed consumers to replace their own RAM chips without voiding the warranty. And changing out a malfunctioning or too-small hard drive for a new one often requires little more than unplugging a cable and unscrewing the drive from the computer’s chassis.
L.C.D. screens are one of the more difficult components to replace. Some are glued to bezels and contain a number of screws and screw covers. To the novice, it may not always be clear whether it’s the L.C.D. that is causing the problem. However, if an external monitor works when plugged into the laptop, then the screen is most likely at fault.
Once you have decided to take the self-repair route, illustrated guides are a must. Fortunately, they are readily available on the Web. On his site, Mr. Rosenthal, the computer consultant, offers several flow charts that help isolate the likely problem and also has take-apart guides for popular laptop models.
Online discussion groups are another good source for diagrams. For Macintosh computers, iFixit and PowerbookMedic.com offer free, extensive repair guides for a host of problems, with detailed photographs showing how to perform the work.
Even with all the help, is there an easy way to figure out if you will be up for the job? According to Mr. Rosenthal, there is. “I tell people if you cut yourself changing a light bulb, then you should not try fixing your computer.”
May 15, 2008
From Parts to How-To Advice, the Web Is a Fix-It Essential
By THE NEW YORK TIMES
For those who would like to fix their own computers, there are a number of online resources that can help guide you through the process. Here is a list of some of them:
How-to videos and more
YouTube has a number of videos that take viewers through the assembly and replacement of various parts.
Also, check the online forums at computer manufacturers’ sites for user support groups. Computer geeks love to help others.
Windows PC help
The Laptop Repair Workbook (www.fonerbooks.com/workbook.htm) offers flow charts and specific information on how to repair various components.
Laptop Repair Help (www.laptoprepair101.com) offers free illustrated instructions on how to repair a variety of problems, including L.C.D.’s. The site also links to some official repair manuals.
AGParts (www.agpartsworldwide.com) is a large supplier of disk drives, screens, motherboards and other components for Acer, Apple, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Toshiba and other machines.
Macintosh help
PowerbookMedic.com and iFixit (www.ifixit.com) both sell new and used parts. Both also offer free how-to diagrams and guides for taking apart laptops, iPhones and iPods.
MacFixIt (www.macfixit.com) visitors can read a daily compendium of Macintosh problems and solutions free. For $25 a year, they can search the site’s extensive archives on hardware and software repair.
Printers
At fixyourownprinter.com, customer help forums and repair parts are available to solve problems with printers from Epson, Hewlett-Packard, Lexmark and several others.
Discrimination Against Women Scientists, Engineers and Technology
May 15, 2008
Life’s Work
Diversity Isn’t Rocket Science, Is It?
By LISA BELKIN
BACK in the bad old days, the workplace was a battleground, where sexist jokes and assumptions were the norm.
Women were shut off from promotion by an old boys’ network that favored its own. They went to meetings and were often the only women in the room.
All that has changed in the last three decades, except where it has not. In the worlds of science, engineering and technology, it seems, the past is still very much present.
“It’s almost a time warp,” said Sylvia Ann Hewlett, the founder of the Center for Work-Life Policy, a nonprofit organization that studies women and work. “All the predatory and demeaning and discriminatory stuff that went on in workplaces 20, 30 years ago is alive and well in these professions.”
That is the conclusion of the center’s latest study, which will be published in the Harvard Business Review in June.
Based on data from 2,493 workers (1,493 women and 1,000 men) polled from March 2006 through October 2007 and hundreds more interviewed in focus groups, the report paints a portrait of a macho culture where women are very much outsiders, and where those who do enter are likely to eventually leave.
The study was conceived in response to the highly criticized assertion three years ago, by the then-president of Harvard, that women were not well represented in the science because they lacked what it took to excel there.
The purpose of the work-life center’s survey was to measure the size of the gender gap and to decipher why women leave the science, engineering and technology professions in disproportionate numbers.
The problem isn’t that women aren’t making strides in education in the hard sciences. According to a National Science Foundation report in 2006, 46 percent of Ph.D. degrees in the biological sciences are awarded to women (compared with 31 percent two decades ago); 31 percent of the Ph.D. degrees in chemistry go to women, compared with 18 percent 20 years ago.
And, women enter science engineering and technology (known as the SET professions) in sizable numbers. In fact, 41 percent of workers on the earliest rungs of SET career ladder are women, the study found, with the highest representation in scientific and medical research (66 percent) and the lowest in engineering (21 percent).
They also do well at the start, with 75 percent of women age 25 to 29 being described as “superb,” “excellent” or “outstanding” on their performance reviews, words used for 61 percent of men in the same age group.
An exodus occurs around age 35 to 40. Fifty-two percent drop out, the report warned, with some leaving for “softer” jobs in the sciences human resources rather than lab bench work, for instance, and others for different work entirely. That is twice the rate of men in the SET industries, and higher than the attrition rate of women in law or investment banking.
The reasons pinpointed in the report are many, but they all have their roots in what the authors describe as a pervasive macho culture.
Engineers have their “hard hat culture,” while biological and chemical scientists find themselves in the “lab coat” culture and computer experts inhabit a “geek culture.” What they all have in common is that they are “at best unsupportive and at worst downright hostile to women,” the study said.
The 147-page report (which was sponsored by Alcoa, Johnson & Johnson, Microsoft, Pfizer and Cisco) is filled with tales of sexual harassment (63 percent of women say they experienced harassment on the job); and dismissive attitudes of male colleagues (53 percent said in order to succeed in their careers they had to “act like a man”); and a lack of mentors (51 percent of engineers say they lack one); and hours that suit men with wives at home but not working mothers (41 percent of technology workers says they need to be available “24/7”).
Josephine, a computer programmer whose boss at a start-up a decade ago nicknamed her Finn, stands out among the accounts.
“It turned out to be really useful to allow some of my colleagues to imagine I was a man,” the worker is quoted as saying. The e-mail messages Finn received were strikingly different than those received by Josephine. Not only did they contain “brutal locker room stuff, that was hard to take,” but also important information shared by colleagues who wanted to keep each other in the loop. Josephine got none of that, making the advantage of being a man in a male world quite clear.
Her advice? “Get yourself a Finn,” Josephine said. “He’s as necessary today as he was in 1997. Back then I thought that Finn would outgrow his usefulness, that there would come a day when Josephine was in the know. It’s sad, but that day hasn’t happened.”
This portrait of a male-dominated culture comes as no surprise to Carol B. Muller, the chief executive and founder of MentorNet, an online network for women and minorities in engineering and science.
The reason the “hard sciences” are “so much worse than other fields,” she said, is multifaceted and rooted in the societal perception that women simply are not as good in math and science as men are.
This notion persists despite the dozens of studies that show the abilities of boys and girls are equal well into high school.
“Most people just don’t look at a woman and see an engineer,” Ms. Muller said.
The result, she said has been a work environment that dismisses women. Female employees come up against “the kind of culture that evolves when women are in the extreme minority,” she said. (Think “Lord of the Flies.”) The ideal worker in this realm is “the hacker who goes into his cubicle and doesn’t emerge for a week, having not showered or eaten anything but pizza. Those people exist and they are seen as heroes.”
THERE is a new spotlight being pointed at these testosterone-soaked corners lately, a result of the fact that even in a faltering economy, the technology and science industries need workers.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts that job opportunities in these fields will grow five times faster than in other industries. Demand for information technology workers, for instance, is projected to increase by 25 percent over the next 30 years, while the number of available workers is expected to shrink over the same period.
Wouldn’t it make financial sense, the study concludes, for these employers to find a way to halt the exodus? And will that incentive be sufficient to transform a culture that has been resistant to calls for change?
A handful of companies are trying. The report highlights 14 pilot programs, many of them implemented by the report’s sponsors, that are designed to retain and promote women.
At Cisco, for instance, where only 16 percent of employees are women, the company’s Executive Talent Insertion Program aims to add about a dozen senior women to its management ranks within an 18-month period ending this year.
This would provide mentors and role models as well as alter the gender landscape. The program at Johnson & Johnson, called “Crossing the Finish Line,” tutors women in leadership skills.
Reducing the current attrition rate by 25 percent would add 220,000 SET workers to the economy, Ms. Hewlett said.
And that just might be a figure that even the unshowered geek in the cubicle can respect. “Cultures only change because they have to,” she said. “Maybe it’s finally time.”
E-mail: Belkin@nytimes.com
Wednesday, May 14, 2008
John Edwards endorses Barack Obama
endorsement came last night with appearance with Barack in Grand Rapids, MI
Robert Rauschenberg, American Artist, Dies at 82
May 14, 2008
Robert Rauschenberg, American Artist, Dies at 82
By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN
Robert Rauschenberg, the irrepressibly prolific American artist who time and again reshaped art in the 20th century, died on Monday night at his home on Captiva Island, Fla. He was 82.
The cause was heart failure, said Arne Glimcher, chairman of PaceWildenstein, the Manhattan gallery that represents Mr. Rauschenberg.
Mr. Rauschenberg’s work gave new meaning to sculpture. “Canyon,” for instance, consisted of a stuffed bald eagle attached to a canvas. “Monogram” was a stuffed goat girdled by a tire atop a painted panel. “Bed” entailed a quilt, sheet and pillow, slathered with paint, as if soaked in blood, framed on the wall. All became icons of postwar modernism.
A painter, photographer, printmaker, choreographer, onstage performer, set designer and, in later years, even a composer, Mr. Rauschenberg defied the traditional idea that an artist stick to one medium or style. He pushed, prodded and sometimes reconceived all the mediums in which he worked.
Building on the legacies of Marcel Duchamp, Kurt Schwitters, Joseph Cornell and others, he helped obscure the lines between painting and sculpture, painting and photography, photography and printmaking, sculpture and photography, sculpture and dance, sculpture and technology, technology and performance art — not to mention between art and life.
Mr. Rauschenberg was also instrumental in pushing American art onward from Abstract Expressionism, the dominant movement when he emerged, during the early 1950s. He became a transformative link between artists like Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning and those who came next, artists identified with Pop, Conceptualism, Happenings, Process Art and other new kinds of art in which he played a signal role.
No American artist, Jasper Johns once said, invented more than Mr. Rauschenberg. Mr. Johns, John Cage, Merce Cunningham and Mr. Rauschenberg, without sharing exactly the same point of view, collectively defined this new era of experimentation in American culture.
Apropos of Mr. Rauschenberg, Cage once said, “Beauty is now underfoot wherever we take the trouble to look.” Cage meant that people had come to see, through Mr. Rauschenberg’s efforts, not just that anything, including junk on the street, could be the stuff of art (this wasn’t itself new), but that it could be the stuff of an art aspiring to be beautiful — that there was a potential poetics even in consumer glut, which Mr. Rauschenberg celebrated.
“I really feel sorry for people who think things like soap dishes or mirrors or Coke bottles are ugly,” he once said, “because they’re surrounded by things like that all day long, and it must make them miserable.”
The remark reflected the optimism and generosity of spirit that Mr. Rauschenberg became known for. His work was likened to a St. Bernard: uninhibited and mostly good-natured. He could be the same way in person. When he became rich, he gave millions of dollars to charities for women, children, medical research, other artists and Democratic politicians.
A brash, garrulous, hard-drinking, open-faced Southerner, he had a charm and peculiar Delphic felicity with language that masked a complex personality and an equally multilayered emotional approach to art, which evolved as his stature did. Having begun by making quirky, small-scale assemblages out of junk he found on the street in downtown Manhattan, he spent increasing time in his later years, after he had become successful and famous, on vast international, ambassadorial-like projects and collaborations.
Conceived in his immense studio on the island of Captiva, off southwest Florida, these projects were of enormous size and ambition; for many years he worked on one that grew literally to exceed the length of its title, “The 1/4 Mile or 2 Furlong Piece.” They generally did not live up to his earlier achievements. Even so, he maintained an equanimity toward the results. Protean productivity went along with risk, he felt, and risk sometimes meant failure.
The process — an improvisatory, counterintuitive way of doing things — was always what mattered most to him. “Screwing things up is a virtue,” he said when he was 74. “Being correct is never the point. I have an almost fanatically correct assistant, and by the time she re-spells my words and corrects my punctuation, I can’t read what I wrote. Being right can stop all the momentum of a very interesting idea.”
This attitude also inclined him, as the painter Jack Tworkov once said, “to see beyond what others have decided should be the limits of art.”
He “keeps asking the question — and it’s a terrific question philosophically, whether or not the results are great art,” Mr. Tworkov said, “and his asking it has influenced a whole generation of artists.”
A Wry, Respectful Departure
That generation was the one that broke from Pollock and company. Mr. Rauschenberg maintained a deep but mischievous respect for Abstract Expressionist heroes like de Kooning and Barnett Newman. Famously, he once painstakingly erased a drawing by de Kooning, an act both of destruction and devotion. Critics regarded the all-black paintings and all-red paintings he made in the early 1950s as spoofs of de Kooning and Pollock. The paintings had roiling, bubbled surfaces made from scraps of newspapers embedded in paint.
But these were just as much homages as they were parodies. De Kooning, himself a parodist, had incorporated bits of newspapers in pictures, and Pollock stuck cigarette butts to canvases.
Mr. Rauschenberg’s “Automobile Tire Print,” from the early 1950s — resulting from Cage’s driving an inked tire of a Model A Ford over 20 sheets of white paper — poked fun at Newman’s famous “zip” paintings.
At the same time, Mr. Rauschenberg was expanding on Newman’s art. The tire print transformed Newman’s zip — an abstract line against a monochrome backdrop with spiritual pretensions — into an artifact of everyday culture, which for Mr. Rauschenberg had its own transcendent dimension.
Mr. Rauschenberg frequently alluded to cars and spaceships, even incorporating real tires and bicycles into his art. This partly reflected his own restless, peripatetic imagination. The idea of movement was logically extended when he took up dance and performance.
There was, beneath this, a darkness to many of his works, notwithstanding their irreverence. “Bed” (1955) was gothic. The all-black paintings were solemn and shuttered. The red paintings looked charred, with strips of fabric akin to bandages, from which paint dripped like blood. “Interview” (1955), which resembled a cabinet or closet with a door, enclosing photos of bullfighters, a pinup, a Michelangelo nude, a fork and a softball, suggested some black-humored encoded erotic message.
There were many other images of downtrodden and lonely people, rapt in thought; pictures of ancient frescoes, out of focus as if half remembered; photographs of forlorn, neglected sites; bits and pieces of faraway places conveying a kind of nostalgia or remoteness. In bringing these things together, the art implied consolation.
Mr. Rauschenberg, who knew that not everybody found it easy to grasp the open-endedness of his work, once described to the writer Calvin Tomkins an encounter with a woman who had reacted skeptically to “Monogram” (1955-59) and “Bed” in his 1963 retrospective at the Jewish Museum, one of the events that secured Mr. Rauschenberg’s reputation: “To her, all my decisions seemed absolutely arbitrary — as though I could just as well have selected anything at all — and therefore there was no meaning, and that made it ugly.
“So I told her that if I were to describe the way she was dressed, it might sound very much like what she’d been saying. For instance, she had feathers on her head. And she had this enamel brooch with a picture of ‘The Blue Boy’ on it pinned to her breast. And around her neck she had on what she would call mink but what could also be described as the skin of a dead animal. Well, at first she was a little offended by this, I think, but then later she came back and said she was beginning to understand.”
Growing Up With Scraps
Milton Ernest Rauschenberg was born on Oct. 22, 1925, in Port Arthur, Tex., a small refinery town where “it was very easy to grow up without ever seeing a painting,” he said. (In adulthood he renamed himself Robert.) His grandfather, a doctor who emigrated from Germany, had settled in Texas and married a Cherokee. His father, Ernest, worked for a local utility company. The family lived so frugally that his mother, Dora, made him shirts out of scraps of fabric. Once she made herself a skirt out of the back of the suit that her younger brother was buried in. She didn’t want the material to go to waste.
For his high school graduation present, Mr. Rauschenberg wanted a ready-made shirt, his first. All this shaped his art eventually. A decade or so later he made history with his own assemblages of scraps and ready-mades: sculptures and music boxes made of packing crates, rocks and rope; and paintings like “Yoicks,” sewn from fabric strips. He loved making something out of nothing.
Mr. Rauschenberg studied pharmacology briefly at the University of Texas at Austin before he was drafted during World War II. He saw his first paintings at the Huntington Art Gallery in California while he was stationed in San Diego as a medical technician in the Navy Hospital Corps. It occurred to him that it was possible to become a painter.
He attended the Kansas City Art Institute on the G.I. Bill, traveled to Paris and enrolled at the Académie Julian, where he met Susan Weil, a young painter from New York who was to enter Black Mountain College in North Carolina. Having read about and come to admire Josef Albers, then the head of fine arts at Black Mountain, Mr. Rauschenberg saved enough money to join her.
Mr. Albers was a disciplinarian and strict modernist who, shocked by his student, later disavowed ever even knowing Mr. Rauschenberg. He was, on the other hand, recalled by Mr. Rauschenberg as “a beautiful teacher and an impossible person.”
“He wasn’t easy to talk to, and I found his criticism so excruciating and so devastating that I never asked for it,” Mr. Rauschenberg added. “Years later, though, I’m still learning what he taught me.”
Among other things, he learned to maintain an open mind toward materials and new mediums, which Mr. Albers endorsed. Mr. Rauschenberg also gained a respect for the grid as an essential compositional organizing tool.
For a while, he moved between New York, where he studied at the Art Students League with Vaclav Vytlacil and Morris Kantor, and Black Mountain. During the spring of 1950 he and Ms. Weil married. The marriage lasted two years, during which they had a son, Christopher, who survives him, along with Mr. Rauschenberg’s companion, Darryl Pottorf.
Being John Cage’s Guest
Mr. Rauschenberg experimented at the time with blueprint paper to produce silhouette negatives. The pictures were published in Life magazine in 1951; after that Mr. Rauschenberg was given his first solo show, at the influential Betty Parsons Gallery.
“Everyone was trying to give up European aesthetics,” he recalled, meaning Picasso, the Surrealists and Matisse. “That was the struggle, and it was reflected in the fear of collectors and critics. John Cage said that fear in life is the fear of change. If I may add to that: nothing can avoid changing. It’s the only thing you can count on. Because life doesn’t have any other possibility, everyone can be measured by his adaptability to change.”
Cage acquired a painting from the Betty Parsons show. Aside from that, Mr. Rauschenberg sold absolutely nothing. Grateful, he agreed to host Cage at his loft. As Mr. Rauschenberg liked to tell the story, the only place to sit was on a mattress. Cage started to itch. He called Mr. Rauschenberg afterward to tell him that his mattress must have bedbugs and that, since Cage was going away for a while, Mr. Rauschenberg could stay at his place. Mr. Rauschenberg accepted the offer. In return, he decided he would touch up the painting Cage had acquired, as a kind of thank you, painting it all black, being in the midst of his new, all-black period. When Cage returned, he was not amused.
“We both thought, ‘Here was somebody crazier than I am,’ ” Mr. Rauschenberg recalled. In 1952 Mr. Rauschenberg switched to all-white paintings which were, in retrospect, spiritually akin to Cage’s famous silent piece of music, during which a pianist sits for 4 minutes and 33 seconds at the keyboard without making a sound. Mr. Rauschenberg’s paintings, like the music, in a sense became both Rorschachs and backdrops for ambient, random events, like passing shadows.
“I always thought of the white paintings as being not passive but very — well — hypersensitive,” he told an interviewer in 1963. “So that people could look at them and almost see how many people were in the room by the shadows cast, or what time of day it was.”
Kicking around Europe and North Africa with the artist Cy Twombly for a few months after that, Mr. Rauschenberg began to collect and assemble objects — bits of rope, stones, sticks, bones — which he showed to a dealer in Rome who exhibited them under the title “scatole contemplative,” or thought boxes. They were shown in Florence, where an outraged critic suggested that Mr. Rauschenberg toss them in the river. He thought that sounded like a good idea. So, saving a few scatole for himself and friends, he found a secluded spot on the Arno. “‘I took your advice,” he wrote to the critic.
Yet the scatole were crucial to his development, setting the stage for bigger, more elaborate assemblages, like ‘“Monogram.” Back in New York, Mr. Rauschenberg showed his all-black and all-white paintings, then his erased de Kooning, which de Kooning had given to him to erase, a gesture that Mr. Rauschenberg found astonishingly generous, all of which enhanced his reputation as the new enfant terrible of the art world.
Around that time he also met Mr. Johns, then unknown, who had a studio in the same building on Pearl Street where Mr. Rauschenberg had a loft. The intimacy of their relationship over the next years, a consuming subject for later biographers and historians, coincided with the production by the two of them of some of the most groundbreaking works of postwar art.
In Mr. Rauschenberg’s famous words, they gave each other “permission to do what we wanted.” Living together in a series of lofts in Lower Manhattan until the 1960s, they exchanged ideas and supported themselves designing window displays for Tiffany & Company and Bonwit Teller under the collaborative pseudonym Matson Jones.
Along with the combines like “Monogram” and “Canyon” (1959), Mr. Rauschenberg in that period developed a transfer drawing technique, dissolving printed images from newspapers and magazines with a solvent and then rubbing them onto paper with a pencil. The process, used for works like “34 Drawings for Dante’s Inferno,” created the impression of something fugitive, exquisite and secret. Perhaps there was an autobiographical and sensual aspect to this. It let him blend images on a surface to a kind of surreal effect, which became the basis for works he made throughout his later career, when he adapted the transfer method to canvas.
Instrumental in this technical evolution back then was Tatyana Grossman, who encouraged and guided him as he made prints at her workshop, Universal Limited Art Editions, on Long Island; he also began a long relationship with the Gemini G.E.L. workshop in Los Angeles, producing lithographs like the 1970 “Stoned Moon” series, with its references to the moon landing.
His association with theater and dance had already begun by the 1950s, when he began designing sets and costumes for Mr. Cunningham, Paul Taylor and Trisha Brown and for his own productions. In 1963 he choreographed “Pelican,” in which he performed on roller skates while wearing a parachute and helmet of his design to the accompaniment of a taped collage of sound. This fascination with collaboration and with mixing art and technologies dovetailed with yet another endeavor. With Billy Klüver, an engineer at Bell Telephone Laboratories, and others, he started Experiments in Art and Technology, a nonprofit foundation to foster joint projects by artists and scientists.
A World of Praise
In 1964 he toured Europe and Asia with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, the same year he exhibited at the Whitechapel Gallery in London and the Venice Biennale as the United States representative. That sealed his international renown. The Sunday Telegraph in London hailed him as “the most important American artist since Jackson Pollock.” He walked off with the international grand prize in Venice, the first modern American to win it. Mr. Rauschenberg had, almost despite himself, become an institution.
Major exhibitions followed every decade after that, including one at the Pompidou Center in Paris in 1981, another at the Guggenheim in 1997 and yet another at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art that landed at the Metropolitan Museum in 2005.
When he wasn’t traveling in later years, he was on Captiva, living at first in a modest beach house and working out of a small studio. In time he became that Gulf Coast island’s biggest residential landowner while also maintaining a town house in Greenwich Village in New York. He acquired the land in Captiva by buying adjacent properties from elderly neighbors whom he let live rent-free in their houses, which he maintained for them. He accumulated 35 acres, 1,000 feet of beach front and nine houses and studios, including a 17,000-square-foot two-story studio overlooking a swimming pool. He owned almost all that remained of tropical jungle on the island.
After a stroke in 2002 that left his right side paralyzed, Mr. Rauschenberg learned to work more with his left hand and, with a troupe of assistants, remained prolific for several years in his giant studio.
“I usually work in a direction until I know how to do it, then I stop,” he said in an interview there. “At the time that I am bored or understand — I use those words interchangeably — another appetite has formed. A lot of people try to think up ideas. I’m not one. I’d rather accept the irresistible possibilities of what I can’t ignore.”
He added: “Anything you do will be an abuse of somebody else’s aesthetics. I think you’re born an artist or not. I couldn’t have learned it. And I hope I never do because knowing more only encourages your limitations.”
Tuesday, May 13, 2008
Here Come the Millennials By BOB HERBERT
Here Come the Millennials By BOB HERBERT
An important aspect of the presidential race so far has been the generational divide, with Barack Obama doing very well with younger voters and Hillary Clinton drawing strong support from those who are older. A similar split can be expected in a general election race between Senator Obama and John McCain.
However the election ultimately turns out, the Obama campaign has tapped into a constituency that holds powerful implications for the future of American politics. The youngest of these voters, those ranging in age from roughly the late teens to the early 30s, are part of the so-called millennial generation.
This is a generation that is in danger of being left out of the American dream — the first American generation to do less well economically than their parents. And that economic uncertainty appears to have played a big role in shaping their views of government and politics.
A number of studies, including new ones by the Center for American Progress in Washington and by Demos, a progressive think tank in New York, have shown that Americans in this age group are faced with a variety of challenges that are tougher than those faced by young adults over the past few decades. Among the challenges are worsening job prospects, lower rates of health insurance coverage and higher levels of debt.
We know that the generation immediately preceding the Millennials is struggling. Men who are now in their 30s, the prime age for raising a family, earn less money than members of their fathers’ generation did at the same age. In 1974, the median income for men in their 30s (using today’s inflation-adjusted dollars) was about $40,000. The figure for men in their 30s now is $35,000.
It’s not hard to understand why surveys show that overwhelming percentages of Americans believe the country is on the wrong track. The American dream is on life support. Polls show that dwindling numbers of Americans (in some cases as few as a third of all respondents) believe their children will end up better off than they are.
The upshot of all this is ominous for conservatives. The number of young people in the millennial generation (loosely defined as those born in the 1980s and 90s) is somewhere between 80 million and 95 million. That represents a ton of potential votes — in this election and years to come. And the American Progress study shows that those young people do not feel that they have been treated kindly by conservative policies or principles.
According to the study: “Millennials mostly reject the conservative viewpoint that government is the problem, and that free markets always produce the best results for society. Indeed, Millennials’ views are more progressive than those of other age groups today, and are more progressive than previous generations when they were younger.”
The Demos study pointed to the very difficult employment environment confronting young adults. Fewer jobs offer the benefits of paid vacations, health coverage or pensions. And moving up the employment ladder is much harder.
As the study noted, “The well-paying middle-management jobs that characterized the work force up to the late-1970s have been eviscerated.”
The longer-term outlook is depressing.
Except for the expected continuing demand for registered nurses, the occupations projected to add the most jobs over the next several years do not offer much in the way of pay, benefits or career advancement. Demos listed the top five occupations in terms of anticipated job growth: registered nurses, retail sales, customer service reps, food preparers and office clerks.
Often saddled with debt, and with their job prospects gloomy, young Americans feel their government ought to be doing more to enhance their prospects. They want increased investments in education, health care and initiatives aimed at expanding the economy and fostering the growth of good jobs.
The American Progress study found that Millennials are more likely to support universal health coverage than any other age group over the past 30 years. By huge percentages, they want improvements in health coverage and support for education, even if it means increases in taxes.
The landscape is changing before our eyes. Younger voters struggling with the enormous costs of a college education, or trying to raise families in a bleak employment environment, or using their credit cards to cover everyday expenses like food or energy costs are not much interested in hearing that the government to which they pay taxes can do little or nothing to help them.
Whether young Americans can shift the balance of the presidential election is an open question. But there is very little doubt that over the next several years they are capable of loosening the tremendous grip that conservatives have had on the levers of American power.
An important aspect of the presidential race so far has been the generational divide, with Barack Obama doing very well with younger voters and Hillary Clinton drawing strong support from those who are older. A similar split can be expected in a general election race between Senator Obama and John McCain.
However the election ultimately turns out, the Obama campaign has tapped into a constituency that holds powerful implications for the future of American politics. The youngest of these voters, those ranging in age from roughly the late teens to the early 30s, are part of the so-called millennial generation.
This is a generation that is in danger of being left out of the American dream — the first American generation to do less well economically than their parents. And that economic uncertainty appears to have played a big role in shaping their views of government and politics.
A number of studies, including new ones by the Center for American Progress in Washington and by Demos, a progressive think tank in New York, have shown that Americans in this age group are faced with a variety of challenges that are tougher than those faced by young adults over the past few decades. Among the challenges are worsening job prospects, lower rates of health insurance coverage and higher levels of debt.
We know that the generation immediately preceding the Millennials is struggling. Men who are now in their 30s, the prime age for raising a family, earn less money than members of their fathers’ generation did at the same age. In 1974, the median income for men in their 30s (using today’s inflation-adjusted dollars) was about $40,000. The figure for men in their 30s now is $35,000.
It’s not hard to understand why surveys show that overwhelming percentages of Americans believe the country is on the wrong track. The American dream is on life support. Polls show that dwindling numbers of Americans (in some cases as few as a third of all respondents) believe their children will end up better off than they are.
The upshot of all this is ominous for conservatives. The number of young people in the millennial generation (loosely defined as those born in the 1980s and 90s) is somewhere between 80 million and 95 million. That represents a ton of potential votes — in this election and years to come. And the American Progress study shows that those young people do not feel that they have been treated kindly by conservative policies or principles.
According to the study: “Millennials mostly reject the conservative viewpoint that government is the problem, and that free markets always produce the best results for society. Indeed, Millennials’ views are more progressive than those of other age groups today, and are more progressive than previous generations when they were younger.”
The Demos study pointed to the very difficult employment environment confronting young adults. Fewer jobs offer the benefits of paid vacations, health coverage or pensions. And moving up the employment ladder is much harder.
As the study noted, “The well-paying middle-management jobs that characterized the work force up to the late-1970s have been eviscerated.”
The longer-term outlook is depressing.
Except for the expected continuing demand for registered nurses, the occupations projected to add the most jobs over the next several years do not offer much in the way of pay, benefits or career advancement. Demos listed the top five occupations in terms of anticipated job growth: registered nurses, retail sales, customer service reps, food preparers and office clerks.
Often saddled with debt, and with their job prospects gloomy, young Americans feel their government ought to be doing more to enhance their prospects. They want increased investments in education, health care and initiatives aimed at expanding the economy and fostering the growth of good jobs.
The American Progress study found that Millennials are more likely to support universal health coverage than any other age group over the past 30 years. By huge percentages, they want improvements in health coverage and support for education, even if it means increases in taxes.
The landscape is changing before our eyes. Younger voters struggling with the enormous costs of a college education, or trying to raise families in a bleak employment environment, or using their credit cards to cover everyday expenses like food or energy costs are not much interested in hearing that the government to which they pay taxes can do little or nothing to help them.
Whether young Americans can shift the balance of the presidential election is an open question. But there is very little doubt that over the next several years they are capable of loosening the tremendous grip that conservatives have had on the levers of American power.
Tony Nominations 2008
Nominations for the 2008 American Theatre Wing's Tony Awards®
Presented by The Broadway League and the American Theatre Wing
Best Play
August: Osage County
Author: Tracy Letts
Producers: Jeffrey Richards, Jean Doumanian, Steve Traxler, Jerry Frankel, Ostar Productions, Jennifer Manocherian, The Weinstein Company, Debra Black/Daryl Roth, Ronald & Marc Frankel/Barbara Freitag, Rick Steiner/Staton Bell Group, The Steppenwolf Theatre Company
Rock 'n' Roll
Author: Tom Stoppard
Producers: Bob Boyett & Sonia Friedman Productions, Ostar Productions, Roger Berlind, Tulchin/Bartner, Douglas G. Smith, Dancap Productions, Jam Theatricals, The Weinstein Company, Lincoln Center Theater, The Royal Court Theatre London
The Seafarer
Author: Conor McPherson
Producers: Ostar Productions, Bob Boyett, Roy Furman, Lawrence Horowitz, Jam Theatricals, Bill Rollnick/Nancy Ellison Rollnick, James D'Orta, Thomas S. Murphy, Ralph Guild/Jon Avnet, Philip Geier/Keough Partners, Eric Falkenstein/Max OnStage, The National Theatre of Great Britain
The 39 Steps
Author: Patrick Barlow
Producers: Roundabout Theatre Company, Todd Haimes, Harold Wolpert, Julia C. Levy, Bob Boyett, Harriet Newman Leve/Ron Nicynski, Stewart F. Lane/Bonnie Comley, Manocherian Golden Prods., Olympus Theatricals/Douglas Denoff, Marek J. Cantor/Pat Addiss, Huntington Theatre Company/Nicholas Martin/Michael Maso, Edward Snape for Fiery Angel Ltd.
Best Musical
Cry-Baby
Producer: Adam Epstein, Allan S. Gordon, Élan V. McAllister, Brian Grazer, James P. MacGilvray, Universal Pictures Stage Productions, Anne Caruso, Adam S. Gordon, Latitude Link, The Pelican Group, Philip Morgaman, Andrew Farber/Richard Mishaan
In The Heights
Producers: Kevin McCollum, Jeffrey Seller, Jill Furman, Sander Jacobs, Goodman/Grossman, Peter Fine, Everett/Skipper
Passing Strange
Producers: The Shubert Organization, Elizabeth Ireland McCann LLC, Bill Kenwright, Chase Mishkin, Barbara & Buddy Freitag, Broadway Across America, Emily Fisher Landau, Peter May, Boyett Ostar, Larry Hirschhorn, Janet Pailet/Steve Klein, Elie Hirschfeld/Jed Bernstein, Spring Sirkin/Ruth Hendel, Vasi Laurence/Pat Flicker Addiss, Wendy Federman/Jackie Barlia Florin, Joey Parnes, The Public Theater, The Berkeley Repertory Theatre
Xanadu
Producers: Robert Ahrens, Dan Vickery, Tara Smith/B. Swibel, Sarah Murchison/Dale Smith
Best Book of a Musical
Cry-Baby
Mark O'Donnell and Thomas Meehan
In The Heights
Quiara Alegría Hudes
Passing Strange
Stew
Xanadu
Douglas Carter Beane
Best Original Score (Music and/or Lyrics) Written for the Theatre
Cry-Baby
Music & Lyrics: David Javerbaum & Adam Schlesinger
In The Heights
Music & Lyrics: Lin-Manuel Miranda
The Little Mermaid
Music: Alan Menken
Lyrics: Howard Ashman and Glenn Slater
Passing Strange
Music: Stew and Heidi Rodewald
Lyrics: Stew
Best Revival of a Play
Boeing-Boeing
Producers: Sonia Friedman Productions, Bob Boyett, Act Productions, Matthew Byam Shaw, Robert G. Bartner, The Weinstein Company, Susan Gallin/Mary Lu Roffe, Broadway Across America, Tulchin/Jenkins/DSM, The Araca Group
The Homecoming
Producers: Jeffrey Richards, Jerry Frankel, Jam Theatricals, Ergo Entertainment, Barbara & Buddy Freitag, Michael Gardner, Herbert Goldsmith Productions, Terry E. Schnuck, Harold Thau, Michael Filerman/Lynne Peyser, Ronald Frankel/David Jaroslawicz, Love Bunny Entertainment
Les Liaisons Dangereuses
Producers: Roundabout Theatre Company, Todd Haimes, Harold Wolpert, Julia C. Levy
Macbeth
Producers: Duncan C. Weldon & Paul Elliott, Jeffrey Archer, Bill Ballard, Terri & Timothy Childs, Rodger Hess, David Mirvish, Adriana Mnuchin, Emanuel Azenberg, BAM, The Chichester Festival Theatre
Best Revival of a Musical
Grease
Producers: Paul Nicholas and David Ian, Nederlander Presentations Inc., Terry Allen Kramer, Robert Stigwood
Gypsy
Producers: Roger Berlind, The Routh-Frankel-Baruch-Viertel Group, Roy Furman, Debra Black, Ted Hartley, Roger Horchow, David Ian, Scott Rudin, Jack Viertel
Rodgers & Hammerstein's South Pacific
Producers: Lincoln Center Theater, André Bishop, Bernard Gersten, Bob Boyett
Sunday in the Park with George
Producers: Roundabout Theatre Company, Todd Haimes, Harold Wolpert, Julia C. Levy, Bob Boyett, Debra Black, Jam Theatricals, Stephanie P. McClelland, Stewart F. Lane/Bonnie Comley, Barbara Manocherian/Jennifer Manocherian, Ostar Productions, The Menier Chocolate Factory/David Babani
Best Performance by a Leading Actor in a Play
Ben Daniels, Les Liaisons Dangereuses
Laurence Fishburne, Thurgood
Mark Rylance, Boeing-Boeing
Rufus Sewell, Rock 'n' Roll
Patrick Stewart, Macbeth
Best Performance by a Leading Actress in a Play
Eve Best, The Homecoming
Deanna Dunagan, August: Osage County
Kate Fleetwood, Macbeth
S. Epatha Merkerson, Come Back, Little Sheba
Amy Morton, August: Osage County
Best Performance by a Leading Actor in a Musical
Daniel Evans, Sunday in the Park with George
Lin-Manuel Miranda, In The Heights
Stew, Passing Strange
Paulo Szot, Rodgers & Hammerstein's South Pacific
Tom Wopat, A Catered Affair
Best Performance by a Leading Actress in a Musical
Kerry Butler, Xanadu
Patti LuPone, Gypsy
Kelli O'Hara, Rodgers & Hammerstein's South Pacific
Faith Prince, A Catered Affair
Jenna Russell, Sunday in the Park with George
Best Performance by a Featured Actor in a Play
Bobby Cannavale, Mauritius
Raúl Esparza, The Homecoming
Conleth Hill, The Seafarer
Jim Norton, The Seafarer
David Pittu, Is He Dead?
Best Performance by a Featured Actress in a Play
Sinead Cusack, Rock 'n' Roll
Mary McCormack, Boeing-Boeing
Laurie Metcalf, November
Martha Plimpton, Top Girls
Rondi Reed, August: Osage County
Best Performance by a Featured Actor in a Musical
Daniel Breaker, Passing Strange
Danny Burstein, Rodgers & Hammerstein's South Pacific
Robin De Jesús, In The Heights
Christopher Fitzgerald, The New Mel Brooks Musical Young Frankenstein
Boyd Gaines, Gypsy
Best Performance by a Featured Actress in a Musical
de'Adre Aziza, Passing Strange
Laura Benanti, Gypsy
Andrea Martin, The New Mel Brooks Musical Young Frankenstein
Olga Merediz, In The Heights
Loretta Ables Sayre, Rodgers & Hammerstein's South Pacific
Best Scenic Design of a Play
Peter McKintosh, The 39 Steps
Scott Pask, Les Liaisons Dangereuses
Todd Rosenthal, August: Osage County
Anthony Ward, Macbeth
Best Scenic Design of a Musical
David Farley and Timothy Bird & The Knifedge Creative Network, Sunday in the Park with George
Anna Louizos, In The Heights
Robin Wagner, The New Mel Brooks Musical Young Frankenstein
Michael Yeargan, Rodgers & Hammerstein's South Pacific
Best Costume Design of a Play
Gregory Gale, Cyrano de Bergerac
Rob Howell, Boeing-Boeing
Katrina Lindsay, Les Liaisons Dangereuses
Peter McKintosh, The 39 Steps
Best Costume Design of a Musical
David Farley, Sunday in the Park with George
Martin Pakledinaz, Gypsy
Paul Tazewell, In The Heights
Catherine Zuber, Rodgers & Hammerstein's South Pacific
Best Lighting Design of a Play
Kevin Adams, The 39 Steps
Howard Harrison, Macbeth
Donald Holder, Les Liaisons Dangereuses
Ann G. Wrightson, August: Osage County
Best Lighting Design of a Musical
Ken Billington, Sunday in the Park with George
Howell Binkley, In The Heights
Donald Holder, Rodgers & Hammerstein's South Pacific
Natasha Katz, The Little Mermaid
Best Sound Design of a Play
Simon Baker, Boeing-Boeing
Adam Cork, Macbeth
Ian Dickinson, Rock 'n' Roll
Mic Pool, The 39 Steps
Best Sound Design of a Musical
Acme Sound Partners, In The Heights
Sebastian Frost, Sunday in the Park with George
Scott Lehrer, Rodgers & Hammerstein's South Pacific
Dan Moses Schreier, Gypsy
Best Direction of a Play
Maria Aitken, The 39 Steps
Conor McPherson, The Seafarer
Anna D. Shapiro, August: Osage County
Matthew Warchus, Boeing-Boeing
Best Direction of a Musical
Sam Buntrock, Sunday in the Park with George
Thomas Kail, In The Heights
Arthur Laurents, Gypsy
Bartlett Sher, Rodgers & Hammerstein's South Pacific
Best Choreography
Rob Ashford, Cry-Baby
Andy Blankenbuehler, In The Heights
Christopher Gattelli, Rodgers & Hammerstein's South Pacific
Dan Knechtges, Xanadu
Best Orchestrations
Jason Carr, Sunday in the Park with George
Alex Lacamoire & Bill Sherman, In The Heights
Stew & Heidi Rodewald, Passing Strange
Jonathan Tunick, A Catered Affair
* * *
Regional Theatre Tony Award
Chicago Shakespeare Theater
Special Tony Award
Robert Russell Bennett (1894-1981), in recognition of his historic contribution to American musical theatre in the field of orchestrations, as represented on Broadway this season by Rodgers & Hammerstein's South Pacific.
Special Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Theatre
Stephen Sondheim
* * *
Tony Nominations by Production
In The Heights - 13
Rodgers & Hammerstein's South Pacific - 11
Sunday in the Park with George - 9
August: Osage County - 7
Gypsy - 7
Passing Strange - 7
Boeing-Boeing - 6
Macbeth - 6
The 39 Steps - 6
Les Liaisons Dangereuses - 5
Cry-Baby - 4
Rock 'n' Roll - 4
The Seafarer - 4
Xanadu - 4
A Catered Affair - 3
The Homecoming - 3
The New Mel Brooks Musical Young Frankenstein - 3
The Little Mermaid - 2
Come Back, Little Sheba - 1
Cyrano de Bergerac - 1
Grease - 1
Is He Dead? - 1
Mauritius - 1
November - 1
Thurgood - 1
Top Girls - 1
www.TonyAwards.com
Presented by The Broadway League and the American Theatre Wing
Best Play
August: Osage County
Author: Tracy Letts
Producers: Jeffrey Richards, Jean Doumanian, Steve Traxler, Jerry Frankel, Ostar Productions, Jennifer Manocherian, The Weinstein Company, Debra Black/Daryl Roth, Ronald & Marc Frankel/Barbara Freitag, Rick Steiner/Staton Bell Group, The Steppenwolf Theatre Company
Rock 'n' Roll
Author: Tom Stoppard
Producers: Bob Boyett & Sonia Friedman Productions, Ostar Productions, Roger Berlind, Tulchin/Bartner, Douglas G. Smith, Dancap Productions, Jam Theatricals, The Weinstein Company, Lincoln Center Theater, The Royal Court Theatre London
The Seafarer
Author: Conor McPherson
Producers: Ostar Productions, Bob Boyett, Roy Furman, Lawrence Horowitz, Jam Theatricals, Bill Rollnick/Nancy Ellison Rollnick, James D'Orta, Thomas S. Murphy, Ralph Guild/Jon Avnet, Philip Geier/Keough Partners, Eric Falkenstein/Max OnStage, The National Theatre of Great Britain
The 39 Steps
Author: Patrick Barlow
Producers: Roundabout Theatre Company, Todd Haimes, Harold Wolpert, Julia C. Levy, Bob Boyett, Harriet Newman Leve/Ron Nicynski, Stewart F. Lane/Bonnie Comley, Manocherian Golden Prods., Olympus Theatricals/Douglas Denoff, Marek J. Cantor/Pat Addiss, Huntington Theatre Company/Nicholas Martin/Michael Maso, Edward Snape for Fiery Angel Ltd.
Best Musical
Cry-Baby
Producer: Adam Epstein, Allan S. Gordon, Élan V. McAllister, Brian Grazer, James P. MacGilvray, Universal Pictures Stage Productions, Anne Caruso, Adam S. Gordon, Latitude Link, The Pelican Group, Philip Morgaman, Andrew Farber/Richard Mishaan
In The Heights
Producers: Kevin McCollum, Jeffrey Seller, Jill Furman, Sander Jacobs, Goodman/Grossman, Peter Fine, Everett/Skipper
Passing Strange
Producers: The Shubert Organization, Elizabeth Ireland McCann LLC, Bill Kenwright, Chase Mishkin, Barbara & Buddy Freitag, Broadway Across America, Emily Fisher Landau, Peter May, Boyett Ostar, Larry Hirschhorn, Janet Pailet/Steve Klein, Elie Hirschfeld/Jed Bernstein, Spring Sirkin/Ruth Hendel, Vasi Laurence/Pat Flicker Addiss, Wendy Federman/Jackie Barlia Florin, Joey Parnes, The Public Theater, The Berkeley Repertory Theatre
Xanadu
Producers: Robert Ahrens, Dan Vickery, Tara Smith/B. Swibel, Sarah Murchison/Dale Smith
Best Book of a Musical
Cry-Baby
Mark O'Donnell and Thomas Meehan
In The Heights
Quiara Alegría Hudes
Passing Strange
Stew
Xanadu
Douglas Carter Beane
Best Original Score (Music and/or Lyrics) Written for the Theatre
Cry-Baby
Music & Lyrics: David Javerbaum & Adam Schlesinger
In The Heights
Music & Lyrics: Lin-Manuel Miranda
The Little Mermaid
Music: Alan Menken
Lyrics: Howard Ashman and Glenn Slater
Passing Strange
Music: Stew and Heidi Rodewald
Lyrics: Stew
Best Revival of a Play
Boeing-Boeing
Producers: Sonia Friedman Productions, Bob Boyett, Act Productions, Matthew Byam Shaw, Robert G. Bartner, The Weinstein Company, Susan Gallin/Mary Lu Roffe, Broadway Across America, Tulchin/Jenkins/DSM, The Araca Group
The Homecoming
Producers: Jeffrey Richards, Jerry Frankel, Jam Theatricals, Ergo Entertainment, Barbara & Buddy Freitag, Michael Gardner, Herbert Goldsmith Productions, Terry E. Schnuck, Harold Thau, Michael Filerman/Lynne Peyser, Ronald Frankel/David Jaroslawicz, Love Bunny Entertainment
Les Liaisons Dangereuses
Producers: Roundabout Theatre Company, Todd Haimes, Harold Wolpert, Julia C. Levy
Macbeth
Producers: Duncan C. Weldon & Paul Elliott, Jeffrey Archer, Bill Ballard, Terri & Timothy Childs, Rodger Hess, David Mirvish, Adriana Mnuchin, Emanuel Azenberg, BAM, The Chichester Festival Theatre
Best Revival of a Musical
Grease
Producers: Paul Nicholas and David Ian, Nederlander Presentations Inc., Terry Allen Kramer, Robert Stigwood
Gypsy
Producers: Roger Berlind, The Routh-Frankel-Baruch-Viertel Group, Roy Furman, Debra Black, Ted Hartley, Roger Horchow, David Ian, Scott Rudin, Jack Viertel
Rodgers & Hammerstein's South Pacific
Producers: Lincoln Center Theater, André Bishop, Bernard Gersten, Bob Boyett
Sunday in the Park with George
Producers: Roundabout Theatre Company, Todd Haimes, Harold Wolpert, Julia C. Levy, Bob Boyett, Debra Black, Jam Theatricals, Stephanie P. McClelland, Stewart F. Lane/Bonnie Comley, Barbara Manocherian/Jennifer Manocherian, Ostar Productions, The Menier Chocolate Factory/David Babani
Best Performance by a Leading Actor in a Play
Ben Daniels, Les Liaisons Dangereuses
Laurence Fishburne, Thurgood
Mark Rylance, Boeing-Boeing
Rufus Sewell, Rock 'n' Roll
Patrick Stewart, Macbeth
Best Performance by a Leading Actress in a Play
Eve Best, The Homecoming
Deanna Dunagan, August: Osage County
Kate Fleetwood, Macbeth
S. Epatha Merkerson, Come Back, Little Sheba
Amy Morton, August: Osage County
Best Performance by a Leading Actor in a Musical
Daniel Evans, Sunday in the Park with George
Lin-Manuel Miranda, In The Heights
Stew, Passing Strange
Paulo Szot, Rodgers & Hammerstein's South Pacific
Tom Wopat, A Catered Affair
Best Performance by a Leading Actress in a Musical
Kerry Butler, Xanadu
Patti LuPone, Gypsy
Kelli O'Hara, Rodgers & Hammerstein's South Pacific
Faith Prince, A Catered Affair
Jenna Russell, Sunday in the Park with George
Best Performance by a Featured Actor in a Play
Bobby Cannavale, Mauritius
Raúl Esparza, The Homecoming
Conleth Hill, The Seafarer
Jim Norton, The Seafarer
David Pittu, Is He Dead?
Best Performance by a Featured Actress in a Play
Sinead Cusack, Rock 'n' Roll
Mary McCormack, Boeing-Boeing
Laurie Metcalf, November
Martha Plimpton, Top Girls
Rondi Reed, August: Osage County
Best Performance by a Featured Actor in a Musical
Daniel Breaker, Passing Strange
Danny Burstein, Rodgers & Hammerstein's South Pacific
Robin De Jesús, In The Heights
Christopher Fitzgerald, The New Mel Brooks Musical Young Frankenstein
Boyd Gaines, Gypsy
Best Performance by a Featured Actress in a Musical
de'Adre Aziza, Passing Strange
Laura Benanti, Gypsy
Andrea Martin, The New Mel Brooks Musical Young Frankenstein
Olga Merediz, In The Heights
Loretta Ables Sayre, Rodgers & Hammerstein's South Pacific
Best Scenic Design of a Play
Peter McKintosh, The 39 Steps
Scott Pask, Les Liaisons Dangereuses
Todd Rosenthal, August: Osage County
Anthony Ward, Macbeth
Best Scenic Design of a Musical
David Farley and Timothy Bird & The Knifedge Creative Network, Sunday in the Park with George
Anna Louizos, In The Heights
Robin Wagner, The New Mel Brooks Musical Young Frankenstein
Michael Yeargan, Rodgers & Hammerstein's South Pacific
Best Costume Design of a Play
Gregory Gale, Cyrano de Bergerac
Rob Howell, Boeing-Boeing
Katrina Lindsay, Les Liaisons Dangereuses
Peter McKintosh, The 39 Steps
Best Costume Design of a Musical
David Farley, Sunday in the Park with George
Martin Pakledinaz, Gypsy
Paul Tazewell, In The Heights
Catherine Zuber, Rodgers & Hammerstein's South Pacific
Best Lighting Design of a Play
Kevin Adams, The 39 Steps
Howard Harrison, Macbeth
Donald Holder, Les Liaisons Dangereuses
Ann G. Wrightson, August: Osage County
Best Lighting Design of a Musical
Ken Billington, Sunday in the Park with George
Howell Binkley, In The Heights
Donald Holder, Rodgers & Hammerstein's South Pacific
Natasha Katz, The Little Mermaid
Best Sound Design of a Play
Simon Baker, Boeing-Boeing
Adam Cork, Macbeth
Ian Dickinson, Rock 'n' Roll
Mic Pool, The 39 Steps
Best Sound Design of a Musical
Acme Sound Partners, In The Heights
Sebastian Frost, Sunday in the Park with George
Scott Lehrer, Rodgers & Hammerstein's South Pacific
Dan Moses Schreier, Gypsy
Best Direction of a Play
Maria Aitken, The 39 Steps
Conor McPherson, The Seafarer
Anna D. Shapiro, August: Osage County
Matthew Warchus, Boeing-Boeing
Best Direction of a Musical
Sam Buntrock, Sunday in the Park with George
Thomas Kail, In The Heights
Arthur Laurents, Gypsy
Bartlett Sher, Rodgers & Hammerstein's South Pacific
Best Choreography
Rob Ashford, Cry-Baby
Andy Blankenbuehler, In The Heights
Christopher Gattelli, Rodgers & Hammerstein's South Pacific
Dan Knechtges, Xanadu
Best Orchestrations
Jason Carr, Sunday in the Park with George
Alex Lacamoire & Bill Sherman, In The Heights
Stew & Heidi Rodewald, Passing Strange
Jonathan Tunick, A Catered Affair
* * *
Regional Theatre Tony Award
Chicago Shakespeare Theater
Special Tony Award
Robert Russell Bennett (1894-1981), in recognition of his historic contribution to American musical theatre in the field of orchestrations, as represented on Broadway this season by Rodgers & Hammerstein's South Pacific.
Special Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Theatre
Stephen Sondheim
* * *
Tony Nominations by Production
In The Heights - 13
Rodgers & Hammerstein's South Pacific - 11
Sunday in the Park with George - 9
August: Osage County - 7
Gypsy - 7
Passing Strange - 7
Boeing-Boeing - 6
Macbeth - 6
The 39 Steps - 6
Les Liaisons Dangereuses - 5
Cry-Baby - 4
Rock 'n' Roll - 4
The Seafarer - 4
Xanadu - 4
A Catered Affair - 3
The Homecoming - 3
The New Mel Brooks Musical Young Frankenstein - 3
The Little Mermaid - 2
Come Back, Little Sheba - 1
Cyrano de Bergerac - 1
Grease - 1
Is He Dead? - 1
Mauritius - 1
November - 1
Thurgood - 1
Top Girls - 1
www.TonyAwards.com
Two New Ways to Explore the Virtual Universe, in Vivid 3-D
May 13, 2008
Two New Ways to Explore the Virtual Universe, in Vivid 3-D
By STEVE LOHR
The skies may be the next frontier in travel, yet not even the wealthiest space tourist can zoom out to, say, the Crab Nebula, the Trapezium Cluster or Eta Carinae, a star 100 times more massive than the Sun and 7,500 light-years away.
But those galactic destinations and thousands of others can now be toured and explored at the controls of a computer mouse, with the constellations, stars and space dust displayed in vivid detail and animated imagery across the screen. The project, the WorldWide Telescope, is the culmination of years of work by researchers at Microsoft, and the Web site and free downloadable software are available starting on Tuesday, at http://www.worldwidetelescope.org/.
There are many online astronomy sites, but astronomers say the Microsoft entry sets a new standard in three-dimensional representation of vast amounts data plucked from space telescopes, the ease of navigation, the visual experience and features like guided tours narrated by experts.
“Exploring the virtual universe is incredibly smooth and seamless like a top-of-the-line computer game, but also the science is correct,” said Alexander Szalay, a professor of astronomy and physics at Johns Hopkins. “No sacrifices have been made. It just feels as if you are in it.”
The WorldWide Telescope project spans astronomy, education and computing. Educators hope its rich images, animation and design for self-navigation will help entice computer-gaming young people into astronomy and science in general. The space service, astronomers say, could also become valuable in scientific discovery, especially with a professional version being developed with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
Like many fields of science, astronomy has become digitized and data rich in recent years, making it an ideal proving ground for advanced computing techniques in data mining, visualization and searching.
So it is scarcely surprising that the other major company with an ambitious astronomy service online is Google. The Internet search giant first layered astronomical data and images onto Google Earth last August.
The switch to astronomy in Google Sky amounts to looking out into space instead of down on Earth. Two months ago, Google introduced a Web-based version of Google Sky, layering space images on its searchable map service.
Microsoft and Google are spirited competitors and antagonists in the rough-and-tumble commercial markets of Internet search and software. Yet in online astronomy, both sides proclaim mutual respect and say their sole rivalry is in scientific discovery and public education. They say they have no plans to sell advertising on the astronomy sites.
Scientists and educators applaud the interest and investment by the two.
“It’s really encouraging that both Microsoft and Google are there, pushing these powerful tools for science education forward,” said Daniel Atkins, director of the National Science Foundation’s Office of Cyberinfrastructure, which focuses on using new technology in learning and research.
There may be no space war between Microsoft and Google, but their offerings reflect their different cultures. The WorldWide Telescope results from careful planning and lengthy development in a research division. It has the richer graphics and it created special software to present the images of spherical space objects with less polar distortion. WorldWide Telescope requires downloading a hefty piece of software, and it runs only on Microsoft Windows.
Google Sky started as a Google “20 percent” project, in which engineers can spend time on anything they choose. Google Earth, where Google Sky began, requires a software download, but its Web-based version, which came out in March, does not. The Google culture encourages engineers to put new things onto the Internet quickly and keep improving them, a philosophy geared to constant evolution instead of finished products.
Despite differences, the companies share motivations. Lior Ron, Google Sky product manager, said the astronomy focus “says a lot about the interests of the people in both companies.” At Google, Mr. Ron, 31, is one of a group of astronomy enthusiasts. He built his own telescope as a teenager and went to astronomy camps in his native Israel. He said he almost joined private space industry last year instead of Google.
A personal fascination in astronomy has also energized work at Microsoft. Jonathan Fay, 42, the lead software engineer on the project, has built an observatory, with a dome eight feet in diameter, in his backyard in suburban Seattle.
The inspiration for the WorldWide Telescope, and much of the early work, came from Jim Gray, a renowned computer scientist who disappeared last year while sailing alone off northern California. Mr. Gray had long been intrigued by the computing challenges of presenting map and satellite images online. His project to show aerial map images of the world, TerraServer, went up in June 1998, a few months before Google was founded. Mr. Gray then worked for years with astronomers on the concept he presented in Science in September 2001, “The World-wide Telescope.” Mr. Szalay was co-author.
Mr. Gray’s vision was largely about making the flood of astronomical data accessible and usable for scientists. The project began to take on its current look and design in fall 2006, when Curtis Wong started working on it full time. Mr. Wong, another amateur astronomer, heads a new media research group at Microsoft, which he joined in 1998. He is the creator of award-winning multimedia CD-ROMs on subjects like the Barnes art collection, Leonardo da Vinci and the making of the atomic bomb.
When he came to the astronomy project, Mr. Wong recalled telling Mr. Gray, “This is great, but let’s bring all this data and make it available, accessible and engaging to the public.”
A conversation with Mr. Wong, 54, is different from most around the Microsoft campus in Redmond, Wash., which is mainly populated by engineers, marketers and business managers. Mr. Wong speaks of the WorldWide Telescope’s allowing citizen explorers to make and post virtual tours. One tour on the site is by a 6-year-old boy from Toronto. “What we’re starting with is just a foundation,” Mr. Wong said. “When it really gets interesting is when more and more stories populate the WorldWide Telescope.”
Young people today are used to sharing stories, on MySpace, Facebook, YouTube and elsewhere. Educators hope that the WorldWide Telescope can entice them to take an interest in astronomy. “Science has a bad rap because it is seen as a dry accumulation of facts,” said Roy R. Gould, a science education expert at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. “But this is a visually beautiful environment where you can explore, create and share.”
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