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Old 28-09-06, 02:54 PM   #2
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Pirate Radio Stations Challenge Feds
Martha Mendoza

To Stephen Dunifer, it was yet another revolutionary moment. But to the untrained eye, it looked more like a geek fest. Over four days, a dozen men and women shyly bumped shoulders as they studied schematics and tinkered with romex connectors, resistors, microphone cords, meters, sockets and capacitors - the stuff of illegal radio stations.

In the corner of this cluttered electronics lab, hunched over a computer, sat Dunifer, their teacher, "the patron saint of pirate radio." Part rock star, part Johnny Appleseed and fully the bane of the Federal Communications Commission, Dunifer has long, gray hair, large, clear glasses and a deep commitment to what he calls "Free Radio."

"We're not stealing anything. We're claiming something that's rightfully ours," he says.

His goal is to create FM radio stations faster than the FCC can shut them down.

"It's always been our position that if enough people go on the air with their stations, the FCC will be overwhelmed and unable to respond," he says.

Pirate radio is radio without a license, radio without government regulations. It's "america the criminal" at midnight on Human Rights Radio in Springfield, Illinois and pre-dawn erotica on Freak Radio in Santa Cruz, Calif. It's an inordinate amount of Frank Zappa at WFZR in West End, Pa. (a station dedicated to playing his music) and the "Voice of the American Patriot" ("no support for liberals disguised as wannabe Conservatives") at NLNR in Butte, Mont.

The rapidly proliferating scofflaws - and there are now hundreds of them broadcasting at any given moment in this country - are usually only audible within a few miles of their "home-brewed" transmitters. They find unused sections of the FM dial, fire up their mini-transmitters, raise their antennas and set up their station.

Some opt to broadcast on the Internet as well, opening up their audience to the entire globe. Costs typically range from about $250 to $1,500.

Pirates, as they call themselves, draw loyal audiences in their communities but complaints from the larger, licensed public and private radio stations who say the microbroadcasters interrupt their signals. And they are a thorn in the side of the FCC, which is tasked with shutting them down.

Ten miles away from Dunifer's radio camp, at an undisclosed location in San Francisco, an FCC enforcement team is part of a nationwide campaign to thwart the pirates.

A record 185 unlicensed broadcasters received fines, cease and desist letters or had been raided by the by early September, up from 151 enforcement actions in all of 2005 and 92 in 2004, according to John Anderson, an expert on pirate radio who tracks FCC enforcement at University of Illinois' Institute of Communications Research. His data show a steady increase in pirate radio enforcement dating back 10 years.

"There are a lot more stations out there these days, thus there are a lot more stations for the FCC to find and bust," said Anderson.

Despite federal laws that ban unlicensed radio, efforts to shut down the stations are rarely popular and appear to be ineffectual, at least some of the time. For example:

-The neon sign says "ON AIR" at the storefront KNOZ station in Sacramento, Calif., even though broadcaster William Major was fined $10,000 by the FCC in June. Major says he's been wrongly painted as a pirate station, and that the FCC just overlooked his license application which he says is still pending. And the fine? "It's 10 G's," he said. "I don't have 10 G's. But they're being real gentleman about it, you know what I mean? They gave us the fine and they're letting us do our thing."

-Residents of Brattleboro, Vt., are also once again listening to free radio. Last summer the FCC raided and shut down their 10-watt radio free brattleboro, prompting an ongoing federal court battle. This summer a new community radio station received permits to open and raised a 30-foot antenna.

-When federal agents raided free radio Santa Cruz in 2004, a crowd of several hundred protesters soon gathered at the 10-year-old broadcast center - including the mayor, who was shouting through a bullhorn. The tires on the FCC agents' cars were slashed before they could leave, and then they received parking tickets before they could repair them. A few days later a fundraiser brought in more than $25,000 and Freak Radio, which is still on the air, was launched.

The FCC's beef, insisted spokesman David Fiske, is with neither the public dissent nor the abundance of Frank Zappa music. The problem is that pirate radio stations can make it impossible for the public to listen to licensed broadcasting and can cut into air traffic control communications, he said.

"We are completely complaint driven," he said. "If there are more enforcement actions, that's because there have been more complaints."

The FCC's 2007 budget includes an additional $1,080,000 for Mobile Digital Direction Finding Vehicles which can be used to sniff out pirate radio stations. But that same budget includes no extra staffing for the FCC's 333-person enforcement bureau, which is tasked with policing everything from cable television to telephone services. They're supposed to investigate obscene broadcasts, bust unwanted faxers and regulate the airwaves.

Pirate radio in its current form dates back 21 years to Zoom Black Magic Radio in Fresno, Calif., founded by Walter Dunn to bring diversity to the FM dial. The FCC raided his station and fined him $2,000 two years later, but like stations of today, he quickly popped up nearby.

At Dunifer's Radio Camp, students are warned about the FCC and taught how to evade the enforcement agents. At the end of four intense days, they walked out holding their own, hand-built, ready-to-use FM radio transmitter, a shiny box slightly larger than a brick.

Participants came from as far away as Namibia and as nearby as five blocks away.

Their reasons for wanting their own station were equally diverse: a neat, middle-aged woman from Mexico, accompanied by a translator, said she wanted to bring news and political information to her community; two young men from Tucson in flowered shirts and sandals said they wanted to start a new pirate station to replace several that have been shut down by the FCC; a self-described "boring insurance clerk" in a lilac blazer was just "looking for something interesting to do"; a man with red dreadlocks, green earrings and tattooed arms was slated to take over the technology job at his local pirate station.

No one is sorrier to hear about these Radio Camp graduates than Dennis Wharton, spokesman for the National Association of Broadcasters, who described Dunifer as "the patron saint of pirate radio." And he didn't mean it as praise.

He said his members, frustrated by interference on their stations, push the FCC to enforce the rules against pirate operators.

"You'd be hard pressed to find a pirate radio station that isn't interfering with another licensed station," he said.

But Wharton conceded that the FCC's policing efforts can be futile.

"It's like whack a mole," he said. "You knock it out in one place and it pops up somewhere else."
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...09-24-12-28-51





First Tests: Fast 32GB Flash Hard Drive

New solid-state hard drives make their way into portable devices.
Jon L. Jacobi

Are you ready for laptop storage with no moving parts to spin up, break, drain your battery, add weight, or make noise? That's what you get with Samsung's new 32GB SSD (Solid State Drive). Built using NAND flash memory, the SSD is the first consumer unit with enough capacity to compete against standard notebook drives; 32GB may not satisfy multimedia addicts, but it's plenty for average business users.

We looked at a preproduction model to see how it fared against 5400-rpm Seagate drives using the latest perpendicular recording technology or traditional longitudinal recording. The SSD found files more than twice as fast, and accelerated boot-up. Its cumulative speed advantage over the other two drives was an impressive 25 percent, though it was slower on two tests that involved accessing the drive many times rather than performing longer sequential reads and writes.

Shipping now, the 32GB and 16GB drives will initially be sold to equipment makers only. Given flash memory costs (approximately $63 per 4GB chip module at press time), it will be a while before an SSD matches the cost per gigabyte of a standard notebook drive, which is typically less than $2 per GB. Samsung already includes the drive in its Japan-only Q30 subnotebook; the company is in discussions with U.S. vendors to bring SSD laptops and portable devices here.

Though the SSD's price is high, its silent operation, light weight, incredible shock resistance, and low level of power consumption bolster its appeal. Our unit weighed just 1.6 ounces, compared to 3.5 ounces for a typical 2.5-inch drive; 1.8-inch SSDs weigh even less. Its shock rating is a whopping 1500G--it can withstand most shocks short of being fired out of a howitzer--far higher than a standard drive's 200G to 300G rating. And it draws a tiny 0.5 watt of power while active and 0.1 watt at idle, far less than common drives.

But don't expect huge battery-life savings. On our system-level test, we saw a boost of about 9 percent in battery life for the test unit when configured with the SSD as opposed to with the Seagate Momentus 5400.3 (4 hours, 25 minutes versus 4 hours, 3 minutes).

Hybrid Tech

To enjoy some of the benefits of an SSD without shelling out big bucks, consider a hybrid drive such as one of Seagate's 2.5-inch Momentus 5400 PSD series, which sport 256MB of flash memory cache. Such drives don't offer all the perks of an SSD, but they do save power by letting the drive motor spin down more often, and they cut boot and resume times by retaining the operating system data in the cache. They should also allow faster access to "instant on" multimedia and boost overall performance. Seagate hinted that hybrids will cost about 10 percent more than regular drives.

Vendors should release hybrids close to the ship date of Microsoft's Vista OS, which will include ReadyBoost, a feature that can use flash memory to accelerate system responsiveness. (See Plugged In, for another Samsung flash-based product that will offer hybrid capabilities.)

Still, mobile pros who can deal with the smaller capacity of a pure SSD--and can afford it--will love the 32GB SSD.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,126833/article.html





Core Values

With the iPod and the iMac, Steve Jobs has revolutionised the media world. But now a financial scandal could topple Apple’s inspirational chief executive
Chris Ayres

The screen went dead for a second. When it came back on, a thin, greying man in his fifties — wearing circular frameless glasses, a couple of days’ stubble, and a black cotton shirt buttoned to the collar — was talking calmly against a glowing purple and black background. He could have been a cult leader, a dictator from the 22nd century, or perhaps an alien prince, addressing Earth from another dimension. In fact, he was Steve Jobs, co-founder and chief executive officer of Apple Computer: the man who has sold the world 60 million iPods, one billion music downloads, 45 million television show downloads and more than ten million iMacs, thus changing forever the way media is consumed by the masses. He was being interviewed on CNBC, the influential financial news channel.

To anyone who has worked in Silicon Valley, the rhythm and tone of Jobs’s voice was instantly recognisable as the “reality distortion field” — a term invented by one of Jobs’s employees to sum up the Apple CEO’s uncanny ability to convince anyone of anything, regardless of the facts.

“We’re not under investigation by the SEC or anyone else,” said Jobs, referring to America’s much-feared financial regulator. “[But] we did start our own investigation,” he continued. “We did discover some irregularities, and we’re, y’know, letting that investigation have it’s due course . . . and it’ll be completed in the not too distant future.”

The Apple CEO’s manner was that of a doctor, gently dismissing the latest phantom symptom of a hypochondriac patient. And when the camera cut from Jobs to a reporter standing outside Apple’s latest product launch event in San Francisco — a fire engine wailing portentously in the background — it was tempting to feel reassured.

But to anyone who has followed the script of any previous corporate scandal in the United States, it was deeply unsettling. For example: how could Jobs possibly know for certain that the SEC wasn’t investigating Apple’s accounts? Especially given that the iPod manufacturer had left investors panicking in August by declaring that financial reports issued by the company since 2002 “should not be relied upon” — not to mention the fact that the “irregularities” of which Jobs spoke were related directly to his own remuneration package.

Clearly, the implications of the Apple investigation, in terms of tax penalties, SEC fines, possible fraud charges and lawsuits, were potentially catastrophic. Hence the note sent out to clients by the Wall Street analyst Richard Farmer, of Merrill Lynch, which brought up the “potential risk . . . that Steve Jobs might be unable to continue as CEO of Apple”.

Perhaps Jobs, already on to the second act of his career, couldn’t bring himself to even think of such a possibility. Perhaps he had fallen victim to his own reality distortion field. Regardless, the question on everyone else’s minds remained: had that beautiful white Apple turned rotten at its core?

Jobs was born in 1955 to an American mother and a Syrian father, but he was put up for adoption because his parents were unmarried. His Arab roots remain something of a mystery (Jobs has infamously sparred with his biographers), but what’s undisputed is this: he grew up in Cupertino, near San José in California, and co-founded Apple in 1976 with his friend and fellow Homebrew Computer Club member Steve “Woz” Wozniak. Jobs was 21, Wozniak 26.

By 1985, however, Jobs had been ousted by Apple’s board amid complaints about his savage and temperamental management technique.

“It was awful-tasting medicine,” Jobs admitted later, “but I guess the patient needed it.” He didn’t return to Apple until more than a decade later, having spent his exile buying Pixar animation studios from George Lucas for $5 million (he would later sell it for $7.4 billion, a 1,479 per cent profit) and founding NeXT Computer.

Jobs’s return to Apple’s HQ at 1 Infinite Loop, Cupertino, turned out to be one of the greatest comeback stories in American history — a Second Coming, as one book memorably put it. Within a year, Jobs had released the iMac. Three years after that came iTunes, then the iPod, then global revolution. For Apple devotees — and there are many — Jobs was a visionary, a prophet, and an undisputed genius (although his management style remained controversial, and “being Steved” became shorthand for being fired while riding in the elevator with the Apple CEO). By the late 1990s, Apple’s sleek white hardware was a lifestyle choice: an almost political statement of good taste over the ugly compromise of Windows-based PCs. Yet few could have predicted the scale of Apple’s success. Between 1997 and 2006, Apple’s stock multiplied in value by five, from just over $16 to just under $90 (adjusted for stock splits).

PC users bought iPods by the million, then swapped their PCs for iMacs, then fitted them with iSight cameras and Airport wireless base stations.

Meanwhile, Apple began selling its hardware at retail stores that looked like modern art museums — complete with “genius bars” for one-on-one Apple technical support.

Even better: customers seemed willing to put up with the often dubious reliability of both Apple’s computers and its music players, both of which suffered battery problems (another example, said critics, of the RDF). To keep the company’s relentless momentum going, Jobs even put Intel chips inside his computers, thus allowing them not just to “think different” (Apple’s advertising slogan), but “think the unthinkable”, and run Windows XP. To promote the new compatibility, Apple launched a TV ad campaign in which a funky young Asian man with jeans, trainers, and a record bag conversed with a fat, balding and neurotic middle-aged salesman in a cardigan. The message was clear: Macs are for rock stars; PCs are for nerds.

The message was completed with iPod endorsements from two rock stars who don’t even do commercial endorsements: Bono and Bob Dylan.

Jobs’s reputation as a 21st-century miracle man was completed by his refusal to take anything other than $1 in salary from Apple — enough to buy a single track on iTunes every year, leaving one cent change. Once again, however, the reality was very different: Jobs had in fact been given a $90 million Gulfstream V jet by Apple, and was getting extraordinarily rich (on paper, at least) from share options — the same options that would cause today’s looming crisis.

Put simply, share options work like this: on a specific date, a company issues a certain number of shares to an employee. The employee can buy these shares at a fixed “strike price” —usually their value on the day they were issued — at a future date. The more the company’s stock goes up between the issue date and the “exercise” date, the more profit the employee stands to make. Investors foot the bill for this, because the value of their shares is diluted when a company issues more shares as options. And yet, because the interests of option-holding employees and investors are supposedly aligned — they both want the shares to rise in value — Wall Street generally prefers stock option incentives to cash bonuses and big salaries.

But stock options can be manipulated by so-called “backdating”. This happens when a company artificially sets the strike price of an option low, essentially rigging it so that a profit is guaranteed. There is growing concern on Wall Street that this practice has been going on for years — with the strike price of many options suspiciously matching the annual low-points of companies’ share prices. This is the subject of Apple’s internal investigation, as well as investigations at 100 or so other US companies. It is thought that in January 2000 Jobs was issued ten million share options by Apple, with a strike price that corresponded to the company’s lowest share price for that month. The resulting profit could have been as high as half-a-billion dollars — but Jobs never collected it. Apple mysteriously cancelled the grant in 2003 and replaced it with another.

Jobs’s case is made stronger by the fact that he never sat on Apple’s remuneration committee after becoming CEO in 1997. But it has also been undermined by reports claiming that executives at Pixar, the animation studio owned by Jobs until he sold it to Walt Disney this year, also received stock option grants at suspiciously low prices (the strike prices corresponded almost exactly to Pixar’s annual share price lows, as demonstrated by a series of widely-circulated graphs). Jobs might not have been one of the Pixar executives awarded any options, but the very fact that not one but two of his companies are now caught up in the widening scandal raises more questions.

The bottom line, of course, is this: will the man who turned computers into gallery exhibits, and who revolutionised the way music is sold and consumed, end up being fired from the company he co-founded for a second time? Will he be ruined by something as idiotic as a rigged stock option, when his fortune is already valued at about $4.4 billion? Until Apple’s investigation is over, it’s impossible to say. Yet Jesse Eisinger, columnist for The Wall Street Journal, made this prediction: “It’s clear that some companies and executives behaved egregiously while others may merely have had lapses in their internal controls . . . the likely outcome is that a relatively small number of the most egregious actors will be punished. Most of the rest will skate free.”

In the worst case scenario, Jobs, now married with four children (one of whom was born to an ex-girlfriend), could get caught up in a fraud case. Indeed, Apple is already the subject of a lawsuit claiming that the company filed “false and misleading statements” to the SEC and backdated options to reap “millions of dollars in unlawful profits”. The best case scenario is that some corrected financial reports are prepared, some extra taxes are paid, some lawsuits are settled out of court, everyone is cleared and another 60 million iPods are sold.

Jobs certainly appears undeterred — and the American press, so far, seems to be on his side. After all, why take down a man who has obviously contributed so much to the American economy, making huge wealth for shareholders along the way?

Apple’s shares, meanwhile, have completely recovered from the initial shock of the options investigation. One of the reasons was the presentation made by Jobs on the day of his CNBC interview a fortnight ago. He unveiled a new movie downloading service for iTunes, fielded questions about the much-rumoured iPhone and widescreen iPod, and unveiled a gadget called iTV that can beam video across a wireless network — allowing people to send movies wirelessly from their iMacs to their TV sets in different rooms, in the same way that iTunes users can already send music wirelessly to their hi-fi systems in different rooms.

While Jobs’s movie downloading service was seen as half-hearted compared with the rival service from Amazon.com, iTV was immediately applauded as a huge breakthrough. “iTV stole the show”, declared the online edition of Business Week.

Back on stage, Jobs was beaming. “Pretty cool, huh?” he said, as reality twisted and turned.
http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/...374215,00.html





Not So Funny Anymore
Sharon Waxman

When Jim Carrey picked up the phone to call his agent, Nick Stevens, earlier this month, it was the end of a long, profitable run.

The comedy superstar called Mr. Stevens, who had represented him for 15 years, guiding his success from “In Living Color” on television to “Ace Ventura” in movies to a rare stratosphere of $20 million roles, to tell him that his services were no longer required. Instead, Mr. Carrey was moving on to that sprawling behemoth of Hollywood talent agencies, the Creative Artists Agency.

The move, which rumbled through Hollywood like a storm, signaled changing times for a tight network of stars who have dominated Hollywood comedies for several years, including Mr. Carrey, Ben Stiller, Owen Wilson, Will Ferrell, Jack Black, Vince Vaughn, Steve Carell and writer-directors Judd Apatow and Adam McKay.

For years now, the key to this web of interwoven talent has been Mr. Stevens and his deputies at the United Talent Agency, and the talent managers Jimmy Miller and Eric Gold, who represented most of the artists.

Now all that may be coming to an end, amid accusations of back-stabbing and character assassination. Not only did Mr. Stevens lose one of his most lucrative and longstanding clients in Mr. Carrey, after having lost Mr. Ferrell last year, but Mr. Miller and Mr. Gold dissolved their 12-year management partnership in early July, splitting their clients except for one they continue to share: Mr. Carrey. Their ties had frayed to the point of dysfunction; their relations with Mr. Stevens, by all accounts, have been shredded.

While the episode is one more example of Creative Artists’ aggressive acquisition of Hollywood talent, the shift in the comedy arena is also part of a broader tectonic movement going on in the entertainment industry. Studios have cracked down on the prices they are willing to pay for top performers and have reduced the overall number of films they make and release.

In particular, the studios began balking at the budgets of recent comedies and at the percentage of gross revenue they were expected to pay. In May, Fox pulled the plug on “Used Guys,” a futuristic comedy starring Ben Stiller and Jim Carrey, to be directed by Jay Roach, saying that the $112 million budget and back-end revenue deals were too high.

Shortly thereafter, another star vehicle for Mr. Carrey, “Ripley’s Believe It or Not,” was suspended at Paramount, when the studio protested as the budget climbed over $150 million and the star demanded changes to the script.

“Right now the whole business is in this cloud of change, and we’re all just trying to figure it out,” Mr. Gold said in an interview. “On the one hand it’s exciting, and rife with opportunity. But it’s a disruptive thing. And people are scared, and the studios are a little lost, and everyone is a little lost.”

Until recently, the artists in the Gold/Miller Company, part of Mosaic Media, and the United Talent comedy stables had been largely protected from those pressures. What the agents and managers sometimes called a “wheel of comedy” successfully built actors into $20 million stars, including Mr. Carrey, then Mr. Ferrell and now Mr. Vaughn, and was responsible for many of the blockbuster comedies made in Hollywood over the last several years.

This summer alone, those movies included “The Break-Up,” the romantic comedy developed by Mr. Vaughn, who starred in the film; “Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby,” a Nascar comedy starring Mr. Ferrell and written by him and Mr. McKay; “Nacho Libre” starring Mr. Black and co-produced by him, and “You, Me and Dupree,” starring Owen Wilson and co-produced by him.

Mr. Miller goes back with Mr. Carrey all the way to his days as a struggling stand-up comedian when Mr. Miller would signal music cues from the side of the stage. Mr. Gold, who represented the Wayans brothers, met Mr. Carrey through the Wayans’ hit show “In Living Color,” and soon became his co-manager. They took Mr. Carrey to Mr. Stevens in the early 1990’s, when the United Talent Agency was in its infancy. With the addition of the prolific Mr. Stiller and his many collaborators, the comedy network grew to include many of Hollywood’s most recognizable figures, who generated their own material and starred in, co-wrote and co-produced each other’s movies.

That network gave United Talent and Gold/Miller enormous leverage. Mr. Miller, in particular, did not hesitate to wield the clout of his clients. He sometimes angered his studio counterparts by suggesting, for example, that his star would be unavailable for promotional appearances unless a script change was made, according to executives who worked with him. And projects were often take-it-or-leave-it packages.

Recently, some studios decided to leave it, embarrassing some United Talent clients. “Used Guys,” starring Mr. Stiller and Mr. Carrey, was just weeks away from shooting in Arizona when the decision was made, and Mr. Carrey was angered by the negative publicity surrounding the shutdown. This month, Fox bought the rights to the “Used Guys” script, but did not tell Mr. Miller or his client, Mr. Roach. Instead the agent for the screenwriter of “Used Guys,” Caren Bohrman, had to tell Mr. Roach and Mr. Miller about having sold the rights to Fox, after they inquired repeatedly about doing so.

“They were devastated” to learn the script had been bought by Fox, said Ms. Bohrman. “I believe Jay is really upset, and I’m sorry for that.”

Mr. Carrey was also at odds with the director Tim Burton over the script of “Ripley’s Believe It or Not.” When Paramount suspended the project, Mr. Burton decided to shoot “Sweeney Todd” instead; executives close to the “Ripley” project said Mr. Carrey and Mr. Burton were trying to work out their differences.

Mr. Carrey gave no specific reason for defecting to Creative Artists after so many years with Mr. Stevens, but Mr. Gold said it was the star’s decision alone. “Jim Carrey isn’t a robot that we tell him what to do,” he said. “He’s well informed. He has opinions, eyes that watch, ears that listen.”

Jim Berkus, chairman of United Talent, agreed that losing Mr. Carrey was a fork in the road of sorts.

“He’s in our DNA,” he said. “We look at him as a founding member of the company. As he grew, we grew. It was a very productive, heartfelt, close collaborative relationship between Nick and Jim, and U.T.A. and Jim. We did a lot of big things together, made a lot of big deals, dodged a lot of icebergs.”

Mr. Stevens declined to comment for this story. The agent, who lives just a block from Mr. Carrey and would commonly greet the star with an exuberant, “Jimmy G!” when he called, is said to be embarrassed and angry at the end of their relationship.

Mr. Gold has signed with Creative Artists as a client, and is seeking to raise money to finance and produce movies, while Mr. Miller, who declined to comment, is pursuing a separate path as a producer, while continuing to manage the careers of his clients. Mr. Gold described his feelings for his former partner as, “I love him and I hate him, all in the same hour.”

As for the partnership over Mr. Carrey with Mr. Stevens, he said, “We were the guys who went from ‘In Living Color,’ to ride him to the biggest deal ever made at the time, to the mix of movies he’s been in. Here it is coming to an end. It’s sad.”

Mary Parent, a producer at Universal Pictures, said the breakup would not necessarily affect the movies that got made. “It’s like a divorce with people who have kids,” she said. “You figure out how to work with each other, for the kids’ sake. They’re all smart and know their core business. They’ll always do what’s best for their clients.”

Another thing that apparently hasn’t changed is the price tags of comedies. At Universal, “Evan Almighty,” the sequel to the Jim Carrey comedy “Bruce Almighty,” has soared far over budget to $175 million, according to executives close to the film, although the studio will not confirm that figure. And at Fox, “Night at the Museum,” starring Mr. Stiller, is so far costing close to $120 million, according to an executive close to the production.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/25/bu.../25comedy.html





Young Internet Producers, Bankrolled, Are Seeking Act II
Miguel Helft

Silicon Valley is awash in serial entrepreneurs, those who start a company, run it for a while, and then after success, failure or something in between, move on and start again.

Jay Adelson, 36, and Kevin Rose, 29, are parallel entrepreneurs — starting a second company just as the first one is taking off.

In 2004, the two started Digg, a fast-growing Web site that allows users to play editor by submitting links to news accounts around the Internet and collectively deciding which deserve top billing.

Now, while they are still very much involved with Digg, Mr. Adelson and Mr. Rose are preparing to announce that they have turned the Revision3 Corporation, an Internet video production firm they have been running on the side, into a full-fledged company.

Revision3 has close to $1 million in financing from a group of investors that includes Marc Andreessen, the founder of Netscape, and Greylock Partners, a venture capital firm that has backed the start-ups Facebook and LinkedIn, as well as Digg.

It is trying to capitalize on the rapid growth of Internet video, and its founders hope that their programming formula, a hybrid of the polished shows created for the networks and the amateur videos that populate sites like YouTube, will be the path to commercial success in this medium.

The company is built around a series of Internet television shows, or video podcasts, aimed at a young, technologically savvy audience, one steeped in “geek culture,” as Mr. Adelson, the chief executive of both Digg and Revision3, put it.

The most popular show so far is “Diggnation,” which is already in its 64th weekly episode. Each installment features Mr. Rose and a co-host, Alex Albrecht, 30, sitting on a couch, drinking beer and talking about some of the most popular stories that have turned up on Digg.com that week. Invariably, most of these are technology-related.

The core audience for “Diggnation” consists of users of Digg, which has more than half a million members and attracted 8.5 million visitors last month, up from 2.3 million in August 2005, according to Mr. Adelson. (That is much higher than the 1.2 million visitors reported for August by comScore Media Metrix, a widely used source of Web traffic data, but it shows a similar growth rate. Mr. Adelson argues that the service does not properly measure the site’s niche audience.)

Digg’s success has made Mr. Rose, 29, an exemplar of sorts in user-generated media, the phenomenon behind the startling growth of YouTube and the popularity of MySpace and Facebook, among other recently minted Internet companies.

The “Diggnation” shows, which are frequently photographed in Mr. Rose’s walk-up apartment in San Francisco, last 45 minutes to an hour and involve a fair amount of banter, off-color jokes and digressions on topics like skateboarding and beer-bottle openers. “A lot of geeks do that, but don’t have a camera,” Mr. Rose said, in explaining what he does and its appeal to fans.

The show is not for everyone, but Digg fans appear to be loyal. Mr. Adelson said that each episode of “Diggnation” was downloaded about 250,000 times, and that all Revision3 shows, including one about hacker culture and a cooking program called “Ctrl-Alt-Chicken,” were downloaded a total of about 1.5 million times each month.

Exact audiences are difficult to measure, especially since video podcast viewers often use software that automatically downloads episodes onto their PC’s, and may not watch all of them.

But “Diggnation” routinely ranks among the most popular shows in the Apple iTunes podcast directory. It is also distributed on its own Web site and through YouTube and other services. By way of comparison, when ABC ran a two-month test and offered free episodes from four hit series on its Web site, including “Desperate Housewives,” “Lost” and “Alias,” it reported 5.7 million online requests for the shows.

Many of Revision3’s performers and producers, including Mr. Rose and Mr. Albrecht, gained experience on the cable television channel TechTV, so they come to the shows with production skills.

That puts the company on the leading edge of a shift in Internet video from user-generated clips to “a more controlled environment,” said Allen Weiner, a research director at the market research firm Gartner.

Mr. Weiner predicted that the popularity of this kind of programming would surge in the next few months. Whether it will turn into an enduring form of entertainment, let alone a profitable one, is an open question. “Let’s face it, this is an experiment in progress,” Mr. Weiner said.

Indeed, Revision3’s technologically hungry audience represents a subset of MySpace enthusiasts, but it is not clear how large a subset it is. The company has broadened its lineup of shows to embrace alternative music, cooking and comedy. But in doing so, Revision3 may run into the kind of challenges faced by Digg.

In June, Digg expanded beyond technology to include world news, business and other topics. Mr. Adelson said more than half the site was now made up of links to nontechnology news. But on a recent afternoon, the top link in the “world and business” section was an item about whether the movie character Napoleon Dynamite was a nerd or a geek. The six most popular items on the site were technology-related.

“It’s a niche,” said George Zachary, an experienced veteran Silicon Valley investor who is a partner in Charles River Ventures of Waltham, Mass., and Menlo Park, Calif.

Most Internet users have much broader interests, Mr. Zachary said, adding, “If you look at the top search terms of Yahoo and Google, it’s not tech products.”

David Sze of Greylock Partners is bullish about Revision3’s prospects but acknowledges that the appeal beyond its core technology audience is unknown. “How new programs will extend the user base remains to be seen,” Mr. Sze said.

Mr. Zachary applauds the company, saying: “One of the most important things going on in media is that people want an authentic point of view. That’s why things like ‘Diggnation’ are popular.”

At a taping of the show last week in San Francisco, Mr. Rose and Mr. Albrecht settled on a couch — each with a laptop, unshaven and in jeans and a T-shirt. As a camera rolled, they spent five minutes chatting about each of seven top items on Digg that week, including one titled “How Paris Hilton Can Help Your Web Development (seriously).”

Everything about the show, including the ads, is unscripted. It is basically up to Mr. Rose and Mr. Albrecht to say whatever they feel like about their sponsors, which include the Internet domain company GoDaddy.com and CacheFly, which helps Web sites transmit video.

“It was a bit scary out of the gate,” said Barbara Rechterman, executive vice president for marketing at GoDaddy, which is known for its racy Super Bowl ads. But she added, “It has worked really well for us.”

Mr. Adelson said Revision3 was already profitable and had monthly revenue from “Diggnation” alone ranging from $50,000 to $100,000. While that is modest, it happened without much effort. Advertisers, he said, called him asking to be on “Diggnation.”

With the new funds, Revision3 will be able to put together an advertising sales team, give regular contracts to performers, lease office and studio space and spruce up its Web site.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/25/te...gy/25digg.html





Cuts Inc. to Offer Video-Editing Service
May Wong

A new video-editing service will let anyone sit in the director's chair to edit and mix copyrighted videos - and even allow users to share their works online.

Hollywood studios may chafe, but Cuts Inc. says its offering is legal.

Users never technically alter the original video, and people who want to watch a video edited with Cuts must have their own copy - whether it's a DVD, or video purchased or rented from online outlets like Movielink, Amazon.com Inc.'s Unbox, or Apple Computer Inc.'s iTunes Music Store.

Unlike existing video-sharing Web sites where viewers can go to watch homemade or tweaked videos that others have uploaded, Cuts doesn't provide the video itself - only a separate software layer of what it calls virtual edits.

Cuts, which will be showed off at this week's DEMOfall tech conference in San Diego, will be free. It will initially generate revenue through ads and sponsorships, the company said. A public test version will be available later this year.

"All over the world people are taking control of their viewing experiences, in many cases illegally," DEMO producer Chris Shipley said. "But everyone should be able to personalize their digital videos without fear of violating the law. Cuts is launching a clever and easy solution to this problem."

Some digital media technophiles have already figured out how to fool around with movies and TV shows, and post their cuts online - helping to put popular video-sharing sites like YouTube in a bit of hot water with owners of copyrighted material.

Cuts believes its system works around that problem. With its editing software, users will be able to mix scenes from two movies, add written commentary or get rid of unwanted scenes like the scary shark sequence at the beginning of "Finding Nemo" that frightens toddlers.

The software also allows users to blend copyrighted work with home movies.

The San Francisco-based company provides a media player, which implements the edits. Users can choose from their own private library of personalized cuts or check out the "Cutlists" that others may have posted publicly online.

The Cuts media player works only on a computer. Unless you're among the growing but small number of households to have their televisions hooked up to a computer or the home network, that means you'd have to watch the cut video on a PC monitor.

Though a wide range of other companies from Apple, Microsoft Corp., TiVo Inc. and Cisco Systems Inc. are all working to make it easier to deliver video to the living room, Cuts Chief Executive Evan Krauss points to how people are already getting more comfortable watching short videos or TV shows on their computers. More than 50 million people are now watching videos online, he said, and more than 45 million TV shows have been downloaded from iTunes.

Cuts also will allow users to build their own communities - a parents section, say, for recommendations of kid-friendly Cutlists - and will rely on users to rate the items and police them.

Cuts wants to become another venue for user-generated video entertainment by catering to teenagers looking to show off humorous movie commentary, budding directors offering their takes, and parents looking to mute bad language or block unwanted scenes.

"The expectation of this generation is that everything is interactive," Krauss said.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...09-25-01-11-46





Mercora to Debut Mobile Music Service
Alex Veiga

Mercora Inc., which distributes software for webcasting music, is making a bid for the bourgeoning mobile music market with a new application that enables users of select wireless devices to listen to tracks stored on PCs or other users' computers.

The Santa Clara-based firm was to debut the service, dubbed Mercora M, on Monday.

Listening to full-length music tracks on mobile devices now generally takes two forms: sideloading - transferring music from a computer to capable handsets - or downloading a track over a high-speed wireless data connection directly to the device.

Such tracks either play as they download, also known as streaming, or download into the mobile device's memory for later playback.

The Mercora service works by streaming songs from a user's music library on their computer to select mobile phones or handheld PCs.

It also allows users to stream tracks broadcast on thousands of Internet radio channels, and eventually, songs from up to five other Mercora users, the company said.

The service requires that users install the Mercora software on a computer running Microsoft Corp.'s Windows operating system. Only mobile devices running the Windows Mobile 5.0 software will work with the service.

At launch, Mercora M will be free through Oct. 31, after which the company will charge $4.99 a month. The company was also offering a 12-month subscription for $49.99 and a two-year subscription for $99.99.

The service launch comes at a time when major wireless carriers and digital music services are increasingly making audio and video content available to mobile customers. Services sometimes charge fees, but in many cases, the content is ad-supported.

In the U.S., about 17 percent of mobile phone customers use their phones to send pictures, listen to audio, play games and browse the Web, said Charles Golvin, a mobile market analyst for Forrester Research.

"The trend is very much in this direction," Golvin said. "Two years ago, it was only about 6 percent."

As the number of mobile devices-turned-music players has grown, some people have begun to see the devices as potential rivals to standard digital music players, such as Apple Computer Inc.'s iPods.

Mercora's mobile service is the most aggressive service yet capable of blurring the line between phone and portable music player, suggested Rob Enderle, an analyst for the Enderle Group.

"The Mercora M represents the next big step in mobile music enjoyment," Enderle added.

Mobile music services that rely on streaming data, however, face potential drawbacks because sometimes the spotty wireless service can interrupt playback, Golvin said. That could dissuade some mobile customers from using services such as Mercora and, instead, they might opt for sideloading music to their handsets.

"It's not unfathomable that consumers would download such an application and use it," Golvin said of Mercora M. "(But) MP3 players are being built into lots and lots of phones. Once you have the music on your phone, there are no playback issues."

---

On the Net:

Mercora: http://www.mercora.com/M
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...09-25-00-55-02





BPI Wants Tax Breaks for New Acts

The UK recording industry says it should get tax breaks for finding the next generation of recording artists.

The British Phonographic Industry (BPI) wants its members to be eligible for tax credits which are currently awarded to businesses conducting research.

Such a system would lead to "greater investment" in new music, said BPI chairman Peter Jamieson.

The BPI was responding to a government programme which is seeking advice on how to make the UK more creative.

It says its members should be eligible for the Treasury's research and development tax credits because they spend 17% of their turnover on finding new artists.

That figure is roughly equal to the amount pharmaceutical companies spend on research and development, says the BPI.

'Creative hub'

The Department for Culture Media and Sport launched its Creative Economies Programme in November last year.

It aims to make the UK the "world's creative hub" by addressing issues such as training, finance and intellectual property.

But the BPI has raised concerns about the scope of the programme.

It says initial reports concentrate too much on how the government could "micro-manage" creative industries.

The BPI says the government's role should be to provide a framework for such businesses, rather than intervening in how they are run.

It has recommended the formation of an independent body which would act as an intermediary between the government and the creative industries.

Ministers are now reviewing the BPI's recommendations, along with those from other branches of the creative industries.

They hope to produce a policy paper in early 2007.

More than two million people work in creative industries in the UK, which includes businesses such as music, film, fashion, publishing and software.

In 2003, they accounted for £11.6bn of the UK's exports - more than 4% of the total amount of goods and services sent abroad.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/h...nt/5377668.stm





OpenOffice: Breaking Microsoft’s Dominance
Ahmed ElAmin

I am writing this article using Writer, part of the slick new OpenOffice.org suite, which by the way is free and now rivals Microsoft Office in terms of features.
Microsoft charges about $499 list for its product suite, which includes Word, Exel, PowerPoint, FrontPage, and Access if you buy the professional version.
OpenOffice.org works just as well, has more or less the same abilities, and can both read and save to Microsoft formats. This latter point is important for those who want to run it side by side with the Microsoft versions, who want to switch without having to ditch their archives,or who need to share documents with others.

OOo is free under an open source licence, which allows individuals and businesses to use it without fear of breaking any patent licensing. It is an example of the fine work produced by hundreds of individuals collaborating over the Internet on the project, just for the fun of breaking Microsoft’s dominance. While OpenOffice has been around for a few years, the recently release of the second version takes it into the competitive space. Ooo, as it is sometimes written, is no clunky amateur effort.

Each application works smoothly and is rich in features. Writer, the program I am using, is OpenOffice.org’s word processor. It is easy to use if you know how to use Word. If not, a detailed manual is available at the OOo site (www.OpenOffice.org) along with an imbedded help file, as for all the other programs.

Calc is a spreadsheet that looks pretty much like Exel, with all the tools to calculate, analyse,summarise, and present data in numerical reports. It can pull in external data, sort it, filter it and produce subtotals and statistical analyses. It also has 13 categories of 2-D and 3-D charts including line, area, column, pie, XY, stock and net templates.

The Impress program works like PowerPoint to create multimedia presentations. The Draw program can be used to produce a range of diagrams. Base is a new addition in Version 2, allowing users to manipulate database data to create and modify tables, forms, queries, and reports.

OOo’s roots lie in Sun Microsystems’ 1999 acquisition of Star Division, a German company that built an office suite called StarOffice. Sun later released the product as the open-source OpenOffice.org project.The open source licence also allows resellers to provide commercial copies, right now available for about $29, if you feel more comfortable going that route rather than downloading the 76MB installation file from the OpenOffice.org site.

Versions are available for Windows; Linux, Mac and Unix platforms. Give it a spin. If you already use Microsoft Office, you can run both side by side. It can open all Microsoft Office documents and it also saves back into that format. It also comes with a built feature to convert documents into PDF format,which works really well. This gets rid of the need to buy Adobe Acrobat’s commercial version if you only need to convert from a word processor. You should note that OOo does not support Word macros or Excel pivot tables.

In November last year Microsoft said it would offer Word, Excel and PowerPoint document formats as open standards.

Technology is transforming the workforce, which may be more mobile than you think. A global study by the Yankee Group shows where the possibilities lie.
According to this year study about 40 percent of today’s workforce can be classified as “mobile”, withnumbers increasing by 10 percent over the past four years.
The increased mobility can be attributed to new technologies in telephony and wireless communications,changing demographics (older workers turn family oriented), globalisation, and increased functionalityfor mobile devices. Mobile workers are defined as workers who spend 20 percent or more of their time away from their primary workspace.

“As a result of increased workforce mobility, global companies are being forced to accommodate the changing workforce dynamics with delivery technologies, applications and IT strategies specifically targeted to accommodate the rapidly changing mobility requirements of their employees,” says the market researcher.
One-third of companies surveyed suggested they would deploy some form of enterprise applications over a mobile device within the next three years.

So how do you make sure you keep in touch? Its survey of best practices found that companies must build their information technology and deliver enterprise applications, services and productivity tools to cater for the mobile workforce. Wireless e-mail access remains the driving application. Web browsing on the move is growing in importance.

“These two factors-combined with the fact that application vendors are beginning to deliver mobile capabilities in some form or factor-are starting to pique the interest of enterprises,” the Yankee Group stated. You can read the rest of the advice at www.yankeegroup.com.
http://www.theroyalgazette.com/apps/...NESS/109270201





A Crunchy-Granola Path From Macramé and LSD to Wikipedia and Google
Edward Rothstein

The pages are yellowed, the addresses and phone numbers all but useless, the products antique, the utopian expectations quaint. But the “Whole Earth Catalog” — and particularly “The Last Whole Earth Catalog,” published in 1971, which ended up selling a million copies and winning the National Book Award — has the eerie luminosity of a Sears catalog from the turn of the last century. It is a portrait of an age and its dreams.

Deerskin jackets and potter’s wheels, geodesic domes and star charts, instructions on raising bees and on repairing Volkswagens, advice on building furniture and cultivating marijuana: all this can be found here, along with celebrations of communal life and swipes at big government, big business and a technocratic society.

Can this encyclopedia of countercultural romance have anything to do with today’s technological world, a world of broadband connections, TCP/IP protocol and the Internet? The Internet, after all, began during the cold war as an attempt to create a network of computers that would be resilient in case of nuclear attack. Its instigator, the United States Department of Defense, was at the very center of the culture being countered by the “Whole Earth Catalog.” How could the romantic, utopian culture of the 1960’s, with its deep suspicions about modernity and its machinery, be closely linked to one of the most important technological revolutions of the last hundred years?

Yet as Fred Turner points out in his revealing new book, “From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism” (University of Chicago Press), there is no way to separate cyberculture from counterculture; indeed, cyberculture grew from its predecessor’s compost. Mr. Turner suggests that Stewart Brand, who created the “Whole Earth Catalog,” was the major node in a network of countercultural speculators, promoters, inventors and entrepreneurs who helped change the world in ways quite different from those they originally envisioned.

Mr. Turner, who teaches in the communication department at Stanford University, is rigorous in his argument, thorough to the point of exhaustion, and impressive in his range. The basic premise, though, is not unfamiliar. A decade ago the cultural critic Mark Dery suggested in his book “Escape Velocity” that the PC revolution could well be called “Counterculture 2.0.” Other writers have also pointed out uncanny overlaps.

And some of the anecdotal evidence is familiar. Steve Jobs created and promoted Apple as a countercultural computer company, most famously in the 1984 television ad that associated it with the demolishment of a totalitarian Big Brother. Even I.B.M., in promoting its first PC, tried to undermine the computer’s association with corporate power, marketing its machine using images of Charlie Chaplin’s tramp, who had twitted the gears of industry in “Modern Times.”

Connections were even made by the participants. Theodore Roszak, whose 1969 book, “The Making of a Counter Culture,” popularized that era’s doctrines, later asserted that computer hackers — “whose origins can be discerned in the old Whole Earth Catalog” — invented the personal computer as a means of “fostering dissent and questioning authority.” Timothy Leary, the psychedelic maestro of that period, declared that “the PC is the LSD of the 1990’s.”

Soon after publishing “The Last Whole Earth Catalog,” Mr. Brand started to write about the computer scene, helped create the “Whole Earth Software Catalog” and, in 1985, became a founder of the WELL — the Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link — a pioneering online community. “As it turned out,” Mr. Brand once explained, “psychedelic drugs, communes, and Buckminster Fuller domes were a dead end, but computers were an avenue to realms beyond our dreams.” By the 90’s, those realms were celebrated by the magazine Wired.

It might be argued that so prevalent was the counterculture, and so experimental and energetic were its most vocal proponents, that it would have been surprising had many of them not found their way to the computer revolution. But Mr. Turner demonstrates something more essential in the continuity.

First, he suggests, we are mistaken in thinking that the postwar technological world was dominated by hierarchies and rigid categories. Under the influence of the mathematician Norbert Wiener, it became increasingly common to think of humans and machines as interacting elements of “cybernetic systems” — organisms through which information flowed. This also led to a different way of thinking about living organisms and their networks of interaction.

Marshall McLuhan wrote in 1964: “Today we have extended our central nervous system itself in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned.” Buckminster Fuller proposed the idea of a Comprehensive Designer, a creator who would embody “an emerging synthesis of artist, inventor, mechanic, objective economist and evolutionary strategist.”

These writers were the patron saints of the “Whole Earth Catalog,” their books appearing alongside macramé and carpentry manuals, their ideas presumably brought to life in the commune, where the natural and human world would be bound together, creating a single organism from which new possibilities would unfold.

By the 1980’s, Mr. Turner argues, similar fantasies were inspired by the computer. It had freed itself from corporate control and ownership; it was also capable of connecting with other computers in communities like the WELL (which John Perry Barlow, a former lyricist for the Grateful Dead, called “the latest thing in frontier villages”). The Internet, designed to be inherently nonhierarchical, suggested even more grand possibilities, even a revolution in politics and human consciousness.

In the 90’s, Mr. Turner says, the writers and editors of Wired believed “they would tear down hierarchies, undermine the sorts of corporations and governments that had spawned them” and replace them with a “peer-to-peer, collaborative society, interlinked by invisible currents of energy and information.” Cyberculture was to be the fulfillment of counterculture.

Ultimately, of course, such fulfillment was not to be had. But the consequences of the association were profound. One reason for the heady pace of innovation during the 90’s is that the motivation was never purely abstract, but was often accompanied by utopian passions. Software development occurred not just in the private realm, but also among collaborative communities that objected to corporate ownership. Even today’s Wikipedia — the online encyclopedia continuously being written by its users — can be traced to these ideas.

But there were also limitations of vision and imagination. For a long time, cyberspace advocates were reluctant to take the problem of mischievous hacking seriously and could look askance at the very notion of copyright in the cyberworld. There was even a strain of countercultural romance in the ways in which the corporate monopolist Microsoft became widely portrayed as an Evil Empire threatening the libertarian Internet. (This is also one reason that Google, which has turned out to be Microsoft’s most potent competitor, made its motto “Don’t be evil.”)

Moreover, so messianic were expectations, that many failed to see that cyberspace was not really a different realm from the hard-wired world of ordinary experience, but would become an extension of it: a place where banking, shopping, conversation and business transactions could take place, where the bourgeois world and an imagined frontier would again have to work out their uneasy relations, and would again face an uncertain future.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/25/ar...n56KcDYO8gAIXw





Rural Areas Left in Slow Lane of High-Speed Data Highway
Ken Belson

For most businesses, the goal is to attract as many customers as possible. But in the fast-changing telephone industry, companies are increasingly trying to get rid of many of theirs.

Bill and Ursula Johnson are among the unwanted. These dairy farmers in bucolic northeastern Vermont wake up before dawn not just to milk their cows, but to log on to the Internet, too.

Their dial-up connection is so pokey that the only time they can reliably get onto the Web site of the company that handles their payroll is at 4 in the morning, when it is less busy. Mr. Johnson doubles as state representative for the area, and he doesn’t even bother logging on to deal with that. He communicates with colleagues in Montpelier, the capital, by phone and post instead.

The Johnsons’ communication agony could soon get worse. Instead of upgrading them to high-speed Internet access, Verizon, their local phone company, is looking to sell the 1.6 million local phone lines it controls in Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine. The possible sale is part of an internal plan called Project Nor’easter, according to a person with knowledge of the details.

A Verizon spokesman, John Bonomo, would not comment on the plan, but said the company “continually evaluates the assets and properties in our portfolio for strategic fit and financial performance.”

Verizon is not alone in its desire to reduce the number of landlines it owns. Big phone and cable companies are reluctant to upgrade and expand their networks in sparsely populated places where there are not enough customers to justify the investment. Instead, they are funneling billions of dollars into projects in cities and suburbs where the prospects for a decent return are higher.

But those projects are unlikely to reach rural areas of Vermont and other states, leaving millions of people in the Internet’s slow lane, just as high-speed access is becoming more of a necessity than a luxury. The United States already lags behind much of the industrialized world in broadband access.

The lack of broadband has preserved places like Bessie’s Diner as Canaan’s de facto meeting hall. Over burgers and turkey club sandwiches, local residents swap tidbits that, in a more wired world, might end up in e-mail and instant messages.

Helen Masson, who lost her job at an Ethan Allen furniture factory a few years ago, grumbles that the lack of broadband has made it harder for her to find work, despite taking computer classes. Mr. Johnson, sitting nearby, nods in agreement. “The staff at the statehouse shudder when I’m on a committee because they have to lick a stamp instead of pressing a send button,” he said.

Verizon has sold phone lines before. In 2005, the Carlyle Group bought its business in Hawaii. Verizon also sold 1.3 million lines in Alabama, Kentucky and Missouri in 2002.

Others have followed. In May, Sprint Nextel spun off its local phone division with 7.1 million lines and renamed it Embarq. In July, Alltel spun off its local phone group and merged it with Valor Communications.

If Verizon does sell the New England lines, it would most likely be to a smaller company or private equity group that could be even less capable of offering fast Internet access. That prospect has Vermonters fearful that the exodus of jobs and employers from the state could accelerate.

“We have companies that lose money because they don’t have broadband,” said Maureen Connolly, a director at the Economic Development Council of Northern Vermont. “We’re not a third world country. We shouldn’t have to beg for service.”

While selling off slow-growing landlines in New England may please Verizon’s shareholders seeking higher returns, the company’s plan has reignited long-simmering political and economic debates about whether the region is being left behind as wealthier states nearby pull further ahead.

The proceeds from any sale of New England lines would help Verizon pay for the potentially more lucrative fiber optic network it is building in and around cities like New York and Boston.

The network is part of Verizon’s push to transform itself into a fast-growing technology company and shed its image as a stodgy utility.

The possibility that Verizon would sell local lines is another sign of how much the phone business has changed in the last half decade. Verizon and other former local phone monopolies argue that since the cellphone, cable and Internet companies that are luring away millions of their customers are not compelled to serve remote and rural places, then they should not have to bear that burden either.

In Vermont, Verizon has broadband available on just 56 percent of its 330,000 lines, compared with 95 percent for most local phone companies, which receive substantial federal subsidies. Without the same aid, Verizon must bear more of the financial burden to upgrade its network.

“Vermont — like all rural states — has higher fixed costs of providing service,” said Polly Brown, president of Verizon Vermont, where the number of landlines has declined 9.1 percent since 2002. “You’re spreading those costs over fewer customers, who are located far and wide, and you’re dealing with topographical challenges such as mountains and a rock base.”

Residents, unions and politicians in Vermont do not dispute that the phone business is a challenging one, but they say that residents will have a harder time telecommuting or home-schooling their children. Towns like Canaan will not have access to the growing number of government records kept online, they say, and hotels and other tourist attractions will have a harder time attracting outsiders.

Take Michael and Louise Kingston, who have had a summer home in nearby Averill for the last 35 years. Owners of a grape-growing company with vineyards in Chile and California, they often cut their vacations short and return home to New Jersey because they cannot run their business on the 26-kilobit dial-up line — a speed considered fast in 1993 — in Averill.

“It means we can spend less time here, which means you spend less money here at a time when the local economy needs it,” Mr. Kingston said.

Connections are so slow that their son drives 25 miles south to Island Pond to find a broadband line. There is no cellphone service either, so when locals go to areas where there is reception, they take along other peoples’ phones to retrieve their voice mail for them. In places where Verizon does not sell high-speed Internet, some people have the option of getting broadband from their cable provider. But in Vermont, cable companies have focused on more populous towns like Montpelier and Burlington, the state’s largest city. Cable coverage in the northeast part of the state is spotty.

Several rural phone carriers have spoken to Verizon about its lines in New England, including Fairpoint Communications, CenturyTel and Citizens Communications, according to people with knowledge of the discussions. Buyout firms may also be considering the business.

Rural phone lines can be profitable because the basic infrastructure was paid for years ago, there are often few competitors and subsidies from the Universal Service Fund, which helps carriers provide service to hard-to-reach consumers, can be substantial.

But the subsidies do not benefit all carriers equally. For example, Vermont Telecom, which has 21,000 phone lines in the state, will receive $24.34 a month per line in the fourth quarter from the fund, money that is credited to customers on their bills.

But as a larger carrier, Verizon will receive one-tenth the subsidy, or $2.42 per phone line. Any company that buys Verizon’s lines will inherit the same subsidies, making such a deal a less attractive investment. Verizon could compensate by lowering its sale price, at the risk of disappointing shareholders.

The economics of providing broadband in rural areas are discouraging, too. The cost of upgrading an existing copper line that runs from switching stations to remote homes can be as much as $5,000, according to the National Exchange Carrier Association. Such costs are prohibitive for phone companies, which typically want to make back their money within three years, said Victor Glass, the director of demand forecasting at the carrier association.

Though frustrations with Verizon run high in places like Canaan, the alternatives are more alarming. Since it took over Verizon’s lines in Hawaii, the Carlyle Group has had billing problems that caused a fourfold spike in consumer complaints.

Carlyle’s experience could presage what rural areas like northern Vermont might face if Verizon departs, particularly if the buyer sharply cuts costs and jobs.

“We would rather deal with Verizon because there’s a process in place and people up and down the food chain that we know,” said Darlene Stone, an operator at a Verizon call center in South Burlington and chief steward in the Communications Workers of America, which represents 135 Verizon employees in Vermont. “Private equity funds are not people who are going to be interested in our opinions.”

The possibility that a sale could lead to worse service has put regulators in the uneasy position of trying to pressure Verizon to do more while not alienating the company, which invested 37 percent less in its network in Vermont last year than in 2001.

In 2005, the Public Service Board fined Verizon $8.1 million for providing inadequate customer service in Vermont. This year, regulators also got Verizon to agree to expand its broadband coverage to 80 percent of its phone lines by 2010.

That holds out some hope for isolated areas, but there is no guarantee that any particular customer, like the Johnsons, will be among the 80 percent and there is no guarantee that Verizon will still be in Vermont by then.

Alternative broadband providers who could fill that gap face problems, too. Jake Marsh, who runs Island Pond Wireless, a company that beams high-speed Internet signals over strings of antennas, has signed up 250 customers and has a waiting list just as long. But to expand, he is counting on towns getting state funds to help defray the installation costs.

Yet officials in Norton, 15 miles west of Canaan, could not download the 20-page grant application because their dial-up line was so slow.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/28/te...28vermont.html





Composer of 'Bikini' Song, Paul Van Valkenburgh, Dies
Nanci G. Hutson

The New Milford native and composer of the 1960s novelty tune "Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini'' died earlier this month.

Paul Van Valkenburgh, 68, who wrote the song and several others as a young man under the name "Paul Vance," died at his Ormond Beach home in Florida on Sept. 6.

Van Valkenburgh grew up in New Milford but later moved back to Florida, where he was born.

Van Valkenburgh has seven living children. Two still live in the area: Daughter Karen Machado lives in New Milford and his son, Paul Van Valkenburgh Jr., lives in Bethel.

His other children are: Kevin, Laura, Michelle, Sherry, and Susan. He was predeceased by a son, Peter Leroux.

The owner of a painting and decorating business in Florida, Van Valkenburgh was a Navy veteran who fought in the Korean Conflict, and who in his early years wrote several songs.

His silly, snappy tune about a girl wearing a very revealing "yellow polka dot bikini'' was a hit when it was released on Aug. 8, 1960, by artist Brian Hyland.

Van Valkenburgh wrote and collaborated on some other songs, including "Hey Now Mary'' and "Magic Melody," but none gained the notoriety of the "bikini'' song.

Today, the song appears in yogurt commercials.

In Van Valkenburgh's obituary, his family wrote that he loved listening to music and spending time with family and friends.

He is survived by his wife of 32 years, Rose Leroux, along with many grandchildren, nieces, nephews and friends.

Family members declined further comment.

Donations in Van Valkenburgh's memory can be made to the Hospice of the Palm Coast in Florida. 149 South Ridgewood Ave., Suite 400, Daytona Beach, Fla. 32114.
http://www.newstimeslive.com/news/story.php?id=1016019





Not so Teenie Weenie Story Stuns Family

Florida songwriter disproves late man's longtime claim to be the author of 'bikini' song
Nanci G. Hutson

Paul Van Valkenburgh, formerly of New Milford and Danbury, once was a budding singing and songwriting talent, but it appears he exaggerated throughout his life in claiming that he wrote the 1960s tune, "Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini."

Van Valkenburgh, who played the Greater Danbury music scene in 1959 under the name Paul Vance, told his family and friends for decades that he wrote the song but never collected royalties because he'd signed them away as a young man.

When the family placed his obituary on Sunday, they prominently cited the song -- which was, in fact, written by a Paul Vance -- as a career highlight.

The family paid their last respects to Van Valkenburgh earlier this month in Ormond Beach, Fla., after he died of lung cancer. He was 68. His obituary moved nationally via the Associated Press.

That's when another, and very much alive, Paul Vance of Florida -- who insists he wrote the "bikini song" and on Wednesday produced records of lucrative royalty payments to the AP to prove it -- started getting condolence calls.

"You have no idea how this has affected my family and my life," said the living Paul Vance, during an interview Wednesday.

The lively grandfather said, "I'm getting about 200 calls every three hours.

A friend came over to give her condolences and was shocked to find out I was not dead. It's crazy."

This 76-year-old Vance of Coral Springs, not Ormond Beach, said he spoke up to set the record straight. A career songwriter, Vance has written music for such artists as Frank Sinatra, Perry Como, Johnny Mathis, as well as scores for musicals and other genres.

The family of Van Valkenburgh is shocked by the revelations.

"He told me he wrote it. He showed me the record, but we've moved so many times I don't know where that record is now,'' the 80-year-old Rose Leroux said of Van Valkenburgh from her Florida home on Wednesday. She and her husband of 32 years moved from Danbury to Ormond Beach in 1973 where he owned a painting and decorating business.

"I do have one record of 'Hey Now, Mary!'' and 'Magic Melody'' and he is singing on that record. And I know it is his voice. I lived with him for almost 40 years.

"I don't know what that man (Paul Vance of Coral Springs) is trying to accomplish,'' she said. "If he's getting royalties, why is he bothering (to come forward)."

Her husband didn't get any royalties.

"He supposedly sold the rights to it (the 'bikini' song) when he was just 19, and that was long before I met him when he was 30.

"I don't know what all the hoopla is about. If this gets back to his son (Paul Jr. in Bethel) it's going to break his heart.''

Van Valkenburgh is survived by seven children -- Paul Jr., Kevin, Karen Machado, Laura, Michelle Prior, Sherry and Susan Leroux -- as well as several grandchildren and a sister, Lillian Raymond in Torrington. His eldest son lives in Bethel and his daughter, Karen, lives in New Milford. He is preceded in death by Leroux's son, Peter. Rose Leroux was his second wife.

The other Paul Vance said he has no animosity toward Van Valkenburgh, who he speculates was just bragging with no idea of the potential consequences, and his family "sincerely believes he wrote it,'' the tune Vance describes as an "evergreen song.'' Upon his death, Vance said, they were just trying to assure his "few moments of fame.''

Doreen Van Valkenburgh, Paul Jr.'s wife who prepared the paid obituary with the songwriting credits that first appeared in The News-Times Sunday, is completely perplexed.

"Through all the years I've known him, that's what he said,'' Doreen Valkenburgh said of her father-in-law, who she first met about 12 years ago.

"This is all screwed up. We would have never made such a thing up. We're not that kind of people.''

Paul Jr. said he finds the whole scenario "weird.''

He said he remembers his father going places and singing the "bikini'' song for them. He can't imagine his father would have intentionally made up such a tall tale.

Yet the evidence seems stacked against Van Valkenburgh's claims to that piece of musical history.

"I'd absolutely, positively bet my life on this,'' said Ronnie Allen, 63, of Morrisville, Pa., a disc jockey and 15-year writer and researcher for Casey Kasem and "American Top 40.''

"He (Van Valkenburgh) could have written those other two songs. I don't doubt that. But I am positively, definitely, 100 percent certain he was not the Paul Vance who wrote 'Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini.'''

A former Danbury middle school classmate Betty Ireland said she was saddened to read about Van Valkenburgh's death. She said she knew nothing of the composing controversy.

In school, she said she remembered that he played the drums, and had done some recording under the name Paul Vance, but didn't recall anything about other musical aspirations. She said she mostly knew him from afar, but recalled that even though he was the quiet type, girls found his tall, blond good looks appealing.

A July 31, 1959, article in The News-Times about Van Valkenburgh's ambition to break onto the national rock 'n' roll music scene described him as a "six-foot-one, blue-eyed crooner'' who was "explosive when in action'' and went by the stage name Paul Vance. The article noted that his "Hey Now, Mary'' record at that time had already sold more than 40,000 copies, and its popularity was such that he and his promoters expected a "gold record.''

In 1955, Ireland recalled that she was working in the downtown Danbury Woolworth's when Van Valkenburgh came in wearing a U.S. Navy uniform. She said she just wanted people to know that he had roots in Danbury.

In his obituary, Doreen Van Valkenburgh wrote that her father-in-law served on the USS Yorktown during the Korean conflict, and his wife said she has pictures of him standing on the ship.

As distressed as Vance has been over the mixed identities -- he will be appearing on a Fox news show this morning -- he said he is still trying to keep some perspective, and a sense of humor.

Now, he said, when he reads the caller identification on his cellphone, and it's a friend or family, Vance said he answers, "This is Heaven.''
http://www.newstimeslive.com/news/story.php?id=1016220





Microsoft Spinoff Wallop Launches Test
AP

Wallop, a startup spun out of Microsoft Corp.'s research lab, is launching the test version of an online social networking site with the premise that people will want to pay extra to look good.

The company, which aims to compete with established brands like MySpace and Facebook, plans to sell graphics and other features people can use to decorate their personal profile pages.

Wallop says the plan to charge users for the decorations will supplant the advertising that supports many such free sites. The add-ons will initially cost somewhere between 99 cents and $4, said Karl Jacob, the San Francisco company's chief executive. The company will offer some elements for free.

People will only be able to sign up for the service if an existing member invites them, an approach Facebook is about to abandon.

Wallop has its origins in a Microsoft research project that goes back several years. In the interim, News Corp.'s MySpace has emerged as a market leader in the now-hot field of forging and maintaining friendships online.

MySpace already lets users customize pages for free, though users typically have to find HTML code elsewhere to post into their profiles. Some visitors have complained that flashy icons and colorful lettering in such customized profiles can make them difficult to read.

---

On the Net:

http://www.wallopcorp.com
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...09-26-04-52-59





Online Ad Revenues in U.S. Set Record
AP

Internet advertising revenues in the United States grew 37 percent in the first half of this year, reaching a new high of $7.9 billion.

Keyword ads displayed alongside search results remain the most lucrative format, accounting for 40 percent of revenues from January to June, the Interactive Advertising Bureau said Monday. Banner display ads made up 21 percent and classified ads 20 percent.

Revenues are on target for a fourth consecutive year of growth - and the third of setting records, said Pete Petrusky, director of entertainment and media at PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, which conducted the quarterly study for the IAB, an industry trade group.

Online ad revenues reached $12.5 billion last year.

Despite the growth, Internet advertising accounts for only about 5 percent of all U.S. advertising revenues.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...09-25-14-40-21





Google to Push for More Electrical Efficiency in PC’s
John Markoff

Google is calling on the computer industry to create a simpler and more efficient power supply standard that it says will save billions of kilowatt-hours of energy annually.

In a white paper to be presented Tuesday on the opening day of the Intel Developer Forum here, two leading data center designers at Google will argue that the industry is mired in inefficiency for historical reasons, dating to the introduction of the first I.B.M. PC in 1981.

At that time, standard power supplies, which convert high-voltage alternating current to low-voltage direct current, were required to provide multiple output voltage, which is no longer necessary in today’s PC’s.

The Google plan calls for a shift from multivoltage power supplies to a single 12-volt standard. Although voltage conversion would still take place on the PC motherboard, the simpler design of the new power supply would make it easier to achieve higher overall efficiencies.

The Google proposal is similar in its intent to an existing effort by the electric utility industry to offer computer makers financial incentives for designing more efficient power supplies for personal computers. Existing PC power supplies vary widely in efficiency, from as high as 90 percent to as low as 20 percent.

The existing effort, 80 Plus, sets an 80 percent efficiency standard as a goal. It is a partnership between Ecos Consulting, an environmental consulting firm, and a group of electric utility companies. Ecos began measuring the efficiency of computer power supplies in 2003 and found that none of them met the efficiency standard.

But a technical adviser for the utility project said in a telephone interview on Monday that since the program began last year, the industry has begun to move toward more efficient designs.

“We now have 70 compliant designs from 15 to 20 manufacturers,” said the adviser, Chris Calwell, vice president and director for policy and research at Ecos Consulting. The new designs are just becoming available in commercial products, he said.

Modern PC designs shift the control of voltage to the motherboards, making the multiple voltage requirements of industry standard power supplies unnecessary, wrote Urs Hölzle and William Weihl, the authors of the Google paper, “High-Efficiency Power Supplies for Home Computers and Servers.”

Google executives said Monday that they were not familiar with the existing effort. They said the project was complementary with their plan and that they were trying to start an industry discussion of the issue.

The overall Google goal is to be applauded, Mr. Calwell said, but by redesigning and simplifying power supply design, he worries that it is possible that overall efficiency may not be improved significantly.

Both the Google engineers and Mr. Calwell agreed that there was a significant design flaw, which they described as “overprovisioning,” in today’s PC power supplies. “It’s like putting a 400-horsepower engine in every car, just because some cars have to tow large trailers every once in a while,” Mr. Calwell said.

The Google white paper argues that the opportunity for power savings is immense — by deploying the new power supplies in 100 million desktop PC’s running eight hours a day, it will be possible to save 40 billion kilowatt-hours over three years, or more than $5 billion at California’s energy rates.

Although Google does not plan to enter the personal computer market, the company is a large purchaser of microprocessors and has evolved a highly energy-efficient power supply system for its data centers.

It is not the first time Google has entered into an industry debate over efficiency. At the Consumer Electronics Show in January, its co-founder, Larry Page, called on the industry to adopt a single power supply standard for portable devices.

“I’m going to just plead with all of you, let’s get the power supply problems fixed, or let’s get all these devices talking together,” he said during a keynote address.

According to EPRI Solutions, an energy research and consulting firm, over 2.5 billion AC/DC power supplies are used in the United States and 6 to 10 billion worldwide.

Currently, EPRI said, power supplies account for more than 2 percent of the nation’s electricity consumption and that more efficient design could cut use in half, saving nearly $3 billion in electricity costs.

One personal computer industry pioneer said he believed that the Google proposal might have important indirect benefits.

“I imagine a standard low-voltage distribution system inside buildings having alternate energy supplies like solar,” said Lee Felsenstein, the designer of the Osborne 1 and Sol personal computers. “Google’s proposal would make that a practicality.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/26/te.../26google.html





REVIEW: Sony's Reader a Step Forward
Peter Svensson

Books have been a bit of the orphan in the digital world. Music has the iPod. Video has YouTube. Books have, well, Amazon.com, where you can buy them printed on paper.

Sure, there are electronic books available for download at Amazon and elsewhere, but they haven't really caught on. Sony Corp. is now tackling part of the problem with the U.S. launch of the first e-book reader that imitates the look of paper by using an innovative screen technology.

Is this the iPod for books? Not quite. But it is a step forward.

The Sony Reader is a handsome affair the size of a paperback book, but only a third of an inch thick. It goes on sale for $350 on Sony's Web site Wednesday, and in Borders stores in October.

The 6-inch screen can be taken for a monochrome liquid-crystal display at first glance, but on closer inspection looks like no other electronic display. It's behind a thin pane of glass, but unlike an LCD it shows no "depth" - it pretty much looks like a light gray piece of paper with dark gray text.

The display, based on technology from Massachusetts Institute of Technology spinoff E Ink Corp., is composed of tiny capsules with electrically charged particles of white and black ink. When a static electric charge is applied on the side of the capsule that faces the reader, it attracts the white particles to the face of the display, making that pixel show light gray. Reversing the charge brings the black pigments floating through the capsule to replace the white pigments, and the pixel shows as dark gray.

Like paper, the display is readable from any angle, but it doesn't look as good as the real thing, chiefly because the contrast doesn't compare well. The background isn't white and the letters aren't black. The letters show some jaggedness, even though the resolution is a very respectable 800 by 600 pixels. It will display photos, though they look a bit like black-and-white photocopies.

But it's still a more comfortable reading medium than any other electronic display. The text is easy on the eyes in almost any light you could read a book by.

The other major advantage of the display is that it's a real power sipper. Sony says a Reader with a full charge in its lithium battery can show up to 7,500 pages, an amazing figure that I unfortunately didn't have the time to test.

The reason behind this trilogy-busting stamina is that the display only consumes power when it flips to a new page. Displaying the same page continuously consumes no power, though the electronics of the device itself do use a little bit.

The Reader's internal memory holds up to 100 books, depending on their size. The memory can be expanded with inexpensive SD cards or Memory Sticks.

To load books, connect the Reader with a supplied cable to a Windows PC running the accompanying software. You can transfer Word documents or Portable Document Format files to the Reader, download blog feeds, or buy e-books at Sony's online store. It will also play MP3 music or audiobook files.

The store is not live yet, so I was unable to test it, but the interface looks comfortably like that of iTunes. It should have 10,000 titles at launch, Sony said, with major titles from publishers like HarperCollins, Simon and Schuster and Penguin-Putnam. In keeping with the e-book market so far, there's no big price break: the electronic version will cost a dollar or so less than the printed book.

The Reader would be a perfect companion for the avid book reader, but for a few things.

First of all, navigation is fairly clumsy. You can't just enter the page number and jump to the page, nor can you enter a word or phrase to search for, as you can when reading a book on a PC. To get around, there are 10 buttons that will each take you a 10th of the way through text. You can also jump to chapter starts, or return to bookmarks. Still, this is very much a one-way device, designed for reading a book straight through from cover to cover.

This lack of interactivity is partly because the screen is slow to change, since it takes time for the pigments to move through the capsules. It takes about a second to display a new page. That means no scrolling through pages, and no note-taking on the screen - imagine having to wait a second for each letter you write to appear.

Secondly, and less importantly, the Reader handles PDFs poorly. It doesn't allow you to zoom in on them, so if they're formatted for standard 8.5-inch-by-11-inch pages, the text will be illegibly small.

Thirdly, the Reader doesn't have a built-in light source, unlike PCs and personal digital assistants. A small clip-on light of the kind sold for books should work well, though.

Because of these drawbacks, it's hard to see the Reader as something that will bust the e-book market open. But it deserves a much better reception than the generally small LCD-based devices that hit the market a couple of years ago, some of which are already discontinued.

Other competition comes from cell phones and PDAs, but none of them match the Reader for screen size, legibility and battery life. Laptops, Tablet PCs and tablet-style Ultra-Mobile PCs have the screen size, but are heavier, more expensive, take time to boot up and have short battery lives.

The real competition, though, will be printed books, which have so far defeated all digital contenders with their excellent "battery life" and "display quality." Sony's going to have to try a little harder before it can really start saving trees.

---

On the Web:

http://www.sony.com/reader
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...09-26-18-52-31





Opera Canceled Over a Depiction of Muhammad
Judy Dempsey and Mark Landler

BERLIN, Sept. 26 — A leading German opera house has canceled performances of a Mozart opera because of security fears stirred by a scene that depicts the severed head of the Prophet Muhammad, prompting a storm of protest here about what many see as the surrender of artistic freedom.

The Deutsche Oper Berlin said Tuesday that it had pulled “Idomeneo” from its fall schedule after the police warned of an “incalculable risk” to the performers and the audience.

The company’s director, Kirsten Harms, said she regretted the decision but felt she had no choice. She said she was told in August that the police had received an anonymous threat, but she acted only after extensive deliberations.

Political and cultural figures throughout Germany condemned the cancellation. Some said it recalled the decision of European newspapers not to reprint satirical cartoons about Muhammad, after their publication in Denmark generated a furor among Muslims.

Wolfgang Börnsen, a culture spokesman for Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservative bloc in Parliament, accused the opera house of “falling on its knees before the terrorists.”

“It is a signal to other stages in Germany, or even elsewhere in Europe, to put no works on their programs that criticize Islam,” he said.

The disputed scene is not part of Mozart’s opera, but was added by the director, Hans Neuenfels. In it, the king of Crete, Idomeneo, carries the heads of Muhammad, Jesus, Buddha and Poseidon on to the stage, placing each on a stool.

“Idomeneo,” first performed in 1781, tells a mythical story of Poseidon, or Neptune, the god of the sea, who toys with men’s lives and demands spiteful sacrifice.

The cancellation of the performances fanned a debate in Europe about whether the West is compromising values like free expression to avoid stoking anger in the Muslim world.

Already in Germany, there is growing sentiment that Pope Benedict XVI may have overdone his contrition for a recent speech in Bavaria, in which he cited a historical reference to Islam as “evil and inhuman.” The speech set off waves of protests in Muslim countries.

The interior minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, who has defended the pope and called for more dialogue with Muslims in Europe, said canceling the opera was unacceptable and “crazy.”

Michael Naumann, a former German culture minister, said, “It’s a slap in the face of artistic freedom, by the artists themselves.” Mr. Naumann, now the publisher of the weekly newspaper Die Zeit, added, “The pope showed the way by being so extraordinarily apologetic.”

The sulfurous public reaction prompted some people to speculate that the decision might eventually be reversed.

Ms. Harms said the “Idomeneo” production, which was first staged by the Deutsche Oper in 2003, would remain on the opera’s program. It could be performed later, she said, though she would have to consider the political and diplomatic aspects of “this complex issue.”

The scene with the severed heads aroused controversy among Muslims and Christians when the Deutsche Oper first staged it. But the company was not the target of any organized protests, and the Deutsche Oper put four performances on its calendar for this November.

Then, in August, came the anonymous threat.

“All this came in light of the cartoon controversy,” said a police spokesman, Uwe Kozelnik. “We started to investigate and finally concluded that disturbances could not be ruled out.”

While the police said they did not pressure the Deutsche Oper to cancel the opera, they supported the decision.

Berlin’s chief security official, Ehrhart Körting, drew a parallel between the decision and that of German newspapers earlier this year to resist reprinting the cartoons depicting Muhammad.

“Even the German journalists’ association criticized the reprinting of the cartoons because their publication could hurt the religious feelings of one group of people,” Mr. Körting said in a statement.

Muslim leaders in Germany reacted cautiously. Several planned to participate in a conference on Wednesday organized by the government to foster a better dialogue with Germany’s 3.2 million Muslims.

The leader of the Islamic Council, Ali Kizilkaya, told a radio station in Berlin that he welcomed the cancellation, saying a depiction of decapitated Muhammad “could certainly offend Muslims.”

“Nevertheless, of course, I think it is horrible that one has to be afraid,” Mr. Kizilkaya said, according to The Associated Press. “That is not the right way to open dialogue.”

The head of the Central Council of Muslims in Germany, Ayyub Axel Köhler, declined to comment on the decision, saying he wanted to learn more about the circumstances.

Those circumstances appear to be in some dispute.

At a news conference on Tuesday, Ms. Harms said she broached the possibility of removing the offending scene with Mr. Neuenfels. When he resisted, she let the matter drop.

However, a lawyer for Mr. Neuenfels, Peter Raue, said Ms. Harms telephoned the director on Sept. 9 to tell him she planned to cancel the performances. The issue of tinkering with the ending never came up, Mr. Raue said, and in any event, “you couldn’t change it; it is part of the story.”

The scene devised by Mr. Neuenfels puts a sanguinary ending on an opera that, in the way Mozart wrote it, ends with King Idomeneo giving up his throne to appease the god of the sea, and blessing the romantic union of his son Idamante with the Greek princess Ilia.

The severed heads of the religious figures, Mr. Raue said, was meant by Mr. Neuenfels to make a point that “all the founders of religions were figures that didn’t bring peace to the world.”

André Kraft, spokesman for Komische Oper, a more adventurous opera house where Mr. Neuenfels is engaged in another Mozart production, described the 65-year-old director as “a secularist who does not believe religion solves the problems of the world.”

For the Deutsche Oper, the cancellation is a major crisis for a prestigious opera company that has been in transition. Founded in 1912 as the Deutsches Opernhaus, the company moved to its present building in western Berlin in 1961, opening with a production of Mozart’s “Don Giovanni.”

Ms. Harms was appointed director in 2004, coming from a less prominent opera house in the northern German city of Kiel. While there, she said, she faced a bomb threat to the opera house. Ms. Harms plans to present her first production, a little-known work by Alberto Franchetti called “Germania,” on Oct. 15.

Some critics of the decision to cancel said it revealed the weaknesses of Berlin’s generously supported cultural institutions.

“Because they are subsidized by the German state, there is a great deal of artistic independence, but also a lack of accountability and intellectual rigor,” said Gary Smith, the director of the American Academy in Berlin.

The practice of updating classical operas — often with current political or social themes — is common in Germany. But the cancellation of “Idomeneo” could make this production a landmark of another kind.

“I’ve never heard of something like this, or even similar to it,” said Nikolaus Lehnhoff, a prominent German opera director. “I have seen many politically incorrect performances in Berlin. I think the reaction to the pope’s speech has sensitized the cultural scene.”

Judy Dempsey reported from Berlin, and Mark Landler from Frankfurt.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/27/wo...rtner=homepage





German Official: Canceling Opera 'Crazy'
AP

Germany's interior minister condemned a leading opera house's decision to cancel a production of Mozart's ''Idomeneo'' out of concern a scene featuring the severed head of the Prophet Muhammad could provoke a dangerous reaction from Muslims.

Kirsten Harms, director of Berlin's Deutsche Oper, said she decided to cancel the production after a warning from state security officials and described her decision as ''weighing artistic freedom and freedom of a theater ... against the question of security for people's lives.''

But the move immediately provoked strong reaction across Germany.

''That is crazy,'' said Interior Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble, the country's top security official, speaking to reporters in Washington, D.C. ''This is unacceptable.''

The furor is the latest in Europe over religious sensitivities -- following cartoons of the prophet first published in a Danish newspaper and recent remarks by Pope Benedict XVI decrying holy war.

German government officials and Muslim leaders were to open a summit on Wednesday to launch a two-year dialogue on how to better integrate the country's 3 million Muslims.

After its premiere in 2003, the production by Hans Neuenfels drew widespread criticism over a scene in which King Idomeneo presents the severed heads not only of the Greek god of the sea, Poseidon, but also of Muhammad, Jesus and Buddha.

The severed heads are an addition by director Neuenfels to the 225-year-old opera, which was last performed by the company in March 2004. All four performances were pulled from the fall schedule after an anonymous call from a concerned operagoer worried about the impact of the Muhammad head.

Response from Germany's Islamic community was mixed, with some praising the decision and others calling on Muslims to accept the role of provocation in art.

The leader of Germany's Islamic Council welcomed the move, saying a depiction of Muhammad with a severed head ''could certainly offend Muslims.''

But in an interview with German radio, Ali Kizilkaya added: ''I think it is horrible that one has to be afraid ... That is not the right way to open dialogue.''

The leader of Germany's Turkish community said it was time Muslims accepted freedom of expression in art.

''This is about art, not about politics,'' Kenan Kolat told Bavarian Radio. ''We should not make art dependent on religion -- then we are back in the Middle Ages.''

Neuenfels has insisted his staging not be altered, saying the scene where the king presents the severed heads represents his protest against ''any form of organized religion or its founders.''

''I stand behind my production and will not change it,'' Neuenfels told the Berliner Morgenpost in its Tuesday edition.

The opera house's decision comes after the German-born pope infuriated Muslims by quoting the words of a 14th-century Byzantine emperor who characterized some of the teachings of the Prophet Muhammad as ''evil and inhuman,'' particularly ''his command to spread by the sword the faith.''

Earlier this year, violent protests erupted across the Muslim world after a Danish newspaper published 12 cartoons depicting Muhammad. The caricatures were reprinted by dozens of newspapers and Web sites in Europe and elsewhere, often in the name of freedom of expression.

Islamic law is interpreted to forbid any depiction of Muhammad for fear it could lead to idolatry.

''We know the consequences of the conflict over the (Muhammad) caricatures,'' Deutsche Oper said in a statement. ''We believe that needs to be taken very seriously and hope for your support.''

Berlin security officials had warned Harms that staging the opera could ''in its originally produced form .... pose an incalculable security risk to the public and employees.''

It is not only Muslims who have been offended by depictions of religion in art.

Last month Madonna drew criticism from some Roman Catholics in Germany for a show that staged a mock crucifixion. Mel Gibson's 2004 movie, ''The Passion of Christ'' met with disapproval from some Catholics and some Jews. In 2004, a Birmingham, England, theater canceled its run of ''Behzti'' after a violent protest by members of the Sikh community.

Still, many in normally open and tolerant Berlin, which has become a home for cutting edge and often contentious artistic productions, cautioned against compromising on issues of freedom of speech and art.

''Our ideas about openness, tolerance and freedom must be lived on the offensive. Voluntary self-limitation gives those who fight against our values a confirmation in advance that we will not stand behind them,'' said Mayor Klaus Wowereit.

Bernd Neumann, the federal government's top cultural official, said that ''problems cannot be solved by keeping silent.''

''When the concern over possible protests leads to self-censorship, then the democratic culture of free speech becomes endangered.''

------

On the Net:

http://www.deutscheoperberlin.de
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/arts...era-Islam.html





New Look at ‘Mona Lisa’ Yields Some New Secrets
Ian Austen

The first major scientific analysis of the “Mona Lisa” in 50 years has uncovered some unexpected secrets, including signs that Leonardo da Vinci changed his mind about his composition, French and Canadian researchers said Tuesday.

Photographs taken with invisible infrared light and a special infrared camera suggest that at least one of the details was hiding in plain sight, the scientists and conservators said.

The sitter in the Louvre Museum’s 16th-century masterpiece, believed to be Lisa Gherardini, the wife of a Florentine silk merchant, was originally painted wearing a large transparent overdress made from gauze, they said. Under normal light, part of the garment is visible on the right-hand side of the painting, but appears simply to be part of the background.

“You can see it when you know what you’re looking for,” said Bruno Mottin, a curator in the research department of the Center of Research and Restoration of the Museums of France, known as C2RMF. He spoke at a news conference with researchers from the National Research Council of Canada.

Mr. Mottin said such transparent robes were worn by expecting or nursing mothers in 16th-century Italy. The robe’s reappearance in the “Mona Lisa” would dovetail with scholarly research indicating that the painting might have been commissioned to commemorate the birth of Lisa Gherardini’s third child.

The imaging also shows, although less clearly, that some of the sitter’s hair was rolled into a small bun and tucked under a tiny bonnet with an attached veil. (The images are too cloudy to be reproduced on newsprint.)

“That is not surprising,” Mr. Mottin said. “The bonnet was usually worn by women in the 16th century.”

More generally, the researchers said they realized that centuries of grime had obscured some elements of the painting.

“You’re seeing a lot more fine detail, showing that this remarkable painting is actually more remarkable than we believed,” said John M. Taylor, an imaging scientist and conservator with the National Research Council of Canada.

Mr. Mottin said that two pieces of clothing had faded from view, largely because of the application of now-discolored layers of lacquer over the centuries.

While the “Mona Lisa” has become famous for the sitter’s calm, some say enigmatic, smile, it appears that the composition was not always so restful. For example, the new images show that at one point one of her hands was painted in a clenched rather than a relaxed position.

“It was as if she was going to get up from a chair,” Mr. Mottin said of the version Leonardo ultimately changed.

David Rosand, a Renaissance art historian at Columbia University, said it was not surprising that the “Mona Lisa” contained hidden secrets. “This is a painting that has never been cleaned, that is remarkably dirty,” he said. “This is exactly what one would expect.”

For security and conservation reasons, scholars have rarely been able to view the painting other than through heavy glass, the researchers noted.

Indeed, Mr. Mottin, whose laboratory is within the Louvre palace complex, said that the “Mona Lisa” last received a complete examination after being vandalized in 1956.

Among other cutting-edge technologies, the scientists used a newly developed Canadian laser camera to construct an extremely detailed three-dimensional model of the painting.

It reveals that while the “Mona Lisa” may be old and dirty, it is not, as had long been thought, particularly fragile.

“We have a good handle on the physical state of the painting,” Mr. Taylor said. While the wood panel on which it is painted is quite warped at points, he said, the 3-D model shows that it is sound and that the paint remains well bonded to its surface.

The 3-D scanner is a variation on equipment used by American astronauts earlier this month to check the space shuttle for damage before it returned to Earth. The Canadian research council, which has worked with museums around the world since the 1980’s and with the French for a decade, developed a model able to resolve fine details in artworks at the limit of known optical technologies.

The pictures it produced, during two scanning sessions in 2004 when the Louvre was closed in the evening, are so detailed that special monitors had to be created to view them.

Researchers hope that their newfound ability to measure and reproduce fine detail will allow conservators and art historians to settle longstanding debates about Leonardo’s sfumato painting technique, which resulted in a painting with no obvious brush strokes.

Mr. Taylor said the scan showed, as expected, that the “Mona Lisa” had been created by using many extremely thin layers of paint.

Mr. Mottin said many scholars believed that Leonardo first executed the light portions of his painting and then gradually built up the dark areas.

A computer-generated relief map of the painting made with the scanned data shows that, in fact, the dark areas around the sitter’s mouth and eyes have the thickest layers of paint. Yet other dark areas are comparatively thin.

Over time, Mr. Mottin said, he hopes that the detailed digital image will help yield even more specific information.

“What I’d still like to know is really how the painting was done,” he said.

Many of the researchers’ findings and images are reported in a book by Jean-Pierre Mohen, Mr. Mottin and Michel Menu that has just been published by Harry N. Abrams, “Mona Lisa: Inside the Painting.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/27/ar...gn/27mona.html





D’Aquino, 90, Dies; ‘Tokyo Rose’ Suspect
AP



Iva Toguri D’Aquino, who was wrongly convicted of being the World War II propagandist Tokyo Rose died yesterday of natural causes, according to family members. She was 90.

Tokyo Rose was the name given by soldiers to a female radio broadcaster responsible for anti-American transmissions intended to demoralise soldiers fighting in the Pacific theatre. Ms D’Aquino, who was later pardoned, was the only US citizen identified among the potential suspects.

In 1949, she became the seventh person to be convicted of treason in American history and served six years in prison. But doubts about her possible role as Tokyo Rose later surfaced and she was pardoned by President Gerald Ford in 1977.

Ms D’Aquino was born in Los Angeles on July 4, 1916, to Japanese immigrant parents. She began to use the first name Iva during her school years.

She was visiting relatives in Japan after graduating from the University of California, Los Angeles, when she became trapped in the country at the beginning of World War II, according to a statement from Barbara Trembley, a Toguri family spokeswoman.

She took odd jobs to support herself while trying to find a way out of the country. That led to her work on a Japanese propaganda radio show manned by Allied prisoners called Zero Hour, the statement said. Using the name "Orphan Ann", she performed comedy skits and introduced newscasts.

On April 19, 1945, Ms D’Aquino married a Portuguese citizen of Japanese-Portuguese ancestry.

The FBI and the Army conducted an extensive investigation to determine whether she had committed crimes against the US.

It was decided that the evidence then known did not merit prosecution, and she was released. But a public furore ensued, that convinced the Justice Department that the matter should be re-examined. Ms D’Aquino was arrested in Yokohama in 1945 and brought back to America where she was tried and convicted.

Ms D’Aquino spent the years following her release from prison living a quiet life on Chicago’s North Side.

Ron Yates, dean of the College of Communications at the University of Illinois, is credited with helping to win her pardon. As a reporter at the Chicago Tribune, Mr Yates managed to track down Ms D’Aquino’s accusers, who said that they were pressured by prosecutors to lie.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article...377631,00.html





Pirates Run Aground at the Polls
Bernhard Warner

The Piracy Party's mustered about 1 per cent of the vote in Sweden's general election but failed to secure an MP, writes Bernhard Warner

Was it naïve to think that a populist movement galvanised by a call of ‘downloads for all!’ could sweep into political power? This rueful question is on the minds of many young Swedes this week after national elections.

The youth-dominated Piracy Party, founded earlier this year in Sweden before spreading to 16 other countries including Britain, failed in its first trip to the polls on Sunday. A party founded on three basic principles – to reform commercial copyright, eradicate meddlesome patent laws and stop the surveillance of file-sharers – proved to be less popular with the voters than the tax cuts and new jobs promised by the victorious right-leaning Moderate Party.

While the official tally was still unavailable at the time of publication, the Piracy Party was expected to amass about 1 per cent of the popular vote. They had been hoping for 4 per cent (or roughly 300,000 votes), the threshold required to earn seats in parliament and begin the arduous task of convincing lawmakers of the need to rewrite legislation governing copyright and patents and to strengthen privacy protections for all netizens.

The BitTorrent generation’s most organised push yet for copyright reform, certainly the net’s most popular rallying cry, will now be stalled for at least two more years – until after the 2009 European Parliamentary elections, an election the Piracy Party has in its sights.

"Obviously, we’re not happy we didn’t get more of the vote," Balder Lingegard, a university student from Gothenburg who serves as the Pirate Party secretary and ran for an MP seat, told me this week after a full day of classes. "But if you think what we’ve accomplished for an organisation with such financial limitations, the mood is still high."

When we spoke last week, on the eve of the elections, he was upbeat and a bit anxious. The early poll results showed promise, and it dawned on him that if successful, the 22-year-old would have to figure out a way to juggle his quantum physics classes with his parliamentary obligations.

But instead, as Mr Lingegard dolefully noted this week, it’s back to the books. He says the party’s primary focus now is to get its 9,500 registered members more involved by organising into regional groups to keep the message alive and tap into the next generation of would-be voters, the 14- to 19-year-olds. Above all, he says, the party needs to clarify its position: that it’s not a bunch of freeloaders, an image that dogged the party throughout the campaign.

"The largest problem we had was the party was not considered a serious party," he says. "Most of the people we met considered us to be some kind of joke. Some thought we had no serious platform, that we just wanted stuff for free. We believe that this image is beginning to change."

The issue that’s winning over the sceptical ones is the spectre of increased surveillance. "No one wants a surveillance nation like you have in Britain" he says.

Alluding to the movement’s appeal overseas, Mr Lingegard vowed that the Piracy Party will remain an active voice in the digital copyright debate. Perhaps the party’s rhetoric is already sinking in. Starting with the campaign, some of the more prominent Swedish political candidates have begun to question for the first time publicly whether the criminalisation of file-sharing ought to be addressed. Whether it’s a political stunt on their parts to appeal to young voters remains to be seen.

To be sure, whether the Piracy Party will last to the 2009 European elections is, historically speaking, a long shot. Political parties formed on a narrow set of issues – lest you forget, the Piracy Party proudly takes no stance on such hotly debated issues as foreign policy, the euro, taxation or the environment – often quickly fall out of favour with the populace.

Even in the aftermath of defeat, the party is not calling for any radical changes; crucially, it sees no need in adding to its platform the concerns of what might be called the analogue world: namely, clean air, job security and the euro. The Party, says Mr Lingegard, has attracted members who were former anarchists, nationalists and communists. "If we were to appeal more to the general public with these issues, the 9,500 members we have today would leave."

In my first conversation with Mr Lingegard in June, I asked him how he would define the party using conventional political labels. Is the Piracy Party centrist, I asked? Right or left? Could it be libertarian or even communist? Certainly, elements of each would appeal to a sharing-is-good, keep-government-out platform. Mr Lingegard responded there is no –ist that applies to the Piracy Party.

Perhaps that clinched the party’s downfall. To quote one famous –ist, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin: "Politics begin where the masses are, not where there are thousands, but where there are millions. That is where serious politics begin."

It’s a bitter lesson learned for this young movement. Filesharers of the world, you are still not united.
http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/...367336,00.html





Mural Deemed Too Violent for School
Keach Hagey

After a debate that divided members largely along the lines of generation and gender, the Chickahominy Neighborhood Association voted unanimously yesterday not to bring a controversial Revolutionary War mural back to Hamilton Avenue School because its content is too violent.

Instead, the group agreed to leave the mural, "The Life and Times of General Israel Putnam of Connecticut," at its current location at Greenwich Library, with the proviso that the foundation that restored it pay for a new mural to be painted for the school, and which will represent the history of Western Greenwich.

"I fought to get that mural back in the school, but when I actually saw it, and saw how violent it was, I had to agree it probably wasn't in the best interest of the children," said Sylvester Pecora, chairman of the association. "But it would be unfair if the library kept the mural and we didn't get a mural."

Painted by James Daughtery of Weston as part of the Works Progress Administration program in 1935, the mural depicts Putnam, Greenwich's war hero, aiming his musket at snarling wolves while all around him Native Americans hurl tomahawks and men armed with guns and knives tussle.

It hung high in the gymnasium of Hamilton Avenue School for nearly 60 years, often knocked by errant basketballs, before it was removed in 1998 and restored with $54,145 donated by the Ruth W. Brown Foundation. It has since hung in Greenwich Library.

Education specifications for the new Hamilton Avenue School called for the mural to be returned to the school and to hang prominently in view of the media center, but after educators and parents took a look at the restored mural's contents, they began to have doubts.

Principal Damaris Rau said having a mural depicting men threatening each other with knives would send a confusing message to elementary school students, who are strictly forbidden from engaging in any violent behavior at the school.

"We will not tolerate teasing, bullying or fighting at Hamilton Avenue School," she said. "But can you imagine them saying, 'How come I can't hit him, but there are knives and guns in that picture?' "

But several older members of the community, especially those who had fought in wars themselves, argued that violence was a part of life, and, more importantly, the mural was a part of the Chickahominy community's history.

Chickahominy native Joseph Ricciardi, fought in World War II and argued that children should know about wars because wars are the reason that they are free now. He also argued that it was the parents' job to make sure the children didn't act violently at school.

"If you look, we can see the difference between male and female right here," he said. "I know you women are concerned about your children, and I understand that because you bear that child, but you also got to understand that we were brought up in a school where we were disciplined."

"We used to get the felt," he continued. "We used to get hit with a rubber hose in the leg. I'm not saying that you should do that. But man, if you would discipline your kids at home, you wouldn't have to discipline them in school."

But PTA President Laura DiBella argued that things are different in a post-Columbine world. Although the mural didn't bother her when she attended the school, she doesn't want her young son to see it every day. Several other parents echoed her statements.

"It's not appropriate for elementary school children," said Aixa Capozza, whose 5-year-old daughter attends the school.

Deputy Superintendent Mary Capwell announced that she had been talking with Mike Harris, a Greenwich attorney and trustee of the Ruth W. Brown Foundation, about the possibility of having another mural painted to take its place in the new school.

The foundation was willing to pay for it, but only if there was consensus that it was something the community wanted, Capwell said.

Over the course of an hour, that consensus emerged, as opponents of giving up the mural, which is technically owned by the town, gradually came to the side of the parents and educators.

Capwell said the foundation would like the subject of the new mural to be decided by a subcommittee consisting of members of the neighborhood association, which would act as part of the committee designing the programs for the new school. She added that the Board of Education had agreed to change the education specifications for the new school to include the painting of a new mural.

Pecora read a letter from one artist, Gary Calabra, brother of St. Roch Church Pastor Nicholas Calabra, proposing one idea: The new mural should depict the history of the Byram Quarry, which supplied the stone for the Brooklyn Bridge, the base of the Statue of Liberty and St. Roch Church.
http://www.greenwichtime.com/news/lo...ocal-headlines





Songwriters, Record Firms Agree On U.K. Royalty for Downloads
Aaron O. Patrick

British record companies and songwriters reached agreement over how much artists should be paid when their songs are sold online or through cellphone downloads, ending a dispute that cast uncertainty over the distribution of profits from digital-download services.

Both sides backed down from their initial claims, agreeing to adopt the existing temporary rate under which songwriters receive 8% of revenue for the next three years, equivalent to about 5.3 pence, or 10 cents, per song download from Apple Computer Inc.'s iTunes Store service.

Songwriters and composers had demanded an increase to 12% to recognize the lower costs to record companies of selling downloads, compared with compact discs. The music companies wanted a 6.5% rate and certain discounts to help develop the music-download industry.

At the end of the three years, a new agreement will have to be negotiated.

The settlement yesterday, announced by both sides in a joint statement, came on the opening day of a hearing at the United Kingdom's copyright tribunal that was to have set the rate. The tribunal approved the settlement, a spokesman for the songwriters and composers said.

The agreement is legally binding only for music sold in the U.K., Europe's biggest online-music market. But experts say it probably will be taken into account in similar cases under way in other countries, including Germany and the U.S.

Sales of music downloads are relatively small but are increasing quickly. Revenue from Internet-music sales tripled in 2005 to $1.1 billion, making up 6% of all music sales, according to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry.

About 300 British record companies were represented by the British Phonographic Industry. The BPI coordinated with seven companies that sell music online. Several mobile-phone operators that offer music downloads were also part of the negotiations.

Songwriters were represented by Adam Singer, head of both the Mechanical-Copyright Protection Society Ltd., which collects royalties for digital downloads and CD sales, and the Performing Right Society Ltd., which collects royalties for live performances.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1159...72576748.html?





Inside the Museum, Dylan’s Youth Goes on Display
Jon Pareles



On Nov. 4, 1961, after working in Greenwich Village clubs, Bob Dylan made his New York City concert debut at Carnegie Chapter Hall (now the Kaplan Space, used for rehearsals). It held 225 people; fewer than 55 showed up. Less than two years later, he was the reigning star of the protest-song movement and the folk revival. Another two years, and a generation would be arguing over whether it was right for him to go electric — not that he would pay any attention.

“Bob Dylan’s American Journey, 1956-1966,” an exhibition at the Morgan Library and Museum through Jan. 6, revisits Mr. Dylan’s headlong trajectory through the early 1960’s, giving visitors a close-up view of a writer and songwriter at work.

The exhibition, which originated at the Experience Music Project in Seattle, doesn’t challenge conventional wisdom. “Born into changing times, Bob Dylan shaped history in song,” it announces, and there’s no caviling or second-guessing through each phase, up to Mr. Dylan’s 1966 motorcycle accident and reclusion. For context, there are segments on the folk revival, McCarthyism and the civil rights movement.

It’s the same era covered by the Martin Scorsese documentary “No Direction Home,” with roughly the same perspective: that Mr. Dylan soaked up everything instantaneously, intersected briefly with the well-meaning folk revival, but was always on his own path. “People often say first time that this isn’t folkmusic,” he told Izzy Young from the Folklore Center in Greenwich Village for program notes at the Carnegie Chapter Hall concert. “My songs aren’t easy to listen to.”

Where “No Direction Home” echoed the tumult of the 1960’s, the museum show allows contemplation instead. There’s a listening station offering that 1961 concert, which has never been officially released; a self-effacing but clearly confident Mr. Dylan yodels gleefully through “Freight Train Blues.”

Listening stations also offer illuminating comparisons: Woody Guthrie’s “1913 Massacre” alongside the same melody in Mr. Dylan’s “Song for Woody,” and Mr. Dylan singing “No More Auction Block,” the melody he would extend for “Blowin’ in the Wind.” A video station has clips from “Don’t Look Back,” the documentary of Mr. Dylan’s 1965 tour of England, and from the rarer, unreleased “Eat the Document,” made a year later.

The exhibition includes staples of rock museumcraft: instruments, discs, posters. A map of Greenwich Village shows how six square blocks held the folk-revival universe. Pictures of Woody Guthrie and Arthur Rimbaud reveal the sources of iconic Dylan poses.

A few explanatory labels draw overreaching conclusions, including one about Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, a Woody Guthrie disciple like the young Mr. Dylan: “Elliott was so well established playing Guthrie songs that Dylan realized he would need to write his own songs to make an impression.” (Mr. Dylan might have become a songwriter anyway.) A Turkish tambourine owned by the New York studio musician Bruce Langhorne is cited as one inspiration for “Mr. Tambourine Man,” but it’s just a round drum, with nothing to jingle-jangle.

The exhibition’s most telling artifacts are the manuscripts: songs in progress, written or typed on whatever paper was at hand. They reveal how Mr. Dylan sharpened every line. “Gates of Eden,” crammed in small, neat lettering on the back of a sheet of Holiday Inn stationery, wasn’t finished yet: “All men are kings inside the gates of Eden,” it reads, later to be changed to the grimmer “There are no kings inside the gates of Eden.”

A page of “Like a Rolling Stone,” famously a torrent of words before it was distilled into the song, has only the phrase “How does it feel” from the eventual lyrics. An early version of “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” was just called “It’s All Right,” and in its margins Mr. Dylan was trying to decide between “Allright” and “All Right.”

Like “No Direction Home,” the exhibition is full of reminders of how seriously music was treated at the time. For the folkies, each song was a manifesto, each change a matter of high stakes. An account of Mr. Dylan’s epochal 1965 Newport Folk Festival appearance in the folk music magazine Sing Out! was far from uncomprehending: “ ‘The people’ so loved by Pete Seeger are ‘the mob’ so hated by Dylan,” Jim Rooney wrote. The folkies, he continued, “seemed to understand that night for the first time what Dylan has been trying to say for over a year — that he is not theirs or anyone else’s.” He concluded: “He shook us. And that’s why we have poets and artists.”

The only one taking it lightly, or trying to, was Mr. Dylan himself. The exhibition’s postscript is a video outtake from “Eat the Document”: Mr. Dylan in a London alley, making Dadaist poetry out of a dog groomer’s advertising sign. Inspired and silly, a genius even when he’s goofing around, he cracks himself up.

“Bob Dylan’s American Journey, 1956-1966” continues through Jan. 6 at the Morgan Library and Museum, 225 Madison Avenue, at 36th Street; (212) 685-0008.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/29/ar...ic/29dyla.html





Dueling Magicians: Whose Trick Is It Anyway?
Campbell Robertson

The Knight’s Tour, a feat of mental agility in which you trace the path of a knight to every square of a chess board, landing on each square only once, is at least a thousand years old, Eric Walton explains when he performs it in the finale of his show “Esoterica” at the DR2 Theater. But it was hardly esoteric to the woman in the audience on Monday night who whispered that she knew how it worked.

“Oh, I’ve seen Ricky Jay do that,” she said.

Mr. Jay, the sleight-of-hand artist and magic historian, did the Knight’s Tour in “Ricky Jay: On the Stem,” his 2002 show. It wasn’t the only overlap between Mr. Jay’s and Mr. Walton’s acts. “I paid for a ticket and I sat through the show,” Mr. Jay said, “and I would very much like my money and my material back.”

Mr. Walton has said that he and Mr. Jay are both new dogs performing old and well-documented tricks.

“This material has been out there,” said Mr. Walton, who has been working on his current act for the last four years. “The best magicians can do is take existing routines and sort of put our own spin on them.”

The skirmish began a few weeks ago when Mr. Jay went to “Esoterica” with friends including Jules Fisher, the Tony Award-winning lighting designer, who is also an amateur magician. The resemblances were apparent early on.

Like Mr. Jay, Mr. Walton uses antique and sizable words — “Brobdingnagian” (Mr. Walton), “pachydermatous” (Mr. Jay) — wears pinstripe suits and combines his act with professorial asides on magic history.

Some tricks overlap too: in “Ricky Jay and His 52 Assistants,” his 1994 show, Mr. Jay made a fountain of cards spring from both hands and plucked two previously chosen ones from the air, a trick, he said, that was the trademark of a card man named Max Malini in the 1920’s. Mr. Walton does the same trick, though with one hand, for his encore.

In “On the Stem” Mr. Jay performed an old con game called Fast and Loose, involving a gold chain, which he said showed up in Shakespeare; Mr. Walton does the same trick, and mentions the specific Shakespeare plays.

Then there was the Knight’s Tour.

Mr. Jay set the trick up as a tribute to Harry Kahne, a 1920’s performer who specialized in the Multiple Mental Marvel: performing several mental tasks at once. In his version Mr. Jay recited the Knight’s Tour without looking at the giant chessboard behind him, in between finding the cube roots of several random large numbers, quoting Shakespeare and singing work songs.

Mr. Walton, who also pays tribute to past performers, does the Knight’s Tour without looking at the chess board, while completing a magic square — in which all rows, columns, diagonals and quadrants add up to the same randomly selected number — and throwing out state capitals and trivia.

A few days after the performance, Mr. Fisher sent an e-mail message to Mr. Walton saying the presentation of the Knight’s Tour “so closely approaches its inspiration as to border on plagiarism,” and suggesting he try another trick.

In response Mr. Walton sent a lengthy message with a detailed history of the Knight’s Tour, mentioning a recent performer, a Belgian chess showman, who combined the tour with feats of memorization.

“Does performing an existing effect, or variation thereof, confer upon the performer of it ownership of that effect, or the exclusive and perpetual right to all subsequent interpretations of it?” Mr. Walton asked in his message. “On this point you and I are obviously in disagreement.”

Shortly afterward, Mr. Walton contacted a Web site, ontheleesh.com, to which he had given an interview, and asked them to remove a quotation describing Mr. Jay as a source of inspiration.

Teller, the non-speaking half of Penn and Teller, who has seen Mr. Jay’s shows but not Mr. Walton’s, said such debates arose quite often in the magic world. Outright ownership isn’t at stake, he added, but Mr. Jay’s act constituted a painstaking and innovative revival of some little-practiced classics, and a certain code of courtesy should apply.

“If an act hasn’t been prominently performed for a long time, and someone takes the trouble to bring it back from absolute death and put it into his act with fine touches, and which at least hasn’t been seen by a current generation,” he said, “the gentlemanly thing to do is say, ‘That’s his for now.’ ”

That said, he added, “magicians are not unique in their absence of creativity.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/27/theater/27magi.html


















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